Man of Steel

by Dave Conifer

  “Hi, Mrs. Pomeroy,” Reno said when they’d reached the bottom of the stairs. “Sorry I never called you back.”

  Mrs. Pomeroy smiled. “You’re one of the last people to see my husband alive.”

  “I’m sorry about your husband’s accident. He was a very nice man.”

  “Yes he was. But we both know it was no accident.”

  “My partner is outside waiting with a car. Can we go someplace and talk?”

  “I’d like that,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “There are some things I need to say before I go.”

  “Would you mind taking off that jacket? We think somebody else is here looking for you tonight and they’ll be looking for that color.”

  Mrs. Pomeroy nodded and took it off. “I’ll carry it,” Reno said. She took the jacket and rolled it up as carefully as she could before tucking it out of sight under her arm. “Is there a way outside from here?”

  Mrs. Pomeroy pointed to a door. “That leads out back.” They walked over and looked out. It was nearly dark. Reno could see rain falling in front of each set of headlights. A long line of cars was crawling by, presumably on their way back to the street.

  “Perfect,” Reno said. “We’ll just wait for Joe. I’m sure he’ll be in that line.”

  No sooner had she said it then the rented Taurus appeared. They waited just inside the basement door until the car was directly in front and then walked out the door. Reno followed Mrs. Pomeroy up a few concrete steps and then opened the rear door of the car for her. After she was safely inside Reno pushed the door closed and jumped into the front seat rather than wait for Mrs. Pomeroy to make room. “Done,” Reno said as soon as her door was closed. “Joe, this is June Pomeroy. Let’s go.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Jonas said as he looked in the rear view mirror. There would be time for a warmer introduction later after they got her away from the church.

  -- Chapter 24 --

  Ted Braden had just gotten home when the secure phone in the den rang. He hadn’t even had a chance to remove his bow tie or loosen his cummerbund. “It’s never good news on that phone,” he muttered softly as he dropped his dripping umbrella into the stand by the door. He checked to make sure his wife was already up the stairs and then walked quickly to the desk in the den. “Braden,” he said into the receiver.

  “Sir, this is Marino,” a voice said. “I’m on a secure line. Can we talk?”

  “Is there trouble?”

  “No, sir. Something interesting happened in the last hour that I thought you might want to know. We’ve been tailing Pomeroy’s wife for a week. I didn’t want any surprises so I put a good team on it.”

  “Pomeroy never gave us too much trouble,” Braden said. “Not until the end, at least. And even that’s debatable. His wife doesn’t worry me. Should she?”

  “I didn’t want to chance it. Who knows how much he’s told her, although I don’t imagine this is something they talked about at the dinner table.”

  “I would hope not.”

  “She doesn’t leave the house much,” Marino said. “She just lost her husband, after all. But tonight she was at church. Our men think the reporters were there, too.”

  “Oh? Right here in the city? Did they see the reporters?”

  “The women that brought Mrs. Pomeroy to church left without her,” Marino explained. “It was dark and rainy but our men think they saw her come out through a different door with a younger woman and get into a car.”

  “This is vague. Very vague. Is this the best information you have?” asked Braden.

  “There was a lot of activity after the mass ended,” Marino said. “They had a hard time getting close enough. I’ll get back to you as soon as I know anything more.”

  “That’ll have to do, I suppose.”

  “Sir, do you want Mrs. Pomeroy taken out if we have the chance?”

  “Good God, Marino! Have you lost your mind? Absolutely not. Leave the poor woman alone. She’s suffered enough.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What about the reporters?” Braden asked. “Do you have any idea what they’re up to?”

  Well, we don’t have a firm sighting of the reporters since the day they were spotted in Becton,” Marino said. “Unless it was them at the church.”

  “Those two worry me far more than Mrs. Pomeroy does. Maybe that’s where your best team should be. Find them. Then get back to me.” He pushed a button and ended the call before Marino was able to say another word.

  -- Chapter 25 --

  “Where are we headed?” Jonas asked.

  “It’s just about dinner time,” Reno said. “Anybody hungry?”

  “Let’s drive for a few minutes to see if we have any company,” Jonas said before making the first of several random turns as he watched headlights behind them.

  “I’d like to go home,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “We can talk there.”

  “That’s probably not a good idea, Mrs. Pomeroy,” Reno said. “If somebody’s looking for us, that’s the first place they’ll go.”

  “I can’t imagine anybody’s after me,” Mrs. Pomeroy replied.

  Guess again, Jonas wanted to say but didn’t. Once anybody hangs out with us, their days are numbered. “Maybe not, but somebody’s definitely after us,” he told her.

  “It was my husband they were after. But they got him and that’s that.”

  “Why did you call me, Mrs. Pomeroy?” Reno asked.

  “Please call me June,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “I suppose I just wanted to talk about R.J. with somebody who knew all about his past. With everybody else I have to watch what I say. God, I miss him.”

  “Looks like we’re clean,” Jonas announced. “Nobody’s following us. Did we decide what we’re doing?”

  “It’s up to June,” Reno said.

  “I’m not hungry,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “But I’ll sit with you two if you want to eat.”

  “Would you rather sit in the car and talk?” Reno asked.

  “That would be better for me,” she answered. “If we can’t go home.”

  Jonas parked at a diner on the side of the road and turned around to face Mrs. Pomeroy. “I’m really sorry. I feel like I’m responsible for what happened. We should have left your husband alone.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t take the blame for somebody else’s evil. He always knew somebody was watching him. Somebody close by.”

  “We know your husband had nothing to do with the assassination,” Reno said. “And he didn’t seem to know too much about it. Why was he being watched?”

  “You’re fishing, honey,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “But that’s okay. I want to talk about it.” She paused as a car pulled into the lot and drove slowly past.

  “It’s not them,” Jonas assured her.

  “R.J. didn’t do anything wrong,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “He’d never hurt a fly. But he was there. You know what I’m talking about. He saw some things that he couldn’t explain. He was right in the middle of something without even knowing it. All these years it always seemed as though there was somebody out there who thought R.J. knew more than he really did.”

  “He saw somebody let Jack Ruby into the basement to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, didn’t he?” Reno asked.

  “He thought so,” she said without elaborating.

  “That’s in the assassination report, even though they didn’t get his name right,” Reno said.

  Mrs. Pomeroy smiled. “We were given a new name when we came here. But yes, it looked to R.J. like they knew Ruby was coming and they let him pass. He wasn’t supposed to notice that.”

  “When you say ‘they ,’ who do you mean?” Jonas asked. “Other cops?”

  “We were never sure,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “R.J. was one of a group of men who joined the force just a few months earlier. None of them had any experience. None of them had any idea why they were hired. We were young and needed the money, so he didn’t ask many questions. I’m afraid the group was used by somebody, somehow, to do something ter
rible. That’s all we ever knew. They broke it up so quickly afterwards that none of them ever got a chance to make any sense out of any of it.”

  “How did R.J. end up joining ERC?” Reno asked.

  “You’re fishing again,” Mrs. Pomeroy said with a half smile. “But I don’t care anymore. I really don’t care about anything anymore. It feels good to talk about it. There isn’t anything anybody can do to me now. They’d be doing me a favor.”

  An awkward silence followed, which Mrs. Pomeroy broke herself. “We knew right away that it wasn’t a coincidence that ERC offered R.J. a job right after that. A few of the other new cops came up too. We never figured out the connection. We never wanted to. It was something we tried not to think about. ERC gave us a good life. But R.J. always knew the price was that he had to keep his mouth shut. And he tried to. He didn’t know very much anyway. But every couple of years another reporter would show up.”

  “Even the little bit he did know had nothing to do with the assassination,” Reno said. “Just Oswald. What a shame.”

  “R.J. always believed that Oswald shot the president, but that Oswald was working with somebody. He always figured Oswald was told he’d be allowed to escape.”

  “Who was in charge of this special group of policemen?” Reno asked.

  “We never knew. R.J. didn’t ask a lot of questions.”

  “Do you believe it?” Jonas asked. “About letting Oswald get away?”

  “You mean, pretending to let him get away, right?” Reno corrected.

  “R.J. saw his partner’s squad car behind the Texas Schoolbook Depository that day,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “You know, the building Oswald was shooting from. A little while later, after the president was shot, Oswald’s landlady saw that same car in from of Oswald’s apartment. You figure it out.”

  “He never told us that,” Jonas said.

  “It’s in the report,” Reno told them. “I remember it.”

  “They were good friends, R.J. and his partner,” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “Charlie McBride. R.J. never saw him again. Charlie died when his house burned down a few weeks later. That was one reason we kept quiet. Something wasn’t right. They said the fire started when he fell asleep in bed with a cigarette. Charlie never smoked a day in his life as far as we knew.”

  “It must have been awful, knowing all of this without being able to talk about it,” Reno said. “All these years.”

  “It wasn’t so hard,” she answered. “We knew what would happen if we talked. And life was good here in Pittsburgh, except you can’t get decent barbecue. We couldn’t complain. But it does feel good to get it off my chest. I just don’t care anymore. There’s nothing more they can do to me.”

  “But sometimes it was hard,” she admitted after another pause. “In some ways it changed everything we did. We always wanted kids but we were afraid of what could happen. It would have been too easy to use them against us if anything went wrong.”

  Nobody spoke for a few minutes. There was just too much to think about.

  “Can you take me home now?” Mrs. Pomeroy said. “I’m ready. I’m really ready. Let it come.”

  Jonas talked her into letting them drop her off at a friend’s house rather than take her home. He wasn’t worried about her safety as much as his own and Reno’s. If he and Reno showed up on Grace Street their cover would be blown, and probably for the last time.

  “That was weird,” Reno said after Mrs. Pomeroy was safely inside her friend’s house. “I would have felt better if she cried a little.”

  -- Chapter 26 --

  “Weird isn’t the word for it. I feel horrible about what we did,” Jonas said after Mrs. Pomeroy was gone. “She spent her whole life with the guy. She was willing to keep the secret. So was he. Then we came along and wrecked it.”

  “I know,” said Reno. “I know.”

  “Where are we going for the night? Any ideas? Do we head back to Morgantown?”

  “I don’t know where else we could go,” Reno said. “We do need to go see the professor again. There’s got to be a way for us to get at those Papers.”

  “You mean the ones in the vault? We can try, but it sounds like a tall order.”

  “Our cash isn’t going to last forever,” Reno pointed out. “Living on the run like this is getting old. Maybe if we settled in one place we could start writing and publishing what we already know. Our bosses would be happy too.”

  “I forgot we still work for a living,” Jonas said. “Maybe you’re right. We’ve got enough material in our heads to write something decent. It’d be a good idea to get it all on paper anyway while it’s fresh.”

  “That might be exactly what we need to do to get these people off our backs,” she added. “Writing what we know is the only way we can fight back. Maybe if our articles start popping up, it won’t be us who needs to run anymore. It’ll be them.”

  “On the other hand, it might make them even more desperate, which would be bad for us,” Jonas countered.

  “I think they’re pretty desperate already. What’s the body count so far?” Reno asked.

  “True. But let’s go back and see if we can get something from the professor before we start writing.”

  Ninety minutes later they were in Morgantown again. Jonas turned the car toward downtown, where their day had begun. “Should we just stay at the same place?”

  “Yeah,” Reno agreed. “It’s too much money, but we can do it one more night. I’m too tired to look for another place. Why did we bother checking out this morning?”

  They drove around the block twice looking for a place to park. “Party night, I guess,” Jonas said. They found a space after venturing a few blocks further from the hotel. After so many hours in the car it felt good to walk. It didn’t take long before they were back in front of the hotel. Just before they went inside Reno’s eyes went wide.

  “Oh my God!” She yanked Jonas behind a minibus just as a black Chevrolet passed slowly in front of the hotel. This time the windows were down.

  What’s wrong?” Jonas asked. Then he noticed the black car. “Is that what I think it is? The car from Pittsburgh?”

  “Yes! And that was Sideburns! The red-haired guy from the airport! He was in the back of the car! I swear to God! I swear it was him!”

  “How can you tell? You hardly had a chance to see.”

  “He was fifteen feet away. I saw him and he saw me. I know what he looks like by now. Weren’t you watching traffic behind us on the way back down? I thought we were clean!”

  “Damn!” Jonas said. “If they knew it was us in the first place, why’d they follow us all the way back down here?”

  The question was barely off his lips when the Chevrolet lurched to the curb, its rear end jutting into traffic as all the doors popped open. “They saw us! Come on!” Jonas yelled as he pulled Reno towards the hotel. Jonas saw three figures emerge from the car as they escaped inside. “We need to find a back door!” They sprinted past the front desk and around the corner where there was nowhere to go except into the restaurant. “In here!” Jonas shouted.

  A man stationed inside the restaurant door raised a feeble arm as they ran past. Jonas sidestepped a woman carrying two meals on a tray and ran in the direction she had come from, with Reno right on his heels. They burst through a set of swinging doors and found themselves in the kitchen. There were so many white-clad workers in the confined area that they were forced to slow to a walk, twisting and turning when necessary to avoid collisions. Several of the culinary staff gawked at them but they were gone before there was time to protest. Jonas looked back in time to see his partner send a stack of bowls clattering to the floor after a direct hit from her swinging bag. “Pardon me,” he said several times as they weaved through the kitchen. Finally they found an exit just past a bank of stainless steel sinks. After pushing their way through they found themselves in an alley.

  “There’s a PRT station right over here somewhere,” Jonas said as he grabbed her bag and ran deeper into the all
ey. “I was there yesterday. Come on!” His shirt ripped open at the abdomen when it caught on a sharp prong as he scaled the wet fence at the end of the alley. As he threw himself over the top he felt the pain of tearing skin along one of his ribs as another part of the fence gored him. Reno took longer to climb. Her hands slipped on the top of the fence as she stepped over. Her momentum carried her forward and down on the other side, where she landed awkwardly on her shoulder. Jonas ran back to pull her to her feet but she was already up and moving by the time he got there. As she resumed running she rubbed a dark blot of blood on her chin where it had struck the pavement.

  “This is Chestnut Street. It’s one block over!” Jonas yelled.

  They reached Walnut Street and clambered up the stairway to the platform just as a PRT car was pulling in. Jonas put one hand on the rail and vaulted it while retaining his hold on the sack. “Hurry!” he shouted back to Reno, who needed two hands but got over the railing quicker than he did. They pushed their way onto the car with no concern for where it was going. Both were sweating, bleeding and breathing hard. Nobody among the handful of students aboard with them said a word, either to Jonas and Reno or to each other. They just stared. Jonas nervously watched the platform and counted the seconds until the doors closed and the car pulled out of the station.

  It seemed that the car was moving in slow motion. They kept away from the windows, knowing that the interior lighting would make it easy for them to be spotted by anybody watching from the streets below. They couldn’t see much except for the reflections in the windows because it was dark outside. That changed ten minutes later when they approached the Towers dormitories, which were surrounded by the busy commercial strip along University Avenue. As the car pulled into the Towers station Jonas gestured toward the door with his head when he caught Reno’s eye.