Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 14

by Chicago Confidential (v5. 0)

  I considered that. Then I said, “You know, that seems fair.”

  He sighed and beamed. “Good. Good…. And thank you for helping my brother, my other brother out, with that Mortimer character.” He shook his head. “Such a lout. Such an uncouth lout.”

  “Some people have poor social graces,” I said, holstering my nine millimeter.

  Charley exited the men’s room, with me right behind him; no sign of Rocco. I think Charley was as relieved as I was. He turned to me and extended his hand.

  “We have a deal, then?”

  “Deal,” I said, shaking with him.

  When Charley had headed back toward the showroom— where Sinatra was singing, “If I Loved You”—I glanced toward the ladies’ room door, and saw Jackie cracking it, peeking out.

  “Come on, honey,” I said. “We’re missing the show.”

  She rushed to my side, looped her arm in mine. “I saw Rocco come out! He didn’t see me, but I—”

  “He’s not going to bother you, anymore.”

  “What happened?”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  And I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice.

  Washington, D.C.—the seat of political power in the western hemisphere—was also the hub of the mightiest industrial and military machine in the history of the world. The White House, the Capitol, various imposing monuments and a multitude of marble buildings swimming in seas of manicured green, were dignified symbols that imparted a stateliness, a nobility to the terrible powers certain men in this town possessed—men who charted the strategies and movements of armies and navies all over the world, who dispatched diplomats and spies to every corner of the earth, who controlled the man-made cataclysm of the atomic bomb.

  I had come to our nation’s capital to see two men who wielded power of a different sort—the power of information…or sometimes misinformation. A few well-placed words—truth or fabrication, it didn’t seem to matter much which—could destroy lives as surely as any bullet or bomb…and without the mess.

  One of those powerful men resided in a townhouse on Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown, a quaint neighborhood of cobblestone streets, reconditioned slave quarters, and Early American shutters. This was a cool, overcast Sunday afternoon, and the well-shaded lane was alive with fall colors—coppers and yellows and oranges and reds (not the card-carrying variety).

  I’d flown in this morning, arriving at the National Airport, on the Virginia side; from my window seat, as we glided over the city, the pilot executing a tourist-pleasing swoop, I’d taken in the grand obelisk of the Washington Monument and the familiar Capitol dome, dominating a distinctive skyline they and other monuments formed, no skyscrapers to compete with—buildings over 110 feet were banned by law, locally.

  I had spent a lot of time in D.C. over the years—particularly on various jobs I’d done for the late James Forrestal, our nation’s first secretary of defense—and was quite used to Washington’s old-fashioned Southern sensibilities, its spacious avenues, tree-shaded lawns, the landscaped green (some of it dyed to stay that way year-round). What the hell—green seemed to symbolize the power in this city even better than stately marble.

  At the townhouse in Georgetown, I trotted up the half-dozen steps to the landing and used the polished brass knocker. The golden-tressed young woman who answered smiled in recognition.

  “Mr. Heller,” she said, playfully, because in other circumstances she had called me Nate, “you are expected.”

  She had a perfectly delightful middle-European accent.

  “Hi, Anya,” I said, stepping at her invitation into an entrance hall that fed both the residential and office areas of the townhouse. “You look swell.”

  “You look good, also.”

  Anya was a Yugoslavian war refugee in her early twenties, with big blue eyes in a heart-shaped face. She wore a businesslike blue dress with white trim and a white belt, an ensemble that played down her bosomy shape. We’d had a brief fling a while back, but her boss didn’t know it—because he was in the midst of a longer fling with his “secretary,” himself.

  Anya was the office’s current “fair-haired girl,” as the staffers around here dubbed them, “cutie-pies” in her employer’s own terminology. Since her English was limited, her secretarial duties ran not to taking dictation but accompanying her married boss to cocktail parties and out-of-town speaking engagements.

  A living room loomed straight ahead, with a formal dining room off to my left; but this was not a social call—the lady of the house, Luvie, spent most of her time at the family farm, anyway. Anya led me down the right a few steps, into the office area, ushering me—wordlessly—into a book-, paper-, and memento-flung study where her boss sat typing furiously at a stand to one side of his big wide wooden desk. Wearing a purple smoking jacket, fingers flying, the tall, bald, sturdy-looking journalist seemed oblivious to our entrance.

  Beyond an open double doorway opposite the desk, a larger office area hummed with activity, a file cabinet-lined bullpen with three women and two men, typing, talking on the phone, interacting. Anya smiled and nodded to me, as she went out and joined them, shutting the doors behind her, though I could see her through the panes of glass, positioning herself at the wire service ticker, watching stories come in, doing her best to read them.

  Sunday was one of Drew Pearson’s deadline days—he had his weekly radio broadcast tonight and he and his staff were prepping frantically for it. (One key figure around here, legman Jack Anderson, was not present: a Mormon, he didn’t work on Sundays, though he toiled his ass off on Saturday.) About twenty years ago, Pearson had gone from being a journeyman Washington newsman to a national figure by appropriating the technique of Manhattan and Hollywood gossip columnists for his “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

  That syndicated column—growing out of a book not unlike the Confidential series by Mortimer and Lait—was an immediate smash, and Pearson was soon America’s preeminent crusader for liberal causes. From time to time I had done background investigations for him, particularly those involving Chicago or California; but we had a rocky relationship—he was a cheap bastard, slow to pay his bills, plus he had an ends-justifies-the-means approach that troubled even a cynical Chicago heel like myself.

  Speaking of Chicago heels, I stood rocking on mine, my hands in my suitpants pockets, waiting for Pearson to come up for air and notice my existence. This study had dark plaster walls decorated with photos of Pearson with show business figures (Sinatra among them) and national political luminaries, including a couple presidents and Senator Estes Kefauver; a few political cartoons, lampooning Pearson and his sometimes controversial stands, were framed and hanging here and there, as well. I was thinking about what an egomaniac this guy was until I realized these reminded me of my own office walls.

  This was homier than my Monadnock suite, however, cozier—snapshots lined the mantelpiece of a working fireplace, and windowsills were stacked with books and magazines and one sill was occupied by a slumbering black cat. A primitive rural landscape and an oil painting of Pearson’s late father— neither very good—shared wall space with the framed photos and political cartoons.

  Pearson stopped typing, heaved a sigh, and flipped the fresh page of copy on a desk lined with paper-filled wooden intake boxes. He had still not acknowledged my presence. He glided over, backward, on his swivel chair and got behind the desk, and turned to me, finally bestowing that foxy grin I knew so well.

  “Must you always come by on broadcast day?” he asked, standing to his full six three, extending his hand. Just as he typed rat-a-tat-tat style, he talked the same way, having trained himself to sound like an elitist version of Walter Winchell, for the radio version of “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

  Reaching across his messy desk to shake with him, I said, “Remind me—what is your slow day around here?”

  The bustle of the bullpen provided background music.

  “No such animal, as you well know.” He gestured for me
to sit and I took a hard wooden chair across from him.

  Pearson settled back in his chair. He had an egg-shaped head, close-set eyes, a prominent nose, and a wide mouth adorned with a well-waxed, pointy-tipped mustache. Under the purple smoking jacket, a white shirt and brown-and-yellow bow tie peeked out. Gentlemanly, aloof, he would have made a fine British butler.

  “Thanks for making time for me,” I said.

  His arms were folded; he was rocking gently in the swivel chair. Then he halted in midrock and he reached for a jar of Oreo cookies on the desk, took off the glass lid, and dug himself a couple out; then he told me to help myself.

  I passed. This—and cheating on his wife, and not paying me promptly—was his only vice. He was a Quaker and did not smoke, though he took hard liquor, albeit not to excess. He also did not pepper his speech with “thee” and “thou,” which would have been a little hard to take, considering his superior manner.

  “I understand you’re not cooperating with my friend Estes,” he said.

  Suddenly I felt as if I’d been summoned by Pearson, even though it had been me who arranged the appointment.

  “I haven’t even met Senator Kefauver yet,” I said. “But I’m sure you’ll appreciate, Drew, that I don’t intend to compromise the privacy of my clients.”

  An eyebrow arched. “You won’t testify?”

  “If the committee calls me, I will, sure. But they won’t learn anything except name, rank, and serial number. If you could pass that info along to your ‘friend’ Estes, that would be swell.”

  “Your visit does have something to do with the Crime Committee, though,” he said.

  On the phone, I had indicated as much, if vaguely. Arguably, I could have handled this—and the other conversation I’d come to D.C. for—over the long-distance wire; but Pearson was one of the most paranoid men in a paranoid town, and refused to talk frankly on the telephone. He had his office swept for bugs on a weekly basis, and made most of his own calls from pay phones.

  I said, “Yes—I would appreciate your insights on a couple of matters related to Kefauver.”

  His response was to bite into an Oreo. Seeing the chunk of cookie disappear into that prissily mustached mouth was amusing, but I kept a straight face.

  “I spoke to Lee Mortimer the other night,” I said.

  “Mortimer.” He shook his head disgustedly, chewing his cookie. “What a pathetic little creature.”

  “Lee claims he’s been shut out of the Crime Committee’s inside circle. Apparently he deluded himself into thinking they’d take him, a reporter, on as a paid, government investigator…just because he was the guy who inspired Kefauver to look into—”

  But I never finished that thought, because Pearson lurched forward, and anger glistened in his close-set eyes. “Mortimer is a self-aggrandizing liar. I am the one who got Estes interested in organized crime—how many exposes have I written over the years, anyway? Louisiana, New York, Chicago…. Damn it, Nathan—you contributed your investigative prowess to a number of them.”

  “I guess I hadn’t made that connection.”

  He made a sweeping gesture. “Isn’t it enough that Mortimer and his fat friend Lait plagiarized my approach in their trashy Confidential books? Must this iguana now lay claim to my efforts to help launch the Crime Investigating Committee?”

  I knew Pearson was a booster of Kefauver’s, and the columnist had even been talking up the Tennessee senator as a possible presidential candidate. But I didn’t realize Pearson was—or anyway thought he was—a prime mover behind the mob inquiry.

  Pearson was saying, “Hell, I was delighted when Estes introduced his resolution to investigate the rackets on a national scale. But then it got stalled in the Senate for lack of support—until I put the pressure on.”

  “Who was trying to block it?”

  “McCarran, for one—though technically McCarran is Kefauver’s boss, you know.”

  Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, home of Las Vegas, was—no shock here—in the mob’s pocket. McCarran was a Democrat who voted like a conservative Republican, one of the rabid anti-Commie crowd.

  I was confused. “How in hell can McCarran be Kefauver’s boss, particularly when he tried to stop the investigation before it even started?”

  Pearson shrugged, smiled his insider’s smile. “Kefauver’s committee ultimately reports to the Judiciary Committee, of which McCarran is chairman.”

  “Christ.”

  Pearson shifted in his seat. “And of course without the support of the Senate majority leader—Lucas, of your home state—Estes could never have launched his probe, in the first place. And initially Lucas was dead set against it.”

  Pearson was referring to Scott Lucas, currently campaigning against Everett Dirksen.

  “So I simply spoke to my good friend Scott,” Pearson continued, “and reminded him of certain rumors that he’d received big campaign contributions from Chicago gamblers. Pointed out that it would look very bad, if he continued to block the Kefauver investigation…and he graciously granted his support—Mortimer my ass! He’s a hack, a conniving hack.”

  “What about these accusations he’s making about Halley?”

  “Jack’s investigated Halley thoroughly…” Pearson meant Jack Anderson. “…and the man is a straight arrow. A partner in Halley’s law firm did indeed represent the railroad in question, the Hudson & Manhattan line, the one with the supposed gangster investors—a relationship that ended some time ago. Halley had no contact himself, and he’s been a dogged investigator, a relentless inquisitor in the hearings thus far.”

  “What about his so-called Hollywood connections?”

  “Nothing of substance there, either. His firm represents a distillery whose publicist has a few Hollywood clients. Typical Mortimer and Lait yellow journalism.”

  Drew Pearson complaining about yellow journalism was like an infected mosquito bitching about yellow fever.

  “Drew, do you have influence with Estes?”

  Tiny shrug, twitch of the mustache. “Certainly.”

  I nodded toward a certain photo on the wall. “Can you ask your friend from Tennessee to steer clear of our mutual friend Frankie?”

  His eyes narrowed. “That might be difficult. An inquiry has to go wherever the truth leads.”

  “Bullshit. Drew, this investigation has all sorts of political strings, and you damn well know it. Look at the emphasis on gambling—I don’t see the mob’s influence on big-city machine politics coming under the microscope.”

  A more elaborate shrug. “…I can try.”

  I leaned forward. “Certainly you can understand it would be devastating to Frank’s career right now, if he were called in front of TV cameras to testify about gangsters he met on his summer vacation.”

  Nodding slowly, Pearson said, “Yes. I can understand that…. I can but try.”

  “Thank you. I’ll let him know—he’s under a hell of a lot of pressure. You see, Frank’s also got a problem with another Senate inquiry…courtesy of a certain old pal of ours.”

  Pearson knew at once who I was talking about. “I can well imagine. Frank has a good heart—and he believes in the right causes. That’s enough to make him a ‘pinko’ in some circles. I can well imagine that ‘Tailgunner Joe’ might relish lining the Voice up in his capricious sights.”

  “No imagining necessary. Really, that’s my main reason for coming to Washington…to try to reason with Joe McCarthy.”

  “Well, then you’ll be the first one to manage that unlikely feat.”

  I frowned. “Your relationship with McCarthy has completely soured?”

  “It verges on war. Even he and Jack aren’t friendly, anymore.”

  It might seem unlikely that Pearson and McCarthy had ever been soulmates, but the archliberal columnist and the ultraconservative senator had a shared interest in weeding out federal corruption. Pearson’s credentials in that arena were impeccable: he cracked the Russian spy ring in Canada; he exposed the Silvermaster Communis
t spy ring; and he ferreted out miscellaneous congressional skulduggery, ruining the careers of a number of powerful legislators.

  Wisconsin’s McCarthy—elected to the Senate in 1946, in part by courting Communist support (“Communists have the same right to vote as anybody else, don’t they?” he’d asked rhetorically)—had been for several years a key Pearson source of inside info about his congressional colleagues and their secrets. I knew McCarthy because I followed leads he provided Pearson, about the so-called “five percenter” influence peddlers.

  But earlier this year, after a national magazine rated him our nation’s worst senator, McCarthy bragged to Jack Anderson that he had come up with “one hell of an issue.” Shortly thereafter, McCarthy gave a speech to the no doubt bewildered little old ladies of the Republican Women’s Club of Ohio County, declaring to have “in his hand” a list of 205 members of the Communist Party, currently operating in the State Department, with the secretary of state’s blessing.

  Never mind that within a day the list had dwindled to “fifty-seven card-carrying Communists”…or that Communist Party members hadn’t carried “cards” for years. McCarthy had made himself an instant household word…and a feared man in Washington.

  Only, Drew Pearson didn’t fear anybody in Washington or anywhere else.

  “Before he’s through,” Pearson was saying, “no one’s reputation will be safe—the whole political process will be poisoned.”

  “He’s got a real, rabid following.”

  “That’s why he’s got to be cut down now, before he becomes a walking national disaster area. Frank Sinatra? A Communist? Good Lord, where would such lunacy stop?”

  “You’re losing a hell of an informant.”

  “My best on the Hill,” Pearson admitted. “A good source, but a bad man…. McCarthy’s already caught up in the demagogue’s compulsion toward escalation. He upgrades ‘fellow travelers’ into Communists, and pro-Communists into spies!”

  “Well, your friend Estes has provided him the blueprint for witch-hunting. You have that coonskin cap to thank.”