Cournoyer was saying, “Two top CIA scientists on the project were running the retreat—Gottlieb and Lashbrook. Gottlieb’s a real brain but an oddball, high up in the Agency. He stutters and has a club foot but don’t underestimate him. Only in his mid-thirties, but somebody to reckon with.”
“First name?”
“Sidney. And Lashbrook’s is Robert; he’s Gottlieb’s deputy. Gottlieb is a big believer in this LSD-25 stuff—considers it a real tongue loosener, a kind of truth serum, potentially a very powerful tool. He’s run all sorts of tests on unsuspecting subjects, last year or so. You need to know that going in.”
“Okay.”
He gestured with an open hand, painting the picture. “For two days, they have group meetings in front of the roaring fire, then split off for smaller specialized meetings—typical retreat stuff. They relax and unwind in the evening. After dinner on Thursday night, everybody enjoys a glass of Cointreau—you know, the triple sec?”
I nodded.
“Served up by Gottlieb and Lashbrook from a couple of bottles. A nice gesture, huh? Twenty minutes later, Gottlieb gathers everybody by the fire and tells them they’ve just consumed a healthy dose of LSD-25.”
“Jesus.”
Cournoyer shook his head, grinning. “No, you don’t understand, Nate. These scientists are fine with experiments like this. They dose everybody else, why not themselves?”
“Okay…”
“In fact, Frank says they laughed their asses off—joke’s on us for a change. For a while they’re loud and boisterous, then all sorts of philosophical discussions get going. But after a while Frank starts feeling paranoid, and when in the wee hours everybody goes off to bed, he can’t sleep. Gottlieb and Lashbrook act concerned and walk him outside the main lodge to a cabin, so as not to disturb anybody. And here’s the thing—Frank told me he isn’t even sure what he said to those two. He remembered being talkative, and thought maybe he’d said too much. About his guilt, about his misgivings, over what he’d been doing. What they’d all been doing.”
“He wasn’t sure he’d spilled?”
“No. It was fuzzy. But he suspected he’d been given a dose of his own medicine—that some of the interrogation techniques he’d helped develop had been turned back on him. And he was afraid he’d made an awful mistake.”
Neither of us said anything for a while.
“I only have two names for you,” he said. “Two people in New York who may know where Frank is. If you still want them.”
Something had crept through the bland mask—what was it?
“Please,” I said.
Fear.
“Nate. Mr. Heller. Do you know what you might be getting yourself into?”
“I think so.”
“I’m not sure you do. For example, imagine you were me. You might be a CIA asset right now, planning to pat me on the back as you leave, and pinprick me with a poison that Frank or some other genius concocted and I won’t see Christmas. I won’t see fucking Friday. Do you understand?”
“I’m starting to,” I said.
CHAPTER
18
Fog got turned into an ivory mist by a two-thirds moon as I followed the winding dirt road and pulled into the driveway of the Olson house, where I had left Bettie. The ranch-style was set back a good distance, surrounded by tall trees whose remaining leaves shivered, ghostly gnarled limbs ticking the rooftop. Lights glowed within the house but the place seemed nonetheless lost in shadow.
Alice met me at the door with a confused, even tortured expression, my lovely black-haired companion standing just behind her with eyes as big as they were blue. The two women led me into the living room, the kids already in bed.
“Something odd has happened,” Alice said.
No! Not something odd?
“Tell me,” I said.
We sat on the couch with me between them, branches scratching at the windows.
“Vin stopped by, not long after you left,” Alice said, her hands folded in her lap as she sat forward. “Vin Ruwet, Frank’s boss?”
I nodded. “What did he have to say?”
“He apologized for not getting here sooner. He said Frank had several sessions starting Tuesday evening with a Dr. Abramson.”
Dr. Harold Abramson—one of the two names Norman Cournoyer had given me just minutes before.
“Go on,” I said.
“Vin said Wednesday night they’d had dinner together and gone to a Broadway show. This morning Frank seemed better and after breakfast they checked out of the Statler Hotel, and went to LaGuardia for a morning flight to D.C., for a session with some other doctor. After that, Vin was driving Frank here when Frank made him pull over. Told Vin he wanted to go back to see Dr. Abramson, that he needed more help. That he was afraid … afraid of doing me and the children bodily harm.”
That phony phrase again—who says “bodily harm” outside of a police report?
“So what’s happening now?”
“Frank’s getting more help. Vin says.”
“Was Vin specific about what kind of help?”
She nodded. “They took a plane from D.C. back to New York, to go to Dr. Abramson’s home on Long Island—the doctor ‘generously’ interrupting his family Thanksgiving. I asked where Frank is staying tonight, but Vin says he doesn’t know—somewhere on Long Island, he supposes. Supposes! If this is all so … so benign … why hasn’t Frank called me? Where is my husband’s voice in all this?”
Temporarily silenced. Or maybe not temporarily …
I took her hand; she was trembling. “Alice, I have names from Mr. Cournoyer to follow up on in Manhattan. Should I still do that?”
“Do you think we’d be wrong to?”
I shook my head. “We’d be wrong not to, in my opinion. But it’s not my call.”
“You think Frank’s in danger?”
Goddamn right I do.
“Possibly,” I said.
She swallowed; lifted her chin. “Then please do see if you can find Frank. At least get him to call me. And if he is in trouble … help him, if you can.”
I summoned a smile. “Do my best to deliver him tomorrow, and you can heat up that wonderful meal for him. Okay?”
She nodded bravely, chin crinkling but no tears.
With a gesture toward my beautiful companion in the pink sweater, I said to Alice, “How did you explain Bettie to Frank’s boss?”
But it wasn’t Alice who answered: “You mean Aunt Bettie, sugah?”
On the porch, with the skeletal trees doing their wind-driven dance around us, Alice asked, “Do you think you should go over to Vin’s and just … talk to him about all this?”
“I’ve been considering that,” I admitted. “But I don’t think so, not right now. For a family friend, Vin hasn’t been much help to you. He’s doing somebody’s bidding. That you haven’t heard from Frank suggests they’re keeping him under wraps for some reason. I’m better off checking out the Manhattan leads first.”
Anyway, Vin Ruwet appeared to be a cog in this, though important enough to the wheel to make it unlikely I could shake anything out of him. Plus he was a military man, and I didn’t have any radical interrogation techniques handy to make him talk.
“Whatever you think,” Alice said. She reached out and squeezed Bettie’s hand, then gave me a kiss on the cheek, and an impulsive hug, after which she moved away with an embarrassed smile, hiding behind her half-closed door.
She said, with a touch of embarrassment, “Thank you for this.”
“It’s early for thanks,” I said, putting on my hat. “Let’s see if I deserve any.”
“You will,” she said, trying to convince herself more than me, I think, then sealed herself within the house.
Fifteen minutes later, Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Heller checked into the Barbara Fritchie Cabins on the fringes of downtown Frederick. We’d both brought small overnight bags just in case, and when Bettie trotted out of the bathroom in a sheer black nightie, brushing all that b
lack hair, I finally had something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving.
The little cabin barely had room for the canopy bed, and the handful of other furnishings were also of an overtly Early American style, the wallpaper pink with tiny faded Liberty Bells, in a Fourth of July theme that was getting as threadbare as the comforter. What had once been a top tourist court would soon belong to illicit lovers not particular about patriotic decor.
Not that we should talk, although our fucking was so sweet and warm it deserved a nicer word; it was as if we’d been together for years, but still found pleasure in each other. Wouldn’t that be something? Married to Bettie Page. Maybe once a year she’d get out her leopard undies for me … I’d pass on the whips.…
She cuddled against me in the near dark, smelling of Ivory soap; some light from the street filtered in filmy curtains and threw a lace pattern over her.
“Ah feel so bad for that little family. The daddy’s in a bunch of trouble, isn’t he?”
“I believe he is. How much did you pick up?”
“He does secret government work, but he’s had a kind of breakdown. Ah guess that makes him dangerous to some people.”
“You’re not wrong. And you knowing any more than that would be dangerous in itself.” My arm was around her and I squeezed fondly. “Look, we’ll catch a morning train in D.C. and be back in Manhattan by noon or so. I’m going to do some poking around that could get a little dicey.”
She looked up at me, pretty, and pretty concerned. “How dicey, Nate? What kind of dicey?”
“Dicey enough that I’ll be carrying a gun. I don’t want you around that.”
“Ah been around all kinds of people and all kinds of trouble. Don’t you worry about little ol’ Bettie.”
“You haven’t been around these kind of people and this kind of trouble. You should steer little ol’ Nate a wide path for a few days.”
“You’re not headin’ back to Chicago?”
“Not till I’m done with this thing. But after I am, we’ll get back together for at least a night or two—all right?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I’ll stay in your room at the Waldorf till you go back to Chicago. Nobody’s gonna bother either one of us there.”
She was probably right.
“Ah’ll just read and relax and order room service, and live in the lap of luxury. I mean, that room has a TV and everything! Doesn’t that sound nice, Nate?”
“The lap part does,” I admitted.
* * *
On this day after a holiday, midtown teemed with Christmas shoppers while the usual button-down worker bees seemed a scarce commodity. With no snow and a temperature in the early forties, fall appeared in no hurry to get out of winter’s way, the sky overcast but only vaguely threatening. Under the Burberry, lining out, I was in the charcoal Richard Bennett number cut to conceal the nine-millimeter Browning under my left arm—with spooks in the mix, I would have felt naked otherwise.
The cab dropped me at 133 East Fifty-eighth Street, a thirteen-story brown-brick office building with its upper floors set back in an Art Moderne style that dated it to the early thirties. The modest lobby, with its five elevators, was underpopulated, though I did have to sign in. The directory put Dr. Harold A. Abramson on the eighth floor, but below his name was a surprise: “Allergist/Immunologist.” Not “Psychiatrist”? Or even “Psychologist”?
Olson’s pal Cournoyer, when he’d given me Abramson’s name, had described the doctor on the q.t. as the CIA’s top man using LSD-25 as a means of psychotherapeutic treatment. And doing it on staff at New York’s prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital.
“In any case,” Cournoyer had said, “it makes sense they’d take Frank to see Abramson—they’re friends or anyway friendly acquaintances, going back to the war. And Abramson has all the right clearances.”
Add to that Olson being dragged off almost bodily to see a “shrink” and I had naturally assumed that meant Abramson qualified. Down this rabbit hole, such assumptions were at your own risk.
The wood-paneled waiting room wasn’t large but seemed bigger than it was, since it was empty of anything but chairs, old magazines, and a young receptionist. She had red hair, red lipstick, and green eyes behind black cat’s-eye eyeglasses; not in nurse’s whites, she wore a black suit with a white blouse, and looked up from Look magazine as if I’d caught her with her hand in the till.
“Dr. Abramson isn’t seeing patients today,” she said, defensive before I’d uttered a word.
I crossed over to her desk, Dobbs in hand, and said with a smile, “But he’s in or you wouldn’t be.”
Her chin came up. “I might be here to answer the phone.”
“You might, but there are services cheaper than you and, anyway, what you’re doing is reading Look magazine. What do you think? Are the Commies infiltrating the Protestant Church?”
That was the story promised under a seemingly unrelated photo of a sultry Marilyn Monroe smoking a cigarette.
While she was trying to figure out whether I was flirting or making fun of her—I was doing both, of course—I handed her my business card and a brief signed letter of authorization from Alice. “Tell the doctor I’m representing Mrs. Frank Olson. He’ll see me.”
She had an intercom but she couldn’t deliver the card and letter over it, so she went through the door to her left, between her desk and a low-slung table of more magazines.
While she was gone, I took one of Abramson’s business cards from a little pedestal on her desk and slipped it into my suit coat pocket.
She returned and held the door open for me. “End of the hall,” she said resentfully, handing me back the authorization letter, which I tucked away.
The hall didn’t go anywhere much, with just a pair of facing doors on either side, offices and/or consultation rooms. The dark-wood door with “DR. ABRAMSON” in gold was ajar at the dead end, left open as a courtesy, but my host wasn’t feeling courteous enough to meet me there.
The office was nothing out of the ordinary, medium-size with framed diplomas on the walls and family pictures on the desk, a non-shrink-style brown corduroy couch along a wall. Blinds on windows over the couch were angled to let in a little of the gray day. The filing cabinets and the desk were a rich dark wood and whispered money, but nothing else did. Not even Abramson himself.
He was in his mid-fifties, in an off-the-fairly-expensive-rack light brown suit and a darker brown tie; sturdy-looking, pleasant features, bald, placid light blue eyes behind dark-rimmed glasses, strong nose, salt-and-pepper mustache, slightly jutting chin. He half-rose behind the desk and extended his hand for a handshake that gave nothing away. He might have been the principal of an Ohio high school.
“Mr. Heller,” he said, in a mellow baritone that conveyed only minimal interest, “sit, please, and tell me how I can be of help to you. Or I should say of help to Mrs. Olson.”
I took the waiting client chair, padded dark brown leather matching his own swivel version. I was happy not to be offered coffee or tea or anything at all really, since this guy’s chief interest in life was LSD-25.
“Before we get to that, Dr. Abramson,” I said, “I wonder if you might answer a basic question.”
His smile barely qualified as one. “Ask it and we’ll see how basic it is.”
“Well, pretty basic. Mrs. Olson was told by Frank and his boss, Colonel Ruwet from Camp Detrick, that there was concern about her husband’s mental state—after he came back from a recent work retreat. That Frank was suffering anxiety related to his job, which had him suddenly wanting to resign … but being encouraged not to by his boss, Ruwet. So he was taken here to New York to see a psychiatrist.”
“That’s all correct.”
“Not really,” I said, “since you aren’t a psychiatrist—unless you’re just too shy to list it on your door with your other accomplishments.”
He gestured with a rather thick hand that made me glad he wasn’t passing himself off as a surg
eon, too. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Mr. Heller, or a psychologist, either. I have expertise in three fields—immunology, allergy, and pediatrics, though currently I’m not actively practicing in the third. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, I don’t know. An allergy doctor treating a mental patient is a little like going to a podiatrist for heart trouble, isn’t it?”
This smile hardly rated as one at all. “That’s rather an oversimplification and exaggeration. There are a number of reasons why, in this instance, I was the doctor selected to treat Frank Olson. But I frankly don’t believe they’re any business of yours, Mr. Heller.”
“They’re business of my client, Dr. Abramson—your patient’s wife, and as far as you’re concerned, I’m her.”
“I do understand that.”
“Good. Doctor, the circumstances here are very troubling. And if you—or someone you might refer me to for more satisfactory answers—can’t explain why an allergist is treating Frank Olson for a supposed mental breakdown…”
“Mr. Heller—”
“… and why Mrs. Olson hasn’t heard from her husband for three days? My next stop will be the New York City Police for assistance in my inquiries, and I have some decent contacts there. And at the local FBI office, since this French farce has an unfortunate whiff of kidnapping.”
For the most part, his face remained a bland mask; but a tightening around the eyes gave him away, that and a bristly look that his mustache got.
“Mr. Heller, I’m afraid we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.” He made his face smile. It was the way a dog seems to smile when it has peanut butter on the roof of its mouth. “Let’s start over.… Could I get you some coffee, perhaps?”
“No!”
He blinked, taken aback by the vehemence of that. “Well. All right. I will do my best to respond. I have to be somewhat vague, because Dr. Olson’s situation touches upon several classified areas.”
“Why, are you a military man, Doctor?”
“No, but I am contracted to do work for the military and other government agencies.…”
“Including the CIA,” I said.
The light blue eyes got wide behind the lenses, seeming not so placid now.
Better Dead Page 24