Murder's Shield

by Warren Murphy

  They called him “Jim” and said among themselves that at heart this multimillionaire was just a cowboy. Hardesty, tall and lean and clean of features, made it to the ground in a short hop and almost pulled the foreman off his horse with the ferocity of his handshake. Jim Hardesty was real people. Jim Hardesty was one of them but for some great passels of money.

  If any of the cowboys had spent much time analyzing systems, they would have realized that Jim Hardesty just happened to be real people five times in year A, four times in year B, three times in year C, then back to five times again in the pattern 5-4-3, 5-4-3. He had found this cycle took the least of his time and was sufficient to maintain employee morale.

  The shared lunches also worked on a pattern, including buying a round of drinks for the employees he would meet in Cheyenne.

  “What other boss as rich as Jim Hardesty would grub down with his hands?” was the question.

  “Anyone who understood industrial relations,” was the answer from one hand who was given his walking papers the next day.

  Jim Hardesty howdied his way through the Bar H ranch, better known to him as V.108.08. The number stood for things like marketability, gross worth, net worth, and a special inventory formula that calculated cattle in relation to the cost of feed.

  “You Bar H boys’ll be the death of me yet,” laughed Big Jim Hardesty.

  “Give me some of that good Bar H beef,” he said and the ranch hands led him over a hill where a chuck wagon was set up and steaks were being cooked on an open fire.

  There was good money in beef, and it was made even better when Jim Hardesty’s packing house jacked up the price a notch and Jim Hardesty’s trucking line jacked up the price a notch, and Jim Hardesty’s city distributors jacked up the price a notch and a half. While violating the antitrust laws in spirit, they did not violate them in fact because Jim Hardesty’s friends owned the packing house and truck lines and distributorships, and if they were just figureheads, well, you go ahead and prove it, pardner.

  What assured Jim Hardesty’s tidy profits was the inability of other people to cut prices on him. He was a reasonable man and in the majority of cases he could show a rancher or a packer or a distributor that when he tried to cut Jim Hardesty’s prices he was really only cutting his own throat. And if the man was unable to visualize this, some friends of Jim Hardesty would bring the point home. From ear to ear. It was even hinted darkly in the underworld that you didn’t order Hardesty hamburger if you liked 100 per cent beef.

  Of course, between Jim Hardesty and the hamburger were several layers of personnel, and Big Jim had been known to use violence only once, when some sidewinders were talking foul in front of ladies. And then it was just fists. Yessir, Big Jim Hardesty was a real man. Salt of the earth.

  So when he raised a toast to the “greatest ranch hands a fella could ever count on,” the ranch hands were surprised to see him tumble over in a faint. No. He was dead. Heart attack? Wait. Let me smell that liquor. Pizened. Who touched the liquor? Get the cook.

  The cook tearfully admitted he had poisoned Hardesty when a rope was thrown around his neck. He said he did it to pay off big debts. He pointed to his tattooed arm and showed the needle holes. He was hooked on heroin, he said, and deeply in debt and two men promised to clear his debts and keep him supplied for the rest of his life, if he poisoned Big Jim Hardesty.

  “Skin him alive!” cried one of the hands, brandishing a Bowie knife.

  “Wait. Let’s get the two men. Keep him alive until then.”

  So they brought the shaking, crying cook to the local sheriff who said he would get a description of the men from the cook and put out an all-points.

  The cook saw the two men again that night in his jail cell. They were wearing state trooper uniforms but as always they talked funny, like Easterners. Now, what were they doing in trooper uniforms, these short squat men built like double filing cabinets?

  Were they really Wyoming state troopers sent to take him to the penitentiary?

  The cook got his answer in a ditch beside a highway. One of the troopers put his pistol to the cook’s head and pulled the trigger. The cook didn’t even hear the shot. His eardrums were in the next county.

  · · ·

  Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Nicholas Parsoupoulous took a sip of his special wine while rolling in his room-sized bathtub with four of the girls from his chorus line. He was in his late fifties and it was half an hour before the girls realized Mr. Parsoupoulous was dead.

  “I thought there was something different,” said a blonde. “He seemed nicer, sort of.”

  At the inquest into his death, it came to light that Parsoupoulous was a key link in a prostitution chain that moved girls from coast to coast. He had been poisoned.

  · · ·

  In New York City Police Headquarters, the moon face of Inspector William McGurk was beaming. Wyoming, good. Las Vegas, good.

  He walked to the map on his wall. Roundheaded red pins were poked into the map along the East Coast. He picked up two pins now and put one in Wyoming and the other in Las Vegas, then went back to his desk to look at the map.

  It was their first venture outside the East, and it had gone like a charm. Right now, Hardesty’s killers were back on duty in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The men who handled Parsoupoulous should be riding in a patrol car someplace in the Bronx. The timing had been perfect; the logistical problem of moving the men to the targets and back on time had been solved easily. Now, nothing could stop the secret police army.

  And the best was yet to come.

  No one ever solidified a power base just with force. It had to be followed with something. McGurk ruffled through a sheaf of papers before him. There was large type printed on the pages, like headlines. It was a speech and it was what would follow the wave of killings.

  The question was who would give the speech. There really wasn’t anyone good enough that he knew of. If Duffy had had any common sense and had not been ruined by that Fordham nonsense but had gone instead to St. John’s where people weren’t that concerned with books—least of all pinko faggy books—Duffy might have done. But Congressman Duffy was dead.

  McGurk read the words of the large type to himself.

  “You call yourself New Yorkers and you think you live in a city, one of the great cities of the world. But you don’t. You don’t live in a city, you live in a jungle. You live frightened in your caves and you dare not walk the streets because you fear the animals.

  “Well, let me tell you something. These are your streets and this is your city, and I’m going to give it back to you.

  “The animals are going into the cages, not you. The animals will fear to walk the streets, not you. The animals will learn that this is a city for people, not beasts.

  “Inevitably, some will call me racist. But who suffers the most from crime? The blacks. The honest blacks. The people who work to try to give their children everything that everybody else wants to give their children. You know who I’m talking about. The good blacks who are called Uncle Toms because they don’t want to live in a jungle.

  “Well, I speak for them too, and I know they too reject the charge of racism. If I say the littlest child should be able to walk this city without being mugged, is that racist? If I don’t want my child or your child raped at recess, is that racist? If I get tired of being gouged to support people who will not work and who threaten me in the bargain, is that racist?

  “I say no. And good people… white and black… join me in voicing a resounding ‘No,’ and sending forth that word now as our program and our platform.

  “We say no to the animals. We say no to the thugs. We say no to the vicious and the depraved who prowl our streets. And we will keep saying no to them, until they are removed from our midst.”

  Inspector William McGurk heard the words in his mind, heard them with such sincerity and force, that he realized only one man could deliver them properly. Mayor William McGurk of New York City. Show ’em a city can work. And then s
how ’em a state can work. Then show ’em a country can work. And if it could work for a country…

  McGurk switched on his intercom.

  “Yes, Inspector,” came a woman’s voice.

  “Get me a globe for the office, will you, please?” he said.

  “Yes, Inspector. There’s a gentleman here with Captain Milken to see you.”

  “Oh, yes, that one. Send them in.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WHAT WAS REMO BEDNICK’S business?

  The question was asked by the moon-faced man, Inspector McGurk. Captain Milken seemed extraordinarily solicitous of the inspector. It was beyond the normal respect a captain shows a superior. Remo filed that away very quickly.

  “Business,” said Remo,

  “What business?”

  “Captain Milken hasn’t told you?”

  “Only what you told him.”

  “I don’t see why I should tell you any more.”

  “Because I’ll take your head off, punk,” said Inspector McGurk.

  Remo shrugged.

  “What can I say? You want me to leave the city, I’ll leave the city. You want me to close my businesses, well, then, you’ve got to find them and do it yourself. You want to be reasonable, I wash your hands and you wash mine; that’s something else. That’s cash on the barrelhead.”

  The eyes in the moon face narrowed as McGurk thought of squads of killer cops crisscrossing the country on commercial airlines, registering into motels, eating and drinking, piling up bills.

  “He’s really okay,” said Captain Milken nervously.

  McGurk looked at the captain disdainfully. Yes, Remo Bednick was okay, but the captain didn’t really understand the reason why.

  “Since I don’t know what you want,” McGurk said, “I’m letting my imagination run wild. The worst. Five thousand a week for what we don’t know.”

  The inspector had batted the ball to Remo’s side of the court. Smith’s instructions were to bargain, to really play a solid game, and maybe just return the ball. Another racketeer in business. But the instinct that perpetually said slam it into the corner with heavy topspin, was operating even before Remo remembered his instructions.

  “I wouldn’t give you $5,000 a week,” Remo said, watching the moon face. “Make it $10,000. That’s what I have on me.” The moon face flushed red. Remo disgorged two fat packets of new bills from his pockets and dropped them on the inspector’s desk like so much orange rind. The captain cleared his throat.

  “There isn’t that much extra in this city that isn’t tied down by someone else,” said McGurk.

  “Again, that’s my worry.”

  “Good to meet you, Mr. Bednick.” McGurk offered a big, flat muscled hand and Remo took it weakly. He could feel McGurk trying to bruise bone, so he collapsed his hand and smiled. McGurk pressed harder, his facial muscles tightening. Remo smiled. Then he unpopped his hand, breaking the grip like an exploding cellophane wrapper.

  “You’re out of shape there, sweetie,” Remo said.

  “You some kind of weightlifter?”

  “The weight of the world, Inspector, the weight of the world.”

  “When we was coming over here, Mr. Bednick said maybe he’d like to meet the commissioner. I told him it wasn’t necessary,” said Captain Milken.

  “Yeah,” said McGurk thoughtfully. “Introduce him to the commissioner. Let the commissioner see some of the people we have to deal with. And Bednick, you shake hands with the commissioner. His stays limp.”

  McGurk shoveled the two packets of cash into his top drawer. Remo left with the captain, who confided with a bit of tension in his voice: “Hell of a regular guy, McGurk.”

  “You hate him,” said Remo. “Why do you say you like him?”

  “No, I like him, I like him. Why do you say I don’t? I mean I never said I didn’t. I really like him.”

  In the hallway leaving McGurk’s office, Captain Milken and Remo passed a gentle-faced blonde girl with skin like porcelain and sky-blue eyes, who turned into McGurk’s office, her eyes straight ahead, her lips tension tight.

  “Janet O’Toole,” whispered Milken when she had passed. “The commissioner’s daughter. Sad story. She was raped when she was seventeen. A gang of blacks. Half the department cheered because O’Toole is a real bleeding heart liberal. They’d leave notes around his office saying they found the guys who did it, but they didn’t have a warrant and they let them go. One note said they spotted the guys in the act but by the time they finished reading them their constitutional rights, the suspects had all finished and fled. Nasty stuff, you know what I mean?”

  “How’d the girl take it?” Remo asked.

  “A shame. It wrecked her. The whole thing. She’s so afraid of men, she can’t look at them.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Remo said, thinking of the doll-like features.

  “Yeah. And frigid.”

  “What does she do around here?”

  “She’s a computer analyst. She works with McGurk on manpower deployment.”

  “Wait here a minute,” Remo said. He turned and walked back into McGurk’s office. Janet O’Toole stood with her back to him, looking over a pile of papers on a desk. She wore a long, paisley peasant skirt, neurotically modest, but incongruously, a low-cut white peasant blouse that dipped down off her shoulders and displayed her throat and neck.

  “Miss?” Remo said.

  The girl wheeled, her eyes startled.

  Remo met her eyes for only a split second, then lowered his to the floor. “I… er, I think you dropped this in the hallway,” he said, extending his hand with a silver fountain pen he had taken, from Milken’s pocket.

  He kept looking down. He heard the girl say, in a soft, tremulous voice, “No, that’s not mine.”

  He looked up, making his eyes appear frightened, met her eyes briefly, then looked down at the floor again. “I’m… I’m sorry, but I thought… I mean, I’m really sorry for bothering you, Miss, but I thought…”

  Remo spun around and walked quickly from the office. So much for now.

  Milken was waiting twenty-five feet down the hallway for him, and Remo gave him his pen back.

  “You dropped this.”

  “Oh, yeah, thanks. Listen, by the way, O’Toole’s not in on any of this.”

  “Any of what?” Remo asked as they resumed walking.

  Milken rubbed his fingers together indicating money.

  Remo nodded.

  Commissioner O’Toole had a head shaped like an egg if an egg could be weak. He looked like Tweety the Canary, but with sadder eyes. When he was informed by Captain Milken that Remo was thinking of entering politics as a businessman, he gave him his theories on law enforcement.

  These theories encompassed constitutional rights for suspects, police community relations, greater awareness on the part of a police force for the community it served, and more responsiveness to the hopes and aspirations of minorities.

  “How about improving the odds on staying alive?” asked Remo.

  “Well, our officers are instructed to use their weapons only in the most dire emergencies and to account for every act of police violence committed.”

  “No,” said Remo, “I’m not talking about the odds for muggers. I mean for people who have committed the great crime of going out at night. What are the odds? Have you improved those?”

  “Well, we’re living in troubled times. If we increase the responsiveness… ”

  “Just a minute,” interrupted Remo. “Thirty years ago, was your department responsive?”

  “Well, no. Not at all. They had yet to be enlightened by the new techniques that… ”

  “Yeah, well maybe all those unenlightened cops had something to do with people being safer.”

  “Sir,” the commissioner said huffily. “We can’t go back to yesterday.”

  “Not if you don’t try.”

  “I wouldn’t want to. That’s reactionary.”

  “Attaboy, label it and put it away. Yo
u’ve got a frightened city out there and if you think another human relations course is going to stop one holdup, then you’ve got smoke coming out of your ass.”

  The commissioner turned, signifying that the interview was over, and Captain Milken nervously led Remo Bednick from the office. No racketeer had ever talked to a commissioner like that. He couldn’t wait until Bednick had left headquarters, before running to tell McGurk about the confrontation.

  But McGurk seemed curiously disinterested, and showed no more curiosity than if Milken had been talking about the dead.

  CHAPTER NINE

  DR. HAROLD W. SMITH STARED out the one-way glass window of his office in Folcroft Sanitarium. The Long Island Sound was out there. It had risen suddenly as tides will do. No matter how much he expected the tide to rise, its sudden engulfing height always surprised him a little.

  Time and tide wait for no man. And neither did CURE or a nation’s problems. Smith did not wish to turn around, to have to look at that map again, the big map on the screen across the office.

  It was a map of a place he loved very much, but now it was like looking at his mother in the hospital. He had loved his mother very much too, but when she was riven by cancer he could not look at her and he secretly wished that she would die so she wouldn’t be in pain any more and he could remember her as a beautiful woman. But that was when he was a boy, and now he was a man who remembered his mother in her hospital bed, frail and desiccated but still his mother.

  He spun in his chair and looked at the map of the United States.

  Red nodules dotted the East Coast. Each represented an identifiable killing from this organization that had mushroomed like a cancer. And now two solitary lumps had appeared in the western part of the country. And suddenly, time had become critical.

  The thing was growing geometrically now. The next jump might be an army, and with that army there would be the first real threat of a police state—particularly if the army decided to seek a political arm.