“Sorry.”
“It has been twenty years. He drove a bus and had a heart attack in the intersection at State and Randolph. No condolences are necessary.”
“Oh. All right.”
“Do we need to go somewhere and sit, Mr. Heller? Would you like coffee, tea?”
“I don’t think so, no thank you. You have a roomer named Vallee? Thomas Vallee?”
Thin curves of eyebrow arched. “I do. He is a polite, strange little man. Is the government interested in him?”
Not why is the government interested in him-is the government interested in him. She’d been in Germany during the war, all right.
“This is fairly routine,” I said, going the Jack Webb route, “but Mr. Vallee is known to have made threatening remarks about the President. And since Mr. Kennedy is coming to town on Saturday, we would like to check up on him.”
Her nicely carved face was placid. “Of him I know very little. He pays his rent on time. He sometimes has men in his room. But I do not judge. Not when he pays his rent on time.”
The way she said that made me think less of co-conspirators than of something sexual. Maybe I was just remembering the glance Vallee and that busboy exchanged.
I asked straight out: “Is he a homosexual?”
“I have my suspicions.”
I found myself recalling that the homosexuals had been in line right next to the Jews at those very special showers. Still, I kind of dug her. She was a nice-looking middle-aged gal, and she couldn’t help being a German any more than I could being a sort of Jew.
“Do you know his place of employment?”
“It is a printing business. Downtown. Where it is exactly, I do not know.”
We’d have to find that out. According to Vallee, it was on the parade route.
“What I’d like to do, Mrs. Peters, is have a look at your tenant’s flat.”
“Certainly.”
She did not ask if I had a search warrant or any official document justifying such a request. Boy, had she been in Germany during the war.…
As I followed her up the stairs, she glanced back at me and said, “I hope you will not be critical of me to your people.”
“Why is that?”
“Because there are things in Mr. Vallee’s room.”
“Things in his room?”
We were on the landing now.
She said, “Things that I find troubling. Things that perhaps I should have alerted you of.”
“Okay. Well, I guess I’ll see for myself.”
Vallee’s room was unremarkable in most ways-a good-size single room with a living area and a bedroom area, no kitchenette, just a place to stay. Furniture dating back twenty years or more, faded floral wallpaper of similar vintage. A small rabbit-ears portable TV perched on a stand near his bed, and a plank-and-brick bookcase under a window bore paperbacks by Fleming, Robbins, and Spillane-not far removed from my own reading habits. The muscle-building magazines on his nightstand wasn’t my scene, but to each his own.
Where our tastes really differed was the collage on the wall next to his bed-a homemade artistic masterpiece consisting of newspaper and magazines clippings, all pertaining to JFK, whose face was inevitably doctored in various ways: red ink turning him into a devil, or an X through his face, or just plain scribbled out. Various threats were scrawled in margins, not that subtle-for example, “Bastard must die!” and that oldie but goodie by the ever-popular John Wilkes Booth, “Sic Semper Tyrannis.” Vallee misspelled the latter, however, as “Tyrranous.” Dinosaurs, presidents-just so they’re extinct, right?
Frau Peters was at my side suddenly. “Will he pay?”
I said, “Well, he has to actually try something before he can be arrested. This kind of thing is covered by freedom of speech.”
“No, I mean, will he pay for ruining my wallpaper?”
I almost laughed. “That’s between you and him, Mrs. Peters.”
She nodded, filing that away. She pointed, like the Wicked Queen in “Snow White” indicating which direction the huntsman should go. “There is something you should see in the closet.”
I figured one thing in the closet was Vallee himself, only not literally. But our Germanic landlady seemed to have a pretty good fix on what was in her tenants’ apartments.
And she was right to call it to my attention. In the closet, among Vallee’s spare work boots, a few other shoes, work clothes, and a single suit, were two rifles, leaned against the back wall.
I parted the clothes on their rung to get a better look.
The rifles were both M-1’s, the standard implement of war for the infantry. Gas-operated, semi-automatic, clip-fed. Using.30–06 rounds, in clips of eight. Speaking of which, on either side of the rifles were stacked ammunition boxes, twenty rounds per oblong box. About half Winchester, the other half Remington. Like maybe he’d bought out a store’s supply of one brand and had to start in on another.
Kneeling there, I counted fifty boxes.
On my feet again, I turned to see Mrs. Peters pointing to a dresser, the Ghost of Christmas Future indicating Scrooge’s gravestone.
She was right again. In the dresser, I found a.22 revolver. A Smith and Wesson model 22. Just one box of ammo, though, Remington brand …
… of 2,500 rounds.
“You will take away all of this contraband,” she said, at my side again.
“No. Actually, it’s not illegal, owning this stuff. It’s not even illegal to say you want to kill the President, though it does get the attention of certain people.”
“I no longer care that he pays his rent on time. I wish you to take him away.”
“You have every right to throw him out on his tail, you know. You don’t need a reason to ask a tenant to leave.”
Those curves of eyebrow were diagonals now, trying to form an upside-down V together. “What, and have that nice little man shoot me? I do not think so.”
I smiled. “Anyway, please don’t throw him out until after this weekend. We like knowing where he is.”
At the door, I gave her my card, after adding the Secret Service number under my regular ones.
“If you witness anything else suspicious regarding Mr. Vallee,” I said, “or odd in any way … you let me know.”
“Oh yes, Mr. Heller. If this happens, you will hear from me.”
She smiled, and the light blue eyes sparkled like sunlight on Lake Konigssee. At Berchtesgaden.
You may think that’s a cheap shot, but before I left, I let my hostess talk me into a cup of tea in her kitchen, which was down a hallway where family photos finally kicked in, and I swear I glimpsed a framed Hitler Youth photo. You could never be quite sure about these German DP’s.
But I still kind of dug her.
* * *
When I got back to the Secret Service office, I found Chief Martineau with my friend Dick Cain in the former’s office. They were preparing to go to another presidential trip meeting, this one in the auditorium of police HQ at Eleventh and State.
“It’s a special security coordination conference,” Martineau said, “with the sheriff, PD and us. I really don’t have time to hear your report right now, Nate.”
I pulled up a chair next to Dick and sat.
“Yes, you do,” I said, and filled him in quickly and thoroughly about the breakfast conversation with Vallee and my visit to his rooming house.
“It does sound serious,” Martineau allowed. “But your loon is not one of the suspects the FBI gave us that your friend the AG wants us to concentrate on.”
“Well, I can see ignoring this,” I said lightly. “It’s just a guy with a kill-Kennedy collage on his walls and a couple of M-1 rifles in his closet and thousands of rounds of ammo. Nothing to sweat bullets over, right?”
Dick-who’d been studying me with that disconcerting gaze of his, with the one milky eye-said, “Nate’s right, Marty. You need to put this joker under surveillance.”
“I can’t spare the men,” Martineau said, his frustration palpable. “How about loaning me a couple of your guys from the SIU, Dick?”