Murder's Shield

by Warren Murphy

  They talked for four hours, O’Toole’s bulblike face becoming grimmer. During the conversation, O’Toole had to phone headquarters for his nightly midnight check.

  Off the phone, he said, “I can hardly believe it. I can’t. I know McGurk. Reactionary, yes. A murderer, no.”

  The deputy chief detailed exactly what he heard.

  “Is it possible that you misunderstood?”

  “No.”

  “Is it possible the firing hurt your ears?”

  “No.”

  “Is it possible McGurk was playing some kind of game with recruits?”

  “No, dammit. These weren’t recruits. These were veteran cops.”

  “Oh, my Lord. My Lord, my Lord,” O’Toole buried his head in his hands. “So it has come to this. Well, go home and tell no one. Promise me that. You’ll tell no one. Tomorrow, we’ll make plans. I guess we’ll have to go to the state… ”

  “What about the FBI?”

  “Maybe they’re in it?”

  “I doubt it,” the deputy chief said. “If we’ve got one agency we can trust, it’s the FBI. The best in the world… ”

  “Well, yes. But don’t phone them now. Come to my office in the morning, and we’ll meet them together… ”

  “Very good, sir… ”

  The deputy chief did not give it a second thought in the morning. He did not give it a first thought. Outside his own home in Staten Island, he heard the click of a cricket. Or was it a child’s clicker? He had no time to think about that either. He went up in a burst of crossing slugs like a body with simultaneous bombs in his bloodstream. The firing lifted him off his feet and sustained him in air for almost a half-second. It seemed like a small eternity to the men firing.

  “See what I mean?” said McGurk to his men later. “Beautiful. It works beautifully when it’s organized… ”

  Later in the morning, McGurk locked his office door at headquarters and dialed a special number.

  “It’s okay now, sir,” he said. The response was not pleasant.

  “Well, look, sir, I’m sorry,” said McGurk. “It was the first time. Sure the outside doors should have been locked. He never should have gotten in. It won’t happen again. Yes, sir, I know it was an imposition on you. Yes, sir. I know, sir. Well, I guarantee we won’t be overheard again and you won’t have to entertain anyone like him again in your home. I’m sorry if he disturbed Janet, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, Commissioner. We won’t make any mistakes any more… ”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DURING THE NIGHT, while Remo slept on a bed piled high with 4,800 black socks, the press was reporting another wave of killings. The assassination teams had struck again—and this time the pattern had changed.

  The first change came in West Springfield, Mass., where the killers left a clue. It was a small square of blue and white striped material and it was found clutched tightly in the hand of Rogers Gordon.

  Gordon was the oldest living member of the planning board for America on Parade, one of the country’s biggest commercial fairs, and his rank gave him the privilege of riding the overhead cable car through a ceremonial paper ribbon to open the week-long celebration.

  Gordon was supposed to ride alone, but at the last minute he invited into the cable car two men with official badges who had accompanied him up the two flights of stairs to the loading ramp. The car moved away from the platform, sliding smoothly along the overhead cable toward the paper strip stretched across the cable between two utility poles. Several hundred people watched from below. Many of them were radio newsmen broadcasting remotes on the opening of the Exposition.

  A cheer went up from the crowd as the golden cable car smashed through the thin paper ribbon. Then, over the cheer, a few faint cracks were heard, and all the eyes looking skyward saw Gordon lean against the edge of the car for a moment, reach out behind him toward the two men, and topple over the side.

  He landed atop a radio station trailer, plummeting through its thin plastic roof, coming to rest on a small table at which an announcer, Tracy Cole, sat sipping coffee and broadcasting the morning’s events at breakneck speed. Rogers Gordon had four slugs in his chest. Even with those, he might have lived a few moments longer, long enough to have told someone that the two men who had presented themselves at his home that morning were not really federal agents who had uncovered his gun-running business; but the cigar smoke in the tiny broadcasting mobile studio effectively prevented anyone from breathing. Rogers Gordon spoke in death, though. As his hand slowly opened, it offered up to Cole—who didn’t miss a beat in his delivery—the tiny blue and white patch of material. Police later announced that Gordon must have ripped it from the shirt of one of his killers, both of whom escaped in the confusion.

  The clue was the first change in pattern, the first time in the wave of violence that a clue had been left behind.

  Another change was discovered in Newark, where the body of an assistant to the mayor was found in the living room of his home in a residential section along the city’s shoreline, a jerry-built conglomeration of instant blight.

  There were three slugs in his head, one through each eye and one through the mouth, gangland’s traditional imprint on the squealer silenced. Staring at the dead body like an unblinking eye was an open wall safe. It had been hidden behind a $2.98 print of a Hieronymus Bosch painting mounted in a $129 gilt frame. It was the only piece of artwork in the entire house except, of course, the bowls of plastic fruit on every table.

  The wall safe was empty. The city official’s wife had been away visiting relatives, had found the body when she returned home and called the police. When they questioned her, she was hysterical and sobbing, not so much from grief as from relief that she was not home when the killers arrived, because she had no doubt that she would have bought the farm too.

  No, she tearfully told the police, there had been nothing of value in the wall safe. Just some old mortgage papers, her husband’s military record—a bad conduct discharge—and a pair of bronzed baby booties from their first grandchild.

  The police nodded, dutifully wrote down what she said and did not believe a word of it. For it was common knowledge that the assistant to the mayor was the man to deal with for a “license” to run a bookmaking shop in town; that he was the man who personally collected the weekly dues from every bookie in town, and that even though he technically collected the money and passed it on to higher-ups, a certain amount of shrinkage inevitably occurred and that shrinkage had made him a very rich man. There was no doubt that the safe had contained a great deal of money.

  “A hundred thou,” one detective said.

  “Sheeit. Five hundred thou,” his partner said as they were walking to the car.

  “Sheeit, yourself. Maybe a mill.”

  That overstated the case somewhat. The safe actually had contained $353,716, mostly in large bills. But it was a robbery—the first time money had been taken in the wave of assassinations.

  Money and a clue also figured 3,000 miles away. Floorboards had been pried loose and money stolen from its hiding place under them in a Los Angeles brownstone owned by Atrion Belliphant, a Hollywood director whose films always failed but whose lifestyle was fed and financed by the world’s largest system of producing and selling pornographic films, a system based largely upon inducing drug addiction in young girls.

  His body had been found by his fifteen-year-old red-haired mistress when she awoke from a heroin-induced sleep. Police knew money had been taken because several cash wrappers were found in the flooring cavity under the loose boards.

  And again a clue. In Belliphant’s hand was a jade and gold cufflink which he must have ripped from the shirt of the killer who had jammed a battery-operated vibrator into Belliphant’s mouth and down into his throat, and then turned it on, letting the movie-man jiggle-strangle to death.

  A pocket and a cufflink.

  Two hordes of cash.

  A new pattern.

  At the moment, they sat in a pile on the desk of Inspect
or William McGurk in a small office off the old police range and gymnasium on Twentieth Street and Second Avenue.

  McGurk had just finished counting the money and putting it into a large metal strongbox. He wrapped each pile of money in a piece of waxed cloth and carefully tightened them with rubber bands. From a small white memo pad on his desk, he snatched two pieces of paper and wrote down the amounts in each pile. $353,716. $122,931.

  He slid the sheets under the rubber bands of the corresponding packets of money.

  From his center desk drawer, he took two envelopes. Into one he put a jade and gold cufflink. Into the other, larger envelope, he put a blue and white striped shirt. It was missing a pocket. He also put into that envelope a purchase receipt from a small men’s shop in Troy, Ohio, which specialized in tailor-made clothes. He put the two envelopes on top of the piles of cash in the strongbox, locked the box, and placed it in a small floor safe that stood in the corner, its open door showing the empty interior. He locked the safe, then turned around with a self-satisfied expression and walked around to sit at his desk. He looked up as a knock came at the door. “Come in,” he called.

  The door pushed open and a big beefy man came in, wearing the dark blue, shadow-striped suit that was, all over the country, a uniform for high-ranking police officers. McGurk smiled when he saw the man.

  “Brace,” he called, rising from his seat to offer a hand. “Good to see you. When’d you get in?”

  “About an hour ago. I met the rest of my team on the plane.”

  “Did you bring them?”

  “No. They’re waiting at the hotel.”

  McGurk waved his visitor to a seat. “When’s your plane back?”

  “Three a.m. from Kennedy Airport.”

  “You’ll be all done by then,” McGurk said with a grin, again opening the center drawer of his desk and pulling out a manila envelope.

  In the top right-hand corner was a name, but even though Police Inspector Brace Ransom of the Savannah Police Department strained his eyes; he could not read the small, precise writing of McGurk.

  McGurk pulled a sheaf of paper from the envelope, to the top of which was clipped an eight-by-ten glossy photo. “Here’s your man,” he said, pushing the photo across the desk.

  Inspector Ransom picked up the picture and looked at it. It was the face of a short swarthy man who might have been Italian or Greek. The man had a slight scar running alongside his left eye toward the corner of his mouth.

  As Ransom scanned the photo, McGurk’s gravelly voice began to read from information on one of the sheets of paper.

  “Emiliano Cornolli. Forty-seven. A lawyer. Known as Mr. Fix. Mob connections through retainers with a number of union locals. Generally represents Mafia leaders in criminal cases and it is an open, but unproved secret, that he buys acquittals by bribing jurors. Lives in an estate in Sussex County, New Jersey, near the Playboy Club. I’ve got a map here. He’s single and technically lives alone, although there’s almost always a broad or two around the place. Grounds guarded by two vicious Dobermans. You’ll have to take care of them first. If there are girls there, you’ll have to take care of them too.”

  He looked up. “You can be there in about eighty minutes by car. When you get close, muddy up the license plates so nobody can pin down the car rental.”

  “We sure he’s home?”

  “Yeah. He’s got the flu. Doctor’s orders.” McGurk slid the map across the desk to the other policeman who picked it up, looked at it carefully, then folded it and put it in his pocket. He pushed the photo back to McGurk. “I’ll remember the face,” he said.

  “Then we’re all set,” McGurk said.

  The Southern police inspector did not move and McGurk looked at him with a trace of a question on his face.

  “Bill?” the Southerner said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I had a chance to read the paper on the plane. That politician in Newark? Was he one of ours?”

  “You know you’re not supposed to ask,” McGurk said. “That’s why we’ve got everything working so well. Teams from all over. In and out. Nobody knowing what anyone else is doing.”

  “I know all that, Bill. But that money that was missing? I thought there might be a change in plans. Should we take anything tonight? Search the place? That’s the only reason I’m asking.”

  McGurk walked around the desk, leaning in front of it near Ransom.

  “No. Take nothing. Leave nothing. Just in and out.” Reading the dissatisfied look on Ransom’s face, he said softly, “Look, Brace. Next week, we’re going to hold our national kickoff for Men of the Shield. I know you’ve got questions, but keep them to yourself. You’ll get the answers then. Until then, just trust me and don’t mention anything to anybody.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Ransom said, standing up. He was bigger than McGurk but lacked the impression of power the New York policeman gave off. “How’s Number One holding up?”

  McGurk winked. “So far, so good,” he said. “But you know how liberals are. They start a lot of things and never follow through. You’ll see him next week at the big kickoff.”

  “Okay,” Ransom said.

  “Listen,” McGurk said, still trying to ease Ransom’s feelings. “If you get done in time, stop back and we’ll have a drink. How are the men you’ve got, by the way?”

  “Look pretty good. One’s a lieutenant from San Antonio. The other one’s a sergeant from Miami. They both look solid.”

  “All our men are solid,” McGurk said. “The best in the business. That’s what it takes to save a country.”

  Ransom puffed his chest a little. “I think so too.”

  And then he was out the door, heading down the stairs to where his rented Plymouth was parked in front. He would pick up his two partners in front of their hotel and then make the drive to the foothills of New Jersey. There, a half-hour stop. Then back to New York. A few drinks with McGurk. The airport, and then home. Sweet and simple. McGurk was some kind of planner, keeping all those things straight in his mind, schedules, rooms, tickets, days off so that men were always available. He really knew what he was doing. A helluva cop, Ransom thought.

  How much of the whole thing was McGurk and how much O’Toole? O’Toole was technically the leader of the operation, but Ransom knew that most of the work must be coming from McGurk. O’Toole was a piece of cheese. He had met him once at a police convention, and all he talked about was minority recruitment. Hah. More niggers on the force. A guy with that kind of idea couldn’t do anything right. He was glad it was McGurk’s show.

  Inspector Brace Ransom of Savannah was so deep in thought driving back to his hotel that he did not notice he was being followed by a hard-faced man in a large beige Fleetwood.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  REMO WAS DISGUSTED, his professional pride injured.

  He had followed McGurk from police headquarters to the old police range on Twentieth Street. He had gone as far as the door under the M.O.T.S. sign and then had hidden when the big Southerner, obviously an upper-rank police officer, had arrived. On a hunch, he had decided to follow the Southerner when he left. And now he had been following the rented car with the three policemen for almost an hour and they had not spotted him. He wondered if they would have if he had been driving a circus wagon, and he wondered if he would ever have been so careless back in the days when he was alive. He doubted it.

  He had been changing speeds mechanically, without thinking, occasionally driving without lights, sometimes with high beams, sometimes with low, trying to avoid being spotted, and finally he had decided it was not worth it, not for these amateurs, and now for the last fifteen minutes he had been tailing them along Route 80, planted on their tail like a dungaree patch, secure in the knowledge that they were too confident, too much at ease to spot him. They just kept plowing straight ahead, like farmers down a furrow, and it annoyed him because policemen should always be alert.

  He tried not to be annoyed. Chiun had warned him about it. �
��One who permits annoyance begins to pay attention to that annoyance and not to his business. One who does not mind his business soon finds his shelves empty.” Right on, Confucius, but they’re still annoying.

  Ten minutes later, Remo saw the tail lights of the car swerve to the right onto an exit ramp from the highway. Remo quickly tapped his brake to slow down. There was nothing behind him and he slowed enough to let the policemen’s car get out of his line of sight, then turned off his lights and sped onto the ramp. Below he saw the car make a left turn and, still with lights off, he rolled down to the corner to see what direction they took. A hundred yards ahead, the road forked and they took the right tine. Remo flipped on his lights and tramped on the accelerator, following them.

  He followed them for five minutes through winding twisting roads that curved uphill and sidehill, near the edges of lakes. Then they pulled off into a small driveway that led to a heavy iron gate, set into a high stone wall. Remo drove by, stopped a hundred yards down the road, and parked against the brush at roadside. As he walked back toward the men, he heard the growling and snapping of dogs.

  He stood in the dark under an overhanging tree, only ten feet from the men, and listened as the dogs growled and snarled and barked, just on the other side of the giant iron fence. Then, like a record on an old phonograph whose spring was winding down, the dogs’ sounds became softer and less frequent. The growls changed to whines; then the whines to whimpers, and then finally silence.

  A Southern voice hissed. “Never did see a dog could resist sirloin steak.”