Sledgehammer

by Walter Wager

  Inside the plywood prefab that was the office, the trailer-camp owner exchanged a bottle of iced Miller’s for two of Antonelli’s quarters while the new arrival signed the register. There were only nine of the “mobile homes” parked in his camp, so Mr. Crowden welcomed this olive-skinned customer as an additional $6 a day. Yes, the Ford with the Florida plates was worth fourteen or fifteen bottles of beer per day in income. Crowden always thought in wholesale prices for himself. He was convinced that he was a sly, shrewd, successful businessman who could have been a financial titan if he’d only bought Coca-Cola stock in 1926 when his brother-in-law had suggested it. That one blunder hadn’t diminished Crowden’s self-esteem, however.

  He glanced at the register.

  “Antonelli—that’s an Eyetalian name!” Crowden crowed in cunning triumph.

  “Italian-American,” the sweaty traveler corrected.

  “Ain’t no Black Hander, are you?” the old man probed warily.

  The new “guest” shook his head, thrust his fingers forward for inspection.

  “Wash ’em twice a day,” he assured. “I’m just a fisherman out of Tarpon Springs heading north in the hot season.”

  “I know all about them Black Handers,” Crowden continued smugly. “Same dirty crowd that tried to do in Eliot Ness on The Untouchables. Saw it every week and all the reruns too. Black Handers, Marfias—same dirty crowd of garlic suckers.”

  Mr. Crowden was beginning to wear on the nerves of the man who’d registered as P. Antonelli.

  “You know Lucky Luciano or Capone or those other Marfier?” tested the white-haired widower.

  “No, but I’ve got a second cousin who knows Frank Sinatra’s dentist. Will that do?”

  The squinty-eyed proprietor of the caravan camp peered at him intently for several moments, grunted and pointed to a parking place in the open field. He watched the dark athletic man—he had the build to be a Tarpon Springs sponger all right—climb into the faintly shabby ’64 Ford. No, rich Marfier gangsters didn’t drive old panel trucks like that and they didn’t live in dusty sagging trailers. They had huge cream-colored Cadillacs, and they stayed in the biggest suites at the most expensive hotels where they drank champagne with naked show girls. Crowden often thought about those meaty, laughing girls, the ones he could have had if he’d bought that goddam Coca-Cola stock. Putting aside his visions of splendid young teats and rumps, the old man concluded that Antonelli was ordinary and harmless.

  For the eleventh time that week, Fred O. Crowden was wrong. It is true that he wasn’t too bright to start with and he’d already imbibed seven bottles of beer since lunch, but even at his best he couldn’t have made a larger mistake about either the man or the trailer. One would hardly rate as ordinary a man who has blown up bridges, machine-gunned his way into a police station and slain a score of heavily armed soldiers—some with his bare hands. As for the trailer, the cargo concealed in the secret compartments—the radio transmitter, infrared beams, sniper guns, revolvers, automatic weapons, bugging devices and electronic jamming gear, safe-cracking equipment, ammunition and plastic explosives—was neither conventional nor harmless.

  Any FBI or CIA agent could have told Mr. Crowden that, but unfortunately none was nearby and the expensive arsenal was expertly hidden. The old man watched as P. Antonelli maneuvered his truck and trailer into the parking place, got out to connect the caravan’s rubber hose to the metal water pipe jutting up there. Tony Phil Arbolino Antonelli was glad to enter the trailer a moment later, for his eyes hurt from seven hours of driving in the glaring sun. He was also pleased that he had arrived in Jefferson County and found this place for a base. He’d smelled the beer on Crowden’s breath, found comfort in the prospect that the trailer-camp owner would be half tipsy most of the time.

  The second invader had infiltrated successfully.

  The rest were already on their way.

  14

  “It’s over a month—well over a month, Ben,” Pikelis pointed out as he sipped from the tall glass of tomato juice.

  “Damn near six weeks, I’d bet,” he added, looking down at his city eight stories below.

  “That’s what I’ve been telling you, Johnny,” argued the beefy police captain. “If anybody’d got their hands on any evidence that Barringer might have put together, you’d sure have heard about it by now. Somebody would be here with his hand out for money, I’d bet.”

  “Somebody like you, Ben?”

  Marton’s eyes grew even more hooded than usual.

  “That’s not funny,” he muttered.

  “It wasn’t meant to be,” Pikelis answered. He smiled a moment later when he finished the juice. “Great stuff, Ben—made from our own Jefferson County tomatoes,” he reminded the policeman with a trace of mockery.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You ought to drink more of it to show your fine community spirit,” teased the man who ruled Jefferson County.

  “I stand up for both ‘Dixie’ and ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,” and I never forget your birthday. That ought to be enough, John.”

  Marton paused, watched Pikelis begin an assault upon a cheese omelet.

  “As I was saying, John,” he continued, “we haven’t found a goddam thing and there’s no sign that anybody else has…unless it was some tricky Federal agent or Senate investigator.”

  “Now there’s a cheerful thought for a nice sunny Saturday morning,” Pikelis exploded. “July eleventh, I’m eating my breakfast peacefully and my good friend Ben tries to ruin the whole damn weekend with talk about the bright boys from the District of Columbia. Listen, Captain, I’ve got friends up in Washington too.”

  Marton nodded silently, aware that this was no time to speak.

  Not unless he wanted to provoke even greater wrath.

  “I’ve got a tame congressman up there—and some other people—who keep their eyes and ears open for just this sort of thing, you know.”

  The captain nodded again.

  “I’m no idiot, you know,” Pikelis rasped.

  Marton nodded a third time.

  “I spend a lot of money up in Washington—money that keeps us all in business, Ben, and don’t you think that I’d know if those meddling bastards up there were after us again?”

  He pushed the plate of eggs aside, glared.

  “John, I never said they were,” Marton replied softly. “I’m trying to tell you that I think nobody has the stuff, that either it got burned up in the car or it never existed. I’m saying there’s nothing to sweat about, that we’ve been churning ourselves up for nothing.”

  Pikelis finished his coffee, lit a cigar and looked out over the penthouse terrace toward the sea. His large black eyes roved over the Paradise Country Club and golf course, the line of palm trees near the shore. It was a soothing sight, and he found his tension fading as it calmed him.

  “Maybe you’re right, Ben,” he admitted with a half smile that flashed several thousand dollars’ worth of excellent dentistry. “Maybe I’m wasting your time when you should be out making like a cop, protecting the entire community. Law and order, that’s the ticket. Our women and our streets are safe,

  “Safer than a helluva lot of other cities. ’Course we have a bit of mischief now and then. Colored girl got cut up over on Larabee Avenue last night, and I’m fixing to do something about it. Yessir, I surely will,” Marton promised.

  “She dead?”

  “Yeah, all cut up something awful.”

  Pikelis blew a smoke ring before he answered.

  “I want you to solve that terrible crime, Ben. I don’t hold any brief for coddling the colored, but I think we ought to show our dark-skinned neighbors that we’re protecting them too. We don’t want any more of those smart-ass outside agitators coming in here to stir up our peaceful black citizens, do we, Ben?”

  “No, though I’m not afraid of those goddam agitators. We busted them up pretty good back in sixty-two and again in sixty-six, I recall. That uppity crowd won’t be back here soon,” th
e captain predicted confidently.

  He was right. The savage beatings would not soon be forgotten.

  “Even so, Ben,” Pikelis counseled, “it looks good if the Paradise City police show some interest in protecting the colored too. It’s like paying your insurance premiums. If they’re contented, it’ll be a lot harder for outside agitators—whenever those damn fools come.”

  Marton sighed, rose from his chair.

  “I’ll get right on it, John,” he promised.

  “Good, and don’t forget about the ‘welcome home’ party tonight. Nine o’clock. Black tie,” the gangster-executive reminded.

  “For Kathy I’ll wear a black tie,” the fat policeman pledged.

  Pan down and left quickly, tighten on the bus station at 12th and Conant and zoom in for a close-up of the 10:56 arriving from Jacksonville.

  That’s what any competent not-too-imaginative Hollywood director would have done if he were shooting the scene. Ingmar Bergman or Antonioni might have filmed it differently, but they’re foreigners and their pictures are hard to understand anyway. Tight on the door as the passengers get out. First the pink-faced sailor on leave, then the two teen-age girls coming home from the visit to grandma, the lean crew-cut fellow with the briefcase and finally the black couple with their nine-year-old son. Pull back and widen the shot as they stretch, sigh and start to scatter.

  Jump cut—fast—to the man with the briefcase as he collects his suitcase and signals a taxi. Williston is passing as Arthur Warren, a poll taker employed by the Southern Public Opinion Corporation to prepare an in-depth study of Jefferson County attitudes on movies and television. There really is a Southern Public Opinion Corporation, has been for six years since a former Columbia sociology instructor organized the firm in Miami It’s a reputable and profitable firm, duly incorporated and regularly tax-paying and a perfect front for Arthur Warren. Arthur Warren is real and sober and respectable. He has Hertz Rent-a-Car and Texaco charge plates, a Diners’ Club card, a Florida driver’s license, a Blue Cross card and a checkbook establishing his account at Miami’s First Federal Bank. In his briefcase is a four-page memo from the president of the S.P.O.C. explaining in detail what Arthur Warren is to do. The memo is laced with just enough sociological and academic jargon to be wonderfully boring—but convincing.

  With no disrespect to the Paradise City Chamber of Commerce, the heat was unpleasantly excessive and the humidity was oppressive and the total effect was lacking in charm. Arthur Warren was glad to accept the taxi driver’s suggestion and took a room in the Hotel Jefferson on Jefferson Avenue. It was centrally located, medium-priced, air-conditioned and drab, the sort of place where shoe salesmen or a visiting basketball team might stay. The best cigar that the lobby newsstand offered was a twenty-five-cent Bering, and the rack of paperback books featured standard treatises on nymphomania, teen-age orgies, sadistic motorcycle gangs, suburban sodomy and Communist infiltration of the United Nations.

  Just an ordinary third-rate hotel, Williston thought as he unpacked his bag in Room 407. When he was finished, he set out to stroll the downtown area for as long as he could endure the clammy heat. The Jefferson Theater was showing one of those vicious Italian Westerns along with a Disney film about a boy and his pet octopus, and the Central—two blocks down the street—was offering a picture about an alienated rock-and-roll musician plus a Japanese science-fiction feature treating a gigantic roach that ate half of Osaka. The papier-mâché half, it appeared. High-school girls eyed the new bathing suits in the Herman Brothers’ windows, mothers in slacks dragged reluctant children into Weiner’s Tiny Tots, and outside the A&P on Carver Street the usual sport-shirted fathers loaded cartons of groceries into station wagons.

  The poll taker walked past the secretaries who were debating evening-gown styles outside Paris Fashions, turned left at Larry’s Liquors and looked around for some cool refuge in the noon heat. A moment later, he hurried into Hammer’s Drug Store—a modern glass-and-aluminum establishment that offered electric clocks, Bar-B-Q sandwiches, aluminum beach chairs, New York Hero-burgers, enema bags, the complete works of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen, four kinds of birth-control pills, ammoniated toothpaste, Revlon makeup, assorted laxatives, diverse anti-dandruff shampoos, eleven different brands of tranquilizers and Hammer’s Own Dubble-Thick Frozen Malt in nineteen flavors. As if that weren’t enough, it was also too cold.

  While he tried to decide between a tuna-tomato surprise on jumbo roll and a bottle of Sominex sleeping pills, Williston noticed a bald, bespectacled man in the traditional pharmacist’s jacket giving orders to a young clerk. The infiltrator guessed that the man in glasses was Mr. Hammer; he was right. Williston sat down at the counter, shivered in the chill of the air-conditioner and concluded that he’d rather risk-his digestion than venture out into the midday heat at this moment.

  “Tuna-tomato surprise, please,” he told the blond counter girl in the tight green uniform.

  She smiled suddenly and then seemed to squirm, making Williston realize that her change in expression wasn’t just old Dixie hospitality after all. A grinning male clerk passing behind her had furtively patted her ample rump on his way to the hot-fudge pot, and as Williston realized that this was why she’d smiled he automatically smiled himself. Then he ordered an iced coffee, and the counter girl singsonged his requests to some invisible sandwich maker.

  Williston’s eyes roved back to Mr. David Hammer, who was handing an envelope to a chubby man in seersucker. It was the assassin who had slain Barringer. The psychology professor didn’t know this, but he had seen enough convicts in enough prisons to recognize this baby-faced man with the hooded eyes as, almost surely, a criminal psychopath. Luther Hyatt was a criminal psychopath with a taste for violence and maple walnut ice cream, and he was collecting Mr. Hammer’s weekly dues to the Paradise City Merchants’ Security Service. Williston didn’t know this either, any more than he was aware of the fact that every merchant in town belonged to avoid broken windows and fractured arms. The pharmacist’s unquestioning payment was no reflection on Hammer’s courage, but rather a recognition that the local orthopedic surgeons left something to be desired. The research papers prepared by the three graduate students hadn’t been quite that thorough, however, so all that Williston knew was that Mr. Hammer had given somebody—probably a criminal psychopath—a white envelope. The tuna-tomato surprise arrived a moment later, focussing all of Williston’s attention upon its bulging dimensions, thick coating of mayonnaise and gastric menace.

  At his first bite, he barely restrained himself from inquiring as to why any tuna sandwich should be polluted with incongruous chunks of pickle and clumps of relish. It was probably some local custom, he reasoned as he forced himself to eat, and even if it wasn’t, only a very stupid spy would attract attention on his first day by complaining about Paradise City food. Williston methodically finished the sandwich, drank his iced coffee and left a 15 percent tip on the counter. Mr. Hammer stood by the cash register near the door to the street, and Williston carried his money over there wondering whether the pharmacist-owner would say it.

  Hammer did.

  “Now you come on back, you hear?” he genially admonished in the traditional Southern farewell.

  Williston nodded politely, his eyes wandering to the Merchants’ Security Service sticker on the register. He walked out into the hot street in time to see the fat assassin collect another envelope from the shopkeeper next door. When the beefy psychopath then reached into the open window of a parked gray Pontiac to extract a pack of Kools, Williston automatically registered the M.S.S. insignia painted on the Pontiac’s door and guessed that it meant Merchants’ Security Service. It was that uncomplicated, that mechanical.

  The spy walked west toward Cherry Street and reached the public library there without any awareness that he was being followed. With only a glance at the bronze statue of the mounted Confederate cavalryman in front of the building, Williston entered the three-story brick library. According to the res
earch paper, it contained 29,000 books, assorted periodicals, back files of the local paper and a head librarian who was the sister of Mayor Ashley. Unlike her brother, she was neither alcoholic nor corrupt nor an ally of murderers. But everyone—with the possible exception of Doris Day and John Lennon—has some human flaw, and Miss Geraldine Ashley’s were (1) maidenhood and head at the age of fifty-one; (2) a queasy feeling that a brigade of marijuana-smoking Black Panthers, ferocious, unwashed and heavily armed with Red Chinese weapons, might well be en route from Harlem to ravish all the Caucasian virgins in Paradise City.

  Being rather prim, Miss Ashley confided this concern to very few people and she certainly didn’t mention it to Andrew Williston when he applied for a library card. In addition to being virginal and prim, however, she was also compulsively prying in a very genteel way.

  “I see you’re staying at the Jefferson, Mr. Warren,” she announced with a tiny nod toward the application form. “That’s a businessman’s hotel, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not exactly a businessman—more a social scientist doing research for business,” he answered.

  Then he explained about the study of television and motion-picture tastes that the Southern Public Opinion Corporation had been commissioned to carry out in Paradise City and—later—four other communities, two larger and two smaller. He used terms like “population coefficient,” “integrated random sample,” “audio-visual synthesis” and “evolving leisure market in an automated society”—just as if he assumed Miss Ashley understood them.

  “Our client is a major conglomerate with investments of more than ninety million dollars in the entertainment-leisure world,” he confided, “and these studies are designed to project the post-McLuhan probabilities for a nineteen seventy-nine America with a Gross National Product at least thirty percent higher than today.”