Gretchen had collected her wits.
“What just happened, sir?”
“I deliberately offended Director Hoover. Mr Hoover will want to take some kind of petty revenge on me for whatever slight he imagines I have just caused him. Because he has a very dirty mind — dirty and nasty, I might add — he will now order his people to uncover evidence that you and I are inappropriately involved with each other. He doesn’t have anything he can use against me, you see. That sort of thing worries a man like Hoover. Things might get a little rocky for you in the next few days. Think of it as a test of whether or not you really want a career in DC. One piece of advice,” he added, ruefully, “you might want to warn that fellow you were with last night to watch out for himself.”
Dan Brenckmann was staying at the Colonial Hotel on Massachusetts Avenue. After Gretchen had written a note for the Deputy Attorney General about the recent meeting with the Director of the FBI, she placed a call to the front desk of the hotel and left a message for Dan to call her that evening at the apartment she, or rather, her father was renting for her on Cathedral Avenue.
Why didn’t I give him my apartment number last night?
Dan rang her at around eight that evening, an hour or so after she had got in.
“Hi, Gretchen,” he said brightly. “What can I do for you?”
“Oh, it is nothing really. Would you like to meet up for a drink?”
“Yes. When did you have in mind?”
“About an hour from now. I’ll get a cab to your hotel.”
“Okay…”
The bar of the Colonial Hotel seemed empty apart from a middle aged woman with a ferocious perm dreamily playing slow tunes on a miniature grand piano in one corner. The bar’s emptiness was a little illusory, for as Gretchen’s eye’s acclimatised to the gloomy mood lighting she realised there were several people, couples and men talking business around the edges of the big room which funnelled towards a small, old-fashioned bar with mirrors at the back of the building.
Dan waved and came to greet her.
He did not attempt to peck her cheek, her expression was too forbidding.
“What is it?” He inquired.
“I met J. Edgar Hoover today and my boss says the old monster will get his agents to dig up dirt about me. You know, evidence that I’m having an affair with Mr Katzenbach, or something…”
“You’re not?”
“Of course not!”
“I didn’t think you were.” This Dan said hurriedly, a little taken aback by the spontaneous vehemence of the woman.
“I’m not having an affair with anybody!” Gretchen hissed angrily. This genuinely surprised her companion which infuriated her even more. “Oh! I knew this was a bad idea!”
“Having a drink with an old chum from Yale?”
“No! Thinking I’d feel better if I talked to somebody about it!”
Dan ordered a whiskey for himself and a Bloody Mary for Gretchen.
“Well, now that you are here you might as well tell me about it,” he suggested. “Whatever it is?”
“My boss says they will probably come after you too,” she confessed guiltily.
“That’s okay. I have no skeletons in my cupboard.”
“I’m sorry, Dan. It’s all my fault that you are involved in this.”
Dan forced a smile to veil how concerned he was to see his friend — whatever else Gretchen was she was a friend — so unnaturally perturbed.
“I’m sure I’ll survive,” he assured her.
“My boss said I should look at this as if it was a test.” She shrugged. “You know, to see if I’ve got what it takes to make a go of things in DC.”
“Coping with being harassed by the FBI is a pre-requisite of making a go of things in this town?”
“So it would seem.”
“My, my,” Dan mused out aloud, “it is a funny old World, isn’t it?”
Chapter 16
The big old house had been built — actually, half-built — by a silent movie star in the late 1920s who had drunk himself to death when, so the story went, people fell about laughing on the set whenever he auditioned for a ‘talking’ part. They said he was one of those big, deep-chested guys who had a high pitched girl’s voice. Anyway, the house had been left derelict, empty, save for the snakes and the rats, for several years. The real estate magnet who had acquired it for a song as part of a job lot of falling down buildings and vacant plots of land in 1938 had used it and its outhouses for his offices and to accommodate his workers in the Canyon; then Second War had kick started a new California land grab and the rest, as they say, is history. Much of the house’s singular character and all its quirks including its name, ‘Gretsky’s’, resulted from the period of three years when it was the long-departed real estate tycoon’s bridgehead in the Hollywood Hills.
The original building was still uncompleted, its eastern end terminating in a slab-sided wooden wall. Fortuitously, this was the side of the house invisible from the road otherwise passersby would think that a giant shark had bitten off one end of the structure. Clustered around the abbreviated mansion — even what remained of the original design was very, very big with fifteen rooms and a thirty feet long, now dry, oval swimming pool on a terrace hanging precipitously over a twenty feet drop to the bush and scrub below — were the ‘barracks’, big solid timber ‘long houses’ partitioned into smaller ‘living areas’ joined together with a crazy tangle of plumbing, and overhead electricity and telephone cables. Weeds and vines constantly tried to envelope these outhouses; in the summer the trees and vegetation kept the sun off the roofs for several hours each day and in the fall and winter sheltered the ramshackle cluster of dwellings from the dry wind off the mountains.
Judy Dorfmann had fallen in love with Gretsky’s the moment that she and Sam Brenckmann had trudged up the hill from distant Mulholland Drive that dusty spring afternoon at the end of their ‘travels’. Of course, at the time they had not known that their travels had ‘ended’; just that for the moment they could go no farther until they had rested up and regained a little strength and optimism.
‘Sam, baby!’ A wiry wild-haired woman in her late forties had screeched and thrown herself into Judy’s partner’s weary arms. ‘We all thought you we dead!’
That was the first time Judy met Sabrina Henschal. ‘Sabrina’ was not her real name; Susan Cora Henschal had come to Laurel Canyon in 1956 blowing every cent of the money her recently deceased father had left her on Gretsky’s. After three marriages she had ‘given up on men, well husbands, leastways’ and needed a place to live, paint and to party. Gretsky’s had been open house to like minded spirits ever since.
Initially, Judy had wondered what she had walked into as Sabrina, a striking woman who had spent too much time in the California sun and lived life faster than most, had clung to Sam like she was never going to let him go ever again.
It transpired that Sam had moved on from being a ‘fuck mate’ to the status of a ‘favourite son’ sometime in the summer before the war; although this had not been immediately apparent for some minutes that first afternoon. Sabrina had eventually stopped hugging and kissing the tall, exhausted much younger man — he had been exactly, give or take a few days, half her age the last time she had seen him — and turned her amused, wide-eyed and hugely curious attention onto Judy.
Judy had been far too exhausted to take offence at being studied, in those first few seconds, rather like an exhibit in a zoological park.