Shark Infested Custard (30 page)

       There were no more calls from Miami.

       In summary, all of this sounds simple enough, but it wasn't. Getting a new identity for Don was complicated and time-consuming, and during this period I had a few problems of my own. I had two chipped knuckles on my left hand, and my hand and part of my wrist was still in a cast. These knuckles hurt constantly. The company doctor told me that they might hurt ("give me some discomfort") for a year or more, and that they would easily break again if I banged my fist into anything hard. To minimize the pain, I carried my left wrist in a black silk sling, and I tried, without much success, not to move my fingers. Every time I moved my fingers, the grating pain in the knuckles grew sharper. But at least I was alive.

       Frank Devlin, one of the security guard supervisors, had called me at the Stevens Hotel and told me that one of his watchmen was drunk and waving his pistol around. The watchman was stationed at an all-night park-and-lock on the North Side. There had been a good many car break-ins in the huge parking lot, and the male cashier in the one-man lighted box by the exit had been held up twice in one week before the stingy owner had called N. S. and hired a night watchman.

       Our security watchmen wear powder-blue uniforms with black Sam Browne belts and .25 caliber pistols. Usually it is safeguard enough just to have one of these uniformed men walking around to discourage car prowlers and stick-up men.

       They are all lousy shots, with only four days of security training before they are sent out on jobs like this one. In 1973 we decided to arm them with .25 caliber pistols, instead of .38s they used to carry, so they wouldn't be so likely to kill someone. I would have preferred to arm them with .22s myself, but a warning shot with a .22 sounds like a pop gun, so we settled on the .25 caliber pistol as an uneasy compromise. At least half of the men I employ for these uniformed security jobs are hired against my better judgment, but I'm like the Dutch kid plugging the dike with ten fingers instead of one, and I have to hire the kind of men I can get. And the kind of men you can get for $2.20 an hour to work twelve-hour shifts—in many cases, but not all, thank God—are often the kind who could and do make more money panhandling, stealing milk bottles, or bagging groceries than they get from National Security. I screen out the worst ones, but to fill the thinning ranks every week I have to take on a good many borderlines. Luckily, I lose the worst of the borderlines during the four days of training.

       Every Monday morning we start a new four-day course. The recruits get lessons in courtesy, some basic city and county law, do's and don'ts, and weapons training. We show them how to use a riot gun, although they don't get to fire one. But we do give them dry and wet run firing with the .25 caliber pistols in the basement range of the N.S. Building. On the fifth morning, Friday, they are issued uniforms and pistols. Tom Brady, the Chicago Director of N.S., gives them a pep talk. We start every Monday with from 25 to 30 new men, and by Friday, when we issue the uniforms, we are fortunate if we have 15 of them left. During the week, they melt away. N.S. has learned to save money by issuing the uniforms on the fifth day instead of on the first, as the agency did formerly. (The men who didn't show up again took their uniforms with them, of course.) Also, on Thursday night, the new men are given their pay for the first four days—even though their work was merely training, and easy training at that—but that first small paycheck means that at least four or five of them will not show up the next morning for graduation.

       At any rate, the survivors, now in uniform, come back to me, and I send them out on jobs. Two months later, after being out on all-weather jobs, there are only one or two men left who started out originally with a group of 25 in a four-day training session. It's a headache to me, trying to recruit and keep manpower, but I can't blame these men for quitting. For good men, intelligent men, the work is too boring after a week or so, and it is cold out there in the open spaces and lonely in the warehouses. But the work they do is light enough. Visibility is the main idea, and the biggest problem they have is in staying awake and walking around. But if, on the job at night, a man gets too bored, or too cold, he simply walks away and goes home. When this happens, the man's supervisor has to find out that the man has gone before the company who hired us does, and replace the watchman with another man or take the position himself until the end of the shift.

       Good supervisors are the key to running a smooth operation, and the supervisors I hire are never borderline cases. I check these supervisors out closely, and fortunately there are still a lot of American males who will work for less money if they are given a uniform to wear and the rank of "Lieutenant." If many of my supervisors are ex-servicemen who would have had a hard time making sergeant in the Army, I still have a lot of retired NCOs with a good retirement pay already who are willing to work as supervisors because they can wear a powder blue uniform with red stripes on the legs and gold lieutenant's bars on the shoulders.

       Frank Devlin was a good man, an ex-first sergeant of Infantry, so when he called I told him, "You don't need me, Frank. Fire the sonofabitch, and replace him."

       "Not in this guy's case," Frank said. "I'm in uniform, and I've chewed him out twice this week already. He's drunk, and he's got a loaded pistol. If he spots me in my uniform, he is liable to start shooting."

       "Okay," I said, "I'll come down. Where're you calling from?"

       Frank had phoned from an all night café two blocks from the parking lot. I put on my full-length leather coat, rode the elevator down, and took a cab. When I reached the café I went inside and Frank and I discussed strategy.

       "I caught him drinking the other night," Frank said, shrugging, "and I should've fired him then. But it was cold, and he only had a half-pint on him, so I let it go."

       "Did you take the half-pint away from him?"

       "Yeah. I did that. And I got word today that he was bitching about it to the other men. Personally, Mr. Dolman, I don't think either one of us should take a chance. We should get a couple of cops to pick him up."

       "If we did, we'd both be on the mat with Tom Brady in the morning. Every time one of our uniformed men is picked up by the fuzz, it's another black mark against the agency. Don't forget that our N. S. watchmen have eaten up a hellova lot of security jobs that off-duty policemen used to get. We can handle it. You can take off your uniform hat and wear my leather coat. Then he won't know it's you in uniform. I'll go into the lot straight on, and you circle around behind. While I wander around, pretending to look for my car, you come up behind him. I'll grab him from the front, and you can sap him behind the ear. Have you got your sap?"

       Frank nodded.

       "Okay. Where's the cashier?"

       Frank grinned. "He was here, in the café—he called me from here. But after I talked to him, and told him I'd call you, he went home."

       "That's good. Let's go."

       The plan was simple, and it should have worked out all right, but the watchman, instead of having his pistol in his holster, had it concealed in his right hand. His arm was hanging down and I didn't notice it. When I jumped for him, he stepped back clumsily and raised his arm with the pistol. In mid-jump, I swung my left hand and arm in a backhand. My knuckles hit the pistol hard, cracking, knocking it out of his hand. I heard it skittering across the wet asphalt of the lot but I didn't see it because everything went red, then blue, and then black in flat wavering sheets of color like a Mark Rothko painting. I must have passed out, or fainted, momentarily, but only for a second or a fraction of a second, because when I opened my eyes again I was on my knees. The drunk watchman was out cold, sapped from behind by Frank Devlin. Because of my injured hand I wasn't much help to Frank, but we got the watchman into Frank's car and drove down to the N. S. Building. I told Frank to get the man out of his uniform—he had awakened by then, and was sobering up as well—into his civilian clothes, and to dump him over on State Street some place. Still hugging my smashed hand, I went back to my room at the Stevens, which was only a block's walk from the N. S. Building.

       I soaked my hand in hot water, ate a couple of aspirins, and drank four ounces of whiskey. It didn't do any good. The swelling was getting worse, and so was the pain. At two a.m. I called the hotel doctor. He taped my hand, and gave me a shot. I took a few more slugs of bourbon, and fell asleep at four a.m.

       The next day, after x-rays, which showed the chipped bones on the first two knuckles, and following the cast-setting, Dr. Haas, our agency doctor, asked me how many hours a day I worked.

       "Twelve, fourteen, why?"

       Dr. Haas pointed to the cast. "This," he said, "shouldn't have happened. As Director of Personnel, you've got a responsible job. Going out with Lieutenant Devlin last night was like a colonel playing P. F. C. By playing games, and taking on everything, you're doing yourself and National Security a disservice. It isn't your place to—"

       "Look, Dr. Haas, don't tell me how to do my job. Somebody had to help Devlin, and he had to call me because there was no one else to call."

       "In that case—" Dr. Haas grinned "—appoint Frank Devlin as the night supervisor, and then your other security supervisors can call him when they get into similar jams, and he'll have to handle it. You can stay in bed at night, and get your sleep for the next day's work. No man can work for twelve and fourteen hours a day without making mistakes through being overtired. And last night, you made one hellova mistake. You could've been shot and killed. And Devlin, if you 'had'' been shot, would have, in all probability, beaten that drunken watchman to death with his sap. And that, Mr. Dolman, would've resulted in much worse publicity for the agency than calling a couple of cops in a patrol car to pick up the watchman."

       Dr. Haas was right. He ordered me to take two days off before going back to the office, and I lay on my bed at the Stevens thinking about my life, the job, and the way things were going.

       A man who is willing to accept responsibility is always loaded down with more and more of it, because there aren't that many men around who will accept responsibility.

       The agency kept two hotel rooms at the Stevens at all times. These rooms were reserved for visitors, directors from the field who were visiting Chicago headquarters for a few days, and for clandestine meetings with clients who, for one reason or another, did not want to come to the N. S. Building for conferences. There were more of the latter than one would suppose—husbands or wives who wanted spouse surveillance, for example; and also, we could meet privately with our ops who were engaged in industrial espionage and discuss their reports in these rooms.

       When I came to Chicago, Tom Brady gave me the use of one of the hotel rooms "until I got settled." The room was convenient, only a block from our building, and with the hotel desk acting as a message center and answering service, I was in touch with the office all of the time. The room was bug-free, swept regularly; and it was always spotlessly clean when I returned to it, with fresh sheets; and my laundry was picked up and returned on the same day. As a consequence, I spent additional hours at the office because I had very few personal matters to take care of, and those few I did have to worry about were taken care of by my secretary. And so, because I was there, in the office, I was doing a great many things myself, making a good many decisions, and taking on too many additional responsibilities that could have and should have been delegated. My full-time presence at the agency made Tom Brady's job easier, so he never reminded me that I was living in a rent-free hotel room because it was to his advantage that I live at the Stevens and be on tap all of the time.

       I decided to pull back and establish some kind of normal life.

       Merita Orfutt, I also concluded, would be part of my new resolve to live more normally, and she would be helpful to have around during the transitional stage. Merita Orfutt was a seventeen-year-old black girl from Dothan, Alabama. She had been picked up for shoplifting, and had been given probation. She had been living with a female cousin who had also moved to Chicago from Dothan, and her cousin was on welfare. The cousin had two illegitimate children already, and was pregnant with a third.

       The probation officer started screwing Merita, and moved her into a housekeeping room, which he paid for, on Cermak Street. It was a mixed block, and he could come and go without too much curiosity from the people in the neighborhood, but he got scared—or so he said. He was afraid that his wife might find out about Merita, and besides, he really didn't make enough money as a probation officer to support the girl, even minimally. And Merita was unable to find enough work to support herself. She found some occasional day-work but she didn't earn enough to live on.

       So I took Merita over, the payments of the room on Cermak, and gave the girl an allowance of thirty dollars a week. Merita was a very black black girl, the color other blacks call a "blue." She was sexually inexperienced and a very poor lay. But she was quiet and amenable, only spoke when she was spoken to, and she ironed beautifully.

       Actually, Merita and I had so little in common that there wasn't much of anything to talk about. She truly ironed beautifully, and liked taking care of the apartment. She was awkwardly efficient, and funny to watch at the same time. If I gave her two things to do at once, like ironing a fresh white shirt and taking the garbage downstairs, she jumped around for a few moments like a woman suddenly tossed a couple of bouncing tennis balls. For a slim girl, Merita had fairly large breasts, and the typical high rounded ass of a black girl, but she didn't really turn me on sexually—or at least, not very often. If she had, I would have taken the time to teach her a few things, but I never bothered, and only took her into my bed once or twice a week. When I had kept her in the room on Cermak Street I visited her about twice a week, and thought, at the time, that the reason I didn't see her more often was because I was too busy. But after I had her living with me in the apartment, where she was available every night, I still only tapped her once or twice a week because that was enough.