by Behn, Noel;
Grafton returned to stirring the coffee and rye. “I am not a bending man, Mister Sunstrom. I’ve rarely acknowledged needing help or assistance. Now I do. I need your assistance if I am to win out over Wilkie Jarrel. I know these headquarters monkeys, Mister Sunstrom. Their grand strategy is to bring the Jarrel matter … and myself … to a close, to include assaults on the administration end of our operations here in Prairie Port. Cutting back on expenditures, such as those for maintenance and repair. Delaying remittance of what has already been paid out by myself and the other agents. Along with this, they will up their demands for paper work and protocol, require three times the number of reports and requisition forms and gripe to high heaven if a word is misspelled or a comma missing. Minor things, I grant you. Pesky things. But on the aggregate, debilitating. This I need from you, Mister Sunstrom … to fight the battle of the filing cabinet so I and my men are free to fight the battle of Wilkie Jarrel.”
Grafton slowed the stirring. “You’re displeased with my proposal, aren’t you?”
“I was hoping for an investigatory rather than administrative assignment,” Strom had admitted.
“What’s your passion?”
“Passion?”
“Each of us has an overriding passion,” Grafton had expounded. “Mine is the misuse of privilege. Not privilege in and of itself. Not power and wealth because they are power and wealth, but the misapplication of that power and wealth, the distortion of it at any level. I suppose you could just as easily replace the word privilege with the word advantage. The police officer who extorts from a shopkeeper, the jail matron who abuses an inmate, these rankle me. A scoutmaster embezzling funds from his troop’s treasury, and we had a case like that, is as offensive to me as Wilkie Jarrel. The Brass Balls’ defense of Jarrel is loathsome. All of them are misusing their privilege, and advantage. That’s my passion, such misuses. It allows me to crusade. Without a crusade, an old fart like myself is best committed to dust. And you, Mister Sunstrom, what is your passion? What makes you pick up lance and sword and ride the great white horse into battle?”
“All crime …”
“Nothing more specific than that?”
“No …”
“And each and every one of these crimes thrill you beyond redemption?”
“I’m not exactly the thrill-seeking type.”
“That’s a pity. I heard of you early on, Mister Sunstrom … when the Brass Balls tried to turn you into one of their own and you refused them. Odd as it may seem, I have a friend or two left in Washington. They told me about you in passing, and I said to myself, There’s a brash fellow who deserves watching. I have watched you from a distance. Learned about you. Southern gentry, Confederate cavalrymen and preachers, isn’t that your stock?”
“Volunteer, not professional, cavalrymen … and one Anglican minister, my paternal grandfather.”
“Could be your bent is with the cloth?” Grafton had spoken evenly. “Do you wish to be a competent investigator, or the best investigator?”
“The best.”
“I doubt that you will make it. To be the best, in my mind, requires two God-given talents: instinct and passion. The instincts of a criminal and the passion, if you like, of the charging cavalryman. You seem to possess neither. You will be a competent investigator, Mister Sunstrom. In this day and age, with the Bureau, competence suffices. Do I depress you?”
“It’s hardly the most optimistic assessment of my capabilities I’ve heard,” Strom replied.
“But you will pursue the investigatorial end nonetheless, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“… Let me propose an arrangement, Mister Sunstrom. A covenant whereby you do what I ask and in return I will make you into a better than competent investigator. Not a great one, but a damn sight abler than competent. And who knows, perhaps I can goad you even further than that. Perhaps I can ignite a spark, get some passion flowing. Have you lusting for the thrill of the charge. For riding the great white horse into battle.”
Strom Sunstrom took over the administrative operations of the FBI’s Prairie Port office January 20, 1969. Within weeks the paper-work end of things was running with computerlike efficiency. Ingenious rebudgeting and tight fiscal management deftly handled the predicted financial squeeze begun in March by antagonistic personnel at headquarters. It was in the selection and processing of transfer agents that Strom’s talents exceeded Grafton’s maximal expectations, and his own. His gentlemanly manner caught the Brass Balls off guard, allowed Strom to turn away transferee after transferee until he found what he wanted, without any undue ruffling of feathers or fur … without really being noticed all that much at headquarters. As hotheaded and recalcitrant as many of these newly selected deportees were on arrival, Sunstrom could somehow win them over. Prepare them. Indoctrinate them with the legend of Grafton. The very first transferee Strom had arranged to be sent to Prairie Port was the special agent who had acted on his behalf during the fracas with the SAC of the Texas office, Jez Jessup. Jez resisted the adoration of Grafton, directed his loyalty and respect to Strom.
Over the years that followed, Grafton more than fulfilled his pledge to Strom. Brought Strom in on virtually every ongoing case. Worked with him shoulder to shoulder. Taught him by example, as was his method with most of the men. Imbued him with a sense of pride and a new respect for the role of leadership. Strom began to hear the far-off clap of hoofbeats … saw the great white horse rear up riderless on a nearby hill … wanted very much to join the charge.
… Now, standing with the receiver to his ear amid six scurrying agents trying to keep up with the seventeen telephones in other parts of the office, Strom Sunstrom listened to J. Edgar Hoover hand him the reins to the Mormon State robbery and temporary control of the Prairie Port residency and then hang up. Strom cautiously returned the receiver to its cradle. Stood motionless with his hand still on the phone. A trembling hand. Such trembling was unusual, but he didn’t have time to dwell on this.
“Graf got the boot,” Strom told Ted Keon, who had fetched him back from the anteroom of reporters minutes before … who knew it was J. Edgar Hoover on the phone. His fingers left the receiver and clenched into a fist. “Grafton got sacked …”
Cub Hennessy glanced over. So did Jez Jessup and Butch Cody and Happy de Camp and Billy Yates. Telephones continued to ring.
Strom had never been known to shout or swear or bark out commands before, but now he did all three. “KILL THOSE FUCKING PHONES! PUT THEM IN A DESK DRAWER OR RIP THEIR CORDS OUT OR DO WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO DO TO KILL THEM! DON’T STAND THERE GAWKING, DO AS I SAY! CAN’T YOU UNDERSTAND, GRAF GOT THE SHABBY BOOT …”
Strom Sunstrom, who in memory had not displayed anger in front of his fellow resident agents, stormed off quivering with rage. “THE SHABBY BOOT HE GETS, AND THEY EXPECT ME TO REPLACE HIM. I’LL NOT HAVE IT! NOT FOR A MOMENT!”
The door to his office slammed resoundingly.
Siren wailing, wheels spinning and skidding, a River Patrol ambulance plowed through the deep sand leading from the access road down to the riverfront swimming area at Prairie Port’s South Beach. A burly lifeguard was applying artificial respiration to the corpse of Teddy Anglaterra. Ambulance paramedics took over, gave oxygen to the motionless body. Eight minutes later, at 10:21 A.M., a first-year intern at Missouri Presbyterian Hospital’s emergency room cut away Teddy’s shirt and discovered that the dead man’s upper torso bore fourteen deep stab wounds. The administrating doctor was summoned. After examining the wounds, as well as the ugly bruises on Teddy’s head and chest, the doctor berated the intern for admitting an obvious homicide victim to the overcrowded emergency room of a private hospital. The doctor ordered that the corpse be put back in the ambulance and sent directly to the city morgue. The intern wondered aloud if the police and next of kin shouldn’t be contacted. The doctor railed that this was exactly what he was trying to avoid … that there were far more important duties for the hospital’s hard pressed staff than getting embroi
led in the paper work of processing a murder victim. Forget the body was ever here, the doctor raged as he left the room. The intern called the garage and ordered an ambulance to the emergency room. He searched Teddy’s pockets. No identification was found in the water-soaked wallet. The ambulance driver appeared and was told to deliver the unidentified corpse to the city morgue as a John Doe and to merely state it was found at South Beach. Later, conscience-stricken by his actions, the young intern called Channel 10, the city’s leading television station, and told a desk assistant in the news department that a corpse had been found at South Beach. A murder victim. The desk assistant, inundated by phone calls resulting from J. Edgar Hoover’s televised address, couldn’t have cared less about the tip, made no notation of having received it. Even if there had been interest, little could have been done. Every news person at the station, and anywhere else in the city, was assigned to the story of the decade … the Mormon State bank robbery.
Rubber-booted scientists from the Missouri Valley Geological Survey dropped through the hole in the bank vault … descended a rope ladder into the mud-crusted cavern … planted tall metal measuring rods firmly into the huge chamber’s wet floor, secured other hydrological measuring instruments in the opening in the north side of the cavern as well as in the tunnel mouth on the south wall before returning up the rope ladder. Five minutes later, at approximately 10:41 A.M., water gushed forth from both openings … and in the incredibly short period of nine seconds reached a level of nine feet.
And stopped.
SEVEN
116s led the master case assignment list. Classification 116, the “FBI’s numerical prefix for Energy and Research Development Applicants … background checks on persons seeking employment at the newly built Atomic Energy Commission research laboratories west of the city. 116s accounted for sixty-three of the five hundred and seventy-one cases being investigated by the eighteen agents of the Prairie Port residency at the time J. Edgar Hoover ordered Sunstrom to become temporary senior resident agent in charge as well as to assume personal responsibility for the Mormon State robbery manhunt, a case titled and prefixed: Romor 91.
Gracing the cellar of the numerical count were such esoteric single inquiries as Classification 74, Applications for Executive Clemency; 142, Illegal Use of a Railway Pass; 103, Interstate Transport of Stolen Cattle; 66, Bureau Automobile Accidents. Due to an oceangoing yacht running aground a delta island on the Prairie Port side of the Mississippi River and the suspicious disappearance of the ship’s captain, the office was investigating a rare Classification 45 … Crime on the High Seas.
The remaining five hundred and three cases, between the top and bottom of the list, covered another forty-odd classifications equally distributed, more or less, among the major subsections of Civil Rights, Accounting and Fraud, Fugitives, and Employee Security/Special Inquiries other than for the A.E.C. Woefully lacking, in the minds of most Prairie Port agents, were cases involving “pure” or “hard” criminal violations such as bank robbery.
The sixty-three Classification 116 Energy and Research Development Applicant investigations, like Romor 91, had originated in Prairie Port and were, therefore, Office of Origin, or OO, cases whose prime jurisdiction lay with the originating office. Fifty percent of the other inquiries being worked on by Grafton, Strom and their men had originated elsewhere, leaving Prairie Port merely the IO, or Investigating Office, with no control over the case other than to provide requested information and send it on to the OO. Agents of the Prairie Port residency, already invested with more autonomy than most field office operatives, favored OO cases, preferred the control of origin, the insulation from outside meddling.
Personal preferences regarding specific classifications contributed to what Assistant to the Director of the FBI A. R. Roland cited as the “contentious group temperament” of the Prairie Port resident agency. Ed Grafton’s abhorrence of Classification 26, Interstate Transportation of Stolen Motor Vehicles or Aircraft, resulted in those investigations receiving the lowest priority possible. Grafton so despised I.T.S.V.s for being “unpure” and “soft” and “demeaning to the integrity of honorable field operatives” that he twice said so on local television interview shows … further denounced I.T.S.V. on one of the two shows as “paltry statistical nonsense created by important headquarters brass monkeys who wouldn’t know a field investigation from a dry martini without olives.”
Classification 100, Internal Security, involved the investigation of seditious and hate organizations. Ironically it was Connecticut’s Ralph Dafney who felt it questionable that except for some follow-up IO inquiries related to the May 5, 1970, burning of the Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps building at Washington University in St. Louis, the full effort of the Prairie Port agency’s Classification 100 cases were directed at the local KKK. Strom explained that the matter had more to do with Ed Grafton’s vendetta against Wilkie Jarrel than the Klan per se … that Grafton wanted to link Jarrel to anything deemed derogatory such as the Klan. And Grafton did eventually establish this linkage. Bigotry, in the circa 1971 FBI of J. Edgar Hoover, was not a stranger. At least not the bigotry of omission. No women and precious few blacks, Hispanics and Jews could be found among the Bureau’s 8,548 nationwide agent population.
It was Classification 25, Violation of the Selective Service Act, which rendered the Prairie Port office a divisive cut. Ten of the eighteen agents assigned to the residency had served in the armed forces prior to entering the FBI. The eldest of these men, Madden “Happy” de Camp, had taken part in World War II. The youngest, Rodney Willis, had fought in Vietnam. The remaining eight were veterans of the Korean conflict. All had been officers. All were not of one mind as to the Vietnam War itself, the peace movement, draft dodgers, conscientious objectors and deserters. Nor was there unanimity on these issues among the eight resident agents who had not been in the military. Differences of opinion, in the past, seldom had affected the men’s discharge of official duties.
With Vietnam, though, work had been affected. As attitudes polarized, antagonisms grew. Conflicting viewpoints erupted in divisive verbal exchanges. Twice, heated discussions of the war provoked a near fistfight.
Grafton, not unpredictably when matters of this nature boiled over, had walked away … left the tempest to the one person who could calm the waters, Strom Sunstrom. Strom, friend of all … diplomat and father-confessor and house hand-holder who read the men of the office and their wives much as a concert pianist read music … and who at times played them with comparable skill. Strom Sunstrom, the master of everybody’s life but his own …
Following J. Edgar Hoover’s call to the Prairie Port resident office, a reversal of roles occurred. It was Cub Hennessy and Jez Jessup who attempted to do the calming. It was eternally even-tempered Strom Sunstrom who had exploded and marched, cursing ringing phones and the expulsion of Grafton, across the floor and slammed the door and locked himself in the combination office-conference room he had shared with Grafton.
Jez and Cub allowed thirty minutes to elapse before going to the door and lightly rapping and reminding Sunstrom that much had to be done. No answer came. They persisted. The lock unlocked. The door remained shut. A voice on the other side said to come in.
Strom sat at the head of the conference table with his hands folded together on top of a yellow pad. In front of the pad lay his pipe and tobacco pouch. Resting on a cart to his immediate right was the Magnavox tape recorder. “Didn’t mean to be self-indulgent out there, lads.” He sounded like the old familiar low-keyed Strom Sunstrom. “Haggish and rude as well. Forgive me. Haggishness will bring us short shrift now. You’re correct. There’s much to do. Fetch the others, would you?”
“What about the phones?” Cub asked.
“Take them off the hook, as I said.”
Hennessy, Jessup, Cody, de Camp, Keon and Yates seated themselves around the table. Strom explained how J. Edgar Hoover had ordered him to replace Grafton on a temporary basis as SRA and that Cub Hennessy
was to move up and become assistant senior resident agent, and more immediate than this was Romor 91, the investigation of the Mormon State National Bank robbery … Romor 91 was now officially their case … Prairie Port was the Office of Origin … so additional agents would be transferred in for back-up assignment and haughty Denis Corticun would show up and probably try to hog the show but this wouldn’t be easily accomplished because of what J. Edgar Hoover had proclaimed to Strom. Beyond Prairie Port being the OO for Romor 91, J. Edgar had designated Strom Sunstrom his own personal proctor in the investigation. His chieftain. His surrogate.
“Let’s have at Mormon State, shall we?” Strom paused to watch Rodney Willis and Donnie Bracken hurry into the room and seat themselves at the table. “There’s something I’d best get out of the way first, if you’ll bear with me.”
Strom rose, began to pace slowly around the table, thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. “I’m not all that adept at speech-making any more. I’m uneasy talking to you right now. I know if all the men were here, I could not say what I wanted to. Could not get it out.
“What I want to say, to tell you, is that I believe Washington wouldn’t be too unhappy if we failed with Romor 91. They could be, conceivably, counting on our failing. Maybe not Director Hoover or A. R. Roland, but the rest of the Brass Balls who’ve been flogging this office for so many years. And why shouldn’t they expect this? I would, wouldn’t you? We’re an odd lot at best. The Brass Balls probably think anything we’ve achieved is because of Graf … that without Graf to lead us we’re nothing. They might even feel with Graf gone there’s no reason to continue penalizing him with the likes of us … that they should send all of us packing and repopulate the office with safe and sane agents.