The Second Assassin

by The Second Assassin (retail) (epub)

  ‘I’d like names and addresses to go with the following licence plate numbers,’ he said politely. ‘A green Dodge, 2V 32 90, a brown Ford, 9K 51 80 and a green Buick, 8A 36 73.’ He listened for a moment as the numbers were repeated back to him. ‘I’ll call again in an hour.’ Bone hung up the receiver, gathered up his notebook and went back down to the basement shop to complete his other chores. Precisely an hour later he made the second telephone call and was given three names and three addresses.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Friday, June 9, 1939

  New York City

  Although the Communications Act of 1934 had banned wiretapping, virtually every FBI field office in the United States had long-standing relationships with the telephone company, allowing them to bridge local line pairs right in the exchange used by the tapped subscriber. When the tapping was done this way even the most suspicious or the most concerned telephone user could never prove that the line was tapped, and an expert could check the line minutely without discovering anything, since there is no actual, physical tap anywhere near the premises under electronic surveillance.

  In the case of the New York field office the bridged lines led from the New York Telephone Company’s massive skyscraper headquarters on West Street to the basement of the Federal Courts Building on Foley Square. Bypassing the regular switchboard entirely, the bridged lines led through the basement to a locked room in the rear of the building officially designated as Records Storage for the FBI offices high above.

  In fact the room contained more than twenty automatically monitored Western Electric Presto Disc Recorders, which recorded all conversations held on the tapped lines on lacquer-covered aluminium discs. At regular intervals the discs would be removed and replaced, the used disks then transcribed and the transcriptions sent to the special agent in charge who had asked for the tap in the first place.

  Since the recordings and the transcriptions were illegal a Do Not File designation was invented. The recordings, transcriptions and any records relating to them were given the DNF heading, which meant that instead of being sent into the Bureau’s Central Records system, the files remained within the field office and were regularly destroyed, usually immediately preceding internal Bureau Inspection Audits. In the case of the bridge taps requested by Sam Foxworth, both the approvals for the tap and any resulting information came directly to him, effectively closing the circle.

  With as many as twenty different taps in progress at any given time, active cases tended to be transcribed first by the special secretarial staff used for the purpose. Since Sam Foxworth wanted to draw as little attention as possible to his activities he did not give his tap requests any special urgency and thus they were at the bottom of the transcription list. This seemed reasonable since there had been no activity on the line at all since the tap had been ordered.

  The two calls made by John Bone to the New York number he had been given were recorded on disk at 5:16 p.m. and 6:17 p.m. the previous day. The preceding shift had ended slightly more than an hour before the first call and the disks weren’t checked again until after midnight. Seeing that there had been some activity during the four-p.m.-to-midnight time period the disk was removed and taken up to the transcription office on the fifth floor, where it remained until nine a.m. With its low priority the disk wasn’t transcribed until almost three thirty in the afternoon, at which point it was sent to Sam Foxworth’s office.

  Once again, since there was no priority assigned to the case, the envelope with the transcription of the telephone conversations was not given a red URGENT tab. Not that it would have made a great deal of difference since, by a stroke of bad luck, Sam Foxworth’s secretary, Alice Spencer, had gone to a dentist’s appointment earlier that afternoon for the removal of an abscessed molar.

  Still in great pain after the removal of the tooth Miss Spencer went home after the appointment and never returned to the office that day. Thus it was that the first Sam Foxworth knew of the calls from John Bone to the location of the tap was on his return from the Claremont Inn at six thirty on Friday evening, less than twenty-four hours before the king and queen were scheduled to arrive at the New York World’s Fair.

  * * *

  Of the three addresses received by John Bone the previous day, two were in Queens and the third in Brooklyn. It was the Brooklyn address that interested Bone the most since it belonged to a night-shift maintenance worker at the fair named Leo Hamner. Of the three people he’d subsequently photographed, Hamner was the only one who was roughly the right size. He certainly had the right occupation.

  When he had telephoned earlier in the day, disguising his voice and posing as a clerk from the Brooklyn Water Department, Bone learned from Hamner’s mother that the house on Adelphi Street belonged to her, that Leo slept during the day and didn’t leave for work until at least 7:30 p.m. and that the water pressure in her toilet was sometimes embarrassingly inadequate and could they send someone around to fix it as soon as possible. Bone promised to see what he could do.

  Using Lavan’s motor car, a ten-year-old panel truck, Bone picked up the last of his supplies and returned to the gun shop a little after three in the afternoon. By five he had erased any evidence of his presence at the shop and had burned the notebook in which he had compiled his research over the previous weeks. By five thirty, now fully committed to his plan, John Bone loaded the last of his equipment into Lavan’s truck and headed for the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Hamner’s home on Adelphi Street was a two-storey green-and-white federal-style house three doors in from the corner of Lafayette Street in the Fort Greene district of Brooklyn, less than a dozen blocks from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Bone went once around the block, identifying Leo Hamner’s Dodge, then parked on DeKalb Avenue and walked back to the house. He paused in front of Hamner’s vehicle, checking the cardboard World’s Fair entry pass taped to the inside of the windshield, then went down the short brick walk and up the wooden steps to the front porch.

  The front door of the house was open to let in the cooling evening breeze, Bone’s way barred only by a flimsy screen. He used the ignition key from Lavan’s truck to slice open the copper mesh; then he reached in, flipped up the latch and pulled open the lightly framed door. He stood silently in the small vestibule for a few seconds, listening. He could smell bacon frying and hear the sound of shuffling footsteps. He could also faintly make out a softly pitched falsetto singing ‘Carry me back to old Virginny.’ Hamner’s mother cooking breakfast for her son just as darkness was beginning to fall. Bone took two steps forward, gently easing the front door closed behind him.

  In front and to the left a steep flight of stairs covered with a Persian patterned rug runner led up to the darkened second floor. In front and to the right a long hallway led back to the kitchen. There were two entries on the left: one a narrow door open but covered by a green curtain hanging from a bar that probably led into a sitting room and farther down the hallway a pair of pocket doors leading into what had to be the dining room. Halfway down the hall between the two doors was a small shelf unit for the telephone and a straight-backed kitchen chair. A stub of pencil hung on a string thumbtacked to the side of the telephone shelf.

  Bone took another step forward, carefully keeping to the side of the passage. He flipped back a corner of the curtain and saw the dark sitting room. Empty. He reached into the left pocket of his jacket and took out the Browning Automatic he’d removed from Lavan’s showcase, then reached into his right pocket for the crude silencer he’d manufactured with the material and equipment he found in the gunsmith’s basement shop.

  The silencer was really nothing more than a steel tube bored with a row of holes on each side to reduce velocity, one end tapped to screw onto the barrel of the automatic and filled with washers made from screening much like that used in Hamner’s front entrance. Bone paused, screwed the silencer onto the end of the gun barrel and then took seven silent steps, bringing him to the open doorway leading into the kitchen.

&nb
sp; The cupboards were pale yellow, the counters green and the floor covered in linoleum the colour of dry slate. There was a farmhouse table in the middle of the room and four chairs around it. On the table was an open newspaper, a large glass ashtray and a red-and-black tin of Target cigarette tobacco.

  Mrs Hamner was standing in front of the stove, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, wearing a long flannel dressing gown belted around the waist. She was in her late sixties or early seventies, her face crumpled in on itself, leathery and seamed from a lifetime of smoking, her grey hair done up in a ragged bun held together by a string net. The upper lip pursed around the wet end of the cigarette was sprinkled with short grey bristles that matched her hair.

  The woman had a spatula in her right hand that she was using to stir both a cast-iron frying pan full of scrambled eggs and a second pan of bacon. On a warming shelf above the stove was an enamel plate covered in newspaper being used to drain the fat from bacon already cooked.

  Mrs Hamner looked up as Bone stepped into the kitchen. ‘I guess I left the door off the hook,’ she said. The old woman went back to stirring her eggs. A long ash fell from her cigarette onto the front of her dressing gown. ‘Shit,’ she said and tried to brush it off with her free hand. She looked at Bone again. ‘You got here quick enough.’

  ‘Traffic was light,’ Bone answered, confused. The woman didn’t seem even slightly upset by having a strange man with a gun in her kitchen.

  ‘Still don’t know what the FBI wants with Leo. He’s just a janitor, for Christ’s sake. A goddamn sewer cleaner.’ She slid the spatula under several strips of bacon and hoisted them up onto the warming shelf. ‘Mind you, he’ll tell you that he’s really a sanitary engineer but he never engineers nothing I can see.’ She pushed both frying pans off their burners, then turned away from the stove and put out her cigarette in the ashtray. She sat down, popped open the tobacco tin and took out a packet of rolling papers.

  ‘Do you know who it was who called you?’ Bone asked. Somehow the FBI had found out about him and played it logically, covering anyone with access to the fairgrounds.

  ‘Said his name was Foxworth. Said he was sending an agent around for protection.’ She pinched tobacco out of the tin, dropped it onto one of the gummed papers and quickly rolled herself a cigarette. She reached into the pocket of the dressing gown, pulled out a box of matches and lit up. ‘Protection from what – that’s what I’d like to know.’

  ‘Probably from me,’ said Bone. He lifted the pistol and fired once, the bullet taking the old woman in the chest and knocking her back out of the chair, the cigarette flying out of her hand. Blood pumped quickly from the wound, soaked up by the flannel dressing gown. Looking around the room Bone spotted a doorway. He opened it and looked down into darkness.

  He smelled the musty-sweet scent of basement. Putting the silenced Browning down on the table he grabbed Mrs Hamner by her slippered feet and dragged her over to the top of the basement steps, making sure that no blood oozed out onto the linoleum. When he had her lined up he lifted her under the shoulders and toppled her forward down the stairs. She disappeared into the basement with a series of thumps. Bone closed the door, spent a moment locating the dead woman’s still-burning cigarette and put it out in the ashtray. He looked around the room. There was nothing obviously out of order except for the abundance of food on the stove.

  Locating a garbage can lined with a paper shopping bag under the sink Bone used the spatula to scrape the eggs out of the frying pan and dumped the bacon and the greasy sheet of newspaper as well. He drained the grease from the bacon frying pan into a tin can on the warming shelf then put both frying pans and the enamel plate in the sink.

  With those details taken care of he picked up the revolver and went back down the hall to the stairs. He listened for a moment and, hearing nothing, climbed to the second floor of the house.

  He found Leo Hamner still asleep in his narrow bed in the small back bedroom of the house. He was sleeping on his stomach, his face buried in his pillow. Draped over a chair at the end of the bed were dark blue overalls with the words 1939 New York World’s Fair Inc. stitched over the left breast pocket and Leo on a rectangular patch over the right. Under the chair was a pair of tall gumboots and a rolled-up pair of thick socks.

  Bone stepped up to the bed, leaned over and fired twice into the base of Leo Hamner’s neck, angling the barrel slightly up and forward. The man’s body twitched several times, the legs jerking spasmodically under the covers, and then he was still. Bone put the gun down on the bed and quickly stripped off his own outer clothing, redressing in the blue overalls. It was an almost perfect fit except for the sleeves, which were an inch or so short.

  He found a half-filled laundry bag in Hamner’s closet, emptied it and refilled it with his own clothes. Leaving the silencer on his weapon he carried the bag of clothing downstairs and left it in the front hall, close to the door. When that was done he went back into the kitchen, started up a pot of coffee and waited. Fifteen minutes later the doorbell rang.

  Bone went down the hall and answered the ring, quickly opening the screen door so the man wouldn’t spot the slit in the screening beside the latch.

  The man was tall, in his mid-thirties, wearing a brown suit and brown hat with a white shirt. ‘You’re Leo Hamner?’ the man asked, eyeing the overalls.

  ‘That’s right,’ Bone said. ‘You’ll be the FBI fellow my mother said was coming around.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the man said. ‘Special Agent Neil Gordon.’ He took a small leather ID wallet out of his jacket and flipped it open for Bone. He looked over Bone’s shoulder and down the hall. ‘Where is your mother?’

  ‘Went to her bridge club,’ said Bone. ‘Why? Was she supposed to wait?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Why don’t you come in?’ Bone said. He stood aside and let the FBI man into the house. ‘Come on back into the kitchen and we can have some coffee.’

  ‘All right,’ said Gordon. He followed Bone back into the kitchen.

  Bone nodded towards the pile of dishes in the sink. ‘We just ate or I would have fixed you some eggs.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Gordon, seating himself at the table. Bone made up two cups of coffee, asked how Gordon liked it and added milk and sugar. He put a cup down in front of Gordon and then sat down himself in the seat recently vacated by Leo’s mother.

  ‘Maybe you can tell me what this is all about,’ said Bone.

  ‘I’m really not at liberty to discuss it,’ said Gordon. ‘But I can tell you that the Bureau thinks your life might be in danger.’

  ‘Can I go to work?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Who’s going to square it with my boss?’

  ‘I’ll do that myself.’ He paused, frowning.

  ‘Something the matter?’

  ‘You’ve got a bit of an accent. Faint, but it’s there. Irish, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Funny. Hamner doesn’t sound like an Irish name.’

  ‘It’s not.’ Bone got to his feet, pulled out the silenced Browning and leaned over the table, placing the end of the silencer just above the bridge of Gordon’s nose. He fired once, the sound no louder than a pair of hands clapping sharply. The FBI man died without a sound, his head snapping back, his chin in the air. There was very little blood.

  Bone stared at the dead agent and considered his options. Bone knew who Sam Foxworth of the FBI was and the telephone call to Mrs Hamner and the resulting presence of Special Agent Gordon meant that his contact’s telephone had been tapped. That in turn meant the other two addresses he had considered as backup possibilities were now useless. Worst of all it meant that the entire project had been jeopardised. Not only did the FBI know of his existence, they also knew that he was going to strike at the fair.

  After his first reconnaissance of the Flushing Meadows site Bone had given himself a ninety per cent chance of accomplishing his objective and an eighty per cent chance of esca
ping cleanly. Now, even with the enemy forewarned, he still considered that he had at least a seventy-five per cent chance of killing both the king and the queen and a sixty per cent to seventy per cent chance of escape.

  Not good odds but an acceptable risk considering the payment. He knew that it would take weeks or perhaps even months to unravel the conspiracy that had led to his being hired in the first place and by then he would be long gone. Bone knew that the prudent choice would be to abandon the project right now. To go forward, however, meant that there would have to be some alterations made to his original plan.

  * * *

  Avra Warren hung up the telephone in the Claremont manager’s office and leaned back in the wooden swivel chair.

  ‘News?’ asked Thomas Barry.

  ‘Assistant Director Foxworth managed to get through to all three phone numbers. He’s sent agents to each residence. They’ve also arrested the man who answered the telephone when the killer called. He’s being brought in for interrogation.’

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Barry.

  ‘A law clerk,’ Warren answered. ‘He works at a company called Sullivan and Cromwell.’

  Jane was impressed. ‘Oil companies, right? Remington Typewriters?’

  ‘Among others,’ Warren answered dryly, ‘including the government of Panama, I believe.’

  ‘So who was he clerking for?’

  ‘One of the junior partners. A man named Allen Dulles.’

  ‘Make any sense to you?’

  ‘On the surface, no,’ Warren said. ‘Sullivan and Cromwell is definitely a Republican firm.’