Sledgehammer

by Walter Wager

  Williston managed to guide the conversation back to entertainment needs and tastes in Paradise City, completed his notes and then left to rent a car. He drove the blue Dart to the post office, mailed the two envelopes and picked up the package of questionnaires sent by the Southern Public Opinion Corporation. Then he telephoned the program director of WPAR-TV, who was so delighted to find a social scientist who respected TV that he invited the spy to lunch at the Country Club. Williston was starting his dessert when Carstairs arrived there for his sailing date with Kathy Pikelis. At the trailer camp, Arbolino sipped cold beer as he monitored the Paradise City police radio to determine the pattern of patrol-car movements and schedules. Late in the afternoon, the stunt man locked his trailer, unhooked the panel truck and set out to scout the area for possible safe places to rendezvous.

  That night he broadcast—in simple code—the map coordinates for three rendezvous points designated “Bob,” “Mort” and “Jo-Jo.” It was the elementary plus-two code, with spots that were located at the intersection of B and 3 on the Chamber of Commerce map of the county to be described as D-5. On another broadcast that same evening—the regular 11 P.M. news on the local radio station—the arrest and confession of Sam Clayton were finally reported. The announcement was brief and routine, reflecting the news director’s attitude that “another colored stabbing” was hardly significant. In fact, it had little meaning except to Reverend Ezra Snell, at whose church dance Clayton had been during the time of the murder, Clayton’s relatives and a young woman named Shirleyrose, who’d been with the accused from 9 P.M. until noon the next day. Neither the minister nor Shirleyrose knew exactly what to do, each being aware of what the local police might do to people who “made trouble.”

  In varying degrees, just about everyone in Paradise City was afraid of offending the Pikelis organization. It wasn’t only the police who frightened people, Arbolino, Williston and Gilman concluded when they met at “Jo-Jo”—the rendezvous point near the quarry on. Route 99—late on Wednesday night. The thugs employed as collectors by the Merchants’ Security Service and other corporate fronts were dreaded even more, Williston and Gilman had learned, had overheard and pieced together from a hundred snatches of conversation. They made their plan for the first operation, and half an hour later—just before 4 A.M.—Gilman relayed the scheme to P.T. Carstairs. Using an infrared beamer whose signals were invisible to the naked eye, he flashed the message onto the wall of the office building across the street from the Paradise House. Wearing the special goggles that looked like standard racing-driver gear, the rich gun collector had no difficulty “reading” the morse message.

  Thursday: reconnaissance.

  Friday: a test run.

  Saturday afternoon: the first blow against the Occupation Forces.

  At 5:20 P.M. on Saturday, Luther Hyatt entered the lobby of the office building at 129 Fletcher Avenue and took the elevator to the fourth floor. He was the last of three collectors to deliver money to the suite occupied by the Merchants’ Security Service. This was a fact; it was seen by trained observers and it fit the pattern of the previous days. In a few minutes, the M.S.S. bookkeeper would close the Venetian blinds. The stunt man watching from the panel truck across the street could almost hear Williston’s briefing again.

  “Nearly immediately after he closes the blinds, he completes the count and gives the money to the fat one…two minutes, maybe three. Then the fat man takes the elevator down and drops the cash into the night depository chute at the Paradise Commercial Bank across the street. We won’t have much time for this, so as soon as those blinds go you hit the horn twice—long and short. Then you move into position at the loading area in the back alley.”

  Arbolino glanced up, puffed on his cigarette and then turned toward the doorway of a nearby shoe store as if he were waiting for someone inside. The streets were crowded with Saturday shoppers and traffic was steady if not heavy. This operation would have to go exactly right, because there couldn’t be any quick escape in this traffic.

  The blind closed.

  He punched the horn twice, started the truck a moment later.

  In Suite 402, a small fussy man in gold-rimmed bifocals meticulously proceeded with his ritual addition. It was almost a religious ceremony, as his solemn voice communicated.

  “5,210…5,230…5,250…5,260…270. Good, it’s all here.”

  “It’s always all here,” the assassin pointed out while he shook his head in exasperation.

  Ignoring this irrelevance, the bookkeeper proceeded to make out the bank deposit slips and place them in the two prepared envelopes with the cash. Then he handed the envelopes and the key to the bank’s night chute to the fat man.

  “Thank you, Beasley,” the assassin said sarcastically.

  “You’re quite welcome, Luther.”

  Hyatt walked out into the corridor, stuffing the envelopes into the pockets of his seersucker jacket as he moved toward the elevator. Inside the elevator, Associate Professor Andrew T. Williston waited. Two minutes earlier, Gilman had taken up his “covering position” in the fourth-floor service hall and the teacher had stopped the elevator at the fourth floor by simply throwing the emergency cut-off switch. The man from Las Vegas would be watching, holding the door to the stairway half an inch ajar.

  Hyatt pressed the elevator button, and the door opened almost immediately. The brief interval reflected the seconds it took Williston to flick the “on” switch.

  As the door opened, Luther Hyatt got a terribly short glimpse of somebody in coveralls and some sort of hat or cap.

  Then he got something else—in the face.

  Williston raised the can of Mace, aimed for his enemy’s eyes and nose.

  A four-second burst, and then a three-second squirt to make sure.

  The results were exactly as the manufacturer had promised, precisely those seen on television news broadcasts. Hyatt’s hands went to his eyes, which felt as if they were on fire, and when he tried to scream because of the pain he found that his throat was all knotted and his chest hurt and he could barely breath. It was awful. He staggered, stumbled and gasped helplessly. He couldn’t see anyone or anything.

  He slumped against the wall, barely conscious. Gilman hurried up behind him with the hypodermic needle in his hand, and as soon as Williston closed the door the man from Las Vegas pumped the drug into Luther Hyatt’s bulging left wrist.

  “Bien fait,” the assassin heard somebody say a hundred miles away.

  He was unconscious by the time they loaded him into the truck. Arbolino had backed it right up against the building’s freight and garbage loading door, so no one passing by on the street twenty yards away saw the body. At 5:28, Arbolino guided the vehicle out into the Fletcher Avenue traffic, and Gilman—in the rear compartment with Williston and the prisoner—automatically looked at the luminous face of his watch.

  One minute late.

  Not bad.

  Not good, but not bad for a first operation after all these years.

  At 10:50 that evening, Mr. John Pikelis, his daughter and the second most eligible bachelor in the United States were proceeding along Central Avenue graciously—in Mr. Pikelis’ 1970 Cadillac, with driver and stereo—en route to the Fun Parlor. The visitor had expressed some interest in trying his luck “for a few quid,” and the host was curious as to how P.T. Carstairs would behave in a gambling house. Sometimes you could learn surprising things about men—especially controlled men such as Carstairs—by how they acted and reacted in a casino.

  The car slowed, stopped.

  A large crowd of people—obviously emerging from the last show at the Central Movie Theater fifty yards away—stood in front of the windows of the Herman Brothers department store. There were so many people that they overflowed the sidewalk out into the street itself, and most of them were giggling. A few were simply gaping or shaking their heads, but the majority were grinning or chuckling.

  “What’s going on, Tom?” Pikelis demanded.

 
Before the chauffeur could reply, the siren of an approaching radio patrol car sounded and the crowd started to disperse immediately. By the time the police car arrived, half of the spectators had moved on as if they didn’t wish to be associated with or blamed for whatever was in the window.

  “Drive up close, Tom. Let’s see what this is all about,” ordered the racketeer.

  The sound of another police siren—not too far away—cut the night as the Cadillac rolled forward to within a dozen yards of the window. Pikelis took one look, blinked.

  “Closer.”

  The limousine stopped directly in front of the display that had been attracting so much attention.

  It was, to be fair, a rather unusual display that would have attracted attention in any department-store window anywhere. Even the elaborate Christmas extravaganzas staged by Neiman-Marcus couldn’t touch this for sheer novelty, simplicity and directness of message. Luther Hyatt was sitting in a rocker in the middle of the window. He was naked, unconscious. His hands were tied together and his feet were tied together, and some wag had placed a curly red wig—slightly askew—atop his large head. His genitalia were also covered, by a heap of crumpled U.S. currency, and a few odd bills peeped out from between his toes and the fringe of the ridiculous wig. In case the intended message wasn’t entirely clear, somebody had printed it—in lipstick—on Hyatt’s chest.

  Doyle, Dane, Bernbach would have loved the whole idea, for that creative New York agency made its name on visually arresting ads with short, punchy copy.

  This was certainly lively in visual terms, and the copy couldn’t have been much shorter.

  It was, in fact, only two words.

  Clean, simple, zingy.

  Two words—in large print.

  DON’T PAY.

  17

  Graffiti—that’s what it was.

  It wasn’t scrawled on any lavatory wall and didn’t include any of those historic Anglo-Saxon sex words that are now being used so heroically by young revolutionaries in their war against materialism, soulless conformity, racism, imperialism, the meddling fascisti of the post-thirty generation and the sadists who run all educational institutions and drugstores.

  The two words may not have been offensive in Chicago or Los Angeles or London, but in Paradise City they were plainly obscene. If not legally obscene, they were certainly indecent and calculated to incite a breach of the public peace and order. Therefore it was surprising that the impact of this subversive phrase wasn’t reflected on the faces of either the two policemen or the people in the limousine. The officers who’d stepped from the radio car looked vaguely embarrassed, slightly guilty, as if they’d dropped a touchdown pass and let the home team down. Pikelis’ driver took one glance, then stared away. The racketeer’s daughter studied the bizarre sight thoughtfully and calmly, seemingly unaware that it had any relevance to her father or her life. As for John Pikelis, his eyes were a bit wider and colder than usual, but his big face was empty of any emotion. He was showing no concern, no rage, no reaction at all.

  Careful, Carstairs thought.

  He’s being cool and careful, and I’ve got to follow that same line.

  “What’s it all about?” the handsome spy asked.

  Pikelis shrugged.

  “Hard to say,” he answered.

  “Practical joke? College kid stunt?” the visitor tested.

  “I doubt it.”

  The second police car arrived, and Ben Marton stepped out to survey the scene. After one quick look at the window, he said Something to the men from the first radio car and they separated. One officer hurried around the corner—presumably to the store’s rear entrance where a watchman might be found—and the other patrolman strode purposefully toward the front door where he searched for a night emergency bell.

  Marton recognized the limousine, walked over to confer.

  Pikelis pressed the button that opened the rear window of the air-conditioned Cadillac, spoke first.

  “Mr. Carstairs—excuse me, Petie—was just asking what this is all about,” the ganglord announced blandly. “You got any ideas, Captain?”

  “Nothing definite, but I’m going to give it a real good look and a real deep think,” Marton promised.

  “If this is some sort of consumer protest about the store’s high prices,” the spy mused, “it certainly is dramatic.”

  “It’s bizarre,” agreed the girl beside him, “like something out of an avant-garde film.”

  Marton shook his head.

  “Our consumers aren’t that crazy,” he judged. “This is weird, real weird. It’s like some hippie stunt, but no bunch of smart-ass kids could do that to Luther.”

  “Luther?” asked Carstairs.

  “The man in the window. He’s an ex-policeman, no pushover. I dunno.”

  At that moment, one of the uniformed men from the patrol car stepped into the rear of the display window from inside the store and began to untie unconscious Luther Hyatt.

  “I’m curious about this whole thing, Ben,” Pikelis announced, “so let me know when you find out who did it—and why.”

  Then he pressed the button that closed the Cadillac’s right rear window, abruptly terminating the conversation as his totalitarian power permitted him to do. The police had been given their orders, and John Pikelis had no intention of wasting the rest of his Saturday night on this matter. Equally important, he certainly wasn’t going to risk exposing his relationship with the Merchants’ Security Service to either his daughter or the second most eligible bachelor in the United States. With both these considerations in mind, the racketeer who dominated Jefferson County steered the talk to the Fun Parlor until they arrived there.

  As the car swung into the driveway off the main road, the yellow-haired spy automatically scanned the defenses. There was a high stone wall, about eight or nine feet, topped by three strands of naked wire that were probably electrified. There was one guard in the gate house—the window looked thick, possibly bullet-proof glass—and he controlled the heavy metal barrier. Inside, the Fun Parlor itself was set back about 150 yards. Surrounded by pleasantly landscaped lawn and shrubbery and flanked by a large parking lot, the window-less two-story structure resembled a reasonably tasteful bowling alley.

  From the outside.

  Inside, it was quite another matter.

  Elaborate crystal chandeliers, red velvet drapes and deep wall-to-wall carpeting in a dramatic shade of royal blue.

  The eyes of the hat-check girl were also blue, and her imposing wig was precisely the same shade of crimson as the drapes. Her skin was a pale powdered ivory, and a large amount of it was showing in the low-cut blue costume. She had a lovely smile, a fondness for stray kittens and instant affection for gentlemen who were generous. She never asked questions, and she was extremely popular.

  Willie Dennison, manager of the Fun Parlor, could have explained all this to Carstairs but he was much too busy welcoming Pikelis. It wasn’t every night that the man who owned the man who technically owned the Fun Parlor—indeed, the proprietor of the entire county—dropped in to visit. Thin mustachioed Willie Dennison had a great respect for Mr. Pikelis, not only because Pikelis had given him this $40,000-a-year job but also because of the executive efficiency and unobtrusive grace—no, style—with which he ruled the county. Like the ex-German rocket scientists in Huntsville or the advertising agencies that can cheerfully handle political campaigns for either party, Mr. Pikelis was a professional and Willie Dennison—as another professional—respected his competence.

  And his tailor.

  As he often said.

  “Good evening, Mr. Pikelis,” he welcomed sincerely. “And Miss Kathy, it’s a delight to see you. Welcome home.”

  She smiled—very well—and thanked him.

  “You’re looking so well, Miss Kathy,” Dennison pressed on. “So rosy and pretty—you must have enjoyed Europe a great deal.”

  “Well, I’ve had a pretty good time since I returned to Paradise City, too,” she answer
ed.

  There was that light in her eyes—that woman light—and the casino manager intuitively guessed that it had something to do with the yellow-haired stranger who stood so close to her. Dennison’s glance flickered to the man’s familiar face for a moment, and then Pikelis introduced him.

  “This is Mr. P.T. Carstairs, a visitor to Paradise City and, I hope, a friendly one. I’d like you to treat Mr. Carstairs as my personal guest, Willie.”

  “Of course. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Carstairs. Won’t you all come in?”

  Dennison knew who Carstairs was, and he knew what it meant when Kathy Pikelis glowed as the handsome celebrity took her arm. Pikelis nodded slightly in paternal approval, pleased that his daughter and the socialite bachelor were getting along so well. Not being a member of the Sicilian-Neapolitan underworld federation that dominated organized crime, he was in no position to marry his daughter off to the son of some capo mafioso who controlled “the family” in Detroit or Boston. Not even if he wanted to—which he didn’t. No, John Pikelis’ daughter would wed somebody important and legitimate—in a cathedral—and it would be in all the papers all over the country.

  It was, of course, premature to think that seriously about P.T. Carstairs.

  And it would certainly be immature to discuss this possibility with anyone, so Pikelis quickly protected himself from any such slip by asking the gambling-house manager about the state of business. Aware that Little John Pikelis was informed each week—to the penny—exactly what Fun Parlor income and profits were, Dennison blandly acknowledged that everything was “going nicely” and complimented Mr. Pikelis on his splendid new suit.

  “Why, thanks, Willie,” the ganglord answered. “Remind me to give you my tailor’s name and address in New York.”

  Dennison smiled appreciatively, conscious that Pikelis would never do so because it simply wasn’t appropriate for an employee—even a senior and well-paid employee—to wear the same clothes as the man who ruled Jefferson County. Committed to the appropriate, Dennison continued the pretense and guided these extremely important guests into the “lounge,” where some thirty couples were dancing.