Max Collins - Majic Man

He frowned, staring into his coffee cup. “I’ll consider it.” Then he looked up, arching an eyebrow. “You know, Nathan, if this is true-if there is a Majestic Twelve group in the government, that Forrestal is a part of-it could go a long way toward explaining the man’s mental state.”

“How so?”

“What if he’s been faced with a threat from the skies?”

I smirked. “Little green men to join the Reds he’s already frightened of?”

Pearson painted a picture in the air with a splay-fingered hand. “Think about it: a recovered flying saucer, advanced technology-maybe he thinks creatures from outer space are trying to kill him. Maybe they are!”

I laughed, grinned. “Definitely put that in your column. You’ll be in the padded suite next to Forrestal’s.”

He shook his head, returning my laughter. “It does sound ridiculous…. Let’s just put it aside, for now at least. But, uh, should I decide to explore this further … you are willing to make the Roswell trip?”

“As long as it’s in a train or a plane,” I said, sipping at my coffee cup, “and not one of these.”

And I tilted my saucer.

We left it at that, and to Pearson I’m sure I seemed indifferent about whether he sent me to New Mexico or not; but in truth my curiosity was piqued.

And Pearson was right: if the government had recovered-and covered up-technology from beyond the stars, the possibility that Forrestal’s condition was related to that remarkable discovery could be very real. Considering that the guy was under stress anyway, suffering from a world war’s worth of physical and nervous exhaustion, being confronted suddenly with the existence of creatures from another planet just might be … taxing.

I didn’t mention the subject to Jo Forrestal, however; she seemed only marginally more stable than her husband, as she prepared for their trip to Hobe Sound, Florida, and I supervised a sweep of their home for electronic bugs.

My A-1 Agency and Washington’s Bradford Investigations supported each other in their respective cities, and two of their men took much of the day combing the big house from basement to watchtower, garage to garden. Electronic surveillance was never my specialty, though, and I spent more of my time with Jo Forrestal than with the Bradford boys.

The Filipino houseboy, Remy, had let me in, and informed me that the bug hunters had beat me there.

“Men in kitchen,” the skinny little man said. He seemed kind of wild-eyed, put out by the intrusion.

I moved past half a dozen suitcases that were lined up next to the second-floor stairway-for the Florida trip, no doubt-and padded on into the kitchen, which was fairly small for such a big old house, and had been remodeled a gleaming white, cupboards and all. The two Bradford dicks were searching high and low, to the displeasure of the Negro cook, who was pacing out back, smoking and muttering.

Bob Hasty, whose last name was an inaccuracy, looked up from the black-patterned white linoleum where he was on his hands and knees, checking the floorboards, looking like a cat after a mouse. Both he and Jack Randolph, who was standing on a kitchen stool, checking the light fixture, were dressed in tan jumpsuits that looked vaguely military.

“Bowing and scraping in my presence isn’t really necessary, Bob,” I said. “A respectful tone will do. You could avert your eyes, maybe.”

“Blow me, Heller,” the round-faced Hasty said with a grin.

“Seems to me you’re in a better position for that.”

His lanky partner Randolph, checking the light fixture, was cackling over our witty exchange.

I asked him, “How’s it going, Jack?”

“Clean so far,” Randolph said. “If I get electrocuted, by the way, it’s gonna cost you.”

“Time and a half,” I said.

Bob, who had gotten to his feet, was brushing himself off. “Nothing so far. I swept the house with a field-strength meter … clean as a whistle. Jack checked all the phones.”

“Checked at the junction for a black box,” Randolph said, “came up empty. Phones themselves seem clean-no inductive pickups, no ‘suckers,’ no replaced transmitters … but we’re still at it.”

“If there are bugs present,” I said, “they could be very sophisticated-espionage quality.”

“We’re going over every floorboard,” Hasty said, “every electrical fixture in the place. But I think we’re on a fool’s errand.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “And nobody’s better at that than the Bradford agency.”

“Go to hell, Heller,” Hasty said with a grin, which then faded. Whispering, he said, “Say, what’s the deal with the lady of the house?”

“What about her?”

“Well I think for breakfast she put a little orange juice in her vodka.”

Randolph, still up on his stool, looked down at me wide-eyed. “She told us if we fucked anything of hers up, she’d have our balls. In that very language.”

“She had her hand on my ass at the time,” Hasty said.

So they had met Jo Forrestal.

“Well, Bob, it is a very cute ass.”

And I left them to their work.

She was coming down the front stairway, so slender she seemed tall-which she wasn’t-looking quietly elegant in a white blouse and black slacks. One hand casually stroked the banister as she came, the other hand held a tumbler of clear liquid and ice that I doubted was water. More than ever, she reminded me of the hostess of the house in the Charles Addams cartoons.

“Nate Heller,” she said, cheerfully. “You fucking bastard.”

“Nice seeing you again, too, Jo,” I said.

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, I added, “You’re looking lovely as ever.”

She did and didn’t: the pale oval of her face, the large dark eyes, the handsome features, were all still in evidence, but more pronounced, as if time had made a caricature of them; and though she hadn’t gained much weight, she had the double chin that years can give anybody. Her hair was still black, but artificially so, soft curls clinging to the side of her head, the length in back hairnet-held.

“Why thank you, Nate,” she said, and beamed, and slapped me, hard.

Then she clip-clopped past me, in her black high-heel sandals, into the spacious living room with its Duncan Phyfe furnishings, where she plopped into a textured cotton-and-silk-damask blue-green lounge chair and curled her legs up under her, sitting like a teenage girl.

I plodded in, rubbing where my face burned, and asked, “What did I do to deserve that greeting?”

She shrugged, sipped at her tumbler. “Maybe it’s because I trusted you and took your advice, and ended up getting shock treatment. Y’suppose that could be it?”

I sat on the nearby plump beige sofa. “I’m sorry about that. I just thought they’d have you talk to a shrink; I didn’t know they’d go the Frankenstein route.”

“Do you have to work at it?”

“What?”

“Talking like Humphrey Bogart in some cheap movie?”

I tossed my fedora on the coffee table. “Well, first of all, he’s trying to talk like me. Second of all, Bogie doesn’t make cheap movies.”

That made her laugh a little, then she frowned and said, “Stop that. I’ve decided not to like you.”

“When are you leaving for Florida?”

She sipped her drink. “I’m going today. Jim can follow me down whenever he likes, or not at all.”

“Why aren’t you going down together?”

Her hooded-eyed, fluttering-lashed expression included a smile that had very little to do with smiling. “We don’t do anything together, Nate, remember? Jim has some banquet tonight, for that horse’s ass replacement of his, Johnson, and then some meeting tomorrow morning. And he wants to make himself available throughout the week, in case he’s ‘needed.’ Do you think they’ll give him shock treatment, too? Or is that just reserved for the ladies?”