Seven Silent Men (26 page)

On Monday night, September 6, Alice Sunstrom and Sue Ann Willis and Tina Beth Yates and Sally Jessup and Helen Perch and Heathia Keon and Jolene Bracken went to Sissy Hennessy's home for a Mormon State Desertion Party. Many brought their young children with them. None had seen their husbands for more than a few hours a day since the Romor 91 investigation had started. In honor of their missing spouses, they did what their husbands usually did on Monday nights this time of year—drink beer, eat a buffet dinner and watch Monday-night professional football. Much was drunk and eaten and said by the wives. Little football was seen.

Corticun, at the time of the hen party, held a full-house press briefing intended to shift media interest back to the FBI. He dryly cited many of the investigatory activities to date, stated that 2,500 known criminals across the nation had been interviewed, that hundreds of scientists with electrical expertise had been talked to, that twenty-three other Channels of Investigation were under way. Corticun would not divulge what those Channels of Investigation were. The next evening, Tuesday, September 7, while Billy Yates took time off to help Tina Beth move into their rented house, Corticun revealed for the first time at any press briefing what Ed Grafton and Cub Hennessy and Strom Sunstrom had learned shortly after the robbery had been discovered: that segments of a rubber boat belonging to a robber had been found in the river.

The night after that, Wednesday, September 8, as Doris Kebbon and two of her five children watched “The Carol Burnett Show” on television and Pauline Lyle, Tricia Dafney and three of their children viewed “Adam-12” at Pauline's house and Helen Perch studied for her real-estate license examination and Hinky Cody read Erich Segal's still best-selling novel,
Love Story
, Denis Corticun made a startling admission at his evening press briefing … that money stolen in the robbery had been recovered from the river. Corticun avoided saying the amount found was fifty one-dollar bills or that the discovery had been made back in August at the same time the boat segment was discovered. He had used the money-in-the-river ploy before, had unofficially leaked it to Chet Chomsky in the early days of the investigation. Now, as then, it worked. Attention shifted to the Mississippi. And tour boats and the scuba industry thrived more than ever.

Martin Brewmeister, with a slight limp and a bandaged shoulder, followed Yates through the door of the twelfth-floor offices supervised by Corticun. He stopped, gazed about the sprawling, multilevel, multicolored premises and asked, “What the
hell
is this?”

“The future,” Yates told him. “Like it?”

“It's a Venetian whorehouse.”

“Been to Venice, have you?” Yates indicated the section of office to the left. “Those agents handle our old residency case load and are doing a pretty good job. Those guys over there,” he said as he pointed to the right, “they're the reserves for Romor 91. They assist our guys down on the eleventh floor.”

After touring the public-relations sector, the main communications area and the still unoccupied office of the flying squad, Yates walked to a horseshoe-shaped enclosure lined with shelves and containing several copying machines and a long table laden with reports. Sorting the report pages, making copies and inserting them into red, white or blue binders, were three secretaries.

“The binders, regardless of color, contain Romor 91 reports.” Yates held up a white binder. “White is the operative color for out-of-town reports whether they come in from the flying squad, other field offices and agencies or whatever. White reports go into white binders. Duplicate copies go into the master casebook.” He pointed to a line of white binders on the wall shelf. “That's the totality of out-of-town reports reaching us to date.”

A longer line of red binders on the next shelf was indicated. “Red is for the eleventh floor. Our floor. The residency. Residency information gathered by us directly on the Prairie Port end of Romor 91. On events that happened only in Prairie Port … which is almost everything. The thicker blue binders are the master casebooks containing the entire investigation, the material from both the white and red binders. One set is up here, and we have a second set down on the eleventh floor. Each master binder holds between one hundred and one hundred and ten reports. As you can see, we're already up to eighty-one volumes. With nearly nine thousand reports on tap so far, we may become the biggest investigation in Bureau history, if you believe projected statistics. We've become very big with statistics while you were away.”

“Where does the
case
stand?” Brewmeister asked.

“It doesn't. It's lying flat on its back, stone dead.”

“What about those breaks inside Warbonnet Ridge?” said Brew. “The machinery? The timing device? All the other physical evidence?”

“They ran us down half a hundred garden paths … and didn't cough up a thing,” Yates told him. “Not one lead. Not a thousandth of a thumbprint. We're at a dead end.”

Brewmeister lowered into a form-fitting plastic chair. “You can't have that much physical evidence and not break a lead.”

“We can. And have.”

“It isn't logical.”

“Maybe that's the trouble.”

“What?”

“Trying to think logically when you don't know all the facts,” Yates said. “That's what we've been doing, trying to think in a logical way. But we don't have all the facts, so how can we be logical?”

“I'm not getting you.”

“Examining the evidence at hand, logic has told us this was a supercaper and, ergo, that the perpetrators must be supercrooks. Particularly our wizard. We've interviewed and investigated more electronics Ph.D.s than Edison had amps. But if you follow our own logic, just to this point, you realize we are faced with an illogical supposition. Somehow we've deduced that the wizard and his gang are experts in everything. Experts in electricity and tunnels and tunnel-flooding and geology and caves and drilling and explosives and alarm-jamming. My God, do you know how hard it is to ride a rubber boat through a mild rapids in daylight? It's hard, I've done it. But we're presuming this crowd of crooks could do it in total darkness and on the crest of eighteen million gallons of escaping water. We're supposed to believe this is the most exquisitely conceived and executed crime in modern times … that power shortages and mud eruptions were charted out to act as decoys. Well, I'll tell you something, God Himself in a month of miracle Sundays couldn't do as many things as expertly as we've convinced ourselves these guys can do.”

Brew considered, then shook his head. “Billy, this gang aren't dunderheads.”

“I'm not saying they are,” Yates replied. “But they could be. If you want, I can make a pretty good case for a bunch of dumbcluck crooks stumbling onto a mark, in their dumbness concocting an off-the-wall plan for taking a vault and screwing up half the time and still being lucky enough to pull it off.”

Brew shook his head again. “That wouldn't explain the wizard. The wizard did one hell of a job with that machinery in Warbonnet Ridge. I read your own reports on it.”

“That's so, but there's one thing we were told down in the tunnel that everyone ignores … the electric timing device wasn't used for the actual robbery, only after … that someone tampered with the device and tried to bypass it … that wires were run directly between the reservoir's water gates and the generator, conceivably run by a different person. It's in the report. Thurston, the electric company engineer, told us that the electrical connections to the reservoir were different from any of the other connections attributed to the wizard. That they were sloppier. Maybe, for whatever the reasons, a different man made that electrical connection to the reservoir gates. A second man. Maybe it was the second man who disconnected the electric timing box too. Maybe the second man didn't have all the skill the wizard did. But maybe what the wizard did just didn't work. Maybe he got the old machinery operative but the flooding end of things was beyond him and someone else had to step in. Someone who didn't give a hoot about doing anything but getting some water into the tunnels any way he could.”

Brew didn't see it. “You tell this to Strom?”

“To Strom and anyone else who will listen.”

“What do they say?”

“They don't. They turn and flee. What the hell, it's only an idea. Imagine the look on Corticun's face if any part of it was true. If his supercrooks turned out to be the Katzenjammer Kids.”

BOOK

TWO

TWELVE

Cub Hennessy drove through the “restricted” gate at University Hospital and down the ramp and on between the bearing beams under city morgue. He had expected Ned Van Ornum to be waiting for him, assumed it was Ned sitting on the edge of the loading dock in the distance. Van Ornum was head of detectives for the Prairie Port Police Department. He was also Cub Hennessy's confidential informant on police force operations. Grafton, the only other FBI man to know the Prairie Port PD was being spied on by one of its own, considered Ned Van Ornum to be Cub Hennessy's finest recruitment. Cub wasn't all that certain. Never had been.

Cub Hennessy ran informants for the FBI's resident office in Prairie Port, which is to say he was in charge of selecting candidates for the small and generally clandestine ring of information-gatherers, then, after clearance from Grafton, recruiting the prospects, convincing them by whatever means possible to “run” for him and Grafton. Other agents at the Prairie Port residency developed their own informants, but these were usually less crucial sources. Strategic recruitments were left exclusively to Cub.

Neither Cub nor Grafton had been keen on recruiting an upper-echelon officer of the Prairie Port Police Department, saw no particular need to do so. Relationships with the PD, though not ideal, had been cordial, at least as long as the force had been run by Chief B. C. Hankler. B. C. “Before Christ” Hankler was, as the saying went, viable. When Hankler's impending retirement was learned, FBI headquarters in Washington had grown restive. More precisely, the assistant to the Director, A. R. Roland, became anticipatory. Roland suggested to Grafton, in his polite and persistent manner, that a change of Prairie Port PD leadership could change the climate of the Wilkie Jarrel investigation and that since Jarrel would undoubtedly be doing everything in his power to influence the selection of a new chief of police, it might be prudent to develop a reliable contact within the PD who could apprise them of developments … a contact who might also prove useful in the future. Grafton, to keep Roland from “pestering us to death,” finally told Cub Hennessy that should the opportunity for a PD recruitment pop up: “Follow through.” What popped up was Ned Van Ornum. Unfortunately, he popped up after a new police chief was selected by the Prairie Port city council … a career police officer Grafton strongly suspected was partial to Wilkie Jarrel or worse.

Cub Hennessy's strategy for the recruitment of Ned Van Ornum was based on age, ethnics, career frustration and patience. Ned was thirty-one years old, by far the youngest police officer ever to hold the prestigious position of chief of detectives. Ned during his previous seven years on the force had amassed one of the best records in memory. Though somewhat taciturn, he was personable and bright and college-educated and a graduate of the National Police Academy course sponsored by the FBI. His parents were third-generation WASPs, which in predominantly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Prairie Port was still important. His wife was from Prairie Port and WASP and had been his schooldays sweetheart. Ned Van Ornum, needless to say, was a comer at the police department. But not the only comer.

Frank Santi, at thirty-four years of age, was the youngest man ever to be made chief of the Prairie Port Police Department. Like Van Ornum, Santi had been born in Prairie Port and married a local girl and had the reputation of being bright and, when he chose, personable. Unlike Ned, Frank had finished only one year of college, never attended a crime seminar given by the FBI and had grown up in the poorest section of Prairie Port, a crime-afflicted, often volatile riverfront area called Old Port and most recently named “the Battle Zone.” Whereas Ned Van Ornum's record on the police force had been one of the best, Santi's record was the best. His rise from the ranks had been faster and more spectacular than Ned's. Frank was something of a local hero. He had played on the Prairie Port High School basketball team that was runner-up in the Missouri State championship finals sixteen years earlier. Between dropping from college and joining the Prairie Port PD, Frank had served with the Marine Corps. One of the two other candidates Santi had beaten out for the top police department post was fifty-one-year-old Tim Shipley, the man former chief B.C. Hankler had handpicked to be his successor. The other was Ned Van Ornum.

Policemen and FBI agents of Prairie Port, except when brought together on official business, politely avoided one another. Didn't even have their respective softball and bowling teams compete. What institutional socializing had to be done was taken care of by Strom Sunstrom. Even chronically gregarious Cub Hennessy didn't fraternize with cops. But he did play golf and was finally accepted at a local country club where Ned Van Ornum had long been a member. This was just at the time Frank Santi was chosen to be new chief of police. Though Cub had never had any direct dealings with Ned, he knew who he was. He also knew that Ned had been a candidate for the police department's number one job … had come very close to winning the position. And Ned knew who Cub was. Cub took his time moving. One Sunday morning ended up in a golfing foursome with Ned. Played with him two weeks later. Showered and took steam with him from time to time. Had drinks at the locker room bar with him. The luckiest break of all was that Cub's wife, Sissy, knew Ned's wife, June. Both women had served as chaperones at the 4-H dance. Cub had Sissy invite Ned and June to dinner. It was one of the few times all four of them would be together. Cub didn't like getting Sissy involved with his work. Especially when he couldn't tell her what he was up to. And anyway, that first night when they were all together had provided him with more than enough to go on.