Seven Silent Men (44 page)

“Why?” Brew asked.

“For one thing, because of how surprised Mule and Wiggles were when they ran into one another in Baton Rouge. In the zoo there. Wiggles was pleased to see Mule, see that Mule was alive. He walked toward Mule with open arms. Mule was surprised to see Wiggles, and angry. Mule had thought Wiggles had run out on him and Ragotsy. Thought Wiggles had joined Bicki Hale and the other crooks in beating Mule and Ragotsy out of their share of the money. That was it, wasn't it?” he asked Brew. “Mule and Ragotsy never got any of the money. Worse than that, they couldn't find any of the other gang members, including Wiggles. Which made them believe that the out-of-town end of the gang had ripped off the Prairie Port members. But Wiggles hadn't gotten any money either. He'd gone down to Baton Rouge for the same reasons as Mule and Ragotsy, to see if he could find Bicki and his money. Who Wiggles bumps into in Baton Rouge is Mule … and before he can say anything … explain anything … he's punched out by Mule. In the middle of this the zoo ranger shows up and gets clubbed. Mule and Wiggles light out in different directions. They don't see one another until each has been arrested for Mormon State. Whether they got to talk together before the charges were dropped and they were set free or after, when Ragotsy could join them, is immaterial. But somewhere along the line they figured out the same thing you did, didn't they? Figured it out the same way.”

“What way was that?”

“Wiggles's way.”

They were at the end of the convent grounds now, ducked under the wire fence and crossed the road and started for the old railroad yard.

“You were saying Mule, Ragotsy and Wiggles figured out the same thing I had,” Brew reminded him. “Something having to do with Wiggles himself.”

“… Wiggles told them what tunnels he had gone through after the robbery,” Yates said. “Where he had been taken with or without his rubber boat. And it wasn't the route Mule and Ragotsy had taken. It wasn't out to the Mississippi River. It was inland. Wiggles had been swept right into the shunting terminal we left earlier, but instead of being carried on into the sewerage system beyond it, like you were, he was diverted due west. Ended up trapped in the mud right under the convent. Trapped stark naked and clutching some money in his hand. Pounded on a metal hatch until it was opened by a nun. Exploded out on them in all his raw glory. And took off. Probably lit out for Kentucky and didn't talk to anybody until he went on down to Baton Rouge for his payment. Once Mule and Ragotsy learned what had happened to Wiggles, where he had gone, they knew one other thing … that another rubber boat had gone inland too. The boat with all the money in it. What other conclusion could there be? Ragotsy was in the last boat, and he knew none of the money was with him. Mule was in the first boat, and there was no money there. Both Mule and Ragotsy had been washed into the Mississippi River. Wiggles was in one of the middle boats, and he was washed inland. But there was no money in his boat either. So it had to be the fourth boat that had the money. The fourth boat had to be a middle boat. That's what Mule and Wiggles and Rat must have figured once they got together, that the money was somewhere in the western tunnels or caves. Brew, that's what you deduced when you followed them back to the tunnels, saw them get in the boat like we just saw them do. From the moment they did figure it out, down into the tunnels they went.” Yates paused. “I said before, it didn't make all that much difference when they made this decision. And it doesn't. But looking back, the earliest they could have been together was when Rat Ragotsy got out of the hospital, unless Mule and Wiggles went to visit him there.”

“They didn't,” Brew said. “I called and checked. I doubt if Rat even wanted to see them. Rat was having one sweet vacation at government expense. That Army hospital has tennis courts, a swimming pool and a golf course. Rat likes golf. He stayed on for twenty days after he was well. It was part of the deal Harry Janks worked out with America.”

As they got to the car, Yates was saying, “Which means when Rat did return and meet with Mule and Wiggles, they didn't waste much time figuring it out and coming down here looking for the money. Anyway, that's how I read it.”

“We're in agreement, old buddy.” Brew pulled open the driver's door. “There's a bit of corroboration I omitted mentioning. The nuns say that the muddy man who jumped out of the sewer and ran off into the night … had a limp.”

Yates got in beside Brew. “What now?”

“I say we go right on over to the office and recheck those alibis that say Mule, Rat and Wiggles were in Illinois when the crime came down.”

“Where do we check on the third call?” asked Yates.

“Third call?”

“You said Mule went to the phone booth and made three calls the times you followed him away from his ranch,” Yates replied. “Three calls before driving on over and going down into the tunnels. I have to assume one call was to Wiggles and one call was to Ragotsy. That Mule called each of them saying he was on his way. That they should get a move on and meet him there. Who did he make the third call to?”

It was half past midnight when Yates and Brew reached the downtown office building. Seeing mobile units from the local television station parked along the curve and reporters hurrying in through the main doors, they drove around to a side entrance, took an elevator up to the eleventh floor. The resident office, as they entered, was in full swing.

“Where the Christ have you guys been?” Cub called out. “We've been looking all over hell for you.”

“It's our night off,” Brew told him.

“What kind of answer is that! You're supposed to check in, right? Check in at all times.” Cub was hot … hot at Brew. “Strom needed you. He had to go on without you. You lost us time.”

“Go where?” Brew asked.

Cub stood back, glowered, then broke into a wide grin. “We
got
him. Son-of-a-gun, we got him. He's in custody and confessing. We broke Mormon State.”

“Bicki Hale?” Brew asked. “You found Bicki?”

“Bicki, my ass. Bicki has nothing to do with it!”

“Then who did you pick up?” Yates wanted to know, “Ferugli? Sash? Epstein?”

“It wasn't that crowd at all … and thank God.”

“Who the hell was it?” Brew demanded.

“The guy we should have thought of in the beginning.”

“Who?”
Yates said.

“Otto Pinkny.”

Brew couldn't believe it. “Pinkny's an assassin, not a bank thief.”

“He's number one on the FBI's most wanted list,” Cub pointed out.

“What the hell does that matter if he doesn't rob banks?” Yates said.

“He robbed Mormon State, okay. I heard a little of it on the phone. If you'd been available like you should have, Brew, you could be hearing it right now. Strom's gone to get him. Strom wanted you to come along and question Pinkny more on the way back. They picked him up in South Carolina three days ago. He's been confessing for three days. Confessing things about Mormon State only the mastermind could know.”

… And David Dellafield was quickly forgotten.

EIGHTEEN

He was on the short side but trim. Framed in the narrow doorway of the railroad car, he looked taller. He wore a three-piece white summer suit and a tan straw hat with a snappy blue band and white alligator shoes and chamois spats, all of which had become part of his trademark. His face was modestly pinched. His surprised eyes were wide-set and owllike. The nose, buttonish. His white, nearly albino skin made a sparse blond mustache hard to discern in the filtering light of the railroad station. His lips were fragile and bore traces of rouge. With his straw hat on and riding low, as it did most of the time, he resembled a passive marsupial. When the hat came off, doffed of course in polite acknowledgment, a radical change took place. The slightly conical head with thinning blond hair was revealed, to no advantage. But so was that smile. And those white teeth. A smile so compelling, teeth so dazzling perfect that you wanted to shake this fellow's hand. Take him to you. Vote for him. Trust him. Hat up, smile on, teeth bared … and he metamorphosed, instantly, from creature into character. There was no doubt Otto Pinkny was a character. He worked at it.

Otto Pinkny smoked thin cigars and cologned with Brut and quoted Elbert Hubbard incorrectly and had authored an incomprehensible cookbook, which wasn't all that surprising since he had quit school in the fourth grade. Writingwise, Pinkny had murdered the English language more surely than the eleven known victims of his French-made burp gun. Speaking was a different matter. Otto was as garrulous an outlaw as ever was born. “A Casey Stengel of a gunsel,”
Time
had once commented. Otto had another oratorical attribute—he spoke in the third person.

“I know Otto Pinkny from a long time ago and intimately, and I can tell you he's the species of bloke who'd turn himself over to the coppers before harming one hair on a little baby in their rompers,” he had proclaimed via phone to an all-night, call-in Philadelphia disc jockey show after errant bullets from his latest gun battle crashed through a window and wounded an infant girl.

When interviewed a year later in his death-row prison cell by “60 Minutes,” Otto told America, “Otto Pinkny is a churchgoing bloke and don't smoke never. If chance should will it he gets himself married, he'll be faithful to his wife and won't never use no prostitutes again.”

After his spectacular prison break was likened to the exploits of John Dillinger and Billy the Kid by a Baltimore newspaper, fugitive Pinkny called the paper's city editor with a veiled complaint. “Otto Pinkny is a student of history, and you better danged well believe him when he tells you that Johnny Dillinger was a stand-up bloke but Billy the Kid was a wimp who goes around shooting human beings in their backs instead of facing them face to face like Johnny Dillinger or Otto Pinkny done.”

Pinkny had burst into the public consciousness in 1968 by shooting it out with a gang of Birmingham, Alabama, gunmen. Black gunmen, four of whom were killed in the fray. No one knew Otto Pinkny was responsible until he called a Birmingham paper and told them so. He chatted with a local disc jockey about it as well. Though never saying so directly, Otto implied he had killed the black men in retaliation for their having raped and murdered his fiancée. The fiancée's name was never learned, her body never discovered.

Seven months later in Pittsburgh he shot to death Joe Danker and Elroy Dobbins, notorious strong-arm men. Pinkny had explained by phone to a Pittsburgh deejay that death resulted from a dispute over money … that Danker and Dobbins tried to shoot him and that he was merely returning the favor. He was arrested in a phone booth the next day as he talked with yet another local disc jockey. Police assumed he must have been involved with Danker and Dobbins in some criminal activities, but before they could question him at length Otto Pinkny broke out of jail. Four months later he went against Tough Tommy Osler on a Savannah, Georgia, street corner. Friends of Danker and Dobbins had contracted Osler to track down and execute Otto Pinkny. It was Tough Tommy who lay dead after the exchange of bullets. A great deal of publicity was given to a report that Tommy was broke … that his contractors refused to pay even for his funeral … that it was Otto Pinkny who sent the money for a classy burial. Tough Tommy's widow was outraged by this blatant lie, even allowed herself to be photographed holding up the family bank books and stock portfolio and the receipt from the funeral parlor which showed she alone had paid all expenses. The media, by and large, preferred the more romanticized version in which Otto Pinkny paid. Little play was given to the widow's proof or her complaints that Otto Pinkny himself must have been the one who spread the nasty rumor, which of course was true.

Seven victims were now dead by Otto's burp gun. Seven criminals, of varying venality, whom he had fought fair and square. Stood face to face with, was usually outnumbered by. Comparisons to Western gunfighting heroes of yore were inevitable. So too were bromides such as, after all, he's not really hurting anybody except his own kind. The funeral-payment rumor evoked Robin Hoodish images.

All these were added to in Miami, Florida. A South Miami narcotics kingpin by the name of Luis Herra had employed Otto Pinkny to help organize and protect the delivery of $2,000,000 in cash from a Miami bank to a boat captain in Jacksonville, Florida. The money was small potatoes to the billion-dollar operation run by Herra, but years of internecine war with competing dope gangs had left him irritable and overcautious. He hoped the mere inclusion of Otto Pinkny on the routine money run would discourage interference by rival marauders. Otto Pinkny insisted on transporting the money alone. Herra wouldn't hear of it and assigned his bodyguard, a killer by the name of Cortez, to go along. On the way, Cortez, who had sold out his boss to a competitor, tried to kill Otto and wound up riddled through and dead in a ditch. Otto delivered the money to the captain, went back to Miami, got his payment from Herra and, thinking Herra had assigned Cortez to kill him, told Herra to pick up a gun and defend himself … told Herra he was going to shoot him for betraying him. Herra managed to push a secret alarm button. Otto mowed down the pair of bodyguards who rushed to Herra's assistance. Otto forced Herra to hold a gun, let Herra raise it and take aim before blowing him away. By the time Otto had finished phoning the story to various disc jockeys he was friendly with across the country, a different account was heard, one in which Otto led a raid on an offshore-island bank controlled by Fidel Castro and stole money to help arm pro-United States guerillas within Cuba … and how in the transfer of this money to a guerilla ship captain in Jacksonville, Herra and his Castroite gunmen had tried to interfere.

Pinkny, for six months, eluded one of the largest manhunts ever mounted along the eastern seaboard. One in which the FBI participated for the first time, though only nominally, since the prime jurisdiction went to the narcotics division of the Treasury Department and fugitive charges were for homicide, a crime the Bureau was not authorized to investigate except in rare and specific instances. When Pinkny was finally apprehended it was in Pennsylvania, where a prior homicide warrant for him was outstanding. He was duly convicted and sentenced to die and sent to death row at the State Correctional Institution at Graterford, where he was visited by a television crew from “60 Minutes.” En route to seeing himself on a guardroom television set some weeks later, Otto effected a spectacular escape, and a total disappearance.