“I don’t know.” I took a bite of toast, chewed as I talked; we knew each other well enough for that. “I do have a few friends in high places, and low ones, and I’ll call on them, if need be. But I won’t make an issue out of this unless I have to. I just want my life back. Maria, I have learned one thing from my investigation, and one thing only: that I do not give a flying shit whether men from outer space crashed near your fair city.”
Her expression was blank. “Then maybe your stay at the guesthouse served its purpose. Maybe that’s all they were after.”
“Then they succeeded. Flying colors.”
When I’d finished my breakfast-which was soon-she took the dishes to the sink and ran water over them.
I stood and found a small notepad and pencil by the fridge. “Maria, this is my business number. Call that when you know where your new duty assignment is.”
She took the slip of paper, folded it, and snugged it in her breast pocket. Then she slipped her arms around my waist; the blue eyes looked up at me, as if daring me to dive in. “Does this mean you want to see me again, Nathan?”
“Yeah-anywhere but Roswell.”
“Aren’t you going to kiss me goodbye?”
“Sure …”
I kissed her, and she kissed back, and it was passionate and sweet and I asked, “When do you have to be at work?”
“Not for a while yet …”
“How would you feel about hiking up that skirt and taking off your panties and really saying goodbye. …”
“I think that could arranged,” she said with a wicked little smile.
“And please,” I said, “leave the little hat on….”
“Where shall we …?”
“How about one of these chairs….”
“Oh my,” she said, a little while later, breathing hard, still straddling my lap; me, I was ready for another long nap. “Nathan, that … that was out of this world….”
“I bet you say that to all the Martians.”
My car was, as promised, in the garage across the alley. My nurse-her skirt only slightly wrinkled-waved goodbye from the kitchen doorway and, wearing her late husband’s clothes, I waved back at her, like she was the little woman and, like a good breadwinner-even if I was unshaven and lacked a lunch pail-I might have been heading for work.
Not preparing to hide my sorry ass.
17
One fine Saturday morning in late May, the District of Columbia alive with dogwoods and cherry trees in full blossom, I found myself being chauffeured all about the capital city by a certain skinflint millionaire journalist. During the ride, I was reminded that-despite this city’s bewilderingly laid-out street system-the white obelisk of the Washington Monument’s position against the washed-out blue of the horizon always served as a massive reference point. Which came in handy, because my chauffeur wasn’t taking me anywhere in particular.
We were in the black Buick convertible, which served as Drew Pearson’s second office; it was pretty spiffy, right down to its red-leather seats, and the license plate number was a simple 13-the columnist’s lucky number.
“I was getting worried,” Pearson said, his smile slitting his eyes and sending the well-waxed tips of his mustache skyward, “when your man in Chicago … Sapperstein, is it? … said you’d be ‘incommunicado for an unspecified interval.’”
“That sounded better than ‘holed-up someplace,’” I said. “Hey, can’t we just park somewhere and talk?”
Pearson was pretty spiffy himself, wearing a gray homburg, dapperly angled and a shade darker than his striped tropical worsted suit, which was enlivened by a blue tie with a brown-and-yellow bird motif. How he kept his hat on, in the wind his rapid driving stirred up, was a mystery this Sherlock Holmes couldn’t solve-glue? Chewing gum? Masking tape?
“Pull over and talk, and be the prey of some lip-reader?” Pearson asked archly, bulleting through a yellow light. “I don’t think so, Nathan…. Besides, driving relaxes me. Helps me think.”
Though I was on the clock, it was Saturday and I was casually dressed, a brown-and-white checked sportjacket over a ribbed sky-blue T-shirt. My hat, a light brown Southwest Flight, was at my feet, or it would’ve taken flight, southwest or otherwise.
“Yeah, it helps me think, too,” I said. “Like, I think you’re gonna kill us both if you don’t slow down.”
I had stayed underground-in Vegas, with an old girlfriend of mine, who worked in the chorus line at the Flamingo-for three weeks. Checking in on a daily basis with my office, I learned that no inquiries about my whereabouts had come from government sources, or any suspicious sources, for that matter; the office was swept for electronic bugs and phone taps every second day-clean as a freshly bathed baby’s butt. Lou Sapperstein-my former boss on the pickpocket detail, and current employee, a turnabout I never ceased to relish-had determined to his satisfaction that neither the office nor my apartment was under any kind of surveillance.
And, every day when I phoned in, I asked if we’d heard from Maria Selff about where she’d been transferred-and every day, no word from her. I had Lou, pretending to be doing a credit check, call the Walker Air Base hospital, where he learned the nurse had indeed been transferred but requests for her whereabouts would have to go “through channels.”
I wasn’t too concerned about this; Maria was probably distancing herself from me, in case she and her movements (and even calls) were being monitored. When the time was right, I figured, I would hear from her. Our relationship had been brief, yes, but also intense; and something genuine had passed between us, besides bodily fluids.
With Sapperstein’s reassurances that the coast was clear-or anyway, the lakeshore-I’d returned to the A-1 offices in Chicago’s Loop. There, somewhat unnervingly, the first phone call for me on my first day back was from a government source, out of Washington, D.C., no less: it was one of Forrestal’s Bethesda shrinks, Dr. Bernstein, who had added a second reason for me making the trip, beyond reporting in to Pearson.
“You will be pleased to know,” the shrink said, the middle-European accent giving his voice a lilt, “that your former client is doing very well.”
“That is good news.”
“Is there a possibility you’ll be coming to D.C., soon? Mr. Forrestal would be comforted by a visit from you.”
“Well, I do have pending business. In fact, I should be there next week.”
“Good. Excellent. Call me when you get to town, and I’ll see to it that your name is on the visitors list.”
And now, five days later, I was back in our nation’s capital, with our nation’s most feared commentator, aimlessly driving the beautifully paved web of streets in the midst of which the White House sat like a lovely spider. An appointment had been arranged by Dr. Bernstein and I would see Jim Forrestal in his tower room at Bethesda this afternoon, at two.
Pearson had similarly upbeat news about Forrestal to report. “You’ll be pleased to hear that your other client is on the road to recovery. Gaining his weight back. Truman visited him and pronounced Jim Forrestal ‘his old self,’ if that’s a good thing.”
“Would you prefer he stay sick in the head?”
A sneer lifted one waxed mustache tip. “I believe James Forrestal’s been sick in his soul a lot longer. I want him to stay out of politics, but rumor is Truman’s planning to give him some important government post.”
I snorted a laugh, leaning an arm where the window was rolled down. “I doubt that, not straight outa the loony bin. Why don’t you lay off the guy, anyway? Jesus, it’s fuckin’ overkill.”
This only amused my dapper chauffeur, who was guiding the Buick around Dupont Circle, as if rounding a curve at the Indy 500. “Still singing that sad song, Nathan? Overkill’s a necessity in my business; the public has a notoriously short memory-repetition’s the only cure. Anyway, I’m the one you should feel sorry for-I’m the one getting the hate mail.”