Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 Read Online Free

it hadn’t been the beginning.

 

1
     
    The Chevy Chase Club was open for golf every day of the year, but the gun-metal sky threatened rain, a muted rumble of thunder promised the same, and only a madman would risk a round on a chill late March afternoon like this.
    Make that a pair of madmen, and make me one of them.
    I had an excuse, however; I was half of this ill-fated two-some because I was on the clock. No, not a caddy—a security consultant, as they said in the District of Columbia. Back home in Chicago, the term in use was still “private eye,” even if these days I was an executive version of that ignoble profession.
    After all, the A-1 Detective Agency was now ensconced in the Loop’s venerable Monadnock Building on West Jackson in a corner suite brimming with offices, operatives and secretaries as well as a more or less respectable clientele. I could pick and choose which cases, which clients, were worthy of my personal attention, and those in that favored category had to be prepared to pay our top rate of a hundred dollars a day (and expenses) if they wanted the head man.
    My golfing partner had wanted the head man, all right, but I was starting to think he needed a different sort of head man than the A-1’s president. Specifically, the headshrinking variety.
    Longtime client James V. Forrestal—immaculately if somberly attired in dark green sweater and light green shirt with black slacks and cleated black shoes—seemed the picture of stability. I was the one who looked unhinged, albeit spiffy, in my tan slacks, lighter tan polo shirt and brown-and-white loafers, having been encouraged to bring golf attire along, assured I was in for “perfect golfing weather.” Then why were my teeth chattering?
    Forrestal carried himself (and his own golf clubs—the caddies weren’t working today) with a characteristic aura of authority, as well as a certain quiet menace; he would have made a decent movie gangster with his broad, battered Cagney-like features, and wide-set, intense blue-gray eyes that could seize you in a grip tighter than the one his small hands held on that three wood.
    But on closer examination, the picture of stability started to blur. The athletically slim body had a new slump to the shoulders, his skin an ashen pallor, his short, swept-back hair had gone from a gray-at-the-temples brown to an all-over salt-and-pepper, and the eyes were sunken and shifting now, touched with a new timidity.
    On the other hand, there was nothing timid about Jim Forrestal’s golf game. After I’d hit my respectable two hundred yards, Forrestal strode to the tee and addressed the ball and gave it a resounding whack, then almost ran after it, all in about four seconds. Perhaps he was trying to beat the rain—God kept clearing His throat as we traversed the blue-green grass—but I suspected otherwise.
    Forrestal played a peculiarly joyless form of golf, striking the ball in explosions of pent-up violence, expressing no displeasure at bad shots, no pleasure at good ones, as if the eighteen holes we were trying to get in were an obligation. He’d outdistanced my drive by fifty yards or so, and stood waiting with clenched-jawed impatience, foot tapping, as I used a two-iron to send my Titleist into a sand trap.
    As for me, I hated golf—the game was something I put up with for the social side of business—and had no idea what the hell I was doing here, on the golf course or otherwise. I assumed, of course, this had something to do with Secretary Forrestal’s rather unfortunate current situation. Politics never held much interest for me (the Racing News didn’t carry coverage of the D.C. scene); but even an apolitical putz like yours truly knew what had been happening to Forrestal of late.
    Plenty had happened in the nine years since I had done that “personal” job for Jim Forrestal. One of Washington’s most powerful figures had, for the first time in a rather blessed life, suffered a humiliating fall from