Shadow of a Broken Man m-1

by George C. Chesbro

  "Yeah, I worked in the Rafferty lab," he said. "But Rafferty himself didn't hire me. I only knew him by sight. There were mostly technical people there; they tested different kinds of metal alloys."

  "I understand that. But you claim to have seen Rafferty die."

  "I don't claim, I did see him die. What's your interest in Rafferty?"

  "It's an insurance matter; a few old loose ends that were overlooked at the time and have to be straightened out. Some people don't think Victor Rafferty is dead."

  His hands rose, fluttered like wounded birds a few inches above the surface of his desk, slowly came back to a landing. It was the most curious gesture I'd ever seen, and it struck me that it could be learned, practiced, purposely exaggerated. Aside from his voice, Harold Q. Barnes was almost too gross, too vulgar, as if he consciously worked at it. The man would bear closer study.

  "What the hell does that mean?" Barnes snapped. "Somebody calling me a liar?"

  "Insurance people are professional skeptics," I said soothingly. "They like to keep going back over the same details."

  "That's crazy," he said, a distant look on his face. "Rafferty died five years ago. Who'd be interested now?"

  "You were the last person to see him alive. Is that correct?"

  "That's what I told the cops, and that's what I told the insurance companies. I don't-"

  "Mr. Barnes, would you tell me exactly what happened?"

  Barnes shrugged, then spoke as if he were reciting. "He was walking on the catwalk over the smelting furnaces. He stopped and leaned over a railing, like he was looking at something down there. All of a sudden he reached for his head, like he was dizzy. I tried to get to him, but I was too late. He fell over the railing into one of the open vats. His body exploded when it hit that hot metal. There was nothing left of him. I called the cops, but there wasn't anything anyone could do for him."

  Barnes seemed immensely pleased with himself, like an actor who has learned his lines well.

  "This was on a Sunday, wasn't it?"

  "Yeah. I only worked there on weekends."

  "Was there anyone else around?"

  "No. The lab was closed on Sundays. I kept an eye on the place and checked the furnaces; they have to be kept hot, y'know."

  "Why did Rafferty take you along with him, Mr. Barnes?"

  "I had to let him on the catwalk. There's a steel door."

  "He owned the building. Why didn't he have his own key?"

  "Hell, I don't know. He must have forgotten it."

  " Why did he want to go on the catwalk?"

  "He never said."

  "What was Rafferty doing there on a Sunday?"

  "I don't know. I wasn't being paid to ask the boss questions. They tell me he was a weirdo. Maybe he just wanted to make sure everything was running like it should."

  I didn't seem to be making much progress in that vein, so I gestured around the office to change the subject. "This is quite a setup you have here."

  His eyes clouded with suspicion. "Yeah, I make out. What's it to you and the insurance company?"

  "I'm interested in making movies myself."

  Barnes's face brightened. "Hey, you ever think of acting? I might be able to build a whole film around you. Something really kinky."

  "No, thanks. How do you get started in a business like this?"

  "Good luck and clean living," he said with a smirk.

  "And a little money."

  "Some." Barnes was getting nervous again; his hands were beginning to twitch, ready for takeoff.

  "About how much, would you say?"

  He shook his head. "I don't discuss my personal business. You said you wanted to talk about Rafferty; okay, we talked. You said you don't want to be a movie star; that's all right too."

  "It's quite a career jump from watchman to movie producer. I was hoping you might be able to give me a few tips. Who gave you your big break?"

  Barnes rose threateningly from his chair. "I'm tired of this conversation. You found your way in here; now find your way out!"

  I found my way out and waited a few feet beyond the entrance to the brownstone until one of the women who had been on the studio floor emerged. I almost didn't recognize her with her clothes on. She was big and lumpy, didn't wear a bra and should have. She hadn't bothered to clean off her theatrical makeup, and her face looked like a cake that had been forgotten in the oven. I stepped in front of her.

  "Excuse me, ma'am. My name's Frederickson. I'd like to talk to you for a minute."

  She stared down at me over the twin peaks of her breasts for what seemed a long time. "I saw you inside the studio, buddy. Whaddya want?"

  "Just talk."

  "I ain't no hooker, mister. I'm an actress."

  "Anybody can see that right away," I assured her. "I said I just want to talk."

  "No offense, but you ain't, uh, normal. I don't know how you get your kicks."

  "I'd get a big kick out of your talking to me."

  She sniffed. "The street ain't no Times Square rap parlor, buddy. I'm busy; I got another job to get to."

  She started to walk past me. I flashed a twenty and she almost broke a platform heel stopping.

  "Twenty bucks, sister, for twenty minutes of your time. A buck a minute."

  She took the bill and stuffed it down the front of her dress; I wondered if she'd ever find it again.

  "What do you want to talk about?" She could turn her tone on a dime; her voice was now positively saccharine.

  We started walking toward Third Avenue. "Tell me about Harry Barnes."

  She seemed relieved; I think she'd been expecting me to grab her leg. "That's all you want to talk about?"

  "That's it. What do you know about him?"

  She darted a glance sideways at me. "You ain't going to tell him what I say, are you?"

  "Not a word, love. Cross my heart."

  She made a face. "He's kinky."

  "Oh-oh," I clucked. "What does that mean?"

  Her breasts bounced violently as we stepped down off a curb, and then settled back into their normal, quivering rhythm as we crossed the street. "He ain't no professional," she said, demurely supporting her breasts with a forearm as we stepped up on the opposite curb. "I mean, there's lots of guys making skin flicks. Most of them treat you like a professional. Harry ain't like that. He likes to touch his girls, sleep with 'em, that kind of thing."

  "What's his product like?"

  Another face. "I don't know how he makes any money on the shit he turns out. The stuff he makes would have been okay a few years ago, but everything now is synch sound and color. Real Hollywood. It's like Harry makes 'em as a hobby." She shrugged. "Still, he pays pretty good. Standard."

  "Where do you suppose he got the money to get started?"

  "Gee, I don't know, mister. I ain't interested in the business end. He just started is all."

  "When?"

  "Oh, I don't know. A few years ago."

  "Five years?"

  "Maybe. Yeah, that sounds about right. I hear he used to be a janitor, or something like that. One day he was just there in the business. Maybe some mob guys set him up, or something like that."

  "Or something like that. Thanks, sister." I started to walk away.

  "Hey, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is! You still got ten minutes left!"

  I blew her a kiss.

  It was a little before ten. I took a cab back to the university; I found one of the night guards, and he let me into the building where I had my office. On the way up to the third floor, I took off my jacket and removed the miniaturized tape recorder I kept in a pocket sewn into the lining; the recorder had been running throughout my talk with Harry Barnes.

  The recorder was a component of a machine called a Stress Evaluator, and it was the latest invasion-of-privacy wrinkle. It was reputed to be far more accurate than the polygraph, and was certain to arouse more controversy. What it did was measure the relative stress in a person's voice, then relay that information to the operator by
means of a line graph fed out of the machine on a paper tape. It was assumed that a person was under more stress when he or she was lying. A recording was played at low speed into the machine, and the paper tape came out the other side. All the operator had to do was to compare the spikes on the graph with the corresponding response to any particular question to determine whether the person had, in all probability, been lying. Instant Truth. The machine was a long way from courtroom use, but I was impressed by its potential uses-and abuses. That was what I'd told the American Bar Association in the evaluation report they'd asked me to write.

  Using the pause control between each question and answer, I played the Barnes tape into the machine, then scanned the readout. The parts of Barnes's story where he talked about Rafferty's supposed death were consistently skewed toward the high end of the graph.

  According to the machine, Harold Q. Barnes had been lying through his teeth.

  5

  Dirty Harold bothered me all night. There was a recurring dream in which I had somehow become a film director; Barnes was an actor who couldn't remember his lines. He was naked, sitting in a pool of grease and gnawing on a hamburger while I harangued him.

  "Are you now, or have you ever been, an architect?"

  No answer.

  "Are you an actor, Harold? Are you acting? What the hell are you all about, Harold?"

  No answer.

  The alarm rang precisely at eight. I slapped it into submission and went back to sleep. The phone woke me up fifteen minutes later.

  "You'd better get your ass down here, brother," Garth said in his cheery morning growl. "I think I've got something that'll interest you."

  "You said ten."

  "I'm saying now. Where's your sense of dedication? Get it down here!"

  "All right. Let me get some coffee."

  "Bring coffee," Garth said. The line went dead.

  I fell into my clothes and made my way downtown to the station house. Garth was sitting at his desk, studying the contents of two pea-green manila folders. He held out his hand as I entered and I stuck a container of coffee into it. He didn't look up.

  "What have you got, Garth?"

  He motioned for me to sit down as he passed one of the folders over for me to see. "Read it, Mongo," he said seriously.

  The field report on the investigation into the murder of Dr. Arthur Morton was about as brief a report as I'd ever seen; all it contained was the bare facts of Morton's death.

  The neurosurgeon had been killed by a single bullet in the brain. The bullet markings indicated that it had come from a gun equipped with a silencer, which probably made the killer big-league professional. The caliber of the gun was British. There had been no signs of a forced entry into the office, and as far as the investigating officers could tell, nothing had been taken or disturbed. There had been no clues, no suspects. The title page of the file was stamped UNSOLVED.

  Garth didn't object when I took out my notebook and wrote down the name of Morton's widow, along with a few other details. "There's not a whole hell of a lot here," I said.

  "That's what I thought would interest you. Whoever killed him was no amateur."

  "Obviously. Morton decided to stroll into his office at three-thirty in the morning so he could get himself killed by a professional." I pointed to the second folder. "What's that?"

  "Oh, this?" he said with a gesture of mock surprise. "This is Victor Rafferty's file."

  "Victor Rafferty had a police record?" My voice reflected my shock.

  "No," Garth said. "But there was a Missing Persons report filed on him."

  "What's the date?"

  "August 15, 1969." "The same day that weird picture outside his house was taken." I reached out for the folder. "Can I see?"

  "No," Garth said, placing his hand on it. "This is pretty heavy; it's flagged."

  "A Missing Persons report flagged? Who flagged it?"

  Garth looked grim. "I can't even discuss it. I'm probably risking my job just having this file on my desk." He rose. "I've got to go to the john. Just remember, you haven't seen any police files on Morton or Rafferty. Understood?"

  I winked. "Understood."

  Garth walked out of the office and I opened the Rafferty file. The first thing that caught my attention was a line that read REPORTED BY________. It had a code number instead of a name.

  I was suddenly conscious of Garth looking over my shoulder. "I thought you'd gone to the head."

  "I'm still there."

  "What's that?" I asked, pointing to the number.

  "I don't know," Garth said evenly.

  "What the hell do you mean, you don't know? Don't you work here?"

  "It's a code number that has something to do with the Feds. That's why it's flagged. Ordinary detectives like your humble brother aren't even supposed to look at these things. My guess is that it's the D.I.A.-Defense Intelligence Agency."

  "Can you find out for sure?" I asked.

  "No way."

  "Who would put a number like that on?"

  "The Commissioner, m'boy, and you're not going to question the Commissioner."

  "Garth, do you think the Feds could have been after him?"

  "It looks that way."

  "So, with government agents presumably after him, Rafferty shows up on a Sunday at his metallurgy lab to inspect the furnaces." I tapped the report. "Doesn't make much sense, does it?"

  "Not when you put it that way."

  "It wasn't even his wife who reported him missing."

  "Maybe she didn't miss him," Garth said wryly.

  "She might have known where he was, or at least why he left."

  Garth shrugged. "Why don't you ask her?"

  "I can't," I said, suddenly feeling foolish. "That's one of the conditions of my employment. Her present husband's the one who's interested, and he doesn't want me to talk to her. He says he's worried about his wife's mental state, and I believe him."

  "She must have a lot of answers."

  The phone rang. Garth picked up the receiver and began speaking with the person on the other end. I took the copy of the newspaper photo out of my pocket and studied it. It was as inscrutable as before, but I was convinced Rafferty had been somewhere nearby when the picture was taken. If true, it meant he'd probably had something to do with the two men on the ground.

  "Rafferty was picked up," Garth whispered, his hand over the receiver.

  "Where?"

  "It's in the report."

  Garth continued his telephone conversation and I resumed my reading. What followed in the report was even more intriguing. Rafferty had been picked up by ambulance in a restaurant on the morning of Saturday, August 16. He'd been taken to Roosevelt Hospital-where he'd escaped from the custody of an officer named Patrick O'Connell. There was no report from O'Connell, and no indication of how Rafferty had escaped from what was described as a maximum-security ward. There was also no mention of why Rafferty had been taken to the hospital, or why a Missing Persons had been filed in the first place.

  There was a name: Lippitt. Below the name was a telephone number. I copied it down.

  "Interesting, isn't it?" Garth said drily as he hung up.

  "Why isn't there a report from this O'Connell?"

  "It could have been pulled," Garth said, looking directly at me. "Or he could have been ordered not to write one up."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "The file is flagged; top priority, very sensitive."

  "You recognize the area code on this telephone number?"

  "Washington, D.C.," Garth said quietly. "There was a directive to call that number the moment anything turned up on Victor Rafferty." Garth rose and walked to the window. He stared out at the blaring traffic, the pedestrians, the hookers, the pimps, the thugs and murderers, all caught up and swirling in the polluted bloodstream of New York City. "I don't like it, Mongo," he said at last. "The whole thing stinks. Why don't you get your ass to Acapulco?"

  "My ass will be toasting in Acapulco soon en
ough. First it would be interesting to hear what this Lippitt has to say."

  Garth turned back from the window. "I don't like your being involved with it, Mongo."

  "You know," I said, watching him, "the Morton investigation just doesn't make it. It was closed out three days after Rafferty's supposed death, which makes it just about the shortest unsolved murder investigation on record. You think it got choked off?"

  Garth nodded absently. "Could be. Morton was pretty famous in his own right. You'd think they'd have spent a lot more time than they did looking into his murder."

  "A police cover-up, Garth?"

  "Christ, I hate to think so, but it could be. Ordered at the highest level. If the police were ordered to cut off the investigation, they probably weren't even told why."

  "Hey," I said quietly, "maybe we should try to find out."

  Garth slowly shook his head. "There's a lot of juice and muscle in that file."

  "Power's never bothered you before. A man's been murdered, and his killer was never caught; another man who's supposed to be dead may be alive. Those seem like pretty important considerations to me."

  Garth's eyes went cold. "I wouldn't have showed you this stuff if I didn't feel the same way. But I'm official, and you're not. I just don't think it would be a good idea to call that number; you could end up with more trouble than you're bargaining for."

  Or Garth might, although he didn't say so. Rafferty, dead or alive, was a broken man who cast a large shadow. "I don't want to start using information that can be traced back to you."

  The silence was prolonged. Finally he said: "Shit. Go get 'em, Mongo. Use your discretion as to what information you think you can use."

  The tension that had been building inside me suddenly evaporated. My brother had signed on, and it gave me a good feeling. No more games. "What about this O'Connell?" I asked. "Can I talk to him?"

  "That's up to O'Connell. He's retired." Garth took a neatly folded paper out of his pocket and handed it to me. "Here," he said. "I got that out of the P.B.A. directory."