by Noel Hynd
He listened intently as they walked.
"I have no idea what the sandhogs were doing. All I know is that he, McAdam, was back and forth in different parts of the world.
Standard cloak-and-dagger stuff, I'm sure. It was on one of those intrigues that he got shot in the hip in 1953. Before he retired and took me on as a daughter."
He nodded. The icy wind made him pull his coat collar tight.
"Well," she continued, 'some men can never retire. They miss the excitement. Or maybe it's just the violence and the blood they miss.
My foster mother died in 1968. That left my foster father in Switzerland, limping around in an empty house staring at the lake and longing to be back in the service.
"At his age?"
"At his age. And as it happened, SIS. were willing to take him back. They had an operation in a different part of the world that needed sorting out. An area where no one would know him, they thought.
Venezuela. South American oil instead of Middle Eastern." She smiled.
"It all gives off the same stench when it burns " They turned another corner and were now on a side street east of Lexington Avenue.
"Can I ask where we're going?" he said.
"See that sign down there?" she asked, pointing halfway down the block to a sign saying READER AND ADVISER, MADAME DIANE.
"That's where we're going."
They walked. She continued to speak.
"My foster father had contacted another man in the Service. The man in Whitehall who was his immediate superior and to whom he would be reporting once his new assignment began. They planned to rendezvous in Maracaibo. They did, in fact. Then they went on to Caracas.
Eventually they were heading north to the United States. There might have been a meeting with some U.S. intelligence service. I don't know.
I only know they never arrived."
"Why not?"
They stopped short and stood immediately beneath the READER AND ADVISER sign.
Leslie glanced at the vacant doorway to the gypsy's parlor.
"The airplane blew up an hour after takeoff," she said.
"A Caracas-to-Miami flight. June 14, 1971. Sabotaged And it wasn't an accident that they were on it. I suspect it was sabotaged for them expressly. After all, there are agents from the 'other side'-as my foster father used to call it-who are actively seeking the oil down there. And with one well-placed bomb, the top British sandhog and his superior were eliminated from the region." She looked at Thomas, studying him for his reaction.
He listened to her story with compassion and sympathy. He believed her just as he had on the first day she'd come to his office.
And just as he'd believed the man in London calling himself Peter Whiteside.
"And that, Thomas'" she said in softer tones, "is why my foster father can't be of help anymore."
"What about Peter Whiteside?" he asked.
Her smile was pained. She shook her head.
"Sometimes you can be very slow," she answered.
He looked at her quizzically as if to ask what she meant.
"Who do you think his superior was?" she asked.
"The second man on the airplane' There was a long pause and he felt a tumbling sensation in his stomach.
"Naturally," he finally muttered.
"You've learned a lot today," she said.
"Now I'll teach you one thing more. The defense of the rabbit. The fleet escape. Never go into a place which you can't get out of in at least three ways. Follow me in five seconds. You'll see what I mean She leaned forward and was no longer a teacher, but rather a woman and a lover. She kissed him on the lips and had him so starved for her physical affection that he tried to pull her closer by drawing her into his arms.
But she'd have none of that. It wasn't time. No sooner did he try to draw her closer than she resisted firmly and pulled back.
'I'll be back in touch," she said.
"Remember. Follow in five seconds' ' He stood there completely mystified as she briskly went up the stairs beneath the sign of Madame Diane. Thomas watched from the sidewalk, then followed after a slow count to five.
He went quickly up the stairs, reached a dingy hallway at the top, and heard nothing. There were four alternatives. More steps leading up. A corridor to the right, a corridor to the left. Back stairs leading down. All four marked with exit signs.
She'd known this place, which thicket could best confuse the hounds.
She was gone. Had anyone been following them, she would have led the pursuer here and easily slipped away.
Her lesson had been well illustrated. He'd learned it.
For himself, he chose the corridor to the left, the one leading past Madame Diane's emporium of guidance. He passed down a side stairway into an alleyway between buildings.
He thought of sandhogs, alive and dead, on his way home, men whose lives and jobs orbited the three spheres of blood, sand, and oil.
McAdam and Whiteside. Men or mirages? And what about Leslie? A cooperative client in desperate need of help? Or a treacherous conniver?
Or both?
During the long walk through the icy wind, he wondered who was real, who was imagined, and who lay in the murky area somewhere in between.
He pulled his coat close to him. Each shadow he passed on that cold night, each stranger coming near him on the sidewalk, represented a multitude of fears. In the same way, the empty apartment he would return to represented a certain loneliness which, at this point in life, he no longer wished to face each night.
He wished that she were coming home with him. But he had no idea where she was, much less who she was.
Chapter 18
It had never escaped Shassad's thoughts that the slaying of Mark Ryder had been done with such surgical precision that it had the mark of professionals. Similarly, what Minnie Yankovich had described had sounded more akin to an elaborately disguised execution than a mugging.
Shassad looked at Mrs. Ryder in her moment of most acute grief.
He knew what his job was.
No, she said, she hadn't seen her husband since the morning he'd last left for work. No, he had no enemies that she could think of, nobody to whom he was in debt, and she knew of no one whom he might have been seeing whom she didn't approve of. Shassad gallantly, refrained from asking the next obvious questions: Did she have any idea where her husband might have planned to spend the night? Did she have any idea that he was seeing another woman?
The answers were obvious.
On the morning following Ryder's identification Detective Patrick Hearn had arrived at the offices of Bradford, Mehr amp; Company, where by five minutes past nine he had obtained a photocopy of Ryde's employment records. Subsequently, Hearn interviewed Ryde's co-workers, none of whom could suggest anyone harboring a grudge against the deceased. To those who seemed to have known Ryder best, Hearn posed one further question: "Do you happen to know if there were any women in addition to his wife?"
Invariably the answer was no, clearly and simply, except in one instance. A young man of Ryder's age, an executive trainee named Durban Hayvis, balked perceptibly before also answering no.
On a hunch, Hearn spent an extra hour going over address lists of company employees, hoping one a female one might read 246 East 73rd Street. None did. The closest address was 316 East 94th Street, the address of Mr. Hayvis. No immediate significance.
However, Hearn did much better two hours later.
He had gone to the Seventy-third Street building itself, and sought to interview the remaining tenants. He finally managed to locate the most elusive, a single girl, early twenties, going by the name of Debbie Moran. Hearn had been seeking her since Daniels had first mentioned the nocturnal activity in her apartment.
Debbie lived in Apartment 3-C, on the floor below Thomas Daniels. She invited the detective in and sat demurely on a large white vinyl couch with large plush cushions, her legs folded under her in tight jeans.
The detective sat across the room and question
ed her.
Debbie Moran puffed a cigarette carefully and spoke politely with a hint of a New York accent. She gave her profession as a part-time actress and part-time model. Her hometown, she said, was St. Paul, Minnesota.
"Actress, huh?" asked Hearn with interest.
"Maybe I've seen you in something. Broadway? Off Broadway?"
"No, probably not."
"Movies?"
The 'no" was hesitant. Her eyes lowered to the ashtray. Hearn glanced around the room. The furniture was both modern and reasonably expensive, centered around a large comfortable sofa. The adjoining bedroom, which Hearn eyed when he asked if he could use the washroom, was dominated by an expensive waterbed. The apartment was designed, in its way, for comfort, for satisfaction, and as a den of voluntary seduction. Under further questioning Debbie Moran admitted that she just remembered what her last acting job had been.
"A series of TV commercials on the West coast she volunteered.
"It's not being shown no more Hearn reached to an inside jacket pocket and handed her a picture of Mark Ryder.
"Ever seen this man?" he asked.
She glanced at it.
"No ' He watched her for a moment, studying the facial features and expression.
She handed back the photograph.
"You're sure?" he asked.
"I'm sure."
"That man was murdered in front of this building," he said.
"How awful: " "He was visiting someone in this building."
She shrugged.
"What we're interested in'" he said, "is what time he left, not what he was doing here "I live in the back of the building," she said.
"I sleep soundly. I didn't see no one or hear no one. I go to bed early."
And often, thought Hearn. All the way back to the precinct he cursed her.
Hearn found Shassad sitting at his cluttered desk on the cramped second floor. Behind Shassad was his bulletin board on which, in addition to items of more importance, there were two small posters.
One pictured a blue-uniformed police officer guarding a school crossing, set in an idealized suburban America of the mid-1950s.
The caption read,
"The Police Officer is your friend. Trust him ' The other, hand-lettered by an anonymous precinct-house philosopher, proclaimed simply,
"God loves Negroes. That's why there's so many of them."
"I found the girl," Hearn said.
"Apartment Three-C?"
Hearn nodded.
"A high-priced hooker," he said, 'unless my eyesight is failing. What I don't know is whether she's doing bar pickups or whether she has a little black book. There's no other female in the building who Ryder would have been on top of."
"Did you show her Ryder's picture?"
"She recognized it. And she wouldn't talk sa "Okay," said Shassad casually but with dissatisfaction @ know what's next."
By the next morning, Shassad had obtained four extra detectives, two teams of two, to aid in the Ryder case. A surveillance unit in a panel truck was placed on Seventy-third Street to observe Debbie Moran. At four fifty that afternoon she emerged from her building, hailed a yellow cab, and led two detectives in a plain car to Gypsys Bar at Fifty-fifth between Sixth and Seventh avenues.
Ten minutes later an undercover detective from the Midtown Anti-Vice Squad (known in the police vulgate as the "Pussy Possie") entered the bar. The detective's name was Samuel McGowan. His partner was a policewoman named Theresa Duchecki, better known as Saint Theresa for reasons which were dear to anyone who'd met her. McGowan was wired.
McGowan spotted Debbie sitting alone at the center of the bar.
He approached the bar and seated himself at the far right end. He watched the clock until twenty minutes past five. Then, certain that she'd been watching him, he initiated an aimless conversation.
Several minutes passed. Debbie wanted to know if she was wasting her time.
"Look," she finally purred, leaning slightly forward so that McGowan could look down her dress, 'what do you say we cut out the talk and have some fun?"
"I'm having fun right now," he said.
"Come on, sugar," she intoned,
"I have a nice apartment where I'm all alone."
"I don't know," he said, fidgeting with his drink.
"You look like the type of guy who'll pay to have a super evening."
Pay?"
"Don't you like what you see, sugar?"
"Sure," he stammered, 'but, uh, well… How much?"
"A hundred and fifty dollars," she whispered, never suspecting that the cigarette case in his pocket contained a microphone and no tobacco.
"You get whatever you want twice. And I have to be back here by ten o'clock' "Let's go" he said.
They went, but not to Seventy-third Street. They were no farther than the sidewalk when they were joined by Saint Theresa. They didn't have to tell Debbie she was under arrest. She knew immediately.
"We've pegged something wrong somewhere," Hearn said sipping lukewarm coffee from a plastic container.
"Maybe they were a pair of standard muggers dressed up in good coats."
"No way, Patty," said Shassad, his dark eyes narrowing.
"You saw those knife wounds. A surgeon couldn't make better incisions."
"Then what's wrong?" asked an exasperated Hearn, heavy circles forming beneath his eyes.
Then finding no method to the crime, Hearn sarcastically answered his own question.
"Maybe they got the wrong man."
Shassad, in thought, said nothing. But his eyes were wide.
"Jumping Jesus I " Shassad then said softly "Of course. The wrong man."
"What?"
"Debbie Moran and her rent-a-muff had nothing to do with it.
Try this: Her customer-Ryder-had the luck to walk out the building at the wrong second. Two professionals were there waiting for a hit. But not Ryder. No one cared about him. No, sir. They were waiting for someone more important who was supposed to step out precisely the same time. And who nearly did."
Hearn twisted his face, half in enlightenment, half in skepticism.
"Daniels?" he asked.
– Yeah" said Shassad, opening his hands expansively.
"Yeah, why the hell not?" They paused and considered it.
"He said himself that he was coming out right at that same time '
Shassad paused a few seconds between sentences, stopping to think as he spoke.
"How big is Daniels? Five ten? Five eleven?"
"Approximately."
"Same as Ryder, right?"
Hearn nodded.
"Coloring? Hair? Build? All similar, right? Similar enough to be mistaken by people who were waiting for a man they'd never met before?
Waiting on a rainy 'night in January when they knew their victim would be coming out of that building."
"But they'd have to know right down to the minute in order to jump to a conclusion like that?"
"Of course. They did know. Don't you see?"
"Sorry. No."
"The janitor wanted to know almost to the minute how soon Daniels would be leaving. Remember?"
Hearn's face was assuming a slow glow.
"And sure," said Shassad, getting to his feet excitedly and slapping the back of an open palm into his other hand, "one of the men on the street was back and forth to the telephone. That's how they knew when to look for Daniels. They were tipped from Thirty-first Street.
Huh? What do you think?" Shassad folded his arms against his chest, as if in summation of his case.
"I like it," answered Hearn slowly. He was thoughtful.
"Ryder goes out the front door while Daniels steps out the back. Poof Ryder gets carved in Daniels's place. Now," he added with an almost imperceptible pause, 'who wants Daniels dead?"
"Only one possibility in the world so far," said Shassad.
"Jacobus!" 'Why?"
Shassad poked at the air with a forefinger.
"That's what we find out
next."
Chapter 19
Jacobus was the thin thread which stitched Shassa(Ts theory together. Like the slaying of Ryder, Jacobus also made little sense.
Shassad had reassigned two support teams of detectives. No longer did they shadow Thomas Daniels in hopes that the young attorney would lead them to the missin woman. Instead, Jacobus was now under twenty-four-hour surveillance by three different two-man detective teams. After three days, the accumulation of information on Jacobus had been a genuine team effort. No one had discovered anything.
Shassad and Hearn were plainly worried. jacobus's house in Astoria had been watched; no one unusual had come or gone. The night custodian had been followed to work as he drove his dented aging Ford from Queens to Manhattan and left it in a metered parking place on Thirtieth Street off Park Avenue South, a similar location each night. He'd been under intense scrutiny for several days and Shassad's theory of his link to the Ryder murder was fading quickly.
"Just another stiff in another crummy job," had been Shassad's recurrent thought after observing the man.
"Just like the rest of us' ' jacobus's thumbprint had been taken from his home mailbox and had been sent down to the crime laboratory for a fingerprint analysis. A police photographer, concealed in the office building across the street at 460 Park Avenue South, had taken thirty-some telephoto snapshots of the man. And Shassad had made arrangements to visitiacobus's bank to peer into his financial status.
But as the two detectives sat in Hearn's car on lower Park Avenue, surveying the entrance of 457 Park Avenue South for the third consecutive night, the possible involvement of Jacobus, as a homicide conspirator seemed less and less likely. By night, no one came or went from the building in which Jacobus worked. And the only occasional company the detective had in the nocturnally quiet section of Manhattan was that of the large white sanitation trucks which prowled the streets picking up refuse.