Man of Steel

by Dave Conifer

  -- Chapter 12 --

  Ted Braden was trying hard to look like he cared. Some young sales supervisor whose name he couldn’t recall was projecting graphs and charts onto the screen in the dark conference room faster than anybody could read them, least of all somebody who wasn’t interested. Braden had been a staple on the org chart in the International Sales Division of ERC for decades, but most people had an idea that it was just a cover for something else. Braden didn’t care what anybody thought anyway, but he was strictly forbidden to tell anybody what his responsibilities really were.

  The light from the hallway snapped Braden out of his daze when the door opened. An intern passed in the dark from person to person along the table, whispering to each one. Finally somebody told him which man was Braden. “Sir, you’re needed downstairs in your office,” he whispered to Braden after circling the table and ducking below the pie chart on the screen. Without a word to the intern Braden scooped up his coffee cup and notepad, both of which were empty, and left the room.

  As he walked to the elevator he already knew what it was about, having received several highly confidential memorandums from his direct reports. Somebody was being nosy. It was Braden’s job to put a stop to that the way he’d been doing for almost two decades. In one way he was glad for the interruption. As the years went by there were fewer and fewer problems like this. That meant that as part of his cover he had to attend more and more meetings like the one he’d just been called out of.

  Having urgent business to tend to was good even though he didn’t want to be as busy as he had been in 1964 and 1965. Back then he was putting out fires nearly every day. The Warren Commission investigators were incompetent, and that was probably by somebody’s design, but it still took a significant effort to make sure they didn’t stumble across anything by accident. The challenge was to find the lowest level of interference and intimidation needed to discourage each person from sharing any information they might have. Every one of them was different. Sometimes it took only a few anonymous phone calls but it often took more than that. There were even a handful of witnesses who hadn’t been left alive long enough to cooperate with investigators.

  During the elevator ride he thought about the recent traffic accident on Crafton Boulevard. That man was an ERC employee, he thought with a twinge of regret. I probably passed him in the halls. He had no idea who I was. But we had always been connected, at least since November 1963.

  The younger man who was waiting in Braden’s office was impeccably dressed in a blue suit. His dark hair was slicked straight back. Braden had never come to terms with having a man so young involved in the project. Even though he could do the math, he wondered how Frank Marino could be old enough to even remember 1963. But Marino was good at his job. Braden knew that whatever order he gave, Marino would see that it was done well and on time.

  “What’s going on?” Braden asked as he walked past Marino to the desk and slapped the notepad down. “Were there any complications from the traffic accident?”

  “No, sir,” Marino answered as he nudged the door closed with a wing-tipped shoe. “But that’s related to why I’m here. The reporters he was talking to aren’t going away. Right now they’re in Charlotte doing research.”

  “Charlotte? Why Charlotte?”

  “One of them writes for The Charlotte Sentinel. The woman is from Texas.”

  “They know about the traffic accident?”

  “Yes, sir. We made sure they saw the obituary. It didn’t slow them down at all.”

  Braden considered the situation and found all of his options distasteful. Maybe he was just getting too old for this. “What do you think we need to do?” he asked Marino. “You know everything I know.”

  “I don’t think we can give them too many more chances, sir. Reporters can gather information pretty quick. Who knows how far they’ll get, and how fast.”

  “What do you recommend?” Braden asked again.

  “We can have phone taps and bugs everywhere we need them within an hour or two. I already have technical people in place. They can get it done as soon as you give the order.”

  “Okay. Go ahead with it. Come by again tomorrow, in the morning. Sooner if you have anything concrete.”

  “Will do, sir.” He stood and opened the door to leave.

  “Marino,” Braden called to his visitor before he was gone. “Good work on this.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Marino said before fading out the door and into the corporate world of ERC.

  -- Chapter 13 --

  “I was thinking,” Reno said as she wound spaghetti onto her fork. “ERC is still around. I could see them not wanting this story to get out, if it’s true. Maybe they’re even doing something about it. Maybe that’s where this is all coming from.” They had left the Sentinel offices on foot and wandered downtown until settling on a plain Italian restaurant for dinner. ”Maybe there’ve been Joe Jonases popping up over the years here and there.”

  “And Abby Renos,” said Jonas. “What do you think happens to them?”

  “I don’t want to go there,” she answered. “Let’s put it this way. Have we ever seen any of their stories in print?”

  “It’s worth thinking about,” Jonas said. “If you’re right that it’s the story of the century, why hasn’t anybody written it? Maybe they tried to.”

  “Can I come back in tomorrow and do some work on Castle? I don’t want to go home yet.”

  “Sure. I can help. Ever since my editor left I’ve fallen through the cracks. As long as I look busy I can work on it too.”

  “Any way you could find out who sent that obituary to you? I’m dying to know.”

  “I tried to trace it. They said that anybody could stuff something in an envelope and drop it in the inter-office mail slot. The trick is getting into the building in the first place.”

  “Don’t you wonder who sent it?” she asked. “You haven’t said much about it. Somebody in that building knows that you might be interested that Pomeroy is dead.”

  “I’ve thought about it a lot,” he admitted. “Burkhardt’s the only one that has a clue why we were in Pittsburgh. But I think he was gone before it was sent.”

  “Do you think it was a warning from somebody?”

  “Maybe it was. Or maybe it was a threat. What’s the difference?”

  “Didn’t he quit without giving any notice?” Reno asked. “Maybe somebody was threatening him, too. Or maybe he was forced out for assigning the story to you. Maybe you’re next.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes. He wasn’t forced out, anyway. Somebody offered him a dream job back home in Sacramento.”

  “Yeah, yeah, whatever. That just doesn’t ring true to me,” she said. “It was so urgent that they didn’t have the decency to give him a couple weeks to wrap up his work here? And what, he’s afraid there are so many editors lining up to move to Sacramento that he had to grab it right away? Does that sound reasonable to you?”

  “I don’t know about Sacramento, but I know Mr. Burkhardt,” Jonas said, sounding irritated. “He wanted this bad and it came up. That makes as much sense as whatever you’re talking about. Don’t make such a big deal of it, okay?”

  “Right, okay. Your boss quits overnight and moves three thousand miles away to some no-name newspaper, but not before anonymously sending you a copy of the obituary of the last guy you interviewed. But I shouldn’t make a big deal of it. Okay, gotcha.”

  “We don’t know it was him.”

  “Yeah we do,” she snapped. “You said it yourself. Who else even knew?”

  Jonas jammed a slab of Tuscan T-bone steak in his mouth and looked away while he chewed. Reno lifted her water glass but froze when the glass was at her lips. “Holy shit!” she whispered.

  “What? What happened?”

  “It was him! My secret admirer! He just walked past the door to the kitchen, like he came out of the bar! The guy I showed you in the airport!”

  “The guy with the sideburns?”


  “Yeah. He looked like he was heading outside!”

  Jonas stood up. “I’m going out there to get a better look. I’ll know if it’s the same guy.”

  “No! Do you think that’s smart?”

  He flopped back into his seat. “I don’t know. What if I just asked him why he was following us around? What would it hurt?”

  “It might hurt you,” she said. “And if he’s leaving, it probably means there’s somebody else watching now, somebody we’ve never noticed. He’s probably part of a team. Just keep your cool.”

  A hunk of steak hovered over his plate on the end of his fork. “You know, sometimes I think you’re onto something,” he said with his mouth full. “But mostly I think you’ve got a wild imagination. We’re not in some detective movie. This is real life.”

  “Joe, do you have a phone number for your old boss? In Sacramento?”

  “No. There wasn’t time. All of a sudden he was just gone.”

  “I hope he made it out there.”

  After dinner they walked back and retrieved Jonas’s car at the Sentinel. On the way back to the hotel they took an indirect route across the city, stopping and turning around unpredictably, hoping to expose anybody who might be trailing them. After a half hour they realized that nobody was, and gave up.

  ~~~

  The next morning found them in the Sentinel Resource room. The day’s mission was to find out everything they could about Kent Castle. Reno started with the periodical directories while Jonas paged through a biographical dictionary. “Hey Abby,” he called across the room. “Castle left Eastern in January 1964. It doesn’t say why. Kind of sudden, don’t you think? Just a few months after Kennedy got shot. Is it just another coincidence?”

  “I’ll look for some articles about that. There must have been some kind of press release.”

  “He lived until 1978,” Jonas reported a few minutes later. “That’s not that long ago. I wonder what he was doing those last few years.”

  “I got a few obituary articles here. No surprises. He died of heart failure in Pittsburgh. He’d lived there for twenty years.”

  They both continued looking through microfilm, periodical guides and every other source that was available in the Sentinel resource room. After a few hours they each had a few pages of notes but neither looked very happy with what they found. “Maybe we were wrong about Castle,” Reno said. “He’s turning out to be the world’s most boring man.”

  “This might be useful,” Jonas said. He held out a copy of an article from The Pittsburgh Post- Gazette entitled ‘West Virginia Historian to Write Castle Biography.’ She probably knows more than anybody by now,” he said. “This article is four years old.”

  The article was relatively short, only about five paragraphs. It explained that Elizabeth Van Scoy, Professor of History at West Virginia University, had taken possession of the personal papers of Kent Castle after having been chosen to write his biography by Castle’s son. It turned out that Castle was a West Virginia native and a graduate of West Virginia University. Van Scoy, considered to be an expert on the steel industry, was quoted as saying that the project would involve eight to ten years of research. It would be at least five years before anything was published, she also said. “There might be something written by now,” he said. “How long could it take to research one guy?”

  “We ought to get in touch with her.”

  “Yeah. Good idea.”

  “You know, it’s discouraging in a way to know somebody else studied this guy,” Reno said. “She’s got all his papers and didn’t find anything interesting? I hope we’re not wasting our time.”

  ~~~

  Later that afternoon Reno called her boss in Austin to update her on the story. She expected to be called home, so she was beaming when she reported to Jonas that she’d been given a few more days, and permission to interview Professor Van Scoy. “I got some travel money,” she said. “I was thinking about going up there. You know, West Virginia University is pretty close to Pittsburgh.”

  “Yeah? Does that matter?”

  “I’m not sure. Should I go up?”

  “You could just call.”

  “I’d rather call,” she admitted. “I still have the jitters from the last time I was in an airport.”

  “But a face to face interview is always better,” Jonas countered. “What if I came with you?”

  “Can you?”

  “I don’t know if I can get travel money like you did,” he told her. “I don’t have anybody to ask right now. I couldn’t fly but maybe we could drive.”

  “How far is it?” she asked, and then found an atlas to help answer her own question. “Pretty far,” she said. “It would be a lot of driving.”

  “While we’re at it, how about this for an idea? Castle is from West Virginia. In a place called Becton. Maybe we could stop off there and snoop around. That might break up the ride and maybe we’d learn something.”

  “I wonder if Sideburns would follow us all the way up there,” Reno wondered aloud.

  “Nah,” Jonas said. “Secret spy guys like that just call ahead and have somebody waiting. You know, scary guys in shiny cars.”

  ~~~

  Reno called Professor Van Scoy that afternoon while Jonas looked for Steve Trappe. The professor was receptive to being interviewed whenever Reno and Jonas made it to Morgantown. “Just give me a buzz when you get here,” she told Reno.

  “When would you go?” Jonas asked.

  “It would have to be tomorrow. They want me back in Austin Monday morning.”

  “I couldn’t find my manager,” Jonas said. “I’ll just tell the secretaries and then go with you.” They ate a simple dinner in the first floor cafeteria before leaving at the end of the day. “I don’t feel like going to the hotel. Can we just go to your place for a while?” Reno asked.

  A few minutes later they walked into the small bungalow near Charlotte Coliseum that Jonas had owned for several years. “Very bachelor,” she said as she inspected it. “Do you have something against interior decorating?”

  “It’s plain, but everything’s paid for. You can stay over if you want,” he offered. “I’ll sleep on the couch. Otherwise I’ll take you back downtown whenever you’re ready.”

  “I’ll take the couch, if I stay. But I might need to borrow some clothes. Mine are all at the hotel.”

  Jonas wasn’t in the mood for working on the story, and from the looks of it Reno wasn’t either. He flipped through the channels on the TV while Reno stretched out on the floor with a thick book. He gave up an hour later and turned the TV off. He couldn’t stop thinking about Kent Castle.

  “Have you ever seen this?” Reno asked when she saw him staring into space. She held up the book she was reading. “It’s the Warren Commission Report on the JFK Assassination.”

  “No kidding?” Jonas asked. “And I thought you were relaxing. Anybody we know in there? That would make our job easier.”

  “I’m not sure yet. My brain’s crunching away,” she said as she tapped her temple with a finger.

  Before he had a chance to answer they heard the crash of breaking glass. Reno screamed. Jonas jumped out of his seat and ran to the kitchen. The window over the kitchen sink was shattered. Shards and crystals of glass covered the countertop and floor. There was a section of heavy black pipe in the sink, surrounded by broken glass and the remains of a coffee mug. “Somebody threw that pipe through my fucking window!” he shouted when Reno came in. “I’m going out back!”

  “I’m sure they’re gone,” Reno said, but he was already out the door.

  “What the hell is going on, Abby?” he asked a minute later when he was back inside. “Who’s doing all this?”

  “Somebody wants us to stop what we’re doing,” she said. “Don’t you think that’s what this is all about?”

  “I’m thinking of going along with them,” Jonas replied.

  “I hear you. I was already spooked.”

  “This shit’s starting to
get out of hand, don’t you think?” He went out back again looked around, more because he needed the air than any expectation of finding anything. When he came back inside Reno had found a broom and was pushing the glass into heaps on the floor. “I better board that window up since we’re leaving tomorrow.” Without waiting for an answer he went out to the garage.

  After a few minutes he came back in with a five-sided piece of scrap plywood that had been there when he bought the house. “This looks like it’ll cover it,” he said. Reno had finished cleaning up glass and was arranging herself at the kitchen table. She’d already pulled more books from her canvas sack and was arranging them into piles. He held the board in place and hammered in two nails. “Warren Report again?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “There are a few things rolling around in my head that I wanted to read up on. I know I won’t be able to sleep.”

  He stopped pounding and looked over. “All those books are part of the Warren Report? I thought it was just one book.”

  “The final report is in one book,” she explained. “But the whole thing is like twenty-six volumes. The appendices of witness testimony is where the good stuff is. I ordered the whole set after I got home from Pittsburgh. As a matter of fact, I read just about everything I could about the assassination after I got back.”

  “I could tell. You’ve got twenty-six of those in that bag?” he asked between swings of the hammer.

  “No. Pomeroy only seems to be involved in Jack Ruby’s end of the assassination. I’ve been concentrating on the parts that involve him, so those are the only ones I brought. I have some pretty wild ideas about what we stumbled onto, Joe.”

  “Shit fire!” he barked as the hammer tumbled onto the counter. He grabbed his finger with his other hand and squeezed. “Shit!”

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “Hit your finger?”

  “Yeah, I hit my fucking finger,” he said angrily. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”