The Shut Mouth Society (The Best Thrillers Book 1)

by Unknown

  “Meaning?”

  “The politicians are worried about the city’s reputation.”

  “And the chief?”

  “I said the politicians, didn’t I?” Damon’s voice had an edge. “Listen, Greg, they want to control communication with the media. This is national news. The chief is the only police official to talk to the press—the only one. You need to make this clear to your people. Anyone quoted directly or indirectly will be fired, with a ‘conduct unbecoming’ recommendation to other departments. Got it?”

  Evarts sighed with relief but hoped it sounded like frustration. “I’ll make the message clear, sir.”

  “Good. That includes you and me.”

  Evarts smiled. “I got that. Don’t worry, I hate the press.”

  “Not as much as you will in a week or two. But there’s more.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “You’re off the case in the morning. Clark will handle it. When the press learns about your relationship with Douglass, they’ll hound you relentlessly. Lead your teams this evening but see the chief first thing in the morning. He’s gonna find you a seminar far away. Even if it doesn’t start until Monday, he wants you ready to leave from the office.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You need me on this case … and I’m a witness.”

  “If the FBI wants your statement, they can have a local office take it, but you’re outta here. Away from the press. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.” Evarts thought this development provided both opportunities and problems. He decided to think about it before arguing.

  For the next three hours, Evarts watched his men scour the house. Nothing. The FBI showed up and were immediately scurried away for a meeting with the political types. They agreed to joint jurisdiction but then went ballistic when they saw the crime scene. Evarts heard lots of angry shouting. The FBI called in another investigation team and their own forensic people. Evarts later learned that they acquiesced to continuing joint jurisdiction but insisted that the autopsy would be done in Los Angeles.

  Baldwin spent the time doing a survey of the Lincoln collection. When Evarts had a chance to pull her aside, she said she noticed nothing glaringly missing besides the Cooper Union manuscript. His assistant called to say she had reserved two rooms at a Days Inn thirty miles away in Oxnard. Things weren’t going well, and then the officer dispatched to pick up Greg Marston told him that Baldwin’s boyfriend had returned to Los Angeles. Now he would need to convince the Los Angeles Police to provide Marston protection. Luckily, Marston had left the envelope for Baldwin with the patrolman. Evarts had to assume that Marston wasn’t interested in hanging around overnight merely to hold Baldwin’s hand.

  He stepped outside onto the freshly cleaned patio for some quiet time. He had to decide. Being relieved of responsibility for the investigation would give him time to break the code, but he would lose control of the investigation. He decided in favor of taking the seminar route because the FBI looked to be in control anyway. If he went off on a junket, he couldn’t order police protection for Baldwin, but he could be her personal bodyguard. Separate rooms were already reserved. He was a gumshoe, not a street-smart cop, but how much danger was she in? Or Marston? Marston no longer had a copy of the document, but the perpetrators wouldn’t know that he had returned it to Baldwin.

  Everything depended on how much Abe had revealed under torture. It all came down to one point. If he told the whole fantastic story to his chief, would the chief believe him? If the chief did believe him, would he consent to expensive protection for nonresidents? Evarts decided he would not, or at least not for more than a day or two. Finally, the FBI was salivating over a high-profile civil rights crime and wouldn’t be receptive to an alternate motivation based on shadowy secret societies.

  He had no evidence except an indecipherable page of numbers. This case revolved around the code, and he had to break it before anyone would believe the Douglass allegations.

  He looked at his watch. It was late, after ten. He decided to gather up Baldwin, take her to the motel, and stay in the other room. Besides, he couldn’t get the chief’s attention right now, and he had a private appointment with him in the morning. Before leaving the patio, he stared at where Douglass had been hung in mock crucifixion. He felt sorrow for the first time since he had left the army. Douglass had been his only truly adult friend. He purposely kept a respectable distance from his subordinates, and he had never been close to his bosses. His weekend buddies were mere playmates. Damn. He would miss Abe.

  After he and Baldwin got into the car, Evarts sat staring through the windshield.

  “Did you tell the FBI?” Baldwin asked.

  “No.”

  “Is that a mistake?”

  He started the motor. “That’s what I was trying to figure out.”

  Chapter 10

  “This is real, isn’t it?” Her voice cracked.

  Evarts steered his Odyssey onto the freeway. “Yes.” He wondered how much he should tell her and decided she deserved to know. “I reviewed Douglass’s security system. Only professionals could get around it to surprise Peter. This wasn’t some kids or some white supremacy cult. They went after the documents, so we have to assume this secret society exists and has some ugly ambitions.”

  “How much do you think Douglass told them?”

  Evarts gave her a smile. “Good question. You should be a detective.” He waited until he had transitioned to the fast lane. “Douglass was old but tough, competitive, and not easily beaten. He had five levels of information valuable to his tormentors, and he would stall as long as he could stand the pain before revealing each level. The first was the safe combination, and we know he gave that up. Next would be my involvement. The third would be that he had delivered to me a hard copy of the document and the encryption. Your involvement would be the fourth level. The fifth level is that you have hidden a copy with someone at the university.”

  “You’re forgetting a level,” she said. “The source of the documents.”

  “Damn it, you’re right. I was too focused on us.” Evarts thought that through and came back to a question he had been mulling earlier: How did the perpetrators discover that Douglass had the document? That information could only come from the source itself—the Shut Mouth Society. But why would the Society give Douglass the material and then kill him to get it back? The only answer that made sense was a rebellious faction inside the Society. Evarts guessed that either one faction wanted to expose the Society’s secrets, or a radical arm disagreed with an inner council decision to reveal the Society’s existence to Douglass.

  Baldwin interrupted his thoughts. “Do you think he told them about us?”

  “I doubt it. They were probably waiting for him when he returned home from UCSB. He had only one innocuous page on his person, so nothing should’ve raised an alarm with them. Especially after they found the manuscript intact in the vault.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Oxnard. We could only get two rooms at a Days Inn.” He gave her an appraising look. “Since Marston left, I thought I should stay in the other room. Just in case … I don’t expect any trouble.”

  Baldwin didn’t respond at first. When she did speak, she sounded worried. “If your place isn’t safe, then neither is mine.”

  “What? No. I assume my place is safe. I just thought you’d feel better with someone within shouting distance.”

  “If you really believe your place is safe, then let’s go there.”

  Was this a test or an offer? He decided it was most likely a test of his truthfulness. He had equipped his house with a better security system than the one installed in the Douglass home, and because of the forewarning, he could take precautions that wouldn’t have occurred to an unworried Abe. Besides, these people worked hard to make the Douglass murder look like a juvenile hate crime. They obviously didn’t want the police excited about a mysterious murder of a prominent figure, probably wouldn’t attack a police officer in his home, and l
ikely wouldn’t bring attention to themselves by going after Marston.

  She broke his reverie. “Aren’t we going back?”

  “No, I live ahead.” He checked her reaction, but she just continued to stare through the windshield.

  He lived about forty minutes south of Santa Barbara at Hollywood Beach, in Oxnard. The community had taken Hollywood as its name because, in the Clark Gable era, movie luminaries had come to the local marshes to duck hunt. Oxnard had to be the most uninspired city in Southern California. Farms and strip malls surrounded the Point Mugu Naval Air Station and Port Hueneme, home of the Navy Seabees. But Oxnard owned a hidden gem. Hollywood Beach preserved the nineteen-fifties Southern California beach culture for posterity.

  He had bought his house twelve years ago, before the intrusion of recreational marinas and condo complexes in the surrounding area. Despite an influx of weekend sailors and their yuppie accoutrements, Hollywood Beach remained hard to find. The small community was tucked away from the main thoroughfares, and it had successfully restrained the growth that had ruined the rest of the coastline.

  He drove through a labyrinth of surface streets, expecting Baldwin to ask where the hell he lived, but she seemed in a reverie of her own. When he reached the small beach community, he turned down a narrow, unkempt street with sand piles built up against every fence and wind-exposed wall.

  “You live here?”

  “Yeah, don’t you like the beach?”

  “I love the beach. Just not what I expected.”

  He pulled a remote unit out of his center console and opened a garage door in the middle of the block.

  She laughed. “See those buttons above your rearview mirror? You can train them to open the door.”

  Evarts pulled into the immaculate garage. “Not this door.” He held up the industrial-looking remote. “Secure automatic opener.” He pressed the button again and put a hand on her arm to keep her in the car until after the door closed. He smiled. “Just being cautious.”

  When she stepped out of the van, she said, “What have you got hanging from the ceiling?”

  “My quiver.”

  “Your what?”

  “Surfer slang. Those are my boards. A different one for each type of surf condition.”

  She looked back inside the van at the missing middle seat. “You said you hauled stuff.” She pointed up. “You meant these?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Aren’t you a little old to be a surfer?”

  “Thanks.”

  “No, I just I thought surfers were lazy dropouts. Beach bums.”

  “Most are, not all. Thieves too.”

  At the door leading into the house, he put his thumb on a scanner, and after it beeped, keyed in a combination. When a whirring noise quit, he knew the deadbolt had receded into the doorjamb.

  He turned to Baldwin. “That’s why all the security. I can assure you that if you leave a coffee mug on the front stoop overnight, it’ll be gone in the morning. Luckily, in my town, the police advise residents on their security systems, so I can deduct from my taxes what the department doesn’t foot.”

  They stepped into a room furnished entirely with gray metal cabinets, gray metal shelves, and gray metal closets. “Nice house,” she said. “Who’s your interior decorator?”

  He laughed. “Storage room. Living’s upstairs.”

  She pointed at what looked like metal wardrobe closets. “You must have a lot of off-season clothes.”

  “Wet suits. Beach gear. Gun safe.”

  He led her up a staircase. “The beach has narrow lots, so they build up, like city townhouses. This house has three stories, each with a high ceiling so you can get an ocean view from the rooftop patio.” He continued to lead her up another set of stairs. “Living’s on the top floor.”

  “How far are you from the beach?”

  “Half a block. Normally two rows of houses, but I’m lucky. The lot behind me is vacant, so only one house stands between me and the ocean.”

  “I’ve made enough money on my books that I’ve begun to think about buying a house where I can step out right onto the sand.”

  “Yeah, that’s my dream too, but here oceanfront houses cost four times as much as this one, and it’s only spitting distance from the beach. Did you see that schoolyard across the street?”

  “Yeah. You like kids?”

  “These kids are okay. Elementary school. They made this house affordable for me because it faces the parking lot.”

  They entered the living level, and she said, “Nice house … and I mean it this time.”

  “Thank you.”

  He had decorated the house with comfortable contemporary furniture and accented it with glossy white custom cabinets to hold his entertainment center. The kitchen had natural maple cabinets and shiny white tile with light brown grouting. Bright blue pillows and glass art added splashes of color. He always enjoyed people’s first reaction.

  Baldwin walked over to a white-framed painting on the wall. “This is original artwork.”

  “Local artist. Lots of them around, and they get hungry occasionally.”

  She turned to face him. “In the movies, cop houses are always a disheveled mess. Beer cans strewn around, dishes in the sink, nothing eatable in the refrigerator.”

  “Street cops, maybe. Not detectives. Good detectives are meticulous.”

  “Then you must be very good.”

  Another laugh. “Let’s hope so. Drink?”

  “You got anything other than scotch?”

  “No port, I’m afraid, but—” He went to a cabinet in the dining room and handed her a bottle. “I don’t know much about wine, but my brother gave me this for Christmas.”

  She handed it back. “Yes, please. And your brother does know wine.”

  “He lives in Napa. If you don’t mind, I’ll revert to type and have a beer.”

  Now she laughed. “Not at all.”

  Evarts handed her a glass of wine and then led her to a front living room that he had converted into a library with facing love seats. Upon entering the room, she made a quick scan of his books but made no comment. After her inspection, she sat down on the love seat across from him.

  Evarts wondered why she had wanted to come to his place instead of the motel. Normally, he would welcome a pretty woman into his house, but today wasn’t a normal day. She didn’t appear insensitive, so she must have motives unrelated to her comments about being attracted to him.

  “I think we dismissed the Cooper Union address too quickly,” she said, without preamble.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Douglass said the Shut Mouth Society members came from a powerful political family that went all the way back to the founding. Before Lincoln’s address, Stephen Douglas had been saying that the framers of the Constitution believed that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery outside the states. The Dred Scott decision and the Kansas-Nebraska Act destroyed the Missouri Compromise, and the expansion of slavery into the territories would be the overriding issue of the next election. At Cooper Union, Lincoln took his audience through the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention to show how their votes and actions after the Convention demonstrated that they did believe the federal government had the power to regulate slavery in the territories. He decimated Stephen Douglas, the likely Democratic candidate, with logic, facts, and ridicule.”

  “How does this fit?”

  “In the speech, Lincoln reviewed the political histories of all of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. The text may provide a clue to the Shut Mouth family.”

  “Something no one has picked up?”

  “Something no one would notice if they didn’t know about the Society.”

  Evarts finished his beer and motioned to Baldwin to ask if she wanted her drink refreshed. Getting a positive nod, he picked up their glasses and went into the kitchen. From the kitchen, he yelled, “What do you propose?”

  “Do you have broadband
?”

  He returned to the library. “Of course.”

  “Then if you think the house is safe, I’d like to stay here tomorrow and do some research.”

  “No problem. Tomorrow will be a short day for me. I won’t be gone long.”

  “What do you mean? Won’t you have a lot to do on the Douglass case?”

  “I’m being sent to a seminar, one far away. Because of my personal relationship with Douglass, they want me out of the way so the press can’t grill me.”

  She sipped her wine and then asked, “The Shut Mouth Society?”

  “No. It smells too strong of city politics. Besides, their tentacles can’t reach everywhere.”

  “What about me?”

  “I’m going to pretend to go to the seminar, but I’ll stay with you until we get to the bottom of this. I need time, and probably your help, to break that code. Until I break it, nobody will believe that far-fetched story.”

  “Speaking of that, I have some additional thoughts.”

  “Let’s hear them.”

  “The law book idea is good, but there are more possibilities than I originally led you to believe.”

  “How many?”

  “Possibly a hundred, maybe more. We need to include books any lawyer might reference, like John Marshall rulings and dissertations on Constitutional law.”

  Evarts smiled. “In the code-breaking business, a hundred or so possible keys isn’t overwhelming.” He finished his second beer and said, “Hungry?”

  “No. I had some of that pizza your cops brought in.”

  “Tired?”

  “Yes.” She took the last half swallow of her wine and rose from the loveseat with the empty glass. “I’m eager to go to bed.”

  Evarts was tired as well, but he suddenly felt a need to be close to someone. “I have two guest rooms. Unless …”

  “No unless. I’m sure either of your guest rooms will do just fine.”

  She walked to the orderly kitchen, rinsed the wine glass in the sink, and then held it aloft in an unspoken question. Evarts opened the dishwasher, and they both added their glasses to the neatly stacked top rack. Before showing her to her room, Evarts showed Baldwin the security features of the house.