Seven Silent Men (19 page)

The reporter appeared on screen with Denis Corticun, who was introduced as “J. Edgar Hoover's man-at-the spot.” Corticun graciously explained he was here merely to assist the senior resident agent in charge, John L. Sunstrom, and the men of the Prairie Port office, who had already made significant progress in their investigation of the crime, details of which would be described more fully at a ten-o'clock press conference in Prairie Port the next morning.

The progress was news to Strom and his viewing agents.

NBC went remote to “special guest crime-analyst Chet Chomsky,” a pudgy fellow in an Anzac hat who was standing in the control center of Prairie Port's Sewerage Department holding a metal gauge. Chomsky, after declaring history was in the making and Mormon State would go down as the greatest criminal masterwork of all time, announced the FBI had just discovered another ploy invoked by the brilliant perpetrators. Wandering along a wall of glass-enclosed dials and gauges, Chomsky revealed the FBI had determined that by dimming and raising electrical power levels in the Prairie Port area,' the criminals had caused most electrical-sensitive mechanisms, such as the Sewerage Department gauge he was holding, or those on the wall behind him, to be knocked out of commission much as an electric clock is knocked out of whack when power is shut off and later restored. Chomsky said the gauges at the Sewerage Department as well as the Water Department had definitely been put out of commission by the power fluctuations and as a result it could not yet be determined when the actual flooding of the tunnels took place. Chomsky then added that the mere discovery of the technique used to neutralize the gauges was the major break in the case FBI men had been hoping for … that it boiled the list of suspects down to a very specialized few. Chomsky leaned into the camera and confidentially advised his viewers to expect a big announcement soon.

Seated in the family station wagon parked in the open-air lot across the street from the office, Cub Hennessy and his wife, Sissy, ate a home-cooked picnic supper while listening to radio station KTY, over which Chet Chomsky's prerecorded voice relayed substantially the same electrical gauge information he was currently presenting live on NBC.

“Sounds like you're making progress,” Sissy said.

“The gauge thing was Yates, the new boy,” Cub told her.

“He has a lovely wife. Young and smart.”

Cub switched off the radio, popped an olive into his mouth.

“What's wrong?” asked Sissy.

“Nothing.”

“When you eat an olive after your custard, something's wrong.”

“… What Strom said up there could be true.”

“Which was what?”

“He warned that Washington might be setting him up, might want us to fail with this case.”

“That's foolishness. It sounds like everything is going fine.”

“We've got to get out into the field. Strom is up there organizing, for D-Day. There's nothing he hasn't thought of … on paper. But so far we're still upstairs planning.”

Sissy kissed him on the cheek. “You'll be out on the bricks soon enough.”

“… Grafton? Why remove Graf at this particular moment?”

Sissy peered at her husband. “You don't think Strom can handle the case?”

“Maybe the case by itself,” Cub told her. “Any investigation is luck, you know that. Ten percent hard work, ninety percent luck. If we get the breaks fast, fine and good. But I …” Cub turned' and faced Sissy. “I have a feeling something else is going on. Something I just don't understand …”

Alice Maywell moved naked through the darkness to the open window. She folded her arms, stared absently out across the narrow street at the lighted but empty third-floor office. The large clock on the office's far wall showed the time to be 10:18
P
.
M
.

“Don't stand there with nothing on,” Elaine Picket said from the bed.

“Don't tell me what to do. No more!” Alice warned.

“People can see in.”

“Let them!” Alice tore aside the sheer curtains, raised her beautiful face, threw back her arms. “Look at me,” she shouted into the night. “All of you out there, look at me …” She clasped her high and firm breasts and dug her fingernails into the smooth flesh.

“Idiot.” Elaine felt about in the bedclothes.

“You're damn right I'm an idiot.” Alice spun around. “That and a lot more for ever loving you!”

“Love? You're a grown woman. You wanted a fling, I gave you a fling. Flings end.”

“I believed in you, I needed you—”

“And I need a smoke. Get away from the window so I can turn on the light and find my cigarettes.”

Alice remained motionless.

The nightstand lamp illuminated. Auburn-haired, frecklefaced, bone-naked Elaine Picket was on all fours on top of the mussed satin sheet searching. “Go home,” she said, belly-flopping on the mattress and reaching down for a pack of Virginia Slims on the shag rug. “You belong at home. Work it out with that husband of yours. You don't cut it as a dyke.”

Alice glowered at the long, lithe woman draped over bed's end lighting a cigarette. She turned abruptly away, again gazed outside.

A man who looked like Groucho Marx was standing at the closed third-floor office window across the street staring at her … a tall man in red fright wig and long black frock coat and white gloves. On seeing Alice had noticed him, he doffed the wig politely, revealing a totally bald head. Then he danced several highstepping steps of a jig and leapt into the air clicking his heels. He was wearing cowboy boots.

Alice retreated several paces. As she did, the bedside lamp behind her snapped off.

A second, far shorter man moved quickly up beside the first at the closed window. He too looked like Groucho Marx. The shorter man wore gray gloves and an unzipped black windbreaker over a dark green T-shirt and was huskier than the taller man. He also had on a fright wig, only his was blue. Powder blue. The short Groucho was visibly agitated. He carried an open cash box, held it upside down in front of his partner to show it was empty, shook it a time or two, tossed it aside, stalked off out of view. Tall Groucho went on staring in Alice's direction.

Alice backed farther into the dark bedroom, but couldn't stop watching. She had already discerned what their disguises were … snap-on, half-face Groucho masks. Short Groucho rushed back to his partner holding a newspaper … a newspaper he had obviously just come across … a paper whose front-page headline he kept slapping with the back of his free hand while he talked animatedly at the taller man. Tall Groucho paid scant attention … went on looking for Alice. Short Groucho grabbed Tall Groucho by the arm, jerked him around, held the newspaper up in front of the masked face, pointed at the headline, screamed something. The tall, red-wigged Groucho stared hard at the headline, slowly shook his head, shrugged, glanced back toward the window and Alice. The shorter, blue-wigged Marx Brother again grabbed the other man's arm, tried pulling him farther back into the office. Tall Groucho broke the grip with ease. Short Groucho pointed a finger at Tall Groucho and stamped a foot. Tall Groucho put a disbelieving finger to his chest. Short Groucho nodded, stamped again, pointed his finger off in the distance, stamped twice more. Tall Groucho shook his head, waved his hand as if to tell Short Groucho to get lost. Short Groucho threw a fit, went into a veritable tarantella … jumped up and down and kicked the floor with his heel and shook an accusatory fist first at Tall Groucho and then off at some distant entity, and ripped the headline in half and ran to one side of the office and then the other, kicking desks, as if trapped or going crazy or both, and then came back and jumped up and down in front of Tall Groucho. Suddenly stopped jumping and just stood there looking up into the taller man's masked face. Tall Groucho again shrugged and motioned the smaller man away. Short Groucho tapped a gloved finger against his own windbreaker pocket, raised the finger at Tall Groucho and wagged it … held up his second gloved hand … made both hands into fists … lifted three fingers of the right hand and one finger of the left hand.

Alice could hear Short Groucho's muted shouts of “Thirty-one, thirty-one”… saw Tall Groucho shake his head vehemently and yell back, “Don't blame the world on me, you lousy mule-fucker, you.”

“Did you say something?” Elaine Picket called from the darkness.

“No.” Alice watched Short Groucho wildly brandish a fist. Tall Groucho appeared to be angry, started toward Short Groucho. The office lights began to dim and raise. Both Grouchos looked around. The lights dimmed and raised again … dimmed and went completely out.

Alice moved up to the bedroom's open window, peered through and around. Every electric light along the block and beyond was off. In the blackness of the office across the street muffled shouting was audible. She strained to see what was happening. The office lights glowed on. Tall Groucho was standing near the window looking in her direction. Then he turned … directly into a gun Short Groucho had raised to eye level. A long-barrel handgun with a silencer encasing the tip.

Alice did not hear the double thuds all that distinctly, but she clearly saw Short Groucho's gloved hand kick to the right twice and two puffs of faint white smoke ring the muzzle of the gun and expand … watched the red fright wig pop high into the air … witnessed the side of Tall Groucho's bald head explode as she had once seen a Halloween pumpkin explode when a lit firecracker was dropped inside.

Exploding, Tall Groucho crumpled from sight beneath the sill of the office window. Short Groucho stood staring down, the smoking gun in hand. He ripped off his wig and mask and went on staring down contemplatively, angrily. He dropped the gun inside his windbreaker. He turned and looked up and blinked in surprise. Only then did she realize she was directly in front of the open window and could be seen. She backed away too late. Alice Maywell Sunstrom, wife of FBI man John Sunstrom, and Marion “Mule Fucker” Corkel had gotten a good look at one another.

EIGHT

Six new teletype machines were among the FBI equipment on the chartered cargo plane that had landed in Prairie Port earlier in the evening. Shortly before 10
P
.
M
. two of these machines arrived at the eleventh-floor resident office of the FBI. The remaining four instruments had gone up one flight to the hastily rented twelfth floor, where support operations for the residency were to be housed. Installation of all incoming machines had begun immediately. Some four hours later, at 2
A
.
M
. Wednesday, August 25, the first teletype, one of the four instruments on the twelfth floor, was activated. The message which began clicking out shortly after was from special agent Alexander Troxel, a member of the newly formed flying squad organized by Corticun at J. Edgar Hoover's bidding. The communication was a summary report made in conjunction with U.S. Treasury Department operative H. C. Kundra and dealt with nineteen interviews conducted days earlier, between Sunday, August 22, and early Tuesday morning, August 24, regarding the shipment of money to the Mormon State National Bank. The text read:

J. F. Dunlop, Senior Vice President, Federal Reserve Bank Branch Office, 5252 St. Charles Avenue, New Orleans, Louisiana, states his bank regularly reprocesses paper currency from depository banks and replaces bills no longer fit for circulation. Unfit bills usually old or damaged or otherwise disfunctional. Unfit bills burned on premises in Fed Bank's basement incinerator. On 11 August 1971 Dunlop says incinerator broke down. Six days subsequent, Tuesday, 17 August 1971, Dunlop telephoned Arthur G. Klines, Assistant Director, Projects, United States Treasury Department, Washington, D.C., to express concern at delays in repairing incinerator and amounts of unfit currency amassing at branch bank: nearly twenty million dollars ($20,000,000).

Arthur G. Klines confirms Dunlop story. Klines says such emergencies are not unusual and that twenty million dollars is a “relatively small sum” considering Fed moves hundreds of millions in currency weekly. Klines states, agreeing with Dunlop, that a transfer of amassing unfit currency should be made to an operative incinerator elsewhere. Klines states telephoning Allen J. Noble, Security Director for Gulf Coast Armored Security Corporation, Corpus Christi, Texas, the afternoon of 17 August 1971. Noble confirms Klines's story, further says Gulf Coast Armored Security is “small, flexible” money-moving company which often assists in emergency or “spot” governmental projects of this kind. Subsequent to Klines's phone call on 17 August 1971, Noble diverted armored semi-trailer truck from Tampa, Florida, to New Orleans. Truck bore no name other than “Gulf Coast Transit” and did not appear to be armored. Truck driven by Gulf Coast Armored Security Vice President, David C. Swoggins. Security guard Jack W. Manly accompanied Swoggins. Swoggins and Manly former Green Berets. Swoggins and Manly, due to company security policies, claim no prior knowledge of mission other than to meet Noble in New Orleans. Noble, Klines, Dunlop say communications between them conducted in strictest secrecy. Klines states being only person to know destination of shipment prior to truck arriving at New Orleans.

Swoggins and Manly arrived New Orleans early evening, Thursday, 19 August 1971, and rendezvoused with Noble. Subsequent to refueling truck and dining, Swoggins, Manly, Noble drove to Federal Reserve Bank branch office on St. Charles Avenue, arriving 8:00 P.M. Bank Vice President Dunlop was waiting for them alone. Between 8:00 P.M. and 9:30 P.M. Swoggins, Manly, Noble start loading some five hundred and fifty (650) canvas sacks of unfit currency into truck trailer.

Money sacks described as heavy-duty canvas of two sizes. Smaller sacks in majority, measure two feet (2 ft.) width, three feet (3 ft.) height, weight estimated at thirty (30) to forty (40) pounds when filled with paper currency. Larger sacks described as three feet (3 ft.) width, four and half feet (4½ ft.) height, weight estimated eighty (80) to one hundred thirty (130) pounds filled. Sacks, large or small, white or gray in color. Sacks, large or small, stenciled either FRB or Federal Reserve Bank. Some sacks, large and small, without stenciling. Some sacks have zipper tops with padlock attachments but no padlocks inserted. Some larger sacks have draw-rope tops.