Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  It was half past two in the afternoon when Cooper and Lauren Richie again arrived in front of Mike Grady's house. Lauren stepped out of the car at the same time as Cooper.

  “Don’t lock your door,” Cooper told Lauren. “Never know when you'll be leaving in a hurry.”

  Cooper was not surprised to again see the drawn shades move in the living room of Grady's home. Grady was standing near the curtains, very still, probably with his weapon.

  “We're already being watched,” he said.

  Lauren’s eyes shifted to the window. The curtain rustled. Her eyes went to the door. Cooper, carrying the Florida newspaper under his arm, rang the bell. He rang it two, three, four times and there was no response. “Mr. Grady?” he called out eventually. He rapped sharply on the door. The entire house remained silent. “Now you try,” Frank said to Lauren.

  “Detective Grady!” Lauren called out. “Please talk to us!”

  The door flew open. Grady's hulking presence again filled the doorframe. For a moment, no word was spoken. The ex-cop wore a dark sports jacket over a soiled T-shirt and jeans. He looked like a bouncer at a waterfront beer-and-crab joint.

  “Sorry to bother you again,” Cooper said. “I think you should see this.”

  From under his arm Cooper withdrew the copy of the Fort Myers News Press. Cooper presented the newspaper open to the first page where it bore the account of Peggy Hubbell's murder. The dead woman's picture was face up under the headline.

  Grady’s gaze settled upon Peggy photograph. Reacting in shock, he slowly took the newspaper from Cooper. He began to absorb what his eyes were telling him.

  “No,” he said, reading. His tone was low and disbelieving. “No,” he said again, long and low. He was very still as he read.

  “I'm very sorry,” Cooper said softly. “This isn't of my doing. I'm the same as you: I would have done anything to have been there in time to prevent it.”

  Grady's composure crashed. He sank his teeth into his lower lip, but the flesh of his chin quivered. His gaze fell toward his shoes. But he fought with his emotions. His left hand passed across his mouth, then upward to his eyes, which were wet.

  “They got her, did they?” Grady finally asked.

  “Who got her?” Cooper asked. Grady looked his visitor in the eye.

  “They did,” he said belligerently. “Goddamn it. I don't have names! Never had names. And do you think I'd give them if I did?”

  “We are after the people who did this to her,” Cooper said. “You can help us.”

  “Please?” Lauren asked.

  Grady backed into his home. He gestured with his hand. Frank Cooper and Lauren Richie could follow. Cooper watched him carefully. Before closing the door, Grady scanned for any shadows that lurked in the afternoon sun.

  Moments later, they sat together in the living room. Grady had taken a chair near a curtained window that allowed him a view of both the street and the room. Cooper sat on a sofa across from him. Lauren was on a chair to one side. Grady found a pack of Lucky Strikes and smoked the first of several.

  “I understand your pain, Mr. Grady,” Cooper said, taking a notebook from a jacket pocket and laying it on the sofa beside him. Grady's right arm stayed motionless against his hip. Cooper had no idea what he would do if Grady went for his weapon. Meanwhile, Grady's gaze settled angrily into Cooper's eyes.

  Lauren read the situation perfectly. It was a time for her to soothe. “We’re horribly sorry,” she said softly.

  Cooper spoke as consolingly as possible. “May I call you Allan?” Cooper asked.

  “You call me anything you want,” he said. “It don't make no difference.”

  “Thank you,” Cooper said. “I know a few things. Maybe you could just listen and guide me along.”

  The cop's eyes were red and strained.

  “Your involvement began thirty months ago,” Cooper began. “You were on duty in Baltimore. Very early in the morning. About two a.m. on February eighth, 1966.” Grady was listening, still maintaining a silence now borne by bereavement and shock. “You were on patrol on the overnight shift. You responded to a call of an accident on Route…”

  “What did the bastards do?” Grady interrupted. “Just walk into her home and shoot her?”

  “Excuse me?” Cooper asked.

  “Peggy,” he demanded. “Did they shoot her in front of her new family?”

  “She was murdered from ambush as she walked on the beach,” Lauren said.

  “Dear God,” Grady muttered.

  “A thirty-two-caliber bullet,” Cooper explained. “The bullet was fired from long range. Maybe several hundred yards. A sniper.” He didn’t add that there were two shots.

  “Long range!” Grady snarled. “Who the hell travels around with big-time weapons like that?” Grady’s face grew gray and gloomy. Sweat formed along his hairline.

  “You were doing your job,” Cooper began again. “You were on patrol in the early morning of February 8, 1966. The weather was bad. Sleet. Ice. You…”

  “You've got it haywire already,” said Grady, interrupting.

  A nervous tick: every minute or so he glanced out the window and scanned his property.

  “You're saying I was on patrol,” Grady corrected. “I wasn't. I had finished my shift. I was on my way home. And it wasn't any ‘accident.’ That's what you called it.”

  “No?” Cooper asked.

  “No. I went to a car wreck. There was a man at the wheel of an overturned car. I was afraid that the vehicle might explode. So I pulled the body from the car. Plenty of blood. He was dead.”

  “Who pronounced him dead?” Cooper asked. “Not you, I wouldn’t think.”

  “I think it was a Dr. Michael Arroyo. I remember. No one liked him. He showed up after the paramedics and didn’t look at much. Just signed the papers so the body could go to the M.E.’s office.”

  Cooper wrote the name in his notebook. “It wasn't a Dr. Schmidt?” Cooper asked.

  “Who the hell is Schmidt?”

  “Schmidt's the name on the bottom of the only existing death certificate,” Cooper said.

  Grady thought about it and frowned. “There was no Schmidt. That’s bull,” he said.

  “But what about the paramedics? Did they examine the victim carefully?”

  Grady practically spit out the words. “Of course not! Do they ever, if they can't find a heartbeat? The county pays them. They do minimum. Then they go home. They forget about it.”

  “But you didn't forget it, did you?” Cooper asked. “For many reasons.”

  A glare and a noncommittal shrug met this assertion.

  Then, “Look,” said Grady. “There were head injuries. But they didn't happen in the car. Someone killed him. Then someone stuck him in the seat of a car and sent him down Arlington Boulevard. The man was dead before he got into the car.”

  “How does a dead man drive a car so fast?” Cooper asked. “And who would have realized that the injuries happened outside the car and before the impact?”

  Grady's gaze settled to the floor again. Then, “Stones,” the retired cop said. “That's how the killers made the car go. They fixed a bunch of stones to the accelerator. They wedged them in against the sideboards. Wouldn't have aroused suspicion had they jarred loose.”

  “I'm not following you,” Cooper said.

  “Poor Peggy,” Grady said, gazing out the window for a second. “Poor girl.” He looked back to Cooper.

  The ex-cop found his voice. Suddenly it was snowing again on the early morning of February 8, 1966. Grady told how the runaway vehicle had nearly killed him as he attempted to access Arlington Boulevard. He saw the car leave the road and flip. A fire truck was there within another few minutes, hosing down the chassis. That's why it hadn't burst into flame, both Cooper and Grady agreed, analyzing it together now. Flames had been intended. There was a heavy odor of gasoline, as if the car seats had been soaked.

  “Otherwise, I never would have seen the stones. Or the blood. And I would
n't have heard no engine. Ever been to a car wreck?” the cop asked.

  “A few, unfortunately,” Cooper said.

  “After you've seen a few of them,” Grady said, “they look alike. So you remember what's unusual.” Grady's eyes visited his front lawn again, then returned. “Once I went to this accident on Route Ninety-five south of Baltimore,” Grady said. “Head-on collision in the middle of the interstate. A pickup truck jumped the meridian, came up in the wrong lane, and took out this family from Jersey. Truck driver was drunk. Four people died.”

  Cooper waited.

  “The vehicles weren't burning,” Grady explained. “There was just smoke and steam rising, 'cause the engines had been smashed together on both vehicles. There's this woman sitting in the one car with her nose sawed off by a piece of windshield. She's still alive. What's weird is this: When the nose is missing from someone's face, you're looking right down that person's throat. This was the first time I'd looked right down someone's throat.”

  Lauren grimaced.

  “Yeah?” Cooper asked. “So?”

  “This same accident,” Grady said, “the man sitting next to her, his head was gone. But he was still wearing a jacket and a tie. That's how I knew it was a man. We found his head the next morning two hundred and fifty feet down the highway at the foot of this big green and white sign that says, Seat Belts Save Lives.”

  Cooper wondered how this would circle back to Peggy Hubbell.

  “The ugly and the unusual. That's what you remember,” Grady said. “And, see, in this incident you want to know about, there wasn't anything that was really ugly. But it was unusual. See, the car was overturned, but the motor was still racing. See? That's wrong! For the motor to race,” Cooper said, “you need a foot on the accelerator. Or a drive train malfunction. First thing I did was look to see why the wheels were still racing.”

  That's when he saw the stones, Grady remembered, wedged against the side of the accelerator in such a way as to keep it pressed down. And that was what made Grady take a second look at the whole scene.

  “It was the blood that convinced me,” he said. “It didn't pay no attention to the laws of gravity. The body should have flown around that car to pick up its injuries,” Grady said. “That would have splattered the blood all over. But the injuries were to the back of the head. And the blood had run straight down the deceased individual's back and onto the car seat. See what I

  mean? The bloodstains flowed downward on the car seat. But the car was upside down. The blood should have flowed upside down, too.”

  “And you voiced your suspicions?” Cooper asked.

  “I told Captain Elijah that we had at homicide. He gave it to me to investigate.”

  “Did you?”

  “Of course I did!” He paused. “For about forty-eight hours. Me and…This is where it gets complicated, you see,” Grady said defensively. “See, this is how Peggy and me… You know… How we sort of got involved with each other,” he said. His eyes were misting, conscious again of her death.

  “But soon after he gave it to you, the case vanished,” Cooper recalled. “It never appeared again in any newspaper. Not in Baltimore or in any neighboring county. Seems strange, doesn't it? My guess would be that someone took the case away from you. And that the someone was not from this department. That’s my thesis. The someone was from Washington.”

  Cooper's guess, Grady said again, was smack-dead on the money. Grady described in detail how a “suit,” as he disparagingly called it, had turned up three days later.

  “So you saw the man?” asked Cooper. “The man who came from Washington.”

  “Sure did. It was a Sunday morning. He sat this far away from me.” He indicated the distance between himself and Lauren. “I got a damned good look at him, Mr. Cooper.”

  “Do you think you would remember him?”

  “You got him somewhere?” Grady asked, with a vengeance.

  “Maybe.”

  “I'll take a look whenever you want.” He paused, anger creeping back up. “Particularly now,” he said. Cooper took that as a reference to Peggy Hubbell. Grady blew out a breath. “See,” Grady said, “this case changed everything. Peggy and me, we were told to forget about it. I saw the suit in Captain Elijah's office. I'd been on the job long enough to know when to lay off. But Peggy wasn't like that. She's like a lot of women. No offense,” he said, looking toward Lauren. “But she never knew when to drop something. Principles, she kept saying. A man had been killed. We couldn't sit on that. She didn't know when to drop this ‘Mr. Carman’. That's what we called it between us. ‘Mr. Carman.’ That was our code name for it, see, the man in the car, so that we could talk about it with no one overhearing and understanding.”

  “Did you talk about it a lot'?”

  “Yeah,” Grady admitted. “It bothered her. We started to meet for a few drinks after work. We'd talk about it. Talk about Elijah. Talk about Mr. Carman. What it must have involved. She didn't want to be part of someone's dirty cover-up.”

  “How did you feel about it?”

  “The cover-up? Didn't like it at all,” Grady proclaimed. “Same way I don't like captains and inspectors taking payoffs to keep dice games going. But I couldn't do nothing about that, either.” He paused. “Then eventually, we started talking about other things as well. Her and me. You know. Romantic stuff.”

  “Were you in love with her?” Lauren asked.

  The question devastated Grady. The ex-cop opened his mouth to answer, but no words came out. There was a tremor of a lower lip and a gagging as he tried to talk. His composure collapsed again. He nodded. Yes, he had been.

  “Very much,” he managed to say. “She was something special. We got involved together about a month after the Mr. Carman incident,” he said. “I can… I can tell you honestly. I had never met a woman like her. She was smart. She was sexy. She was tough. She knew,” he concluded, “she knew how to be a woman. Know what I'm talking about?”

  “How long did your affair go on?” Cooper asked.

  “About a year,” Grady said. There was a very long pause. “I wanted to marry her.”

  “She didn't want to?” Cooper asked.

  “She turned me down,” he said. “And it was because of this case.”

  From the corner of his eye, Cooper saw how focused Lauren was upon their subject.

  “Christ, I loved her,” Grady said, letting go with a deep breath. “We tried not to let anyone else know we were carrying on. You know, two cops together. It didn't look good. Some of our friends knew, but they kept quiet.” Cooper gave Grady a moment to recover. Then Grady spoke with greater ease. “We'd do things on our days off,” Grady said. “Go to the ocean. Go to the eastern shore. We'd stop off in rooming houses, go to bed, sleep, make love late the next morning, then go back to sleep.” He paused. “I loved everything about her. Know that? I loved the way she pulled her stockings back on after we'd been in bed together. I loved the way she looked lying next to me. I loved watched her get dressed after we’d had some time together. “Me and her. You know?”

  “I know,” Cooper said.

  Grady’s face stormed over. His eyes found Cooper's.

  “Where did the bullets hit, Mr. Cooper?” The question was very cold.

  “I don't know,” Cooper said, recalling that one of the shots had taken part of Margaret’s head off. Cooper considered himself an excellent liar when he needed to be.

  “Yes, you do,” the cop said, seeing through him immediately.

  “She died instantly,” Lauren said. “Never knew what hit her.”

  “You telling me the truth?”

  “I am,” Lauren said.

  Grady looked down and ran a hand across his face again. Then he disappeared into a happy memory again. His smile fought with his tears. Then the clouds rolled in anew.

  “But, see?” Grady continued. “Always there was this thing between us. Mr. Carman. Peggy wanted me to talk to the police commissioner. She'd done some snooping around. Asked a lot
more questions than she should have.” Grady gave it a long pause, combined with plenty of thought. Then his gaze fell upon Cooper's. “It was a CIA job, wasn't it?” he asked.

  Cooper nodded. “I think so. But I can't prove it yet,” Cooper said.

  “It’s the angle we’re working, Mr. Brady,” Lauren said, still attempting to soothe.

  Grady shook his head. “Goddamn it. I warned her. I warned her so damned many times, Mr. Cooper. I told her this particular case, this one above all, don't touch it! For your own sake, Peggy, drop this one!” He was still shaking his head and his voice rose. “A beautiful, stubborn woman. Wouldn't listen. That's what ended our relationship,” Grady said. “She wanted to take the story to the newspapers,” he said. “To the TV stations. To the police commissioner. To the courts. The more important she thought the story was, the more she wanted to talk about it. She even had this one delusion about writing a book.”

  Cooper rolled his eyes. So did Lauren.

  “No, she was real serious about it,” Grady said. “Doing all this research, making all these notes. She had theories, Mr. Cooper. Same as you. And she was one smart lady, but none of us male assholes would listen to her.”

  “Regrettably,” Cooper said.

  “She wanted me to do it all with her,” he said. “But I drew the line. I warned her. I said, no, it ain’t going to do no good. She got real mad at me. ‘We're partners in this from the beginning,’ she'd say to me. ‘You drew me into this case.’ It wrecked our relationship. She said I wasn't standing by her. I didn't have any balls, she told me. I retired from the force. We saw each other less. I went off on a vacation to think things over. Thought maybe, just maybe, I would see it through to the end with her. Instead, no. She met the hardware man while I was away.”

  “Jim Hubbell?”

  “That's him,” Grady said bravely. “Got my woman, he did. Made off with the only person I ever loved.” He paused. “Couldn't protect her, either,” Grady said bitterly. “Did he? When the bad guys were after her, did he stop them? No!”

  “In fairness,” Cooper said, “he probably didn't even know she was in danger.”

  “I warned her. But would it have mattered?” It was a rhetorical question.