I gave him the kind of smile generally reserved for in-laws. “How so, Mr. Gottlieb?”
His eyebrows flicked up and down. “Well, in your profession, don’t you count on going unrecognized? So you can do undercover work?”
“I have a staff for that kind of thing. But I suppose you’re right that it’s counterproductive. Rather like being a famous spy.”
A half smile tickled thin lips. “Well, a spy would not make his picture available to the press, whereas you’re splashed all over various magazines. I would imagine you’d have a difficult time finding a photograph of a master spy. Of course, I’m just guessing.”
The hog-caller was back at the microphone.
Bettie gave a little “ooh” of excitement, then asked our guest if he’d care to be her partner on this next round.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m still catching my breath. Go ahead, please. I’ll chat with your friend while you dance.”
Bettie flounced out.
“Mr. Heller,” he said, in his measured way, “I must confess I was expecting … hoping … you would be here tonight.”
“Might be hard to believe,” I said, “but this is my first square dance.”
“Hang up your coat and spit on the wall! Choose your partners and promenade all!”
“Square dancing is a great passion of mine,” he said. “Actually, folk dancing in general is. Whenever I travel, I come back with new steps. And I’ve been to some very interesting places. Margaret … my wife, she’s not here tonight … is as much an enthusiast as I am.”
“You spoke to Mulholland,” I said, blowing past the bullshit, “and he told you he’d sent me here to find you.”
A little shrug. “And you found me.”
“And you found me.”
He looked at the autographed napkin with a smile. “You did us a favor, talking to Mulholland.”
“Oh?”
“Meet that gal and hold her tight! Don’t forget your date for Saturday night!”
He folded the napkin and slipped it in his shirt pocket. “You obviously didn’t have to work very hard to fool him into telling you anything you wanted to know.”
“That assumes he was telling me the truth. He’s a magician. Maybe he was manipulating me.”
“A possibility.”
I shifted in my chair. “I’m assuming you spoke to Dr. Abramson as well.”
“I did. And your mission is obviously a noble one, and I frankly feel some of my … subordinates … have handled this matter badly.”
“The Frank Olson ‘matter,’ you mean?”
“Run across and don’t get lost, and give your opposite lady a toss!”
He nodded. “Not keeping Dr. Olson’s wife more in the know was thoughtless and a mistake. All we’ve been trying to do is help Frank. He’s a valued colleague.”
“Do you normally spike the drink of valued colleagues with a dangerous drug? Oh, well, I guess you do, since Olson was only one of, what? Ten? Eleven, at the retreat?”
He flipped a hand. “We all experiment on ourselves. That’s the nature of what we do.”
“I would think the nature of what you do would include some scientific controls. To a layman, this all seems fairly freewheeling.”
“Around you go, just like a wheel—the faster you go, the better you feel!”
“Mr. Heller, I can assure you that everything that’s been done these past several days has been with Dr. Olson’s best interests at heart. My understanding is that he’s phoned his wife and will be going home tomorrow.”
“That’s mine as well.”
“Good. Then I believe we’ve reached the conclusion of this episode—and of your investigation.… What a lovely girl, Miss Page. So shockingly wholesome. I suppose that’s why those pictures she poses for have such appeal. Just look at those leather boots.”
“Salute your corner lady, salute your partners all—swing your corner lady and promenade the hall!”
He rose, nodded, and threaded through the sea of tables toward the exit, the limp barely discernible.
CHAPTER
20
At around 2:30 a.m., the cabbie let me out on the Penn Station side of a nearly deserted Seventh Avenue, and I’d just paid him, and he’d rolled off, when I heard the cry of “Jesus!” from across the street.
My eyes shot to a guy in full doorman’s regalia, hat and all, but not in front of the Statler Hotel, rather rounding the corner from Thirty-third Street, and looking up like he’d just spotted Superman. In a split second, I’d followed his upward-jutting chin and pointing finger to the blur of white, in midair, coming from well above.
I stood frozen in disbelief as the blur became a man who seemed to be diving, hands in front of him. Then he twisted and was suddenly coming down feet-first, as if only he could land that way everything would be all right, but his hands knew better, clawing at the air above him as if trying to grab onto it. With the sidewalk waiting to meet him, he hit a wooden partition covering some work on the entrance area of the hotel bar, then bounced off the plywood wall, landing feet-first on the sidewalk with a sound like the cracking of thick crisp celery stalks.
I already knew.
It was a big hotel, the Statler, probably a couple of thousand rooms, and this could have been any unhappy guest who’d decided in a dark moment that the best way out of the place was through a high window.
But I knew it wasn’t just any guest.
The Village Barn always stayed open late, the 1:30 a.m. show well under way when Bettie and I had finally left and walked over to her apartment. She was on the fourth floor, a walk-up, and the place was nothing to write home about but she’d made it cute, painting the walls pink here or lilac there, the furnishings a mix of atomic-age modern and nice secondhand ’30s Art Moderne. We sat in the kitchenette at a little wooden table and had some brandy and she told me what a wonderful evening she’d had.
“But half the time you were somewhere else, sugah,” she’d said. “What’s on your mind? What’s troublin’ you?”
“There’s something … somebody … I should check up on.”
“Well, it isn’t dawn yet. We can go out again.”
“No, this is business. I’ve been trying to track down a woman’s husband, and before we left she called and said she heard from him, and he’s fine. So my job is probably over. But something…”
She touched my hand. “Honey, you go on and check that out, if you need to. Ah can wait here for you, and we can go back out tomorrow. Ah mean, you’re only gonna be in town a few more days. Don’t wanna waste it.”
I was on my feet, grabbing my hat. “I’ll only be forty-five minutes or an hour at most. I’ll come take you out for breakfast, and then we’ll sleep all day.”
“We’ll do some sleepin’,” she said, and winked.
When I left, she had propped herself up on her sparkly salmon couch, a couple of throw pillows behind her, a metal-legged atomic lamp glowing on an end table, as she read a paperback, One Lonely Night. Knees up, she was still in the red dress, hiked enough to show the sort of garter belt and sheer black stockings rarely found beneath square-dance togs, the leather boots still on.
Now I had Penn Station to my back and was running across a street so dead that ducking traffic wasn’t an issue, my trench coat flapping in air chilly enough to make breathing visible. The gaping uniformed doorman was leaning over the apparent jumper, who was on his back, in a white undershirt and white boxers, one arm outstretched, fingers extended, reaching like David in the Sistine Chapel, only God wasn’t around. The fallen man’s legs were together, twisted to one side, a pool of shimmering red spreading out from under him; a scattering of broken glass, like shaved ice in a cocktail, glittered with reflected light from the hotel’s main entrance maybe forty feet away.
Frank Olson looked up at me, his pale green eyes filled with pain, his mouth filled with blood. The latter didn’t stop him from trying to speak, though nothing came out but a gurgle.
The doorman, skinny, mustached, in his early twenties, had eyes wilder than Olson’s; in the doorman livery, he looked like he’d wandered out of a high school production of The Student Prince.
He said, “I just slipped away for a drink. I didn’t abandon my post or anything!”
Olson was groaning, gurgling, looking up at me.
“Never mind that,” I said. What, did he think he might have reached out and caught the guy in his arms like an eloping bride from a bedroom window? “Go call for help, and get your night manager out here. Now.”
A few people had emerged from nearby bars and from the train station—not many yet, maybe five, six—and I said loudly, “Police! Stay back!”
They obeyed, to some degree anyway.
Olson was trying to speak again. His eyes cried blood and scarlet streamed from his nose and ears too; as he tried to speak, all he produced was frothy red bubbles.
I got a handkerchief out and gently wiped the foam away. “Hang on, Frank. Help’s coming.”
He didn’t have a goddamn prayer, but he didn’t need to hear it from me.
“Did you jump, Frank?” I whispered. “Or were you pushed?”
His only answer was a tortured expression that could have meant anything, including that nothing was registering but pain.
A dark stocky round-faced man in a dark blue Statler-crested blazer and light blue trousers knelt opposite me, his face taut with concern.
“Just hold on,” he said to the bleeding sprawled figure. “You’ll be okay.”
He looked across at me, almost reaching his hand out for me to shake but thinking better of it. “Armand Pastore. Night manager. Someone said you’re police.…”
“Nathan Heller,” I said. “Ex-cop actually, but a licensed investigator. I thought somebody needed to take charge till the officers arrived.”
He nodded his somber approval. His eyes and mouth were slits, his nose somewhat bulbous; but kindness lived in the blunt features.
I wondered if I should tell him that I knew this man; but in these circumstances, I figured I’d better play it tight.
The doorman came up behind the night manager. “Ambulance on the way, sir. I called the Fourteenth Precinct, too. What else?”
“This sidewalk is freezing,” Pastore said, breath pluming. “Fetch him a blanket.” Then, sotto voce, face turned to the boy, he added, “But, uh, call Saint Thomas Church first—see if anybody answers. Get a priest.”
The kid nodded and ran off.
Pastore looked across at me again. “It’s nearby, Saint Thomas. Stay with him, Mr., uh, Heller, is it?”
I nodded.
“Stay with him and I’ll get these gawkers away.” He got up and, in a voice much bigger than he was, ordered people to stay back. To make room for the ambulance that was on its way.
I was crouched there. The blood would have soaked my trousers if I’d knelt. I leaned in and again whispered.
“Frank—were you pushed?”
His eyes jumped, but that didn’t mean he had. Sounds rose from his chest, his throat, but by the time they reached the bubbling mouth, what came out was incoherent mumbling.
“Did you jump, Frank?”
More frothy red mumbling.
“Blink once for yes, twice for no.”
Gurgling.
“Were you pushed?”
He blinked four or five times, but that seemed to be just getting the blood out of his eyes as best he could. Wasn’t it?
The doorman was back with a folded woolen blanket.
Pastore came over and took it from him.
“I don’t know what’s taking the ambulance so long,” the night manager said.
I said, “It’s only been a few minutes.”
He and I covered Olson with the blanket, and the broken man groaned like a guy having a bad dream. I eased the blanket over where a section of shattered bone was poking out of his left arm.
A white-haired priest came rushing across Seventh Avenue, folded shawl and Bible in hand. Behind him were two uniformed officers. Pastore rose and so did I, as the priest slipped on his shawl and went to Olson’s side and knelt, blood be damned, and began administering Last Rites.
The hotel man and I met the cops.
“Armand Pastore, night manager, Officers.”
He shook their hands. One cop was in his mid-thirties, the other pushing fifty. The older one, as if asking the time, said, “Jumper?”
Pastore shrugged. “I guess so.”
The seasoned cop turned to me. “Are you the house dick?”
“No,” I said, and I got out my identification. “Nathan Heller. Private investigator, ex-cop, second on the scene after that doorman.”
“We’ll take it from here, Mr. Heller.”
Should I tell them why I had really come?
I said, “Let me know if I can help.”
The two cops immediately went into crowd-control mode. Maybe a dozen people had gathered by now and they got them well back.
That allowed me to return to Olson’s side, where the priest had finished his work. I crouched where earlier Pastore had been.
“Hear that siren, Frank?” I asked. “Help’s almost here. But before they get you to the medics, tell me—were you pushed?”
His right hand grabbed my arm, clutching; his head came up, just slightly, lips moving, eyes wide with urgency, dripping blood tears. I leaned closer. He took a deep bubbling breath, let it out, and was gone.
I rose.
“Shit,” I said to nobody.
A man was dead. It was nothing new—people died all the time. But Frank Olson had been my responsibility and somehow I’d let him, and his wife, down. Whether LSD-25 had taken him through that window, or Uncle Sam’s minions had given him a push, this dead man was still my responsibility. And I wouldn’t let him down twice.
I looked around. The two cops were dealing with a dozen people now. The doorman was checking anybody who wanted to go inside the hotel.
Where had Pastore got to?
Then I spotted the night man, across the street, standing on the curb in front of Penn Station, facing his hotel. He was looking up, slowly scanning the front of the big building. I jogged across, stopping for a moment for a lone cab to pass, then fell in beside him.
“He had to come from somewhere,” the night manager said.
Room 1018a, I thought.
“That look on that poor bastard’s face,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ll never forget it. But I saw that before.”
“Yeah?”
“During the war. Italy. France. That look that says a guy knows that life is over for him.”
“… I saw it before too, Mr. Pastore.”
“Where?”
“Guadalcanal. What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
I pointed. “There, that window shade. High up. Over to the left. It’s pulled way down, outside the window—watch the breeze catch it.”
“I see it!”
Then he raised a finger high as if testing the wind and began counting to himself.
“What are you up to?” I asked.
“I think I can figure out which room that is.…”
1018a.
The ambulance arrived with an unnecessary scream. Attendants clambered out and began dealing with what was now a corpse. The small crowd watched, and thinned, the two policeman maintaining order. No more cops had shown yet.
Pastore said, “I’m pretty sure it’s 1018a. I’m going to get our security man to check it out.”
“I’ll go with you. But let me clear it with those two boys in blue first. I’ll meet you at the front desk.”
He nodded. “I’ll see if any of our people have gotten calls from guests about jumpers. Maybe somebody saw something.”
We moved across the street together, then Pastore rounded the front end of the ambulance to head into the hotel, while I went over and sought out the older cop. He had a bucket head and eyes that had seen everything twice.
&nb
sp; I asked him, “Are plainclothes dicks coming over from the precinct?”
“Eventually.”
“Well, the hotel manager thinks he may know which room belonged to the jumper. He wants to check it out. With your permission, I’ll go with him.”
“Might be better to wait, bud.”
“It’s Heller. And that night man can go where he likes in his hotel. As an investigator with a New York license, I’m an officer of the court. Maybe you’d feel more comfortable with me keeping an eye on him, till the detectives get here.”
He thought about that, then nodded. “Yeah. Keep him out of trouble, Mr. Heller. Appreciate it.”
I nodded back and headed in, the ambulance doors shutting with clanging finality as I passed.
As the vehicle pulled away without a siren, I went in and crossed the vast high-ceilinged ornate lobby to the endless front desk. Two clerks were on duty, giving the place a ghost-town feel. Out in front of the counter, Pastore was waiting for me with a pale slender guy in his late twenties, sharp-featured, also in a dark blue Statler-crested blazer and lighter blue slacks.
“This is my security man,” Pastore said, “John Martin.”
“Mr. Heller,” the house dick said, extending a hand for me to shake, which I did.
I said, “Do I know you from somewhere, Mr. Martin?”
“Don’t think so,” he said with a mild smile on his knife-blade face. “But I worked hotels all over town. Say, I checked the rooftop doors. They’re all locked. So our guest didn’t jump from there.”
Pastore started shaking his head halfway through that. “No, he came out the window of Room 1018a.”
A frown formed on the security man’s narrow face. “How do you know that?”
“I started with the window with that shade flapping, counted the number of windows above it, and then the adjoining ones toward the west end of the building. No question, it’s Room 1018a.”
“Nice work,” I said. “But that flapping shade looked higher up to me than ten floors.”
“It is,” Pastore said. “It’s really the thirteenth floor—we don’t count the lower public floors.”
Better Dead Page 27