“I thought maybe you’d find a book of poetry comforting,” I said.
He held it in both hands, then flipped through some pages, contemplating the volume with a thin smile. “Very thoughtful of you, Nate. Very thoughtful indeed.”
We shook hands and, in an uncharacteristic gesture, he touched my shoulder.
“Thank you for this visit,” Forrestal said, surprising warmth in his voice.
“Good seeing you, Jim. See you back on the golf course.”
“I’ll take you up on that, Nate.”
I left Bethesda in a cloud of confusion. If what Forrestal had told me was true, then the flying saucer at Roswell was an experimental aircraft out of White Sands. To some extent that would even account for the government’s clampdown, if not quite justify death threats and trips to the Walker “guesthouse.”
But how did that explain the detailed, convincing eyewitness accounts I’d encountered in Roswell? And my own, deep sense of conviction that what had happened there did involve a craft from another world, with a crew from the same place? A conviction fueled by recurring dreams of that friendly spaceman …
… who I was for a change not dreaming about, that night in my bed in my room at the Ambassador Hotel, when the phone rang me awake. I’d been sleeping deep and soundly, after seeking escape from my whirling thoughts with a night out that had included the company of the Yugoslavian lass, Anya, the bebop of Louis Jordan and the comic antics of Tim Moore at the Howard Theater, and a late dinner at the Water Gate Inn.
After clicking on the nightstand lamp and blinding me, Anya, blonde hair pleasantly tousled, handed me the receiver. I glanced grumpily at my watch, and said thickly into the mouthpiece, “It’s two-thirty a.m. This better be good.”
“Actually, it’s bad, Mr. Heller,” a businesslike second tenor intoned. “This is Baughman, and I’m over at Bethesda. How quickly can you get here?”
Anya batting her blue eyes at me, I sat up and said to the chief of the Secret Service, “Give me a reason and I’m on my way.”
“James V. Forrestal committed suicide here, forty minutes ago. You were his last outside visitor. Is that sufficient reason?”
I felt it was.
19
No red lights flashed, no scurry of activity indicated that an event with international repercussions had taken place within the looming white tower; no ambulance out front to cart a dead body away-after all, this facility had its own morgue. One-stop shopping here at the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda, Maryland, which-not being in the District of Columbia proper-fell within the jurisdiction of the Montgomery County Sheriffs Department, a few bemused uniformed officers of which could be seen loitering in the parking lot and in the lobby.
But on the sixteenth floor of the hospital tower, the only uniforms on view were those of the naval medical ensigns and a few naval nurses. The investigation into the death of James V. Forrestal was strictly a plainclothes affair, an apparent mingling of Secret Service, FBI and possibly even CIA.
The plainclothes agent in the lobby (he didn’t identify his branch) who had allowed me onto the elevator must have walkie-talkied ahead, because Chief Baughman himself was waiting for me as the elevators opened onto the sixteenth floor.
Though he had surely once again been called in from home, Baughman was a considerable distance from the Hawaiian shirt of our first meeting. The lanky, fortyish, poker-faced Secret Service chief with the piercing gaze wore a double-breasted blue tropical worsted with a red-and-blue striped tie against a white shirt-appropriately patriotic. He showed no signs of middle-of-the-night awakening, in contrast to my casual clothes of earlier today (actually yesterday-this was Sunday morning, now) which I’d tossed back on, the brown-and-white sportjacket over a blue T-shirt. The Southwest Flight fedora was pushed back on my head.
Baughman offered me a hand to shake, which I took and shook, even as we started walking slowly down the relatively short hallway toward room 1618. Even without a mysterious death, the world of a hospital at night is an eerie one, the corridors dimly lighted, the cleaning staff leaving their mark by way of slick floors and antiseptic smells, as the rubber-soled shoes of nurses and orderlies take careful footsteps, so as not to disturb patients sedated and asleep in their rooms, their deep breathing providing a wall of ambient sound.
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Heller,” Baughman said, in that hushed manner reserved for churches and after- hours hospitals. “I want you to understand that we’re not going to ask you for an official statement. That may come later.”
“Am I a suspect?”
“Of what?”
“You tell me. Forrestal’s murder, maybe.”
Down a hallway at the left was the nurses’ station, where a number of plainclothes officers gathered in a small lounge area.
Baughman was matter-of-fact. “I told you on the phone, Mr. Heller. The former Secretary of Defense jumped from the pantry window. This is a suicide.”
“Did anybody see him jump?”
We were nearing the short hallway between 1618 and the diet kitchen; next to the diet kitchen was the single room that adjoined Forrestal’s double one via a bathroom-the single room where supposedly either a medical corpsman or a doctor had been on watch, twenty-four hours. Baughman stopped, so we could speak without being heard by the handful of plainclothesmen bustling about from room to room.
“No one saw him jump,” Baughman said, almost whispering. “But we’ve completed questioning of Lieutenant Dorothy Turner, a duty nurse on the seventh floor, who heard a loud crash around one-fifty a.m. She called the alarm and within minutes the body was found, on the roof of a third-floor passageway connecting this tower to one of the wings.”
“A thirteen-story fall.”
“Yes. The body was, uh … rather badly mangled, I’m afraid. Landed facedown, sprawled amongst some drying mops and buckets … apparently they’d been cleaning off the roof.”
“Lucky for them they hadn’t finished.”
“Forrestal was found in his dressing gown, with the sash of the gown knotted and wrapped tightly around his neck.”
“Well, that sounds to me like somebody strangled him with it, which isn’t suicide in Chicago unless you pay off the right cops.”
Baughman frowned at that, just a little, then said, “Apparently Mr. Forrestal tied the other end of the sash to the radiator and when he jumped, the sash slipped undone. The fact that he meant to hang himself and fell accidentally to his death, instead, makes it no less suicide.”
“Yeah, well it does sound like the Dutch act, at that.”
Baughman sighed. “At least death came instantaneously. That’s what Dr. Brochart says, anyway.”
“Who?”
“The Montgomery County coroner. He agrees with our verdict.”
“I thought verdicts were a jury’s job.”
Baughman ignored that; a hint of emotion broke through the professional mask. “Funny-poor bastard’s wristwatch was still ticking, hadn’t been broken in the fall; but his face was so badly crushed, he wasn’t identified until a bed check turned him up missing.”
“What about the ’round-the-clock observation he was supposedly under?”
“We’re about to interview the two medical corpsmen who were on duty, one who went off at midnight, and his replacement, who was on duty when this happened. The other member of that ’round-the-clock watch we’re also going to interview; he’s a staff psychiatrist named Deen who slept through the whole thing.”
I frowned. “Raines and Bernstein were Forrestal’s doctors, was my understanding.”
Baughman nodded. “Raines is the primary physician and Bernstein is consulting. This fellow Deen is just one of a number of staff shrinks who take turns standing watch; he’s not actively involved in the case.”
