Columbo: The Hoover Files Read online

  Columbo: The Hoover Files

  William Harrington

  A Tom Docherty Associates Book

  Copyright © 1998 by MCA Publishing Rights, a Division of MCA, Inc.

  COLUMBO: THE HOOVER FILES A novel by William Harrington Based on the Universal Television series COLUMBO Created by Richard Levinson & William Link All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book,

  or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  A Forge Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harrington, William.

  Columbo : the Hoover files / William Harrington.—1st ed. p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN 0-312-86027-7

  1. Hoover, J. Edgar (John Edgar), 1895-1972—Fiction. 2. Columbo, Lieutenant (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.

  First Edition: January 1998

  Printed in the United States of America

  0987654321

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note to Reader

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Epilogue

  Note to Reader

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters

  and events portrayed in this novel are

  fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  One

  “That guy there. That guy in the raincoat. That’s Lieutenant Columbo, LAPD Homicide. He never misses. He’ll get whoever did it. If I was the guy that blew up Betsy, I’d be shakin’ in my shoes.”

  Wednesday, December 16 —2:41 P.M.

  Though this was the fourth time she had visited the place, Betsy Clendenin could never enter this California women’s prison without a shudder. The women’s stares—many curious, some wistful, some hostile—distressed her. She knew what she was to them: a handsome, well-dressed, confident woman, free to come and go. They were conspicuously envious, most of them, of her fur-collared beige suede coat and would be more envious if they could see her royal blue suede mini-dress. She was conscious—no, self-conscious—of the contrast between her and them.

  “I read your latest, Miss Clendenin,” said the uniformed woman officer who conducted her across the campus, into the building that housed the visiting facility. “Tough stuff. I had no idea. I supposed Jonathan was a real straight talented guy.”

  “They say celebrity is its own reward, that you can get away with anything if you’re a celebrity and pile up enough money. And it is that way until somebody finds you out and exposes you.”

  “I read somewhere that his latest disk isn’t selling at all. I guess people are turned off on him.”

  “Disgusted is the word.”

  “I expect Mrs. Cooper-Svan will be glad to see you.”

  “I’m always glad to see her. I’m damned sorry she’s here.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry she’s here. I guess we’re all sorry she’s here. But you beat your husband’s brains out, you wind up in this kind of place. Particularly if Lieutenant Columbo works your case. We got two other women here because of Lieutenant Colombo. Remember Erika Bjorling, the game-show squealer? She’s here for the same reason: Lieutenant Columbo. He’s got a rep in this place.”

  “Gunnar Svan had it coming,” said Betsy Clendenin.

  “I figure he did,” said the officer. “Which is why she got ten years instead of life.”

  “She still working in the cafeteria?”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t seem to want any other kind of job. Actually, her real work is what she does in her cell. Reads. Marks up manuscripts—editing, I guess you call it. You know, she’s got a typewriter, writes some stuff; I don’t know what. Technically, she’s not supposed to run a business from here, so I guess we’ve bent the rules a little for her. She’s taken it hard, being here. I hate to think what her time here would do to her if we didn’t let her run her magazine from her cell.”

  “She doesn’t actually run it,” said Betsy. “She couldn’t. What she does is some editing, and she makes some choices and decisions about what will be published. Also, she writes a column that’s published under another name. But the day- to-day operations—Of course, she still owns it.”

  “She’s a rich woman. She’s going to have a good life when she’s paroled in two, three more years. All of us here wish her well.”

  Ai-ling Cooper-Svan did not thrive on imprisonment. Except when she was working in her cell, she was lethargic—just enduring, doing her time. Having been here as long as she had and having no bad marks on her record, she was entitled to wear street clothes; but she didn’t; she wore the blue denim jumpsuit the institution issued her. The straight black hair she had always kept so carefully styled now simply hung around her ears, just cut, with no style at all. She was of course descended from generations of Chinese women, and from generations of Yankee sea captains who had married those Chinese women—so her face was round; she had a pug nose and black eyes. She had gained a little weight, which showed even through the jumpsuit. She shook hands with Betsy and sat down at a square wooden table. Immediately she pulled a package of Marlboros from her pocket and used a paper match to light a cigarette.

  “Bill told me you’ve got something for me,” said Ai-ling Cooper, who was trying to drop the Svan, the name of the abusive husband she had killed. “Got it with you?”

  Betsy gestured to the officer who was examining the contents of her little briefcase. The woman brought the briefcase to the table and handed it to her. Betsy pulled out a manuscript.

  “Who’s getting it in the balls this time?” asked Ai-ling.

  “John Edgar Hoover,” said Betsy with a little smile.

  “Been done, hasn’t it?”

  “Not what I’ve got. When I publish what I’ve got, they’ll take his name off the FBI building in Washington.”

  “What’s this, a chapter?”

  “A chapter. I can’t let you have the hottest stuff just yet. I’ve got to save something to make the book sell. But what I’ve got here will work for Glitz.”

  “We’ve always done well by each other,” said Ai-ling. “How many pieces have you run in Glitz? Six?”

  “Six.”

  “Right—including two you’ve brought here to my luxury retreat.”

  “What you need is a pardon.”

  “Well—Maybe it’s not impossible. I’ve made Glitz more political since I’ve been here. You know, figuring maybe I could build up some influence. Off the record.”

  “Of course.”

  “You see the cartoon?”

  Ai-ling referred to a cartoon that appeared in a San Francisco paper after Glitz magazine made its first political endorsement. The cartoon showed the endorsed candidate kneeling outside Ai-ling’s cell while she reached through the bars with a sword and dubbed him knight.

  Ai-ling picked up the manuscript Betsy had brought her and glanced at it. She grinned as she read—

  Eleanor Roosevelt called them “disgusting.” FDR had to be at some pains to prevent her saying publicly that she found the openly erotic relationship between J. Edgar Hoover and his boyfriend Clyde Tolson nauseating.

  Why was Hoover not forced out of the closet? Because by the time he and Tolson arrogantly flaunted their homosexuality, the Director had become so powerful that he supposed he could do anything he wished, without fear of disclosure or criticism.

  Almost everyone who knew the facts and could have exposed him was under threat of blackmail. Director Hoover had for years used the FBI as a personal fiefdom, and much of the work of its agents was given over to building dossiers against anyone he regarded as a potential enemy. Much of the “information” contained in those files was gossip at best, outright fraud in many instances, but it was “information” its subjects did not want publicized by the powerful—and eminently (though fraudulently) credible—Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Fraud? Yes. John Edgar Hoover was never the anti-Communist zealot he trumpeted himself to be. His FBI was ineffective against subversion. He pretended to be anti-Communist to distract attention from the fact that he had entered into an unholy alliance with the Mob, agreeing to lay off organized crime in return for… God knows what.

  Ai-ling put down the manuscript: some thirty pages. “You’ve got a deal,” she said. “I may change a word or two, but you’ve got a deal.”

  “I’ve got a whole lot more than what you see there,” said Betsy. “A whole lot worse. I’ve got information to the effect that Hoover disclosed confidential FBI files to Roy Cohn, to help him in his defense against criminal charges. I’m trying to get in touch with a retired agent named Kloss, who may know something about it. He was assigned to FBI headquarters in Washington when this came down. He doesn’t want to talk to me, but he’s gonna have to.”

  “Bring me some of that, and we’ve got a real big-money deal. Meanwhile, don’t talk so much on TV,” said Ai-ling. “I want at least some of this stuff to be new when we run it.”

  8:02 P.M.

  Betsy pointed her garage-door opener and pressed the button. The lights went on in the garage, and then the door rose. She picked up from the seat another radio controller and pre
ssed the button on that one. It switched on bright floodlights that glared on the front of the house. Her shrubbery was all small. No one could be crouching behind a shrub. She kept nothing in the garage behind which anyone could hide. Satisfied that all was clear, she drove in and used the controller to close the door behind her.

  Betsy took no chances. Over the years she had offended a lot of people. Offended? No, much more than that; she had exposed them to ridicule, censure, and even to prosecution. She could have no doubt there were people in this world who would like to kill her. Or at the very least to give her a savage beating.

  Three had tried. None had ever touched her. She carried a pistol, knew how to use it, and had no hesitation about using it. She had in fact shot one man in the leg.

  She used her key to open the door between the garage and kitchen. She then had twenty seconds to step to the control panel and enter a code. If she did not, the whole house would erupt in the ear-splitting screams of four horns, and the alarm company would put in a call to the police. She punched in the code, then went to the counter and poured herself a glass of Scotch, to which she added ice and no soda. She walked into the living room and switched on the lights on the Christmas tree before she went upstairs to change.

  Betsy Clendenin was forty-two years old and was a full-figured, husky, vigorous woman who tended to move faster than she needed to, sometimes trotting up the stairs. Tonight she walked up. She had driven to the prison and back and was feeling a little weary. She shed her clothes and stood looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, a little resentful of the red marks elastic had left on her skin. She took a moment to brush her hair. It was light brown but frosted with bleach carefully applied by her hairdresser. She wiped off her makeup. It had been on too long. She liked to go naked inside her house. She picked up a dressing gown and carried it downstairs, in case someone came to the door.

  She had drunk her Scotch while upstairs, so went to the kitchen and poured another. She lit a cigarillo.

  Time to check her telephone recorder. She had five messages, all but one routine. That was—

  “Miss Clendenin, this is Frederick Kloss… uh, returning your call. You can call me again tomorrow if you want.”

  Curt and hostile. Apart from the curtness of the message, hostility put a sharp edge on his voice. Kloss didn’t want to talk to her. But he would because, like a lot of other people, he did not want her to write of him that he would not return her telephone calls or that he refused to be interviewed. He was smart enough to know that was tantamount to a damaging admission.

  Betsy returned to her kitchen. She explored the refrigerator, looking for something to eat. She would love to go out to a restaurant, even alone, but she was tired. No question. She was tired. She had frozen pizzas. Those were her fallback dinners. She would have a small pizza, with a tomato-and-onion salad, and red wine. Okay. Not a bad end to a long day.

  But too early. She carried her Scotch in the living room, sat down naked on her couch and for several minutes just stared at her Christmas tree. Then she picked up the clicker and began to surf the television channels.

  If there was satisfaction in seeing yourself on the tube, she’d had all that satisfaction she could want. Actually, it was too late now for the shows where her name might be mentioned. The networks were on their usual bullskevitch. She looked for a good movie. And found one. The original Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. She’d seen it twenty times, but she chose it. “Your will is strong… Van… Helsing.” Betsy relaxed and sipped Scotch.

  Her mind was not monopolized. She thought about Kloss. Of course, he didn’t want to talk to her. He might have information on the Director that would destroy the pitiful remaining shreds of that old, grotesquely inflated reputation. The Roy Cohn connection. And more.

  Kloss was squirming. Okay. She’d make him squirm more.

  Thursday, December 17 —6:42 A.M.

  Frederick Kloss—Fritz—sat down over his breakfast of orange juice with one ice cube in the glass, bacon and eggs, toast, and coffee, the same breakfast he had eaten every morning for the past sixty years. He ate alone. His wife of thirty-four years had been dead almost twenty years. He spread his newspaper on the table and glanced through it as he ate. He always looked for any story recounting some new exploit by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  He had been an agent of the FBI for twenty-five years, from 1949 to 1974. It was the defining experience of his life. He was seventy-five years old now and had been retired from the agency more years than he had served it, but he still identified himself as an FBI man. In spite of the fact that after retirement from the FBI he’d made a fortune in Los Angeles County real estate, he did not think of himself as a realtor. Like an old fraternity brother, he attended every agents’ reunion or convention he could, and he made a point of stopping by the Los Angeles office every month or so, to be sure they knew who he was and to compare the way things now were with the way they had been.

  Everything was very different now, mostly in ways he could not approve. He had seen agents wearing sweatshirts and jeans, with baseball caps! There were women agents! There was a want of the discipline and respect, plus the unfailing self-confidence, that had so characterized the FBI in the old days and had been a key to its effectiveness.

  Fritz Kloss still wore three-piece suits in winter, two-piece suits in summer, always with white shirts and narrow ties. He wore felt hats in winter, straw hats in summer. That was what the Director had prescribed. (Once when he mentioned the old dress code to one of the young men in the office, the fellow had made an unfunny joke: “Yeah, you guys had to dress like the Fruit of Islam.”)

  He had retired two years after the Director died. The FBI had already begun to deteriorate. And it had deteriorated sadly every year since.

  That had been inevitable. No organization could lose a leader like the Director and fail to weaken. Director Hoover hadbeen the FBI. He had shaped and guided it and made it the world’s preeminent law-enforcement agency. No agency anywhere had even approached it. The FBI under the Director had been America’s pride, the world’s envy.

  He’d had the privilege of knowing the Director personally. For eight years he had worked at SOG, the FBI term meaning “Seat of Government.” Knowing the Director would be looking at him, he’d kept his hair trimmed, his suits cleaned and pressed, his shoes shined; he’d even had his hat blocked. He never wore a white shirt twice between launderings. Each time he spoke with the Director, he made a point of focusing his entire attention on him, catching not just the words he spoke but studying the nuances of his words and the tone of his voice. His attentive air had not been contrived; he had been attentive. He had of course spoken very respectfully to the Director and called him sir.

  That was how it was. It was worthwhile to make a good impression on the Director—and dangerous not to. It was important to write reports exactly in the form the Director stipulated. It was essential to adhere strictly to the Director’s detailed procedures and standards, set forth in two thick volumes. That was how the man built the unique esprit de corps that had defined the agency.

  When the Director sent him to California, Fritz had been unsure if he had been banished for some violation or if he had been rewarded with a plush job. He continued to be troubled by the question until the Director died.

  For years now, the vultures had been out to damage the Director’s reputation. They said and wrote things about him they wouldn’t have dared say when he was alive. Now this woman, this Betsy Clendenin, was preparing to do another hatchet job. She actually admitted it, that she was digging up dirt and meant to publish it.

  How could she? Could no one to be spared the indignities of tabloid reporting? The woman was cheap; that was plain. She was also persistent. He had no choice but to meet and talk with her, even though he was certain he could not dissuade her from publishing her dirt.

  When she called, he would agree to see her. He had no choice. Seeing her might be unpleasant and risky, but God knew what lies she would tell if he didn’t.