by Noel Hynd
He took a final look around. He saw no one who would bother him. “Good,” he said again, to no one other than himself. He opened the trunk at the rear of the car. In the trunk, wrapped in a brown plastic bag that he immediately tore open, he found a German-made thirty-eight-caliber pistol, a Heckler and Koch, in a clip-on belt holster. With it was a forged set of identity cards, some with his photograph in the name of Lopez. There was also a badge that would identify him as a sergeant with the New York State Police, plus two boxes of bullets— thirty-eight and thirty-two caliber. At any given moment, Misha could become Sergeant Lopez. There was also a compact pair of binoculars that the assassin slipped comfortably into his jacket pocket.
He checked the handgun. He confirmed that it was loaded, with the exception of the chamber above the hammer. He clipped the gun onto his belt. He pocketed the identification and the bullets.
Bound together with heavy twine were two cartons he had shipped north from Florida, the cartons containing his weapon. He looked upon them approvingly and picked them up. He held them under his arm as he shut the trunk of the car.
Then he walked to the driver's side of the automobile. He waited as a car passed. Then he unlocked the door to the Ford and reached in, turning down the sun visors on each side. This would be a signal that the car could be removed.
He walked back to Astor Place. He found a taxi with an Off Duty sign on. The cab picked him up immediately. He asked to be taken to a movie theater at 92nd Street and Broadway. The driver was pleased with the fare and attempted conversation. Misha responded to most questions with one or two words until the driver took the hint.
Misha arrived at 92nd Street and Broadway at a few minutes after eleven. He tipped the driver and watched the cab disappear. Still carrying his two bound-together packages, he walked against the traffic on 92nd Street for half a block, then quickly reversed himself.
Again, no one followed. For the first time, Misha knew his trail was completely clean.
He walked up Broadway. He bought a pack of cigarettes along the way. On West 96th Street he strolled east until he crossed Amsterdam Avenue. He stopped.
There he saw it, the building where Frank Cooper lived. The assassin counted up the floors to the floor where, those who had briefed him said, Cooper lived. The lights were off in Cooper's apartment.
“Well,” the gunman said to himself with a laugh. “He has to come home sometime.” He laughed again. Some men took considerable enjoyment from their work.
Chapter 60
Toward ten the next morning, the phone rang in Cooper’s motel room. Cooper answered. A flat male voice that he didn’t recognize asked for him by name.
“This is Frank Cooper,” he said.
“Ah, Mr. Cooper,” the voice said. “This is Jim Hubbell. If you’re interested, I’ll talk to you. Interested?”
“Yes,” Cooper said.
“I’ll tell the police out front to allow you through,” he said.
Cooper and Richie drove to Jim Hubbell’s house.
Several days had passed since his wife had been murdered. Now Jim Hubbell sat quietly in a corner of his living room and attempted to shed some light, any light, upon her death. But for the time, Jim Hubbell found only darkness.
“I don't know what I can tell you that I haven't told the local police, Mr. Cooper,” the widower said. “What can I say? Peggy's gone. I don't know who killed her.”
Cooper looked at the bereaved man. Hubbell was pudgy with thick black-framed glasses and a shaggy mustache. From a few minutes of conversation, Cooper sensed that Hubbell was a decent individual whose vision of life had rarely extended beyond the ledger sheets of his hammer-and-nail enterprises. His sister was staying with him since the murder of his wife.
“What sort of angles are the police following?” Cooper asked.
Hubbell shrugged. “They're following their noses, I guess,” he said.
“Please tell me anything you can. It can only help,” Cooper asked.
Hubbell explained further. The Fort Myers police were interviewing anyone who might live within walking distance and own a gun. But so far, no breaks. The cops were also going door to door in the area where Peggy had been shot. Someone had to have seen something, the local police theorized. Yet the few people who had actually witnessed her death claimed she had just dropped cold.
No sound, no fury. No visible assassin.
“Are they digging into her background at all?” Lauren asked. “Inquiring outside this area?”
“What do you mean by that?” Hubbell asked.
“Well,” Lauren began, “she was a police officer in Maryland for several years. She made arrests. She put people in jail. There could have been a residual grudge somewhere. Unresolved issues…?”
Hubbell shook his head. “Why's this so interesting to you?” Hubbell asked. “Don't you have enough murders in New York?”
“More than enough,” Cooper answered.
“Well then…?” Hubbell seemed nonplussed.
“We’re approaching this case from a different angle,” Cooper said. “It may upset you.”
“My wife was taken from me. I'm upset already.”
“We think there's a tie to some sort of espionage operation.”
A silence followed. It was so thick that Cooper felt he could cut it with a knife.
“Spies?” Hubbell finally asked. His brow contorted.
“If you want to call it that,” Cooper answered.
“What sort of spies?”
“I don't know. Russian? American?” Cooper shrugged. “I wish I could tell you, Jim. If I find out, I will.”
Hubbell exhaled slowly. A perplexed expression crept across his face and stayed there.
“Like James Bond? That sort of stuff?” Hubbell inquired.
“Not quite. More rooted in reality.”
“Whose reality?”
“I don't know, Jim. I'm still guessing. Same as you.” Cooper paused. “I think the shot was fired from several hundred meters away. Who uses weapons like that? Who even owns weapons like that?”
For what seemed like a long time another silence held the room. Then a rueful smile tiptoed across the widower's face. He removed his glasses and cleaned them with a paper napkin as he spoke. His eyes were red and moist.
“Peggy was a fan of that sort of Ian Fleming stuff,” he said. “Obviously, you know that. She would have of been fascinated if it hadn't been her who'd been killed.” He thought about it for a moment again. “I never read any of it myself. I'm not much of a reader. She was, though. College girl, you know.”
“University of Maryland. Bachelor of Science in criminology,” Cooper said. “I looked at her file in the Baltimore Police Department,” Cooper said.
“You done more research than the police here.” Cooper kept quiet during a pause. “I want to show you something, Mr. Cooper,” Hubbell said. “Come with me.”
Cooper and Richie stood and followed. They walked through a dining room into a small library carved out of a corner of a sitting room on the first floor of the Hubbell home. Hubbell led Cooper to a series of bookshelves.
“These belong to Peggy,” he said, still talking of his wife in the present tense. Hubbell surveyed the books. “I don't know whether you're able to get a grip on a person's personality by looking at their things after they're gone. Ever do that?”
“Many times.”
“Maybe this will tell you something. I don't think there's a book here that she didn't read.” Hubbell shook his head. “Great reader, that girl.”
Cooper studied the books. Mysteries and historical novels. Spy stories and political thrillers. The slain woman had arranged everything alphabetically by author. Then the fiction gave way to the nonfiction. Peggy had had a taste for political intrigue. Maybe too much so.
“Fascinating,” murmured Cooper. He was waiting for his thoughts to take shape.
In nonfiction, there were two entire shelves on Presidential deaths, the ultimate in newsworthy obituar
ies. The section began with Lincoln, continued through Garfield and McKinley, then leaped across sixty-odd years to John F. Kennedy.
Not just Presidential deaths, Cooper noted with a slight tremor. But Presidential assassinations. Cooper saw a book on President Harding. He pulled it from the shelf. The Strange Death of President Harding was the title. The book was hardcover in black cloth. No dust jacket. It had been published in 1928 by a now-caput Boston firm named Bower & Stepford. It stated its case outright in the first paragraph: that Warren G. Harding, the twenty-ninth President of the United States, had been murdered.
Cooper ran his hand along the volumes in Peggy's library, trying to sense what it was telling him. Lauren examined the same shelf.
“She was fascinated by all this stuff,” the hardware man said. “Read all this stuff in college, then wanted to become a policewoman. Then she got disgusted and quit the force.”
“When were you married?” Cooper asked.
“October 14, 1966,” he said.
“She left the force abruptly,” Lauren asked. “Why? Do you know?”
“She never really explained fully,” Hubbell said. “And I never asked. She spent a lot of her time thinking and reading. Tried to do some writing, too,” he said. “Don't know whatever happened to it.”
Cooper looked at him. “Was she writing about this sort of thing?”
“I don’t know. I never found it. I've looked.”
“No one took it, did they?” Cooper asked.
“Who would take it?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.” Cooper answered.
Cooper moved his hand to a book on President Lincoln's last day alive. Next to it were thirteen books taking issue with the Warren Commission. His gaze drifted to a hardcover condensation of the Warren Commission's report. It was the most worn book on the shelf.
“Want my opinion about something?” Hubbell asked.
“Sure, Jim,” said Cooper.
“I think education for a woman is like pouring honey into a fine watch. Didn't do Peggy any good.” He shrugged again. “Who knows? Maybe it even got her killed.”
Lauren held her tongue.
“If anything further occurs to you, if you find anything, if anything comes to you as out of the ordinary,” Cooper asked, “please call me. I’ll give you my number in New York, also.” Cooper placed a consoling hand on Hubbell’s shoulder. “Call me collect if you want. Anytime you want to exchange thoughts. Okay?”
Hubbell thanked the reporter. He said it was okay.
“And do me one favor if you call,” Cooper added. “Go to a phone booth, even though you'll feel like a jerk when you're doing it.”
“A phone booth? Why?” His voice tailed off as he motioned to his home phone.
“You just never know,” Cooper said.
Jim Hubbell thanked the reporter for his time, interest, and sympathy. Cooper and Lauren were the first people Hubbell had ever met from New York whom he actually liked, he said.
Then in the car outside, “We’re going back to Baltimore,” Cooper told Lauren. “We're taking a drive to see our last good witness,” he said.
“Who?” she asked.
“You’ve already met him,” Cooper answered.
Chapter 61
At a ballroom at the Hilton Hotel in Pittsburgh, Governor Wallace introduced his running mate: the retired Air Force Chief Of Staff General Curtis Lemay, the former commander of the Strategic Air Command. Those who knew LeMay from serving with him during his highly aggressive military service, and who were lucky enough to still be alive, also knew him by his nickname: “Old Ironpants,” given for his insistence that his bombers fly through enemy defenses without evasive action to improve their accuracy. LeMay had usually been in the lead plane.
The ballroom had been painted in luminous pink psychedelic floral patterns for a previous event. Wallace’s press conference was hastily convened, so there was no time or money to re-do the room. Hence, as Wallace introduced LeMay, Alabama State Police and U.S. Secret Service watched from holes in the swirling pink Age of Aquarius patterns.
LeMay was well known to the American public, and, for that matter, the Japanese public. In 1945, he had been placed in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands. LeMay felt the tactics developed against the Luftwaffe were unsuitable against Japan. He theorized that high-altitude precision bombing would be ineffective, given the usually cloudy weather over Japan and strong winds which would blow his beloved bombs off course. Thus, LeMay switched to low-altitude attacks at night.
LeMay personally commanded attacks on seventy Japanese cities. LeMay ordered the defensive guns removed from 325 B-29s, loaded each plane with Model M-47 incendiary clusters, magnesium bombs, white phosphorus bombs, and napalm, and ordered his bombers to fly in streams at 5,000 to 9,000 feet over Tokyo.
Japanese cities were constructed of combustible materials such as wood and paper. Firebombs were the perfect thing to incinerate civilians. The first pathfinder airplanes arrived over Tokyo just after midnight on March 10, 1945. They marked the target area with a flaming “X.” In three hours, the bombing force dropped 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs and killed one hundred thousand civilians. The firebombs scorched sixteen square miles of Tokyo. The American flight crews could smell burning human flesh as their aircraft flew over the targets. The firebombing directed by LeMay between March 1945 and the Japanese surrender in August 1945, may have killed more than half a million Japanese civilians and left five million homeless. LeMay later said that had the U.S. lost the war, he expected to be tried for war crimes.
But there was no mention of war crimes on this day in the acid-flash pink hotel ballroom. Instead, there was a proud and enthusiastic introduction from Governor Wallace, who boosted LeMay as a war hero.
Then Marty Friedkin of the New York Eagle rose to ask a question.
“General,” Friedkin asked, “as the man who was once been responsible at S.A.C. for potentially delivering American nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union or any other enemy, how do you currently feel about the use of nuclear weapons?”
“Nukes are just another one of our weapons in the arsenal,” the General responded cheerfully. “When you’re in a war, get in with both feet and win. There are many times when it would be efficient to use nuclear weapons. I don’t think the world would end if we exploded a nuclear weapon.”
As LeMay continued, Wallace uneasily watched him. General LeMay rambled on. TV cameras aimed in and reporters clicked on their handheld recorders.
“It’s pure propaganda that nuclear weapons cause permanent damage to human, animal and plant life,” LeMay explained. “On Bikini Island where we tested our weapons, the fish are all back in the lagoons, the coconut trees are growing coconuts. The guava bushes have fruit on them. Everything is the same except the land crabs. There’s some question about whether you can eat a land crab or not, but the rats are bigger, fatter and healthier than they ever were before.”
Wallace tried to interrupt the idyllic images, but LeMay kept going. “Nuclear war is horrible but there’s no difference between being killed by a nuclear weapon or a rusty knife. If I had a choice,” he concluded with enthusiasm, “I’d rather be killed by a nuclear weapon.”
“What about the millions of people who would die with you?” Friedkin asked.
Wallace stepped between his running mate and the microphone. He insisted that LeMay had not endorsed using nuclear weapons. But the general was not a man to retreat.
“If I found it necessary, I would use anything we could dream up,” LeMay insisted, leaning in to the microphone. Wallace looked stricken. The former sergeant with the 20th Air Force needed to instill some discipline in his former commander.
“The General is not advocating the use of nuclear weapons,” Wallace said, taking control of the podium. “He’s against nuclear weapons and I am, too,” contradicting what everyone had just heard.
“Wait a minute now!” LeMay barked in his b
est SAC Command voice. “I’m certainly not going to stand here and tell our enemies we’re never going to use nuclear weapons. If we’re not going to use them, we might as well bury those great weapons at Fort Knox.”
It was too late to roll the Mad Bombardier back into the hanger. He was armed, aloft and soaring ever higher. It was a situation that was difficult to make worse, but LeMay managed.
Asked why he had agreed to run with Wallace, LeMay responded with admiration. “Listen, to read about him in the press, you get the idea that he’s a bigot and a racist. Well, I find him reasonable and practical. We in the Air Force have always had a place for good solid citizen colored people and the country does, too.”
It was over in seven minutes, all seven of which were worthy of Stanley Kubrick.
Herb Block of the Washington Post christened the Wallace-LeMay ticket as, Run ‘Em Over and Blow ‘Em up. By evening, Hubert Humphrey referred to Wallace and LeMay as, “the Bombsy Twins.” Nixon started circulating the phrase, “Bombs Away With Curt LeMay.”
The next day, LeMay asserted that he had inside knowledge that Nixon planned to “pack his cabinet with left wingers,” a charged which must have shocked and bemused the Nixon camp.
“Curtis Emerson LeMay is a bomber,” proclaimed Marty Friedkin’s column in the New York Eagle the next afternoon. “That sums him up. His hair is iron gray and so are his suits, which seem to have been tailored for a Brink’s truck. The solid cigar-chomping vigor of his triumphant post-war American face has been deadened by a recent stroke into a doughy fleshy weightiness, with a permanent snarly expression. As for Governor Wallace, all four feet nineteen inches of him, he has never looked as physically coarse as today when he aspired to look like a statesman. With his clumsily slicked-back cowlick, he was small, unpleasant and petulant. It may be premature to say so,” Friedkin concluded, figuring he might be fired for this column, “but Wallace didn’t just shoot himself in the foot today with the LeMay decision. He nuked himself.”
Chapter 62
