Better Dead (39 page)

“Did you…?
Those
are the two who came to mah place and … Are they
dead
?”

“Very,” I said. “They tried to kill us both.”

She blinked several times, as if fighting dizziness. “How … how did you
find
me?”

“Not important. Your dress is over in the corner. Put it on and let's get the hell out of here.”

Her eyes went from corpse to corpse again. “Shouldn't we call the police?”

“No. Trust me on that. This never happened. What did they give you? They drugged you some way or another.”

She swallowed, leaned on me. “They held a cloth near my nose and mouth. Must have been chloroform.”

At least they hadn't held it to that pretty face, because it would have scarred her. As if this hadn't.…

I walked her to the red square-dance dress. Dazed though she was, she didn't need help slipping it on. For once, there was nothing erotic at all about it.

I said, “Did they make you drink anything?”

She shook her head, black hair brushing off her shoulders. “Didn't make me. Asked if ah was thirsty, after ah came around.…”

“Were you tied in the chair then?”

She nodded. “Yes. Ah said ah was
terrible
thirsty and they gave me some Coke Cola.”

I grunted a sigh. “It may have been spiked with a drug. How are you feeling?”

“Better. Little off mah feed, but … better.”

We were heading for the door when it opened and he stepped in—Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a raincoat over his plaid shirt and blue jeans, to the top of his cowboy boots. He hadn't had a chance to change. The absurdity of it might have made me laugh, if we weren't sharing the living room with dead men.

“My God,” he said, his eyes going from one corpse to another, shutting the door quietly behind him. “What have you
done
?”

“What have
you
done, Doctor?” I asked, getting the nine-millimeter out and pointing it at him, holding Bettie to me with an arm around her slender waist.

He raised his hands about chest-high, palms out. We were maybe six feet apart. “I have no weapon. I'm not a vuh-violent person.”

I left Bettie to go over and pat him down. No gun. Of course, he might have a poisoned needle on his wedding ring or maybe a raincoat pocket full of poison pills. With this fucker, you never knew.

Returning to Bettie, keeping my gun trained on him, I slipped my free arm around her waist again and said, “Let's hear your story, Doc.”

“No story,” he said, hands still up, but something casual about it. His short hair gave him a Julius Caesar look. “These two foul-ups killed a man tonight, a man they were supposed to help.”

“They were supposed to
help
Frank Olson?”

He nodded emphatically. “That's right. We had scheduled him to go into a hospital, Chestnut Lodge. Near Rockville, Maryland. Earlier in the evening, Dr. Olson had agreed to take treatment there, but he'd been so … vuh-
volatile
of late … we were afraid, come morning, he'd be, well, a handful. I arranged for our man at the Statler … the late Mr. Martin here … and another individual to handle, you might say, the rough stuff … the late Mr. Sarito there … to make the transfer in the middle of the night. We wished to avoid the embarrassment, for all concerned, of dragging Dr. Olson through a crowded lobby in daylight. And apparently he objected to being taken from his sleep to make this unexpected departure…”

“Apparently.”

“… and he put up a struggle, and, well, he wound up going out the window. Absolutely unintended.”

“For the sake of argument, let's say I buy that. Why grab Miss Page here?”

He swallowed. “Your puh-presence at the Statler was most unfortunate and terribly upsetting. Dr. Lashbrook was beside himself when he realized whose questions he'd been answering. I suggested … I admit it came from me … that Miss Page be brought here as a way to leverage your cooperation. Perhaps not my best notion, or finest hour.”

“Was it your idea to drug her?”

“Of course not!
Was
she drugged?”

“I think so. It may have been that LSD-25 of yours.”

“If so, not my doing, nor my idea.” He smiled at Bettie, who was clinging to me. “Dear, there's nothing to worry about. The substance has a tendency to muddle the thoughts, and occasionally there are heightened sensations. But you'll be yourself again soon, if you aren't already.”

I said, “Not how it worked for Frank Olson, though, was it, Doc?”

He patted the air with his raised palms. “Let me suggest that you let me huh-handle this situation. Puh-personally. Obviously calling in the authorities would put all of us in awkward circumstances. You've killed two men, Mr. Heller … and I understand it isn't the
first
time you've wandered into a CIA operation and left bodies behind.”

Bettie glanced at me.

“Killing me,” Gottlieb said, “wouldn't do anyone any good.”

“I might find it satisfying.”

“Yes, but revenge is such a fleeting thing. Rescuing Miss Page is admirable—murdering me, in cold blood?… I doubt that's who you are.”

I nodded around at the garish sex den. “What do you use this place for, Doc? This fraternity boy's idea of heaven? Blackmail?”

His eyes flared with indignation. “Heavens no! What do you take me for! I'm a
scientist,
Mr. Heller. And I like to think, in my way, a patriot. You won a Silver Star, I understand. Do I have to explain sacrifice?”

And I knew.

Just as I'd known that the figure falling from a high floor at the Statler had to be Frank Olson.

“You're
testing
that shit here,” I said. “You bring men up here, visiting businessmen, poor bastards from Des Moines and Duluth, and then some prostie or maybe CIA femme fatale spikes a drink with your LSD-25 and gives it to her gentleman friend of the moment and you watch and record and film and … Jesus, you are a fucking monster. I really should kill your ass—if there's a God, He'll thank me.”

Bettie squeezed my arm. “Let's go, Nate. Come on, sugah.
Please
.”

I looked down at her. Her eyes were wide and wild with fear—as they would have been when she was bound in that chair, if she'd known what the hell was going on.

“All right,” I said to her. “But first help me with something. I think this is a job that will come fairly easy to you.…”

We tied Gottlieb into the chair where not long ago Bettie had sat. Maybe he was kinky enough to enjoy it, but I doubt it—I thought I saw real fear and discomfort in his eyes, much as I saw girlish pleasure in Bettie's as she cinched the final rings of rope around his upper torso. The finishing touch was mine—I fetched a ball gag from a nightstand drawer and Bettie giggled as she stuffed it in his mouth like a roasted hog and looped the strap around the back of his head.

And we left him there, in the den of government iniquity, in the stench of his killed colleagues, which was nearly as foul as the things he did to his unwitting human guinea pigs.

*   *   *

At Bettie's, with dawn at her windows, I took a card from my wallet and dialed a number. Early or late, I would get an answer, though not necessarily a direct line to the man I was calling.

And that proved to be the case—I had to leave my name and number. It took six whole minutes to hear back from him.

“Is Gottlieb yours, Shep?” I asked.

Edward Shepherd took a long pause and then said, “And if he is?”

“Is this a secure line?”

“Of course.”

“Well, he's tied to a chair in that honeypot safe house on Bedford Street. With two dead men, who when they were still breathing kidnapped a friend of mine. One used to be your inside man at the Statler, the other is one of Costello's muscle boys.”

“Thank you for the tip. Can we meet?”

“Well, you need time to put a little cleanup crew together, I suppose. How about in an hour at the Waldorf?”

“The hotel?”

“The cafeteria.”

 

CHAPTER

22

At six in the morning, the Waldorf Cafeteria—like any other respectable twenty-four-hour restaurant (not to suggest any respectability here)—was serving breakfast. At my side was Bettie, in a man's gray sweatshirt, blue jeans, and moccasins, wearing just a dab of lipstick but no other makeup, her hair back in a ponytail and jumpiness in the azure eyes. She'd said she didn't think she could sleep and didn't want to be alone, and frankly I didn't want to leave her alone.

Bettie understood that when my guest arrived, she would have to move to a table across the restaurant from us, while remaining in my sight. Surprisingly, we both felt like eating—not that it hadn't been an energetic evening, but after the Village Barn, nothing much about it had been what you'd call appetizing.

We'd got here a little early and had gone through the cafeteria line to gather orange juice, coffee, scrambled eggs, link sausage, silver-dollar pancakes, and other breakfast edibles about on a par with what I used to get at the mess hall at Marine boot camp in San Diego.

She ate slowly but spoke quickly. “Ah feel like ah
imagined
it all. Did ah imagine it all, sugah?”

“I'll let you know after I talk to my friend.”

“Is he with the police, your friend?”

“The federal government.”

Her big eyes grew bigger, and they could get very, very big. “Those were government men back there?”

“Bettie, don't think about it. I'm going to straighten this out for both of us.”

“Are you bein' honest with me, honey?”

“I'm going to
try
to straighten it out. That's the truth-and-nothing-but version. But whatever I can put together will almost certainly include you getting amnesia about the last ten or twelve hours.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding, fine with that—such a pretty woman, ponytail bobbing. Nothing else bad today was going to happen to her, if I could help it. Big “if,” maybe.…

When Shep Shepherd entered the cafeteria, pausing to hang up his fur-collared topcoat, he was uncharacteristically late—a good fifteen minutes. Bettie and I had been fifteen minutes early, so it felt longer.

But I wasn't surprised. First of all, I didn't know how far he'd had to come—I assumed somewhere in Manhattan, because if it had been Washington, D.C., he'd have asked for a later meeting. No, he'd had things to do. To organize. Like get that cleanup crew going. Even for an organization man, that takes time.

Yet there was nothing bedraggled about him, nothing to indicate he'd got a disturbing phone call that had drawn him from his comfortable bed just an hour and fifteen minutes ago. He looked clean-shaven and bright-eyed, if not quite bushy-tailed.

His hat (a Dobbs, I'd guess) was light blue with a dark blue band that matched his suit, which was a Botany 500, both right out of my wardrobe. His button-down-collar shirt was white, his tie a muted red with white stripes. My suit—the tailored charcoal number that concealed the nine-millimeter—wasn't as crisp and fresh-looking as his.

I'd been up longer.

Tucked under his arm was a fat, fastened manila envelope, which he flipped onto the table near where I'd set my hat. He nodded to Bettie, who quickly rose, smiling back nervously, taking her tray of eggs and such with her and heading across to another small table, the CIA security chief flashing her a friendly gap-toothed grin, but not overdoing it.

He tossed his hat on the chair next to him. I did not rise and we skipped the hand-shaking ritual as he bent a bit to ask if I minded if he went through the line and got himself some breakfast before we got started. He hadn't had a chance to catch a bite. I told him to go ahead.

Around us, the place was fairly empty. The clientele lacked the Bohemian spirit of the predawn-a.m. Village, those who'd endured long nights of booze and art talk having by now stumbled into a bed or a cot or a corner. A few shabby-looking drunks were hunkered over coffee and sometimes a roll, with bleary pissholes-in-the-snow eyes, men not looking much like they were contemplating the bright possibilities of the new day that lay ahead.

With a plate of biscuits and gravy, Shep returned and said in a Southern drawl much more understated than Bettie's, “That's a lovely gal you got there, Nate. You know, that's a rarity, that kind of figure, the old-fashioned hourglass variety. But she's got a pretty face, too.”

“I'm glad you approve. She's from Tennessee. You two can get together sometime and talk about how downhill things have gone since the slaves were freed.”

His quick laugh was about what that remark deserved. “Nate, would you mind if we start with you givin' me an account, in some detail, of your evening? As you see it, from when you arrived at the Statler—around two-thirty a.m., wasn't it?”

He ate his biscuits and gravy and I gave him all of it, leaving nothing out though identifying my client as Mrs. Frank Olson, with no mention of McCarthy. Biscuits and gravy are a sloppy dish, but he ate his with a certain grace, keeping some eye contact with me as I recounted the events. He'd nod now and then, to underscore that he was following.

When I was done, he was done, and he touched his mouth with a paper napkin, rose, and went over to dump his dishes in a plastic tub abandoned by a bored busboy, then got himself some more coffee. Just as he came back, a waitress was freshening mine. About a third of my breakfast was left, but cold as a stone by now. Across the room, Bettie had finished hers, and sat turned away from us, looking out the window at a street coming alive as dawn turned into day.

Shep and I had plenty of privacy—I'd taken the same rear table as our previous meeting—but the covering din of loud boasting musicians and writers and actors was absent. The handful of nondrunk patrons seemed to be shopkeepers who were having a quick breakfast before opening up. So our conversation was low-key, in volume if not content.