Unpunished

by William Peter Grasso

  A murmur of amusement rippled through the room. Somewhere in the throng a male voice offered a derisive sigh: “Oh, Jesus!”

  Tad Matthews’s face screwed up as if he had just smelled something putrid before shifting to a condescending smile. With a dismissive wave of the hand, he said, “That ridiculous accusation was answered long ago, miss. We won’t dignify it with any further comments.”

  A smattering of supportive applause greeted Tad’s answer. Allegra felt herself sinking into a hole. She needed to throw herself a rope; nobody else in the room seemed interested in helping her. So she yelled, “But does the Congressman know Mr. Moscone? Did they actually serve together in the war?”

  His face did not lose the smile. He raised a hand in a tidy wave of goodbye and spoke once more into the microphone. “Thank you all for coming, ladies and gentlemen.” He stepped down from the podium and made his way across the ballroom.

  A hand touched Allegra’s shoulder. She was not surprised. She had seen it before—goons planted in a crowd to intimidate and silence those who might try to embarrass the speaker. She wheeled to face the intruder, her voice gathering all the menace it could muster as she said, “Take your goddamn hands off me!”

  Her assailant was merely a waitress who had been manning the nearby refreshment table. The waitress fought the urge to spout something equally harsh to this pushy, ungrateful Amazon with the fresh mouth. But trading barbs with the guests would only get her fired. This crappy hotel job had been hard enough to find. She had mouths to feed.

  “No disrespect, ma’am,” the waitress said, “but your change purse fell out of your bag. Didn’t know if you’d noticed.”

  Feeling relieved—and a bit foolish—Allegra retrieved the purse from the floor. As she stood, she removed a dollar bill from the purse and extended it toward the waitress—an apology wrapped as a gratuity. But the waitress was gone, returned to her station at the refreshment table. Allegra did not pursue her. She pursued Tad Matthews instead.

  She caught him at the doors at the far side of the ballroom. Matthews was chatting with a small knot of local newsmen, his eagerness to break away becoming more obvious by the second. This was usually the moment a staff member would come to the rescue, claiming an urgent phone call or some other convenient untruth. But Tad Matthews was working alone. There were no staff members to extricate him.

  He could not help but notice the tall woman approaching, the one who had asked that irritating final question. But he pretended not to see her as he traded clipped remarks with the newsmen, repeating several times, “Okay, that’s it, boys. Gotta go.”

  When he had finally pushed through the doors and began striding down the hall to the hotel’s lobby, he found himself face to face with the roadblock that was Allegra Wise. He flashed a smile more insolent than friendly and tried to skirt around her. She sidestepped, blocking his path and bringing him to an annoyed halt.

  “If you don’t mind, miss…”

  “Why, Thaddeus Matusik! Is that any way to greet an old friend?”

  He truly thought that he was being confronted by the rudest woman on earth. Or maybe the craziest. “Pardon me?” he asked, at the limit of his patience.

  “Oh, come on, Tad…it’s me! Ally! Ally Wyznicki.”

  He stood silently for a moment, processing memories long suppressed. Finally, the cogs fell together.

  “Tommy Wyznicki’s little sister? Really? I could have sworn in there that you said your name was Wise. ”

  “See? We’ve got something else in common…We’ve both dumped our Polack names.”

  “And you work for CBS?”

  Allegra Wise nodded proudly.

  He could not help but be amused by the coincidence of their new names, but he grew more wary by the minute of her intrusion—and its implications: Knowledge is power…and she certainly knows me. A reporter who knows things about you is the worst enemy you can have.

  He danced about uncomfortably in a losing attempt to hold down the panic rising within him. “Holy smoke! Tommy’s little sister…How is old Tommy, anyway?”

  “Just great! Got a law practice in Baltimore…great wife, two swell kids.”

  “I’m…I’m glad for him,” he stammered. “Look, Ally, I’ve got to go. We’ve got a big meeting…”

  She did not let him finish. Grabbing his arm, she pulled him toward the lobby bar. He complied without resistance; he did not want to make a scene with half the press in Western Pennsylvania in attendance. As he had witnessed back in the ballroom, she could get loud. Better just to ride this one out and escape as soon as possible.

  “I won’t keep you long,” she said. “We’ve got some catching up to do, Thaddeus.”

  He did not mind the table she selected. It was in a quiet corner, far from the boisterous, fresh-from-the-office heavy drinkers that bellied up to the bar at 4:05 in the afternoon. When the waitress arrived, Tad Matthews ordered a Coca-Cola. Allegra Wise’s drink request was, “Scotch. Rocks.”

  She got right to the point. “I really want to talk about this Moscone guy, Tad.”

  “And as I have already told you, Ally…there’s nothing to talk about. The man is mentally disturbed. Probably schizophrenic. The congressman has no relationship with him. Never did.”

  “The police talked to some people at the VA hospital, you know. Mr. Moscone was definitely a bomber crewman who was interned in Sweden. A radio operator, they said… that would make him some kind of enlisted man, no?”

  Matthews nodded warily.

  “And the Congressman was a bomber pilot…An officer, right?”

  Tad feigned boredom. “Of course. This is all public record.”

  “And by the way, Tad, Mr. Moscone is not mentally disturbed. Or schizophrenic. He suffered from combat fatigue. You can recover from that, you know, with your mental faculties and memory pretty much intact.”

  “Is that so? I have it on good authority that he didn’t fly nearly enough missions to get combat fatigue.”

  “Oh? How many missions does it take, Tad?”

  “More than three, that’s for sure.” Instantly, Tad wished he had not given away that piece of information. He dodged for cover: “That’s what they said on the news, right?”

  She had him. Tad had screwed up, badly. That was almost too easy, Allegra thought, struggling to suppress a satisfied grin. We didn’t even know how many missions Moscone flew…until now!

  Allegra knew full well that individual service records were not a matter of public record. Even congressmen did not have access without the written approval of the serviceman, his next of kin, or a court order. Tad Matthews knew too much about Anthony Moscone, certainly more than Allegra knew at this point. And that information probably did not come from any government archive. If a judge had authorized release of Moscone’s records to Pilcher, that would be easy to determine, but I have it on good authority somehow did not sound like the product of a court order.

  “How many missions did the congressman fly, Tad? Was he interned in Sweden at any time?”

  “You’d have to check with the congressman on that.”

  You can bet I’m going to check, honey, flashed through Allegra’s mind. She took a deep pull on her scotch. Mission accomplished. There’s a definite connection between Leonard Pilcher and Anthony Moscone.

  She glanced at her watch. She still had plenty of time to get to the airport, but she launched into a fluttery, apologetic goodbye and quickly made her escape.

  Just before boarding the evening flight to LaGuardia, she put in a collect call to Sid, the producer. “Boss,” she yelled into the phone, “I need a sit-down first thing tomorrow morning with you and Wally. It looks like we’ve got a major scoop on the story of the year, maybe the decade.”

  Much to her surprise, the producer agreed without the cross-examination to which such pitches were usually subjected. “Scoop of the decade, eh? That’s just great. But you realize, Ally, that this is only the first year of the decade, right?”

 
; He laughed. The producer never laughed.

  “We’ll talk more in the morning,” he said. “Have a nice flight.”

  “Don’t you want to hear the details?”

  But he had already hung up.

  That’s weird, Allegra thought. And here I was, figuring Sid would piss in my corn flakes, like he always does. She rushed to the airplane, its far-side engine already coughing to life. She could not have known the reason for Sid’s agreeableness. When she called, the secretary who had answered at that late hour was, in fact, straddling the producer as they had sex in his plush executive’s chair.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The flight back to New York was mercifully uneventful. Allegra was in her Manhattan apartment by 11:00 p.m., plenty of time to get a good night’s sleep before that all-important 8:00 a.m. meeting. But she slept hardly at all. Her brain would not stop churning.

  Up at 6:00, dressed and made-up by 7:30, and in the office by 7:55. Five minutes to spare. She dropped her pillbox hat and gloves at her desk, made a quick stop at the ladies’ room to recheck her hair and makeup, smooth the lines of her new blue suit, and make sure there were no smudges on her matching pumps. Satisfied that all was in order, she took a deep breath and strode off to the conference room.

  Already seated were Sid, the producer, Wally—the most trusted man in America—and two researchers. Allegra breezed in, grabbed a cup of coffee from the serving table, and eased into a chair at the big table.

  “So, are you ready to lead with Presidential candidate is a murderer, Ally?” Wally asked, with a big smile. “Do we have any idea who he supposedly killed?”

  “No, but I’m working on it,” Allegra said.

  She gave them the whole rundown. How Tad had said too much—and how he must know too much. What he let slip had probably come from someone’s personal knowledge of Moscone’s internment. Pilcher must be hiding something, at the very least the fact that he, too, had been interned in Sweden. There was something fishy about the three-mission thing; the standard combat tour for an Eighth Air Force bomber crew in late 1944 was 35 missions.

  Wally sat back and puffed his pipe. He was deeply interested. This had the smell of a blockbuster scoop. Catching a politician in an omission, an outright lie, or a crime before anyone else was a newsman’s wet dream.

  “But the internment story won’t cut much ice unless we’ve got a body to go with it,” Wally said.

  The producer pointed to Charlie, the senior of the two researchers, and said, “Check for subpoenas of Moscone’s military records. See if Pilcher’s been snooping around.” Charlie nodded while tearing a page on which he had just scribbled from his notebook.

  “Shouldn’t take more than a day or two, provided the subpoena was in either the D.C. or Western PA Federal Court,” Charlie replied, passing the torn-out page to the young female researcher seated beside him. “Give these guys a call. See what they’ve got,” he told her.

  Charlie turned back to the producer and said, “If they filed someplace else, that may take a while to find.”

  “Bomber crewmen didn’t end up in Sweden by themselves,” Allegra added. “They arrived by the planeload. Ten men per plane. If Moscone was there, there were others from his crew. If we could get confirmation from another source…a believable source…that Moscone and Pilcher were actually interned in Sweden…”

  The producer interrupted. “Is that right, Charlie? Ten in a crew?”

  “Yeah, she’s right,” Charlie replied. “But it still won’t prove Pilcher killed anyone.”

  “Of course not,” Wally said, “but that’s where we start.” He took a big puff on his pipe, then added, “The little lady knows how to do her homework.”

  If the producer was enthusiastic about any of this, you could not tell from his expression. “I want this story growing legs real quick,” he said. “I like the feel of this one…but if it starts to fuck the dog, I’ll kill it in a heartbeat. I don’t need to make us a target of some big money hot-shots when all we’ve got is an empty gun.”

  Wally frowned. “I think we can be a little braver than that, Sid.”

  The producer paused to light another cigarette before continuing. “Let’s see how brave we are when our budget gets slashed to nothing. Ally…you’re going to find this Moscone guy, right?”

  “Uh-huh. That’s first on my list.”

  “And what about interviewing Pilcher himself?” Wally added. “Is your contact still going to open doors for you?”

  Allegra tried her best to sound confident: “Oh, I think he might.”

  Wally had no reply, verbal or otherwise. He just kept smoking that pipe, looking content and all-knowing. The white clouds from his pipe that rose in puffs and the thick, dark-rimmed glasses, like a windshield, reminded Allegra of the little engine that could.

  “Let’s go over what we already know about the good congressman,” the producer said. “The general impression is that he’s a lightweight, propped up by Daddy’s money, right?”

  “Actually, boss, lightweight is being pretty generous,” Charlie began. “Useless is how most describe him. We’ve got a lot of archive material from his two congressional runs. Despite all Daddy’s money, he got in the first time only because the incumbent, Kent Blanding, conveniently killed himself in a plane crash. Pilcher never would have gotten the nomination otherwise. The steelworkers’ unions were dead set against him. Seems young Leonard has always been quite the problem child…drunk driving, messing around with women even after he got married. There are some fairly credible rumors that he got a few of these ladies in the family way…and Daddy paid for the abortions. All hushed up, of course.”

  Wally could not help but chuckle. He had heard this story before and many others like it. What would politics be without a whole lot of sin?

  Charlie continued, “We’ve still got a lot of stuff on deep cover that never aired. He’s the only son…the male heir. Apparently, Daddy has this dream of putting his kid in the White House. Been groomed all his life, despite the fact the kid is a total fuck-up…”

  “Ah-hem!” Allegra interrupted, with mock seriousness. “Again with the dirty mouth! A little respect, gentlemen! There are ladies in the fucking room!”

  Wally chuckled. Nobody else did.

  Charlie rolled on without missing a beat. “He managed to graduate from Pitt on the strength of the endowments Daddy made, went for the glory with the Air Corps in the war, although nobody seems to know much of anything about his war record…yet. Could be one of those instant heroes in uniform whose tune changes after he realizes you might actually get killed doing this shit.”

  Wally, the old war correspondent, chuckled again and said, “His achievements in Congress have been nothing short of dismal…practically nonexistent. He’s sponsored zero bills…and apparently caused his father’s company to lose a big government contract…”

  “The Randolph deal, right?” the producer asked.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Charlie continued. “He didn’t show for some big, important meet-and-greet…looks like he was on a bender and shacked up with some tootsie…must have just slipped his mind.”

  None of this was news to the producer. “So,” he said, “who thinks this clown is presidential material?”

  Wally set down his pipe. He spoke in that serious tone he used on the air, the one that made you trust him. “His Daddy’s wallet, that’s who.”

  The producer had one more question. “Do we know how many American airmen were interned in Sweden during the war?”

  Charlie had the answer to that one, too. “About one thousand, boss. Roughly one hundred airplanes’ worth.”

  “A pretty small haystack, people,” The producer said. “Let’s figure out who Pilcher supposedly killed…and who else knows about it.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Tad Matthews had no choice but to tell Max Pilcher of his encounter with Allegra Wise. The old man was less than thrilled by the news. He would have been far less thrilled if Ta
d had told him the whole story, including how he had let the comment about only three missions slip out. Tad may have been foolish with Allegra, but he was not suicidal. He would cover his mistake somehow. He would fix it before it did permanent damage.

  “So how much does this woman know about you, Matthews?” The subtext of that question was: Does she know you’re a faggot?

  “I was in the same class as her older brother. She was just a kid…I think she had a crush on me,” Tad replied.

  Max Pilcher found the crush part amusing—and strangely reassuring. Maybe Matthews’s peculiarities were well concealed back then, too.

  Tad then spoke words he knew were almost certainly a lie. “Aside from knowing that I’ve changed my name, she doesn’t know much of anything.”

  “So we’ve got to make sure she can’t connect the dots about Lenny’s war record,” the old man said.

  “Yes, sir. Anything that Moscone says is already discredited. Everybody knows he’s crazy.” Matthews said, beginning to feel confident, convinced he had dodged the bullet. “We just need to make sure that no part of Leonard’s military record sees the light of day. That whole Swedish adventure must remain concealed. Forever.”

  Max Pilcher nodded in agreement, then leaned back in his huge leather chair. He looked troubled. Another question was deep on his mind: “You don’t suppose that idiot son of mine actually did kill someone in Sweden, do you? I mean, everybody approves of murder in concept. Whether they’ve got the balls to pull the trigger themselves, though…”

  “I’m not sure everybody approves, sir,” Matthews interjected.

  “Oh, don’t give me that holier-than-thou crap! People kill when it’s necessary. It’s that simple,” Max Pilcher stated flatly. That patrician certainty in his voice was unmistakable: only fools question such obvious truth.

  At that moment, Leonard Pilcher entered the office without so much as a knock, bypassing the secretary guarding the door and leaving the flustered woman in his wake.