Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 Read Online Free Page A

Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11
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grace. This was the man who had built the vast fleets of the Navy from a mere four hundred to over fourteen hundred combat vessels; who had—despite his extensive administrative duties—made dangerous front-line inspection tours in the Pacific, landing under fire at Iwo Jima.
    In 1944 he’d became Secretary of the Navy, and, following Roosevelt’s death, President Truman appointed the highly regarded Forrestal the first Secretary of Defense, despite Forrestal having fought against the creation of such a position, in the belief that the Army, Navy and Air Force should each be their own boss. After Truman’s unexpected victory over Republican Tom Dewey last November, Forrestal alone among Roosevelt’s holdover cabinet members seemed likely to stay on for the peacetime duration.
    Or anyway, that’s what most of the pundits had been saying, with a few key exceptions, specifically a guy who knew less about politics than I did—Walter Winchell—and, more significantly, Drew Pearson, the most powerful left-leaning muckraking columnist in the country.
    In his various syndicated columns and on his national radio show, Pearson for over a year had been accusing Forrestal on a near-daily basis of everything from being a personal coward (by failing to stand up for his wife in a holdup, supposedly) and a Nazi sympathizer (because Dillon, Read & Company had done business with Germany in the twenties).
    But from a political standpoint, most damning was Pearson’s claim that Forrestal had secretly made a pact with Tom Dewey to continue as Secretary of Defense under a new administration that, obviously, never came to be.
    James Forrestal’s resignation had been made public on March 3, and that this action was taken at the request of President Truman was no military secret. Louis Johnson, a key Truman fund-raiser, would take over Forrestal’s position two days from now, in a patronage tradition that was easy for a Chicagoan like me to grasp.
    All of which added up to, I was golfing with the most famous lame duck in the United States.
    Soon to be a wet one: the sky exploded over us while we were approaching the tenth tee, and Forrestal—the golf bag slung over his shoulder damn near as big as he was—waved for me to follow him back to the white-stone porticoed clubhouse. He’d moved fast, and so had I, lugging my rented clubs, hugging a tree line, skirting the tennis courts; we got drenched just the same. A colored attendant provided us with towels, but we looked like wet dogs seated in the clubhouse bar.
    Save for the bartender, we were alone, which was one small consolation, anyway. Forrestal ordered a whiskey sour and a glass of water but I needed coffee, to help me stop shivering.
    We sat at a small corner table by windows that provided a front-row seat on the rolling black clouds and white lightning streaks and sheeting rain turning the gentle hills of the golf course into a hellish surreal landscape. Forrestal, hair flattened wetly, sat back in his chair as if he were behind his big executive desk at the Pentagon, calmly sipping his whiskey sour. He looked like the elder of an elf clan, and a wizened one at that. He probably only had ten or twelve years on my forty-three, but looked much older.
    “Nate,” he said quietly, “they’re after me.”
    I tried to detect humor in his medium-pitched, husky voice, and could find none; no twinkle in the blue-gray eyes, either.
    “Well, uh, Jim,” I said, and smiled just a little, “it seems to me ‘they’ already got you. You are out of a job.”
    “You can lose a job and get another,” he said, and the slash of a mouth twitched in a non-smile. “But a man only has one life.”
    Thunder rattled the earth, and the windows; cheap melodramatic underscoring, Mother Nature imitating a radio sound-effects artist.
    “Have there been threats?”
    He nodded, once. “Telephone calls to my unlisted number at home. Cut-and-paste letters.”
    I gestured with an open hand. “But
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