Morris PI

by Dion Baia

  Morris grinned, closed his eyes, and let the darkness claim him.

  Chapter 31

  BACK IN THE TOMBS

  Morris looked across the table at Special Agent Graham, deep inside the New York City Tombs. He spat out another mouthful of blood and saliva onto the floor. He was still handcuffed and raised his wrists as high as they would go to take a final drag of his cigarette. He stubbed it out into a metal ashtray that was next to an empty milkshake glass, containing the remnants of his chocolate float.

  “Well, you’ve done a man’s job, sir, haven’t you?” Agent Graham said with an air of learned appreciation. He took a minute and put his lighter and pack of cigarettes back into his breast pocket. He closed the notepad that he had in front of him.

  “That’s it? We’re done here, then?” Morris remarked coldly.

  “Just about,” Graham replied, not making eye contact, instead taking the time to make sure his pen caught the inside of the breast pocket when he slid it in. “Anything else you want to say?”

  Morris sat back and took a moment to think. He tried to shift his weight but realized very quickly that the move caused a great deal of pain. He stared at Agent Graham. “What I’ve learned these past couple of days…the things I’ve heard and seen…it changes a man.” Morris thought about his statement, comparing it to when he had first been told that his little brother Stevland was not just another missing person’s case, but the victim of a child killer. What made this realization, this truth he’d been exposed to, any different? “I don’t think I will ever be able to go back to where I was a just over a week ago.”

  Graham pursed his lips and stood, finally making eye contact with Morris. “Tell that to our boys when they get back. Question is, what now for ya?” He turned to leave.

  “What now? What now. Good question.” Morris surprised himself by even asking.

  “Learn to forget. And live. Simply, and truly live.” Graham had a polite smile that was supposed to exude professional confidence.

  “Be sure and take care Mr. Morris. An ambulance will be in route to take you to get patched up.”

  He knocked on the large cell door and a moment later it opened. He gave Morris a quick nod and walked out. It slammed shut behind him.

  Chapter 32

  VICTORY DAY

  Morris examined his bruised face, prodding it with a light touch. The tenderness of the area answered back with a dull throb and his reflection winced in pain. The Pervitin that Gray had given him was now long gone, taking the masking of his pain with it. His battered body creaked and bore the scars of his trauma. Both physically and mentally, he was realizing with every passing day, it was all so different now.

  The radio was on and he was listening to a program about a man who’d gone around the Delta and Mississippi, recording farmhands and sharecroppers performing all kinds of ingenious songs for the Library of Congress. At the moment, an ex-con named Leadbelly was performing a tune called “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”

  Morris’ mind wandered while staring into the little four-by-six-inch vanity mirror attached to the small cabinet above the compact sink in his office. He traced the edges of the large bandage attached to the left side of his forehead, his fingers subconsciously moving down to the other deep stitched cuts on his cheek and chin.

  He thought about his unique and singular practice that he shared with his partner and founder of the agency, North England’s own Jacob Roland. A black and a white, an American and a Brit, two men who met working on a transatlantic ocean liner and decided to go into business for themselves in a city where they could make it rich by being able to fit in and blend in with anyone. Yet Morris was numb to all that now. His eyes had been opened to what horrors men were truly capable of, men like Josef Mengele, Hans Von Stroheim, and Albert Fish. There was no difference between any of them—except for their methods. Each one believed deep in their heart that what they were doing was right. They thought God was on their side, that He understood and condoned it.

  Morris felt like running, running like he’d done before. But he was too old now. And where would he run to? Back to the bowels of a steamship or the bottom of some hellish coal-lung mine? Not a lot of opportunities for a man of his age, his disposition, and his skill set. No, he knew this time he had to absorb it, do the best he could where he was to close part of himself off to this horribly damned world.

  He broke his own stare and finished cleaning his hands. He found himself incessantly washing them these days and didn’t know why. He’d also drift in thought and at times just felt like he wanted to cry. He couldn’t figure it. After drying them, he closed the cabinet door above the sink and walked over to the radio. When Leadbelly was over, he turned off the wireless so to not engage his attention with another tutorial and performance.

  Morris did something he rarely did anymore; he went into his wallet and took out the picture of his little brother. It was a photo of the brothers together; his mother had it taken at a studio out on Coney Island one Sunday afternoon. It seemed like several lifetimes ago now. He stared down at the image and only when his eyes began to water did he cross over to his desk and insert the little memory in the top right drawer underneath his copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book, given to him by the publisher himself, Victor H. Green. He made sure the photo was secure and wasn’t creased, then eased shut the drawer.

  Tatum came around the desk in the waiting room and entered his inner office. Morris had meanwhile seated himself behind his desk.

  “How are you doing?” she asked him

  He shrugged, trying to look busy.

  “What will happen to Caldonia?”

  “Hayden’s estate is gonna finance her extended stay in Creedmoor. There’s nothing upstairs anymore. She’s got long days in a white room to look forward to.”

  “That’s so sad.”

  They were both silent for a while before Tatum spoke again.

  “What about the doctor?”

  “I’m going to hope the OSS got him.”

  She walked over and hugged him. “Why don’t you take some time off?”

  Morris didn’t respond. There was another long pause and an emotion flashed over his face, and as quick as it was visible it was gone again. His demeanor changed and he smiled warmly at Tatum. “Hey, so what do you do during the day now?”

  Tatum smiled. “Well, if Zallerilla gets dumped or left on a planet by Johnny Flash next season, I might be spending my time just loafing.”

  “You wanna answer the phone and call people for us here at the agency?” Morris winked.

  She laughed. “A secretary, you mean?”

  He smiled lovingly at her. “If that’s what they’re calling it nowadays.”

  She moved closer. “Why do you think I hang out with you? I knew you’d eventually start giving me money.”

  They both laughed and continued to gaze at each other. Morris had just placed his hand on her shoulder when the door opened.

  Jacob Roland entered, carrying a suitcase and an overnight bag. They looked over to him as he set his bags down.

  “Looks like I found the party. Geeze, Walt, don’t tell me you’ve been sitting here the entire time! You got to be kidding me. You find a secretary at least?”

  Morris nodded and the smiles faded from his and Tatum’s faces as they stared blankly over at Roland.

  “What?” Roland asked. “What have I missed? I’m sorry I was gone for almost a week, but I got one helluva case to tell you about!”

  Chapter 33

  TOMORROW

  It was well after midnight as the fog crept in on the lonely stretch of New Jersey motorway. Tall forests of pine populated either side of the road. In the distance the mountain ranges were silhouetted against the moon’s illuminated shine. The low hum of an engine rose and drifted across the evening air.

  A Kenworth needle nose tandem-axle semi-trac
tor-trailer truck crossed the top of a hill towing a huge trailer, followed closely behind by two other rigs. The three trucks continued down the long, quiet road. The convoy began to decrease in speed when they saw a patrol officer standing in the middle of the highway, flashlight in hand, flagging them down. The patrolman and his partner had positioned themselves about a mile before the New Jersey/Pennsylvania border.

  When the rigs were close enough, the officers could see that all three trucks belonged to the Army, green with white stars and stripes on both the rigs and their trailers.

  The first Kenworth crawled to a halt directly in front of the two New Jersey State patrolmen. The two officers crossed from their vehicle and greeted the driver.

  Three men in Army fatigues sat on the bench seat of the cab. A flashlight’s beam traveled across their faces. The driver and middle man smiled down at the officers. The last man had his cap resting over his face and his head laying against the passenger window. His mouth was visible under the brim, half open, and his arms were tightly locked across his chest which rose and fell like he was in a deep sleep.

  “Evening, fellas,” the first officer said. “Can I see your manifest?”

  The young driver flashed a look of awkwardness, then grabbed the clipboard, handing it carefully out of the window and down to the officer who examined it. The driver lit a cigarette.

  The police officer thumbed through the manifest’s pages and spoke without looking up. “What ya carrying?”

  The driver took another puff. “Artifacts from Albany, bound for the Smithsonian in DC.”

  That piqued the patrolman’s interest. “Wow. Really?”

  The driver smiled, getting animated as he spoke, “Yeah, we’re not supposed to say anything, but since you guys are brothers in blue…,” he stuck his head out and glanced back at the two tractor trailers behind them, “…those trucks got mummies and other shit from Egypt that our boys rescued after we drove a Sherman up Rommel’s ass in Africa. From what I’ve heard, all this stuff only just made it back stateside.”

  The Army officer in the middle chimed in. “I guess it wasn’t Patton’s top priority.” He chuckled.

  The driver laughed too and turned back to the officers below. “Scary stuff, from what I’ve heard.”

  “Really?” the second cop said, eyes wide with interest.

  The Army guy in the middle nodded. “They ship ’em in ice nowadays to keep them from drying out.”

  “Wow…that’s exciting. I was with Patton in the Thirty-Fourth Infantry Division in North Africa and then Italy,” the officer told them. “Got injured at Monte Cassino and they shipped me back. Spent a year in the hospital recovering.”

  The driver kept his smile, staring down at the patrolman. The officer in the middle nodded, silently watching the officer’s body language.

  “Well, everything seems to be in order.” He handed the manifest back up to the driver. “Take care, guys, and drive safely, okay?”

  “Thank you.” The Army driver took back the clipboard “You too. ’Night.”

  The second officer backed their patrol car out of the way. The truck driver shifted the rig into first gear and the machine growled to life and pulled away. The cops waved the other two trucks on. The tractor trailers blew their horns in gratitude.

  They cruised away and the lead truck driver handed the ID back to the man seated in the middle, who pulled out the automatic handgun he’d hidden behind his back. He clicked the hammer down into place and put the weapon back behind himself.

  “He didn’t even look at it,” the driver said, referring to the identification. The man in the middle replaced it back into his breast pocket.

  The third man who was sleeping lifted his cap and straightened it, slyly watching the patrol officers in the rearview mirror get smaller. It was Josef Mengele, clean-shaven, with a fresh, short military-style haircut. He took his round glasses from out of his pocket and put them on.

  “I am glad we didn’t lose all of you English-speaking commandos in the Bulge,” Mengele said in his native German.

  The driver answered back in German, an air of pride in his voice. “Thank you, Herr Doctor…Heil Hitler.”

  Mengele nodded.

  The convoy crossed into Pennsylvania and continued down the lonely highway into the night.

  Epilogue

  Doctor Josef Mengele went on to live a quiet life in Paraguay. The world’s most notorious war criminal passed away while swimming in a cove in 1979. His remains were later dug up in 1985 and through dental records, the White Angel of Auschwitz’s identity was finally confirmed.

  The End

  Appendix

  Prologue – Edward R. Murrow was embedded with the troops in Europe and was the first reporter on scene of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Surprisingly, most of the American public had been unaware of the horrors the Nazis had perpetrated against the people of Europe, and Murrow was one of the first one to officially bring it to the public psyche.

  Chapter 1 – The Office of Strategic Service, or the O.S.S., was the precursor to the modern C.I.A.

  Chapter 2 – There were monumental measures taken in the United States and New York City specifically to aid in the war effort, including but not limited to many restrictions of things such as meat, rubber, and metals, which were being used to help make supplies for our boys overseas fighting the war. Since New York City was considered a premium target for our enemies at the time (with reports we learned only after the war that German U-boats were on the outskirts of New York Harbor and even dropping people off on the tip of eastern Long Island), all lights from buildings, theater marquees, streetlights, and even vehicles were extinguished at night for fear of being targets of aerial attacks. Lorraine B Diehl’s 2010 book, Over Here: New York City During World War II, and World War II: Film and History by John Whiteclay Chambers II and David Culbert in general were invaluable resources for this knowledge.

  Built into the design of the Empire State Building, the spire was intended to be a mooring station at the very top, for zeppelins; in 1929 when the building was devised, dirigibles were thought to be the future of air transportation. The height of the building was increased by more than 222 feet so a mooring mast could be installed. Alfred E. Smith, the leader of a group of investors who were financing the Empire State Building’s construction, explained passengers were to disembark via a gangplank to the building while the almost 800-foot-long blimps could swing in the breeze, and within seven minutes visitors could be down at street level, ready to set out into Manhattan. Only once, in 1931—the year of the building’s opening—did a privately owned zeppelin dock for three minutes, in 40-miles-per-hour wind. It immediately became apparent how impractical it would be. The Goodyear Blimp, the Columbia later that year delivered a stack of Evening Journals by lowering a 100-foot-line. NBC began broadcasting from the tower by year’s end.

  Chapter 4 – The RMS Olympic was the first of the Olympic Class Fleet of White Star Line ocean liners, of which the legendary RMS Titanic was a part. It was the only ship that did not sink like its sisters the aforementioned Titanic, and the later HMHS Britannic. The RMS Olympic had a 24-year career of service, including as a troopship during World War One. It was decommissioned in 1935.

  Chapter 5 – Father Divine was an iconic African American Spiritual leader who was active from 1907 to his death in 1965. He was hugely influential on many levels, and also claimed to be God.

  Chapter 7.5 – Albert Fish was a real life serial killer, child rapist, and cannibal. He had many aliases, such as the “Moon Maniac,” the “Brooklyn Vampire,” and “The Boogey Man.” He boasted that the number of his victims was in the hundreds. He was finally apprehended in December of 1934, and executed by electric chair at age 65 in January of 1936.

  Chapter 11 – Operation Paperclip (Overcast) was a top-secret program which ran between 1945 to roughly 1959 where
German engineers, scientists, and the like, many of whom were former Nazi Party members, were secretly brought from Europe to America after the war because of the building tension between the Soviet Union and the United States, for the purpose that the West would have the strategic and military advantage in development of post-war tech. Doing this gave the United States unprecedented advantages in the medical, aeronautics, and weapon making fields. Probably the most famous benefactor of this program was Wernher von Braun. It was first called Operation Overcast, until the name was changed to Paperclip in July of 1945, (perhaps because of this story?)

  Chapter 12 - M1911A1 .45 pistol full auto conversion, known as the “Swartz Conversion”, named after a Colt Industries engineer. This was an experimental weapon that Colt developed themselves in the 1930s. The notorious gangster John Dillinger had himself one made, and it was able to fire up to 700 rounds per minute, using a huge, 25-round magazine. The United States tested prototypes in 1940, but found them impratical because of control, the speed with which the weapon would empty, and potential jamming issues the mechanism encountered. But something as compact as this was literally the stuff of fantasy and shocking to behold, back when most other machine guns were the size of long rifles and weighed ten pounds unloaded.

  Chapter 16 - The Kent Automatic Garages existed from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. There were several locations around Manhattan, along with other cities such as Chicago, Cincinnati and Philadelphia, known as a “Hotel for Autos”. With the boom of automobiles in dense cities after the First World War, architects were attempting all kinds of ways to store them while not in use. These skyscraper garages had electric automatic parkers, using the same principle and tech that modern car wash carousels use. Some locations could hold up to one thousand cars. A vehicle could be brought up via an elevator to an assigned spot, and then brought back down, without even starting the automobile’s engine. After World War II and increase in size of newer cars, their large size cut the capacity of the Kent garages by half. And the onslaught of large-scale underground garage along with the ballooning size of sedans spelled the death knell for these Kent garages. The Manhattan locations went out of business and the buildings were rehabbed into office and condo buildings, but the superstructures are still visible if you know the addresses.