Seven Silent Men (61 page)

When Billy Yates began typing up his report he wasn't aware that Strom Sunstrom was dead. Nor would it have made any difference. Billy detailed what happened hours before in the tunnels and caves and what was discovered there … an account in which Jez Jessup's true role as abettor of the criminals and traitor to Romor 91 was changed to co-investigating agent with Strom and Yates, a man who had sacrificed his life in the line of Bureau duty.

… On completion of the report Billy Yates collapsed and was taken to the hospital, where he slept for three days. Jez's corpse was found downstream in the river, and Strom Sunstrom's body washed into the shunting station under Lookout Bluff and was discovered there. Cub Hennessy was made temporary senior resident agent in charge of the Prairie Port office, and Denis Corticun was placed in control of Romor 91. The two of them, with a contingent of Bureaumen, attempted to examine the underground areas described by Yates, but ongoing salse rumblings forced them to keep their distance. Media preoccupation with the eruptions made it easier for Corticun to downplay the deaths of Strom and Jez, who were officially cited as being accidentally killed in a tunnel cave-in and flooding while on a routine investigatory assignment. Their funerals were small and private. Rat Ragotsy's body was recovered from the Mississippi River a hundred and ten miles below Prairie Port, where rural authorities, dismissing him as a drowned vagrant, laid him to rest in the local potter's field. No one around Prairie Port much noticed that he was missing or that Wiggles and Mule seemed to have dropped out of sight.

When Yates, in his hospital room, later learned that the United States was proceeding with the trial of Otto Pinkny, he put on his clothes and went to Cub and Corticun and protested. He was taken by the two FBI men down into the tunnel and caves, shown that little of what he described in his report existed as he described it … that the entire subterranean panorama had changed or been demolished … that the corpses of Little Haifa and Windy Walt and Worm Ferugli and Meadow Muffin were nowhere to be seen … that not a single item of equipment or a dollar of stolen money could be found.

Billy Yates lodged a formal letter of complaint over the impending trial of Otto Pinkny with Cub and another with Denis Corticun. Never to them nor anyone else did Yates reveal what he felt he knew about the Silent Men or Jessup's complicity with Mule. This made him appear all the more intractable, more irrational, when Cub and other members of the residency pointed out he couldn't really expect the government to call off Pinkny's trial on his uncorroboratable say-so. Billy paid them no heed, sent letters off to Washington, sharply stating the wrong man was about to be prosecuted. He was placed on extended convalescent leave, which he refused to take. The first day of the Pinkny trial he barged into the courtroom and damned the proceedings as a sham. He was forcibly restrained and placed back in a hospital under observation. While there, he had Tina Beth go out and write down the numbers of various pay phones around the city.

Ed Grafton called at 5 A.M. and told Cub Hennessy when and where he wanted to meet him. Cub arrived at the cemetery at dawn, found Grafton standing at the twin graves of Strom and Alice Sunstrom.

“They do not belong here,” Grafton told Hennessy. “This is alien clay. Send them home to Virginia, where they'll be happy. Where Priscilla is. Put them with Priscilla.”

Cub recalled hearing once that Strom's first wife was named Priscilla … that Priscilla was Alice's sister. “Yes, I'll see to it.”

“Where's Jez?”

“Over in the Baptist section.” He indicated a hillside tract of burial ground. “We can drive if you want.”

Grafton shook his head, laid on the graves two of the three floral arrangements he had brought, bowed his head, stalked off toward the hill.

“Where have you been, Graf?”

“You weren't told?”

“Not a word since you left. Strom tried finding out. He always got double-talked.”

Grafton's strides were long and determined. “They put me out into what's left of the wilds. The wilderness. I like that. Plenty of bear and moose and trout. No crime, less Brass Balls.”

Grafton knelt at Jessup's grave and placed his flowers. “Never thought I knew you were Edgar's angel, eh, Jez man? From the day you were sent, I knew okay.” He patted the soft earth. “Thanks for keeping me out of trouble.”

He stood and faced Cub. “Jez was supposed to make sure I didn't get done in by the Brass Balls or Jarrel. It should have been me watching out for him. What happened?”

They started down the hillside, with Cub saying, “Jez, Strom and the new agent, Yates, went down in the tunnels and got caught in that mud volcano. The damn thing explodes with them in it. Explodes and floods the tunnels. Strom dies inside one of the tunnels. Jez and Yates make it out and Jez drowns in the river … in the Treachery.”

“I heard,” Grafton said, “that Jez had a gun wound.”

“He got that inside the caves and tunnels. According to Yates they were tracking some of the early suspects in the Mormon State crime. They got into a chase and gunfight with them. Jez was wounded in the gunfight.”

“You said ‘according to Yates.' Does that mean you don't believe there was a chase and shooting?”

“I believe that part okay. I just don't believe those three had anything to do with Mormon State.”

“I'd like to talk to Yates.”

“So would we. He's escaped.”

“Escaped?”

“The thing in the tunnels and caves was too much for him. He flipped out. He was ranting all kinds of blather. Rushed right into the courtroom and tried to disrupt the Pinkny trial. They put him in the hospital under guard. He climbs out a window and jumps three stories down into the back of a truck filled with mattresses … a truck his wife, Tina Beth, was driving. That was three days ago. He and his wife are gone.”

“… What happened to Alice Sunstrom?”

“She committed suicide.”

“Why?”

“She was never all that well upstairs, you know that.”

“I heard she was raped.”

Cub sighed. “And her female parts badly mutilated.”

“What have you done about it?”

“Nothing yet, but we will.”

“Why did Yates run into the courtroom and try to disrupt the trial?”

“I told you, he was off his rocker.”

“How did he disrupt the court trial?”

“He barged in shouting Pinkny hadn't robbed Mormon State.”

“Did he say who had?”

“He claims it was Mule, Rat and Wiggles.”

“Who are they?”

“Boy, you really
have
been in the wilderness. They're three of the early suspects in the case.”

“The ones Jez, Strom and Yates were following in the tunnels? The ones who shot Jez?”

“Yes.”

“But you said those three had nothing to do with the robbery.”

“I'm telling you, Graf, it's Otto Pinkny. Otto Pinkny did it, not those three—”

“Then why would Strom, Jez and Yates bother following them in the tunnels and caves?”

Cub was ready with the answer. “Yates was always coming up with something or other to prove Rat, Wiggles and Mule were the real gang. But their being in the tunnels and caves meant nothing. Rat had a history of scavenging the tunnels for any kind of loot he could find. Mule and Wiggles were third-raters too. Why the hell wouldn't they forage in washed-out tunnels in the wake of big floods? It's a perfect place to find junk.”

Graf considered, then began walking away.

“Where you going?” Cub asked.

“Back to the wilds … to my moose and bear and trout.”

Billy Yates was placed on “leave without pay” by the Prairie Port resident office. A week after that, with his whereabouts still unknown; he was listed by Denis Corticun as a “missing person,” and alerts for him went out to law-enforcement agencies across the land.

TWENTY-SEVEN

They were driving, Yates and his Tina Beth. Had been since they left Prairie Port two weeks earlier … traveling north up into Minnesota, then west across South Dakota and Wyoming and Idaho, up into Canada. Tina Beth had rented the car on a credit card made out in her maiden name, so there wasn't all that much chance of their getting picked up.

Cards came into play in another way. Flash cards. White index cards on which Yates had written all the questions that bothered him about the investigation, all the thoughts and comments he could remember having along the way. Only one comment or thought or question was written on a single card. At the beginning of the trip he drove and dictated while Tina Beth took down what he said. By the time they reached Canada, three hundred cards had been filled out. Tina Beth took over the wheel and Yates pored through the stack time and time again. Reviewed with Tina Beth or himself what was said on each card. When they reentered the United States, a hundred and ten cards had been eliminated from the stack and further consideration. A long night in a Duluth motel saw another seventy-five disqualified. As they headed into Chicago, the card count was down to under fifty. As they were leaving Chicago, two days later, only nineteen relevant cards remained. Each one contained a question rather than a thought or comment.

It was at Starved Rock, Illinois, a state park on the Illinois River with high bluffs not unlike those of Prairie Port, that the final reckoning came. Starved Rock had been one of Brewmeister's favorite places, the spot where he had often gone camping with his wife and young children, a place, he had told Yates, where he could always think and figure things out.

Tina Beth and Yates had happened on Starved Rock by accident, had seen it announced on a highway information board and on a whim decided to stay there for the night. Since they had been camping out for most of their trip, they were well prepared for their sojourn in the state preserve, could easily cope with the early spring cold spell. Around a campfire four more cards were eliminated. Beside Starved Rock itself, the next morning, seven more were discounted. By sunset, at river's edge, Billy Yates was down to five cards … five questions which he was certain, if answered, would explain all there was to know about the deception-riddled Mormon State investigation and the Silent Men.

A pair of the questions were the first two he had ever asked regarding Romor 91: Why had J. Edgar Hoover chosen the exact time he had, the onset of the massive Romor 91 investigation, for replacing his old chum Ed Grafton as head of the Prairie Port office? Secondly, why had it taken two days from the time the alarm sounded before anyone realized an additional $31,000,000 had been in the vault and was missing?

A third question had once seemed trivial to Yates, then gained more importance in his thinking: Where in Prairie Port did J. Edgar Hoover land by helicopter? The morning after Harry Janks had cleared Mule, Wiggles and Ragotsy of complicity in the robbery and secured their releases, Yates was sent to the Prairie Port airport to meet an incoming J. Edgar Hoover and chauffeur him into town. Hoover never appeared at the airport. He was told, instead, that he landed by helicopter “elsewhere” and had already gone to the local office. The exact location of “elsewhere” fascinated Yates.

Question number four was, what had become of Natalie Hammond? Yates suspected the answer to this would provide a direct link to how the conspiracy to replace the actual robbers with Otto Pinkny had evolved.

The final question was not where were the hundreds of pages taken from the twelfth-floor files by Brewmeister, but rather, what had they contained that allowed Brew to discover the Silent Men?

For a time Yates considered adding a sixth question: How much of what Jez had said in the river before drowning was true … and relevant? Billy believed Jez had answered to Hoover or an intermediary called “Freddie” and that Jez's secret mission was originally to protect Ed Grafton. Yates concluded that Jessup had probably been recruited by Edgar after Sunstrom had arranged for Jez's transfer from Texas to Prairie Port. Being known as Strom's man was an ideal cover from which to keep an eye on Grafton. Jez, just before his death, had sworn he didn't know who the Silent Men were. Yates thought this was also possible, felt that the Silent Men might very well have controlled Jez by directing orders to him via “Freddie.” What Tina Beth found incredible was that Sissy Hennessy could be “Freddie.” Billy didn't want to belabor the point. Nor was the matter that urgent. Ultimately the sixth question was dismissed by him as being redundant. If he could answer the first five questions, Yates believed everything else would fall into place.

Tucked tight beside Tina Beth in their sleeping bag, staring up at a ginger moon, Yates spoke out his strategy. The fifth question, the matter of what in the files had allowed Brewmeister to determine the Silent Men existed, seemed the least urgent. And the one offering the most available material to examine. Billy Yates might occasionally forget what he had heard, as had been the case in part with Orin Trask's model crime being discussed at the other end of Barrett Amory's dinner table some years back, but seldom, if ever, did he forget what he had read. When it came to remembering the written word, Yates was blessed with near total recall. He had read much of what was in the eleventh-floor files regarding Romor 91 … and the eleventh-floor files were the master files, constituted the entire casebook for the investigation. He could recite nearly verbatim the key parts of individual reports, recall names and dates and places and other specifications, including who the inquiring special agent had been.

Lying in the silent darkness of Starved Rock, Billy told Tina Beth that a recapitulation of those files, to see how Brew had deduced from them what he had, could come later. The files were always there when needed, safe in memory. No, where he would begin was with the fourth question—with what had become of Natalie Hammond.

“Know what Brew said to me from that booth?” Yates spoke softly up at the night sky. “Know the very last words I heard him speak before he was killed?”