Max Collins - Majic Man

Keeping the weapon trained on him, I moved to the stove, dropped open the door.

“Now, Doc?” I shrugged, walking back to where he sat, shivering with pain. “Now I’m going to embrace my Jewish side.”

The barrel of the nine-millimeter caught him across the forehead, knocking him out, and I dragged his unconscious form over like a bag of grain and shoved the top half of him into the oven.

Then I turned on the gas.

On a clear, sunny morning in May, after a nineteen-gun salute, the boom of howitzers playing bass drum to the Naval Academy Band’s rendition of Chopin’s “Funeral March,” the Old Glory-draped caisson bearing the casket, drawn by seven gray horses, accompanied by an honor guard made up of all three services, wound its way up the serpentine drive of Arlington National Cemetery.

There, on the Wednesday following his fatal fall, James Vincent Forrestal received full military honors at a ceremony attended by President Truman, the cabinet, an array of Congressional leaders, the diplomatic corps and several thousand friends and associates. A crowd of interested citizens numbering at least four thousand stood behind a velvet rope at the end of the white marble amphitheater, in the chapel of which the President, Vice President and pallbearers including former president Herbert Hoover, Generals Marshall and Eisenhower, Bernard Baruch and Forrestal’s friend Ferdinand Eberstadt, attended the service itself, with Bishop Conkling from Chicago presiding.

Jo Forrestal did not attend. She and her sons Peter and Michael, young men in their early twenties, both of whom had echoes of their father in their faces, waited a few hundred yards away, at the gravesite, for a ceremony reserved for family, relatives and close friends.

I’d been invited-by Eberstadt-and was among this fairly small group. Forrestal, of course, had been physically rather small, and the size of his casket reflected this, and was little bigger than a child’s coffin-like the coffins the Air Force had tried to buy from Glenn Dennis at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell.

The air was sharply cool, almost cold, and I stood at the back-immediate family seated on folding chairs, no tent-as Bishop Conkling read from First Corinthians. The little casket was lowered, and the sons threw in the symbolic clumps of earth. We were on an oak-studded knoll overlooking the tranquillity of the gray-blue Potomac and the panorama of government buildings beyond.

A slender, fragile, elegant-looking pale figure in mesh-veiled, stylish black (had Mainbocher designed her a funeral gown?), Jo Forrestal-looking more than ever like Charles Addams’ creation-drifted among the gathering of friends and relatives with her sons in attendance, making introductions when necessary. I shook hands with both boys, who had appropriately shell-shocked expressions.

Jo said to me, “You should have felt at home here today, Nate.”

“Well, uh, yes, you mean with Bishop Conkling presiding …”

“No, I mean Jim got a regular Chicago-style send-off, don’t you think?”

She took me by the arm and walked me a few steps away from her boys; I couldn’t smell any drink on her, but then I never could-vodka was kind to the breath, after all.

“I don’t quite get your drift, Jo …”

Her eyes glittered under the veil; her voice had a brittle edge. “All the pomp and goddamn circumstance, flowers and brass bands, it’s like when your syndicate big shots take one of the boys for a ride, right? Got to have a big show, after the bump-off-to feel less guilty, and fool the gullible fucking public. You must feel at home.”

“Now that you mention it,” I said, “it’s not the first time I’ve been at this kind of affair.”

She touched my sleeve with a black-gloved hand. “Jim liked you. I’m sure he didn’t show it, but you were one of his favorites. He felt you were a man’s man … sometimes he felt his … intellectual pursuits were less than … I don’t know … manly.”

“You and Jim turned out a couple of handsome boys.”

“Nate, you may not believe this, but Jim and I loved each other, in our way. I will never forgive those shits for …” And she slipped a hanky-in-hand up under the veil and caught a sob.

“Jo …”

“… never forgive them for sending me out of town. When they killed him. Do you know how that made me look? ‘Mrs. Forrestal was in Paris when her husband fell to his death.’ Cold, heartless bitch. They’re the cold, heartless ones. I told the cocksuckers-you can have your gangster’s funeral, but I’ll have no part of it.”

“You better keep those thoughts to yourself, Jo.”

She smirked beneath the veil. “Why, ’cause I’ll be the next lunatic they stick on the sixteenth floor, near an open window?”

“… Yes.”

She thought about that for a moment, turning her gaze toward the Potomac. From this knoll on the heights of Arlington, we could see in the distance on this clear morning the great dome and the magnificent white marble temples of our nation’s capital.

“Funny, isn’t it?” she said. “What men in public life will do, in the name of the people.”

Then I walked her back to her sons, who stood at the grave-side, standing, heads lowered, at the edge of where the casket had been lowered. That was when it occurred to me: this was the first time-in all the years I’d known them, in the various jobs I’d done for our late Secretary of Defense-I had ever seen Jim and Jo Forrestal together.

The suicide of Dr. Joseph Bernstein-no surviving relatives-was buried in the back pages, with no mention that he had been one of James Forrestal’s psychiatrists, in fact no mention that he had worked at the Naval Medical Center at Bethesda. Nobody, not even Drew Pearson, picked up on the amazing coincidence of the two interrelated suicides in one night.

Nobody questioned me. Whether they suspected me or not, who can say? I had wiped my fingerprints from the few surfaces I had touched in Bernstein’s dream house, and had driven Maria’s Studebaker back to the hospital parking lot, wiping it clean of prints. No one seemed to have seen me leave the car there, and get in my own and drive away.

The biggest risk had been leaving the bullet that killed Maria behind; it was lodged, no doubt, somewhere in the woodwork of that house, having traveled at close range through her brain. If anyone had thought to check with the Chicago police department, or probably the FBI-who had that thick file on me, remember-a ballistics match to my weapon might have been possible. The nine-millimeter was a gun I had carried since my father’s suicide, and it had left its own fingerprints, here and there.

I wasn’t worried about it, not when the newspapers carried no word of Maria’s death. She had vanished, like a magician’s assistant. Bernstein, in that harassed way, got mentioned; a psychiatrist was too high-profile to just disappear. A nurse was far less significant. She could do a vanishing act.

That gave me the worst nights, thinking about the family she must have had, somewhere. We never spoke of it, but hell-even I’d had a mother and father. What he had the government told them about their daughter’s death? Where, if anywhere, had her remains been interred? Not on an oak-studded knoll in Arlington, I’d wager.

The only conversation I had with a government official bearing at all on Forrestal’s death was a rather oblique one with onetime Capone nemesis and former Secret Service chief Frank J. Wilson, the evening before the big funeral. The meeting-he’d asked to meet me for a cocktail in the Ambassador’s High Hat Cocktail Lounge-was ostensibly a social one; but soon it revealed itself as business, pertaining to Wilson’s consultant role with the Atomic Energy Commission.