Assassins Play Off td-20

by Warren Murphy

  "I guess you're right," said Bardwell. He was smiling.

  "Can I see the bodies?" asked Remo.

  "Oh, two were buried right away. Religious thing, you know. The other three are still at the funeral homes. Their burial's tomorrow."

  "I'd like to see the bodies."

  "Well, that's sort of delicate. The families are having closed coffin funerals. But we have pictures back at headquarters."

  "Not as good as the bodies," said Remo.

  "I'm a close friend of one of the families," said Bardwell. "Maybe I can help."

  "I didn't know that," said the deputy chief.

  "Yeah," said Bardwell. "That is, before everyone started forgetting they knew me when I was fired."

  "I always supported you, Hawley. I thought you did wonders with what you had. Always supported you."

  "Not publicly," said Bardwell.

  "Well, not exactly out in the open. I've got my job."

  "Yeah," said Bardwell. "C'mon, Mr. Slote," he said to Remo. "I'll show you the bodies that are still above ground."

  "You shouldn't take it so hard, Hawley. You'll get another job," said the deputy chief.

  "I expect so," said Bardwell. All the way to McAlpin's Funeral Home, he explained to Remo how it must have been a dozen men who killed the bankers, because of the terrible injuries.

  "Uh huh," agreed Remo.

  McAlpin's was a dark-carpeted, quiet private house, transformed with some neat carpentry into a funeral home.

  "They'll be waking tonight. But we can get a good look now because no one's here in the afternoon," said Bardwell.

  "I thought you knew the family."

  "That's just something I told the chief. He's got balls of tapioca."

  The coffin was white ash, polished to a high gloss, and Remo wondered at all the fine furniture that was made just to be planted with an occupant who couldn't care less. The room smelled of Pineclear air freshener, and the two walked up the aisle of dark folding chairs. Bardwell opened the coffin. A man's skull was waxed down the middle with skin colored wax powdered over. Remo pressed down on the wax to see how wide the cavity. His thumb collected powder and he rubbed it away with a forefinger.

  "They had to scoop out some of the brains, I hear, just to get the head closed again," said Bardwell. Remo saw perspiration form on his forehead. Saliva collected in a small pool at a corner of his lips.

  "I heard there were some people with their shoulders hurt," said Remo. "That's what the papers said. That they were immobilized first at the shoulder and then killed."

  "Yeah," said Bardwell in a heavy breathy gasp. "Whadddya think of that head, huh? Isn't that the worst thing you've ever seen? Huh?"

  "No," said Remo. "The guy should have used a gun instead of his hands. If he's going to use his hands that way, he might as well use something wild as a gun."

  "What wild?"

  "You don't need that much in the central forehead. The hand must have gone into it up to the knuckles. You only need a break and a minimum of pressure inside the brain for an instant kill. Sloppy. I bet it was some karate idiot on a spree."

  "But don't you think it's fantastic that somebody with a bare hand could do that? Don't ya? Huh? Don't ya?" said Bardwell.

  "Inferior," said Remo and he noticed Bardwell smiling and centralizing his balance, and then because he had been trained to, Remo did something wrong because his body did something right. Bardwell's right hand shot out at Remo and Remo took it, but in doing so, he felt a small direct pressure on his left shoulder and Bardwell's hand kept going through and into the shoulder. An insane stroke. A stroke of such incredible, suicidal stupidity that Remo had never seen it before. And what made it so insane was that the power and accuracy required training, but no one would ever train for something like that. It was suicide against anyone with a serious level of competence.

  Bardwell's right hand was into Remo's shoulder while at the same time his face, whole head, throat, and heart were open as a gift to Remo's right hand or right leg. It was a here-I-am-kill-me thrust, and Remo's right hand had but a half a foot to go to catch Bardwell's throat, splitting the thorax and driving pieces of it back into the vertebrae. Bardwell had set himself up for his own death just to get in a cheapie shoulder shot. Remo felt the pain in the left shoulder and wiggled the fingers of his left hand. He could still do that. But the arm would raise only slightly.

  Bardwell could raise nothing. He lay at the foot of the coffin, his tongue lounging out of his mouth, forced out of his jaw by the pressure from the throat.

  "Shit," said Remo. He had found the man who could talk about the death of William Ashley, and he had killed him because he had reacted automatically. It was almost as if the man had been set up so Remo would have to kill him. Now Remo had not only stifled his possible explanation of why Smitty's man was killed, but he also had a body to get rid of. He worked with his right hand, letting his painful left shoulder hang limp.

  Underneath the comptroller with the patched-up forehead, underneath the white silk and the styrofoam fed rosary, was bedding, the final support for a body that needed no support. Remo pushed back the white ash lid and with his right hand grabbed the belt of the corpse and deposited it on the other side of the lid. He paused and listened. No movement. No one was coming. He whistled a moving tune he had heard Aretha Franklin sing, remembering only the "needya, baby, baby, needya, baby."

  He took the fine seam out of the silk covering at the bottom of the coffin and found cheap cardboard supports. He ripped the cardboard down to bare unfinished wood and placed it in a pile at his feet. His one hand worked like a flashing blade as he picked up the rolling beat of the song and lost the tune so totally he would never find it again.

  He grabbed a handful of Bardwell's muscled stomach and hoisted the corpse up into the bare bottom of the coffin. He flattened Bardwell for a better fit, eliminating the bumps of the chest and head without breaking skin. Then, crushing the cardboard at his feet, he reconstructed the well sides around Bardwell and covered it again with the white silk, carefully tucking in the edges.

  "Perfect almost," muttered Remo. "Needya, baby, baby."

  He took the comptroller of the Tenafly Savings and Trust Company off the lid and put him gently into his final resting place and stepped back to examine his work.

  "Shit." The comptroller was three inches too high. Maybe he could get an inch and a half off him and this time he cracked the corpse's spinal column, put a hairline midchest, and pressed down on the groin area, for the comptroller had been well padded in the posterior. Where Bardwell was slim, the comptroller was fat and vice versa. So it worked.

  Remo stepped back again.

  "Nice fit," he said. Of course, by the time the wake became active, with people coming by to pay last respects, the release of Bardwell's sphincter muscles might cause an unnerving smell, but for now, a nice job. Remo heard someone and quickly touched up the powder on the comptroller's cold face.

  "Baby, baby, needya, baby," sung Remo and from behind him a whiny voice called out:

  "You there. What are you doing with the deceased?"

  Remo turned and saw a man in black suit, white shirt, and black tie with a very pale face, pale because he used the same powder on himself as he had used on the comptroller.

  "Just a friend of the deceased."

  "The wake's tonight. I know who you are. I know your kind. If you've played with that man's privates…"

  "What?" said Remo.

  "Sick," said the man. "You're sick. Sick. Sick."

  "I was just saying goodbye to a friend."

  "I bet, sicko. I know your kind. Hang around funeral homes trying to get jobs but you'll never get one in mine. You know why? You're sick is why. That's why."

  "If you say so," said Remo.

  "Glad I caught you before you could get to anything."

  "Thank you," said Remo, taking it as a compliment for his work.

  At the bank he saw the deputy chief again, who introduced him to the hea
d teller, who pointed out Lynette Bardwell. She had a strong, elegant face with a faint almond shaping to her gray eyes and neat, bouncy blonde hair, streaked with just the right touch of darker blonde. Her lips were full and moist and she carried herself with a calmness. Even under the formal stiff white blouse and tweed skirt, Remo could sense the beauty of her body. He wondered what she had seen in Bardwell.

  He waited until the bank was closed to customers and then, with the head teller's permission, took her into one of the private rooms where customers examined safe deposit boxes.

  "Why do you want to interview me?" asked Lynette. She was only in her early twenties, yet she seemed unflustered by the interview.

  "Because your husband is the man who slaughtered those bankers upstairs."

  Lynette Bardwell lit a filter tip cigarette and exhaled.

  "I know that," she said. "What do you want?"

  "I'm interested in his friends, who might have taught him what he knew about handling himself in a fight."

  "And just who are you?"

  "I'm the man your husband confessed to."

  "That dumb bastard," said Lynette, and her composure disappeared as she surrendered to teary sobs. "That dumb bastard."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As he watched her weep, Remo realized he had overestimated Lynette Bardwell's toughness. He had listened to that nasal bray that New Jersey women called human speech, and had been fooled by it. Lynette Bardwell was just a woman, soft and yielding. He decided not to tell her that her husband was dead.

  Lynette blotted her eyes with a tissue and looked up. "If you want to talk all night, you've got to buy me a sandwich."

  "Don't you think Hawley will mind?" asked Remo, not really caring. For Hawley Bardwell to mind would involve his raising himself from the dead, getting past one body, and out of a sealed coffin. Remo wasn't worried.

  "Suppose he does?"

  "He's a pretty fast guy with his hands, I suppose. He might light into you pretty hard."

  "Hah. That'll be the day," said Lynette. "Look, big magazine writer, are you on an expense account or not?"

  "Yes."

  "Then no sandwich. Dinner. A real dinner."

  Lynette Bardwell's idea of a real dinner was a cinder block structure outside the city that had changed from diner to restaurant by adding wood paneling, tables instead of booths, and turning down the lights. No one apparently had bothered to tell the chef of the change in status because the menu was still built upon one-plate meals, most of them seeming to specialize in chopped meat.

  Lynette ordered salad—"it's nice and crisp here all the time"—to which Remo did not comment, contenting himself instead with the thought that so was birch-bark. She wanted Thousand Island dressing, sirloin steak rare, baked potato with cheese mixed in, asparagus tips with hollandaise sauce, and a Tom Collins in a tall glass to start everything off.

  Remo asked for a glass of water to start things off, and rice, if the cook had long-grained wild rice, with no seasoning, no salt, no pepper, no monosodium glutamate, and if they did not have long-grained wild rice, he would settle for just the water.

  Which he did, because the chef had never heard of wild rice and if it was made by Minute Rice he would have known about it. The waitress snapped her gum as she told Remo this and delivered the water. He sipped it. It was good to be back home in New Jersey where the water contained trace elements of every one of the known elements, including macadam.

  Lynette sipped at her Tom Collins, carefully replacing it on the paper napkin between sips, and asked Remo suddenly:

  "What's wrong with your shoulder?"

  "Why?"

  "It looks like you're holding it funny," she said. "Like it's hurting."

  "Touch of arthritis," said Remo, who thought he had been disguising the immobility of his left arm. "Where did Hawley learn his karate?"

  "Oh, he's been at it for years. There are places in Jersey City that he goes to."

  "You know the name of them?" asked Remo, putting the water aside for when he might really want it, like after a thirty-day trek in the Sahara.

  "Not really. I don't pay any attention to that. I don't know what kick some men get out of hopping around in pajamas."

  "You prefer men hopping around without pajamas?"

  Lynette giggled. "Well, maybe not hopping," she said. She raised the glass to her mouth and looked over the top of it at Remo. "What makes you think Hawley killed those bankers?"

  "He told me," said Remo.

  "Just like that? He told you? 'I killed the bankers and stole their money?'"

  "Almost," Remo said. "He kind of bragged about the different strokes used on them. He talked too much about it not to have done it."

  "Did you tell him you knew?"

  "Yes."

  "And then what?"

  "He said he was going on a trip."

  "Somehow I don't believe you," she said. "If Hawley knew you knew, then I think he would have smacked you around, too."

  "Maybe he was afraid of me. Maybe I look like another guy who hops around wearing pajamas."

  Lynette shook her head. "No, no. Definitely not. You're not the pajama type."

  "How did you know he did the killings?" asked Remo.

  "He told me." Remo waited for her to fill in the blanks, but she said nothing more.

  "Have another drink," said Remo.

  Lynette Bardwell did. And another. And another. That was before the steak (well done and stringy), the baked potato (burned to a crisp), and the asparagus tips (not tips but spears).

  She did not seem to mind. She ate doggedly through it, reveling in the dim lights and the canned music by two hundred and two violins, and she had yet another drink and leaned on Remo heavily as she lurched with him toward her car.

  "Suppose Hawley's home?" said Remo. "Maybe I should stop near your house and you can drive home yourself?"

  "He won't be," she said with some confidence. "Home, James."

  She snored a little bit. She woke up near her house, sat upright, and snapped her fingers. "I just remembered," she said thickly.

  "What?"

  "There's a guy Hawley practices with. Another karate freak."

  "What's his name?"

  "Fred Westerly."

  "Where do I find him? I'd like to know more about all this karate stuff."

  "He's a cop. I remember now. A policeman. A lieutenant or something. I think he's in the training school. Hawley mentioned him once. Yeah. Jersey City. He trains cops in Jersey City."

  "Fred Westerly, huh?"

  "Thass right," Lynette said, and her head dropped onto Remo's shoulder and she was asleep again.

  Getting out of the car, she lurched heavily against Remo's left shoulder, forcing him to grit his teeth against the explosions of pain that sounded inside his skull. Biting hard on his lip, he sleepwalked her upstairs to the bedroom in the Bardwell's tiny frame Cape Cod on the edge of town.

  She put up no resistance as Remo undressed her and put her under the covers. Before he left, Remo did a thing to the nerves under her left armpit and whispered in her ear, "Dream of me. I'm going to be back."

  She smiled in her sleep.

  As he walked away from the house, Remo saw a small light click on in the upstairs bathroom.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Captain Lee Enright Leahy of the U.S. Submarine Darter had made this trip before. Five times in five years and each time he understood it less. Because of the destination, he couldn't embark from Japan. Russia and North Korea got copy on any ships leaving through the Sea of Japan and especially submarines, and anyone making port at Taiwan or the Ryukyu Islands might as well forget it. You could add China, too. So much for normal secrecy for normal trips.

  For this trip, you had to start evasive action at San Diego, spreading the word you were heading for Australia, letting crew wives know their husband's next port was Darwin. You crossed the Pacific practically at flank speed, entering the East China Sea submerged between Miyako and Naha Islands. Then yo
u headed north into the East China Sea, risked the China coast within a hundred miles of Shanghai, and kept on the China side as you entered the Yellow Sea, because if the Chinese did get copy on you, there would be a delay, hopefully, before they would inform North Korea. At latitude thirty-eight and longitude one twenty-four, you veered north by northeast into the West Korean Bay and then, in that infernal joint where North Korea and Communist China meet, you let out a team of SEALS (Sea Air Land) boys, the descendants of frogmen, Rangers, OSS, and every other whacko group that the military was forced to use on missions on which they would not send the sane.

  And all this to deliver a tiny purse of gold to an old woman who would meet them on the coast, just outside the village of Sinanju, at three A.M. every November 12.

  What puzzled Captain Leahy was that the bag contained less than $10,000 in gold, and it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to deliver and risked millions plus an international incident. He had wondered why the CIA (he was sure it was the CIA) couldn't find a safer and cheaper contact route, or at least deliver three years' gold at once, thus eliminating two risky trips.

  So when the Darter turned north into the East China Sea, only to surface later that evening, Captain Leahy thought he would visit with the passenger. This time they had a passenger who was not only bringing the gold, but clumsy bolts of cloth, boxes of jewels, a clumsily framed, autographed picture of an insignificant soap opera actor, and three outsized lacquered trunks. How they were ever going to fit into the rubber rafts, he didn't know. But he was grateful that he had gotten away with refusing to surface and carry electronic gear that would pick up, of all things, television shows that some idiot in the Pentagon was thinking of beaming to the Pacific just for the Darter.

  At that suggestion, Leahy had popped his apple.

  "Dammit. There are safer and saner ways to transmit information than through television," he had said.

  "It's not exactly information," said the admiral who coordinated CIA-Navy relations.

  "Well, what is it?"

  "Television shows."

  "You mean newscasts or something?"

  "Not exactly. The shows listed are, minus commercials, twenty-one minutes and fifteen seconds of As the Planet Revolves, thirteen minutes and ten seconds, minus commercials of The Young and the Raw, twenty-four minutes and forty-five seconds, minus commercials, The Edge of Life. Total transmission time would be under an hour."