Max Collins - Majic Man

I tooled my dark green rental Ford down M Street, where I left the car in a parking garage near the Francis Scott Key Bridge; I walked away humming “The Star Spangled Banner,” jaywalking across to 34th Street and-pausing once to take in the dramatic view of the canal and the Potomac at my back-trudged up its steep hill.

Washington was a suit-and-tie town if you were a native, but I was a tourist in a pencil-stripe blue rayon short-sleeve shirt, darker blue garbardine slacks and a tan felt fedora. Falling in behind a honeymooning couple from Dubuque (eavesdropping is second nature to the paid snoop), I turned left onto Prospect Street; the lovebirds and I crossed to the right-hand side of the street. The bride was a curvy little brunette, by the way; the groom … I don’t remember.

Their destination-and that of any number of other Washington wayfarers-was a weathered gray-painted brick colonial house with white trim and shutters and authentic period decor. Tours were available and a gift and coffee shop was inside, a stone bench outside. When I wasn’t on foot, scouting the neighborhood, the coffee shop and the bench were my home for the surveillance.

The coffee shop in particular was perfect, with its generous window view of the big house cater-cornered from here. The plump fiftyish colonial-costumed gal who managed the coffee shop (and who cheerily negotiated me up from a sawbuck to a double sawbuck for the privilege of hanging around most of the day) informed me that 3508 Prospect Street was known as Morris House, built in the 1700s and once owned by a naval commander of that name.

Another naval commander-the former Secretary of the Navy, in fact, who was the current Secretary of Defense-lived there now. Forrestal and his wife had only been in that Woodland Drive house near Rock Creek Park a year or so before moving into this impressive, dignified near mansion with its trim brick walls and exquisite Georgian detailing. The front was well-proportioned, sitting above the sidewalk on a low, stone basement story, and the west wing had been turned into a garage; but its most distinctive feature was an octagonal tower that had no doubt once allowed the naval commander named Morris to keep watch on his fleet.

In back of the house were well-tended terraces that fell toward the Potomac, a view that could be enjoyed from New Orleans-style balconies whose iron grilles and leaf-and-grape design were sheer French Quarter. Beyond the terraces, hugging the waterfront, were the ramshackle shacks of some of Georgetown’s remaining colored residents; I doubted the tour buses pointed these out or that many Brownie snapshots got taken.

Of course I couldn’t see the rear view of the Forrestal house from my window seat in that coffee shop, or the bench out front, either. Periodically I walked the area, as the point of this exercise was not to maintain surveillance on Forrestal but to ascertain whether he was the subject of surveillance. This meant a careful, surreptitious assessment of any peddlers, vagrants, street cleaners, laborers or other invisible members of the landscape; plus checking out second-floor or higher windows, and parked cars.

Throughout a long Saturday morning, neither my periodic reconnaissance of the neighborhood nor my across-the-street observation turned anyone or anything up. Despite my suspicion that Forrestal’s fears were a stress-induced unconscious imitation of the symptoms of his wife’s earlier mental breakdown, I operated from the assumption that he really was being watched. I took him seriously. Or anyway, I took his three-grand retainer seriously.

This was an atypical day for Forrestal. Any other Saturday, he would have been at his Pentagon office; he was a fourteen-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week workhorse and what little leisure time he had was spent on the golf course at Chevy Chase or Burning Tree, or in the company of women other than his wife. It seemed to me if somebody was trying to kill him, the husbands of the married women he slept with were more likely candidates than Zionists or the CIA.

Today, however, my client was home. There was no work to do at the office because tomorrow was his last day as Secretary of Defense. His wife wasn’t home, either-she was at their farm in Duchess County, New York; this was not atypical, as they’d been living more or less separate lives for some time now. But Forrestal indicated he and Jo would be “meeting up” at the Island Club resort in Hobe Sound, Florida, later in the week, for a “post-retirement wind-down.”

“You’ll come to Florida with me,” Forrestal had told me yesterday in the Chevy Chase parking lot when the rain had let up, “as added security. Hobe Sound’s a perfect place for them to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Kill me!”

“Oh. Right.”

Which gave me today and tomorrow to determine if my client was being watched.

Just after one o’clock, Forrestal came out the front door, in golfing attire, and was picked up in a black Lincoln with a white chauffeur-Forrestal was chauffeured everywhere by government limo-and, per plan, I walked back to M Street, got my car, caught up with the Lincoln and hung a loose tail on it.

The driver headed out Wisconsin Avenue, toward Bethesda in nearby Maryland, where Forrestal was to meet a friend from New York-investment banker Ferdinand Eberstadt-at Burning Tree, a private, men’s-only country club. This excursion would allow Forrestal to relax a little (if that grim brand of golf of his could be considered relaxing) and give me the chance to see if anybody else was tailing him.

Nobody was. After Forrestal got dropped off at the two-story stone clubhouse, I followed his chauffeur to a movie theater in nearby Rockville where the chauffeur (and I, though he didn’t know he had company) caught a matinee of Undercover Man, Hollywood’s version of how the feds sent Capone away. Glenn Ford didn’t remind me much of either Elmer Irey or Frank Wilson, the real IRS agents on that case, and my pal Eliot Ness and his squad of Treasury agents were nowhere to be seen. Not that it mattered, as I was paying more attention to the chauffeur than the silver screen, waiting to see if anybody made contact with him.

Nobody did. So it was back to Georgetown, with no one following Forrestal’s limo but me, and back to the bench and the coffee shop and periodic bouts of foot surveillance. The coffee shop was my salvation because it provided cold sandwiches, hot coffee and a men’s room. But the place closed at eight p.m., just after dark, when the streets were beginning to thin of tourists, so after a brief stint on the bench, I went back to the parking garage for the car and parked on 35th Street, where I had a reasonably good view of Morris House.

I was on the same side of the street as sprawling Georgetown University Hospital, which took up the entire block between Prospect and N Street. I sat in front, behind the wheel, seat reclined as far as possible, to where I could see just over the dashboard, fedora tipped forward and almost covering my eyes, arms folded casually, as if I’d pulled over for a rest. The key to this is sitting very still-passersby rarely notice you, and if they do, think nothing of the sight of a guy grabbing a quick nap. Plus, the proximity of the hospital made my presence commonplace.

With the tourists gone, and the traffic eased, the neighborhood grew quiet, its carriage-house-style gaslamps casting a golden patina over the elegantly historic homes with their deep-red brick walls, black wrought-iron trim, burnished brass doorknockers. It was not difficult to imagine the likes of John Adams or Aaron Burr walking these streets, or to summon the ghostly clip-clop of hoofbeats, or the sound of children singing “Yankee Doodle” when it was still a new tune.

Or maybe I’d just been on stakeout too long.