Max Collins - Target Lancer

“I’m a member in good standing,” I lied.

The John Birch Society was an ultra-right-wing movement started by candy mogul Robert Welch, who deemed Dwight D. Eisenhower an agent of the Commies. For a bunch of screwballs, they had attracted considerable mainstream attention.

Vallee was talking very fast now, his high-pitched voice almost shrill. “Then you get it, Nate-you know we have to be vigilant. We have to be more than vigilant … we have to take action. What would you say if I told you another Cuban invasion was coming? And not to be surprised if you look in the papers someday soon and see somebody took care of that son of a bitch Castro.”

This little lunatic, if he’d been training guerrillas on Long Island, was-whether he knew it or not-a pawn of the CIA, and likely had been for some time. How else would a plate-in-the-head medical reject get to reenlist in the Marines? And the guerrilla training he’d done in fucking Levittown, aimed at taking Castro down, meant he was a part of Operation Mongoose, too … though he’d likely never heard the phrase.

“You’re right about the Bay of Pigs,” I said, quietly goading him. “It’s that bastard Kennedy’s fault.”

“ Yes! Yes, exactly. He’s the primary obstacle.” If he’d opened his eyes any wider, they’d have rolled out of his head onto the Formica. “He’s surrendering our military forces, our security, into Communist hands. We have to eliminate the Communist influences in Washington, Nate, and we need to start with Jay Fucking Kay, pardon the French.”

“You know, he’s coming to town this Saturday-Kennedy.”

Vallee smiled his small smile. “I know. I know. He’ll be near where I work.…”

Mention of work made him think to check his watch. “Hell, I’m gonna be late! Nice meeting you, Nate.”

His breakfast gone, he rose, we shook hands again, and he was gone.

He was gone, all right.

The Eat Rite manager didn’t know where Tommy Vallee lived, but he thought that one of his busboys might, which turned out to be the case. The address was on Paulina, less than two blocks away, so I left the Jag parked on the street near the cafeteria and hoofed it over.

Once past a block of nondescript brick apartment buildings, this was a nice enough neighborhood, with plenty of trees and expansive lawns, in what many decades ago had been a well-to-do community, a small town that the city engulfed.

In less than five minutes, I was on the sidewalk outside the three-story paint-peeling-off white frame house where Vallee lived. Three stories was generous, since the top floor was the peaked-roofed attic. An open but roof-sheltered porch fronted what had once been a big one-family residence; acknowledging the structure’s current rooming-house status was a metal fire escape that climbed one side all the way to the attic.

I took the eight steps to the porch where several old worn wooden chairs sat, not yet hauled in for winter. In summer around neighborhoods like this, people sat out and watched kids, fireflies, and the world going by. The door I knocked on was an echo of the handsome residence this once had been-a solid if weathered well-crafted door with cut-glass decorations in an arc above with narrow stained-glass panels on either side. The only sign this still wasn’t a one-family dwelling was the oversize mailbox.

The woman who answered was slender and handsome in a severe, time-carved way, with very pretty light-blue eyes; probably in her mid-fifties. She wore a brown-and-orange-print housedress with an apron, her graying blonde hair tucked under a yellow scarf. No makeup, but you could tell she could have once given Leni Riefenstahl a run for the money back at the cabaret.

I think she liked my looks, too, because instead of frowning and beating me with that broom she was leaning on, she cast something my way that had the makings of a smile in it.

Her voice was a kind of guttural purr. “Yes, young man?”

Young man, huh? I was easily her age. She did like me.

I flashed her my credentials. I tried to make it quick enough that she wouldn’t catch the name “Heller.” Some people are known to hold grudges.

“I’m here on a confidential matter for the government,” I said. “May I step in?”

“Certainly.” She had the kind of accent that made each syllable seem considered.

I stepped inside and she closed the door behind us. She rested the broom against a wall and casually removed the scarf from beauty-shop hair, and the apron, too, setting them on a small table with tenant mail piled up on it.

The foyer was enclosed, with several apartment doors on either side, a spindle-banister stairway rising to more doors. No framed paintings or family pictures were on the uncluttered wallpapered walls to remind you that this had been a home, before it got chopped up into flats.

“My name is Peters. How may I help you, Mr. Heller?”

She had seen the name.

“ Miss Peters?”

“Missus, I am a widow.”

“Sorry.”

“It has been twenty years. He drove a bus and had a heart attack in the intersection at State and Randolph. No condolences are necessary.”

“Oh. All right.”

“Do we need to go somewhere and sit, Mr. Heller? Would you like coffee, tea?”

“I don’t think so, no thank you. You have a roomer named Vallee? Thomas Vallee?”

Thin curves of eyebrow arched. “I do. He is a polite, strange little man. Is the government interested in him?”

Not why is the government interested in him- is the government interested in him. She’d been in Germany during the war, all right.

“This is fairly routine,” I said, going the Jack Webb route, “but Mr. Vallee is known to have made threatening remarks about the President. And since Mr. Kennedy is coming to town on Saturday, we would like to check up on him.”

Her nicely carved face was placid. “Of him I know very little. He pays his rent on time. He sometimes has men in his room. But I do not judge. Not when he pays his rent on time.”

The way she said that made me think less of co-conspirators than of something sexual. Maybe I was just remembering the glance Vallee and that busboy exchanged.

I asked straight out: “Is he a homosexual?”

“I have my suspicions.”

I found myself recalling that the homosexuals had been in line right next to the Jews at those very special showers. Still, I kind of dug her. She was a nice-looking middle-aged gal, and she couldn’t help being a German any more than I could being a sort of Jew.

“Do you know his place of employment?”

“It is a printing business. Downtown. Where it is exactly, I do not know.”

We’d have to find that out. According to Vallee, it was on the parade route.

“What I’d like to do, Mrs. Peters, is have a look at your tenant’s flat.”

“Certainly.”

She did not ask if I had a search warrant or any official document justifying such a request. Boy, had she been in Germany during the war.…

As I followed her up the stairs, she glanced back at me and said, “I hope you will not be critical of me to your people.”

“Why is that?”

“Because there are things in Mr. Vallee’s room.”

“Things in his room?”

We were on the landing now.

She said, “Things that I find troubling. Things that perhaps I should have alerted you of.”

“Okay. Well, I guess I’ll see for myself.”

Vallee’s room was unremarkable in most ways-a good-size single room with a living area and a bedroom area, no kitchenette, just a place to stay. Furniture dating back twenty years or more, faded floral wallpaper of similar vintage. A small rabbit-ears portable TV perched on a stand near his bed, and a plank-and-brick bookcase under a window bore paperbacks by Fleming, Robbins, and Spillane-not far removed from my own reading habits. The muscle-building magazines on his nightstand wasn’t my scene, but to each his own.