The Fedorovich File: The Lacey Lockington Series - Book Three

by Ross H. Spencer

“Not bad. Last time I saw you was up the road a piece at the New Delhi Motel—the Devereaux debacle—front end of June.” Lockington didn’t say anything. “That was one very hairy morning,” Dellick added. Lockington still didn’t say anything. “You’re in Youngstown because of Fedorovich?”

  Lockington shook his head. “I live here now.”

  Dellick winked. “Sure, you do.” Frank Addison was yawning. “Carruthers said that you have Fedorovich in the sack.”

  “Carruthers speaks with forked tongue.”

  “Don’t we all?” Addison put in.

  Lockington said, “Man is born in sin.”

  Dellick said, “You got something to run on?”

  “Not immediately.”

  Dellick said, “We’re here to take orders. You’re in charge.”

  “Who says so?”

  “Carruthers. Carruthers got it from Massey at Langley.”

  “Who’s Massey?”

  Addison said, “I’ve never seen the sonofabitch.”

  Dellick said, “Neither have I, but nobody argues with him.”

  Lockington said, “All right, boys, you’re on twenty-four hour alert.”

  Addison said, “I was born on twenty-four hour alert.”

  Dellick took out a pad, scribbling on a sheet, tearing it free, handing it to Lockington. “I’m at the Day’s End on Belmont Avenue—Mr. Felix Martindale—I sell cook books—Room 108.”

  Addison said, “Call Mr. Felix Martindale—Felix can get hold of me.”

  Lockington eyed Addison. “Damned good thing I didn’t call the Youngstown Police Department.”

  “Yeah, they already got one Frank Addison.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Ninety days—pimping for his grandmother.”

  Dellick said, “Helluva good way to starve to death.”

  Addison said, “Hey, you oughta see his grandmother!”

  Lockington downed his double cognac. “Fellas, it’s been a genuine delight.” He went out, waving to John Sebulsky.

  Sebulsky waved back, looking slightly puzzled.

  59

  Autumn was the saddest of seasons and it wept inconsolably on that morning. Lockington stood at his office window, one foot up on the seat of the wooden bench, looking over the rain-drenched plaza parking lot into the sodden forests west of Meridian Road. It would be an excellent day for something, he supposed, but he couldn’t imagine what that would be—a drawing-and-quartering, perhaps. He was powerless—he knew what to do and he knew how to do it, but he didn’t know where to do it.

  It was likely that Olga Karelinko lived within ten minutes’ drive of his office, but from his office he could be in another county in less time than that. They were somewhere in the vicinity, perhaps two or three miles distant, old General Fedorovich and his woman, peeking through windows, watching every passerby, every automobile, reading sudden death into every midnight sound, waiting for the axe to come down, while the appointed savior of the situation stood motionless, staring out of windows while the whole damned dance hall came down around his ears. Barney Kozlowski’s friendly swat on the shoulder spun Lockington, seating him roughly on the bench. Barney boomed, “Hi, Mr. Lockington—sorry I’m late!” If it wasn’t the most unapologetic apology in history, it certainly ranked in the top ten.

  Lockington lurched to his feet. “And that’s why you just disconnected my gizzard from my appendix?”

  Barney had turned away, oblivious to the question. The kid’s morale had improved, obviously—he’d never been flippant with the boss. He’d crossed the room, taking a slim packet of white filing cards from a shirt pocket, placing it on the desk. He glanced over his shoulder, grinning like an undertaker at the scene of an airliner crash.

  “Mr. Lockington, would you step over here, please?”

  Lockington approached warily, the way you approach a drunken grizzly bear. “Kid, this better be good!”

  “You be the judge.” Barney turned the top card, placing it face-up on the desk. “Tell me, is that the series of mixed-up footnote numbers you gave me yesterday morning?”

  There was a string of numbers on the card—20-24-9-20-2-14-20-4-17-1-3-6-15-22-24-3-17. Lockington took one look and shrugged. He said, “I’ve been blessed with a lot of things, but a photographic memory ain’t one of ’em. You tell me—is it?”

  “It is—it’s identical!”

  “All right, if it’s identical, it’s identical.”

  Barney turned the next card on the stack, pointing to it, looking very much like Caesar at the Rubicon, Lockington thought, although he really didn’t know how Caesar had looked—at the Rubicon, or anywhere else for that matter.

  Barney said, “And is this the problem as it was presented to me—three eight-spoked wheels—first wheel, 1 through 8, A through H—second wheel, 9 through 16, 7 through P—third wheel, 17 through 24, Q through Y, X and Z eliminated, Q to indicate a space?”

  Lockington bent to peer at the card, studying it briefly.

  He said, “That’s how it looked to me.”

  Barney said, “All right, 20 is the first in the series of footnote numbers, and what letter does it correspond to?”

  “The letter in the 20 slot is T, and you’re going to run into a whole bunch of gibberish—it just won’t work that way.”

  “Only if we don’t move the wheels.” He flipped another card. “Now we’ve turned the wheels one notch from left to right, left to right being the direction in which you told me the cart was being pushed. The numbers haven’t turned, just the letters—A has advanced from the 1 position to the 2 position, I from 9 to 10, Q from 17 to 18—see for yourself, Mr. Lockington.”

  Mr. Lockington saw for himself.

  He said, “You’re right.”

  Barney said, “The second footnote number is 24—what’s the letter?”

  “The number 24 letter is W.”

  “See how easy it is?”

  “See how easy it is? So far, we got ‘TW’—how many words start with ‘TW’?”

  “Quite a few.” He was turning another card. He said, “Check me on this—A has moved to 3, I to 11, Q to 19—is that correct?”

  Lockington looked.

  He said, “You got it.”

  “And the third number is 9—give me the letter.”

  “That’ll be O.”

  “Now we have ‘TWO,’ don’t we?”

  “We do.”

  “One more time, Mr. Lockington—okay?”

  Lockington said, “Okay.” The back of his neck was beginning to tingle.

  Barney snapped over another card. “Did I mention that there was a code similar to this in Ralph Collingsworth’s Here’s to the Next Man Who Dies?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I believe you did. Let’s get on with this, shall we?”

  Barney got on with it. “Give me the locations of A , I, and Q, if you will, Mr. Lockington.”

  Lockington checked the new card.

  “A’s at 4, I’s at 12, Q’s at 20—they’ve moved up another click. What happens when they’ve gone completely around?”

  “They keep going around and around until you run out of key numbers. In Here’s to the Next Man Who Dies the Allies encoded an entire chapter from the Bible—it was a code within a code, you see—it had to do with a hush-hush aerial operation which—”

  “Later on that, kid—what’s the next number?”

  “The next number is 20, 20 corresponds to Q, and Q is a space, so our first word is ‘TWO’.” Barney turned a card. He was having the time of his life, Lockington could tell. Barney was saying, “Our next number is 2.”

  Lockington said, “Looky, kid, I don’t believe that we’ll have time to go through the whole thing at this pace—how does it come out—what’s the message?”

  “I don’t quite understand it, but it’s an address, Mr. Lockington.”

  “Let’s have it!”

  “TWO FIVE HACK ROAD—ROAD’s abbreviated to RD.”

  “Hack Road—wh
ere the hell is Hack Road?”

  “It runs off of Kirk Road—I got a friend who lives out that way.”

  “Kirk Road’s south of here, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, maybe a mile—you take Meridian Road to Kirk, turn west on Kirk until you hit Route 46—Hack Road pops up something like three-quarters of a mile after you cross 46.”

  “You know that area well?”

  “I just came from there.”

  “You just came from there?”

  “I was reconnoitering, Mr. Lockington.”

  Lockington said, “Good God, kid, I hope you didn’t go out there wearing a cape and a deerstalker hat—I mean, you could attract attention that way! Were you followed?”

  “No way—not at seventy-five miles an hour on Kirk Road, both ways!”

  “Did you turn into Hack Road?”

  “Naw, that would have been too obvious—I drove past it and turned around, but I took a good look going, and another one coming back!”

  “How’s the neighborhood?”

  “On Hack Road? There ain’t no neighborhood—that’s Gongaland! Somebody must of been going to build a subdivision but I guess they ran outta money! Hack Road’s half a block long and there’s just one house on it—that’s gotta be number 25!”

  “What kind of house?”

  “Little white bungalow, stuck back in the trees.”

  “Trees?”

  “It’s a jungle out there—trees to the north of the house, trees to the south, trees behind it, trees across the street! Hell, except for a couple foundations nobody ever finished, it’s all trees!”

  “Signs of life at 25?”

  “Nothing the first time—second time I saw some old woman on the front porch, picking up a newspaper. Who is she?”

  “Probably the luckiest woman in Ohio—so far.”

  “So far?”

  “We’re in the eighth inning—we gotta play nine.” Lockington took a scratch-pad from a desk drawer, tore off a sheet and wrote rapidly on it. He handed it to Barney. “Call this guy—tell him to meet me here at 1:30 sharp—no earlier, no later. Got that?”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I should be back in twenty minutes.”

  “And then the shit hits the fan?”

  “I think so.”

  Barney grabbed Lockington’s arm. “Can I come along on it, Mr. Lockington?” The boy’s eyes were beseeching, the eyes of a hungry hound.

  Lockington said, “Kid, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  He meant it.

  60

  He’d driven to the house at the north end of Dunlap Avenue. Natasha’s car wasn’t in the garage, and he’d anticipated that—the rain hadn’t stopped her. Tuesday was Natasha’s shopping day, that was etched in granite—to delay it by so much as an hour would have been difficult, to change it impossible, and on Tuesday, October 18, this had been a convenience because Lockington had wanted a handful of spare .38 cartridges and he hadn’t wished to alarm her—lately she’d been wound tighter than a mandolin string.

  He’d gone into the bedroom, digging into his dresser drawer to half-empty the little cardboard box of .38’s into his jacket pocket. Then he’d looked for his Chicago police handcuffs. If General Fedorovich proved uncooperative, Lockington figured on handcuffing the old bastard to a water pipe until he could call in the reserves. No handcuffs. He’d shrugged—well, that was where he’d thought he’d last seen them. He’d gone into the kitchen to grab the phone and dial the Day’s End number that Steve Dellick had given him. He’d asked for Room 108, and Dellick had answered on the first ring. Lockington had said, “Got him—I think.”

  Dellick had said, “Got him, you think?”

  “We’ve got something, and it’s probably Fedorovich.”

  “Damn! That didn’t take long!”

  “It took a week, that’s long enough.”

  “Meet at your office?”

  “Pronto.”

  “Flak jackets?”

  “I’d think so. Did you bring slickers?”

  “Yeah—we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Lockington had hung up, pausing to peer at Natasha’s pile of yellow legal paper on the kitchen table. There’d been activity. Apparently she’d spent part of her morning on the wheels project, but he’d looked at the work sheet that was clear of the stack and the letters hadn’t been shifted—A had been at 1, I at 9, Q at 17—no progress. Good. He’d been determined to keep Natasha out of it.

  He’d climbed into the Mercedes, heading south. His plan came in three stages, and if it worked smoothly, Gordon Kilbuck would get his interview, Dellick and Addison would get Fedorovich, and Lockington would get drunk in a tavern he hadn’t been in before. Lockington frowned. That might be the toughest part of it—finding a tavern he hadn’t been in before.

  He stopped at the bank.

  61

  Steve Dellick and Frank Addison came into the plaza parking lot on screeching rubber less than ten minutes after Lockington had returned to his office. He waved them in. He said, “This isn’t going to take long.” It didn’t. Five minutes later, he watched them pull away in Addison’s blue Chrysler, Addison at the wheel, Barney the guide in the front seat with Addison, smiling broadly, flashing Lockington an okay sign, Dellick hunched on the rear seat, glowering out at the rain.

  Lockington slammed the office door, tilting back in his swivel chair, lighting a cigarette, waiting, watching for Gordon Kilbuck’s dark blue Cadillac. It came at exactly 1:30. Lockington watched Kilbuck clamber out of the car, hobbling toward the office through the downpour, his limp more pronounced, his cane bumping on the blacktop. Wet weather’s rough on bum hips. Kilbuck came in, shaking rain from his hat, his smile anxious, his muddy eyes feverish with anticipation. He sat on the bench near the window, facing Lockington’s desk. There was a slight tremor in the hand holding the cane. He said, “You have something?”

  Lockington nodded.

  “You’ve found Fedorovich?”

  “We know his probable location.”

  “‘We,’ did you say?”

  “You and I—it’s likely that he’s living with Olga Karelinko in a lightly populated area west of here.”

  “Olga Karelinko—that’ll be the woman with the post office box, the one I told you about.”

  “Right—Olga was Fedorovich’s junior high school girl friend.”

  Kilbuck grinned from ear to ear. “Oh, God, isn’t that romantic? What a note to finish my book on—the aging Russian general and the sweetheart of his teens, together again—so many years, so many tears, so many miles—home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from—”

  Lockington said, “Don’t get carried away, Kilbuck—we aren’t sure that Fedorovich will even open the fucking door!”

  “But, he has to—after all our effort, he simply has to!”

  “Don’t bet the barn on it.”

  “If I can just talk to him for a minute—I can be very persuasive! Good Lord, Lockington, Alexi Fedorovich is a living legend—why, they say that he killed at least fifty German soldiers, more than half of them in hand-to-hand combat—cold steel! They say that he was known as ‘The Lion of Stalingrad’!”

  “Who says that?”

  Kilbuck’s smile was a lame thing. “Stuff I’ve read on him from time to time—old Russian periodicals, articles from Pravda—things like that.”

  “Written before he hit the bricks, of course—by now he’ll be the biggest coward in Soviet history. You read Russian?”

  “No, this was translated copy—New York City’s main library has acres of it on microfilm—it dates back beyond 1940. Believe me, I’ve made a thorough study of Fedorovich, and I can’t believe that I’m about to meet the man! Fedorovich would have had a monument built in his honor!”

  Lockington left the desk. “Let’s roll—you’re driving.”

  Kilbuck got to his feet. “Good—then I won’t have to transfer my things.”

  “What things?�
�

  “My attache case and my tape recorder—you can’t conduct an interview without a tape recorder. Do you know precisely where we’re going?”

  “If I did, I’d drive.” They went out, getting into the Cadillac. The rain was letting up, there were jagged streaks of copper on the western skyline. Lockington motioned for a left turn on Meridian Road. Kilbuck was cramped forward over the wheel, looking for all the world like a praying mantis with a bellyache, Lockington thought. They swung west on Kirk Road. Kilbuck said, “How far?”

  “I don’t know exactly—when we get there, we’ll stop.”

  At the Raccoon Road traffic signal Kilbuck said, “Are you armed?”

  Lockington said, “Yeah—why?”

  “Well, isn’t it possible that the KGB will make an appearance?”

  “It’s possible that the KGB has already made an appearance.” He checked his watch. They’d be deployed now—Steve Dellick in the trees behind the house, Frank Addison in the trees across the street, having reached their positions from east and west, undetected, he hoped. Barney would be waiting in Addison’s Chrysler, watching for the arrival of Kilbuck’s Cadillac, ready to seal off Hack Road.

  They crossed Route 46 and Lockington said, “We’re close now—slow down.”

  The Hack Road sign was readable from a half-block away, jutting from the weeds at a forty-five degree angle, badly in need of paint. Lockington signaled for Kilbuck to turn south on Hack and Kilbuck rolled the Cadillac into the narrow, rutted, dead-end street. Lockington spotted Addison’s blue Chrysler at the side of the road, a block to the west, beginning to move east. Kilbuck pulled to a halt in front of the only house in sight. He turned to Lockington. “Apparently, this is it.”

  Lockington nodded, studying the tiny white bungalow surrounded by trees. “Helluva change for Fedorovich, wouldn’t you think? No bands, no uniforms, no May Day parades, no hoopla, no prestige.”

  Kilbuck made a wry face. “Well, I’m not sure that those things would be important to him now. There’s a verse of an old poem that says it so well. Care to hear it?”