Seven Silent Men (57 page)

“Me?”

“Might I come in?”

Tina Beth led him into the living room, excused herself, dashed upstairs and changed into a pair of shorts and a halter, rushed down into the kitchen, searched for tea or coffee or beer, darted back to J. Edgar holding up a bottle and asking, “Apricot juice?”

“Of course,” he told her.

Back in the kitchen, she found a glass. Back in the living room, she handed it to him. He sipped, smacked his lips, sipped more, sat back contentedly and folded his hands over his stomach. “The best book of the Good Book is the old book,” he told her, then with his eyes flickering he began reciting passages from the Old Testament. He seemed particularly partial to Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego and Joshua at the Wall. From there he went into infertility and parenthood. He stood, requesting she repeat not a word of their tête-à-tête to a soul, including Billy. At the door he took her hand and said he would cherish having had a daughter as well as a son, and if she could only convince her husband to renounce his Judaic faith, how happy all three of them could be.

“He said
what?
” Billy Yates asked her.

“That if you gave up being Jewish, how happy the three of us could be,” Tina Beth told him with a straight face.

“By ‘the three,' you think he meant you, me and him?”

“No doubt about it.”

“Holy shit.”

“Don't swear, Billy Bee.”

“After he said that what did he do?”

“He tossed a hand to the wind and walked over our front yard and down the sidewalk, jauntylike.”

“No car was waiting?”

“No.”

“That's all of it, everything that happened?”

Tina Beth crossed her heart.

“You must have been scared to death, hon!”

She shook her head. “I sort of liked him.”

“He's mad as a screaming banshee.”

She smiled. “But with a twinkle.”

A week and two days after the phone-booth tap was installed, Mule's voice was heard for the first time. It was preceded by the sound of coins being deposited and a number being dialed. The answering voice said, “Ya?” Mule said, “It's on,” and hung up. More coins clinked and another number was dialed. “Hi,” a second voice said. “It's on,” Mule repeated. Another number was dialed, but no one picked up at the other end. The phone, a moment later, rang and was answered by Mule, who said, “It's on.” Whoever was on the other end hung up.

Yates was at home and listening when this exchange of calls came in. It was just after sunset. He got into his car and drove to the old waterworks complex at Lookout Bluff, descended into the underground shunting terminal Brew had introduced him to, walked along a catwalk in the dark and curving irrigation tunnel to the vantage point he had occupied with Brew. Mule appeared where he had been seen before, then Wiggles and Ragotsy. They lowered a rubber motor boat into the water and got in and sped off.

The next afternoon Yates brought his own rubber boat down to the shunting terminal and began exploring the tunnel Mule, Rat and Wiggles had gone into … soon found himself in a series of flooded caves and grottos.

Two evenings later Billy overheard the same exchange of calls between Mule in the outdoor phone booth and the three other persons. This time when Mule, Rat and Ragotsy started off through the flooded underground passageway, Yates was waiting for them uptunnel, watching from a shadowy alcove to see which cave they motored into. A moment later he heard another motor approaching, saw the silhouette of a second boat with only one passenger head into the same cave.

That same night Yates rendezvoused with Hagland, who said the first two numbers Mule dialed from the outside booth near his ranch were the home phones for Ragotsy and Wiggles, respectively. The third number called, the one on which no one answered, was a pay station in the bar around the corner from the FBI's Prairie Port office. By the following afternoon Hagland had the bar phone tapped as well.

At the office Yates was assigned to the small team of special agents aiding Assistant U.S. Attorney Jules Shapiro in preparing his prosecution of Otto Pinkny. This sharply reduced the time he could spend covering Mule and the taps as well as exploring the tunnels and caves under the western side of Prairie Port. He turned to the only ally he could trust, Tina Beth.

The outdoor pay phone near Mule's ranch rang. Mule picked up and said, “We got something hot.”

“How hot?” asked a raspy voice.

“It's maybe a money sack.”

“Maybe or is?”

“It maybe could be.”

“Not hot enough to come out for,” the raspy voice said, and hung up.

… Wiretap apparatus do not always make allowances for the passage of time. When they do not, one voice-activated recording follows another one on the tape even though the two calls might have been placed hours apart. Hagland's rig established the time at which each call was received or made. Because of this, Yates and Hagland and Tina Beth, who was monitoring the machinery at their home, knew that Mule had not dialed out from the phone booth near his ranch immediately prior to receiving the incoming call. No outgoing call had been recorded at that booth in over ninety minutes. The only deduction to be made from this was that the call was prearranged … that previous contact had been made between Mule and the unknown speaker in which it was agreed for Mule to go to the outdoor booth at a specific time and wait for the phone to ring. This further reinforced Yates's belief that the fourth man seen in the tunnel and cave, the one who motored in to rendezvous with Mule, Wiggles and Rat, had his own lines of communication with the gang.

Hagland tapped into the phone lines leading to Mule's ranch, hoping this was the originating point for the prior communication. No positive results were garnered. Yates, knowing that early evening was the preferred contact time for sojourns into the tunnel, began sneaking an hour or so off from his office assignments so he could tail Mule in the late afternoons. By week's end he spotted Mule entering a pay phone near the bus terminal. Hagland wasted no time in putting on a bug. It was a busy phone. Fifty separate dialings and conversations were recorded in the next four hours alone. The hour after that began with a number being dialed and someone picking up.

“You gotta come and take another look,” Mule's voice told the silent listener.

“Not now.” The voice was raspy and muffled. “You take a vacation too.”

“Huh?”

“Lay off. Stop going down there.”

“You fuckin' crazy? We're goddam close. Any time could be the time.”

“You've been saying that from the beginning.”

“Now it's true. We're almost there. I can smell it.”

“People are catching on. Stay away.”

“No one tells me what the fuck to do—”

“I am. It's your ass if you don't listen. You stay away from there. I'll tell you when it's right to go back.”

“Tell me how?”

“Call you at home and ask for Howard. You say to me I got the wrong number.” The phone hung up.

The driver of a semi-truck saw her first, slowed in midhighway, waved for the vehicles behind him to stop, got out and pointed. Soon traffic had stopped in all ten lanes, the five southbound as well as the northbound lanes. All eyes looked skyward to the solitary steel trestle spanning the expressway twenty-five feet overhead. Alice Sunstrom, her dress in tatters and a coil of bright yellow nylon rope over one shoulder, crawled along the beam on all fours. Crawled shakily. Finally reached the center. Lay prone. Tied one end of the rope to the beam. Noosed the other around her neck. Rolled off the trestle and hanged herself.

TWENTY-FOUR

Two small scars marred the striking face of John Lars Chalmers Sunstrom III, a small shrapnel wound at the corner of his left eye gotten during the Korean campaign and a dimplelike indentation along the lower right cheek resulting from a childhood confrontation with a horse's hoof. These were appropriate. Strom was to the valiant born. And equestrian. Virginia valiant and equestrian. Sunstrom's forebears were into the fray long before the Civil War … and long after. Save for one great-great-great-grand-uncle who was a career officer, all were volunteers. Chalmers men shed their blood at Horseshoe Bend and New Orleans and Wilson's Creek and Shiloh and Fair Oaks and Bull Run and Antietam, which family members always referred to as Sharpsburg. The Sunstroms, descended from a former Swedish diplomat who retired to Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1905, joined the Chalmers men in enlisting for World War I and World War II, with them were tabulated among the wounded or dead or missing at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood and Omaha Beach and Anzio and Malmédy and Remagen. All but two of these citizen soldiers had been cavalrymen; in the case of World War II, mechanized cavalry. The pair of nonconformists came from both sides of the aisle. John's great-uncle, Edwin Chalmers, had been an aerial artillery spotter for the Allied Expeditionary Forces and was shot down and killed over the Hindenberg Line by a Bosch fighter pilot named Hermann Goering. John's paternal grandfather, Lars Sunstrom, an Anglican minister, was the personal padre to General “Black Jack” Pershing.

John Sunstrom, at the age of twenty-four, dropped out of the University of Virginia Law School to become a tank commander in the Korean War. He was wounded three times, received a medical discharge and returned to law school with a slight numbness in his right arm and leg. Subsequent to graduation and passing the bar, he divided his time between breeding and training horses on the family's twelve-thousand-acre stud farm and working as a special counsel in the office of his cousin, Tad Chalmers, who was assistant prosecuting attorney for the State of North Carolina. The following year, 1955, twenty-nine-year-old John Lars Chalmers Sunstrom III took for his bride eighteen-year-old Priscilla Maywell. He had met Priscilla five months earlier. He had known of her much longer. Most of his post-pubescent life, in fact. She was a daughter of the Fairy Princess.

Priscilla's mother, Hope, had been a parishioner of John's paternal grandfather, Anglican minister Lars Sunstrom. The accidental death of Hope's husband left the young widow penniless, forced her and her two tiny daughters, four-year-old Priscilla and an infant sister, Alice, to leave Virginia and go to a brother's farm in Oklahoma. Reverend Lars financed the move, made sure for many years to come that the fatherless family had money enough for an adequate style of life. Hope Maywell did well running her brother's farm, eventually bought a place of her own, and prospered enormously. Bought larger places. Prospered all the more. She moved to a big house and sent her daughters to fine schools and never remarried and not only repaid every cent Reverend Lars had sent her over the years but donated the money for construction of a new chapel he had always fancied. The singular stipulation Hope attached to her gift was a wall plaque reading: “This is to attest that fairy tales come true.” Reverend Lars sputtered over the allusion to “fairy tales” being posted in the house of Anglican worship. Hope was unbending, threatened to add to the inscription that he, Lars Sunstrom, not Jesus Christ on high, was the savior who elicited the miracle of her survival and success. Sputtering, Lars submitted. The chapel was built and the plaque was affixed. Hope became known, among the Sunstroms, as the Fairy Princess.

John Sunstrom, when he married Hope's elder daughter, Priscilla, called her his “fairy-tale bride,” had linen and stationery inscribed PMS/FTB. And for two years they led an enchanted life. Loved one another as few newly weds have ever loved.

Priscilla's first pregnancy miscarried. Her second pregnancy killed her. Alone with her in the Fairy Chapel, John considered getting into the coffin beside her and taking his own life, and well might have if Hope hadn't walked in on him. Staring at his tear-drenched face, Hope knew what he was contemplating and went to Priscilla and kissed her good-by and closed the coffin lid on that gentle child she had so dearly loved and motioned to John, whom she also loved, that it was best they go. He took, in silence, her out-held hand. In silence they walked from the chapel, and he knew Hope had saved his life and meant to thank her for this later. He didn't have time. Four months later Hope was dead of leukemia.

John's grief was now laid aside in his attempts to assist Priscilla's sixteen-year-old sister, Alice. Whereas Priscilla had been a pretty woman, Alice was already a full-blown beauty. And a fragile one. The double deaths of her mother and only sister sent Alice first into convulsive tremors, then into a near catatonic depression. John would not hear of her going to a hospital. He gave up his work, spent night and day with Alice. Nursed her back to life. Back to health and sanity. Back even, occasionally, to fun. She told him she loved him, and John was pleased to hear her say so but did not construe this to be a romantic love, merely a grateful one. Alice helped John partially shed his own impacted sorrows. Got him to go to movies and take trips and laugh a little again. Urged him to go back into horse-breeding and law. He confided in her he needed a change, that the law and the horse farm were too ghost pent. She coaxed him into admitting that among the new professions he'd really like to try, criminal investigation ranked near the top. Alice suggested he look into the FBI, not really knowing what the FBI entailed. The matter was passed over.

Alice and John became inseparable. Sustained one another in every conceivable way except sexually, John rejecting all notions of their becoming intimate. Alice did little else but entertain such notions. On her eighteenth birthday the usually reticent Alice thanked John for the array of presents he had gotten her, then said what she wanted most, on this her majority, was to sleep with him. John, who feared such a confrontation was possible, and therefore had prepared, responded he was flattered she considered him in such terms but at the risk of sounding an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy, must decline the offer on the grounds that her virginity should be offered to her future husband only. Alice said this was the whole point … that she wanted, more than life itself, to marry John. That he was her life. Her salvation. Her friend and confidant. Her brother and father and child. All things and everything except two things … her lover and her husband. She begged him to become both. She told him she needed him. Wanted him. Must have him. Was nothing without him.