At the president’s house, a certain amount of overlap was taking place; the undertaker’s men were still carrying equipment out, while the caterer’s men had already started carrying equipment in. The three young men casually crossed the street, walked up to the house, up the stoop to the porch, and through the open front door.
The bustle was limited to a front room on the right. The three moved past that, deeper into the house, eventually finding another area of bustle in the kitchen, where some of the caterer’s men were setting up the coffee urn and the large metal pans of food. There was a rear exit from the kitchen, but it seemed a crowded route to take if in a hurry, so they went looking for an alternate, and eventually found it. Behind the main dining room was a plant-filled solarium, its wall of windows facing the morning sun and the river. French doors led out from here to a stone patio, slate steps led down from there to the lawn.
While two of them waited in the solarium, the third went out and down to the water’s edge, to be sure the one with the motorboat had arrived. He had, and was waiting close to shore, tucked away under a willow that grew on one corner of the property.
When the third man returned to the solarium, he and the other two continued exploring the house, looking now for a place to hide until the funeral party returned. They went up to the second floor, entered several rooms, and in one came unexpectedly face to face with Earl Chatham.
Earl didn’t realize anything was wrong; these looked like clean-cut ordinary young men. He said, “May I help you?”
Thinking that all family members must have gone with the cortege, the leader of the young men decided on boldness as a tactic. He said, “You could tell me what you’re doing up here.”
Earl’s amiable, rather vague face took on the smiling-through-bewilderment expression it often wore when Evelyn more bluntly rejected his advances. He said, “I beg your pardon?”
“No one’s supposed to be up here,” the young man told him firmly. “Are you with the mortician?”
“Of course not,” Earl said. “I’m family.”
The young man was flustered for just a second, but it didn’t show. He said, “Oh, in that case, it’s all right. Come on, men.” And turned around to leave.
Belatedly it occurred to Earl to wonder who these people were and what they wanted. He said, “Just a minute. Who are you three?”
“We’re just keeping an eye on things.” The three trooped on out to the hall.
“Keeping an eye on things?” Earl, following them, frowning now in puzzlement, said, “But I’m supposed to keep an eye on things.”
The leader turned back. “Oh, are you? What’s your assignment?”
“Just a minute, now,” Earl said, with sudden suspicion. “Let me see some identification.”
“Sure,” the leader said, and hit Earl in the mouth.
Earl, staggering backward through the doorway, eyes wide in surprise, managed somehow to stay on his feet. But the three pushed into the room after him and shoved him farther backward, shutting the door behind them. The second time the leader hit Earl, he fell down.
Earl shouted, a call for help from someone who didn’t yet really believe he needed help, and one of the others kicked him in a sudden panic to make him stop. Earl shouted again, this time louder, with more panic in the sound, and all three started kicking him, desperate to keep him silent. He screamed, and the leader grabbed up a table lamp and swung it hard, hitting Earl’s forehead with the metal base. Earl dropped backward flat on the floor, and was silent.
“Good Christ,” one of them said. His voice was hushed.
The leader, trying not to show his shakiness, put the lamp back on the table. “Go see if anybody heard,” he said. Blood was pouring out of Earl’s forehead and down into his hair.
One of the others went to open the door and listen. The third one said, “I think he’s dead.”
“No,” said the leader, “I didn’t hit him that hard.” His nervousness made him irritable.
“Hold a mirror to his mouth,” the second one said.
“He isn’t dead!” the leader said, more angrily than before.
“I don’t feel any pulse,” the third one said. He released Earl’s wrist, and put a hand on Earl’s chest. “I can’t feel him breathing.”
“He’s in shock,” the leader said,
The second one looked around the room, which was Elizabeth’s bedroom. “Where’s a mirror?”
“Never mind that,” the leader said. His voice was unsteady. “We’ve got other things to do.”
“We don’t need a mirror,” the third one said. He wore glasses, which he took off and held so one lens was just above Earl’s mouth.
The leader went over to look out the window, while the second one came back to see if Earl’s breath would fog the glasses. The glasses stayed clear.
The third one put his glasses back on. “He’s dead,” he said.
The leader stayed looking out the window while the other two gazed at his back, waiting for him to do something. Finally, he gave an angry shrug and turned around, saying, “What the hell was he doing here anyway?”
The second one said, “What do we do now?”
“What do we do now? We wait for the funeral party to get back, what do you think?”
“What about this guy?”
“What about him?”
“We can’t just—He’s dead, for Christ’s sake!” Hysteria hung like fog around the edges of his words.
The leader frowned. Fear and nervousness demonstrated themselves in him as irritation.
“Put him in a closet,” he said finally, and turned around again to glare out the window.
The other two looked at one another. After a moment, they picked Earl up and carried him to the closet and put him inside on the floor. His bloody head smeared several of Elizabeth’s dresses.
iv
WAS THERE TO BE only the one attempt? Wellington was growing increasingly nervous as each stage of the funeral passed with no further trouble. They had come to the church, and James Fanshaw and Joe Holt were both outside and in the proper places, the sign that everything was all right within. The ceremony, twenty-five minutes long, had droned to an end without an interruption, as had the procession from church to cemetery. Near the cemetery entrance, Eugene White and Mortimer Wellington signaled by their presence that here too everything was as it should be.
Beforehand, Wellington had believed the time of the burial would be the most dangerous of all. Bradford would of necessity be out of the car then, the cemetery was rolling open land, a grab here would be extremely difficult to deal with. But the time came, Elizabeth was put in the ground, and nothing happened.
And now the final leg, down the road along the river, through town, back to the house. Three cars of outriders led and flanked the cortege now: the Wellington brothers in one car, Fanshaw and Holt in a second, Eugene White and Mortimer Wellington in the third.
Four blocks from the house, Wellington spoke into his transmitter: “Six.” That was Earl Chatham. “We’re approaching.” That was the signal for Earl to leave the house and walk a block and a half to a certain intersection. His presence there would indicate there was no trouble in the house.
After a moment, the small voice in Wellington’s ear said, “He hasn’t emerged.”
Wellington frowned. Would there really be trouble at the house? He’d assigned that post to Earl Chatham, a willing but ineffectual man, because it was the least likely place for any kind of ambush.
Of course, it could simply be that Chatham’s receiver wasn’t working properly, or that he’d taken it out of his ear for a while because it itched or something. But Wellington wouldn’t take a chance; he waited until he could see ahead to the intersection, see that Chatham wasn’t there, and then he said into the transmitter, “Seven.” That was Albert Bloor, in the first car. “Circle.”
Bloor, three cars ahead, heard and understood the message. He leaned forward and said to the driver, “Go around the blo
ck, please.” As he understood it, Wellington had prepared the driver of the lead car for this eventuality; in fact, the driver was one of Wellington’s men. And now that the hearse and flower car were no longer with them, he was at the head of the line.
They did not make the turn they were supposed to make. They kept going straight ahead.
Wellington spoke again into the transmitter: “Three.” Fanshaw and Holt. “Four.” Wellington brothers. “Five.” Eugene White and Mortimer Wellington. “No reaction from Chatham at the house. Check it. Three in the back way, four and five in the front.”
The three automobiles, widely scattered around the general area of the cortege, all turned at once toward Sterling’s house, arriving almost simultaneously. James Fanshaw and Joseph Holt went around to the rear of the house and in through the solarium, while the three Wellingtons and Eugene White went in the front. All were men in their forties and fifties, but all were healthy, fairly active types, only Mortimer Wellington among them being very much overweight.
The three young men in Elizabeth’s bedroom saw the six men arrive, and they didn’t like it. One of them said, “We’d better get out of here.”
The leader was trying to remember about fingerprints; what had he touched, what was the likelihood of being able to wipe every fingerprint away? He said, “We stay here until we get Bradford Lockridge. We need him now more than ever.”
“Why?”
He turned on them, his fear transposing itself into fury. “Because we’re going to need asylum now. We killed that guy; you think they won’t get onto us? We’ve got to get out of this country, and that means China, and that means we need Lockridge. Because if we give them Lockridge they’ll be happy about us, and they’ll give us asylum.”
The second one said, “I don’t want to go to China.”
“It’s better than jail. Better than jail for the rest of your life. We have to hide somewhere. We’ll be able to move around again when the house is crowded.” Then we’ll get Lockridge and get out of here, same as we planned.”
Downstairs, Fanshaw and Holt and White and the three Wellingtons had finished checking out the first floor, and the credentials of the caterer’s men. They then asked the caterer’s men to join them while they looked the house over for a suspected burglar. The caterer’s men, while dressed as waiters, were all burly men, used to carrying heavy cases of food and drink, used to performing occasionally as bouncers. The six family members split up, each taking two of the caterer’s men along, and they proceeded to search the rest of the house, the Wellington brothers taking the basement and the other four going on up to the second floor.
They found all three young men fairly quickly. One tried to plead his way out and was ignored. One tried to run his way out and was caught by the caterer’s men. And the leader tried to bluff and bluster his way out and got his face slapped by Joseph Holt.
They had the three in the upstairs hall when Mortimer Wellington came out of Elizabeth’s bedroom, a drawn look on his round face. He was holding his right hand out away from himself, and it was smeared with reddish-brown. “We’d better call the police,” he said. “They’ve killed Earl.”
v
NEITHER STERLING NOR BRADFORD was told about Earl. The cortege continued to drive around for fifteen minutes, while things were briskly taken care of in the house. The local police came and took away the three young men and the body. They moved with more speed and fewer questions than they might have, except that Wellington’s department had been in touch with their chief; they understood they were involved on the periphery of something hush-hush in connection with national security, but they didn’t know—and didn’t expect to know—exactly what. The last young man, waiting in the motorboat, was not discovered. He stayed where he was until dark when, certain by then that something had gone wrong, he drove the boat across the river and walked up route 14 to Millersburg, where at a gas station he got a lift back south again to Harrisburg. From Harrisburg he took a late bus east to Philadelphia, then the train to New York and another train out to Babylon, Long Island, arriving at ten the next morning. His parents were delighted at the fact of his return home, the change in his appearance, and his newly subdued manner. Two days later he was picked up and transported back to Lancashire to be charged as an accessory in the murder of Earl Chatham.
Once the house had been cleared of the young men and their victim, Eugene White walked out and down a block and a half, standing at the corner until the cortege came by, facing the other way during the passage of the car containing Bradford, nodding to Wellington two cars later, and then going on back to the house.
Wellington said, into the transmitter, “Seven. To the house.”
In the lead car, Albert Bloor leaned forward and said to the driver, “We’ll go to the house now.”
“Yes, sir.”
Five minutes later, the cars were emptying in front of Sterling’s house. The family members went slowly inside, Bradford at all times in the center of a large group, and just inside the door Joseph Holt took Wellington to one side and said, “Three of them were in here. They killed Earl.”
Wellington frowned, truly shocked. “They killed him?”
“Hit him with a lamp. I suppose they were afraid he’d give the alarm.”
Wellington shook his head. “I thought they’d use more professional people,” he said.
“We’ll have to tell Patricia,” Holt said.
Wellington seemed to be thinking about something else. He looked at Holt without really focusing on him, then suddenly seemed to draw himself back in. “You’re right,” he said. “We’ll have to tell several people. But not Bradford. We get him away from here first.”
“It’s a hell of a complication,” Holt said. “Isn’t that a bitch? I should be pitying Earl, and I do, but all I can really think is, it’s a hell of a complication.”
Wellington said, “Bradford doesn’t have to know about it till tomorrow. We can have it covered by then.”
“If we’re lucky.”
“Get to Evelyn,” Wellington said. “Tell her to hurry Bradford along. No need to tell her why.”
Holt nodded, and went away. Wellington went into the parlor where the food and drinks were to be found, and disguised himself with a small plate of turkey and a cup of coffee. He then stood unobtrusively in a corner, watching, unnoticed. The small voice in his ear was talking to him, telling him the current situation, the whereabouts of the body and the seven captured young men, the present legal position, the handling of the problem of the two Chinese agents waiting at the farmhouse, the search for the still-missing eighth Twelfth of July activist. From time to time, shielded by his coffee cup, Wellington’s lips moved, but no sound escaped. He might have been chewing, or talking to himself.
vi
TWO MEN WITH DRAWN guns came in the front door of the farmhouse. One of the Chinese, seeing them, jumped to his feet and ran through the farmhouse toward the rear. As he dashed into the kitchen, two more armed men entered through the back door. He turned in mid-flight, as though to jump through the closed kitchen window, and both men fired. Killed by two bullets in the head, he crashed forward and down into the sink, and flopped backwards onto the floor.
In the living room, the other Chinese rose and held his hands high up over his head. “I am your prisoner,” he said, in carefully enunciated perfect English, as though it were a magic phrase that would change the situation, or remove him to another place, or render him invisible. One of the two men strode up to him, pressed the barrel of the pistol against the left side of his chest, looked coldly into his astonished eyes, and pulled the trigger.
vii
THE FAMILY WAS SORTING itself out. Ten minutes ago, Wellington had seen Bradford leave, in his car, accompanied by Evelyn and Howard. Two other cars had followed him, at an unobtrusive distance; in the first were Robert Pratt and John Bloor, John’s wife Deborah, his cousin Albert Jr., and Albert’s wife Jane, and in the second were Gregory and Audrey Holt, and Thomas
Wellington. (No further trouble was assumed, but they were taking no chances.)
Off to the police to make their statements about the death of Earl Chatham—so as to allow the mills of justice to begin to grind without too noticeable a pause for special interests—were four of the group of six that had discovered the body and the young killers: the three Wellingtons, Walter and William and Mortimer, and the psychiatrist James Fanshaw. A man of Wellington’s had already seen the young men, and pointed out to them that any statement about their intention to kidnap Bradford Lockridge would only further complicate their already bleak legal picture, whereas cooperation might eventually, in unspecified ways, redound to their favor.
Still downstairs with Sterling were Elizabeth’s two brothers, Albert and Edward Bloor, and their wives; Edward and Janet Lockridge; and about a dozen wives waiting for their husbands to be finished with family business.
Upstairs, in a sitting room with French provincial sofas, was the new widow, Patricia Chatham. With her were her parents, Harrison and Patricia Lockridge. Marie Holt, who seemed suddenly to be Patricia Chatham’s closest friend, was there at Patricia’s insistence, with her husband George. Meredith Fanshaw, the Senator, was there at Harrison’s insistence. And facing them were Joseph Holt, Eugene White and Wellington.
This had begun as a delicate task, handled jointly by Joe and Wellington: the informing of Patricia Chatham of her husband’s death. It had grown rapidly, had moved upstairs in the process of its growth, and was swiftly altering in tone and purpose. And the change had begun with the elder Patricia, when she had said to Wellington, “I hold you responsible for this.”
Wellington said nothing, it wasn’t the sort of remark to which he would respond, but Joe Holt immediately rose to the bait, saying, “How can you say such a thing? In the first place, the work Wellington did organizing things here today was nothing short of brilliant. And in the second place, every one of us knew there might be trouble. When those fellows jumped out of the car there, they might have been armed, they could have had knives or guns, there was no way for us to tell.”
Ex Officio Page 43
