The Fitzgerald Ruse

by Mark de Castrique

  “How long?” Donaldson asked.

  “Like I said, a couple days. A week at most. Things are coming to a head.”

  I could tell Barkley was shaken. He mulled his options for a few seconds. “How soon?”

  “I’m phoning Nathan Armitage as soon as we finish here.”

  The older man nodded. “Then make the call.”

  “When we’re finished here,” I repeated. “What’s in that lockbox, Terry? I know the code. I want to know what it translates.”

  Incredulity replaced the anxiety on his face. “She told you? She wouldn’t even tell me.”

  “No. But I’m pretty sure I’ve figured it out. Now tell me what you know or you can fend for yourself. The other option is I tell the police you’re holding out on them.”

  “How will this information help you?” Donaldson asked.

  “Our enemies know what’s in the lockbox. I’m in the dark. I’m trying to lure them out, and I’ve got to make them think I know something they don’t.” I shut up. That was all I was going to tell them.

  “Well, I’ll talk,” Donaldson said. “And, Terry, as executor of your mother’s estate, I advise you to cooperate. I trust Sam to watch out for our interests more than I trust the police.”

  Barkley didn’t answer. He stared straight ahead, his thoughts hidden behind an unreadable mask.

  “Hold up a second,” I said. “If you’re going to help me, then I’ll call Nathan right now and set things in motion. Can I use your phone? They’ve bugged my office once already, and my cell might not be secure.”

  “Sure,” Donaldson said. “Use the one in my office. Next door on the left farther down the hall.”

  At first I couldn’t find the phone because Donaldson had so many papers and folders piled on his desk. I explored the biggest lump and found the receiver under a thick folder labeled “Selected Minutes: House Committee on Un-American Activities.” I was tempted to thumb through it, but Donaldson had trusted me alone in his office. I dialed Nathan’s cell from memory and he answered after only a few rings.

  “I was hoping I’d hear from you,” he said.

  “It’s been a little crazy, but I need your help big time.”

  “Just ask, pal.”

  “Can you come to my office right away. I’m creating a story for our friends, and I need you to be in it.”

  “What should I wear?”

  “Come ready for any occasion. And I need a supporting cast.”

  His voice turned serious. “What’s happening, Sam?”

  “Not for the phone. But Hewitt Donaldson and his cousin Terry Barkley need experienced guards. Plain clothes but I want anyone to see they’re carrying.”

  “Okay. Where should they report?”

  “Donaldson’s office, or if he’s gone back to court, have your man meet him there. I’ll tell his cousin to stay put.”

  “That it?”

  “No. To finish this story, I need good men. No disrespect, but closer to combat training than jiggling locks.”

  “Whoa,” Nathan said. “Where are the police in this?”

  “They didn’t like the plot so Calvin and I are writing them out. I wanted to give you a heads-up in case you need some prep time.”

  He was silent a moment. “How soon?”

  “Twenty-four hours. And with six players to be safe.”

  “Counting you, me, and Calvin?”

  “No. In addition. And as for you, my friend, you’re under doctor’s orders to take it easy. I’ve already gotten you shot once.”

  “You want my help or not?”

  Without Nathan’s help, there was no show. “I want your help as long as it doesn’t endanger our chance for success.”

  He got what I was saying. “Fair enough. I’ll make sure no one’s life depends on me. But I’ll want to be close by.”

  “There’s plenty for you to do. What about the men?”

  Again, he hesitated. “I can get them. I’m afraid I’ll need freelancers, but I can vouch for them.”

  “That’s good enough for me.”

  “Where’s Nakayla in all this?” he asked.

  His question caught me short. I was putting my team together and I’d left her off the roster. “We haven’t had a chance to talk. Do me a favor, Nathan. If she’s with me when you get here, follow my lead. Don’t mention the number of men you’ve enlisted unless I bring it up.”

  Nathan chuckled. “Sam, I’m warning you. If you try to keep that woman out of the action, then the fight with Ali Baba will seem like a picnic on the Blue Ridge Parkway.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  When I returned to the conference room, Donaldson and Barkley were speaking in hushed tones.

  I rapped on the doorjamb. “Nathan is sending two men. Hewitt, if you’ve been called back to court, look for one of them when you leave. He’ll be just outside the courtroom. Terry, your man’s going to meet you here.” I sat. “Okay. I’m all ears.”

  Donaldson rested his forearms on the table and took a deep breath. “Let me say right up front that you’re going to hear two different stories. The truth might be somewhere in-between, or one of us could be completely off-base.”

  I saw anger simmering in Barkley’s eyes, but he said nothing.

  “The reason, and I think Terry will agree with me, is that our mothers saw things very differently. What my mother proclaimed an embarrassment, Terry’s mother embraced as a virtue.”

  “Because in her mind she was standing firm for her Christian beliefs,” Terry snapped.

  “I’m not here to make judgments,” I said. “I just want the facts of what happened.”

  “But that difference is a fact,” Donaldson said. “Probably the central fact through which everything else is colored. If Terry and I can agree to disagree, then you need to accept you’ll hear different truths from each of us. We’re cooperating as best we can, but you can’t consider conflicting testimony to be perjury.”

  I understood Donaldson’s precaution to keep me from sounding like a prosecutor. Barkley would erupt if he felt I was attacking him or his mother.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve conducted enough interviews to know even eyewitness testimony usually conflicts. We all have the same goal here, justice for Ethel Barkley and for your families.”

  Barkley relaxed his clenched jaw. “Then I’ll tell you what I know. After Hewitt.”

  Donaldson smiled. “All right, cuz. I’ll give you the last word as long as you don’t interrupt.” He paused to collect his thoughts and then began his story.

  “My father, Hugh Donaldson, was born in 1900, November third to be exact. One month to the day after Thomas Wolfe. They knew each other as kids, though my grandmother discouraged their playing together.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because she thought W. O. Wolfe was a nut. Tom’s father was bad to drink. My father grew up on Woodfin a few blocks away, and my grandmother told me Mr. Wolfe would often lurch along the street late at night, screaming verses of Shakespeare at the stars.

  “Tom’s mother Julia was a real piece of work. A shrewd businesswoman but paranoid that people were taking advantage of her.” He gave a polite nod to Terry. “Aunt Ethel told me F. Scott Fitzgerald went to the Wolfe house when he was in Asheville, and Mrs. Wolfe threw him out, saying she didn’t rent to drunks.”

  “That’s true,” Terry confirmed.

  “My father and Tom both went to Chapel Hill. Tom a year earlier because he was such a bright kid, and a few times he and my father rode home on the train together. Tom went on to Harvard, my father got his law degree from UNC and returned to Asheville.”

  “You never knew your father?”

  “No. He died six months before I was born. Most of what I know came from my mother, aunt, and paternal grandmother. Mother was quite a bit younger. Her mother had died in childbirth, and she was reared by her father, a strict Methodist circuit-riding preacher, and later by a stepmother whose affections shifted to her own natural chil
dren as the marriage produced them.”

  “Were your mother and your aunt close in age?” I asked.

  Donaldson nodded. “A perceptive guess. My father was seventeen years older than both of them. My mother and Aunt Ethel met working at the Sears-Roebuck back in the 1930s, after Ethel left the Grove Park Inn. My mother told me she knew she wasn’t the great love of his life, but she’d made peace with being in third standing.”

  “Third?” I glanced at Terry and he looked surprised.

  “Yes,” Donaldson said. “His first girlfriend, Ina Tribble, was also his first fiancée. She died in the flu epidemic of 1919. He threw himself into his law practice and didn’t date for fifteen years. Mother said she could never replace Ina in his heart and she could never be a greater priority than his work. What really hurt was knowing he put the Silver Legion of America and William Dudley Pelley ahead of her. Fascism over family.”

  Terry rapped his knuckles on the table. “No. Your father and my mother were doing what they thought was best for the country they loved.”

  Both men’s voices had begun to rise to the levels I’d heard when entering the office. I made a “T” symbol with my hands. “Time out. You’ll get the last word, Terry, so let him finish.”

  Barkley settled back in his chair, a scowl on his face.

  Donaldson continued. “When William Pelley came to Asheville with his claims of traveling into the afterlife, he hired my father for legal work in setting up Galahad Press and the other propaganda organs he developed. Pelley saw the rise of Hitler as the great hope for ushering in a new age. He formed the Silver Legion of America the day Hitler assumed the chancellorship of Germany, but he put as much emphasis on religion as politics. A theocracy disguised as a democracy.

  “Pelley’s efforts to undermine the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution gained momentum in those early desperate days of the Depression. My father helped guide their expansion. As the Silver Shirts’ membership grew, my father and Terry’s father, the accountant for the operations, moved into the inner circle.

  “At the height of their national influence, the movement became unglued as charges of stock fraud were leveled at Pelley by the state of North Carolina.”

  I remembered seeing Pelley’s face on the wanted poster issued by the sheriff of Buncombe County.

  “And as the violence and atrocities of Hitler’s reign became known, the movement fizzled. But my father and my Uncle Terrence stuck by Pelley, even after he was convicted of fraud in Asheville and later charged with sedition by federal prosecutors in 1942.

  “My mother told me she was appalled that my father, so decent and kind in so many ways, would have held such outrageous and unpopular beliefs.”

  “Was your father ever charged with anything?”

  “No. And neither was Terry’s father.”

  Barkley’s tight lips softened into a smile. “That’s because they never did anything wrong.”

  “They were on a list drawn up by the House Committee on Un-American Activities,” Donaldson said.

  Barkley shrugged. “Who wasn’t? The country was paranoid. Hell, it still is.”

  “Did your father have to testify?” I asked Donaldson.

  “No. And after Pelley went to jail, the spotlight moved elsewhere. But my father still kept his network together, writing letters and dispensing legal advice. They would visit the German POWs in Hendersonville and other areas of the state.”

  “Were they passing information?”

  Donaldson cocked his head and eyed me cynically. “What do you think?”

  Barkley swiveled to face him. “There’s no proof they did anything but offer humanitarian assistance. They made sure the prisoners were well treated. I’d hope someone like my father and Uncle Hugh would have been doing the same for our soldiers.”

  “Yes,” Donaldson snapped. “Fixing them strudel while the cattle cars carried women and children to their deaths.” He leaned over the table, trapping me with a hard stare. “I have some sympathy for the German people. They’d been sold a bill of goods. After my father died, over a thousand German prisoners burned their uniforms when they saw the newsreels of the liberated concentration camps. But my father had a choice, and he backed a fascist megalomaniac who saw himself general of a righteous army, marked by big scarlet Ls on silver shirts glittering in the sunlight as they marched over everything in their path.”

  I thought about the poem I’d found in Ethel’s book. Donaldson’s verbal picture came close to that imagery, and I suspected he’d searched for clues as to why his father chose to work for such reprehensible ideals.

  “You can bet it wouldn’t have been long till these Silver Shirts would have been herding those they didn’t like into their own concentration camps,” Donaldson said. “My mother had hoped that with my birth our family would have moved up his chart. Part of her clung to that belief after he died. But he left his insurance to his sister who claimed she held it for others who would come for it.”

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  He glanced at Barkley. “I think she expected Pelley to return. My father’s instructions had been to use the money as a last resource. And as far as I know, she never touched any of the policy’s proceeds. Pelley was released from prison in 1950 on the condition he stay clear of politics and make no attempt to reactivate his Silver Legion of America. He went to Indiana where he died in 1965. And my mother died in 1990, a woman whose marriage was haunted by what might have been. But Aunt Ethel never stopped waiting.” He looked away and spoke to the wall of 1960s music. “Imagine placing your hope in such a despicable cause.”

  Barkley twitched with nervous energy. “She wasn’t right in the head, but she loved you and she loved me. That counts for something.”

  “Was she active in the Silver Shirts?” I asked him.

  “No. Look, Hewitt is obsessed with this nonsense.”

  “The facts speak for themselves,” Donaldson said.

  “You’ve had your say, now I’ll have mine.” Barkley turned in his chair so that Donaldson wasn’t in his peripheral vision. “My father had a job. That’s all it was. I don’t remember him very well, as I was only four when he was killed. But when he came home, he left his office behind. Mom and I were the priorities of his life.”

  “Did he work for other clients?” I asked.

  “Of course. Pelley had several businesses and his political organization, but my father served many other small businesses and industries. Why he kept the books for one of Asheville’s Jewish furniture stores.”

  “And Hitler loved little children,” Donaldson said.

  “He’s telling his story,” I warned.

  “The Silver Legion of America wasn’t about Hitler,” Barkley insisted. “It was created because our country was in real danger of becoming a socialist state. Pelley might not have had the right solution, but 15,000 voices of the middle class got Washington’s attention, and limits were put on Roosevelt’s efforts to take over the government. Look how he tried to pack the Supreme Court.”

  I didn’t want to get into a historical debate that would degenerate into a shouting match. “Was your father a member of the Silver Shirts?”

  “Yes,” Barkley admitted. “Just like Hewitt’s father.”

  “And unlike Hewitt’s mother, your mother was proud of your father’s actions?”

  “Yes. And her brother’s actions. My mother idolized Hugh Donaldson.”

  “Is that why you think the insurance money went to her?”

  Barkley paused a second. “Probably.”

  “Why not to your father?”

  “They were killed in the same wreck.”

  “You’re saying they planned to die together?”

  Barkley’s head jerked back like I’d slapped him. “No!”

  “There was the need for an insurable interest,” Donaldson said. “Otherwise, the company wouldn’t have issued the policy. It keeps people from taking out insurance policies on total strangers and making themselves
the beneficiaries. It eliminates an incentive for murder. My father could make his sister the beneficiary without any trouble.”

  “Thank you, counselor,” I said with exaggerated gratitude, “but I wanted to hear Terry’s answer.”

  Donaldson reddened. He realized he’d butted in when I already knew the answer. I was probing for Terry’s opinion of the relationship between his father and his uncle.

  Barkley shrugged. “I guess what Hewitt said. My mother was blood-kin.”

  “And would she have been more likely to carry out Hugh Donaldson’s wishes?”

  “Yes. Like I said, she idolized him.”

  I smiled with reassurance. “What did your mother tell you about the money from that insurance policy?”

  “That we were to keep it ready. A time would come when we would be asked for it. She told me that Hewitt and I might be called forth. That’s the way she phrased it.”

  “But you did nothing all these years?”

  Barkley threw up his hands. “It was her money. Maybe if she’d spent some of it I wouldn’t have had to work three jobs to get through college. She only took out enough to pay each year’s taxes on the interest earned.”

  He was expanding on his answers and I knew if he were going to tell me anything significant, he would say it in the next few minutes.

  “Where do you think the money came from—the money to buy the insurance?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked over at Donaldson. “But it wasn’t foreign money. Mother said it was Americans standing up for America. Christians standing up for God.”

  I kept my eyes steady on his. “Grim men. Christ’s men.”

  Barkley looked at me blankly, but Donaldson nodded with recognition of the line of poetry.

  “And there wasn’t any money in the lockbox?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Barkley said. “I only saw inside it one time.”

  Donaldson’s head jerked around. “When?”

  “I guess I was ten. Mother had taken my toy soldier maker and I wanted to know why.”

  “What’s a toy soldier maker?” I asked.