Seven Silent Men (49 page)

The events Pinkny had recited were, indeed, absolutely true and accurate, with one exception … he had replaced the real robbers with himself and his gang. Yates and Brewmeister stood nearly alone in believing this … were sure that the facts were real and Pinkny's alleged involvement fiction. Their frustration came in trying to prove this, or at least disprove or discredit Otto Pinkny.

Yates, in his final afternoon of cross-interrogating Pinkny on the robbery, blurted out, “I don't believe a word of this. Nothing. It's a great trick. Someone told you all about the robbery, and you're telling us. Telling us things that can't be corroborated. Cowboy Carlson, who you claim found the score, is dead. Eddie Argulla, who you say showed you the score and helped in the perpetration, is dead. The Latinos, if they ever existed, are gone to parts unknown. J. L. Squires, the legendary fugitive, is still an unlocated fugitive. There is no one to say, nothing to say, you were within a thousand miles the night of the robbery. It is all circumstantial. Everything is
circumstantial
.”

“… You want me to prove Otto Pinkny was there, that's what you're saying.”

“That's what I'm saying.”

Otto Pinkny bit on his finger as he thought … finally raised a thumb. “The coppers could tell you.”

“What coppers?”

“The ones getting their pee-pees licked.”

“Pee-pees?”

“Dingles.” Otto Pinkny pointed at his genitals.

“Cocks? They were getting their cocks sucked?”

Otto Pinkny stiffened, looked away, nodded.

“Where?”

“On the street in front of the bank.”

“When?”

“In the middle of the robbery.”

“How the hell could you know that if you were thirty feet below getting ready to blow the vault?”

“The television monitors in the command post showed it. One of the screens showed what was on the street outside. Two police cars pulled up just when the countdown to explode the vault was starting and everything in the cave had to stop. Coppers got out of each car, and one of them ain't a copper but a girl which could be seen when she lit her cigarette. One of the coppers dropped his pants, and the girl got down and licked his dingle.”

“This happened during the robbery?” Yates said. “On August twentieth?”

The head nodded and the raised thumb wagged. “The picture on the monitor was so clear we could see the number on the police car … it was one hundred fifteen.”

… No one noticed that Otto Pinkny, for the first time, had dealt with himself in the first person and included himself in on the robbery … had used the pronoun
we
.

Police Officer Herbert L. Minot marched down the carpeted second-floor corridor of the Prairie Port Police Department headquarters building and into the executive offices and presented himself to an impatient Lieutenant Ned Van Ornum. Van Ornum led the way up a short hall and through the double doors of the chief's office.

“Fellatio!” Frank Santi stood pointing a finger at Minot without bothering to introduce or identify Strom Sunstrom, Cub Hennessy and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jules Shapiro, who were seated to his right. “Fellatio!” he repeated. “Did you or did you not, on the late evening or early morning of August twenty of this year, allow fellatio to be performed on your person?”

“… Sir?” was all Minot could answer.

“Were you or were you not on that night assigned to car one hundred fifteen along with Officer Karl Heath?”

“I was working with Karl back in August, okay, but I don't know what car we had.”

“Did you or did you not, during the course of duty on August twenty, stop in front of the Mormon State bank and allow a female to perform fellatio on your person … as you stood up?”

“I'd never do a thing like that while I was on duty.”

“I have no time to waste with you!” Frank Santi warned him. “Did what I say occur at the times specified?”

“… I really don't remember, chief.”

“Bring in Officer Karl Heath!” Santi called out.

Karl Heath entered through a side door, looked sheepishly at Minot.

“You told them?” Minot said.

Heath dropped his head.

“Aw, shit.”

“I ask you one more time,” Santi began, “did this event occur as described … when described?”

Herbert L. Minot said that it had, and thereby confirmed, in the presence of Strom Sunstrom and Cub Hennessy, that what Otto Pinkny had said was true.

Alice Maywell Sunstrom lay in bed waiting for her husband to come to sleep. When after a long while he hadn't, she tiptoed downstairs, found Strom fully dressed and standing rigid before his desk staring down at a spread of photographs and rubbing the back of his neck.

Alice moved up beside him, put a hand on his shoulder. “Problems?”

“Problems?” Strom pecked her on the cheek, moved across the room, took up the sherry bottle, poured a glass for each of them. “We have a man confessing to the Mormon State robbery. He's telling us things we never knew about the theft. We're corroborating lots of it too.” He handed her a glass and they drank. “Earlier this evening he came up with something no one but a robber could know … he saw a cop doing something in front of the bank, and the cop verified it. It would seem our confessor was there and did the theft. And I should believe he was there and it happened. Everyone else does and I should too.”

“Do Yates and Brewmeister believe it?”

“They never believe anything. It's me I'm talking about. I don't believe this man, this Otto Pinkny.”

Strom walked back to the desk, placed a fist in the middle of the photographs of Mule, Bicki, Windy Walt, Ragotsy, Wiggles, Ferugli and Epstein. “These are the men who did it. What's grinding me is I can't prove it.” He motioned to her to come forward. When she did, his arm reached around and pulled her tight to him. “Maybe this case means too much to me. Maybe I've got to thinking I'm Ed Grafton … or at least wish I were Ed Grafton. I thought all I wanted was to be assigned a top-flight investigation. I know now that isn't enough. I have to do this case, this investigation, right. No tricks, no compromises. The right men have to be arrested and convicted.” He dropped his fist onto the photographs. “These are the right men, Mule and Bicki and all of them here, not the hypester gunman we've been questioning. And I'm helpless. I'm going to have to help convict the hypester … the wrong man.”

Alice pointed down at the picture of Mule. “Which one is that?”

“Corkel. The one they call Mule Fucker. How did you miss him? The press damn near ran him for President.”

“You can't prove anything against him?”

“He has a nonsensical alibi we can't break. Three of them do. I think I told you about that.”

“Did you? I must have forgotten,” she lied. “What were those alibis?”

“That they weren't in Prairie Port at the time of the robbery. Not in Prairie Port that night and for the next week.”

“What would happen if you proved one of them had been here in Prairie Port that week?”

“We could convict them, in all likelihood.”

She kissed him on the cheek and started out, saying, “Come to bed soon, darling.”

Alice Maywell Sunstrom had recognized the photo of Mule from the instant she glanced down at it … knew it was the same man whose face she had so often seen in the papers and on TV … knew she had witnessed him murder another man four nights after the robbery. Blow the tall Groucho Marx's head away.

Tall Groucho was Willy “Cowboy” Carlson. And Alice may have known this. Hearing conversations about the original robbery gang as well as guarded references to Cub's confrontation with police Chief Frank Santi over Willy's corpse, Alice could have come to realize she had witnessed bald Cowboy's murder at the hands of Mule. If she did, she couldn't admit it to herself, just as she couldn't admit the constant fear she lived under, knowing a killer who had seen her face might be stalking her.

Alice had chosen to forget everything she had witnessed that Tuesday evening, August 24 … and everything she had done. There was no choice. Revealing that she had seen Mule kill another man, be it Willy Carlson or not, was tantamount to exposing her brief fling with Elaine Picket. Besides the emotional hurt that knowledge of Elaine would inflict on Strom, the professional consequences could be far graver. Homosexuality was anathema to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover. Alice feared the slightest hint of her liaison with Elaine Picket could finish her husband's Bureau career. She knew the wrathful ways of the Bureau better than most wives, had suffered through Strom's exile with him. Strom was her life. The Bureau was his life. She could not, would not, must not jeopardize his standing in the FBI. This left frail Alice in a state of perpetual terror and anguish. Even in her dreams there was no escape. Often she had awakened from a nightmare in which Mule stood in the office across from Elaine Picket's apartment staring down at the man he had just killed … and then looked up and saw her … Alice standing in Elaine's window stark naked and staring at him.

Alice Sunstrom had gathered up all her inner strength to scour the events from memory and maintain an outward equanimity. The effort, whatever its pain, was worthwhile; she was protecting the only thing she loved—Strom. But for safety's sake she had become more reclusive than ever.

Now, walking upstairs to the bedroom, Alice decided that her silence was harming, not protecting, Strom. That somehow she must let it be known what Mule had done and
when
. Let it be known without revealing how she could have seen it. Long after Strom came to bed and fell asleep beside her, she agonized over what to do. A solution occurred. She slipped from bed and went down and picked up the phone and dialed FBI-2000.

“FBI hot line,” the voice on the other end announced.

“If you wish to know where Mule Corkel was the night of August twenty-fourth, go to Twelve twenty-one Hosking Street.” She spoke softly and through a linen napkin and tried to distort her voice. “He wasn't in Illinois as his lawyer said. It was four nights after the robbery, and he was here in Prairie Port killing someone in the third-floor office at Twelve twenty-one Hosking Street.” As an afterthought she added, “The someone might be Cowboy Carlson.”

Brewmeister said it was urgent they meet at the city morgue. Yates rushed there only to find Brew had left word to meet at the office. At the office Yates was told Brew had just gone out, saying that they should meet where originally planned. Toward midnight Yates was back at the morgue, found Brewmeister sitting in the medical examiner's office amid a sea of open records.

Stack-hunter was the phrase used at Prairie Port for an agent skilled at the examination and analysis of records and data … and Martin Brewmeister ranked among the residency's best. He had a nose for discrepancy and the patience to find it. Could cull through endless pages of material searching for that one fact that didn't gel, that one contradiction which could provide new insights into a problem at hand. The only drawback for the other men, once Brew locked in on such a find, was the meticulous and elongated way he explained the discovery … which was why, on arriving at the morgue office, Yates asked with reluctance, “Find something?”

Brew tossed a pair of manila folders across the desk. “I came down here earlier to check on an inconsistency in dates over Sam Hammond's death. Remember that Natalie, Sam's wife, had told us she thought Sam had jumped off Warbonnet Ridge and killed himself in the early evening of August twentieth. Killed himself just before the robbery began that night. But Otto Pinkny said he thought Sam had died three days before that, that he heard Sam had committed suicide after J. L. Squires reamed him out on August seventeenth. Otto Pinkny's been bothering me a lot. Who the hell could know what he knew about Mormon State without some connection to the robbery? When he told us Sam had killed himself three days earlier than Natalie said, I thought I saw a possible link … the chance that Bicki Hale hired Otto Pinkny to be the enforcer over the gang, over Bicki's gang. After all, what does Otto Pinkny do in life if it isn't terrorizing and executing people? I thought maybe Cowboy Carlson had given the gang some trouble and that Bicki Hale had had Pinkny blow him away. If that was possible, why couldn't Pinkny have given Sam Hammond a friendly shove off of Warbonnet Ridge? Or maybe it wasn't a shove. Maybe Pinkny killed him another way. Maybe that killing took place when Pinkny said, three days before the robbery instead of the night of the robbery.”

Brew got to his feet. “I went through our office file on Sam and found out we fucked up again. No one had bothered to get a copy of his death certificate and autopsy report. All we had on his death was a burial permit and a note from the Prairie Port police saying his body had been found. So I came down here to the morgue and asked to see what they had on Sam. They didn't have a goddam thing. No file, no death certificate, no nothing. I told the assistant M.E. there must be something because Cub had seen Sam's body here a couple of weeks after the robbery. The assistant M.E. explained that could be possible because they have a public funeral parlor upstairs where bodies shipped in from other cities can be viewed before interment. If the body had been shipped in, the Prairie Port medical examiner might not have done the autopsy or even seen the autopsy report. The assistant M.E. didn't have any more time to give me and said if I wanted to go through the files on my own, be his guest. So I did. The filing system here is so disorganized it's amazing anything can be found. I finally located a report on Sam Hammond, and sure enough, the autopsy was done in Cape Girardeau, not Prairie Port. According to the data, Sam's body was pulled out of the Mississippi River near Cape Girardeau at about ten
P
.
M
. the night of the robbery, Friday night, August twentieth. The apparent cause of death was a concussion and drowning. The condition of the body, though bloated, indicated death had come within the last twenty-four hours. In other words, Billy, Natalie's version had been correct. Sam Hammond died August twentieth, not three days earlier on the seventeenth. More important for us, Otto Pinkny was wrong. Had been proved wrong and possibly caught in a lie. I knew we had cracked the ice … knew that if Pinkny was wrong or lying about this, we'd soon find out he was wrong or lying about a helluva lot more. That was the good news. The headache news is in one of those files you're holding.”