the wreckage of the saucer had been taken.
“If this is a hoax,” Pearson said, “we have a very knowledgeable practical joker at work.”
“So you want me to investigate Major Marcel’s story,” I said.
“Yes. In particular, I’d like you to talk to the witnesses who claim they saw the crashed craft and the bodies of the crew.”
“Isn’t that the part of the country where they smoke locoweed?”
“Well, there’s smoke, all right, Nathan, but not necessarily from locoweed. And where there’s smoke, there’s-”
“Mirrors…. What’s the latest word on Forrestal?”
“Making good progress, they say.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed.”
Defensiveness edged his tone. “I don’t wish the man any ill, personally. Just politically.”
“Then why don’t you let up on him?”
“What I write and say isn’t having any effect on Jim Forrestal’s state of mind. My sources inside Bethesda tell me he isn’t allowed to read newspapers or listen to the radio and all communication from the outside is strictly controlled. He may be insane, but I’m confident the nation is strong enough, stable enough, to hear the truth, to have the answers.”
Pearson had been asking the questions in his column and on the air:
Now dry sarcasm colored his voice. “Do you know where your former client’s room is?”
“No.”
“The sixteenth floor of the Bethesda tower. Doesn’t that sound like just the ideal place to keep a potential suicide?”
“More like the ideal place to help keep him away from the press,” I admitted.
“Or maybe they’re isolating him for yet another reason.”
“What would that be?”
“Who knows what drugs they’re pumping into him, or what sort of mind-control magic they’re up to? That hospital is a hotbed of CIA shenanigans, you know.”
“Bethesda.”
“Yes. And if my sources are to be believed, the CIA-Forrestal’s own ‘baby,’ which is a nice irony-is doing research with drugs, electric shock, hypnosis…. Nathan, I just want you to understand-I’m not the villain here.”
“Neither is Forrestal.”
An operator’s voice came in to let Pearson know that he needed to feed in some more coins to keep this conversation going.
After the music of the dropping coins had ceased, Pearson said acidly, “You’re already costing me money. Will you go to Roswell and do this job?”
“Sure, but I want a five-hundred-dollar retainer, in advance, nonrefundable.”
“What if you only work three days?”
“It’s a minimum fee, Drew. I never chase flying saucers for under five cees.”
“… All right. I’m going to send you a list of names that Marcel has given me, with some rudimentary background information. It’ll come Special Delivery, with your retainer check, and your plane tickets. Can you go out there next week?”
I could, and I did. Of course that miserly son of a bitch sent me the cheapest way he could: on a charter flight of retired schoolteachers going to Carlsbad Caverns. At El Paso, the charter group boarded a bus and I rented the Ford. It was a wonder Pearson didn’t expect me to tag along with the teachers and then hitchhike to my first stop.
Sleepy little mountain-nestled Cloudcroft (pop. 265) had the near ghost-town look of off-season, its downtown storefronts no different than in an Illinois or Iowa hamlet; but from a perch overlooking this slumbering resort community loomed a wide-awake ghost of another sort.
The hotel known as the Lodge seemed to have been transported from another time-say, Queen Victoria’s-and another place-the Swiss Alps, maybe. The grand old railway inn was an architectural aberration, a rambling three- story gingerbread chalet-wooden, not adobe, painted gray, trimmed burgundy, with gabled windows, glassed-in verandas and a central copper lookout tower. The shape of the structure was distinct against the New Mexico sky, which at night was a deeper blue but no less clear, with stars like tiny glittering jewels set here and there in its smooth surface, purely for decorative effect, the full moon casting a ghostly ivory luster upon the mansionlike building, whose windows burned with amber light.
Lugging my Gladstone bag, I moved through the covered entryway, pushing open double doors decorated with stained-glass windows, and entered into a two-story lobby that was at once cavernous and cozy, its dark woodwork highly polished, its hardwood floor worn, plants and flowers everywhere, from potted to freshly cut, a world of elegant antiques and hand-beveled glass and sepia lighting; it was as if I had walked into a daguerreotype.
“We have your reservation, sir,” the assistant manager said numbly, at the check-in counter. He was a guy in his late twenties with short-cropped prematurely gray hair and a scar over his left eye; he was pleasant enough but had an all-too-familiar look, the postwar equivalent of what we used to call the thousand-yard stare.
“Which theater?” I asked.
“Huh?” He flashed a nervous smile. “Pacific.”
“Me too. I helped remodel Guadalcanal.”
“At least you had some ground under you-I was on a carrier.”
“Listen, Mac, you got any suites available?”
“Just one; we’re underbooked, and even off-season, the suites get snapped up.”
“But you do have one?”
“Yes,” he said, but shook his head, no. “The Governor’s Suite. It’s pretty expensive-it’s where Pancho Villa, Judy Garland, Conrad Hilton and Clark Gable’ve stayed.”
“Together?”
That made him chuckle; he looked like he hadn’t chuckled in a while.
Pushing my hat back, I scratched my head. “I have to do some interviews and I’d rather not do them in a public place, like your bar or restaurant-”
“It’s fifty a night.”
“Christ, I just want a room, not stock in the joint. Never mind-my cheapskate boss would stick me with the bill. I’ll muddle through with my five-dollar room …”
“… It’s just the one night?”
“Yeah.”
“Take the bastard,” he said. He had a tiny smile as he handed me the key. “You gonna eat first?”
“Think so.”
“Leave your bag. I’ll get it to your room.”
“Thanks, Mac.”
“A warning, though …”
“Yeah?”
“The Governor’s Suite is Rebecca’s favorite room.”
“Who’s Rebecca?”
He raised the shrapnel-scarred eyebrow. “Our resident ghost. She was a chambermaid, murdered by her jealous lover here, back in the thirties.”
“No kidding. Was she … is she … good-looking?”
“They say she’s a gorgeous redhead.”
“What the hell-I always wanted to lay a ghost.”
I tipped my hat to him and headed over to where leather armchairs were grouped about a large carved-
