Seven Silent Men (42 page)

Billy Yates escorted the Director down to the waiting limousine, drove him to the first address J. Edgar read from a typewritten list. The home of Martin and Elsie Brewmeister. J. Edgar went to the door, rang the bell, introduced himself to a startled Elsie Brewmeister. Asked if he might take tea with her inside. Chitchatted with Elsie over tea for exactly twelve minutes as Yates waited at the rear of the room. Gave her, for free, an eight-by-ten-inch glossy photograph of himself. Signed the picture: To Elsie Brewmeister, a woman, mother and FBI wife … her obedient servant, J. Edgar Hoover. On departing told her how proud he was that she was the woman behind the man he was so proud of.

Yates drove to the home of Rodney and Sue Ann Willis. Edgar dropped in on Sue Ann as he had on Elsie Brewmeister. Stayed twelve minutes. Praised her husband and her and autographed a photograph of himself for her. Did the exact same thing with Flo de Camp. Then with Sissy Hennessy. Then Tricia Dafney. Maureen Bevins. Hinky Cody. Nell Travis.…

“He dropped in on all eight unannounced,” Billy told Tina Beth that night. “When we're leaving Nell Travis, he looks at his watch and acts surprised and says he's run out of time and won't be able to visit the other wives like he planned. He tells me to take him to the airport. I find out later that it's all crap. That he didn't have to check his watch. That he only intended to sign eight photographs. At the airport he gives me an envelope with nine more photographs of himself. Each photograph was already made out in the name of one of the nine wives he didn't visit, including the one I have here for you.”

Billy handed Tina Beth a glossy photo of J. Edgar Hoover that was inscribed: To Tina Beth Yates, a woman, mother and FBI wife … her obedient servant, J. Edgar Hoover.

“Don't you see, it was an act, Tina Beth. He knew he was only going to visit eight wives. The eight he had not already autographed pictures for. The eight I drove him to. He'd signed the pictures for the nine other wives before he even got into the limousine with me. They were in an envelope he carried.”

“What difference does it make, Billy?”

“The difference is he lied about it.”

“Why?”

“You want to know why, Tina Beth?… because if you ask me, J. Edgar Hoover is a nut job.”

“Crazy?”

“Asylum bait.”

“You sure, Billy Bee?”

“Look at it yourself, Tina. J. Edgar Hoover, who never flies in helicopters, comes into Prairie Port by helicopter. J. Edgar Hoover, who travels everywhere with Clyde Tolson, arrives in Prairie Port without Tolson. Without anyone. J. Edgar Hoover, who hates riding around in strange cities in anything but one of his own limousines, has the Chicago field office airlift the limousine, store it for him in Prairie Port, only he doesn't helicopter to where the limousine is. J. Edgar Hoover, who is a tough, direct, no-nonsense speaker, gets in front of the resident office and starts babbling long, irrelevant passages from John L. Lewis and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. J. Edgar Hoover, who is nothing short of Jehovah in the wrath department when agents and offices make even minor investigatory errors, praises Prairie Port rather than burying it. Exalts all of us to high heaven for fouling up, rather than applying thumbscrews and the lash. Tells an entire office, I love you. J. Edgar Hoover then proceeds to coerce the same seventeen agents he loves into buying an autographed copy of one of his old books. J. Edgar Hoover visits the twelfth-floor offices, a space which months before he had ordered decorated in the most lavish style, and hates what he sees. He orders it totally redone. Humiliates the man he had entrusted the operation to, Corticun, by saying this in front of other agents. J. Edgar Hoover goes and visits eight of the seventeen wives and lies about not having time to see them all and sign their pictures.

“… Listen to the last thing J. Edgar Hoover does. While I'm driving him around today, we don't exchange more than one or two conversational words. He tells me what he wants me to do, and I say okay. Beyond that there's nothing said. But then at the airport … instead of a helicopter, he goes home by plane … as I'm holding the car door open and he gets out, he stops and throws his arms around me. Hugs me. Says that I am to him like the son he never had. The son he had always been looking for.

“Oh, no, Tina Beth, if J. Edgar Hoover isn't right off the wall, then I have to be. Or will be. If I don't have a nervous breakdown thinking about all of this, it won't be from lack of trying.”

Strom got out of bed and hurried downstairs to the den to the ringing red phone—the direct tie-line phone to Washington that Corticun had insisted be put in.

“Yes?” Strom said into the mouthpiece.

“J. Edgar Hoover here. This is Mister Sunstrom, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“I have a favor to ask. A highly personal and confidential favor. Would you look into the adoption laws of Missouri for me?”

BOOK

THREE

SEVENTEEN

New suspects were developed by the residency and duly announced by Denis Corticun. Mule, Wiggles and Ragotsy dematerialized into yesterday's news. And FBI-2000 rang on … FBI-2000, the emergency hot line telephone number used by the Prairie Port Bureau office for receiving confidential information from the public regarding Romor 91. Denis Corticun, at every opportunity, exhorted the public to phone in whatever information anyone might have, no matter how slight or unconfirmed.

The hot line number was originally connected to the eleventh-floor switchboard in the residency office. When incoming traffic grew too great, the overflow went up to the auxiliary switchboard on the twelfth floor. This system remained until J. Edgar Hoover visited Prairie Port. His orders to redecorate the twelfth floor were immediately implemented. The communications room was all but ripped out and the auxiliary switchboard installed on the eleventh floor. Following the twelfth floor's five-day alteration—the entire space had been transformed into the sterile dullness of the residency office below—it was decided to keep the auxiliary switchboard, and therefore all FBI-2000 traffic, where it was. Let it be maintained by the resident agents of the eleventh floor, who were, after all, the prime investigators of Romor 91. And it was to FBI-2000 that an unidentified woman caller suggested the Bureau look into the Elison sisters … that the Elisons might be the wizard.

Strom Sunstrom, in the wake of J. Edgar Hoover's departure from Prairie Port, had launched an all-out search for new suspects. Some attention was given to tracing the whereabouts of Bicki “Little Haifa” Hale, Thomas “The Worm” Ferugli, Lionel “Meadow Muffin” Epstein and Reverend Wallace Tecumseh “Windy Walt” Sash. Routine efforts were being made to find Natalie Hammond. Mule, Wiggles and Rat were ignored … and Brewmeister vociferously objected. He argued it was imperative that surveillance be placed on the three men, even though Rat was still convalescing at the Army hospital. He argued that more must be done to find whether Natalie Hammond was well or in trouble. His requests were rejected by Strom. Yates had consoled Brewmeister, eventually confided his suspicions that the investigation of Mormon State might be being sabotaged. Brew had had similar thoughts. They discussed Yates's questions about the J. Edgar Hoover firing of Ed Grafton as well as the curious conditions under which $31,000,000 had been shipped to the bank.

Brewmeister and Yates had decided, on their own, to look into both matters, to investigate unoffically. Brew would cover the money shipment. Yates would handle the Grafton firing … check out the Hoover-Wilkie Jarrel connection. They had gone as far as giving themselves first assignments. Brew was to delve into the breakdown of the armored truck bringing the millions from New Orleans to Prairie Port. Yates meant to check the phone systems used by Jarrel, try to find records to establish whom Jarrel had talked to. Brew still felt surveillance should be placed on Mule, Wiggles and Ragotsy. Yates maintained there was no time for such surveillance in light of their already heavy Romor 91 work load. As it turned out, surveillance would be the only one of their plans there was time for.

Brew received a new Romor 91 assignment from Strom, was placed with a unit of agents touring penal institutions in Missouri, southern Illinois and western Kentucky. Their quest was for an inmate, or inmates, who might divulge relevant information on Mormon State. This was part of a much larger operative channel. Nationwide, as Romor 91 headed into its third month, four thousand full-scale investigations were under way on criminals who could know about, or have participated in, the theft.

Brewmeister, during hiatuses in travel, began spot surveillances of Wiggles and Mule. When Ragotsy was released from the Army hospital and came back to Prairie Port, Brew kept an eye on him as well, or tried to … what with a full schedule at the residency when he wasn't on tour, Brew's time for tailing was limited. He did manage to see the three men get together for what he presumed was their first joint encounter since Baton Rouge. Brew became more interested in Mule. Spent every free evening watching Mule. Then Mule vanished. Dropped from sight. When he reappeared four days later, Brew continued where he left off, watching from afar.

Yates, during this period, was assigned to look into a subject on which he had become expert in Ohio … extremist organizations, particularly organizations close to the college community. The college community, Strom had always felt, was a choice place for finding and recruiting someone with the skills of a wizard. Yates was given two agents from the twelfth floor to assist him. Together they culled lists of known members of extremist groups in a five-state area. At first Billy labored without conviction or interest. His indifference soon gave way to fascination, but never zeal. He worked around the clock developing what would become the office's latest “hot lead.” He hardly had time to see or speak to anyone, Tina Beth and Brew included. The reason for this began with the FBI-2000 phone call citing the Elison sisters.

The unidentified tipster said Louise and Nadine Elison, daughters of a prominent Prairie Port physician, had shared an apartment with Dwight Armstrong while they were students at the University of Wisconsin the previous year … that Armstrong talked Nadine, who was an engineering major, into stealing money for left-wing causes … that Nadine had recruited her sister Louise, a biochemistry major, to help out with the biggest theft of all—Mormon State.

The call might have been downgraded or disregarded had not the name of Dwight Armstrong been mentioned. Armstrong was well known to the Bureau. He and his brother and two other men had been indicted in connection with the August 24, 1970, bombing of Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin campus at Madison. The blast had left one person dead and three others injured.

The Elison sisters, Yates learned, had been on the periphery of several local radical movements while attending the university but definitely had not resided with Dwight Armstrong. They had never even met the fellow. Apparently knew nothing of him other than what the media carried at the time of his indictment. But the investigation into Nadine and Louise led back to Prairie Port, where they currently shared an apartment in the bohemian part of town known as Old Port. And the apartment produced a most disturbing set of fingerprints … latent prints of a notorious fugitive by the name of Libby Tidwell.

Libby Tidwell had been described in New York City's Soho
News
as a “radical nihilist social butterfly.” The FBI concurred. Libby, a matronly appearing woman of twenty-six, had been weaned in the old left groups such as the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Patty and the Chinese Progressive Labor Party, teethed on several antiwar organizations which the Bureau deemed to be vulnerable to “subversive influences,” including the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (SMC), the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA) and the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC). She had radicalized in the Weathermen, a violence-prone wing of the pre-June 1969 Students for a Democratic Society. Bolting the Weathermen, she became the political commandant of a Marxist terrorist group known as the Latin America Action Committee. LAAC was believed directly responsible for a series of bombings in Washington, D.C., New York City and Los Angeles. Just what LAAC's aims were, or exactly what its connection to Latin America was, seemed obscure. No known Latinos were involved with LAAC, and it had no connection to the Venceremos Brigade, a suspected pro-Cuban group.

Billy Yates had heard about Libby Tidwell while he was underground in Ohio. She struck him as the quintessential middle-class revolutionary of the period. A joiner more than a believer, but, with a burning stick of dynamite in her hand, extremely dangerous. Informant reports at the time stated Libby was nearby and organizing a series of clandestine conferences among LAAC, the Black Panther Party and the Weathermen. The Bureau, fearing an Apalachin of Terrorism was in the making, raided the meeting site, a home in suburban Cleveland. No Libby Tidwell was to be found. No Weathermen. What was taken were several minor LAAC and Panther members and a large cache of weapons and ammunition belonging to LAAC. Libby was not heard of again. Amid rumors she had fled to Europe or Hanoi, Libby went on the FBI's ten most wanted list.

Billy Yates had feared the discovery of Libby's fingerprints in Prairie Port might trigger trigger-happy Denis Corticun into a boisterously discreet blitz of guess-who-we-have-coming-up press releases and media conferences. To Yates's relief, Corticun ignored the fact that one of the nation's ten most wanted criminals might be hiding out in Prairie Port … might be connected with the Mormon State bank robbery.

Louise and Nadine Elison, when asked in a three-hour interview by Billy Yates, had no recollection of the name Libby Tidwell. On being shown a picture of Libby, they identified it as Martha Salowski. They had then gone on to explain they had met Martha the year before at a rock concert outside of Madison, Wisconsin, which the sisters had attended with a group of politicized friends. The friends knew Martha. Martha and the sisters spent the night talking about nonpolitical matters. Martha, in fact, never impressed them as even slightly interested in movements, let alone as a radical. Several months later, the sisters met her at the apartment of her then boyfriend, George, whose surname they did not know. That was the last they saw of Martha/Libby while at Wisconsin.