Firebird_A Spy Story of the 1960's

by Noel Hynd

  Deke Moreland walked Friedkin past two rows of security barriers and toward a private elevator. They went down a flight. Friedkin was suddenly backstage. Then, in a surreal moment he was less than twenty feet away from a small animated man with an angry expression, crooked necktie and slicked back hair. Wallace.

  Police from Michigan and from Alabama formed a ring around the candidate, facing outward. There were four of them within the outer circle—tall, taut security gorillas. The only thing in Friedkin’s memory that he had ever seen that was similar were the bulked-out hulking security men who ringed President de Gaulle of France: Roger Tessier, Henri Djouder, René Auvray, Raymond Sasia, and Paul Comiti.

  Friedkin, one hand to the back of his skull, tried to pause to get a good close look at the Presidential candidate. But Moreland kept him moving. They arrived moments later in a private lounge. Friedkin seated himself in a large chair. His head pounded. He felt as if he had a concussion. A pretty woman brought ice. Indulgently, Moreland pulled up a chair next to him.

  “Now, how are you feeling?” Moreland asked.

  “Better. A little. Thank you.”

  “Rough crowd, huh?” Moreland asked.

  “Bunch of crazy latter-day Fascists,” said Friedkin.

  “Oh, now, don’t get going in that direction again, friend. The governor just speaks the truth as he sees it. Working people connect.”

  “So do a bunch of overt bigots and racists.”

  “Your opinion,” Moreland said.

  “What do you do for the governor?” Friedkin asked.

  “On the record?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m a friend and admirer. I enjoy a campaign that’s not ashamed to be patriotic.”

  “Now how about off the record?” Friedkin pressed.

  Moreland laughed.

  “Off the record, friend, I bundle money. The governor has several large contributors who like to remain anonymous. I make sure the dollars get into the bank account.” Moreland paused. “I’m just happy to participate. I doubt if Mr. Wallace even knows who I am.”

  “If you’re a big-time bundler,” Friedkin said, “he knows who you are.”

  Moreland laughed. “I suppose. Or maybe not.” He stood and reached into a wallet. He pulled out a business card and handed it to Friedkin. “But now you know, too,” he said. “Apologies for what happened here. I got to mosey along. Stay as long as you like. I hope you feel better. Okay?”

  Friedkin accepted the business card and the apology. “Okay,” Friedkin said.

  “Friends?” asked Moreland.

  “Yeah. Sure,” said Friedkin.

  Then Deke Moreland, the bundler, was out the door.

  Chapter 72

  Jim Hubbell wore dark glasses when Cooper and Richie arrived at the doughnut shop. He looked shaken and frightened. And he hadn't been kidding about the shotgun. He kept it up front with him below the dashboard of his pick-up truck, where he sat waiting. Cooper pulled his car next to the pick-up, window to window.

  “I would never have believed it,” Hubbell said from his truck. “If you'd come here, even if you were an old pal of mine, and told me all this, I’d never have believed it about Peggy.”

  “You always find things out after people die, as well,” Cooper said.

  “Follow me,” Hubbell said.

  Hubbell drove a circuitous indirect route to his home. Cooper and Lauren followed, Cooper driving. Cooper flipped down the sunshade above his portion of the windshield. He also watched his rear view. It didn't take him long to spot a compact blue Chevrolet station wagon, three cars back, following.

  “I hope that's a friend of Hubbell’s following us,” Cooper said. “Otherwise, we'll be needing that shotgun pretty soon.”

  They arrived at Hubbell’s house. The follow-up vehicle parked down the street. Hubbell eyed it as he walked to Cooper.

  “Who’s your friend?” Cooper asked, indicating.

  “Buddy of mine from work,” said Hubbell. “Name's Frankie. One of my store managers. He's my buddy but I'm his boss. He’s a retired cop.”

  “You're that alarmed, are you?” Cooper watched their escort through the mirror. Frankie was a big, moon-faced man with a beard and a red Florida State baseball cap.

  Cooper placed a hand on the widower's shoulder. “Is Frankie reliable?”

  “Better be. I pay his salary.”

  “Then sometime give him a tip for the future. If he knows where we're going, he should pull ahead now and then. Otherwise, if you get a real tail someday, someone playing hard ball, he'll make your pal and hit him right before he blows you away. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And if you're really worried about being followed,” Cooper continued, “you should hit your brakes and pull to the side of the highway for five minutes. Then see who cuts theirs to try not to lose you. Sometimes it's almost amusing.”

  “Sure,” he finally said. “I'll tell Frankie. We'll start doing that. Thanks.”

  The Hubbell house had a condemned air, as if much of its life had vanished with Peggy. The air conditioning had been off. The house was an inferno. Hubbell opened all the doors and two downstairs windows. Outside, Frankie sat in his wagon halfway down the block and broiled.

  Hubbell's new story was succinct. Among his late wife's possessions, he discovered as he gradually went through them, was a pistol. Firearms were nothing new in the Hubbell domicile. But as parents they had had a standing agreement. No weapon was ever unaccounted for, acquired secretly, or left without a lock when their little girl was about. Peggy had violated that code. Jim had found the loaded pistol that she carried under the seat of her car.

  He had agonized over it for days. Why had she had it? Whom had she feared?

  He was brooding upon that in the kitchen one night, getting up the moxie to call Mr. Cooper in New York and shoot the breeze about it, when Jenny came into the room.

  “Daddy?” she had asked. “What are you doing with Mommy's gun?”

  “I couldn't believe it, Mr. Cooper,” Jim Hubbell related. “I didn't know my wife had an extra pistol. But my daughter knew. It made me wonder. What else didn't I know?”

  “How did your daughter know about it?” Cooper asked.

  “That's the first thing I asked her,” Hubbell said. “Come with me.”

  Hubbell led Cooper and Richie out the back door of his house toward a garden.

  “Jenny told me how she watched my wife get up from sleeping one night and walk out here. My wife had a pistol and some bullets buried in a section of the garden” Hubbell indicated a spot in a flowerbed just ahead of them. “Jenny showed me the spot.” Hubbell walked Cooper to the exact location. “My wife kept a gun hidden down there in a box in the ground. So I wondered whether Peggy had anything else down there. The other day, when Jenny was at school, I got me a shovel.” He glanced at the spot and dug a toe at it. The soil moved easily, like the fresh dirt from a tiny grave.

  “My wife kept her secrets well buried,” Hubbell said. “I loved her and lived with her and I didn’t even know. How do you like that? The things you find out after someone’s dead.”

  Cooper nodded knowingly.

  “I'll show you something else,” said Hubbell.

  They walked back indoors. Hubbell went to the front window to see if his sentry was still in place. He waved to his guard. Frankie was standing to the side of the truck now, drinking a quart bottle of Dixie 45. He returned the wave, holding his red baseball cap in his hand.

  Hubbell led Cooper back to where all of Peggy's books were shelved.

  “I thought it was only right that I kept this here, seeing as how she wrote it. And it's sort of on the same subject matter.” Hubbell removed two handfuls of books and reached behind them. He withdrew a brown folder and gave it to Cooper. “This isn't the original. This is a set of photocopies. I got the originals elsewheres. Hidden real good.”

  “Smart idea,” Cooper said. “May I?” He indicated a chair.

  “Pl
ease do.” Hubbell invited him to sit and read.

  What Cooper saw was the copy of a notebook Margaret McCray had started to keep four and a half years earlier, starting in January 1964 as a police officer. She had maintained it until her death. Theories. Questions. Isolated facts. Everything that had come into her stubborn, inquiring mind on a subject close to her.

  It took Cooper several minutes to begin to read her small, spidery handwriting with any ease. But when he conquered her unorthodox penmanship, her words served as a revelation.

  Margaret McCray had been just out of college when President Kennedy had been murdered. As a teenager she had read some American history. As a young adult she had developed an exceptional student's feel for history and a police officer's insight into the criminal mind. She had applied everything else she knew to the Kennedy assassination. She had been so obsessed by it, judging from the notes she kept, that she had not only studied the murder of the thirty-fifth American President, but also the murders of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.

  Yet it was the Kennedy slaying that had been the most recent in history. Plus it had spoken to her generation: a sinister blend of violence, political intrigue and the death of idealism. To Margaret, it was a piece of contemporary history.

  “Project Brontosaurus,” Margaret had written as a heading in the initial pages of the notebook and probably eleven years earlier. “Project Brontosaurus was close to the mark. But off the mark. It ties to the JFK slaying. A.G. is wrong.”

  Brontosaurus? Cooper thought. How did she know about Brontosaurus? And A.G.?

  Cooper’s eyes rose. “Who is A.G.?” he asked Hubbell.

  “I assume it was Albert Grady,” Hubbell said. “Or Allan, as she sometime called him. Her former partner on the police force and in this conspiracy stuff.” He seemed about to add something, but then changed his mind. “Who else but Grady?” he said.

  Who else, indeed?

  Grady’s shadow loomed all over everything right now. Cooper and Lauren scanned dozens of notes. They flipped pages. Hubbell kept a jittery vigil. They exchanged glances but said nothing to each other. Occasionally, Lauren would point to something to bring Cooper’s attention to it. He would do the same. Their teamwork became unspoken and intuitive. It was common currency between them that they would discuss things later.

  Cooper couldn't believe what was before him.

  There were even accounts of little social get togethers that Margaret and her former partner used to attend, conspiracy theorists and speculators from the Baltimore-Washington Beltway area. The theorists would get together, have drinks, eat nachos and flirt with each other’s partners or theories or both. As time went on, some local Russian emigres—and there were many of them—flitted in and out of these circles, looking for free eats, free booze and the occasional horny wandering wife.

  Across this terrain in mid-1966 flitted a new arrival, a man whom Margaret referred to as “my Russian.” She was more than a little intrigued with him. They met first in small groups with the others, then kept smaller more intimate rendezvous. They went out for jasmine tea, plates of borscht, and—Cooper reading between the lines—perhaps other more intimate pleasures as well.

  “My Russian insists Nosenko was a liar,” Peggy had written, almost with schoolgirl enthusiasm for a new crush. My Russian says. My Russian says. My Russian says. The phrase reappeared over and over.

  Cooper's attention turned manic. His eyes rose and met Grady’s.

  “Who’s this new favorite Russian?” Cooper asked.

  “I can’t help you on that one,” Hubbell said.

  Cooper’s thoughts flew in every direction. He and Lauren concluded their initial survey of the document. “This Russian must have had a name,” Cooper said.

  “She never mentioned a name. Never talked about it.”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?” Cooper asked.

  Hubbell shrugged. He had nothing to offer on the point.

  Cooper looked back to the journal.

  “Does any of this mean anything to you?” Jim Hubbell finally asked. “It flummoxes me.”

  Cooper sighed. “I think with a little corroboration we might come up with something. This was Peggy's journal, I assume. This is what she'd been working on?”

  Hubbell nodded.

  “Her secret hell. She kept it buried when she wasn't writing?” Cooper asked. Hubbell nodded again. “I can keep this copy?” Cooper asked.

  “It's for you. I haven't mentioned it to the local cops.”

  “Don't,” said Cooper, standing. “It won’t accomplish anything.”

  Cooper grasped Hubbell's hand and shook it. “You take care of yourself. Keep a low profile. Stay on guard.” Hubbell said he would.

  Cooper and Lauren returned to their car. They gave a final wave to Frankie. There was nothing like a drunk guy in a red cap on surveillance. They pulled away and headed north.

  “’A.G.’ Albert Grady,” she said softly. “No wonder he sits by the window with a pistol.”

  Lauren paused. “I assume that’s where we’re going.”

  “You assume correctly.”

  “Should we update Murphy?”

  At the wheel, Cooper laughed.

  “Why bother?” he said. “Editors only get in the way.”

  Chapter 73

  Eighteen hours after leaving Florida, Cooper and Lauren returned to Albert Grady's home, this time without warning. Grady was not pleased to see them, but he allowed him in. They sat in Grady's living room. The doors and windows of the house remained closed.

  “Okay. I didn't lie to you,” Grady said, indignation creeping into his voice, when Cooper broached the subject of the detective's deceased lover. “I told you the truth as I remembered it.”

  “Yes, you did,” Cooper said “But you didn't tell us the complete truth, did you? It wasn't just Peggy who had theories,” Cooper said. “I have a copy of the journal she used to keep. She had a collaborator. Or at least someone who knew her theories. You.” Grady opened his mouth to speak. Cooper stopped him with an upraised hand.

  That was Lauren’s cue to jump in. “Albert, we read Peggy's journal in its entirety on our way here,” Lauren said. “We have part of the puzzle pretty well straightened out.”

  “You do, huh?” Grady stared at them dead-on, his nervous eyes jumping first to him, then her, then the other way. “For God's sake, you two!” he demanded. “Why can't you just drop it?”

  “The death of a President? The attempted murder of sports editor? If it's murder, it's of interest. We report, Albert. We inform the public, most of who don't give a damn, anyway. But I want the whole story and the names of the guilty. Maybe in fifty years someone will read it and be impressed.” Cooper paused. “As for you, Albert, no need to worry. You're just a source. Sources are confidential. No one even knows we visit you. Except us.”

  “It’s us you have to keep happy,” Lauren said.

  Grady uttered a long, low string of impressive profanities.

  “Correct us where we’re wrong,” Cooper requested. “You and Margaret worked together several times in Baltimore,” Cooper said. “You liked each other. You had a romance. You shared a lot of things. Either you were a conspiracy buff to start with, or your better-educated lady friend made one out of you. Which was it?”

  Grady stared at him. His resolve started to fade. He leaned back in his chair.

  “She made one out of me,” he said.

  A batch of bright daylight slipped through the drawn blinds. It crossed Grady’s face. He looked briefly very old but seemed to be gathering his thoughts in a way that suggested he wanted to put them correctly in order.

  Finally, Grady continued. “She was always talking about it. The Kennedy assassination case. Oswald. Ruby. The Russians. Cubans. CIA. Mafia. The inconsistencies of the Warren Commission. The fact that Earl Warren didn’t believe the conclusions of his commission.”

  “Peggy refers to ‘my Russian,’” Cooper said. “It sounds like her R
ussian was a Soviet defector.”

  “Frank and I assume the man was Pavel Lukashenko,” Lauren said. “Would we be correct in that assumption?”

  Brady eyed them cautiously.

  “Where did you first meet Pavel Lukashenko first?” Cooper asked.

  “How the hell did you figure this out?” Grady demanded.

  “Snooping around,” Cooper said.

  “Connecting the dots,” Lauren said. “So when was it?”

  “I think it was the year before they killed him,” Grady said. “June of that year. Peggy and me, we used to go to these conventions. You know. Conspiracy junkies would all get together once a year. Like people going to a car show. We'd go and talk over the latest ideas with other people. There were always a lot of JFK assassination freaks at these things. This big burly guy with a roadshow Dracula accent starts turning up at one of them. Obviously Russian. Nervous as a herd of cats. Smart, but paranoid. Bit of a drunk, too. They all are, I hear. We struck up a friendship, the three of us. He liked us 'cause we were solid working people instead of the intellectual fairies he normally met. ‘Good cops,’ he called us. ‘Good people.’”

  “Where did he live?”

  “Down near Washington. The CIA had him on a long leash. He’d go out at night and socialize. Crazy stuff. Then he started going to our meetings. Wanted to get something off his mind. He wondered if he was crazy for thinking what he thought.”

  “And he was driving down to see you the night he was killed,” Cooper said.

  “How'd you know that?”

  “Partly it's a guess. But partly because you wanted to investigate the case. And partly because, where else would he be so intent on going at two in the morning in an ice storm? And why else were you out at that hour, too?” Cooper let his first premise sink in, then continued. “I'm guessing Lukashenko felt threatened because he'd been talking too much at some of these conspiracy conventions. Maybe he wanted your protection. And maybe he wanted to talk to a couple of true believers before it was too late.”

  “Peggy was obsessed about this Russian,” Grady said. “She said Lukashenko held the key to understanding the whole thing.”