The Wabash Factor

by Howard Fast

  “No, not at all.”

  “Now about the ransom note, did you see it?”

  “Only the content.”

  “But since you set up the system for catching the museum thief if he tried to collect the ransom, you must have felt it was genuine. Is that so?”

  “Yes. I thought so.”

  “But evidently, the thief knew the painting had been recovered. Have you any idea who the thief was?”

  “Not really. If I were to run a real investigation, I suppose I would concentrate on the guards. To begin, anyway.”

  “But you didn’t run a real investigation?”

  “I brought it up, but Courtny vetoed it. He was right. The property had been recovered.”

  “You could have pushed for it.”

  I shook my head. “No. I thought about that. We just have too much work for my squad to handle as is.”

  “That’s a point against us. But we have a few for us.”

  At that moment, a small, bright-eyed lady, who was evidently Sally, came into the office and dropped an annual report on Charley’s desk. “And you’re Fran,” she said. “I recognize the hair, of course.”

  She sailed out of the room, and Charley slammed his fist down onto his desk and yelled, “Bingo! I am goddamn brilliant! See this? See this? This is the annual report of Wabash Protection. These annual reports always list the directors, who are very often window dressing and no more. Oh, they may pick up a few hundred dollars for each board meeting and they’re supposed to render know-how and experience, but as often as not it’s a place for the president’s friends to nod their heads. And right here, on the list of Wabash directors, Paul D. Grogan, president of Grogan Industries.”

  He had been carried away. It was his manner, and it made him a splendid trial lawyer, but I can guess that often enough he’s halfway down the road before he knows clearly why he’s running. This was a triumphant exercise of memory, to remember that he had seen Grogan’s name in the Wabash report, but at the same time it tended to demolish all the staid and serious doubt he had cast at the suggestion that there could be a conspiracy of the size I proposed. His ebullience subsided, and he stared at us rather glumly.

  “Hoist by my own petard,” he said.

  “And what does that mean, Charley?”

  “A petard was a sixteenth-century cannon, used to break the walls of a city under siege, and when the cannon broke its anchor ropes, it could spring back and kill the gunners, or something like that.”

  “I didn’t ask you what a petard was. I asked you what you meant.”

  “Anyway, it isn’t that,” Fran said. “It was a kind of primitive bomb.”

  “It means I’m scared,” Charley said. “It means that you two could be right. No, it doesn’t!” he snapped emphatically. “What does it matter that Grogan is a director of Wabash? Who told you that Wabash is controlled by Porfetto?”

  “Harvey Crimshaw, if you know who he is?”

  “Of course I know who he is. How do you happen to know Harvey Crimshaw?”

  “Oscar put me on to him, and I had lunch with him at the Harvard Club yesterday. Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Just for your information,” Fran said, “Harry doesn’t make that a way of life. He’s a cop, a poor, battered, lonely cop.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Sis, I’m trying to help.” And to me, he said, “How much does Crimshaw know?”

  “A good deal, not everything. I had to talk to him. Charley, this is a world I don’t know.”

  “Look, Harry,” Charley said gently, “the reason I keep coming back to that Edgar Wallace story all the time is because it’s the one piece that could hang you. We’re dealing with two things: One is the possibility of Porfetto being connected to a gigantic murder ring; the other is the matter of the charges brought against you. You feel that these charges are part of a device to destroy you, and I can understand why you feel that way. But whether or not it’s the fact, we have to make a case against the charges, and this Edgar Wallace thing could bring you down if they get hold of it. It would indicate that you used the story not to solve the crime, but to commit the crime. That’s why I am so desperately anxious that the story should not get out of this room. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t reply. I was staring at his desk, a beautiful old Queen Anne piece.

  “Harry?”

  I slid off my chair and down on my hands and knees.

  “Harry, for heaven’s sake—” Fran began.

  “Harry, what the hell are you up to?”

  I crawled under the desk, and then I wriggled back out, holding a small round object in my hand. “It’s already out. Every word we said here this afternoon is out. This thing in my hand is the latest beauty in a transmitting bug. It’s my fault, Charley, not yours. I should have known that they would think of Fran’s brother, and we came running here, just as they knew we would.” I dropped the thing to the floor and ground it under my heel. “They’re working us, using us, directing us, and we do their will.”

  “Mother of God,” Fran cried, “we told them where the kids are!”

  “Did we?”

  “We did, we did.”

  Charley picked up his phone and told Sally to get him the overseas operator. “Use our priority,” he said, and then to me, “Do you want to talk to Sean? Harry, I don’t know whether you’ll ever forgive me, but I’d give my life before I’d see harm come to any of you.”

  “I know.”

  Fran was huddled over, sobbing. For the comfort it might give her, I whispered, “They still don’t know where we live.”

  “I think we’ve gotten through,” Charley said, handing me the telephone. It was Sean’s wife, Mary, talking to the operator.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said quickly. “Mary, don’t hang up. This is Harry. Where’s Sean?”

  “He does a seminar at the university. He’ll be home about ten.”

  “Can you get to him?” I begged her.

  “Well, I don’t know. For what?”

  “They know where the kids are. He has to put them somewhere else.”

  “Harry, it’s nighttime here. Sean can’t go over to England tonight. And where can he put the children? What is this, Harry? What is happening?”

  Charley reached for the phone. “Give it to me, Harry.” And into the phone, “Mary, this is Charley Murphy, Sean’s brother—yes, of course you know me. Now listen, Mary, we have a corresponding firm of solicitors in Dublin, and one of the partners is Darby O’Sweeney. He’s a big, tall, capable man.” Pause, and then, “Oh, you know him. Good. Good. I will call him and he’ll meet Sean at your place tonight, and they’ll both fly over to London. And don’t worry about the money. If there are no flights, Darby will hire a plane. Now lock your door, and don’t be letting anyone in but Sean or Darby. If they have to, let them call me collect at my office here in New York. Sean has the number. And Mary, you have some kin with the police. Have them put a lookout on the school.” He put down the telephone and managed a smile of sorts, explaining that whenever he spoke to anyone in Ireland he put a brogue into his voice. “Got into it as a kid, imitating Pop and his friends. I’m going to call Darby now. He’s a fine man, and he’ll have a pistol in his pocket for a thing like this. It’s a kind of Dublin reaction.”

  Fran was still sobbing.

  “Come on, Sis,” he wheedled. “We’re going to climb out of this one, believe me.”

  “Why are they after my children?”

  “Same reason they bumped Harry here from the cops. They want a good hold on both of you. But they won’t get your kids. Convince her of that, Harry. I have to call Darby.”

  I put my arms around Fran while he called his solicitor friend in Dublin, and I whispered to her, “As God is my witness, baby, this will be over tomorrow.”

  I felt foolish as I spoke. We had departed from reality, and I had a sense of speaking lines that someone else had written. The background was Charley speaking to Darby in Dublin, and all of it took o
n that color of lunacy that one finds in the Irish theater, and I remembered Sean in Dublin pointing with such pride to the bullet marks on the old post office where the Sinn Fein had fought its last fight—Sean so gentle that he could not crush a flea.

  “Well, it’s in Darby’s hands now,” Charley said as he put down the telephone. “He’s a fine lad.”

  I felt like telling him that his phony brogue added nothing to the occasion, and that he should stop acting like a team-playing defensive tackle in the game of kill all the Goldings.

  Fran had pulled out of her bout of tears. “I can’t stand much more of this, my children at the mercy of demented killers three thousand miles away—”

  “Fran, no one’s going to kill our kids. Stop that.”

  Charley said, “We still haven’t managed anything with the matter of your suspension. We have to put together a defense.”

  Suddenly, I didn’t care anymore. I told him that.

  “You’d damn well care about going to jail. I’m going to call the district attorney. We’ve dealt with him, and he occasionally takes some booze with me at the Harvard Club. I want to set up a meeting. The whole thing is so damned outrageous. The Murphys don’t breed thieves.”

  I didn’t remind him that I was not a Murphy. He meant well, and he was certainly rallying around, and I couldn’t fault him. He did call the district attorney. There’s a good deal of confusion in the public mind about the role of district attorney in a place like New York City. There are five boroughs that constitute Greater New York, each of these a county and entitled to its own district attorney; but the notion fostered by TV and film that there is one D.A. prosecuting like crazy is far from the fact. The Manhattan district attorney, like the others, is not appointed to his office. He’s an elected official, but he has working under him over three hundred assistant district attorneys, and he himself, more often than not, is almost impossible to reach. He doesn’t prosecute cases; he runs the machine, and since the people who desire to get to him are legion, he is somewhat more unapproachable than the President of the United States.

  I was astonished that Charley was able to reach him on his first try, and my estimation of Charles and the weight he carried went up a good many notches. The conversation, as Charley told me later, went like this: Charles began by specifying me as his brother-in-law, which seemed to cut no ice at all with the D.A. It just happened that the D.A. knew all about me. Would he meet with Charles and myself? No way, nor did he desire to discuss the case any further with Charles. Evidently, I was being discussed more than I had imagined, and dispensed with more than I imagined. The D.A. advised Charles to instruct me to proceed along proper channels, and there were men, capable men, on his staff who handled bunco and fraud. Also, as he told Charles, I would be best advised to keep my nose out of things that did not concern me, and that I would know damn well what he was talking about.

  “So that’s it,” Charles said to me. “There’s an assistant D.A. named Opperman who runs the bunco department. I’ll get to him tomorrow. Leave this with me, Harry. You have enough to worry about. I give you my word—we’ll clear this up. You tell me you’re not at the apartment now. Where can I reach you?”

  I took no chances. I wrote the name and address on his desk pad, telling him to hold on to it. I had a strong feeling that our only chance for getting through this was to keep our address a secret. I told Charley, “If you talk to them again overseas, begin by telling them no names, no places. I’m totally paranoid at this point.”

  He hugged Fran as we prepared to leave, telling her that he had been a lousy snob of a brother, but that he would make up for it. I thanked him. “For what?” he wondered. “I gave it away. But how in God’s name did they get in here to plant that bug?”

  “You can get in anywhere if you want to, Charley.”

  Downstairs, we walked north. Eventually, we’d have to go through the business of shaking a tail, providing there was one, but here in the crowd that thronged lower Broadway, there was no way to go about it.

  Fran had tightened her face and closed off the tears. I knew her well enough to suggest that she should stop blaming Charley. “Hell, he makes maybe four, five hundred thousand a year. He’s pretty decent for anyone in that income bracket.”

  “Oh, I don’t give a damn about his money. It’s just that he’s the kind of Irish’ I like least, clever as hell with no substance, pushing that phony brogue, trying to assure you that even death can be pleasant. Harry, I’m going to Ireland.”

  “That’s what they’d like you to do.”

  “Don’t be so damn smug. I want to be with my kids.”

  “So do I. But in order to achieve that, we have to stay alive. I don’t believe in that heaven your guys preach, and even if I did, I’d want to postpone it.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a horse’s ass!”

  “Then don’t get mad when I talk a little common sense.”

  “Oh, yes. Common sense.”

  “Common sense. I should underline that. And whatever you think of Charley when you get mad at him, he does things. He has two good men looking after the kids, but you feel that the situation will improve if they also have to look after you.”

  “They won’t have to look after me.”

  “Fran, you’re not going to Ireland.”

  “You’re telling me!” She turned there in the street, her eyes narrow and angry. “Since when do you tell me where to go and what to do? Since when? Since when have you taken ownership?”

  People were turning to look at us. I took her arm, but she pulled away. “Please, Fran, not here. Please.”

  She strode away, myself after her. I kept pace with her and begged her to wait until we were back at the Primrose Hotel, and then she could tear me to pieces.

  “Yes,” she replied, “because the quality of men is just beginning to dawn on me. You do nothing, you change nothing, you think of nothing. Like the great maned lion who lies around all day while the lioness hunts, brings back the food, raises the cubs, teaches them—and her lord and master fucks. That’s all he’s good for.” She took a deep breath and added, “And now, you cretins have found an atomic bomb, to blow up the whole world with—oh, what a lot of turds you all are!”

  I agreed with her. I assured her that she was right, even though I couldn’t immediately connect the atomic bomb with the rest of it. “Frannie, we’ll talk this over. If Ireland’s the answer, we’ll find some way to get you there,” adding to myself, at least she’d be out of this. “But now,” I said, “take it easy. We’re in this together and I’m doing the best I can. That’s all I can do—the best that I can. But I told you that this will be over tomorrow.”

  “How?”

  “Let’s get something to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry. Are we being followed?”

  “We’ll do the routine,” I told her, and for the next six blocks we made all the motions that were habitual to us by now, stepping into the proper store, popping out at the right moment, into an uncrowded side street and crossing it, memorizing faces, splitting up to go around opposite blocks—well, we were not followed.

  There was a chill in the air. We went into a small restaurant for coffee and Danish, and when we found a table, Fran said, “Take your coat off, Harry, or you’ll be cold when we go outside.”

  “No, I’ve got a gun in my raincoat pocket.”

  “I thought you turned in your gun.”

  “That was the company piece. This is my twenty-two.”

  “You know, I’m glad you have a gun. I was never glad before. I hated guns. I still hate them, but I’m glad you have it.”

  “You have your purse gun?”

  She hesitated, then nodded. The waiter came and we ordered. Then Fran said, “What happens? I mean, Charley never got anywhere with the D.A. What happens now?”

  “If they feel they have a case against me, they’ll give it to the grand jury.”

  “And if they hand down an indictment, you go on trial—is that what
we can expect?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Harry, I’ve heard that if a cop goes to prison, he hasn’t much chance of coming out alive.”

  “That’s vastly exaggerated.”

  “And I’m supposed to take comfort from that?”

  “Let’s go back to the hotel,” I said abruptly. “There’s one thing I have to do.”

  Back at the Primrose Hotel, seated in our little living room in our safe house, safe haven, Fran watching me, I telephoned the district attorney’s office. I persuaded the lady who answered the phone to pass me through to someone important enough to tell something very important to. I identified myself, and after a few minutes, I found myself talking to Assistant District Attorney Abel Johnson. Again, I identified myself and said that I would like to put something on the record, but I wanted it taped. I would not speak unless he assured me that what I said was being taped. He asked me whether I could hold on for about five minutes. I said that I could.

  “All right, Lieutenant Golding. You’re being taped now.”

  “Okay. This is Lieutenant Harry Golding, making a statement on Thursday, the twenty-second of March, 1984. If I should be found dead any time during the coming week, I wish this to be a deathbed statement and so considered. Two years ago, in April of 1982, a large cocaine bust was made at the marina at Seventy-ninth Street and Riverside Drive. The plans for the arrest were drawn up and led by Lieutenant Joseph Finelli. The cocaine was stored overnight in the property room at the Twenty-fourth Precinct, Lieutenant Finelli’s precinct. During the night, Captain John Hallihan, same precinct, switched the cocaine for powdered sugar. Day before yesterday, I suggested to Lieutenant Finelli that Captain Hallihan had made the switch, and yesterday, or perhaps late the night before, Lieutenant Finelli discovered the shop where the large amount of sugar had been purchased. This morning, Lieutenant Finelli was murdered. This is the latest of an endless series of murders, most of them disguised as accidents, committed by a death squad which has its roots in Santa Marina and which is operated here in the United States as part of an industrial-dope complex that has become very powerful and tightly interconnected with the executive branch in Washington—”