Free Better Dead by Max Allan Collins

or anything like it happen?”
    â€œNo.”
    He didn’t bother prompting me for the notebook this time.
    â€œYour loving brother-in-law says that when he was on furlough, you invited him and his wife Ruth over for dinner, and that a woman named Natalie Ash was there.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThat the purpose was to introduce the Ash woman to Greenglass so she could go southwest to play courier with atomic secrets.”
    His mouth tightened and so did his eyes. “I know her, she’s a neighbor … but no such thing happened.”
    I leaned forward again, holding his gaze. “Do you remember what really happened, the night Greenglass claims your wife typed up atomic secrets and you cut up a Jell-O box to make a two-piece jigsaw puzzle out of it?”
    A full shrug this time. “Just idle conversation. The war effort. That the Russians were carrying a heavy load, and we should have a second front. Nothing treasonous, or conspiratorial either for that matter.”
    I asked, “What about this Gold character? Do you know him?”
    â€œI never met him in my life.”
    â€œWhat about this woman Elizabeth Bentley, who says she had calls from you?”
    His nostrils flared. “The professional ex-Red? She said she had calls from someone named Julius. I’m not the only one with that name, starting with Caesar. But my understanding is that these spies use code names. So if she did talk to a ‘Julius,’ it was someone else.”
    â€œYou didn’t know her.”
    â€œI don’t know her.”
    â€œAnd your codefendant, Morton Sobell?”
    â€œHe was at City College, an acquaintance. I bumped into him years later. Purely social and not much of that.”
    â€œThere was a witness who claimed Sobell turned over some film to you.”
    â€œNever happened. But what film? This witness, Max Elitcher, was a friend of ours going back to City College days. First, Saypol and Cohn put the fear of God into him … then they put words in his mouth.” He shook his head. “On this, Sobell gets thirty years? Incredible.”
    I finished my notes on that, then went back to the main point.
    I asked, “Did your brother-in-law, on either of his two furloughs, come to your apartment and deliver to you—at your request or otherwise—information about an atom bomb?”
    â€œCertainly not.”
    â€œWhat about a sketch of a cross section of the atom bomb?”
    â€œNo.” A deep dismissive laugh came up and out from his chest. “Even if Dave had been capable of such.”
    â€œWhy do you say that?”
    Rosenberg smirked. “He’s a machinist with a high school education. It’s laughable to think that he would even know what he was looking at—much less memorize the ‘secret’ and carry it home in his head.”
    I held his eyes; they didn’t waver. “What about the claim that your wife typed up notes David brought to you?”
    â€œShe did no such thing.”
    â€œ Can she type?”
    â€œCertainly. She was a clerk, a secretary, when we met. But she didn’t type any such material.” He shifted in his seat. “Mr. Heller, Ruth claims her husband’s handwriting is illegible, and that’s why Ethel was enlisted to type from it, since only his sister could decipher it. But Ethel says her brother has excellent handwriting.”
    I frowned. “I don’t remember seeing where your attorney introduced samples of David’s handwriting into evidence.”
    His eyes widened a little. “He didn’t. Should he have?”
    Underlining something in my notebook, I said, “Well. Let’s just say I’ll be looking for samples. My understanding is—after the war—that you and David went into business together, and that he left that business, a machine shop, under a cloud.”
    He tilted his head. “There was a strain. David felt I owed him