fetched the ice bucket and thrust it into my arms.
“Fill it,” she said.
I went out and down the hall to an ice machine and filled the bucket and came back; fixed two water glasses of rum and Coke and ice, and joined her on the couch, where she sat, smoking.
“You disappoint me,” she said, taking the drink.
“The Reds aren’t out to get you. Honest.”
“You didn’t dig deep enough. You didn’t look close enough.”
“I dug. I looked.”
She clutched my arm-my bare arm. Her nails, which were painted blood red, dug into my flesh. “They’re insidious, Nate. You’ve got to stay on the case.”
“There’s no case, Jo. This town is just getting to you.”
“Fucking town!” She gulped at the rum and Coke, then gulped at it two more times, finishing it. She stabbed her cigarette out and stalked over to the wet bar and was making another (with damn little Coke), as she said, “Jim’s the only one I can trust. Jim, and you.”
Why did
She settled in next to me, answering my unspoken question. “The same instincts that tell me who to suspect, tell me who to trust. And I trust you, Nate.”
“Jo, nobody’s after you. Really. Truly.”
“Nate, you
And she kissed me. There was urgency in it, and something that might have been passion, and I felt her arms slip around me.
“I need you, Nate.” She pressed my right hand to her small firm left breast. “Please help me.”
This time she put her tongue in my mouth, and she was a lovely woman, but she was drunk, and she was nuts. Plus, she was my client’s wife.
On the other hand, the asshole was catting around on her, so it would serve the bastard right….
“No,” I said, pushing her gently away. “Jo, we’re not going to step over that line.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, pressing against me, slender fingers finding their way into my hair, a giddiness working itself into her voice. “My husband wouldn’t mind-we’ve always had an open marriage, Jim and I. We’ve both always been fiercely independent! Free spirits….”
As free spirits went, Jo was in one hell of a cage, and her pipe-sucking Brooks Brothers husband was an unlikely candidate for tree nymph.
Besides, in shadowing both of them, I’d seen Forrestal score with half a dozen dames in under two weeks, and Jo’s assignations were strictly with booze bottles.
So I pulled away, rose, poured her another drink, and stuck to my story: nobody was after her or her boys. An hour-and three drinks and six cigarettes-later she seemed to be listening to reason.
She was shaking her head, staring into her sickness. “But these dreams-what you say are
“The feelings in you are real,” I said, and took both her hands in mine and looked right at her, made sure she was looking back at me. “Listen-let me tell you something about myself that I don’t tell just anybody.”
She smiled sexily; and she was sexy, bonkers or not, drunk or sober. “You’d share something personal with me, Nate? Something private?”
“Yes,” I said, and I told her about my father killing himself with my gun.
“He was an old union guy,” I explained, “and he hated the cops, he hated the system, but I managed to get myself on the police department, and it ate him up inside. Later on, when he found out I lied on the witness stand, for money, he used my nine-millimeter to blow his brains out. And I found him like that, at his kitchen table.”
Her eyes weren’t hooded, now. “Oh, Nate …”
“Anyway, I had some problems sleeping after that. I saw a guy, what they used to call an alienist.”
“A psychiatrist?”
“Yeah. And it helped.”
“You think … you think that’s what I should do?”
“Yes. Talk to somebody like that, who can help you sort out the truth from the bullshit.”
She just sat there quietly for the longest time; and suddenly the former
And in a kid’s tiny voice, she said, “All right. I’ll do it.”
Then she kissed me again, and I might have reconsidered my noble stance where bedding her was concerned, but the truth is, I had just enough time to still make my date with Jeannie from the Farm Credit Administration (who maybe had a little to do with this story, after all). So if my conscience kept me from sleeping with Jo Forrestal, that conscience was blonde.
And that would have been the end of it, if 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.
