Sledgehammer

by Walter Wager

  24

  Friday, July 25, was—according to your point of view—a very groovy day or a total drag. It was a very groovy day for a couple of imaginary and imaginative people who called themselves Judy Ellis and Arthur Warren, but they stayed in a cozy cool room most of the day and concentrated on the relatively simple task of finding out more about each other. She called down for food and drink, and he found that he liked all the records that she played on her phonograph. In many ways, their tastes were compatible. For example, they both enjoyed George Shearing and neither of them thought that Andy Warhol or Mrs. Mao Tse-tung would make a very good President. Of the United States of America, that is. Dizzy Gillespie? Well, he was a big talent not to be brushed off lightly. Yes, Dizz might turn out to be a real “heavy” President. He had class and experience, and he’d already been cleared for “security” by both the State Department and the FBI as a prelude to government-sponsored tours overseas. He certainly played a much better horn than Spiro Agnew, the mayor of Chicago or John Wayne.

  For Ben Marton, the twenty-fifth was a total drag. A clutch of out-of-town reporters arrived to interview that bigmouthed Davidson, the investigation at the Fun Parlor produced no solid leads and none of his police could find any group of strangers who might be the raiding party. As if that weren’t bad enough, Pikelis remained in a grim mood as the initial surveillance reports on recently hired Fun Parlor employees were all unrewarding. Aside from the discovery that the cleaning woman named Inez was stealing a few napkins, there was nothing worth mentioning. That night, Marton sent out a few of his most reliable men to talk to the African Americans whom Clayton had initially insisted could confirm his presence at the church dance at the time of the murder. The idea was to explain firmly that it would cause considerable waste and trouble if any of these good folks were to come to court to testify, because the city already had a cast-iron case against the confessed criminal. Such precautionary warnings weren’t usually necessary in Jefferson County, but the chief of police saw no harm in being a bit extra wary in light of the unusual situation. Shortly after ten o’clock, the last of his messengers reported back. Of the seven blacks they’d gone to see, three had left town—without any forwarding addresses. One of these three was the strapping girl whom Clayton had described as his fiancée and night-long companion, Shirleyrose Woods, who had never been out of Jefferson County before. Her brother said that she’d mentioned getting a job in one of those Miami Beach hotels, or trying to get one, or something.

  “I think the three who took off were just scared, Chief,” Sergeant Wallace reported. “Too scared to stay let alone show their ugly faces in court.”

  Maybe. Maybe not. Probably, but could you be sure?

  Marton brooded, decided not to mention the uncertainty to Pikelis, who was already extremely irritable. Ashley wasn’t helping much by stepping up his drinking, and Reece Everett was fussing and fuming and pouting like some nervous high-school girl afraid that her mother might find out what she’d been doing with the swimming coach. To add to all the unpleasantness, Mrs. Marton was on the Southern Comfort again—in which case anything might happen. When the extra patrols and the informers and the brothel keepers produced no clues about the faceless invaders, Marton shrugged as if he weren’t bothered and passed the word to keep looking. All his experience told him that there was no reason to be bothered, for the enemy would make some mistake—some tiny error that would identify them as outsiders—and then he’d wipe them out as he had other intruders in the past. But he was bothered, for the sophistication and boldness and ingenuity of this group wasn’t at all similar to that of the others.

  There was something different involved.

  These people didn’t even kill; they cut like surgeons.

  There was no way of predicting where they’d cut next, so the corrupt captain could do little but watch and wait.

  Saturday—nothing.

  Sunday—nothing.

  Nothing that anyone reported, anyway. Andrew Williston—furtively but very gracefully—met Judy Barringer and drove her out to a secluded beach for a picnic of cold chicken and white wine, Niersteiner.

  Monday—nothing, nothing that anyone in the Pikelis organization noticed. There was nothing to attract their attention to the newspaper advertisement offering a blue bicycle for $55 that was buried in the second column of the classified section, no reason to tap Reverend Snell’s phone that afternoon or to follow him to the rendezvous where Williston laid out the details of the intelligence-gathering operation. There was no way of guessing that the Invaders now had an additional two hundred pairs of eyes and ears working for them, that the information was being funneled through the minister of the First Baptist Church to a psychology professor who carried a silenced M-3 submachine gun. Black porters, waiters, delivery boys, maids, bootblacks, taxi drivers and tavern owners—all so familiar and anonymous that nobody noticed them as they moved through the city on their normal routine duties—had joined the secret war.

  Now the Sledgehammer team was no longer a quartet; it was an army.

  It was everywhere and yet it was invisible, almost like the Viet Cong. In accord with Williston’s instructions, Snell recruited selectively and cautiously—picking only the cleverest and most trustworthy members of his congregation. None of them knew who the other agents were; the network was organized with the same rules and security procedures that SOE and OSS had learned—the hard way—in developing their réseaux in Occupied France. By Thursday, useful information was beginning to pour in at an accelerating pace.

  It was put to good use. When the big trailer-truck delivered the eighteen slot machines on August 1, the OSS alumni knew when and where it would arrive and Arbolino was able to film the unloading with a concealed motion-picture camera from a roof across the street from the Games Inc. warehouse at the corner of Prince Street. The name of the company and the street sign were easy to read, and the faces of the men and the licence plates of the truck were equally clear in the excellent prints that were delivered two days later to (1) CBS, NBC and ABC news headquarters in New York; (2) the FBI in Washington; and (3) the office of the attorney general in the state capital. If the pictures weren’t plain enough, the unsigned letters that accompanied the film filled in the details.

  Interstate movement of gambling devices raised a Federal question, and the violation of state law prohibiting slot machines was even clearer. The FBI immediately began its usual thorough and careful investigation, while the state attorney general talked to the governor about what to do. One of the assistant attorneys general knew exactly what to do; he told the senator from Jefferson County to warn Pikelis. That message reached the ganglord at 6 P.M. on the fourth, the same evening that the film was shown nationally on both the CBS-TV Walter Cronkite show and NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley news stanza.

  Most of the adult population of Jefferson County saw it on the Cronkite telecast that WPAR-TV regularly carried, and dozens of members of the state legislature watched the same news show in the capital. There were a number of calls to the governor and the attorney general, both of whom lost their uncertainty as to what to do approximately eight seconds after they realized what could happen to their own political futures if they didn’t move with righteous vigor. The will of the people was an awesome thing, and CBS even worse.

  “Poor John,” muttered the attorney general sympathetically as he picked up the phone to call the superintendent of the state police.

  A dozen men—including five off-duty police, one a sergeant—were already sweating at the warehouse as they hurried the machines into two trucks. Neither Williston nor Arbolino was perspiring on the nearby rooftop, where the teacher and his machine gun protected the stunt man as he took still pictures with an infrared camera that needed no telltale flash to shoot in the dark. All the illegal machines were gone by the time the state police arrived at 9:20, but at noon the next day prints of the infrared stills were delivered by Western Union messenger to the network news bureaus in Miami and to the
city desks of the key Atlanta and New Orleans dailies. Each picture was neatly captioned with an explanation of who was doing what, where and why.

  That night, David Brinkley made some terribly witty and cynical—if not snide—remarks about law enforcement in Jefferson County as he showed the sixteen stills, and a CBS correspondent named Evans arrived in Paradise City on the same flight that brought in a Life writer-researcher-photographer team and an Associated Press correspondent. A number of practical politicians in the state capital and Washington made statements—for publication and broadcast—about the need for immediate action to clean up this shocking situation. On Sunday, fifty-one ministers and fourteen rabbis in various parts of the country put aside their prepared texts on Vietnam and the Generation Gap and preached ringing sermons on the decline in morality reflected in the Paradise City corruption.

  On Sunday, the man who drove the yellow Mustang made his usual phone call and explained that he still didn’t know who was behind the uproar or what might happen next. Nobody outside the Pikelis organization could say where the machines were hidden, and Mayor Ashley was limiting his public remarks to pious pledges to newsmen that “the entire matter is being checked out by our hard-working police.” The piece of film recording this pap really bombed when it reached CBS News on West 57th Street in New York, and since the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere—“no visuals, dammit”—one top executive began to think of recalling the crew from Paradise City to move on to the strike in Birmingham which promised some wonderful riot footage. But at 5 A.M. on Monday morning, a black bellboy allied with Reverend Snell slipped a note under the door of the CBS correspondent’s hotel room, banged twice and fled.

  Fifty-three minutes later, the network news crew—all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and full of histamines aroused by the prospect of a “beat”—drove up to the large handsome house at 1818 Gardenia Drive. As promised, there was a large handsome truck parked directly in front and when they obeyed the unsigned note’s instruction and opened the vehicle’s rear door they saw the slot machines. They didn’t know that the Sledgehammer army had stolen the gambling equipment in a 3 A.M. raid on Pikelis’ waterfront depot, but they were happy enough with what they did know.

  (1) The film would look great and New York would be delighted.

  (2) The owner and resident of 1818 Gardenia Drive was Mayor Roger Stuart Ashley. They took special care to get the small sign with his name—the metal plaque on the manicured lawn—into as many shots as possible.

  Let NBC and that smart Brinkley chew on that, the earnest truth seekers rejoiced as they considered the bonuses and promotions that might follow. To make sure that these benefits followed, the decent God-fearing CBS correspondent took the trouble—as a responsible citizen should—to telephone the state police in the capital. That was 7:10 on a bright, hot August morn, a nice clear cloudless day that was excellent for filming with a 16-millimeter Auricon sound camera. Who said God is dead? Just before eight o’clock, two cars carrying troupers of the state police rolled up Gardenia Drive and stopped smartly on either side of the truck in front of 1818. Noting the TV crew, the officers did an absolutely bang-up job of searching the truck, finding and officially seizing the slot machines. It was so emphatically bang-up and noisy that the front door of 1818 Gardenia Drive opened right in the middle of Lieutenant Stanley Gregory’s interview, and the CBS team got quite a nice long shot—and then a zoom closeup—of Mayor Ashley in his paisley bathrobe and matching hangover.

  The United Press and Newsweek chaps arrived the next day, and that afternoon somebody asked the President of the United States a question about Paradise City during his press conference. Being a Republican he unhesitatingly denounced the disgraceful situation in Jefferson County—which had given him only 19 percent of its votes in the 1968 election. It was being looked into very carefully, he assured the American people, and the possibilities of sending in a Federal anti-racketeering task force were under “serious study.” This came as a minor surprise to the head of the U.S. Department of Justice, but the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times responded so favorably with editorials that he told an assistant attorney general to start the ball rolling. In Miami, Irving suddenly developed a nervous stomach and an eye twitch—his left eye—causing Uncle Meyer to suggest an immediate three-week vacation in Aruba, where a former associate was running a casino.

  “It will be good for your sinuses too,” Meyer predicted as he handed his distraught nephew the airline tickets, “and Gloria could use the change.”

  Arizona would have been even better for his sinuses, but Arizona was U.S. and Federal subpoenas could be served there. There was an FBI bureau in Phoenix, but none in Aruba. Meyer was a veritable encyclopedia of such practical information and legal lore, and people said he could write a whole book on the fine points of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. When it came to avoiding self-incriminating testimony, he was an acknowledged authority in certain circles.

  On Wednesday night, the Life correspondent was taking a shower before dinner—he was clean, alert and thoroughly resourceful—when somebody slipped into his Paradise House room and left an envelope in the pocket of his freshly pressed poplin jacket. He discovered this when he dressed, was delighted to find that he was the owner of a list of the addresses of eight brothels—all within two miles of where he stood. His photographer and the girl researcher—the Japanese-American beauty who wore Vassar T-shirts and knew Harold Pinter terribly well—were ready to go into action, but there was the problem of evading the policeman who was watching them. Marton had assigned plainclothes detectives to keep track of all the nosey journalists, to trail them and subtly obstruct their snooping. If this fellow saw the Life trio photographing one of the whorehouses, he might smash a camera or two “accidentally” or ram their car with his own. At the very least, he’d alert the other bordellos and the tough chief of police. It was worth a try, however, even if all the Life trio could do was to drive past the houses on a general reconnaissance.

  After dinner, the three of them piled into the Plymouth sedan and set off on what they hoped would appear to be a casual sight-seeing drive around town.

  “That bastard is right behind us,” announced Gillian Daifuku as she turned the car toward City Hall.

  She not only knew Harold Pinter, but she drove very well—which was not too surprising since she was also on very close terms with Sterling Moss and Lyndon B. Johnson as well as both Simon and Garfunkel. In view of all this, her occasional lapses from gentility could hardly be taken seriously.

  The two men in the sedan glanced into the rear-view mirror, spotted the unmarked police car that was following them. Neither of them noticed the blue “compact” coupe half a block farther back, and neither did Marton’s plainclothesman. He was focussed on the Plymouth, which headed west on Acorn, then north on Magnolia and east on London Boulevard. He began to make the same turn onto the boulevard.

  Then P.T. Carstairs leaned out of the right window of the blue Dart, took careful aim with the long-barreled Smith and Wesson K-38 target pistol and blew holes in both of the police car’s rear tires.

  “Home, James,” he said grandly to the professor behind the wheel.

  “You’re pretty good with that thing, aren’t you?” Williston asked as he swung the Dart toward the center of town.

  “One of the best. I’m nearly as good with guns as I am with women.”

  The millionaire sharpshooter slipped the K-38 under his jacket, smiled contentedly. Aside from the question of what he’d do about Kathy Pikelis, everything was under control and the operation was moving nicely. Three blocks away, the Plymouth sedan was also moving nicely—without any police car that could block the tour of the brothels. The Life trio succeeded in shooting four of the whorehouses before another patrol car—alerted by police radio—raced toward them on the 900 block of Wayne Street.

  “Gillian, head back downtown,” the correspondent ordered. “Let’s quit for tonight before
the local fuzz suspect what we’re up to.”

  “What about the interiors? I want to get some shots inside,” pleaded the photographer. “I can do it with the little subminiature job.”

  “Tomorrow night, Stu. Take your time, baby, and you’ll stay out of jail—or the hospital—long enough to get all the Minox snapshots you want.”

  It took three nights, but the two men both succeeded in visiting several of the whorehouses, and the story they got was a sensation when it appeared in the August 14 issue. It ran as the cover story, and since the Arab guerrillas were taking that week off and there were no riots at any colleges and no major-league pitcher tossed a no-hitter it attracted a great deal—maybe a disproportionate amount—of attention. Johnny Carson made several jokes about it, Adam Clayton Powell denounced it as an example of “Charlie’s hypocrisy and corruption” and Simone de Beauvoir blamed it on the “same evil that produced the immoral American invasion of Vietnam.” The Vice President of the U.S.A. assured a surfers convention at Waikiki that the Administration was moving vigorously to wipe out such organized crime, student violence and the tragic problem of bedwetting in the ghetto. A massive program of outdoor calisthenics, rose growing and safe driver instruction was about to be launched, he disclosed, and organ lessons were also planned.

  On the fifteenth, the desk clerk at the Paradise House told all the irritating journalists that they’d have to leave on the next day because their rooms had been reserved for other guests—and when the press checked with other hotels in the city they found not a single bed available. In case the message wasn’t clear, the CBS truck was set on fire, The New York Times man hauled off to jail on a drunken-driving charge and Life’s Gillian Daifuku was arrested when a detective blandly swore that she’d approached him in the street and offered to commit an unnatural act for $20. The AP correspondent was fined $150 because he was operating a vehicle without functioning tail lights, a malfunction that had been simple to arrange. A United Press photographer fell—or was pushed—down a flight of stairs, breaking his left ankle and his camera in the process. The entire NBC team became violently ill after dinner at the Dixie Mansion, leaving them retching for two days and suspicious that some sneaky son-of-a-bitch had tampered with the fried chicken or the shrimp jambalaya.