Kollek saw me come in, brightening at the prospect of rescue, and the tackle looked my way, too, but not in time to stop me from grabbing with both hands onto his fist and arm and tug-of-warring him off Kollek, enough for Teddy to squirm free and get to his feet, his spiffy green sportcoat wrinkled and moisture-spotted, some of it piss, probably, some of it sink water, some of it blood: Kollek’s nose was bleeding-he’d already taken a punch. The tackle’s face was contorted in reddened rage.
I let go of the guy’s arm, retreated a couple steps, held out my palms and said, “This doesn’t have to get any uglier than it already is … there’s two of us … now back off.”
Kollek, breathing hard, had already backed off, by the far, high-windowed wall. His eyes were wild and scared shitless above the palm cupping his bloody nose.
On one knee, the tackle, still grimacing fiercely, reached inside his suitcoat and, before he could bring a gun out, I kicked his balls up inside him; his anguished cry echoed in the tiled room, like an animal that had taken a spear.
As every man knows, the son of a bitch should have been paralyzed by that pain, but-amazingly, frighteningly-he instead got quickly to his feet while simultaneously swinging a massive fist at my face, narrowly missing as I ducked it, then threw myself at him, tackling the tackle, driving him into the door of a stall, through that door and into the stall, where the stool caught him in the back of his legs, sitting him down hard, not for a dump, but for two fast right hands, interspersed with a fast left, a one-two-three combination that knocked him out, leaving him sprawled on the pot, head against the wall where it said “For a good time, call Irene.”
He may have had brass balls, but his goddamn jaw was glass.
I checked inside his suitcoat for the gun, and there was a gun, yes, but not in a shoulder holster where I thought it would be, and not on the side of him where he’d reached: a .38 snubnose Colt in a cross-draw holster on his belt. What the hell had he been reaching for, then?
His wallet, maybe?
“Oh shit,” I said, knowing.
His credentials.
The tackle’s name was Gary W. Niebuhr and he was employed by the federal government; he was, in fact, an FBI agent. If he’d gotten a good enough look at me, this might wind up yet another glowing entry in one of J. Edgar’s favorite files.
“What the hell have you got me into?” I snarled at Kollek, who was at the sink, wetting a paper towel for his nose.
“I didn’t ask for your help,” he said.
“What, were you resisting arrest?”
Kollek nodded.
I suggested we scram, and-leaving Agent Niebuhr in his stall, sleeping soundly-we scrammed, just as another patron was heading in, seeking relief, a sentiment I could well understand.
As we moved quickly down the stairs to the street, an embarrassed Kollek said, “That’s why I had to shut down the office over the Copa. The FBI had our phones tapped; I been under surveillance for months. Somehow we aroused the Bureau’s suspicions.”
“Do you suppose it was the arms smuggling and hanging out with gangsters?”
He looked sheepish as we reached the sidewalk. “Most of my network’s already been arrested.”
“Thanks for saving this information for last.”
“No hard feelings…. I could use a man like you, Nate.”
“Give it up, Teddy. I’ll take a raincheck on the Hideaway Club.”
I was moving through the pleasantly cool evening toward where I’d parked my car.
Kollek was jogging off in the opposite direction, disappearing into the shadows, but calling out: “I’m afraid I can’t give you a number where I can be contacted!”
“Somehow I’ll manage to get over that,” I said, got in my car and got the hell out of there.
Fucking zealots, anyway.
6
The “most feared and hated man in Washington, D.C.”-as the Washington Times-Herald had termed him, with neither affection nor irony-lived in a typically dignified Georgetown townhouse so evocative of bygone days that you might expect to see a gloved gent in stovepipe and muttonchops stroll down the steps to the cobblestone lane where a horse-drawn coach awaited.
But on this sunny Sunday afternoon on Dumbarton Avenue, you would instead have seen only a gloveless guy in a tan fedora and dark blue shantung suit going up those steps, and trying the polished brass knocker at the door of the home/office of Drew Pearson.
Speaking of knockers, it would have been more fun trying those of the healthy young woman who answered-a buxom lass of perhaps twenty with big blue eyes in a heart-shaped face.
“Who is, sir?” she asked, in a middle-European accent similar to, but much more fetching than, Teddy Kollek’s.
She stood at attention in a crisp, streamlined white dress with thin vertical blue stripes (well, as vertical as they could be, considering her figure) and white collar and cuffs; she looked like a nurse in one of my dirtier dreams.
“Would you tell your boss his overdue account from Chicago is here?”
She frowned, full red-rouged lips forming a pouty kiss. “Excuse, please?”
So English was her second language; still, I’d wager her job description read “Secretary.” Clearly she was the latest office “fair-haired girl,” as Pearson’s veteran employees dubbed them, “cutie-pies” as the boss described each lucky girl singled out for such special services as enlivening cocktail parties and accompanying him on out-of-town speaking engagements.
“Just tell the big cheese Nate Heller is here.”
“Big …?”
“Nate Heller, honey.”
“Very busy today.” She frowned again and shook her shimmering golden locks; it was cuter than a box of puppies. “Mr. Pearson see no one on broadcast day.”
I dug out one of my cards and handed it to her. “Just give him this-I’ll wait.”
Soon she was back, equal parts solicitude and pulchritude, smelling like lilacs (or anyway lilac perfume), hugging my arm, yanking me into an entrance hall that fed both the residential and office areas of the house.
“I am too sorry, Mr. Heller,” she said, batting long lashes, putting the accent on the second syllable of my name.
A modern living room was straight ahead, down a couple steps, and to the left, also sunken, was a formal dining room with a kitchen glimpsed beyond.
“Honey, I’m almost over it,” I said, taking off my hat.
That confused her for a second, but then she grinned, showing crooked teeth I was perfectly willing to forgive, and lugged me down two steps to the right, through a doorway into a book-, paper- and keepsake-arrayed study where the air was riddled with the machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of typing. To one side of a wide, wooden desk, at a typewriter stand, his back to us, a large (not fat) bald man in a maroon smoking jacket was hammering away at the keys.
The blonde looked at me gravely and held up her hand, in case I was thinking of speaking: the boss was not to be interrupted while he was creating.
A window fan was churning up air. Off to the right of the fairly small room, visible (and audible) through the open doorway, a desk-cluttered workroom bustled with two men and a trio of women typing or talking on the phone or attending the clattering wire-service ticker or putting something in or getting something out of one of the endless gray-steel filing cabinets lining the walls. While these secretaries were not unattractive, they-unlike my blonde escort-had the businesslike apparel and bespectacled, pencil-tucked-behind-the-ear manner of professional women. Depending on the profession, of course.
Drew Pearson’s profession was journalism, or anyway a peculiar variant of his own creation. At one time just another Washington newspaperman covering the State Department for the Baltimore Sun, Pearson had taken the gossip-column style of New York’s Walter Winchell and Hollywood’s Louella Parsons and grafted it-to use a fitting term-onto the Washington political scene.