Sledgehammer

by Walter Wager

  Then she changed the subject—quite openly—and asked what the police chief had reported on the strange event of the previous evening. She listened to his reply with far less interest than Professor Andrew Williston, who was eavesdropping on the infinity transmitter and carefully taping the entire conversation. This tape—and the others that would follow—would be mailed to a certain postal box in Miami, where they would be picked up by an employee of the Southern Public Opinion Corporation who would place them in a safety-deposit box rented under the name of still another company. Williston listened until noon, then left for his meeting at rendezvous point “Bob,” where Gilman and Arbolino would be waiting.

  They would discuss the next operation.

  Little Johnny Pikelis had been absolutely right.

  There was a lot more coming—soon.

  Someone else in Paradise City had also made the same guess. As the three infiltrators shaped their plans that Sunday afternoon, that someone else was dropping quarters into a pay telephone outside a roadside hamburger stand nine miles away. He was speaking to a man in Atlanta, a man with an unlisted telephone number and a number of armed associates and a great curiosity about conditions in Paradise City.

  “Bud, this is Freddie,” said the man who wasn’t Freddie to the Atlantan who’d never been christened Bud. “Something’s going on here. Something we hadn’t bargained for…No, I’m not going into it all over the phone. I’ll send you a picture postcard…All I can say right now is that it looks real weird…Listen, if I knew what the hell was going on I’d let you know…No, I don’t even pretend to know what the score is. I’m not sure what the game is, Man, or even who’s playing, so how can I tell you what the score is…Yeah, yeah…I think it’s going to get rough around here and the hunting season may start about thirteen weeks early this year…Am I getting through to you, Buddy Boy?…Your concern about my health and welfare is touching, definitely touching…How bad is it here? Well, only yesterday a former policeman was kidnapped and robbed and stripped naked and left bare-assed in the window of a department store. Now if that ain’t a sign of the moral decay of our times, Buddy Boy, I don’t know what is. Why, that’s a Federal offense! No…no, but I’m starting to feel a little lonely and it might be nice to have a family reunion down here soon…I’ll let you know when the weather’s right. It’s warm right now, and I don’t think we ought to wait till it’s too damn hot…Buddy, I just know it’s going to get hotter in the immediate future…People will sweat and tempers will get frayed and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a number of serious accidents, domestic disputes and loud noises in the night. You had better tell that to the family…Read my next letter to Uncle Jed; he’ll understand. He’s got that wonderful warm feeling for people, like Vito used to have…Well, I thought it was funny.”

  Then he hung up the telephone, stepped out of the hot booth and mopped his wet brow with a handkerchief. The bell on the instrument rang, and he knew it was the operator calling to ask for another thirty or forty cents for overtime. It rang and rang, and he listened, smiling. It was dishonest and illegal to ignore the demand for proper payment, and that was why he smiled. He took a perverse pleasure in the thought that he was illegally beating a large organization out of such a ridiculous sum. He was getting tired of rules and large organizations and violence.

  As he drove back toward Paradise City in his yellow ’67 Mustang, he listened to the two-o’clock news on the car radio and wasn’t at all surprised to hear nothing of the bizarre hijacking. Pikelis controlled the paper and the broadcasting stations, reflected the man who telephoned Atlanta almost every Sunday, but that wasn’t going to stop the people who’d pulled this job. They had designed it and worked it like a military operation, like a trained commando team. But they hadn’t done it for the money.

  Publicity.

  They wanted publicity. That had to be it.

  They wanted everyone in town to know that they were there and that they had no fear of the Pikelis organization.

  It was more than that.

  They were showing their contempt, publicly humiliating a well-known Pikelis thug in an open challenge.

  “Jeezus,” the man in the Mustang said as he realized the implications, “this is a declaration of war.”

  The people in Atlanta and the people who controlled the people in Atlanta weren’t going to like that at all. The plan hadn’t called for any war, and if the previous night’s incident was any clue it was going to be a wild and weird war indeed. The unknown and uncounted invaders might do anything, hit anywhere at any time with any tactics and any weapons. There was absolutely no way of predicting what they’d do or guessing why they’d come, but if publicity and defiance was their immediate goal the next attack would be soon and spectacular.

  “Wednesday night,” Williston announced as he, Arbolino and Gilman pored over the drawings and photos in the shaded isolation of the rendezvous point in the woods. The smell of the green trees was strong, but the three men were focussed entirely upon the next strike.

  “We go Wednesday night,” the psychology professor explained, “because we want to keep the spotlight, to shake up their organization and to show that we’re not a one-shot group. We’ve got to maintain our momentum, and we’ve got to keep the initiative if we even hope to build a Resistance here.”

  “Even if we keep hitting them, Andy,” Gilman warned, “it’s going to be tough to get any significant Resistance movement going here. This is a pretty complacent town. As long as nobody gets mugged on Main Street and the Reader’s Digest arrives on time every month, I doubt whether these people are going to get mad enough to risk their necks.”

  Williston nodded.

  “We need an issue. That’s obvious. We need an issue around which enough people can or will rally,” he agreed. “In the meanwhile, we’ve got to keep kicking around and embarrassing the Pikelis organization until their own people get shaky and the rest of the town realizes that these hoods aren’t invulnerable.”

  “Any ideas on what our issue might be?” wondered the stunt man.

  The teacher shrugged. “Maybe John Pikelis will give us one,” he joked hopefully.

  Williston had no way of knowing that this most unlikely possibility was, in fact, already moving toward becoming a reality.

  19

  Late that afternoon, Miss Kathy Pikelis received about $50 worth of roses—the large long roses—in a box delivered personally by the proprietor of Barton’s Blooms, Paradise City’s most expensive florist shop. Most people would have some difficulty in arranging for such a delivery on a Sunday when the store was closed, but five $20 bills passed to a hotel desk clerk—even one who looks like a dead Nazi named Gindler—can work more wonders than two bottles of Bayer aspirin or three hours of silent prayer. Not that P.T. Carstairs would ever put down prayer or nationally advertised headache remedies, but he had worked out his own ways of coping—especially with women—and he saw no reason to change his methods after all these years of success.

  There was a card with the roses.

  “Compliments of a friend—P.T. C.,” it read.

  Kathy Pikelis smiled fleetingly, and then sighed.

  Friend?

  He was a bastard all right, a perfect gentleman and a perfect lover and a perfect bastard. She had no ideas as to what to do about him, or what he meant to do about her. She didn’t realize that America’s second most eligible bachelor—so perfect in so many ways—wasn’t quite sure either. That annoyed him. He realized what he ought to do, and he would do it—he told himself. But he was still annoyed, with the girl and with himself. Gilman and Williston had masterminded all the research and planning with great care, but neither of them had told him that this girl would be so vulnerable. He could handle her, of course, and he did. He was absolutely charming—with just the right amount of warmth and the barest smiling promise of tenderness—when he took her water skiing that afternoon. He was very good at that too, very strong and skillful without being the least bit exhib
itionistic. It reminded her of the way he’d made love to her the night before, and that visceral recollection started tiny shivers deep within her that she had to struggle to control. The heat of the July sun didn’t help her a bit; nothing did. The bikini that she wore was small, but when this man looked at her she felt absolutely naked—and she didn’t mind. No, she minded but she didn’t care.

  She wanted, and the wanting made her look even more attractive.

  Carstairs told her how desirable she looked when they returned to the Paradise House, and she knew that he wasn’t lying. But he wasn’t really committing himself either. Even after they had the iced vodka drinks in his suite and he kissed her and they made love again, even after she held him tight and tears diffused the glow in her eyes and he reassured her, she sensed—as a woman can—that there were reservations, things left unsaid because he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak of them.

  “It would almost be better if you’d lie to me,” she said with her head on his shoulder.

  He looked at her, stroked her hair gently.

  “No, I imagine that you’ve heard all the lies you’d ever need. You’re a lovely young woman, Kathy,” he answered, “and I’d bet that a lot of males have told you a lot of tales and that not one of them ever fooled you for a second. That’s not my bag, anyway. Remember? I’m the most honest dirty old man you know.”

  “I know you’re not a dirty old man either, you bastard,” she announced.

  “That’s ridiculous. Of course I am.”

  This sudden recognition that he wasn’t came as an immense relief and release; she smiled and kissed him with an odd spurt of joy. He would say what there was to be said—whatever it was—when the time came. She kissed him again.

  “What are you, a sex maniac?” Carstairs jested.

  “Weeell, if you don’t have anything else planned for the next half hour—”

  “I’m not talking about any half hour,” the handsome millionaire countered. “I’m thinking about the long run—say, a week or a month. We may not be compatible. I’m so much older. I’m thinking about the generation gap.”

  “I just adore men who talk dirty,” she replied as she drew him down to her again.

  Less than one hundred yards away, her father was talking—cleanly and warily—on the telephone to a man named Irving in Miami. To be entirely truthful and grammatical, he was named Irving everywhere—including the files of three Federal agencies where there were extensive reports on the slot machines and other “gaming devices” sold by Irving’s company. The bulk of the firm’s product went to casinos and gambling establishments owned by associates of Irving’s oh-so-very-silent partner, a white-haired elder statesman named Meyer who had $6,000,000, a lot of friends in the Mafia and an inconvenient criminal record that made it useful to have Irving “front” the company. If anybody in the Mafia or the Cosa Nostra or the American Dental Association or the Girl Scouts of Montreal—it’s hard to keep track of what they’re labeling the Syndicate these days—was or were or had been meddling in Paradise City, then Irving could surely find out from Meyer because Meyer knew a lot of people everywhere and had a terrific memory. Meyer was also the sort of sensible person who deplored trouble and violence, Pikelis reasoned, and could also serve to negotiate a peaceful and reasonable settlement.

  Now none of these matters were said right out over the phone, but Pikelis referred to “some trouble” with “people from out of town, I think” and Irving assured his good customer that he’d “ask around tomorrow” to see if “anybody had heard anything.” Meyer didn’t like to be bothered at home on Sunday because he was having more gall-bladder trouble, but Irving didn’t mention this on the telephone because any law-enforcement agents who might be tapping were certainly well aware of Meyer’s gall-bladder problems and Irving wouldn’t give those lice the satisfaction anyway. Irving was loyal as well as prudent; he was also Meyer’s nephew by marriage. There were practically no limits to what Irving would do for his uncle-in-law. Why, he’d even cultivated a taste for veal cutlet parmigiana just to get along with Uncle Meyer’s Northern friends when they visited Miami. You couldn’t help liking good-hearted Irving, Pikelis thought as he hung up the phone, but yet nobody did.

  The next morning’s Paradise City paper announced that Coroner Percy Farnsworth had discovered that the late Pearl Delilah Tubbs had been barbarously violated both before and after she’d been stabbed to death, and reported that the rape-murder trial of Sam Clayton would start on Thursday. Judge Ralph Gillis had declared that he’d appoint a lawyer for the accused if Clayton couldn’t secure his own counsel. District Attorney Reece Everett piously declined to discuss the case to avoid possibly prejudicing any members of the jury “in accord with recent rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court,” but confided “off the record” that the sexual aspects of the trial would make shocking reading. The police reporter who wrote the story didn’t quote this, but hinted very broadly that sensational testimony might be anticipated.

  The case apparently attracted very little attention in the middle-class white neighborhood where Williston was going through the motions of poll-taking that morning, a ritual that he used to try to feel out the temper of the community and to search for potential recruits for a resistance movement. Nobody mentioned the imminent murder trial, and nobody showed the slightest signs of discontent with the governing and criminal exploitation of Paradise City. One thirty-two-year-old blond housewife indicated some discontent with her husband’s performance and implied that Williston needn’t hurry away, but nobody talked about the immorality or viciousness of the Pikelis organization. This town didn’t even know that it was occupied, Williston brooded, so how could it fight to expel the Nazis?

  He had lunch with the mayor at the City Club; Ashley’s press secretary had set it up because he calculated that it might make a story for the paper. Roger Stuart Ashley didn’t get much publicity because he didn’t actually need it—since no one opposed him—but he still had some shreds of ego, and the press secretary liked to show that he was doing his job. The lunch abounded in bourbon highballs, fried chicken, and well-marinated platitudes about the emerging economic boom and cultural explosion of the New South. The mayor also made a few shrewd observations about public tastes and political power, revealing that there was still some intelligence and awareness behind that photogenic face despite all the years of drink and corruption. Degraded but not wholly destroyed, Ashley came through to Williston as a weak, wily man whose commitment to his own comfortable survival would preclude any opposition to John Pikelis.

  A photo was taken of the two men, sent with a copy of the mayor’s prepared statement on the city’s future to each of the local news media. After lunch, the spy resumed his public-opinion survey—edging into the Lowell Square area where the more affluent black residents lived. There weren’t that many of them—some lawyers, doctors, insurance men, undertakers, merchants and restaurant and bar owners. It was just off Lowell Square that he saw the First Baptist Church and recalled that Mayor Ashley had referred to its minister as “a responsible clergyman who speaks for many in the Nigra community.” It was not a large church and the minister’s office in the rear of the building wasn’t large either, but Reverend Ezra Snell was big. He was big, ebony-black, slow-speaking and courteous.

  “I don’t wish to be inhospitable to visitors,” he declared in tones of dignified sonority, “but I rather doubt that I can answer these questions about the future entertainment market in our community.”

  He’d probably taken some courses in oratory—or perhaps in acting—at college many years earlier, and now this barrel-chested man projected both richly and routinely. He had the voice and style of a powerfully effective speaker of the old school, the manner of a natural leader.

  “There are some other questions on my mind of a more urgent nature,” the minister continued soberly. He paused, studied the spy for several seconds. “You are employed by a Miami research firm, is that correct?” he asked.

  “Yes,
for the past three years.”

  “But you’re not a Southerner, Mr. Warren?”

  “No, I’m from Vermont originally. I guess you can hear that in my voice,” the teacher acknowledged. “I’ve lived in New York too. Why do you ask?”

  The black clergyman hesitated, phrasing his reply precisely.

  “I don’t intend to embarrass you, Mr. Warren, but I find that I have—perhaps because of the difficult nature of our times—I have a tendency to speak differently to Southerners. And I guess that most of them—the whites, I mean—talk differently to me. I don’t mean to criticize or complain, you understand.”

  “I think so, sir. Of course, there are plenty of Northerners and Westerners—lots of people in all parts of the country—who’d speak ‘differently’ to black people. Our company does work in many states, and I meet such people quite often.”

  Snell nodded.

  “I have a public-opinion problem of my own right now,” he said quietly. “One of our church members is going on trial for a murder he didn’t commit, and our people are going to be very bitter—very angry and full of hate—when he is executed.”

  “You’re talking about the Clayton case?”

  “Yes. Samuel Clayton did not kill Pearlie Tubbs, and he surely didn’t rape her.”

  “What makes you so sure, sir?”

  “Because no one would have to rape her. She was a prostitute, and she had been for years. Her mother threw this pitiful harlot out of the family home when she was fifteen—eight years ago. Anybody could have had Pearlie Tubbs for a pint of gin or a couple of dollars, any hour of any day of the week. Pearlie Tubbs was a fallen soul, and she’d fallen all the way to the gutter.”

  “Maybe Clayton didn’t have any money, not even a pint of gin,” Williston challenged.

  The old black man shook his head.

  “That’s impossible. He had his own business, his own ice truck, and he had his own girl anyway. He was at a church dance—I saw him—with his girl until well after midnight, after the murder. A number of people saw him at the dance.”