Charley was shaking. He reached a hand in his tux pocket and found the small round silver box, from which he selected two pink pills. He popped them in his mouth, and ran a faucet and stuck his face under the water and drank. Then he used a paper towel to dry his face and turned to me, his hazel eyes tight with apparent earnestness.
“Nate…I will handle my brother. I will make sure this unfortunate incident is a…one time thing…. Just a sad falling out among old friends.”
“I’ll kill him if he touches her.”
“I know! I know…. You made your point. What Rocco fails to understand is how…misguided he was in evicting Miss Payne.”
“Why is that? He was tired of her—she was nothing to him but a dog to whip.”
Charley drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. “This inquiry…with the potentially damaging publicity it could bring…. Miss Payne might feel sufficiently alienated from my brother to do something unwise.”
“You mean, she lived in your penthouse for a long time, and saw people come and go, and probably heard things.”
He nodded, once, a kind of a sideways nod. “Now. If I…handle Rocco. Keep him away from her—and from you…will you see to it that Miss Payne does not become friendly with the senator from Tennessee and his little tea party?”
I considered that. Then I said, “You know, that seems fair.”
He sighed and beamed. “Good. Good…. And thank you for helping my brother, my other brother out, with that Mortimer character.” He shook his head. “Such a lout. Such an uncouth lout.”
“Some people have poor social graces,” I said, holstering my nine millimeter.
Charley exited the men’s room, with me right behind him; no sign of Rocco. I think Charley was as relieved as I was. He turned to me and extended his hand.
“We have a deal, then?”
“Deal,” I said, shaking with him.
When Charley had headed back toward the showroom— where Sinatra was singing, “If I Loved You”—I glanced toward the ladies’ room door, and saw Jackie cracking it, peeking out.
“Come on, honey,” I said. “We’re missing the show.”
She rushed to my side, looped her arm in mine. “I saw Rocco come out! He didn’t see me, but I—”
“He’s not going to bother you, anymore.”
“What happened?”
“I didn’t kill him.”
And I couldn’t keep the disappointment out of my voice.
Washington, D.C.—the seat of political power in the western hemisphere—was also the hub of the mightiest industrial and military machine in the history of the world. The White House, the Capitol, various imposing monuments and a multitude of marble buildings swimming in seas of manicured green, were dignified symbols that imparted a stateliness, a nobility to the terrible powers certain men in this town possessed—men who charted the strategies and movements of armies and navies all over the world, who dispatched diplomats and spies to every corner of the earth, who controlled the man-made cataclysm of the atomic bomb.
I had come to our nation’s capital to see two men who wielded power of a different sort—the power of information…or sometimes misinformation. A few well-placed words—truth or fabrication, it didn’t seem to matter much which—could destroy lives as surely as any bullet or bomb…and without the mess.
One of those powerful men resided in a townhouse on Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown, a quaint neighborhood of cobblestone streets, reconditioned slave quarters, and Early American shutters. This was a cool, overcast Sunday afternoon, and the well-shaded lane was alive with fall colors—coppers and yellows and oranges and reds (not the card-carrying variety).
I’d flown in this morning, arriving at the National Airport, on the Virginia side; from my window seat, as we glided over the city, the pilot executing a tourist-pleasing swoop, I’d taken in the grand obelisk of the Washington Monument and the familiar Capitol dome, dominating a distinctive skyline they and other monuments formed, no skyscrapers to compete with—buildings over 110 feet were banned by law, locally.
I had spent a lot of time in D.C. over the years—particularly on various jobs I’d done for the late James Forrestal, our nation’s first secretary of defense—and was quite used to Washington’s old-fashioned Southern sensibilities, its spacious avenues, tree-shaded lawns, the landscaped green (some of it dyed to stay that way year-round). What the hell—green seemed to symbolize the power in this city even better than stately marble.
At the townhouse in Georgetown, I trotted up the half-dozen steps to the landing and used the polished brass knocker. The golden-tressed young woman who answered smiled in recognition.
“Mr. Heller,” she said, playfully, because in other circumstances she had called me Nate, “you are expected.”
She had a perfectly delightful middle-European accent.
“Hi, Anya,” I said, stepping at her invitation into an entrance hall that fed both the residential and office areas of the townhouse. “You look swell.”
“You look good, also.”
Anya was a Yugoslavian war refugee in her early twenties, with big blue eyes in a heart-shaped face. She wore a businesslike blue dress with white trim and a white belt, an ensemble that played down her bosomy shape. We’d had a brief fling a while back, but her boss didn’t know it—because he was in the midst of a longer fling with his “secretary,” himself.
Anya was the office’s current “fair-haired girl,” as the staffers around here dubbed them, “cutie-pies” in her employer’s own terminology. Since her English was limited, her secretarial duties ran not to taking dictation but accompanying her married boss to cocktail parties and out-of-town speaking engagements.
A living room loomed straight ahead, with a formal dining room off to my left; but this was not a social call—the lady of the house, Luvie, spent most of her time at the family farm, anyway. Anya led me down the right a few steps, into the office area, ushering me—wordlessly—into a book-, paper-, and memento-flung study where her boss sat typing furiously at a stand to one side of his big wide wooden desk. Wearing a purple smoking jacket, fingers flying, the tall, bald, sturdy-looking journalist seemed oblivious to our entrance.
Beyond an open double doorway opposite the desk, a larger office area hummed with activity, a file cabinet-lined bullpen with three women and two men, typing, talking on the phone, interacting. Anya smiled and nodded to me, as she went out and joined them, shutting the doors behind her, though I could see her through the panes of glass, positioning herself at the wire service ticker, watching stories come in, doing her best to read them.
Sunday was one of Drew Pearson’s deadline days—he had his weekly radio broadcast tonight and he and his staff were prepping frantically for it. (One key figure around here, legman Jack Anderson, was not present: a Mormon, he didn’t work on Sundays, though he toiled his ass off on Saturday.) About twenty years ago, Pearson had gone from being a journeyman Washington newsman to a national figure by appropriating the technique of Manhattan and Hollywood gossip columnists for his “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”
That syndicated column—growing out of a book not unlike the Confidential series by Mortimer and Lait—was an immediate smash, and Pearson was soon America’s preeminent crusader for liberal causes. From time to time I had done background investigations for him, particularly those involving Chicago or California; but we had a rocky relationship—he was a cheap bastard, slow to pay his bills, plus he had an ends-justifies-the-means approach that troubled even a cynical Chicago heel like myself.
Speaking of Chicago heels, I stood rocking on mine, my hands in my suitpants pockets, waiting for Pearson to come up for air and notice my existence. This study had dark plaster walls decorated with photos of Pearson with show business figures (Sinatra among them) and national political luminaries, including a couple presidents and Senator Estes Kefauver; a few political cartoons, lampooning Pearson and his sometimes controversial stands, were framed and hanging here and there, as well. I was thinking about what an egomaniac this guy was until I realized these reminded me of my own office walls.