Sledgehammer

by Walter Wager

  Mr. Pikelis was counterattacking on a broad front.

  The press fell back under the veiled violence, some leaving and some publicizing the indignities and some retreating to motels just outside Jefferson County. Every day, police cars waited to harass them on the roads to and from Paradise City. Every night, the irate journalists planned new forays and scouting missions into the “denied territory”—like U.S. Special Forces teams probing the jungles near the Cambodian border.

  The Sledgehammer quartet was continuing its own war. On the nineteenth—the day that Judge Gillis grudgingly granted Davidson a final postponement until the twenty-fifth—Sergeant Leroy Beggs of the Paradise City Police and two of Pikelis’ gunmen set out to collect the week’s profits from the recently reopened brothels that were running full blast now that the state troopers had left. A maid in one of the houses had notified Reverend Snell that Fat Florence and her sister madams were back in business and that the schedule called for the collection on that night. The sergeant and his two escorts were properly wary as they emerged from Fat Florence’s, glancing around and scanning the street before they started down the steps toward their parked car. Seeing only an aged invalid in a wheelchair—he was apparently blind as well as infirm if the dark glasses were a clue—being pushed down the street by a shambling white-haired servant who seemed nearly as old, Beggs descended and began to walk past them. As they drew abreast, the hunched codger in the wheelchair spoke.

  “I’ll take the money,” he announced.

  There was—suddenly—a .32-caliber revolver in each hand, with a cylindrical silencer fitted to the muzzle of each gun.

  The sergeant stiffened, clutched the airlines’ bag in near panic. He wasn’t about to surrender the proceeds of seven houses, but Williston persuaded him. The spy pointed his weapons, shot the collector through each arm with a precision that a skilled dentist might have admired. The twin “pops”—louder than a champagne cork but not much—were followed by Beggs’s gasp, and he dropped the bag.

  “You’ll get it in the belly,” the disguised invader promised one of the hoodlums.

  The man instantly picked up the bag, thrust it forward. Arbolino, who’d been pushing the chair, reached out and took it.

  “Truck,” ordered Williston.

  The stunt man ran twenty yards down Merrill Avenue, started the stolen diaper-service truck and drove it up to where the twin revolvers still covered Pikelis’ trio.

  “You’re dead,” predicted the wounded sergeant grimly as he fought down the pain. “Nobody shoots a cop in this town. It’s suicide. You’re all dead. Your luck can’t hold out forever you know.”

  “Into the truck, Baby,” the spy replied in the same croak that disguised his voice so simply.

  They climbed into the rear compartment, which Arbolino locked as Williston jumped out of the wheelchair. A moment later, the teacher ripped off his glasses and disguise and climbed up beside Arbolino in front. The white wig slid off the seat onto the floor as the truck picked up speed, but that didn’t matter. All that counted was swift flight from this neighborhood and an uninterrupted drive to tree-lined Mercer Lane, where they parked the vehicle and made their escape. Twelve minutes later, an anonymous telephone call informed the duty nurse at the Mercer Lane Hospital emergency room that a wounded policeman required assistance only two blocks from the hospital—in a diaper truck of the Kuddly Kiddee Company.

  Word of this latest raid—they’d called them coups de main in that other war against those other Nazis—spread through the city quickly. Well, it didn’t reach every dental technician and CPA by morning but the news did get to most of the bartenders, whores, police, taxi drivers, public officials, journalists (local and “foreign”), tavern customers and assorted stay-ups in town. Early that next afternoon, the man with the unlisted Atlanta number was told of the incident and informed that the Paradise City Police had found two fingerprints on the abandoned wheelchair.

  “I understand that they mean to send them to the FBI for identification,” reported the Mustang owner. “Don’t you think that’s funny?…No? Well, you never had much of a sense of humor. I’d give a dollar forty and my three Goldwater buttons to find out whose prints those are, Buddy. John would probably pay even more…maybe sixty thousand. That’s what I hear the Apaches took last night…All right, maybe they’re Comanches who feel alienated. They were much too smart and slick to be SDS, and they didn’t call a press conference afterwards…The local cops are intensely bitter now. Nervous too. Last night—maybe an hour after the hijack—a patrol car spotted a couple of perfectly respectable businessmen who were perfectly respectably intoxicated and looking for a perfectly respectable cat house named Amy’s—and the police beat the stuffings out of those clean-cut taxpayers on the theory they might be the heist artists. One of those clobbered is a prominent member of the Chamber of Commerce. He’s in the hospital, semiconscious and wholly unhappy…Buddy, this is turning into a very bad scene, very fast. I doubt that our own plans are feasible any more…That’s just too damn bad…Yeah, I’ll keep my ear to the ground and nose to the grindstone and my eye on the ball—but I’ll have my car keys in one hand and my gun in the other…No, I kid you not—so don’t try to kid me. Okay, Ciao.”

  On the twenty-first, the president of every women’s club and every clergyman in Jefferson County received a letter containing $20—his or her “share of the brothel profits.” The note thanked each of them for the “years of loyal support for our local whorehouses, one of our outstanding industries.” Similar cash-laden missives went to all seventy-four members of the state senate and the governor, none of whom were amused. As expected, a number of the recipients had small fits or medium-sized attacks of heartburn or even seizures of the lower conscience. The ladies turned an interesting assortment of the latest high-fashion colors, duly noted by their affluent lawyer-merchant-doctor-banker husbands who caught the psychedelic backlash. The chairwoman of the Paradise City chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy—Miss Geraldine Ashley—didn’t have a husband, but she took it up with her brother as soon as her flush of faintness subsided.

  Hackles were rising, tempers were flaring and a number of long-dormant senses of morality began to torment usually sensible citizens. The Catholic bishop and a leading Protestant cleric in the state capital added fuel to the situation with ringing statements that won instant support from several rabbis and social critics; people even began to talk about the mess on a number of golf courses, including the one at the Paradise Country Club. Nobody was ready to take the responsibility—or risks—of doing anything significant about it yet, but there was promise in the fact that the situation—the evil—could no longer be ignored.

  Neither John Pikelis nor Ben Marton was ignoring the situation. The chief of police was pushing his men harder and harder, and he kept telephoning Washington to inquire whether the FBI had identified the owner of the fingerprints. Each time he was assured that they were still checking. He would have been extremely surprised and disturbed if he’d known that the FBI was not telling the truth. After all, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is respected for its sincerity, integrity, neat clothing, passion for conscientious law enforcement, efficient staff work, scientific detection and reliable cooperation with local police. Like Swissair’s cutesy Heidi, the FBI never lies.

  But it was lying to Captain Ben Marton this time.

  Somebody high up in the Bureau—very high—had ordered this.

  He had his reasons for not informing the Paradise City P.D. that the prints belonged to a former OSS agent named Andrew Williston who’d won two Silver Stars and a Distinguished Service Cross. Agents were assigned to check on Williston’s wartime records in the OSS files, a task that required the cooperation of the Central Intelligence Agency, which controlled the still-classified archives of its predecessor. Other agents were assigned to find out what had happened to Lieutenant Andrew Williston since he left the Office of Strategic Services in 1946. Still others went to work on Williston’
s family, friends, wartime associates, sex life, political affiliations and personal hygiene.

  The result was a very complete and informative report.

  “You’d better send a summary—by hand, not teletype—to MacBride,” ordered the very high official in Washington. “He’ll know what to do with it.”

  He did.

  About a dozen hours after MacBride began to do, Andrew Williston sat in the blond singer’s hotel room waiting for her to return from her night’s work. She arrived shortly before three, smiled when she saw him.

  “I’ve been drinking,” he announced as he took another sip from the glass in his left hand.

  “My liquor, no doubt.”

  “I brought you another bottle to replace what I’ve consumed. You know, this John Begg is starting to grow on me. Will you have one?”

  She nodded, put down her purse.

  “I might have two or three,” she warned.

  “You deserve it after slaving all night over a hot microphone,” he reassured her.

  He prepared the drink, nodded as she took the first drink.

  “Hard night at the gambling casino, dear?” he asked in mock solicitude.

  “Harder than it used to be before certain people held up the place in such a noisy and colorful fashion, sir. A very uptight atmosphere prevails.”

  Williston shrugged.

  “Those certain people have problems of their own,” he pointed out as he finished his own whiskey-and-water, “and you could say that they’re somewhat uptight themselves. But, unlike certain busty blond beauties, they never complain. They cope.”

  “You’re wonderful.”

  “That’s true. Wonderful, capable and pragmatic,” he agreed while he refilled his glass.

  “And awfully handsome—for an older man.”

  “I think you’re putting me on, dear.”

  “And I think you’ve been putting me off, Professor,” she answered truthfully.

  She was wise all right.

  “I’m trying to cope—intelligently,” he explained.

  “It won’t work. Even if you got Gilman to plan the operation down to the last detail, you couldn’t cope with a woman that way—and you damn well know it.”

  He nodded.

  “If you stopped figuring all the angles and worrying about those footnotes in psychology textbooks, you could cope in about two minutes,” she predicted.

  Her estimate was somewhat optimistic. It actually took him seventeen minutes. During that period each of them had an important belief confirmed. He discovered that she wasn’t anybody’s little sister, and she found out that he was the hero she’d wanted for so many years. Dreamless and warm, they slept all night in each other’s arms.

  25

  By the time the Clayton trial resumed, Paradise City was almost as well known to the U.S. and world public as Lidice, Czechoslovakia, or Selma, Alabama, or Disneyland. French and British and West German radio and newspaper reporters arrived with ample funds and the special enthusiasm that always buoyed them at the prospect of showing how rotten the rich-powerful Americans actually were. The London journalists set up their headquarters in a trailer, which they parked just outside the county, and the resourceful French worked from a chartered cabin cruiser, which they anchored a little up the coast at Calloway’s Marina. The foxy West Germans had cleverly tricked the Hotel Jefferson into providing three rooms by making their reservations in the name of a touring rock-and-roll group that didn’t exist, and once they checked in they tipped generously and hinted they’d call their ambassador in Washington if they were not treated “correctly.”

  As Davidson entered the courthouse at 9:50 A.M. on the twenty-fifth, cameras were flashing and reporters were buzzing but this clamor didn’t prevent him from noticing the steely-eyed young man with the briefcase. Joshua David Davidson recognized him as one of the capable attorneys of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund staff, and he was pleased that the sober National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was taking an interest in the case. The NAACP wasn’t the noisiest of the civil-rights groups, but its lawyers were excellent and utterly practical. The chief counsel was an old friend as well as an authority on the Constitution.

  “Give my regards to Jack,” Davidson told the NAACP counsel to let him know that the criminal lawyer recognized him.

  “I’ll do that…Hot day, isn’t it?”

  “Going to get hotter before October,” Davidson prophesied with a grin.

  The NAACP attorney eyed him thoughtfully.

  “You think it’ll take that long?”

  “Maybe longer. I’ve got a thousand questions and motions, and we won’t even get to that until next month after we’ve picked a jury. That is, if we can assemble a proper jury in this county.”

  The young lawyer nodded.

  “You’re going to do the whole number—everything?”

  “Everything. I don’t believe in stinting—not at these prices. I’m going to give them everything in the book, and then I’m sending half the fee over to your outfit as a tax-deductible gift.”

  “You serious?”

  “I never joke about money,” Davidson answered as he walked on with Kelleher and his other assistant.

  They entered the courtroom, saw that it was crowded with press, police and journalists.

  “SRO,” commented Kelleher.

  “I like to play to a full house. It brings out the best in me,” Davidson replied as his eyes swept the chamber. He recognized Everett, two of his assistants and another face that he never expected to see in Paradise City. He sauntered down the aisle to the third row, smiled.

  “This isn’t El Morocco, Petie, so what the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Nothing much else to do in this town, Joshua,” answered the blond millionaire.

  “At ten in the morning? You sick, or bloodthirsty for a sensational trial?”

  Carstairs shook his head.

  “Neither, just expanding my horizons—as they say in the poverty program.”

  “Didn’t know you’d lost your money.” The rich sportsman grinned.

  “Not my money, just my mind. Love of a good woman. Get up early and stop wasting life. This is the good woman, Joshua.”

  The brunette seated beside him was small, glowing, lovely.

  “Kathy, may I present a fellow who once saved a rather hot-tempered cousin of mine from the electric chair?”

  “Gas chamber,” the lawyer corrected. “California uses gas.”

  “Okay, the gas chamber. I’d like you to meet Joshua David Davidson, bard of the bar and a keen student of both the Old Testament and the penal code…Joshua, this extraordinary female is Miss Kathy Pikelis, daughter of one of Jefferson County’s most prominent businessmen.”

  She was quite pretty, even if not as glamorous as the girls usually associated with Carstairs.

  “Happy to meet you, Miss Pikelis,” Davidson acknowledged politely.

  He wasn’t going to say a word about her father, not a word.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Davidson…I didn’t realize that Petie knew you.”

  The lawyer shrugged.

  “Petie knows almost everybody, although I’ve never seen him with a young lady as nice as you. Maybe he’s growing up—at last.”

  “You’re a worse flatterer than he is,” she scolded.

  “No, better. It’s one of the few things that I do better than Parker Terence Carstairs.”

  “She, knows all about that,” countered the mischievous bachelor.

  Kathy Pikelis almost blushed.

  “He’s got a lot more growing up to do,” she judged.

  “And I’ve got a case to try. Please excuse me, but there’s an ice-truck driver who’s counting on me to save his life. Will you be in town for a while, Pete?”

  Carstairs hesitated, nodded.

  “A while. How about you?”

  “Quite a while. Let’s get together for dinner some night. If you bring this attractive lady al
ong, I’ll buy. Where are you staying?”

  “Paradise House.”

  “So are we. I’ll phone you. A pleasure to meet you, Miss Pikelis,” Joshua David Davidson announced with a toss of his gray mane.

  Up front speaking with Everett, Marton watched and wondered why the second most eligible bachelor in the U.S.A.—perhaps all North America—and Pikelis’ daughter were chatting so pleasantly with the enemy. John ought to talk to her about that tricky Yid lawyer, Marton brooded. Of course there were a lot of things Little Johnny ought to do, things Ben Marton would do if he were running Jefferson County. Maybe John was getting a bit soft after all these years of uncontested power and riches; maybe a firmer hand was needed.

  The judge entered, and the trial began. When Gillis recessed the proceedings at 4:45 that afternoon, not a single juror had been picked. Davidson’s complete command of procedures and technicalities was awesome; he’d made the district attorney look like a flustered, furious first-year law student trying desperately to cope with a cool, wise professor. The next day wasn’t much better, and it wasn’t until 3:50 that the first juror was named.

  “You’re not in any hurry, are you, Mr. Davidson?” Gillis asked at the recess.

  “Can’t rush justice, can we, Your Honor?” the lawyer answered with an ironic half smile. “By the way, I forgot to ask, how was the fishing?”

  “Just dandy. I wish I was still at the lake.”

  The famous criminal lawyer sighed.

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor,” he apologized. “I’ll try to make it up to you by making the defense as interesting as possible.”

  “You’re off to a pretty good start, Counselor,” Gillis answered wryly. “It’s quite interesting to watch you teach our distinguished prosecuting attorney the latest points of trial procedures. It would cost him at least one hundred and fifty dollars to take the course at the Practicing Law Institute.”