The Blackmail Club

by David Bishop

  “That’s a crock. What about his affair with Chris Andujar? Did you confront him about that?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Over his years with the CIA Engels has been a top covert operative. He wrote several of the Agency’s training manuals. He still runs their mock interrogation classes. He heads up deep operations that never see the light of day, including several for which I led field operations. My asking that would have told Engels we know he had a gay relationship with Chris and he would not have given me anything in return. Advantage, Engels.”

  “You’ve said you doubt the intelligence community knows that Engels is gay. Instead of Andujar being blackmailed and committing suicide, he might have told Engels he was coming out of the closet? If so, Engels may have bumped off Andujar to keep him quiet.”

  “Possibly, but not likely. Engels could have leveraged Chris into silence without killing him, and I can’t see Chris wanting to come out of the closet. It would have crushed his wife and ruined whatever modicum of a relationship he had with his son. No. Both Engels and Chris would want that kept a secret. That scenario also doesn’t explain Andujar’s missing quarter mil. Besides, if Engels had killed Chris he could have arranged for him to simply disappear—like Jimmy Hoffa.”

  Nora’s body language told him she knew Jack had it right.

  Jack then suggested a more likely set up: Haviland got the blackmailer into Chris’s office to get the goods on some of his patients, and later into Donny’s Club to tape Harkin with Jena Moves.

  “But Chris’s files were only coded,” Nora retorted. “The blackmailer would have the goods on people without knowing who they were.”

  Jack nodded, and then said, “The blackmailer had film taken in Donny’s club for leverage over Harkin. Maybe they used surveillance equipment in Chris’s office.”

  Jack dialed his phone and called Clarence Drummond, the former CIA surveillance expert who had a few days earlier took countersurveillance measures in the home of Chris’s former receptionist, Agnes Fuller. Drummy agreed to join Jack tonight to perform a sweep of Chris’s office, and while they were at it, the office of Chris’s pal, Dr. Radnor. Access courtesy of Clark’s janitorial service.

  Chapter 32

  Alan Clark was clearly skittish when Jack and Drummy approached the back door of the office building in which Chris Andujar had rented space for his practice. Clark’s cleaning crew had left, leaving the building empty except for the three of them.

  Jack did not introduce Drummy to Carl Anson, alias Alan Clark who kept looking at Drummy, clearly wondering who he was and why he was with Jack.

  After beseeching Jack to be as quick as possible, Clark gave Jack a master key and waited in the lobby.

  Andujar’s office had already been picked clean by Goodwill Industries. Nothing remained but an unreliable florescent ceiling light with a periodic flicker and a constant hum from its defective ballast.

  Drummy gave Chris’s office a fast sweep using equipment capable of detecting virtually any radio-frequency eavesdropping device made, including those used by government intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

  “Ain’t nothing here, Jack. If anything ever was, it’d be long gone by now anyway. No installer wants his equipment found in the office of a dead doc the cops booked as a suicide.”

  Jack began repacking the equipment while Drummy used a handheld xenon lamp in combination with infrared and ultraviolet filtration to search for an indication that bugs had been hidden in the baseboards, drapery cornices, walls, or ceiling panels.

  Suddenly, Drummy snapped his fingers and pointed to a faint image of a forearm print on the wall just below the acoustical drop ceiling. He climbed the ladder and slid a two-by-four foot ceiling panel to the side.

  “I got scratches here on the support grid. The recorder was likely right here.”

  Drummy lowered the acoustical panel. Jack took it and examined the pinhole in the white side of the panel. Drummy then pointed at a small channel bored into its soft unpainted surface.

  “See that? A tiny camera was used to provide pictures as well as sound. The guy’s equipment was crap, very dated, but it’d do the job.”

  “Would the filming be constant?”

  “I doubt it. More likely it all started with a voice activated recorder, after that the camera would take pictures at preset intervals. The audio is the more significant part of the surveillance. The periodic pictures did the job of eliminating any doubt as to the identity of the person speaking.”

  What they found would fit the known blackmailing of Chris’s patient, the newspaper magnate, Dorothy Wingate, and her beau, Philippe Frenet. It could also support Jack’s theory that another of Chris’s patients, Allison Trowbridge, had been blackmailed, but they had not yet established that extortion had actually occurred.

  Alan Clark was pacing in the lobby when they came out of the elevator. Jack offered to let Clark look through Drummy’s equipment case.

  “Let’s just get out of here,” Clark said excitedly. “The other building should be clear by the time we get there. I just want this night to end.”

  Twenty-five minutes later Alan Clark locked the three of them inside the building where Jack and Nora had been a few days before to interview Dr. Radnor. Clark collapsed into one of the lobby chair.

  Jack and Drummy got off the elevator on the floor below Dr. Radnor’s office and walked up one flight of stairs. Radnor’s office was close to the size of Chris’s, only Radnor was still in practice so his office had furnishings, phones, and cable television service.

  Drummy used the same equipment and process he had used in Andujar’s office. He also used a Time Domain Reflectometer on Radnor’s telephone and data cable. He found no signs of bugs in position, but found similar markings above one of the acoustical panels in the ceiling. From the top of the ladder, he shined a bore scope into a hole he had found behind the smoke detector.

  “There’s a scrap of wire left inside. The kind commonly used for RF recorders, not smoke detectors.”

  With Chris Andujar dead, removing the surveillance equipment from his office made sense. But why remove the equipment from Radnor’s active practice? Is the blackmailer being cautious enough to limit the number of marks he obtains from a single source? It would seem he got the goods on Dorothy Wingate and her lover, along with whatever he had held over Allison Trowbridge from the bug in Chris’s office. But, at least so far, they had no knowledge of any patient of Dr. Radnor being extorted. When they confirmed Trowbridge had been blackmailed, they would know the how.

  Jack and Drummy took the stairs down to the floor below, and were nearing the elevator when Jack paused at a door with small white block letters: The Office of Dr. John Karros. Medical doctors often put their specialty under their name. Dr. Karros had not.

  “Drummy?” Jack raised his eyebrows.

  “Why not?” Drummy said. “Could be another shrink?”

  “Our blackmailer may be limiting how many marks he’ll take from one source, and it looks like his specialty may be using psychiatrists to find his targets. If Karros is a shrink, with him being in the same building,” Jack shrugged, “I would, wouldn’t you?”

  Drummy nodded, and said, “The convenience of a double hitter might have been too good to pass up. Only take us a minute to find out.”

  Doctor Karros’s lobby materials indicated he was, in fact, a psychiatrist. Drummy unpacked his equipment to sweep Karros’s office.

  “I should go touch base with Clark,” Jack said, “he’s probably jumping out of skin.”

  When Jack came out of the elevator, Clark rushed up waiving his hands frantically. “Where’s the other fella?” He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the top of his partly bald head.

  “Relax, Alan. You and your people are in this building for hours every night. Keep your lunch bag open as if you’re taking a break. I entered my number into your cell phone. If anyone comes in the building, they’ll need a ke
y. If that happens, hit redial and my phone’ll ring. Then hang up. We’ll be ready to play the role of two of your janitors.”

  “If what I’m doing gets out—you should be done by now. This is taking too long.” Clark ran the blue hankie over his head again, then across the back of his neck.

  “We’ll be another twenty minutes. Should anything happen, just call my cell number and we’ll adjust. Relax. Finish your sandwich. The sooner I get back up there, the sooner we’ll be back down.”

  Jack stepped into the elevator, giving Alan the peace sign from the hippie era.

  “Man. I haven’t seen that in a long time.”

  “That’s the attitude. Be cool.” The elevator door closed on Jack’s reassuring smile. He got off the elevator two floors below Karros’s office and walked up the stairwell. If Clark had watched the lobby elevator panel, he wanted him to remember the wrong floor.

  When Jack entered Karros’s office, Drummy held his finger to his lips. “I hit a hot one,” he whispered. “A voice-activated recorder set up to take a single picture on activation and again every few minutes. My equipment picked up the infrared bloom from the optical device. I erased our visit.”

  Drummy had already packed his equipment; they eased out into the hall and relocked the door.

  “Maybe,” Drummy reasoned, “this is a fresh set-up. Your blackmailer is still soliciting new customers.” He paused. “Then again, if the blackmailer used Clark’s supervisor, Bennie Haviland, to get in, maybe events dictated that he kill Haviland before he could get this equipment out. Maybe Haviland was coming to see you? No, no, that can’t be. The equipment would have been here long enough to fill the tape, and very little of it has been used. This set up’s pretty new. And you know what really seems screwy?”

  “What?” asked Jack.

  “From what you’ve told me your blackmailer is smarter than the average bear, so why is he using this old stuff? I mean he’s got no capacity for remote viewing or retrieval?”

  “I’ve got no answer. Not yet,” Jack replied, “any other observations?”

  “Sloppy workmanship.” Drummy shook his head. “Whoever installed this junk knew how. It’s just sloppy—except for wiping everything down so he’d leave no fingerprints.”

  “If he’s removing his prints, what makes it sloppy?”

  “He left wire cuttings, just like at the first two offices. A careful technician would’ve removed everything.” He patted Jack twice on the shoulder. “We’d better get downstairs.”

  Clark was waiting with his nose nearly against the elevator doors. “Tell me you’re done. That we can get out of here.”

  “We can leave. But I want you to remember our talk about keeping quiet about tonight’s activities.” Clark again ran his hanky over his brow. He and his wife had a lifetime of keeping their own secret, so Jack figured they’d keep this one too.

  On the way to Drummy’s house, Jack said, “Are you available tomorrow?”

  “I can be.”

  “Come by MI in the morning. Let’s find out if our blackmailer has somehow bugged our office. The building doesn’t use Clark’s janitorial, but the blackmailer may have leverage with more than one janitor service. I also want you to check my house and Nora’s apartment.”

  Chapter 33

  Jack nearly ran the red light at Pennsylvania Avenue when he heard the radio newsflash:

  Shots fired at the residence of a Miss Phoebe Ziegler. An unidentified woman is dead. Police are at the scene. More at eleven.

  Jack had already dropped Drummy off at his home. He spun a U-turn and headed for Phoebe’s apartment about a dozen blocks to the north. While he drove, he dialed.

  “Harkin? Jack McCall. I came by your place earlier. Where were you?” Jack hadn’t stopped to see Harkin, but he wanted to read Harkin’s reaction.

  “You must have gone to the wrong house. I’ve been right here since I got home from work. Ask Ms. Burke. She’s called twice to check on my progress on the list of copyists. It’s finished. What’s this about, Mr. McCall?”

  “You haven’t had the news on? Have you been alone?”

  “Yes, alone. No, I have not watched the news. I’ve been working on this list and digging up addresses. What’s going on?”

  “Jena has been murdered. I don’t know anything more than that.”

  “Oh, my God.” Harkin audibly sucked back a sob. “Poor Jena.”

  The tires on Jack’s Concorde screeched as he dropped from fifty miles an hour to a dead stop along the curb a few houses from the small cluster of units where Phoebe lived, had lived. The area in front of her place was bedlam. Cop cars were scattered like an impromptu meeting of drunks.

  “Stay put, Harkin. Talk to no one. Our deal remains the same.”

  “I can’t keep up this charade now.” He was crying openly.

  “Her real name was Phoebe Ziegler. Did you murder Phoebe?”

  “What! Of course not. I couldn’t hurt—”

  “Then our focus remains on the portraits. You took your pleasure. Now you suck it up and carry your load.”

  Jack approached the property while uniformed officers dispersed the neighborhood crowd. A bullet-riddled body lay along the curb, a dead hand snagged on the foot peddle of a black and chrome Harley Davidson, Road King. One of the uniformed officers put up his hand when Jack walked toward the house. He stopped. “Who’s in charge?”

  “Sergeant Paul Suggs, Major Case Squad.”

  “Sergeant Suggs.” Jack hollered toward the house. “Yo. Sergeant Suggs.”

  Two uniform officers were off to the side talking with two detectives. Like all modern cities, DC investigated every officer shooting. The two uniforms were likely the shooters, the suits tonight’s edition of the department’s shooting team. Right then, two other guys with cameras wandered out onto the porch.

  “She could’ve danced on my lap anytime,” one of them said.

  “Your lap and my face.” The other replied. They both laughed.

  “Shut your mouths, you sons-a-bitches,” Jack screamed over the uniform’s shoulder. “Or come over here and I’ll shut ‘em for you.”

  “Now hold on buddy,” the uniform blocking Jack’s forward motion said. “If you knew Ms. Ziegler, the sergeant will want to talk with you.”

  “Yeah. I knew her.” Jack said to answer the officer. Then he called out again. “Suggs. Sergeant Suggs. It’s Jack McCall.”

  Suggs came out the front door and down the sidewalk toward him. When he got close, Jack could hear his left shoe squeak with each stride.

  “Good evening, Mr. McCall,” Suggs said. Then he turned toward the porch. “You two mugs are here to shoot pictures, not to shit out of your damn face holes.”

  Suggs took Jack’s arm and led him away. “You knew this woman?”

  “Nora and I met Ms. Ziegler through her employer, Sara Andujar’s son, Donny Andujar.” Jack started around Suggs, toward the apartment. “How did she die?”

  The sergeant slid over to stay in front of Jack and then loosened his tie. “Jack. I can’t let you on this scene. Forensics just arrived and the M.E.’s not here yet. At the Haviland scene, Chief Mandrake invited you in. I can’t take on that decision, not at a homicide scene. The dead guy hanging on the bike was put down by the cops first on the scene. The shooting team is over there interviewing the shooters.” He motioned with his head. “We haven’t identified the dead guy.”

  Jack stepped back and took a deep breath. “I believe you’ll find that crud is George Rockton, a bouncer at Donny’s Club where Ms. Ziegler danced under the name, Jena Moves. Now you give. How was she killed?”

  “Looks like strangulation. We found her naked. I’m guessing the dead guy’s the killer, but that isn’t established. The station got a call from a neighbor who heard fighting and screaming. We had a car in the area. They got here in minutes. Rockton, if that’s his name, fired on them and made a break for his motorcycle. The officers put him down. Were these two lovers?”

  “I do
n’t know. I just know they both worked at Donny’s club. I don’t think they were an item. The other girls at Donny’s would know.”

  “Tell me about her,” Suggs asked, “other than where she worked?”

  “She still seemed like a good kid, not all hard yet. She came to DC to study sculpting. She was saving her money to go to school. She invited Nora and me over to see one of her pieces.”

  “You seem … upset by her death.”

  “Nora and I tried to talk her into leaving Donny’s and returning to school right away. I should’ve … I don’t know, convinced her somehow. Tried harder.”

  “Don’t put this in your pocket, Jack. It doesn’t fit. She was a big girl—well, big enough to make her own decisions. She made them and they went bad.”

  “Thanks, Paul. She didn’t have enough to be a burglary target. What does it look like? A rape and murder? Torture for information? What’s your gut on this?”

  “We can’t rule out a botched burglary, but I doubt it, there just ain’t much he could haul away on his motorcycle. It appears they had sex. From what I saw before you called me out, it wasn’t consensual. I’m expecting the M.E. to get here any minute. We’ll know more after she’s done.”

  Suggs took Jack by the arm and got him walking toward his car. “From the multiple marks on her neck, the rash like spots on her skin, and the hemorrhages in her eyes, the perp repeated near-strangulations. Or, maybe she’s one of them sicko gaspers. Or maybe he got off that way. He was a mean prick though, I can tell you that.” Suggs paused a moment, then went melancholy. “Things have certainly changed over my years on the force. Whatever happened to the days when if you wanted someone dead, you just pumped ‘em full of lead? Brutality has become a growth industry. Maybe I’ve just gotten too old for this job.”

  Jack couldn’t tell Suggs about Phoebe’s relationship with Harkin. The slim chance that he could find the presidential portraits would drop to zero if that story broke.