Sledgehammer

by Walter Wager

  The librarian nodded.

  “I knew you’d understand,” Williston continued.

  “And you chose Paradise City because—”

  “Because a scientific statistical study of the last Federal census showed that this community is an ideal—that is, remarkably typical—example of American cities with populations between one hundred thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand,” the spy lied earnestly. “We feel that we can learn a lot from this gracious community, Ma’am,” he added in his most boyish manner.

  Miss Ashley beamed. Her delightful dimples showed, and for a moment Williston expected her to purr.

  “It’s going to be a big job,” he predicted gravely, “and I mean to start right now by beginning to familiarize myself with the television and motion-picture programming offered here during the past year.”

  “You’d find it all in the back issues of the paper,” she suggested brightly, “and we’ve got a complete file right here.”

  As he’d intended, Williston was soon reading through the preceding twelve months of the Paradise City daily. The newspaper carried a lot of advertising, society news, sports reporting, syndicated columns, articles lauding local commerce and industry, and wire-service accounts of riots, violence and urban problems in Northern cities. The films featured at local theaters were almost entirely trash, and nearly every picture had received a fawningly favorable review from the obliging local critic. The published television schedules indicated that the single station—which Williston’s researchers had found to be independently owned by a group that included Pikelis—had achieved the near impossible by broadcasting the worst shows of all three networks. Aside from the nightly CBS news, there was practically nothing for an adult to watch.

  None of this really mattered to Williston, for his main interest lay in Barringer’s columns. There might be—should be—some clue or lead in what he’d written in the weeks before the murder, some hint as to why he’d been killed. Williston read every column for a month before the slaying, but noticed nothing that might provoke violent savagery from the Pikelis organization.

  “I’ll have to come back Monday and take detailed notes,” he told Miss Ashley when he got up to leave at 4:20.

  “We open at noon on Mondays,” she responded.

  It was still hot—it must have been more than ninety degrees as he stepped out into the late-afternoon glare of Cherry Street—and the furtive watcher who’d been waiting for Williston to emerge was wet and irritated. But he had the calculating cool of a professional, which he demonstrated as he followed the professor-spy back to the Jefferson. Five minutes after Williston entered his room, the watcher entered a telephone booth in the Central Smoke Shop across the street. Thirty seconds later, the phone jangled in Room 407.

  “You have a person-to-person call from Miami,” the hotel’s switchboard operator announced.

  “Okay. This is Arthur Warren. Who’s calling?”

  “Arthur, this is Stan Clearwater. Been trying to reach you all afternoon,” Arbolino’s familiar voice boomed. “I wanted you to know that the questionnaires are being sent to you in care of General Delivery at the Paradise City P.O.”

  “Fine. Good.”

  “What’s the weather like up there?” the man in the booth two hundred yards away asked.

  “What you’d expect. Hot and steamy, but no worse than Miami, I imagine.”

  Arbolino laughed, suggested a cold bottle of Dr. Pepper and reminded the pretended poll taker to check in with the Southern Public Opinion headquarters at least once a week.

  Clearwater—that was good, Williston reflected as he hung up.

  Clearwater, and all afternoon.

  The stunt man had been cautiously watching him all afternoon to see whether anyone else in Paradise City was following him, and Arbolino had detected no sign of surveillance. It was a standard OSS tactic that had been borrowed from the French Resistance, old but serviceable. Arbolino was exceptionally gifted in following people discreetly, the lean Vermonter recalled as he peeled off his wet shirt, but it was still disturbing that he hadn’t noticed him. That was not good, not adequate.

  Gilman would have noticed him.

  Ever wary and focussed, Gilman would surely have noticed him.

  “I’ll have to be as careful and compulsive as Gilman,” Williston told himself as he flicked on the television set.

  He certainly couldn’t count on Pikelis’ people being any less skillful than Arbolino in surveillance.

  Picture and sound leapt at him suddenly from the metal box, and for ninety seconds the professor gave his attention to the 1949 Grade C “Western” that WPAR-TV was offering on its Early Show. Williston felt a bit better as he realized that there were a few things in Paradise City on which he could count, after all.

  He could count on uniformly terrible local TV programming.

  It wasn’t much but it was a beginning, and you could build from there.

  15

  He looked like Gindler.

  The room clerk at Paradise House had the same bland face and peering eyes as Obersturmbannfuehrer Egon Gindler of the Third Reich’s Sicherheitspolizei, Carstairs realized as he stepped up to the desk. An obersturmbannfuehrer had been a lieutenant colonel and the Sicherheitspolizei—SIPO for short—had been Himmler’s Security Police, and Egon Gindler had been a prize bastard in that organization of prize bastards. He wasn’t anymore, of course. Williston had nearly cut him in two with a sub-machine gun in the ambush right after D-Day.

  “Your name isn’t Gindler, by any chance?” the millionaire inquired pleasantly.

  “No, sir. Hawkins. May I help you, sir?”

  The resemblance was uncanny.

  He even had the same thin lips and oily complexion as the late obersturmbannfuehrer.

  “Yes indeed, Mr. Hawkins, I’m sure you can help me. My name is P.T. Carstairs,” the second most eligible bachelor in the United States replied, “and I have carelessly left a small maroon Bentley outside your front door. There are three suitcases in the trunk.”

  He paused, smiled that famous smile.

  “Yes, Mr. Carstairs?”

  “In my left hand I hold a set of car keys, Mr. Hawkins. Please watch carefully, as I don’t intend to repeat this trick until my next appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.”

  “Yes, Mr. Carstairs.”

  He was plainly less intelligent, duller-witted than Gindler.

  “I now deposit these keys before you, draw my fine Cross ballpoint pen and prepare to autograph your registration card. Do you know why, Mr. Hawkins?”

  “You’re checking in?” the uneasy clerk speculated.

  Carstairs nodded approvingly.

  “You’re a sly fox,” the millionaire announced as he signed the form. Then he put away his silver-cased pen, opened his wallet and extracted a ten-dollar bill. “I have no doubt, Mr. Hawkins, that you may be trusted to give a piece of this to the keen young chap who parks my vehicle and brings in the luggage,” he continued, “but I’m also confident that you’ll carve yourself a piece as a down payment on wonderful service.”

  “We pride ourselves on wonderful service, Mr. Carstairs. I assume that you’d like a suite, sir. The Breckenridge Suite-bedroom, sitting room and bath—is forty-two dollars per—”

  “Let’s not talk money,” the millionaire suggested wryly. “It’s so grubby. Just do your thing, Mr. Hawkins, and I’m sure that it will be totally peachy. I’m going to love that suite. I just know it.”

  The clerk tapped a bell, sent a uniformed African American out to the car with the keys. Then he turned, stared at Carstairs intently.

  “You’re that New York fellow who was on the cover of Time,” he accused.

  The gun collector sighed.

  “You got me. It’s all true. I’ve even been in the Leonard Lyons column, although he misspelled my name,” Carstairs acknowledged. “The jet set’s friendliest sex maniac! The Thing with Twelve Bank Accounts has arrived from outer space! Hide your women and gi
rl children!”

  Uncertain whether he was being charmed or insulted, the clerk forced up a feeble grin. They’d had these New York wise guys at Paradise House before, not as rich as this one, though.

  “I thought you drove a blue Maserati,” Marvin Hawkins recalled as he remembered the article.

  “She’s gone, traded her for a couple of rare seventeenth-century pistols and a zinc truss,” Carstairs tossed over his shoulder en route to the bar.

  There was nothing impromptu about his remarks or behavior. They had worked it all out back at The Inferno. Since it was unlikely that the well-known millionaire playboy would not be recognized, Williston had argued that they should try to turn Carstairs’ fame into an asset instead of a liability. After all, P.T. Carstairs was (1) socially prominent; (2) rich; (3) handsome and unwed; (4) famous for his collection of antique firearms. Any one of these factors should attract the interest of Pikelis, who was (1) socially shaky as a notorious racketeer; (2) wealthy himself, and greedy; (3) father of an unmarried daughter whom he adored; (4) an ardent gun collector who’d surely heard of Carstairs’ remarkable hoard of historic weapons.

  It would be out of character for the “glamorous” millionaire to approach the ganglord, so Carstairs had to maneuver Little Johnny Pikelis into approaching him. That was why the second most eligible bachelor in America had mentioned the seventeenth-century pistols, hoping that word would be relayed to the fellow collector who ruled Paradise City. And while he hoped, he sat in the bar drinking Pernod and water and thought about the Swedish ballerina.

  “We don’t get much call for Pernod here, Mr. Carstairs,” the bartender observed as he put down a small bowl of salted peanuts.

  “Omigod, have I committed another awful social blunder?” the worldly infiltrator gasped in mock concern. “Have I once again offended the good, decent, simple people with my lewd and depraved tastes? If so, I apologize.”

  Harry Booth’s eyes flickered briefly in amusement.

  “If I didn’t know that you’re putting me on, Mr. Carstairs,” he replied casually, “I’d say that you were putting me on.”

  The blond millionaire shrugged.

  “Another hideous gaffe,” he lamented between sips of the yellow liquid. “You know, the truth is I only drink this stuff because I love licorice—have since I was the freckle-faced Huck Finn of Park Avenue.”

  The anise-flavored liquor was strong, chilling and soothing in a way that seemed to airbrush away all the rough edges of life. Whatever one might say about General de Gaulle’s anti-Americanism or bad breath, Carstairs reflected, the debt owed to the French people for supplying Pernod could never be fully repaid. Carstairs looked around the lounge at the half-dozen couples playing knees and preparing for the usual Saturday-night charm contests, realized sadly that these earnest whiskey lovers weren’t even trying.

  Harry Booth walked away to serve a short, sturdy man with gray eyes who had just entered.

  “One for the road,” Gilman ordered without a glance at his partner.

  Booth prepared the vodka Gibson quickly.

  “Excellent,” the man from Las Vegas judged after the first sip. His eyes wandered around the room, narrowed when he noticed the millionaire.

  “We’ve got a celebrity in the house,” Booth said softly.

  “I’ve seen the face somewhere, Harry…Who is he, Sonny Tufts?”

  “Parker Terence Carstairs, rich and hip and a famous collector of fast cars, young girls and old pistols.”

  Gilman studied his friend at the other end of the bar.

  “You think he dyes his hair, Harry?”

  The bartender chuckled, Gilman paid his bill and departed for the Fun Parlor as Carstairs signaled for another Pernod.

  “That fellow wanted to know whether you dye your hair,” Booth reported with the slightest touch of malice.

  “No, but I read Vogue at the dentist’s sometimes—and that ought to count for something,” the playboy counterpunched automatically.

  “Who was that clown anyway?” he added when the second Pernod-and-water arrived a few seconds later.

  “Stickman who works out at the Fun Parlor, our main center for games of chance and girls who’re sure. It ain’t Antibes or even Vegas, but for Paradise City it really swings.”

  Carstairs sucked at the drink, put it down and removed a dark cigar from his pocket. Then he pulled out a gold cutter that some woman—was it the passionate Roman contessa?—had given him, neatly snipped out a wedge from the tip and lit the corona. After two puffs, he extracted another expensive cigar from his jacket.

  “From me to you, Harry,” he said amiably, “so we can be friends and you can tell me about the rest of your fair city. There must be more action than just the…the Fun Parlor. That’s all right for the horny businessman, but where do the grown-ups play?”

  The bartender pointed the gift cigar in his hand at the ceiling.

  “Tonight they’ll be playing upstairs in the penthouse,” Booth confided. “Mr. John Pikelis is flinging a thing tonight—champagne-and-caviar party for his fair and only daughter—and all the influentials will be there. Nobody in this town would dare miss one of his parties without a note signed by a doctor, they say.”

  “What do you say, Harry?”

  “About him? Nothing. I don’t carry that much insurance, and neither does anybody else in Jefferson County. All I can tell you is that he’s a big tipper, a keen collector of aged arms—like yourself—and a very dedicated papa of a very pretty brunette who just returned from a year in Paris. Oh yeah, I hear that he’s charitable too.”

  Carstairs nodded, finished the drink.

  “He sounds like a terrific talent,” the millionaire said as he got up to go. “If only he was colored I could make him a star, a big star! Maybe with his own show—in prime time!”

  The bartender shook his head. “Please, Mr. Carstairs, no jokes like that around here,” he advised. “This isn’t Easthampton or Hollywood—just a square Southern city with a limited sense of humor and an even smaller interest in changing race relations. You can tell all the dirty stories you want, but no saucy jests about the remotest possibility any Caucasian could be colored. Please don’t.”

  “Another terrible blunder?”

  “Mr. Carstairs, for the sake of your future health and my future tips—please don’t.”

  The millionaire winked, puffed on his cigar, paid the bar bill and asked about the food and wine served in the hotel’s dining room.

  “If you’re looking for tournedos béarnaise and a ’62 Chambertin, I couldn’t guarantee either,” Harry Booth replied frankly, “but the shrimp are good and there’s a ’64 Chablis that you couldn’t knock. That’s what they say,” he modified cautiously.

  “But you’re not committing yourself, right?”

  “Mr. Carstairs, it’s going to take two men in white coats to get me committed.”

  When Carstairs sat down in the hotel dining room at 7:55 P.M., he found that the service was deft, the large Gulf shrimp fresh and properly sautéed in garlic butter, and the ’64 Chablis more than adequate. This was certainly a lot better than it had been living in the snowy woods all winter with the Maquis, moving often to escape Nazi troops hunting them. At the next table, a waiter was flaming some cherries for a middle-aged couple’s dessert, and the gun collector abruptly recalled—no, saw—the attack on the German fuel truck convoy on the Route Nationale near Dijon. He saw it so clearly, even the motorcyclists and the scout car leading the convoy and the insignia of the 14th S.S. Panzer Grenadiers on the vehicles.

  The first truck going up in flames when Barringer detonated the mine.

  The hail of phosphorus grenades.

  The cross-fire from the properly placed, correctly concealed machine guns.

  The explosions and the shouting and the screaming.

  The burning trucks and men.

  The smoke and the smell, the panting perfect escape.

  “Would you like some strawberries, sir?” the wai
ter beside him asked politely.

  Carstairs shifted his focus and attention immediately, like some television director switching cameras.

  “That will be fine,” he replied.

  The berries were fine and so was the strong-winy espresso, but neither of these satisfactions quite canceled out the uncertainty as to how he’d make contact with Pikelis. Gilman had warned him that it couldn’t be rushed, and the man from Las Vegas was right. Eased by this awareness, Parker Terence Carstairs lit a cigar and signaled for his bill. A moment later, the balding maître d’hotel arrived wearing the maître d’s usual polyethylene smile.

  “I trust that you enjoyed the dinner, Mr. Carstairs?”

  “Oh yes, so much so that I’ll even enjoy the check.”

  The maître d’ shook his head, about half an inch.

  “It’s been taken care of…by Mr. John Pikelis, sir,” he explained.

  Bull’s-eye.

  “And I thought old-fashioned Southern hospitality was dead,” Carstairs announced. ‘That’s very nice of him. I’d really like to thank him.”

  “You’ll be able to, quite easily. Mr. Pikelis has invited you to join him at a small party in the penthouse—here in the hotel—anytime after nine this evening.”

  “It’s after nine now, according to my slim gold timepiece,” the millionaire noted. Then he stood up to go.

  “Black tie, of course,” the maître d’hotel added.

  “Of course. I shall instantly ascend to don my rumpled tuxedo. Good meal, and your bartender was right about the ’64 Chablis.”

  The maître d’ was plainly puzzled.

  “What about the ’64 Chablis, Mr. Carstairs?”

  “You can’t knock it. Nossir, you can’t knock the ’64 Chablis if you’ve got any taste at all.”

  The maître was beaming as Carstairs left, and so was the second most eligible bachelor in the United States. Carstairs’ contentment continued after his return to the Breckenridge Suite on the seventh floor, for some thoughtful individuals had unpacked his bags and they’d even pressed the tuxedo. As he shaved, he made the decision—calculating just the way Gilman would have done.