Seven Silent Men

by Behn, Noel;

  A flare gun popped, sent a tiny fireball curving up into the night sky. The ball burst into a blaze of glowing green.

  Why exactly the FBI agents, charging down from the rise and in from two sides on the flat below, also let out Indian war whoops as they ran would never be fully understood. The loudest whooper of all was Les Kebbon, riding a bounding jeep driven by Happy de Camp.

  Mule spun about, took stock of the assault, dove inside the teepee, moments later backed out, loin-clothed bottom first, rolling a tripod-mounted World War II light machine gun after him.

  “Machine gun! Machine gun!” Bureau voices echoed in the darkness.

  Mule slid in behind the gun, threw the breech, swung the muzzle around toward three nearing silhouettes. A tear-gas grenade exploded off to the side. Another detonated directly before him. Mule scurried back into the teepee, darted out of it through a rear flap carrying rifles and clusters of small round objects.

  “The fields! The fields!” came shouts. “He’s heading into the fields.”

  Mule, as he ran through darkness, also shouted, shouted the words “Vonda Lizzie!”

  Hap de Camp, following the cries of “Vonda Lizzie,” wheeled the jeep over the bumpy terrain, neared the zigzagging Mule, tried keeping him in his headbeams as Les Kebbon, standing on the vehicle’s front seat, began to twirl a lariat over his head.

  Mule, glancing back as he ran from side to side avoiding the headlights, saw the spinning rope. He grasped a small round object firmly in his hand, stopped and spun around and hurled the object at Les … hurled round object after round object at him and the jeep.

  “Mule dung?” Sue Ann Willis questioned as her husband, Rodney, slid into bed beside her. “He threw gourds filled with mule dung at Les?”

  “Les and Hap,” Rodney Willis said. “Hit both of them with damn near every one he threw, which was a lot. He knocked Les right back into the jeep with a mouth full of the stuff. And Hap, I don’t know if you know but Hap fought against the Japanese in World War II, made five amphibious landings and never got driven back once. But Mule Fucker sure as hell drove him back.”

  “That’s what they call him, Susie, Mule Fucker. It’s right on his sheet. He hits Happy full in the face with dung, and Happy gets momentarily blinded and the jeep goes bumping off in one direction damn near hitting some of our guys, and Mule Fucker is running in the other direction like something wild. A real scene. Mule Fucker’s dressed like an Indian with these gun belts crossing his chest and shouting out ‘Vonda Lizzie,’ whatever that means. He stops and knocks the jeep right out of action with mule dung and takes off again with damn near the whole office chasing him. He keeps throwing mule dung at us, and when he runs out of that he starts throwing old rifles at us. He’s been carrying an armful of old rifles and he throws those too. And bullets from the bullet belts over his shoulder. Bandoleros like you see Mexican bandits in the movies wear. And he doesn’t stop running, Susie. The man was amazing. Our guys are getting winded and dropping out, but this looney-toon seems to be gaining strength. He goes running across one field after another until nobody’s left chasing him except Cub. Cub’s chugging away right behind him like an old steam engine chugging up a steep hill. Mule can’t shake Cub, so he runs right out onto the highway. This looney-toon is running in and out between highway traffic dressed like an Indian and with his nose painted white and letting out war whoops and shouting ‘Vonda Lizzie’ and doing everything to shake Cub. Cub finally brings him down with a flying tackle. Tackles the guy right before a tollbooth. That crazy Mule Fucker was heading right for a tollbooth.

  “I can’t keep a straight face when I think about that guy. I know I shouldn’t be telling you this, Susie, but I’ve been collecting all the background stuff coming in on him, and some of what’s come in today is unbelievable. You’d think I’d have been laughed out with all the laughing I already did. I haven’t even gotten some of the material on him typed up yet. I just kept reading it over and over and saying, ‘This just can’t be, this just can’t be.’”

  Sue Ann snuggled into her husband, saying, “Tell me.”

  The following night a shocked Billy Yates, lying in bed and staring at his shorty-clad wife sitting cross-legged beside him, could barely say, “Up where?”

  “You heard me plain as day, Billy Bee.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I’m not saying.”

  “Sue Ann Willis told you, didn’t she?”

  “Billy Bee, do you or do you not wanna know what happened to Mister Mule Fucker and—”

  “Don’t use that word!”

  “It’s his name, honey. His Christian name.”

  “It is not. It’s an alias. An underworld nickname.”

  “Well, all I know is, they’re deleting the whole story from the record.”

  “Who’s deleting?”

  “Mister Corticun and that snooty assistant of his who still wears pinstripes and sounds like Bobby Kennedy.”

  “Harlon Quinton?”

  “Selfsame.”

  “They were deleting what? And how?”

  “Sue Ann told me that Rodney had got this report in about Mister Mule Fucker and—”

  “Call him Mule, can’t you, Tina Beth?” he said. “Call him Marion or Corkel … or anything but that.”

  Tina Beth patted her husband’s knee. “Rodney Willis had received this report about Mister Mule and the rodeo and was having it typed up when Harlon Quinton comes down and reads it over the secretary’s shoulder. Harlon Quinton gets very mad and says this report doesn’t belong here on the eleventh floor but upstairs on the twelfth floor, where Mister Corticun and all the men working on the out-of-town end of the investigation are. Rodney says no it doesn’t. Harlon Quinton says he’s in charge of the central files on the twelfth floor and therefore he says what goes where. Rodney says everything about Prairie Port people is investigated by the eleventh floor and that Mister Mule is from Prairie Port and that anything about him is staying on the eleventh floor until someone from the eleventh floor decides differently. Jez Jessup comes over and asks what the trouble is. Rodney explains. Jez Jessup sides with Rodney, and Harlon Quinton gets madder and says that a lot of what’s in the report happened away from Prairie Port and therefore it belongs on the twelfth floor because it can’t be verified until the flying squad checks it out. He says if he doesn’t get that report here and now, he’s going to take it. Jez Jessup tells him he better not try.

  “Harlon Quinton goes upstairs and comes back down with Mister Corticun. Mister Corticun reads the report and turns green and tries not to show it. Mister Corticun tells Jez Jessup the report definitely belongs on the twelfth floor. Jez Jessup says no it doesn’t. Mister Corticun starts to take the report with him, and Jez Jessup pulls it out of his hand. Mister Sunstrom comes over and keeps Jez Jessup and Mister Corticun from hitting one another and makes a compromise. He says until everyone gets unangry and can settle things peaceable, the report stays on the eleventh floor in his office. And that’s where it is, locked in his desk in the office … which is the same as having it deleted.”

  “Do you know what was in the report?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along, Billy, only you got mad and started fussin’ at me.”

  “I’m sorry, Tina Beth, for fussing.”

  “Are you?”

  Billy Yates crossed his heart.

  Tina Beth laughed her little-girl laugh, popped the pillow onto her lap, leaned forward on it. “Mister Mule is a smuggler, everyone already knows that. What they don’t know is what’s in Rodney’s report … exactly how he smuggled things. And that was like I just told you, he put things up the rear end of horses and mules. Mister Mule has this horrid-looking ranch west of town where you can rent horses to ride if you want. Or you can board your animal if you’re so inclined. One day a friend of Mister Mule’s comes and leaves his horse there. Only this is no ordinary horse. It’s a rodeo horse that has to get itself shipped on over to eastern
Texas for an important rodeo. Now at this very same time Mister Mule has this business associate in Texas who is always wanting things smuggled to him. Mister Mule sees a way of killing two jaybirds with one stone, getting paid to ship the rodeo horse to Texas and smuggle something to his business associate as well. So Mister Mule puts whatever’s to be smuggled in a small bag and walks up to the rodeo horse … and up inside the horse’s rear end it goes. Well, sir, the horse arrives in Texas no worse for the experience, only the business associate doesn’t come by and take the bag out like he’s supposed to. Instead, the man who owns the horse, a Mister Cowboy Carlson, rides the horse in the rodeo. Well, once that horse comes out into the rodeo arena with that bag up its behind and has to run, it don’t act like no cowboy horse, it turns into a bucking bronco. A bucker like no one’s ever seen.”

  Four miles across town Sissy Hennessy completed the tale of the bucking bronco Sue Ann Willis had told her and Tina Beth early in the day.

  “The horse bucks from one end of the arena to the other with Cowboy Carlson holding on as best he can,” she told Cub in the darkness of their bedroom. “And then the poor animal dropped dead. At the height of a buck its heart must have given out. It hit the ground and collapsed and died with Cowboy partially pinned underneath. The rodeo officials temporarily suspended Cowboy Carlson’s license until an autopsy could be done on the horse, an autopsy to see if he had given it some drug. The veterinarians found a bag of stolen antique coins in the anal tract. Luckily for Cowboy, the coins weren’t valuable. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and served two months at a county work farm but had his rodeo license revoked for good. Poor Cowboy was barred from rodeo-riding for life.”

  “Poor?” Cub said.

  “He was innocent, Cub,” Sissy said. “Whatever his other crimes, he was innocent of smuggling. And who knows, could he have ridden in a rodeo, maybe he wouldn’t have had to return to theft?”

  “Who knows?”

  “When Cowboy Carlson got back to Prairie Port he of course went looking for Mule Corkel. Mule Corkel was nowhere to be found. He was hiding from Cowboy. Some months later, when he thought Cowboy had calmed down, Mule Corkel surfaced. Nothing happened for a while. One night late, Cowboy Carlson was walking down the street and saw Mule Corkel sitting in Howard Johnson’s having a sandwich. Cowboy Carlson ran all the way to a stable. The next thing Mule Corkel knows, he’s looking up from his sandwich in the Howard Johnson’s and Cowboy Carlson is trying to ride through the door on a horse. Mule Corkel ran out the back door and down the street with Cowboy Carlson riding after him on this horse, riding after him and trying to rope Mule Corkel with a lariat … Cub, maybe that’s what Mule Corkel saw when Les Kebbon was trying to lasso him from the jeep. Maybe he saw Cowboy Carlson coming at him.”

  “… Maybe.”

  “Cowboy Carlson chases Mule Corkel down the street. Rides behind Mule Corkel, not roping him with the noose but lashing him on the back with it. He rides and lashes and drives Mule Corkel right through a plate-glass window. Mule Corkel was three weeks in a hospital recovering from the cuts. Then he invites Cowboy Carlson to his ranch and gives him a new horse and they make up.”

  Sissy lit a cigarette. “Even if it was true, why would Denis Corticun hide it?”

  “It is true,” Cub told her. “It’s been confirmed.”

  “But why cut it out of even interoffice reports?”

  “It makes us look bad, Sissy,” Cub told her. “God only knows I don’t care for Corticun or Quinton or any of their headquarters crowd, but this gang of criminals is making us look the laughingstock.”

  “When more comes out, you’ll look just fine. The Bureau always does.”

  “No, it doesn’t, Sissy. And it hasn’t for a while. What’s worse with the Mormon State robbers is, they’re funny. Really funny. Chasing Mule down the highway with him dressed like an Indian with war paint on, the man was funny. He was yelling out the name ‘Vonda Lizzie’ and letting out war whoops and every now and then turning back and sticking his tongue out at me, and I almost cracked up. He had tried to cut down our guys with a machine gun minutes before, and it took all I had not to laugh while I chased him … but we’re not funny, Sissy. Nothing about the FBI is humorous. We’re looking bad in this. The public is amused by the crooks. It likes them. It may not like us.”

  Sissy turned to her husband, put her arms around him. “The Bureau is fine. You’re fine. You don’t have to keep back reports, you just don’t.”

  “If we want to keep them out of the press, Sissy, I think we must. Everything we do in that office of ours has a habit of ending up on the front page. Someone sees to it.”

  FOURTEEN

  It had taken the strongest agents of the residency office, E. G. Womper and Ralph Dafney and Cub Hennessy, to hold Marion “Mule” Corkel down and handcuff him. It had taken the heaviest, Happy de Camp and Hank Perch, to sit on Mule and keep him from thrashing and kicking on the auto trip into the city. One of the bravest agents, or more foolhardy, Dick Travis, had leaned over from the front seat and tried to apply a gag to the cursing, spitting, shouting white-nosed prisoner in the back. Travis was bitten three times before succeeding.

  Thoughts of bringing Mule to the eleventh-floor residency office for fingerprinting and photographing, as was routine procedure, were dismissed. The media hung out on the twelfth floor, was in and around the building almost as often as the agents themselves. The media, for reasons incomprehensible to the local agents, had not learned of the raid on Mule’s farm. Had either not found out about the Baton Rouge arrest of Wiggles Loftus and the “all points” alerts emanating from that city for the two other suspects or had not connected these events to the Mormon State robbery.

  Mule was driven to the rear entrance of the federal building. When the coast seemed clear, was carried bodily and on the run through the door down into a steel isolation cell in the basement. Once loose in the cell and unhandcuffed, Mule, in his war paint and loin cloth, began shouting and cursing and kicking the walls and beating his head furiously against the door. Cub and Dafney and Womper and two U.S. marshals rushed in and restrained him. Shackled his wrists and ankles. Locked a metal body belt around his waist and chained the belt to a steel rung in the steel wall.

  Legal procedure dictated the prisoner must be afforded an arraignment before the assistant U.S. magistrate as quickly as possible, must be provided with legal counsel. The assistant U.S. magistrate could not be reached, and word was left for him. Mule would not answer whom he wished to defend him, would not make a phone call … did nothing but twist and curse in his irons. The Bureau photographer and fingerprint equipment arrived. Four men held Mule while a fifth cleaned away his war paint. A picture was gotten. With inordinate trouble, so were prints. E. G. Womper and Ralph Dafney stayed inside the steel cell with Mule. Dick Travis waited on the other side of the door. The rest of the agents hied it back to the office.

  There was excitement on the eleventh floor. And suspense. The rare sort which comes only as a great case begins to crack … can be expected at any moment to burst full open. Manpower lacked, that was so. Brewmeister was in Baton Rouge waiting to escort Wiggles Loftus to Prairie Port. Les Kebbon and Ted Keon were en route to Meridan County to retrieve Elmo Ragotsy from Chief Sheriff O. D. Don Pensler. Three agents had been left with Mule in the basement of the federal building. But Jez Jessup had returned from Louisiana and he worked feverishly along with Strom and Cub and Yates and Rodney Willis and Hank Perch and Preston Lyle and Donnie Bracken and Hap de Camp and Butch Cody and Heck Bevins. Worked feverishly over incoming information on the eight men alleged to be the Mormon State robbers … and the jigsaw puzzle rapidly began falling into place. Began producing images.

  River Rat Ragotsy, according to the latest informant accounts reaching the eleventh floor, had used the caves and tunnels in the area of Mormon State bank to hide contraband … had been doing so for years … had used the tunnels and caves north and south of the bank as well … was a scavenger in such
tunnels … had been picked up several times, but never booked, for scavenging in the city’s water and sewerage tunnels. There was no known direct connection between Ragotsy and Reverend Wallace Tecumseh “Windy Walt” Sash, but, thirty years before, both men had been listed as possible witnesses for the aborted 1941 grand jury inquiry into the disappearance of heavy machinery from the MVA hydroelectric plant inside Warbonnet Ridge. Fifty-three-year-old Wallace Sash was, in fact, a reverend of the First Church of the Holy Conversion, an Illinois-based and-accredited operation that the federal government had unsuccessfully tried to discredit as nothing more than a tax dodge. Sash had a number of arrests, but no convictions, for petty theft, petty extortion and the molesting of children. His only conviction was for a felony—extorting funds from a mentally incompetent uncle—and ended in a three-year jail sentence. An appeals court reversed the decision. Windy Walt, a native Illinoisan, was a long-time friend and alleged underworld associate of another Illinois resident, Bicki “Little Haifa” Hale. It was believed that Sash had first served as the “keep” or “holder” of stolen funds entrusted to him by Bicki Hale, that later he became a full partner in many of Hale’s illegal ventures.

  Bicki “Little Haifa” Hale did look Semitic, but he received his nickname in an Indiana reformatory, where he was the constant shadow of an older inmate, Clarence Highfall. Clarence had a speech impediment and pronounced his name “Cwarence Highfaw.” Around the yard he became Haifa. His shadow, Bicki, became Little Haifa. Bicki Hale was a car thief and adequate lockpicker before going to reform school. He came out a journeyman safecracker. Years of subsequent practice elevated this skill, but only somewhat. According to underworld sources, Little Haifa rated as a competent box man who was far better with drills than with explosives. Where Little Haifa excelled, in the estimation of his criminal peers, was at organization. They attributed Bicki’s almost nonexistent conviction record to this. To organization alone. Not to spotting the potential mark, definitely not. If Bicki picked the mark, there was every chance it was an impractical, if not preposterous, choice. Bicki was a dreamer. A Don Quixote. His eyes were far bigger than his talent. That’s why he and Windy Walt Sash were a perfect pair. Both were down-home crooks who aspired to be big-time operators. With Bicki, confidential underworld informants told their Romor 91 contacts, “Let the other guy spot and pick the score.”