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by Brian Freemantle

  He said, ‘You mean that, about being as close as that to who did it?’

  Powell said, ‘I could be but Leroy’s got to tell me what I want to know.’

  ‘What’s the deal?’ demanded the gang leader.

  ‘No move on anything you tell me today, Leroy,’ said Powell. ‘Anything. You understand?’

  ‘Don’t know what you want,’ said the old man uncertainly. The excitement of the cocaine hit was fading.

  ‘You answer straight – honest – whatever it is. You won’t incriminate yourself. You’re cool. OK?’

  ‘Tell the man,’ ordered Jethro Jnr.

  Goodfellow looked doubtfully between Morrison and Powell and then shrugged.

  ‘Tell me about Florence,’ demanded Powell.

  ‘Told you,’ said Goodfellow. ‘Me and Jethro pulled five apiece, heisting war materiel. Saved our asses.’

  ‘And you got extra time you didn’t tell me about, all for things you and Jethro did running a gang inside,’ said Powell accusingly.

  The old man shrugged again. ‘Happens. Not a problem.’

  ‘Worked the prison as well as you did the streets, that right?’ prompted Charles Andrews.

  ‘Sweet as a pussy’s cherry.’

  ‘How many?’ asked Powell, glad Andrews had joined in the questioning. ‘Just you and Jethro? Or a gang of you?’

  ‘Maybe eight, nine guys,’ said the old man.

  ‘Names?’ said Andrews.

  Goodfellow shook his head. ‘Long time ago. Not sure any more.’

  After the way she’d so far proved herself, Amy could probably get the names from records in minutes, Powell thought. ‘Jethro the boss?’

  ‘Good organizer, Jethro. Got respect.’

  ‘What happened if Jethro didn’t get respect?’ came in Andrews.

  Goodfellow grinned brightly towards the dead man’s son. ‘It sure as hell got taught.’

  The gangster smiled back, proudly.

  ‘Who’s the muscle: you? Or the others?’

  ‘Jethro didn’t need no help.’

  ‘But he sold muscle, right. His and yours and everyone else’s in the team.’

  ‘Useful thing, muscle, when you’re in the can.’

  ‘Who was the customer?’

  Goodfellow hesitated until there was an encouraging gesture from Jethro Jnr.

  ‘White guy,’ mumbled Leroy Goodfellow. ‘Lifer. Big operator.’

  ‘He run your landing, in Florence?’ suggested Andrews.

  ‘Ran the whole fucking prison!’ said Goodfellow, still with open admiration after so long. ‘Always a load of money: and I mean a load. Buy what he wanted.’

  ‘He buy guards as well as your muscle?’ pressed Andrews.

  Goodfellow nodded.

  ‘Tell us how it worked,’ said Powell.

  ‘He could get anything you wanted,’ said Goodfellow. ‘Booze, cigarettes. Feelgood stuff …’ The man sniffed, as if to indicate what he meant. ‘Any sort of food. Hookers, sometimes. Certainly for himself. Had regulars. Horny mother.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ queried Andrews. ‘We’re talking segregation time, even in jail?’

  Goodfellow looked wary. ‘Segregation didn’t matter none to this guy.’

  ‘But it would have mattered to you,’ challenged Powell. ‘You couldn’t have gone into any white part of the prison.’

  ‘Could if he said so.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Andrews.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘So you worked for him?’ said Powell, hoping the name he’d got from Amy would come from Goodfellow unprompted, although it hardly mattered because he was totally sure now.

  ‘Lot of bad guys in prison,’ said Goodfellow seriously, totally unaware of the irony.

  No-one else thought it amusing, either. Andrews said, ‘Jethro and you and the others kept him safe? So he saw to it that you had the run of the prison: go where you liked?’

  ‘Sweet life,’ recalled the old man, nostalgically. He looked towards the other black man. ‘You got a little touch for me, Jethro? I’m awful dry, all this talking.’

  The man crossed to the bar and returned with a fresh bottle of Mount Gay and four glasses, nodding an invitation to Powell and Andrews. Neither accepted this time. Deciding he couldn’t wait any longer, Powell said, ‘What’s this guy’s name had all this influence?’

  ‘Myron Nolan.’

  It was the name Amy had pulled from Records. Powell said, ‘If he was paying a lot of people off he must have had money? Very big money?’

  ‘Fucking fortune,’ agreed Goodfellow. ‘Main reason we had to look after him. Keep the bankroll safe.’

  ‘How’d he make it? Get it into the prison?’ asked Charles Andrews.

  ‘Don’t know how he made it before he was sentenced. Financed the rackets inside. Money made money. Had a lawyer visit regular. Myron used to pay off the visiting day guards, for him and the lawyer to meet by themselves, in the guards’ office sometimes. Do what they liked. That’s how it worked with the hookers, too.’

  ‘What was the lawyer’s name?’

  ‘Never knew. Never ever saw him. Just knew it happened. None of our business.’

  ‘This is important, Leroy, so I want you to think carefully about it,’ cautioned Powell. ‘Was Myron Nolan ever visited by family? Or someone like a special friend?’

  Goodfellow shook his head, helping himself to more rum. ‘Can’t ever remember him talking about kin. Or of him being visited by anyone apart from the lawyer. And the hookers, of course.’

  ‘Tell me about Myron Nolan,’ demanded Powell. ‘What sort of guy was he? Big? Small? Mean guy? That sort of stuff.’

  ‘Didn’t take no shit, from no-one. Didn’t need no muscle on a one-to-one. Just needed back-up against another team.’

  ‘Hard man as well as rich?’

  ‘Always. Never knew it no other way.’

  ‘He have other people working for him, besides you and Jethro and your team?’

  ‘Bought his own cell. Had two white dudes clean for him. Fags. Not that he was that way. Horny, like I said, but for pussy. But fags are particular, right? Neat and tidy. Myron’s cell always had to be neat and tidy, like him.’

  ‘Like him?’

  ‘Florence was a stockade, right? Temporary. You got a shower once a week, if you were lucky. Myron got his every day. His own stall, separate from everyone else. Anyone try to use it, doubt if they would have walked again. No-one ever tried. Never knew a guy shower so much.’

  ‘You say there were eight or nine others, so with you and Jethro that made about ten guys?’ said Andrews.

  ‘That’s about it,’ said Goodfellow, needing to rub his nose with his hand as well as sniff. He took a third drink, enjoying his moment of notoriety.

  ‘Quite a team,’ said Powell, taking his direction from the other FBI man. ‘Guess Myron attracted a lot of jealousy, all that business, all that money?’

  ‘You’re damn right,’ said the old man, guilelessly. ‘That man, he had a fucking empire, like General Motors.’

  ‘So who’d he deal with, when he wanted something done? All of you individually? Or just one of you? Who’s the muscle closest to him?’

  ‘Guess that had to be Jethro. Jethro was kind of in charge.’

  ‘Jethro kill him alone or did you help?’ asked Powell, quietly.

  ‘By him—’ started Goodfellow, abruptly stopping at Jethro Jnr’s shout.

  ‘Hey now …!’ began the son but Powell said, ‘Cut the crap. Cameras are outside. All past, all over, a long time ago.’ Going back to the old man Powell said, ‘Now I want you to try again, Leroy. I’m going to tell you why it’s important and I want you to think really hard, harder than you did a little while back. If someone in Nolan’s family knew it was Jethro who killed him, even though it was never proved in the investigation afterwards, they could have killed Jethro in Lane Park, even though it all happened a long time ago. So. Did any family or friend – anyone at all apart from
the lawyer and hookers – visit Myron Nolan in the Florence stockade?’

  Goodfellow allowed some deep thinking time. Then he said, ‘No, sir. I don’t believe no-one ever did.’

  ‘How much did Jethro get, when he killed Myron Nolan?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘You do and it’s not going beyond this room.’ Powell stopped him curtly. ‘I can’t catch who killed Junior’s daddy here, you don’t tell me.’

  ‘’bout five grand.’

  Powell guessed at ten. He wouldn’t need to trace any others of the gang. ‘What about the rackets?’

  Goodfellow sniffed a reluctant admission. ‘Didn’t have the outside contact, like Myron had. No supply. Kinda broke up.’

  Powell lifted his briefcase on to the desk and stood over it, carefully making his selection in the order he wanted. He offered Goodfellow the Pittsburgh Hilton video freeze frame of the young man following Marcus Carr. ‘You ever seen this man before? Take your time.’

  Leroy Goodfellow squinted at the print. ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You sure? Absolutely sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  Powell took out the picture of the older, identically dressed man recorded on the camera virtually outside the Carr apartment block. ‘How about this man?’

  Goodfellow’s face opened into a smile, which at once became an expression of uncertainty. ‘That’s Myron. But I don’t understand …’

  ‘No,’ agreed Powell. ‘Neither do I.’

  It didn’t improve when they stopped at the slave-built tourist attraction on their way to the airport. Michael Gaynor frowned at the picture just identified as that of Myron Nolan and insisted he’d never seen the man before.

  When he saw the younger man’s photograph Gaynor said, ‘Oh yes. That could very easily be him. Why are they both dressed the same?’

  ‘One of the many questions I don’t have answers to,’ admitted Powell.

  Powell had cut short his Birmingham airport argument with Beddows by claiming that his plane was about to leave – which it hadn’t been – hoping for time at Pennsylvania Avenue to talk through a lot of things with Amy and Barry Westmore. He’d phoned both from Birmingham, too, giving a precise arrival time so they’d be waiting.

  Both were, in his side office off the incident room, but Powell had overlooked the security system throughout the FBI headquarters building, in which access and movement are governed by electronically controlled gates recognizing a person’s individual ID tag inserted into a slot. The tag also identifies the holder and instantly plots where he is in the building.

  Powell was only just able to hear what both had to say – and tell them about his encounters with Leroy Good-fellow and Michael Gaynor – and was looking at the photograph Amy had obtained from Army Records when the division chief stormed in.

  ‘What the hell’s going on!’ Beddows yelled. He was puce-faced with anger, a vein pumping in his forehead. He ignored Amy and the forensic scientist.

  ‘I wish I could tell you,’ said Powell, mildly. The Birmingham detour would shortly be shown to be justified and he was curious at Beddows’s over-reaction.

  ‘No-one keeps the Director waiting! No-one.’

  You poor, politically driven bastard, thought Powell, although totally without sympathy. ‘You’d rather have the Director and the Bureau – everyone, including you and the division you’re in charge of – made to look ridiculous?’ He realized, surprised at himself, that he was enjoying having Amy Halliday as audience to the row.

  Beddows faltered. ‘How?’

  ‘By talking about a dead man coming back to life after almost fifty years.’

  For the first time Beddows looked at the other two in the office. He shook his head, bemused. ‘What’s going on? What’s he talking about?’

  ‘We’ve got a situation none of us can understand or explain,’ said Barry Westmore. ‘And if we don’t it is going to make us all look ridiculous. I don’t believe in ghosts but I believe, like Wes says, that we’ve got evidence of a man coming back to life.’

  Powell was looking at the division chief intently, believing he could analyse the visible change in the attitude of a man he’d once known so well. Beddows’s anger instantly evaporated. In its place was emerging an awareness that so far he was uninvolved in the absurdity of what he was being told by two supposedly sane men, one a practical scientist. Testingly Powell said, ‘You want to tell the Director that? Or shall we?’

  ‘He’s waiting,’ said Beddows.

  ‘I need Amy and Barry with me: their input,’ said Powell. ‘There hasn’t been time for a composite analysis.’

  Clarence Gale was a tall, thin, dried-out man who’d served fifteen years as a judge on the New York bench, been a friend of the new President’s family for ten years longer than that and hoped for the attorney-generalship when the man was elected to office. He’d been so disappointed when he hadn’t got it that he’d considered refusing the alternative Bureau stewardship, but only briefly, because Clarence Gale had ambition of elephantine proportions and had decided the FBI was an excellent stepping stone to a political career. To that end he had become the most publicity conscious, media available Director since J. Edgar Hoover, whose reputation he was determined to outdo. Gale’s boast was that he was sufficiently politically astute to gauge wind change, not just on Capitol Hill but around the corridors of the White House even before it wafted into the Oval Office. And it was politically astute to be personally briefed and ready to respond either to Congress or the President on an otherwise unimportant serial killing now that the latest victim was a general that newspapers and television were calling, with some justification, a hero of the Second, Korean and Vietnam wars and who had finished an outstanding military career as a deputy Joint Chief at the Pentagon.

  With four people, three of them carrying folders and documents, Gale assembled in his conference room rather than in the adjoining office, which would have been too small. Before they sat, Beddows began apologizing profusely for the postponement; Gale impatiently cut him short by saying he hoped the delay was worthwhile. Beddows, his distancing strategy decided upon, said he hoped so, too.

  ‘Perhaps Special Agent Powell can help us decide?’ Beddows finished, accusingly.

  ‘I’m not sure that I can,’ said Powell, unconcerned by the buck-passing because what Amy and Westmore had to add made everything even more inexplicable. He gave his résumé out of sequence, because the mystery only truly began with Marcus Carr. With the headquarters state-of-the-art equipment Westmore had succeeded in even greater enlargements of the two men on the Pittsburgh videos and he presented these to Beddows and Gale, as he talked. Gale listened judge-like, expressionless. By comparison Beddows sat, face twisted and frowning, unwittingly doing a bad job of concealing his total lack of comprehension.

  ‘Michael Gaynor thinks the younger is the man he saw in the park the night Jethro Morrison was killed,’ said Powell. ‘Leroy Goodfellow immediately identified the older man as Myron Nolan, who was murdered in a military stockade in Florence, Alabama, in April 1951 …’

  There’d been no time for rehearsal and Powell hoped Amy remembered when he turned invitingly to her. She did.

  ‘He was serving life there,’ she picked up, immediately. ‘He’d been sentenced by a military tribunal of the Four Power Commission in Berlin, in August 1949. He’d been transferred to the Control Commission at the end of the war. He originally arrived in Berlin as part of the American Third Army, in which he’d been a quartermaster sergeant …’ She hesitated. ‘These army records, which I only today got from military archives in Adelphi, Maryland, aren’t complete. There are some gaps, which I hope to fill but can’t guarantee: they’re obviously not on any computer database. From what I have been able to get of the trial transcript Myron Nolan was a major black marketeer. Leading up to what became the Russian blockade of Berlin there was an enormous black market, in everything. Even drugs and medical equipment. Nolan sold contaminated penicillin and streptom
ycin to a German paediatric clinic. There was a near-epidemic of polio and a high incidence of tuberculosis at the time. Thirty children died. Fifteen of the polio sufferers were permanently crippled …’ She hesitated again, going into her folder. ‘… As I said, the trial records are incomplete. But there are two things …’ Along the table she slid an army regulation photograph and a right and left profile and full-face arrest picture and another ageing evidence picture. ‘The photographs are the official ones, taken in 1949, of Myron Nolan. And those are his fingerprints, taken at the same time …’ Amy turned, gratefully, to Westmore.

  ‘The military tribunal photographs identically match that taken by the video camera close to General Marcus Carr’s apartment in Pittsburgh fifteen days ago,’ responded the scientist. ‘We’ve subjected all the video freeze frames of both men to every sort and type of photographic comparison known to us, scientifically. Every physiognomy specialist we have here is satisfied – prepared to swear in court – that the faces are those of two different men. Just as every other specialist believes the two bodies are the same …’ Westmore got up and went round to the top of the table where the Director sat with the video stills set out in front of him. ‘Here,’ he said, pointing between the two sets. ‘That ring they’re wearing on the pinkie of their left hands is identical. And look. There’s sufficient of the dial showing beneath the cuff in both sets to see that the wristwatch is the same. Every body measurement is identical, to a fraction of an inch. Only the faces are different.’

  ‘A disguise mask,’ blurted Harry Beddows.

  ‘We’ve positively eliminated that,’ dismissed Westmore, still standing at the Director’s shoulder. ‘And I haven’t yet got to the strangest part of all.’ He went quickly back to his separate folder, selecting a series of fresh photographs before returning to where the Director sat. These are prints taken from the cab of Gene Johnson, the Texas victim. And these are from the bathroom and living room of General Carr’s apartment …’ He placed them side by side and then pulled into a comparable position the prints from the fifty-year-old Berlin court-martial records. ‘They perfectly match – in fact they are – the fingerprints of Myron Nolan …’