The Hess Cross (28 page)

"You waiting for somebody?"

Smithson realized who the man was. He jerked his billfold from his pocket and held the ID up to the man. "I'm here on business," Smithson said impatiently.

"I'm sorry, sir, but your clearance isn't sufficient to enter the building."

"I'm well aware of that," Smithson replied, his heavy jowls flapping as his impatience turned to anger. "I'll wait right here."

"Yes, sir. No offense meant, but you'll be watched while you're here."

"I assumed that. When'll today's interview be over?"

The guard smiled. "What interview? Neither you nor I are aware of any interview."

"Shit," Smithson exclaimed as he looked at the lab entrance again. "You'd think that . . . "

A black Chevrolet pulled to the curb. Its passenger jumped out and opened the rear door. Two plainclothes guards emerged from the Metallurgical Lab. One immediately approached Smithson and asked if he would leave the area. When Smithson again flashed his ID, the guard became polite, but no less insistent.

"You tell Crown that Everette Smithson wants to see him. I'll be standing at the end of the building. Tell him our boss has some orders for him, and they're urgent." Smithson could not keep his irritation at not being in full command of the Chicago operation out of his voice.

From a hundred feet away, Smithson saw Crown, accompanied by a tall, black-haired man Smithson assumed was Rudolf Hess, emerge from the building. Hess slipped quickly into the back seat of the Chevrolet, and a guard followed him in. The man with the blanket folded over his gun-wielding arm spoke a few words to Crown. Crown glanced toward Smithson, thanked the guard, and walked the distance to the Chicago agent. With the students and plainclothes guards, Ellis Avenue was an unlikely spot for a setup, but Crown's eyes scanned passing automobiles and building tops.

He smiled briefly as he held out his hand to the corpulent agent. "Good to see you again, Everette." Crown's eyes kept
searching, never stopping. If Smithson noticed Crown's jerking eyes, he didn't mention it.

"Likewise. I understand from the boss you did a fine job getting your charge out of England." Smithson nodded his head rapidly as he spoke, and his bulbous double chin bloated and deflated like a croaking bull frog.

"Not much problem with it," Crown replied, and paused, letting Smithson know the amenities were over.

"Well," Smithson said, rubbing his hands with the relish of one about to impart important news, "you've heard about the hijacking?"

"What hijacking?"

"No, of course you haven't. You've been with your guest all morning." Smithson quickly filled Crown in on the Ridgeland Street massacre. "The Priest thinks it's sabotage, so he wants you to help me out here," he concluded apologetically. "You'll hear why we think it's sabotage when we get there and talk to an old lady."

"Did he say anything about the other concerns I might have?" Crown asked testily.

"Only that you can work them in with helping me investigate."

There was only one reason the Priest would order Crown to get involved with this mess. He believed it was connected with Hess and with Maura's death. Crown looked over his shoulder. Peter Kohler stood next to the Chevrolet, checking his watch, anxious to get Hess off the street. Heather and Hess were visible through the rear window.

"All right," Crown said. "Meet me at the EDC house in fifteen minutes. I'll have our guest secured by then."

Smithson used the drive to relay facts of the hijacking as summarized by early police reports. They arrived at the site at 1:45. A four-block area had been cordoned off. Crown
counted a dozen police cars with flashing lights near the scene and guessed most of the others were unmarked police cars. The bodies had been removed. White paint silhouetted where they had fallen on the concrete. The motorcycle and two damaged cars had not been moved. The pools of blood were still damp. Bent over one red puddle was a white-coated police lab technician putting samples on thin glass slides. Perhaps twenty uniformed and plainclothes officers worked in the vicinity. A police photographer busily snapped pictures of the scene. An army of reporters was kept at bay by a circle of policemen. Smithson and Crown struggled to the police line, assisted greatly by the obese Chicago agent's low center of gravity. Smithson showed his ID and they passed through the line. Aching tension ebbed from Crown as if he had sunk into a hot bath. In this crowd of policemen, he was safe.

"John, this's Lieutenant Michael Sullivan, who's in charge of the police investigation."

Sullivan was on his knees between the two bullet-scarred cars, carefully inspecting the point of impact. He thrust his powerful hand up at Crown. "Glad to know ya," he said cursorily, and resumed his study. His gray-brown hair was cut extremely close, perhaps to disguise its sparsity. Sullivan's neck was drill-instructor thick, and under a threadbare raincoat his shoulders sloped like a linebacker's. Only his belly had aged, bloated with beer over the years. The pencil Sullivan used to jot down his discoveries looked ridiculously small in his hand.

"Crown's from our office. He's here to lend a hand."

Sullivan looked up. "Then you'd be wanting to talk to the old lady."

"I want him to hear it firsthand," Smithson said. "Can the three of us talk to her?"

"You won't catch me in that house again. I get enough of the mother types on weekends," Sullivan said, shaking his
head and resuming his inch-by-inch survey of the collision. "But you're welcome to talk to her. The gray house." He flipped his thumb, indicating the house with the large elm tree in its front yard.

The door to the home was open before Smithson and Crown had climbed the half-dozen steps to the porch. A silver-gray cat leaped through the door, shot down the steps, and disappeared around the side of the house.

"Oh, that old cat," said an ancient voice on the other side of the screen. "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty." She made a series of clucking sounds, apparently imitating a chipmunk. "Oh, well, he always comes back. Come in, gentlemen, come in. Don't stand out there in the cold."

The woman was in her late seventies, with a face that had retained its soft prettiness. Her hair was startlingly white and was pulled back into a bun. She wore a light green print dress with a matching sash around her waist. It was Sunday wear donned to honor the occasion of visitors.

The heavy odor of mothballs and cat urine smacked Crown as he stepped into the living room.

"Please come in and make yourselves at home. Why don't you sit over there? Right over there." She pointed Crown to a sagging sofa under a dark landscape painting notable only because of its ornately carved wood frame. She guided Smithson to a delicate cherrywood rocking chair, but then, seeing his bulk, directed him to the other end of the sofa. Crown quickly grabbed the sofa's arm to prevent toppling as Smithson's ponderous weight buckled the cushion. Crown felt like he was sharing a hammock with Oliver Hardy.

"Tea?"

"Pardon?" Crown asked, having regained his balance.

"Would you like some tea?"

"No thanks, ma'am. We're here to ask you about . . . "

"Tea?" She turned to Smithson. Her voice had a very
high, almost falsetto pitch. "Tea" sounded like a bird's chirp.

"Thank you, yes. Four lumps of sugar."

While she puttered around the kitchen, Crown surveyed her living room. He doubted it had changed in twenty years. The curtains were drawn, and the room was dim, accenting the mothball odor. A Tiffany lamp sat on an end table near the sofa. A year of
Saturday Evening Posts
cluttered the tea table in front of them. Oval-framed photographs of relatives from the last century were perched on the mantel over the fireplace. Bookshelves built into the wall near the fireplace contained a hundred or more miniature pieces of furniture collected over a half-century. An early RCA radio rested on the radiator cover near the sofa. Between the radiator and the fireplace was her chair, a gray, worn, comfortable command chair replete with footstool and knitting pouch hanging from the antimacassar-covered arm. In front of the chair was an afghan that she tucked her feet into when knitting. An August Junghans eight-day clock hung on the wall across from Crown and filled the room with its soothing tick. The home was old and comfortable, the home of a woman enjoying her last years.

The old woman padded from the kitchen to Smithson, handed him a cup and saucer, and said, "Sorry, young man. I don't have any cubes. I'll pour sugar, and you tell me when."

After a sufficient time to half-fill the cup with sugar, Smithson waved his hand. She had forgotten a spoon, so he stirred the syrup with his watchband.

When she had settled into her chair and balanced her cup and saucer on the arm, Crown began, "Ma'am, I'm John Crown. My friend, Everette Smithson, and I are with the Chicago police—"

"Well, I'm always glad to see you boys, what with the neighborhood going like it is. Why, just this morning, you would not believe what was going on . . . "

"What's your name, ma'am?"

"Mrs. Falkenhausen," she answered, sipping her tea. For the first time, Crown noticed a slight accent, the light inflection of one who has spent decades minimizing that vestige of the old country.

"Did you see the hijacking, Mrs. Falkenhausen?"

"I've never seen anything like it. First I saw this big black car sitting in the Austens' driveway. I know the Austens' car, and that wasn't it, so I phoned the police . . . "

She was not the rambling, senile woman Crown had expected when first seeing her. She had witnessed the hijacking from beginning to end. Her powers of observation were remarkable. The apparent leader was thirty-six or thirty-eight years old, five feet, nine inches tall, very muscular, and had short, very curly blond hair. He had used the pistol on the truck driver. The man who had shot out the windshield was very tall, perhaps six-four or -five, and had shoulders as wide as the elm tree in her front yard he had hidden behind. She described a purple blotch under his right ear. He had straight blond hair. She had not seen the smaller, dark-complexioned man until near the end, when he stood up from behind the hedge across the street. He had a small, almost invisible black mustache. All three wore shabby clothes. Both the giant and the mustached man used weapons that sounded like those she had heard on her radio shows. She nodded when Crown mentioned a submachine gun, but vigorously shook her head when he described the wooden stock of a Thompson submachine gun, the standard Chicago mob weapon.

"No, no wood."

"What do you mean?"

"There wasn't any wood on the guns. Only metal."

"Well, there has to be wood. It's the part that goes against the shoulder sometimes when you fire. It's the stock."

"No," she repeated emphatically. "No wood. I know what I saw."

Crown popped his arm several times. He said finally, "Yes, I believe you do."

"That's the clue I was talking about," Smithson said. "Sullivan told me that he has never known either an Irish or a Sicilian gang to use anything but American-made Thompsons. The gun Mrs. Falkenhausen is describing is foreign."

"That's not the only thing foreign about them," the old lady said, putting her cup and saucer down with importance.

Crown's eyes darted to her. She was a watcher and a reliable reporter. She had delivered her information like a cub newspaperman to his editor. If she regarded it as important, it was.

"What else, ma'am?"

"Well, this didn't occur to me until after Mr. Sullivan talked to me. It didn't even ring a bell when I heard it first. But later it just struck me. Funny how that works."

"What was that?"

"The leader, the curly-headed one, yelled, 'Lange, down the street.' "

Crown was mildly disappointed. Of course, the name of one of the men was an important clue. The Chicago police and the FBI would scour their files looking for hoodlums named Lange. But it wasn't a clue that sparked Crown's interest.

"Mrs. Falkenhausen, that's really sharp of you to pick the man's name up. Very important." Crown collected his feet under him to rise. "We really appreciate your time."

"The name's not the important part."

"Oh?"

"The leader didn't yell, 'Lange, down the street.' He yelled,
'Lange, unten auf der Strasse.'
"

"What?"

"That's right," she said, appreciating the impact of her
statement. "I spent my first fifteen years in Berlin. I know the mother tongue when I hear it."

"Find anything else?" Lieutenant Sullivan asked as he wiped automobile grease from his hands with a towel. The Cadillac's front bumper was now attached to a police wrecker, which jolted forward. Glass fragments popped as the Cadillac rolled over remnants of the Chevrolet's windshield. Only a dozen or so police remained. A street sweeper was parked against the curb, with its engine idling, ready to erase the last trace of the ambush.

"Nothing important," Smithson lied smoothly. "How's your search going?"

"No results yet. All we can do is look for the dynamite truck. There must be five hundred cops doing nothing but that right now. We've formed circles. Here, let me show you."

Sullivan withdrew a street map from his pocket and laid it across the hood of the Chevrolet.

"Here's where we are. These two red circles are the lines where we have men posted. I'm pretty sure that, should the dynamite truck cross any of these lines, it'll be spotted."

"How far is the outside circle from where we are?" Crown asked.

"Two miles."

"You're probably too late, then. It's been hours since the heist."

"You don't think I know that?" Sullivan snapped, reflecting the pressure he had been under since the chief of police and the mayor had personally issued his orders that morning. "But it's better than doing nothing. And nothing's all we have to go on right now. Plus, it's giving a lot of damned angry cops something constructive to do."

"What else is being done?" Crown asked, looking up and down the street, for nothing in particular.

"All the radio stations are announcing the description of the truck. There's a good chance someone will spot it. It's hard to hide something that big when the entire city is looking for it."