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

someone in your position always hears from cranks.”
    Now he leaned forward conspiratorially, whispering, “Didn’t you wonder why I wanted to meet you here?”
    “Hell no.” I waved to the rain-streaked window and the squall beyond. “Beautiful golfing weather like this?”
    He dipped the fingertips of his right hand into his water glass, as if it were a fingerbowl, and then raised the fingers to his lips, moistening them gently.
    Then he said, “My phones are tapped. Electronic bugs all through my house.”
    This wasn’t making sense to me; I sat forward. “Why bring me in from Chicago? Why don’t you call some of your friends in from the FBI or intelligence or something, and do a sweep?”
    “That’s who probably planted them.”
    I sat back. “Oh.”
    He began to shake his head, slowly, his eyes glazed. “We won the war, Nate, but we’re going to lose the peace.”
    “What are you talking about, Jim?”
    “I’m talking about Communists in government.”
    “Communists. In our government.”
    He nodded gravely.
    “And that’s who’s ‘after’ you.”
    His eyes flared. “If I knew who wanted me dead, why would I hire you?”
    “Who else could it be, Jim? Besides the Communists.”
    His whiskey sour glass was empty. He lighted up his trademark pipe, having to work a little to get it going. I was about to repeat the question when he said, “That prick Pearson, for one.”
    Lowering his pipe, which was in his left hand, he again dipped the fingertips of his right hand in his water glass and remoistened his lips.
    “The S.O.B. made me out a coward, Nate.” He was trembling; I’d never seen Forrestal tremble before, and I couldn’t tell if it was anxiety or rage. “Told a pack of damn lies that made me out a yellow weakling who ran from danger when his wife was threatened! I wasn’t even there, when that robbery occurred….”
    “Jim … Pearson’s a newspaperman. All he’s after are stories.”
    Forrestal’s hand was clenching the bowl of the pipe as if it were a hand grenade he was preparing to lob. “Pearson is not a mere newspaperman. He’s a crusader—a misguided one—and a pawn of the Communists. Hell, he may be a damn Russian agent; certainly it’s no great stretch of the imagination to see him on Stalin’s payroll.”
    “Maybe so. But you’re still out of office.”
    His eyes narrowed and the thin line of his mouth almost curled into a faint smile. “… In four years I might assume another one.”
    “Under another president, you mean?”
    An eyebrow arched. “I mean as president.”
    It seemed to me, despite my political disinterest, that I had read something about the Republican party courting Forrestal; but looking at this gray-skinned, sunken-eyed shell of his former self, a man seeing Communists under his bed and the FBI in his pantry, I found it difficult to picture his face on a Forrestal in ’52 campaign button. In with Jim! I didn’t think so.
    The real irony, of course, the aspect of this that was truly odd and even creepy, was the extent to which this circumstance mirrored that “private” job I’d done for Forrestal in 1940. The parallel was so glaring, so disturbing, I couldn’t seem to find a way to bring it up, to point it out to Forrestal….
    In the aftermath of that earlier investigation, Forrestal had told me he’d taken the troubled Jo to see a New York psychiatrist, that she’d been hospitalized with a diagnosis of clinical schizophrenia. Shock treatment had been part of the therapy, and I hated to hear that, because I didn’t believe in that snake-pit shit. I even felt a little guilty about telling her I’d seen a shrink myself; the story about my father killing himself with my gun was true, of course, and I still carried guilt for it. But I’d never lost a night’s sleep and wouldn’t have seen a psychiatrist if voices were telling me to paint myself blue and dance naked in Marshall Field’s window.
    And now, almost nine years later, in