Abel Baker Charley

by John R. Maxim

  Peck nodded vigorously. “Which leaves him with six months to complete a ten-year course study.” He held up his hand to stay further questions.

  “Back to the major,” Peck continued. ‘Try as he might, the major simply could not get over the resemblance. He was loath to mention it to anyone official because he didn't want to discomfit his new jogging buddy. But he did mention it to a friend in his apartment building who happens to work for the IRS. Just for the fun of it, and not really expecting to find anything, the IRS man punched out both names on a cross-check computer. It turns out that both men do exist and that Roger Hershey's background is legitimate.”

  “Except Hershey isn't Hershey.” Harrigan nodded. “Next he checked the handwriting, right?”

  “Very good. Berner's handwriting and Hershey's were basically the same. There were some differences, believed at first to be an attempt at disguise. But on further study, Hershey's writing now had all the loops and sweeps that one associates with an extroverted personality. In brief, he's not acting. His personality has been radically altered in an impossibly short time.”

  “Lobotomy?”

  “No brain surgery did that. A lobotomy wouldn't turn a military slug into an engaging intellectual. If anything, the reverse would be true.”

  Harrigan shrugged. “So anyway, how did you get into this?”

  “The IRS man used some imagination. He chose not to go to his superiors when he smelled a possible rat, and he knew better than to go to the FBI. He felt that Hershey's cover was so thorough that he must have been set up by the Relocation Section at Treasury.”

  “What Relocation Section?” Harrigan asked innocently.

  “Behave yourself, Connor.”

  “What behave? I'm not supposed to know anything about a—”

  “You're not but you do. What's more, our friend at the IRS had another friend who knew. Happily, he went to that friend and the friend came to me. I looked into it personally. He's not one of ours, of course, but his cover is, if anything, better than the best we've done. His personnel file over at General Services is a thing of beauty. University transcripts, letters of recommendation including one from the associate curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, birth and baptismal certificates, a driver's license—most of which seemed to be genuine Roger Hershey. He had press clippings from more than three years ago that seem absolutely authentic and of course are not. It's Berner in the photographs and Hershey in the text. What would you conclude from all this, Connor?”

  Harrigan produced an empty pipe and sucked on it for several yards. “Someone planted him. He's not doing a solo. Someone good. If Relocation didn't do it, and I gather no one over at Justice planted him, who did? And why would they use the Smithsonian for his hole? What's he going to do there? Steal Orville Wright's blueprints? And anyway, where's the real Roger Hershey?”

  “Excellent, Connor. There was indeed a real Roger Hershey. Four years ago he had a six-month life expectancy. Leukemia. Hershey left a note saying that he was going to try to die usefully and privately. He's certainly dead now.”

  “What about the new Roger. You tried wiring the guy, right?”

  “Yes, we tapped his phone and the three pay phones closest to his home and office. Nothing for several weeks except a lot of purring between Berner-Hershey and a female researcher over at the National Gallery. That's probably a dead end. At one point, however, he received a long-distance call. An apparent wrong number. But then he promptly began making calls himself to three different numbers around the country, each time asking for a particular person, and each time being told that he too had dialed a wrong number. The numbers he called, by the way, were all public phones. This process has been repeated several times since then, sometimes to the same numbers. Any observations, Connor?”

  “Wrong numbers to pay phones.” Harrigan shrugged. “That code's older than I am. What you got is probable cause to suspect a conspiracy. Do I get to hear the rest of this in one shot or do I have to get stroked some more first?”

  “Patience, Connor.” The older man raised another staying hand.

  But Harrigan was beginning to feel uneasy. He knew Peck was about to tell him that one or two other clones had popped up. Peck would do it his own way because he was into sequential logic and tidy patterns. He probably also knew who was pulling the strings. That meant he was about to ask good old Connor Harrigan to dig around the guy and find out what he was up to. But so far, it didn't sound like any of the Treasury Department's business. Which meant Peck was going to ask him to do this on the side. Which meant unofficial. Which meant it was his ass if he stepped on the wrong toes.

  He wasn't worried about the FBI so much. Hershey wasn't their plant because they tended to be much more slipshod about placing people. Not so much that they were incompetent. They just didn't seem to give a good goddamn about most of the hide-and-seekers in the Witness Protection Program. Who could? Bums, mostly. Hoods who testified about mob activities to save their own asses, political activist informants, communists, Klansmen . .. shit! If you took all the FBI informants off the KKK and Communist Party rosters, they'd lose half their membership.

  Anyway, the FBI wasn't Berner's connection. Then who? The CIA, maybe. Not all that likely, considering the Dengler killings, but possible. They would have worked with him in Nam, and if they liked his style they would have tagged him for future use. There! That's a connection with the Relocation Service. Relocation was set up to provide deep cover for defectors and for CIA operatives who either had prices on their heads or who committed a major crime in the course of their jobs. Treasury took it over in the late forties because Treasury had access to the IRS, which could create a whole taxpaying past for the new guy. Treasury also had the Documents Section, of course, and a staff of engravers who could doctor any piece of paper in the world. Plus which, the guy who set it up was a genius. What was his name? Ivor something. Sounds like blunt. Blount? It doesn't matter. He's dead. But the bastard was good. He could hide one person or a whole bureaucracy. Maybe fifteen other people in Washington know that Relocation is anything more than an administrative section that finds apartments and moves furniture for transferred Treasury personnel. Anyway, back to Roger Hershey and his phone calls ...

  “So let's hear it.” He tapped Duncan Peck on the arm. “Hershey called his wrong numbers and your tap told you which numbers. Who was on the other end?”

  “That's one step ahead, Connor.”

  Harrigan's eyes rolled skyward.

  “First I must tell you I already had his wrong number list, although I couldn't be sure until he actually made the calls.” Peck waited for Harrigan to be either curious or impressed. He showed neither reaction and Peck continued.

  “Our people visited Hershey's apartment during one of his Saturday five-mile runs. They examined and photographed virtually every item there, including the contents of his wallet. We found nothing enlightening until I came upon one of those cards on which you list credit card numbers in the event of loss or theft. Hershey's list, however, contained not credit card numbers but coded telephone numbers. The code consisted of fourteen digits. The two on either end were random numbers. The middle ten were the area code and the number written backward.”

  “How the hell would you know that just looking at it?”

  “I'd seen the device before. No connection with this matter. The real giveaway was the fact that he carried such a list in his wallet at all.”

  Where it would be lost or stolen, thought Harrigan, right along with the credit cards. Dumb! So we know Hershey's not perfect. “Okay, you had a bunch of numbers. I keep asking who owned them.”

  “Five were public telephones. A sixth was the home phone of his sponsor at the Metropolitan, a man named Poindexter. A seventh was a private residence in New York's Westchester County, but we'll come back to that. Of the five public phones, four were outdoors in busy locations. A difficult surveillance problem with my limited staff. The fifth, however, was inside a taver
n in Dayton, Ohio. We concentrated on that number for want of a better choice. The man I sent established another wiretap and took some routine photographs of the tavern, its owner, and a few of the regular patrons. The owner, by the way, is a very pleasant black fellow named Howard Twilley. Would you like to hear about him?”

  “I'm breathless.” Peck's delivery could be exhausting. But it was getting interesting.

  “Four years ago, Howard moved from Waycross, Georgia to Dayton. He quickly found a job in a tavern that had, incidentally, an all-white factory worker clientele. Over time, he purchased the tavern from its absentee owner. An attorney named Benjamin Meister.”

  “Meister? It rings a bell.”

  “He's been in the papers. A Bronx grocer who decided late in life he'd rather be Melvin Belli. Passed the bar exams of several states within a year. Some with record grades. No established office or practice, however.”

  “Sounds like he and Hershey played for the same coach.”

  “But back to Howard. Howard Twilley lives in an apartment above the bar and keeps much to himself. His only hobbies seem to be the hermetic pursuits of woodworking and fishing. Vanishes for days at a time in quest of brook trout.”

  “Duncan.” Harrigan made a time-out signal with his hands. His lips moved as he groped for yet another way to ask Peck to stop the bullshit and get on with it. “Listen,” he said finally, “you're waiting for me to notice that both Hershey and Twilley are into carpentry and fishing. I notice. Sooner or later, you're going to tell me that Twilley isn't Twilley either. Why can't it be right now?”

  “You're no fun, Connor.”

  “Come on,” he insisted, ignoring the other man's pout. “You connected Notre Dame with this black guy who runs a redneck bloody knuckle in Ohio. Notre Dame is a very nice and very talented guy who used to be a shit. Howard Twilley, you told me now, is also a very nice guy. You're about to tell me that there's something freaky about him too and probably that he used to be an even bigger shit.”

  “He's Benjamin Coffey.” Duncan Peck dropped the other shoe with a thud.

  Harrigan gaped. He stopped on the running track and stared after Duncan Peck. “Jesus!” was all he could manage.

  “Bad Ben,” Peck repeated. His expression betrayed his satisfaction at Harrigan's loss for words.

  “You're sure?” Harrigan asked.

  “As sure as I can be from a photograph and a voice print. I couldn't very well run a fingerprint check or the FBI would be all over this.”

  Harrigan took a long breath and whistled. He could see the old headlines in his mind. Ben Coffey. Bad Ben. Black activist. Sometime Panther. Their minister of defense. Long history of juvenile crime and random violence. Then straightened out, after a fashion, under Cleaver's tutelage. One subsequent bust on a drug charge and another on weapons. Both possibly rigged. Broke out of the Alameda County Jail, killing a guard in the process. Went underground, what... five years ago?

  “Interested, Connor?”

  “What's different besides nice? What's his talent?”

  “An alert question, Connor.” Peck smiled approvingly. “All I have in reply is rumor. Folklore has it that he's an almost hypnotically persuasive man. It's been useful in calming truculent patrons. One story has him convincing a gun-toter that he was holding a live rat instead of a weapon. Probably apocryphal. But by all accounts a remarkable man. Possibly a troubled man.”

  Harrigan waited while Peck did an isometric while walking. Peck was given to dramatic pauses and Harrigan had learned to indulge him.

  “Twilley placed a call last month to the suburban New York number I mentioned earlier. Mamaroneck, actually. Would you like to hear the transcript, Connor? I know it by heart.”

  Harrigan nodded.

  ” 'Doc?' Then a hesitant, ‘Is this . . . ?' ‘It's George.’ ‘Please hang up at once.’ ‘I've had it, Doc. Four years. I want to use it.’ Til contact you.’ ‘Soon, Doc.' Click. Click.”

  “That's it?”

  “That's rather a lot,” Peck countered. “Right there you have your probable conspiracy. We don't know what the 'it' is that Twilley wants to use, but I'm inclined to guess it has something to do with his talent.”

  “What about 'Doc' ? Who's he?”

  “The phone is unlisted. But it belongs to a Dr. Marcus Sonnenberg of Mamaroneck, New York.”

  Harrigan glanced curiously at Peck. Peck's eyes had done something when he said that name. A switch opened in his brain and that impression was filed there. He stopped at a stone bench and began thoughtfully adjusting his laces.

  ”A medical doctor?” he asked.

  ”I don't know.” Another distant look. A spark of coloration. “If he is, he doesn't practice. IRS says he's an inventor. Quite successful. Lives well and under extremely tight personal security, which may or may not relate to the fact that his business involves security devices. I've taken a look at the home myself and I now have it under daytime surveillance. Michael Biaggi's up there. You know him, Connor?”

  “Young, bright, ambitious. Yeah, I know him. He get anything?”

  “On Sonnenberg, nothing. It's apparently quite difficult to get close to the house or to spend much time in the vicinity without being questioned by the police. However…” Another dramatic pause. Harrigan sighed and looked at his watch, but the sarcasm did nothing to quicken Peck's delivery. “However ... the mysterious Dr. Sonnenberg has a house guest. On two occasions, that house guest has slipped from the house and made his way to a public phone a quarter-mile away. He makes his call and returns immediately. The man leaves the Sonnenberg home at no other time and for no other reason.” Peck paused and waited.

  “So?”

  “So, doesn't that suggest anything to you?”

  “Hey.” Harrigan threw up his hands. “What am I, your straight man? The guy walks to a phone because he doesn't want to call from the house. He doesn't call from the house because the call is private. That would end that except you got more, don't you. Biaggi would have taken the guy's picture during the first phone call. Or he'd lift the guy's prints off the receiver, in which case you'd have a positive ID within twenty-four hours. You know who the guy is but you're taking your time telling me. You're doing that because you want to get me interested. You want me interested because you're going to ask me to do something illegal, unofficial, or at least outside your jurisdiction. Then I'm going to ask you ‘Why should I?’ and you're going to say Trust me.’ I'm going to say ‘In a pig's ass,' and then you're going to lay a lot of shit on me about how I'm the only person in the Fed who you can trust to do this right because I operate as a free safety and don't have to play politics. You might even wave the flag. But what it's going to come down to is, you want to be the only guy in Treasury who knows what's going on. You want that so much, you're going to make almost any deal I ask for. How'm I doing?”

  ”A shocking display of cynicism.”

  “Duncan . . .”

  Peck raised a silencing hand until two runners, both women in their late twenties, passed by. One stopped, bending over to pull up a sweatsock, then continued on without glancing at the two men.

  “The house guest's name is Jared Baker.” Peck dropped his voice by several shades. “An unremarkable man, at least compared to Berner and Coffey. There are, however, at least two key similarities. Mr. Baker committed an act of extraordinary brutality against a young man who caused the death of his wife and crippled his daughter. It was the daughter, incidentally, whom Baker left Sonnenberg's house to call. In any case, Baker was arrested, bailed out by none other than Benjamin Meister, and then fled upon the murder of the young man's father, who was bent on vengeance. Baker may or may not have done the deed. I rather think not.”

  “How come?”

  “The killing of the father was too unlike the maiming of the son, although both were uncharacteristic of Baker. And the killing of the father, a judge named Bellafonte, had the look of a frame. My hunch is that Meister, or Sonnenberg, wanted Baker in a fugitive's ro
le. If Baker was tried and imprisoned, there seems to be some doubt that he'd have survived his incarceration. The judge had considerable political

  clout. There's also some vague connection with organized crime in there somewhere, as if Baker didn't have enough reason to run already.”

  Harrigan made a face. “Bellafonte!” he repeated. “Every dago with an uncle claims some connection with organized crime. Most of it's bullshit. What's the second similarity?”

  “That he vanished, obviously,” Peck answered. “Just as Berner, Coffey, and Lord knows who else vanished. And that all three are connected with the mysterious Dr. Sonnenberg. At the moment, by the way, only you and I know that.”

  “What about Biaggi and whoever identified Baker's picture?”

  “Biaggi knows little or nothing about Baker. Identification does, obviously, but they don't connect him with Sonnenberg.”

  “One last question. Why don't you just feed all this to the FBI?”

  “Because the FBI, assuming they don't muck the whole thing up, will only want to know what Sonnenberg is doing and why, and whether he's violated any federal law. Clearly, he's part of a conspiracy, but conspiracy is difficult to prove. They might get him on three counts of abetting a fugitive ...if l were to tell them about the Berner and Coffey connections, but even that is hard to prove. Their investigation would accomplish little more than driving Sonnenberg underground. I want to know more than what he's doing, Connor. Even more than why. I want to know how he's doing it.”

  Connor Harrigan's mind seemed to have wandered. His head had turned toward the Jefferson Memorial. Peck followed his eyes. Harrigan, Peck saw, was looking not at Thomas Jefferson but at the distant swaying rumps of the two women who had passed them. Duncan Peck reddened.

  “This is important, Connor.”

  Harrigan raised one finger, smiled, and walked a few feet closer to the receding women as if for a better look. With his back to Duncan Peck and without moving his head, he looked down at the spot where the one runner had paused. He saw it. A button microphone lying low in the grass. Harrigan turned and retraced his steps back to the irritated Duncan Peck.