Ask Not

Chapter 4

Feeling half asleep, I got to the Monadnock Building just after nine A.M. on Monday, a sunny fall day that was doing my bloodshot eyes no favors. I’d spent yesterday in Hollywood with my son, taking in Topkapi at Grauman’s Chinese, dining at Musso & Frank, and goofing off poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Then after Sam’s mom picked him up, I caught the red-eye back to Chicago. Hence my red eyes.

In its day the largest office building in the world, the Monadnock was a towered-over, sixteen-story, gray-brick relic now. But as the home base of a nationally prominent private detective agency, the Monadnock couldn’t be beat for class or mood or history. Going in the main entrance on West Jackson, I passed the rear display windows of stores facing Dearborn and Federal, moved past the open winding stairwells, and caught the elevator to seven.

We maintained the corner suite of this floor. The frosted glass-and-wood exterior hadn’t changed since we moved in, although I now did give billing to a partner:

and smaller,

My Hollywood partner, Fred Rubinski, got similar billing out there, only with the same size lettering as me — always a tough town to negotiate billing in.

In the reception area, with its blond Heywood-Wakefield furnishings and framed Century of Progress posters, sat a slim woman in her early thirties, reading Redbook. She looked prim and crisp in a tailored gingham plaid dress, her blonde hair flipping up at the chin, a style maybe a little young for her, but she had pretty enough features to overcome it. She glanced up at me with big blue eyes and a tiny, hopeful smile touched with pale red lipstick.

I gave her a nod and a smile and moved on.

More likely a girl looking for a job than a prospective client. Well, we could use another swimmer in the secretarial pool. Not much chance she was after investigative work — she just didn’t have the seasoned look of the ex-policewomen we hired.

I paused briefly to acknowledge our receptionist, who wanted to be called Millie now — she felt this was an improvement over Mildred, and maybe it was.

Millie, a dark-haired doll in her late twenties, had a pleasant manner and was sharp as hell. She had shifted from her Jackie Kennedy fixation in favor of Mary Tyler Moore from The Dick Van Dyke Show. It was working okay, though she and office manager Gladys Sapperstein had recently gotten into it over the issue of wearing slacks to work. Today Millie wore a navy blue dress with a V neck and no sleeves.

“Good morning, Mr. Heller,” she said, chipper. She was on her feet, taking my Burberry to hang it up for me. “How was Hollywood?”

“Great,” I said. “I got you Morey Amsterdam’s autograph.”

“Really?”

“No.”

Sharp but gullible.

She crinkled her chin and warbled, “Mr. Hel-ler...”

She said that like Laura Petrie said “Rob” on Van Dyke, and I hadn’t decided yet whether it was cute or annoying.

We had a regular Monday morning staff meeting at eleven, so the bullpen with its modern metal desks — I don’t like cubicles — was well-populated, only a handful of agents out on assignment. Age and sex and color varied — we had three Negroes now — and all our agents had police or military police backgrounds. A wall of windows looked out onto Jackson Street while another wall was home to a lineup of metal four-drawer files.

Office manager Gladys Sapperstein was my partner Lou’s wife. They had no children, unless you counted me. Her office was between Lou’s and mine, and right now she was poised outside of it, her hands filled with paperwork.

Her eyes narrowed as she saw me ambling in her direction. She met me halfway, still an attractive woman after all these years (I’d hired her in 1939) — a busty, pleasingly plump brunette about sixty. She looked like the kind of teacher whose lap a fifth-grade boy wanted to sit in, but didn’t know why.

Right now her lap and much of the rest of her was in a green and yellow floral dress and, like Carlos Marcello’s secretary, she wore jeweled cat’s-eye glasses, though I’m fairly sure she didn’t run a four-state call-girl ring.

“Can I bring you coffee?” she asked.

“No thanks, Gladys. I had plenty at home, trying to get my engine started.”

“Car trouble?”

“No. My engine.”

“You noticed the girl in our reception area.” This was delivered in an I’m-stating-the-obvious fashion.

“Why, because she’s a looker? Is that how you think my mind works?”

“Yes,” she said. It was two questions that deserved only one answer. “She’s a prospective client. She has an appointment.”

“When?”

“Nine-thirty. She’s a little early.”

“Well, there is a staff meeting...”

“Really, and you were going to attend that, were you?”

“Gladys, you know I never miss a staff meeting when I’m in town.”

An eyebrow arched. “Never?”

“Seldom.” I checked my watch. “Well, I guess I do have time, at that.”

“Almost an hour.”

“Give me fifteen minutes, then send her in. Good morning, by the way.”

This rather typical conversation should have been over, but she was still blocking my path. “Actually, Lou would like to talk to you about the client first. That young woman is a family friend of his. Could I send him in?”

“You’re asking my permission?”

“You’re in charge around here, aren’t you?”

“Could I have that in writing?”

She just looked at me.

“In triplicate,” I added.

And now she granted me a smile. She said, “Oh you,” and slapped my arm and walked away, putting some wiggle in her fanny. She did both of those things, in that order, about once a day, if I was lucky.

Soon I was behind the old scarred desk in my inner sanctum, the desk (like me) a dinosaur dating back to a one-room office over the Dill Pickle in Barney Ross’s building on Van Buren. Throughout the early years of the A-1, I had lived in that office, which had a Murphy bed and bathroom. Deluxe stuff.

I’d come a distance. This inner office was as big as its whole Van Buren Street predecessor. No Murphy bed, but a comfy leather couch, padded leather client chairs, a row of wooden filing cabinets, and walls where faces from my past stared at me — celebrity clients, celebrity friends, in a few cases celebrity lovers, from Sally Rand to Marilyn Monroe.

I did get around, like Sam’s other favorite group, the Beach Boys, said.

Sam’s framed picture was not on the wall — it was on the desk, twice: a nice solo studio portrait, and a snapshot with his mother, which was maybe an excuse to be able to look at that lovely face of hers. How many times had I said, or at least thought, I could kill that bitch! Yet now, with the threat of... of what?... hanging over me and Sam and maybe Peggy, I could only wonder if everything I’d accomplished and all the money added up to a big nothing. That every shady deal I’d made, every evil I’d witnessed, every body I’d buried, was finally going to catch up with me.

A shave-and-a-haircut knock told me it was Lou. He had picked that up from Paul Drake on Perry Mason, I figured.

“Come in,” I called.

Bald, bulbous-nosed, bespectacled, he came over and sat, no hello, no preamble, resting his sturdy, muscular frame in the chair opposite, sitting forward as I leaned back. He wore a pale blue shirt and darker blue clip-on tie, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. He was past seventy, but only the wire-frame bifocals tipped it at all.

“How did she react?” he said.

He meant Peg.

“She surprised me,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“No recriminations or any such shit. She appreciated my concern. Approved the precautions. Remember, Peg was Jim Ragen’s niece. She lived through all of that.”

Ragen had run a racing wire service here in Chicago for bookies nationwide. It had got him killed when he refused to sell out to the Outfit. Peg had been around “underworld figures” all her life. Hell, she even dated a Capone bodyguard before she met me.

“Yeah,” Lou said, as if reading my mind. “She dated Bugsy Siegel for a while, too.”

“Thanks for reminding me. But he preferred ‘Ben.’”

Lou sat back, grinned. “Maybe so, but he’s not going to do anything about it now, is he?... You know, two men, twenty-four hours — even for the president of the agency, that’s going to run into money.”

“I got money.”

“Not a bottomless pit of it, you don’t. How long do you figure you can keep it up, round-the-clock surveillance?”

“I don’t know. Long as I have to.”

He was playing it casual but the eyes behind the bifocals were studying me. “Are you going to do anything else about almost getting killed by a runaway Cuban?”

“I could always go to Miami and see if I can find any Cubans named Gonzales and Rodriguez.” I shrugged. “I talked to my CIA contact, I talked to my Outfit guy. What else can I do?”

Lou and I had no secrets, or anyway not many. He even knew about my visit with Carlos Marcello; and he was in on most of what had gone down with Operation Mongoose.

“You sometimes take steps,” he said.

“I’ve taken them. What, do you expect me to crack the JFK killing? I already know who did it. I knew who did it before it was done.”

“Question is... are you a loose end?”

“All I can do is wait, Lou.”

“Wait, and keep your powder dry.”

Now I sat forward. “If they get in my face, I’ll defend myself, and I’ll do it in a messy way. Anybody who wants me dead won’t want the kind of noise I will make along the way.”

“What kind of noise?”

“Shooting back. Shooting my mouth off. All kinds of noise.”

He folded his arms like Big Chief Rain-in-the-Puss. “Your pal Bobby isn’t in a position to help you out anymore.”

Robert Kennedy had stepped down from the attorney general’s chair to run for United States senator in New York.

“He will be someday,” I said.

“Oh yes, someday he’ll be president like his brother, who they shot, if memory serves. In the meantime, you look over your shoulder. And keep your kid and ex-wife under armed guard.”

“I detect a critical tone. You have a suggestion?”

“You could go public with what you know.”

I laughed. “What, go to the feds? J. Edgar was probably sitting in the window next to Oswald, on a box of schoolbooks, handing him rounds. The papers? I’ll be dead before the ink dries — before anything I reveal could turn into hearings and trials. Maybe I could give Hef one of those interviews he sticks in the magazine between nudie shots, to keep him straight with the postal authorities.”

Lou said nothing. He was frowning. He knew I was right.

“I wish I could help,” he said finally, uncrossing his arms. Then he shrugged. “Only suggestion I have is to go on about your business. Get your mind off this mess with some work.”

“So go ahead and tell me,” I said.

He blinked behind the bifocals. “Tell you what?”

“About the girl in reception. The family friend.”

He took a moment, clenched and unclenched his hands, then said, “She’s kind of a family friend of yours, too, Nate. Her father was Jack Halloran.”

Halloran had been a veteran copper on the Pickpocket Detail with us in the early thirties. He quit to take a job as a deputy sheriff in Geneva, where I heard he’d done well for himself, making it to sheriff and holding the office for decades, finally running for mayor and winning when he was in his sixties. But he was no one I’d stayed in touch with.

“You said ‘was,’ Lou — he’s deceased?”

“Heart attack two years ago. But that’s nothing to do with this, other than just the general bullshit and hardship that kid out there has been put through.”

“She’s a kid in her thirties, though, right?”

“I suppose. I don’t know her exact age. I just know her problem. And it’s tricky as hell. There’s a political aspect to it.”

“Local?”

“Local if you live in Texas. Also national.”

“Texas? I thought she was from Geneva, Illinois.”

He ignored the question. “You’ve read in the papers about this character Billie Sol Estes?”

“Yeah, but I don’t know chapter and verse. He’s some kind of con man, scamming the government. Pyramid scheme crapola. Pal of LBJ’s, right?”

“Right. He’s currently in stir. He bribed government officials, took advantage of federal loan programs for farmers, and made millions peddling mortgages for nonexistent fertilizer tanks.”

I laughed. “A genuine bullshit artist selling fake bullshit. Beautiful.”

He gestured offhandedly. “Well, you may want to chat about this with a couple of your old pals. Good ol’ boy Billie Sol was shaping up to be a major embarrassment for the Kennedy administration, before the assassination. No connection to them, but Johnson may have been an accomplice in those scams.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Not really. Johnson has a reputation for that kind of thing, and Bobby Baker and Billie Sol were scandals that quieted down all of sudden when he became prez. Never forget that Lyndon B. won his first election by having a ballot box stuffed. And I’ve heard he blackmailed his way onto the ticket when Jack ran.”

I shrugged. “That’s nothing I ever discussed with Bobby. You said ‘a couple’ of old pals?”

“Yeah, your old boss McClellan’s one of the guys who exposed Billie Sol.”

Senator John McClellan had been head of the rackets committee, a father figure to Bobby Kennedy and officially my boss, when I was on that payroll. I knew him fairly well. I could probably get him on the phone if need be.

I asked, “What does this have to do with that young woman out there?”

“Maybe plenty. Possibly nothing.” He sat forward again. “Estes is in jail, yes. But he’s kept his mouth shut. Refused to testify on his own behalf. Is apparently protecting whoever else is in this... maybe including the President himself.”

“Then why doesn’t the President just give him a pardon?”

“Maybe he will, right before he leaves the White House and heads back deep-in-the-heart-of. But I don’t think so. This is very dirty stuff, Nate. A pardon for Billie Sol would be an admission of guilt.”

“So what? Sleazy underhanded practices netted some shady politicians some greenbacks. That sounds like Texas, and it sounds like Chicago, and it sounds like Everywhere USA.”

But Lou was already shaking his head. “No, no, Nate, we’re talking murder here.”

I frowned. “Whose?”

“Well, we can start with a guy named Henry Marshall. He’s the Texas farm official who first blew the whistle on Estes. In June 1961, before he could testify about any of what he dug up, Marshall conveniently committed suicide.”

“People do that sometimes, under stress.”

He looked at me over his glasses. “Marshall must have been really stressed to shoot himself five times in the stomach with a rifle.”

“Oh. That kind of suicide.”

“There have been four more. In April of ’62, right after Estes was charged with fraud, his accountant committed suicide. Carbon monoxide, hose attached to his pickup’s tailpipe. But the guy also had a bad bruise on his head.”

“That’s one. What’s two?”

“A building contractor partner of Estes who died in a suspicious plane crash in early ’63.”

“And three?”

“Early this year, a major business partner of Estes, recently convicted as an accomplice, facing a prison term. He was ‘accidentally’ killed working on the exhaust pipe of his car. The tools scattered around him in the garage, around and under the car. Only they didn’t have a thing to do with the repair he was supposedly making.”

“Dead of carbon monoxide poisoning, too?”

“Yup. And bruised on the head.”

“That leaves one more.”

Lou nodded. “But I need to back up. This one’s not in chronological order, because it needs some context.”

“By all means. Context away.”

His hard dark eyes narrowed behind the wire-rims. “Seems the Marshall ‘suicide’ just didn’t sit well with a certain Texas Ranger name of Clint Peoples.”

“You made that up.”

“No,” Lou said, grinning, shaking his head, “this badge-wearing, horse-riding Texas Ranger did a shitload of investigation, and managed to get a DA on his side, and together they got a judge to authorize an exhumation. This was in March of ’62.”

“They dug Marshall up.”

“They dug him up. And the county coroner’s autopsy showed that, despite the five gunshots in the abdomen, the cause of death was actually carbon monoxide poisoning... administered after an incapacitating blow to the head.”

“Jesus. Somebody sure wanted to make sure this son of a bitch was deceased.”

Lou was nodding. “So it would appear. And now we come to the fourth murder... the fifth, counting Marshall himself. Which happens to bring us home, Nate. Sweet Home Chicago.”

“How so?”

“Seems Billie Sol wormed his way into owning a big piece of a company called Commercial Solvents. He bought huge quantities of liquid fertilizer from the firm, through the Chicago office. The office manager, a Joseph Plett, committed suicide in Evanston... the day after Marshall’s body was exhumed.”

“Carbon monoxide poisoning again?”

Lou nodded.

I held up four fingers. “Okay, four murders, maybe five.” I added a thumb. “One in Chicago. So what does this have to do with Jack Halloran’s daughter sitting out in our reception area?”

“She isn’t just Jack Halloran’s daughter, Nate. She’s also Mrs. Joseph Plett.”

She was the girl you fell in love with in high school, ten or fifteen years later, holding up just fine — blue-eyed, pretty smile — but if you looked close, you saw tragedy there. In the crow’s feet, in her slightly sunken cheeks and the gentle lines in her forehead that time would turn to grooves, possibly prematurely. She sat next to Lou across the desk from me, perched on the edge of the chair, hands folded in her lap, like a wallflower hoping for the next dance.

“I hope you don’t think I’m terrible,” she said, “being so concerned about money and everything. First and foremost, I want Joe’s name, his memory, cleared. We’re good Catholics, Mr. Heller, and I couldn’t even bury my husband in consecrated ground.”

Her voice was firm, her eyes clear. There would be no tears today. The death of her husband was over two years ago. This was about dealing with the aftermath.

“You have a right to worry about your own welfare,” I said, “and your children’s. That insurance policy would have brought double indemnity, making it...”

“Five hundred thousand dollars,” she said. It was a number she’d become familiar with. “As it was, we got nothing.”

I said, “No payout in the case of suicide is standard.”

“But it wasn’t suicide.”

“From what little I know so far, I’d be inclined to agree. But I’d like to hear more about why that’s your opinion.”

“Certainly.” She cleared her throat. “First of all, we have three children, Mr. Heller. Our son Alec is ten, Judy is six, and Beth is two and a half.”

“Beth was born shortly before Mr. Plett’s death?”

“That’s right. Joe was giddy over that little girl, loved her to pieces. He loved all his kids, and he loved me. We were happy. He was making good money, and we were very compatible, in... well, in every way.”

“How old was your husband, Mrs. Plett?”

“Please call me Marjorie, Mr. Heller.”

“Marjorie,” I said, and smiled. “That’s a very pretty name. One of my favorites.” I’d known a girl called Marjorie once. “And call me Nate, please.”

She showed me the smile again, briefly. “Yes, Nate. Well, Joe was thirty-one. A healthy, happy thirty-one, with everything to live for.”

“Husbands and wives can have secrets from each other, Marjorie.”

“The only secrets he had, if he had any, would have been related to business. It’s obvious this Billie Sol Estes individual was a bad sort.”

“He’s a con man. But he’s not a murderer.”

That puzzled her. “How can you say that, Mr. Heller?”

“Nate. Well, he wasn’t brought in by the cops on the Marshall killing, at least as far as we know, and he was already behind bars when the other suspicious deaths occurred. Including your husband’s. Had Joe ever suffered from bouts of melancholy?”

She shook her head. “Nothing unusual. Who doesn’t get blue from time, Mr. Heller? Nate.”

“No, you’re right. We all have our dark days. But did you ever see him get really low? Did he ever drink to excess?”

“No,” she said, with no hesitation, “and that’s one of the suspicious things that the police, damn them... I’m sorry... but they just ignored it.”

“What is?”

She raised a hand as if it held something invisible. “There was a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the front seat next to Joe, in the car. But the coroner said there was no alcohol in his body.”

I glanced at Lou, who just nodded a little. He’d obviously already heard the basics from her.

“I understand there was a note,” I said.

“Yes, Nate. Would you like to see it?”

“Please,” I said, but she was already digging in her purse.

She handed me a well-worn, folded-in-four photostat of the note. It said: BELLS EVEN TOLL WHEN A RAT DIES. THE BURDEN OF GUILT IS ON MY SHOULDERS. NO ONE ELSE IS TO BLAME. ALL OF YOU LIVE AND BE HAPPY WITH A CLEAR CONSCIENCE.

“Typewritten,” I said softly. “Unsigned.”

Lou was just shaking his head.

She said, “Joe was a letter writer, Mr. Heller. Handwritten letters. He wrote his parents and his sister at least once a month. He never used a typewriter except at work. And hardly ever there, because he had a secretary. If he were going to do something crazy like this, he’d write it out. He’d sign it. But he never would!”

I’d been wrong. Tears did come. She got some tissues from her purse and Lou edged his chair over to slip an arm around her. I waited. Didn’t take her long to settle down.

“I found him in the morning,” she said. Swallowing. “In our garage. When I went to bed, he was working in his little home office, in the den. He said he was expecting some phone calls from the federal agents who he’d been talking to about this Estes criminal. Did I mention that? That federal agents had contacted him?”

“No. FBI?”

She nodded vigorously. “Yes. Anyway, he was still up when the kids and I went to bed. The garage is on the other side of the house, and the front door, too, so if he let somebody in, or if somebody broke in and did this, you know, quietly? We’d never know.”

“Were there any signs of a break-in?”

“No. But if someone came around and it had to do with business, Joe would let them in. I’m sure he would. He would never have guessed that... well, that’s just not how he was.”

“He was talking to FBI agents. He must have known there might be danger.”

“But that Estes louse was in Texas. And Commercial Solvents is headquartered in New York.”

I wasn’t sure I followed that logic, but I nodded. “Marjorie, what’s your situation now?”

“I sold the house, but we didn’t have much in it. Still, it paid off the mortgage and gave us enough to go on for a while. We’re living with my mother now. Dad’s gone, as I think you know. You were friends, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I work odd shifts as a waitress not far from where we live. Back in Geneva now, so Mom can babysit. I’d like better work, but all I have is a high-school education. If we had the life-insurance money, possibilities would open up. Maybe I could go back to school. Or just live on it till the kids are grown.”

I raised a hand. “We’ll look into this, Marjorie.”

She sat forward so far she almost fell off. “I understand this will be expensive. Is it possible I could pay you on a time schedule? I know a retainer is standard, but—”

“Marjorie, we’ll take this on, on a contingency basis. Reasonable expenses and ten percent of what we get out of the insurance company.”

Her eyes grew very large. “You would do that?”

“Yes. But there’s no guarantee we’ll get anything out of them. So you’d be on the hook for the expenses.”

“That’s fine. That’s fine. Do you think there’s a possibility that...?”

“I do. These other suspicious deaths, two with carbon monoxide poisoning as the murder method, make proving foul play a real possibility.”

She smiled. For the first time I couldn’t see the scream behind the smile. “Thank you, Mr. Heller. Nate. Thank you. This is the first glimmer of light my family has seen in a very long time.”

“Family’s important,” I said, Sam smiling at me from his picture on my desk. Even the ex had a smile for me.

I came around and walked her to the door, then let Lou take her to do the paperwork in Gladys’s office. We worked through a lawyer’s office when client cases had sensitive issues that might benefit from confidentiality.

A few minutes later, Lou was shut back inside my inner office and seated across from me again.

“A third of that insurance money on a contingency case is standard,” he reminded me, grinning. “If it gets around that Nate Heller has a heart, we’ll be out of business.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “What did you think of that suicide note?”

“You first.”

“Everything in it seemed aimed at silencing other potential witnesses — ‘bells even toll when a rat dies’? If you talk and get killed, it says, ‘the burden of guilt’ is on your own shoulders, ‘no one else is to blame.’”

Both his eyebrows went up. “Yeah, and those left behind can have ‘a clear conscience,’ because you caused your own murder.”

“And the text of the note got in the papers?”

“Oh yeah.” His eyes narrowed. “Carbon monoxide MO sure makes it sound like one guy is doing this.”

“It does. One guy among several in a dirty business, elected to cleanup duty.”

He nodded, then asked, “So what now?”

“You’ll need to handle this on the Chicago end. That garage is a very old crime scene, but give it a gander. Talk to neighbors and see if anybody saw anybody around that night who didn’t belong, or anything suspicious. And get the police files on this thing, look at the photos if there are any, talk to the dicks who worked it, see if you can locate the coroner who called it suicide.”

“What I would do without these work tips? What about you, Nate?”

“Well, I’m taking the advice I’ve been given so often by so many.”

“What advice is that?”

“I’m going to hell,” I said cheerfully. “And Texas.”