The Fifth Horseman (58 page)

“Mr. McClintock, please.”

“This is his desk, but he’s out of town for a few days.”

Grace gave a little giggle which, she hoped, would convince O’Reilly that he was dealing with a dumb woman. “Oh,” she said, “what’s he off safeguarding?”

“Who’s calling?” The voice was chill and formal.

Again Grace invoked Citibank. “Can you tell me where I can reach him?”

“No, I can’t. The nature of his business and his whereabouts are classified information.”

Stunned, Grace set the telephone back in its socket. Why would the U.S. government feel it had to make a snow-removal exercise in New York classified information? And bring in people from Las Vegas to work on it?

My God, she realized, those trucks have nothing to do with snow removal!

That’s just a cover.

She thought of Angelo’s phrase last night, “a typical detective’s day, running around looking for a needle in a haystack.” And the Mayor. Why had the President given him a Presidential jet to fly back to New York yesterday?

She called Angelo’s office. There was no answer. She took out the secret NYPD telephone directory he had given her and frantically began to call, one after another, the offices of a dozen senior detectives. Not a single one answered.

Two minutes later, Grace was standing by the desk of Deputy Managing Editor Art Gelb. She waited until he had finished talking to another reporter, then leaned down to him. “Art,” she whispered. “I’ve got something I’ve got to talk to you about right away. I think it may be very, very big.”

There had been six “sixty-ones;” crimes of leaving the scene of an accident, recorded on the daily crime sheets of the seventy-three precincts of the New York Police Department on Friday, December 11.

Because of the snowstorm that number was, as Angelo had guessed it would be, well above the Department’s daily average.

One of the six was a serious case under active investigation. It involved an elderly black woman knocked over by a motorcyclist on the pedestrian crossing at Broadway and Cathedral Parkway and transported to St. Luke’s Hospital with a broken hip. The five remaining cases all bore the same notation under the heading “Disposition”: “Detective McCann is assigned to this case.” To the outsider, he might well have appeared to be the busiest investigative officer in the New York Police Department.

He in fact did not exist. Detective McCann was the wastebasket. His name after each of those complaints indicated the sentiments of the NYPD toward such a minor crime as leaving the scene of an accident involving a scraped fender: a lot of paperwork for nothing.

Angelo had covered nineteen precincts and four of the recorded incidents when he called the Tenth Precinct in west midtown, the area in which he had conducted his earlymorning hunt for a hit-and-run driver years before.

“Yeah, I got a Sixty-one here,” the clerk replied. “Procter and Gamble salesman got his fender scraped.”

“OK,” Angelo said. “Read it to me.”

“Complainant M-42 indicates that between the hours of one and two P.M., Friday, December 11, his motor vehicle, a 1978 Pontiac bearing New York number plate 349271 was parked in front of 149 West Thirty-seventh Street, and when he came out he observed the fender had a crease in it. Under his windshield an unknown person or persons had left a note stating: `A yellow truck hit you and took off.’ Complainant interviewed Friday, December 11, Tenth Precinct by Officer Natale. Detective McCann assigned to this case with request it be marked closed pending a further development, at which time proper and prompt police action will be taken.”

Angelo couldn’t resist a laugh at the Department’s bureaucratese. “Tell me about that `proper and prompt police action’ you got in mind,” he remarked.

“That note really said a yellow truck?”

“Yeah.”

“OK. Give me the salesman’s name and address.”

On the other side of the United States the first warm rays of sunshine glinted off the great green rolls of Pacific surf crashing onto the Santa Monica seashore. An earlymorning jogger had just turned off the beach and headed up the cliff toward his seaside cottage. He was a hundred yards from his front door when he heard the clatter of his telephone.

Still panting, the West Coast correspondent of The New York Times grabbed the phone and instantly recognized the caller from the intense, confidential murmur rippling from his receiver. “I’ve got something very important for you,” Art Gelb told him. “Get your stringer in Reno down to Las Vegas right away. There’s a John McClintock who works in some kind of a safeguards section in the Federal Building on Highland Street there. I want your guy to find out urgently exactly what it is this guy McClintock does and call me back as soon as he’s got it.”

Angelo Rocchia eased the telephone back into its cradle, thinking hard as he did it. The Procter & Gamble salesman whose fender had been scraped was out making his calls on the West Side of Manhattan, his office had just told Angelo. He wouldn’t be phoning in before nightfall. There was no way to spot his car on the city’s streets; the Cincinnati soapmakers had long ago abandoned the practice of branding their salesmen’s vehicles with the company’s familiar trademark of a smiling man in a crescent moon against a darkblue field of stars.

The only suggestion the helpful office manager had been able to make was that if Angelo wanted to reach him in a hurry he call on De Pasquale’s Hero Sandwich Bar on West Thirty-fifth just off Ninth Avenue. The salesmen working the West Side gathered there for coffee and Danish around eleven.

He would probably be there, and if he wasn’t someone who could pin down the neighborhood where he was working probably would be.

Four hundred Hertz trucks out there, Angelo thought, and how many yellow trucks on top of that? It was a very, very wild unscientific idea. He glanced into the garage at the busy array of FBI forensic experts. Not the kind of idea they were apt to appreciate. Almost reluctantly, he heaved his heavy frame from the Hertz manager’s chair and stalked into the garage with his deceptively awkward gait.

It had been the salesman’s rear left fender that had gotten the scrape, so it would probably have been the truck’s right side that had done it. Angelo surveyed the pieces of the right side of the van lined against the wall of the garage, counting on them fourteen red circles, each one numbered, each representing a different bump or scrape. He picked up the sheaves of spectrographic analysis that corresponded to the numbers. Inconclusive, just as he had thought they’d be. They had identified positively traces of three brands of paint on the truck’s right panels, two used by General Motors, one by Ford. Together, the models that employed those three brands of paint represented just over fifty-five percent of the cars on the highway. A lot of help, Angelo mused, a real lot of help.

“Something I can do for you, Detective?”

The speaker was the agent in charge of the forensic team. His words contained, the New Yorker noted, about as much warmth as those of a bank security guard questioning a teenage Puerto Rican loitering in his lobby.

“No,” Angelo replied. “Just looking around.”

“Well, why don’t you wait out there in the manager’s office where you’ll be more comfortable? We’ll let you know if we’ve got anything for you.”

I’m about as welcome in here, Angelo thought, as an archbishop in an abortion mill. Was it because of those classified papers they’d pulled out of the files? Or just the feds’ traditional mistrust of other law-enforcement agencies?

In a corner of the garage, he noted his young partner earnestly talking to one of his colleagues. He had barely gotten the time of day from him since they arrived. No one seems to want me around here, or anyplace else for that matter, he reflected bitterly, thinking back to his telephone conversation of the night before. He strolled over to Rand and tossed a conspiratorial arm over his shoulder like a coach who’s about to send a tight end onto the field with a criticial third downplay.

“Come here, kid,” he growled, edging him away from his fellow agents. There was no question of telling him what he really had in mind. The young agent was much too procedures-conscious for that. He’d say, “Have headquarters send out someone else,” and that wasn’t Angelo’s idea at all. On the other hand, one thing you could probably count on Rand for was a sense of solidarity, the “We’re all cops together, so don’t rat to the boss” thing.

He would lose Rand’s respect, but why the hell should he care about that?

“Listen, kid,” he whispered, “Cover for me for an hour or so, will you? Your guys got nothing for me and-” he winked at the FBI agent “I got a little something over here, a little biscuit I haven’t seen for a while. I’m going to just drop in and say hello to her.”

Rand whitened in shock more than anger. “My God, Angelo, you can’t do that!

Don’t you realize how desperately important it is to find this-” He was about to say “bomb” when he caught himself.

“This what?” Angelo asked. There it was again, this thing they kept dropping in front of him, then pulling away.

“The barrel of gas we’re looking for.”

“Tell me, kid, what’s so secret about chlorine gas the government has to classify stuff on it? Or is it really chlorine gas they got in that barrel?”

“Of course it is.”

For a second Angelo gazed at him, his eyes as appraising as they had been twentyfour hours earlier scrutinizing the dip in the front seat of his car. Then he jerked his head toward the agent in charge. “Your friend over there wants somebody to run out for coffee and a Danish while I’m gone, tell him they got a diner just up the street. I got the very clear message that’s all he figures a New York cop is good for anyway.”

“Angelo.” Rand was almost begging. “Going away like that is like …” The young man paused, trying to think of the worst example he could cite. “Like a soldier deserting his post in wartime.”

The New Yorker snorted, squeezing the young agent’s shoulders as he did.

“Don’t worry about it, kid. I’ll see if she’s got a friend for you.”

Arthur Gelb paced his office in the third-floor newsroom of The New York Times. The deputy managing editor was a lanky, intense man, all kinetic energy and raw nerve ends, a man who kept his staff in a state of constant tension — some would have said terror-with a nonstop flow of ideas, suggestions and queries. Like the paper he so proudly represented, he was not so much a conservative as he was a man devoted to a certain notion of responsibility. Above all, he was dedicated to the proposition that if it hadn’t happened in the pages of The New York Times it hadn’t happened at all, and to his growing anger he sensed that something very important was happening in his city and the Times didn’t know about it.

Gelb suddenly stopped his pacing. Rushing through the maze of the newsroom was one of the dozen men he had sent to scour the precincts to find out what was going on after Grace’s whispered conversation. On his face Gelb could read that special sense of purpose always present on a young reporter’s visage when he knows he’s about to impress his editor.

“This is what’s going onl” he gasped, out of breath, dropping the photos of the Dajanis onto Gelb’s desk. “They’re Palestinians. Cop killers. Everyone in town’s out looking for them.”

Gelb picked up the photographs one by one, studying each of the three in turn. “Who did they kill?”

“Two patrolmen in Chicago two weeks ago.”

“Chicago?” Gelb frowned. Since when had New York’s police been so devoted to their brethren in the Windy City? “Get Grace Knowland for me, will you?

I want to make a phone call.”

Gelb passed the three pictures to her when she entered his office. “These are your needle in the haystack. Three Palestinians that are supposed to have killed two cops out in Chicago two weeks ago. Except there hasn’t been a cop killed in Chicago for three months. I just checked with the Tribune.”

As Grace studied the pictures, Gelb picked up his phone and dialed Patricia McGuire, the Deputy Police Commissioner for Public Information. She took his call immediately. New York City officials didn’t keep the Times’s deputy managing editor on hold.

“Patty, I want to know what the hell’s going on. There’s a fake snowremoval exercise up in the Seventh Regiment Armory that’s got nothing to do with getting the snow oft the streets. And half the cops in the city are out looking for three Palestinians who didn’t do what you told them they did. What’s going on, Patty? You’ve got something here, some kind of major Palestinian terrorist action, and I want to know what it is.”

There was a long, pained silence when he had finished speaking.

“I’m sorry, Arthur,” the woman answered. “I’m afraid I don’t have the authority to answer your question. Are you in your office?”

“I am.”

“I’ll ask the Commissioner to call you right back.”

The odor of salami, of garlic, of provolone, olive oil and fresh peppers swept over Angelo like a veil of incense as he stepped inside De Pasquale’s Hero Sandwich Shop on West Thirty-fifth Street. The detective took a deep, approving breath, then surveyed the place: a lunch counter with a dozen red moleskin stools, half of them occupied, a few booths in back, a counterman slapping heros together in readiness for the lunch-hour rush, the heavy mama in black hovering protectively near the cash register. Leave it to the drummers, he thought, they always find the best joint in the neighborhood.

He stepped over to the woman, nodded at the flasks of Chianti behind her and asked her in his best Sicilian-accented Italian for a glass of Ruffino.

“Bellissima signora,” he said as she gave him the wine with an approving smile, “you know Mr. McKinney, the Procter and Gamble salesman?”

“Sure,” the woman answered. “He’sa down there.” She indicated a middle-aged man in a gabardine overcoat, a coffee and Danish before him, reading The Wall Street Journal in one of the booths.