Read Online Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 11 by Majic Man (v5.0) - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Majic Man (v5.0)
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it didn’t seem likely we’d be seated until maybe next Wednesday—toward a teensy elevator behind a velvet rope guarded by a massive colored samurai of a headwaiter.
“Evening, Mr. Wilson,” the burly headwaiter said with a wide, white smile that made him no less menacing. “Been some time, sir.”
“Yes it has, Pooch. We’re expected on the third floor.”
“So I understand, sir,” Pooch said, and unclipped the velvet rope for us. We stepped aboard and there was just room enough for the two of us and the ancient colored elevator operator, who said, “Evening, Mr. Wilson.”
“Evening, James.”
As the elevator groaned and wheezed its way up, Wilson said, “You’re lucky, Nate—J. Edgar’s out of town this weekend.”
“Why, is this a favorite spot of his?”
“The third floor is; he and Tolson have a regular table.”
When the elevator door slid open, even an uninformed oaf like me was able to recognize a good share of the faces seated in the spare, simple dining room with its old tables and chairs and black-and-white tile floor: my late client Huey Long’s son, Russell; Estes Kefauver, who’d got his picture in the national press by campaigning in a coonskin cap (he was bareheaded tonight); the radio and TV commentator Edward R. Murrow.
While there were wives sprinkled here and there, it was mostly men, eating in groups, and the air was laughter-filled and as smoky as those legendary political smoke-filled rooms, though the aroma was only partly cigarette and cigar smoke, the scent of sizzling meat and barbecue sauce mixed pleasantly in. Wilson led me past an open charcoal grill, where a Negro chef prepared steak, fish and ribs (Baughman in his Hawaiian shirt might have fit in at that). Diners were selecting their own lobsters from a tank, or steaks from a butcher-shop-style counter, and helping themselves to gumbo and oyster crackers at a huge cast-iron cauldron in the middle of the room.
We were headed toward the back, past some tables that had been left empty, to a table near the wall where a small compact man in his sixties sat with three younger men, another man standing behind the older man, in the same manner that bodyguards used to watch Frank Nitti eat.
No one at this table seemed to be dining except the older man, who was dunking into the butter the last bits of what must have been a two-pound lobster, the shell and various other remnants of which were on a platter; also on the table was a basket of sliced white bread with butter pads, a pitcher of water and a bottle of Old Fitzgerald and a glass.
The older man’s hair and double-breasted suit were neat and gray, though a snappy red bow tie enlivened his ensemble, set off by a perfectly folded five-pointed handkerchief in his breast pocket; his gray-framed glasses magnified his gray-hazel eyes, slightly. Thin-lipped but with a ready smile, pleasant features dominated by a prominent, almost hooking nose in an egg-shaped face, he sat as erect as if a steel rod had been implanted in his spine. His jaunty manner had a birdlike, almost roosterish quality, and the younger men around him said little, hanging on his every word and movement, possibly because they were Secret Service and he was President Harry S. Truman.
This man had been (in this order) a farmer, an artillery battalion commander, a bankrupt haberdasher, an obscure county judge, the chief patronage man in the U.S. Senate for the corrupt Kansas City Pendergast machine, and Franklin Roosevelt’s final—and largely ignored—vice president. Dismissed as an inept, stodgy mediocrity by not just his enemies, Harry Truman was fooling everybody as a strong-willed, decisive president.
I felt butterflies gathering in my stomach as Wilson led me to the leader of the free world, who jumped to his feet and thrust a hand toward me to shake, like a javelin.
“You must be this Heller fella I been hearing about,” he said in that familiar dry Missouri twang, as he pump-handled my
“Evening, Mr. Wilson,” the burly headwaiter said with a wide, white smile that made him no less menacing. “Been some time, sir.”
“Yes it has, Pooch. We’re expected on the third floor.”
“So I understand, sir,” Pooch said, and unclipped the velvet rope for us. We stepped aboard and there was just room enough for the two of us and the ancient colored elevator operator, who said, “Evening, Mr. Wilson.”
“Evening, James.”
As the elevator groaned and wheezed its way up, Wilson said, “You’re lucky, Nate—J. Edgar’s out of town this weekend.”
“Why, is this a favorite spot of his?”
“The third floor is; he and Tolson have a regular table.”
When the elevator door slid open, even an uninformed oaf like me was able to recognize a good share of the faces seated in the spare, simple dining room with its old tables and chairs and black-and-white tile floor: my late client Huey Long’s son, Russell; Estes Kefauver, who’d got his picture in the national press by campaigning in a coonskin cap (he was bareheaded tonight); the radio and TV commentator Edward R. Murrow.
While there were wives sprinkled here and there, it was mostly men, eating in groups, and the air was laughter-filled and as smoky as those legendary political smoke-filled rooms, though the aroma was only partly cigarette and cigar smoke, the scent of sizzling meat and barbecue sauce mixed pleasantly in. Wilson led me past an open charcoal grill, where a Negro chef prepared steak, fish and ribs (Baughman in his Hawaiian shirt might have fit in at that). Diners were selecting their own lobsters from a tank, or steaks from a butcher-shop-style counter, and helping themselves to gumbo and oyster crackers at a huge cast-iron cauldron in the middle of the room.
We were headed toward the back, past some tables that had been left empty, to a table near the wall where a small compact man in his sixties sat with three younger men, another man standing behind the older man, in the same manner that bodyguards used to watch Frank Nitti eat.
No one at this table seemed to be dining except the older man, who was dunking into the butter the last bits of what must have been a two-pound lobster, the shell and various other remnants of which were on a platter; also on the table was a basket of sliced white bread with butter pads, a pitcher of water and a bottle of Old Fitzgerald and a glass.
The older man’s hair and double-breasted suit were neat and gray, though a snappy red bow tie enlivened his ensemble, set off by a perfectly folded five-pointed handkerchief in his breast pocket; his gray-framed glasses magnified his gray-hazel eyes, slightly. Thin-lipped but with a ready smile, pleasant features dominated by a prominent, almost hooking nose in an egg-shaped face, he sat as erect as if a steel rod had been implanted in his spine. His jaunty manner had a birdlike, almost roosterish quality, and the younger men around him said little, hanging on his every word and movement, possibly because they were Secret Service and he was President Harry S. Truman.
This man had been (in this order) a farmer, an artillery battalion commander, a bankrupt haberdasher, an obscure county judge, the chief patronage man in the U.S. Senate for the corrupt Kansas City Pendergast machine, and Franklin Roosevelt’s final—and largely ignored—vice president. Dismissed as an inept, stodgy mediocrity by not just his enemies, Harry Truman was fooling everybody as a strong-willed, decisive president.
I felt butterflies gathering in my stomach as Wilson led me to the leader of the free world, who jumped to his feet and thrust a hand toward me to shake, like a javelin.
“You must be this Heller fella I been hearing about,” he said in that familiar dry Missouri twang, as he pump-handled my
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