Better Dead (3 page)

I also wondered if I'd be this welcome at Joe's table if he knew my pop had been an old union man, a Wobbly who ran a left-wing bookstore on the West Side.

We wound up back in the hotel bar. I hadn't had near as many beers as him, but enough to ask some questions that might have been ill-advised.

For example. “Joe, you used to be a Democrat. Civil rights, race relations … a damn moderate. How you'd get to where you are now?”

Drunk, he was in full-blown nasal speechifying. “I was a Democrat
because
I was ignorant. I know
now
they're all a bunch of Commie-crats. Whether they know it or not, they're part of a
conspiracy
on a scale so
immense
it dwarfs anything in human history.”

“You really believe that.”

“Damn right I do. And we have our friend Jim Forrestal to thank.”

“Oh?”

“He's the boyo who clued me in about the Commie threat in government.”

He was also the boyo who jumped to his death from a high window in an insane asylum.

I said, “Well, it's sure working for you. That speech you made in Wheeling, it really started the ball rolling.”

He didn't deny it. He grinned a little and the droopy-lidded eyes glittered. “I got hold of something here, Nate, something really good. Something that'll help me
and
our country.”

“But some of these people you're accusing, Joe—you're painting them with an awful wide brush.”

He shrugged and sipped from his pilsner. “If I'm right in the larger sense … and I
am
 …
it
doesn't matter a damn that the details are wrong.”

I was pretty drunk myself, but not enough to buy that bullshit. Still, I was sober enough not to say so.

*   *   *

The next morning I stopped by McCarthy's suite at eight o'clock. The door was answered by the young staffer, who was in a silk mauve dressing robe. He looked tired but I didn't sense I'd woken him.

“I'm afraid the senator's indisposed.” He was blocking the way.

“Joe said to stop by and get him for breakfast.”

“Oh, I don't think he's in shape for that.”

I pushed through. “I need to talk to him before I head back.”

There was a living room area and two bedrooms. In one of the latter I found a nude Joe McCarthy sitting up in bed, pillows propped behind him, pouring himself a glass of something from a pitcher. I thought at first it was water.

But raising his glass, he asked, “Care for a martini, Nate?”

I will spare you any description of a naked Joe McCarthy, other than to say it would have involved hair, muscle, flab, and an appendage that was limp, which was fine by me.

“No, Joe, I better grab a quick breakfast downstairs. You want to throw something on and join me?”

“No. No, I'm fine.” He set the pitcher on the nightstand next to a little pile of pulp westerns. “Listen, I gave it some thought.”

“Uh, yeah?” I wasn't sure what he was referring to, but I hoped he meant my University of Chicago friend.

“How did you
know
I was looking into that professor guy? That pinko scientist …
how?
”

“The private detective agency you hired to investigate him in Chicago is one I farm things out to sometimes. A colleague there clued me in. Professional courtesy.”

“Breach of trust, I say. Bastard shoulda kept that name to himself.” He grunted. “But you, Nate, you're a good guy, looking out for a pal. What the hell. I'm gonna give him a pass.”

Right then he could've wrapped one of those sheets around himself and passed for Nero, even without a laurel wreath—
thumbs-up, thumbs-down.

“I appreciate that, Joe.”

He grinned goofily and held out his hand for me to shake. Handshaking was a staple of his approach, though I found it as clammy as it was vigorous. And I wasn't comfortable being that close to the naked senator.

Not that the image put me off breakfast—you develop a strong stomach in my line—and I made the ten a.m. flight just fine.

That was the end of my Mosinee adventure, but there is a postscript: Mayor Ralph Kronwetter, forty-nine, died on May 6. And Reverend Will La Brew, seventy-two, who had so indignantly promised the fake Commies he would hide his Bible, was found dead in his bed the next morning. A spokesman from the Mosinee American Legion called it “a terrible, tragic coincidence.”

But the doctor who'd treated them both said “the excitement and exertion of the day” had likely “contributed” to their untimely passings.

On the other hand, it was still relatively bloodless for a coup.

 

CHAPTER

2

Washington, D.C., March 26, 1953

I'm not sure I would trust anybody in my business who read private eye novels. Reading the “true detective” magazines was a different story, because there was always a chance you could place a case of yours there and get some publicity, or possibly a little dough if you split with a reporter or even wrote it up yourself.

The pulps and the paperbacks were such a travesty on what a real private investigator did that I had no time for them, and I was perfectly capable of giving rise to my own sex scenes, thank you, and as for violence, that was mercifully rare in coming.

But scratch somebody in my profession and you'll find a onetime reader of the romantic version of what we do. For me it was Sherlock Holmes and Nick Carter and eventually
Black Mask,
a pulp magazine I read in the twenties as a very young man. All that stuff had gone into the hopper and helped point kids like me toward police work. It hadn't strictly been the graft.

One of the
Black Mask
boys, as the editor liked to refer to his stable of writers, was an actual ex–Pinkerton operative, and his stories had an understated yet gritty reality the rest of the pulp-paper yarns lacked. When the writer graduated to publishing actual books, I had stayed with him, through my early years on the Chicago P.D. and even later as a private detective. I might have kept reading him, but I hadn't seen anything new by him in the bookstalls for a while.

“Samuel Dashiell Hammett,” the frail thin man said, seated at a table with a glass of water, two microphones trained on either side of him like rifles, and a glass ashtray where he had stood a pack of Camels upright.

A flat nasal voice from the dais, where a brace of senators sat with various staffers behind them, asked: “And what is your occupation?”

“Writer.” He had a full head of brushed-back white hair, darker eyebrows, salt-and-pepper mustache, and a handsome if ravaged, sunken-cheeked face the color of typing paper. In a medium-gray suit with a dark gray tie and a breast-pocket handkerchief, this was the kind of man who seemed dapper without trying.

The kid playing prosecutor—and he
was
a kid, still in his twenties—was Roy Cohn, who'd made a name for himself in the Rosenberg “atomic spy” case, as assistant to District Attorney Irving Saypol. With his slicked-back black hair, high forehead, reptilian hooded eyes, and cleft chin, he might have been the son of the man he sat next to—Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Referring pointlessly to his notes, Cohn said, “You're the author of some rather well-known detective stories. Is that correct?”

Hammett leaned forward, elbows on the table. He looked comfortable, or at least not uncomfortable. “That is right.”

“In addition to that, you have written on some social issues. Is that correct?”

The emaciated-looking writer's shrug involved his whole upper body. “Well, it's impossible to write anything without taking some sort of stand on social issues.”

I was seated off to one side, just behind the press tables, in the gallery of the Caucus Room in the S.O.B., as the Senate Office Building was nicknamed. The vast rectangular room with its trio of grand sun-streaming windows had an oddly French-derived style, from the black-veined marble floors to the ceiling with its gilded rosettes. The smell of cigarette smoke—allowed between witness appearances—did cut the elegance somewhat, as did the rumpled suits of reporters and politicos.

This was a hearing of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations into the use of federal funds to purchase books by known Communists for State Department libraries abroad. I recognized one of the senators—loquacious Everett Dirksen from my home state of Illinois—but it was Cohn, the young committee counsel, doing the talking right now.

The young prosecutor turned to McCarthy and they exchanged sleepy-eyed looks. “Mr. Chairman, some three hundred books by Mr. Hammett are in the Information Service today in some seventy-three information centers.”

“That's a lot of books,” Hammett cut in, with a smile that managed to be both wide and barely perceptible.

“I'm sorry—three hundred
copies,
eighteen books.” The young prosecutor offered up a slight smile to his witness. “I realize you haven't written three hundred books. About how many
have
you written?”

“Five, I think.”

“Just five books?”

“Yes, and many short stories that have been collected in reprint books.”

Cohn nodded, thumbing through his papers. “There are eighteen books in use, including some collections. Now, Mr. Hammett, when did you write your first published book?”

The author's head tipped to one side. “The first book was
Red Harvest
in 1929.”

“At the time you wrote that book, were you a member of the Communist Party?”

Hammett's chin came up, as if inviting a swing; but his voice was quietly nonconfrontational. “I decline to answer on the grounds that an answer might tend to incriminate me, relying on my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the United States.”

Cohn had expected that. “When did you write your last published book?”

Hammett's frown was as barely perceptible as his smile. “Well, I can't really answer that … because of the short story collections. I imagine it was sometime in the thirties or forties.”

Cohn nodded. “And at that time were you a member of the Communist Party?”

“Same answer.”

McCarthy hunkered toward the microphone, gesturing with his black-rimmed glasses, the beast awakening.

“Mr. Hammett,” he said, his voice dripping cold contempt, “let me ask you this. Forgetting about
yourself
for the time being, is it a safe
assumption
that any member of the Communist
Party
 … under Communist
discipline
 … would propagandize the Communist cause
regardless
of whether he was writing
fiction
books or books on politics?”

McCarthy's oratorical style was in full sway, that familiar nasal second tenor randomly dropping and raising register for emphasis.

Unimpressed, Hammett shrugged. “I honestly don't know.”

McCarthy leaned in farther, teeth showing in nothing like a smile. “Refusing to
answer
on the
grounds
that it might
incriminate
you is normally taken by this committee … and by this
country
 … as meaning that you are a
member
of the Communist
Party.
Therefore, you should know
considerable
about the Communist movement.”

Hammett's eyebrows were up; there was something lazy about it. “Was that a question, sir?”

Now McCarthy accompanied his emphasized words with bobs of the head. “That is just a
comment
on your
statement.
” He swung toward Cohn. “Mr. Counsel, do you have anything
further
?”

Cohn flashed a nervous smile and sat forward, the smartest kid in class. “Oh yes … Mr. Hammett, from these various books you've written, have you received royalty payments?”

“I have.”

“And I would assume that if the State Department purchased three hundred copies of your books, you would receive some royalties.”

A tiny nod from the author. “I should imagine so.”

Several nods from the prosecutor. “Could you tell us what your royalties are, by percentage?”

Hammett flipped a hand. “On the books published by Alfred Knopf, I think it starts at fifteen percent.”

McCarthy—sitting back now, as if trying to get as far away from this odious witness as possible—asked brusquely, “Did any of the
money
which you received from the
State
Department find its
way
into the
coffers
of the Communist Party?”

Hammett again matter-of-factly declined to answer.

Cohn, showing no opinion of the witness at all, asked, “Is it a fair statement that you have received substantial sums of money from the royalties on all of the books you have written?”

“Yes, that is a fair statement.”

“And you decline to tell us whether any of these moneys went to the Communist Party?”

“That is right.”

McCarthy shook his head and smirked at several other senators on the dais.

Cohn pressed on. “Is it a fact that you have allowed the use of your name as sponsor and member of governing bodies of Communist front organizations?”

Hammett declined to answer.

Now Cohn raised his voice somewhat, but his youth made that seem like he was trying too hard. “Mr. Hammett, is it a fact that you recently served a term in prison?”

A tiny nod from Hammett. “Yes. I did six months on the bail-bond matter—actually,
five
months.” The writer smiled again, just barely. “I got time off for good behavior.”

Some mild laughter rippled across the spectator section. I admired the wry good humor of this long-in-the-tooth
Black Mask
boy; but the thought of this frail-looking individual being incarcerated was anything but funny.