Seven Silent Men

by Behn, Noel;

  Cub concluded that children growing up in Prairie Port forged too strong, too close-knit a relationship for his professional liking, that even without the police connection he never could be all that certain of where Ned Van Ornum’s loyalties lay in regard to Frank Santi. Reviewing the Van Ornum situation, and he constantly reviewed each of his recruited informants, Cub came across another fact to ponder. Ned had never once voluntarily provided information. Everything had come as a direct request from Cub.

  Ultimately, the matter of whether Ned Van Ornum could or could not be relied upon was of secondary importance. His recruitment, after all, had been a Washington headquarters idea, a possible ploy for learning if Wilkie Jarrel had influence over Frank Santi. When asked directly by Cub, Ned said Jarrel had absolutely no input with Santi, that no one did, that Santi was his own man and could be influenced by nobody. Whether or not this was so, or if Ned Van Ornum went on providing information, had no effect on strategy at the FBI’s resident office in Prairie Port. Ed Grafton would continue investigating Wilkie Jarrel regardless of the situation with Frank Santi or the Prairie Port Police Department or God Almighty.

  Still, Cub Hennessy was fond of Ned Van Ornum and saw no pressing reason for breaking off relationships with him … particularly on the golf course. Cub merely stopped asking Ned questions. Then, on August 7, Ned called to say there was someone Hennessy might be interested in … a man in the employ of Wilkie Jarrel who would possibly consider informing on his boss if the price was right. A man named Willy Carlson.

  Ned claimed never to have seen or met Carlson, only to have learned of him through a reliable underworld middleman. Ned, via the middleman, arranged for, but did not attend, a clandestine chat between Hennessy and Willy Carlson. Willy explained he had just done time at Statesville Penitentiary in Illinois on armed robbery, needed money and was currently employed as a fill-in, weekend security guard/chauffeur at Wilkie Jarrel’s estate, and that Jarrel was, among other things, a crusty old geezer obsessed with the notion he was being followed by the FBI. Jarrel, according to Carlson, routinely had his home and offices searched for eavesdropping bugs and wasn’t above using a public booth for more important calls. He had scrambler telephones in the private study and bedroom of his home and in his limousine. On one occasion, with Carlson driving, Jarrel had tried to reach J. Edgar Hoover from his car but couldn’t get through.

  Cub Hennessy liked what he saw and heard and recruited Willy Carlson as a paid informant for the FBI. Willy, thirty-six hours later, delivered a list of phone booth locations frequented by Jarrel, was paid in cash by Cub, given a new assignment and handed more money on the spot. This took place Thursday, August 19, three days prior to the alarm going off at Mormon State National Bank … one day before the actual theft was perpetrated.

  Shortly after discovering the bank’s vault had been looted, on Sunday, August 22, Ned and Cub met and concurred that Willy Carlson, recently out of prison and familiar with the crime community of Prairie Port, as well as southern Missouri and southern Illinois, might be a valuable source of information concerning Mormon State. The policeman and the FBI agent agreed to join forces, expand Willy’s informant chores and share the information he would, they hoped, provide. Willy couldn’t be found. Cub and Ned looked high and low. Willy Carlson had dropped out of sight. Not, of course, uncommon behavior for an ex-convict when a massive manhunt is under way … when the con has reason to suspect a law-enforcement agency he’s been making money from might want him for riskier assignments.

  Earlier this evening, when the emergency phone call from a police dispatcher to FBI night-duty officer Butch Cody had requested that Cub go immediately to the morgue for a meeting, Cub had assumed it was Ned Van Ornum who wanted to see him … who had intentionally made contact in this official and clumsy way rather than ring up directly. Ned, on learning that only $6,500 had been stolen from Mormon State and that the FBI was deliriously giddy over the Prairie Port Police Department being stuck with the case, had been none too cordial toward Cub. Later, after it was established $31,000,000 was missing and the FBI stormed ashore with full media pomp to claim the investigation for its own, Ned Van Ornum made his resentment of Bureau behavior known to Cub in a brief, two-word phone call: Hoover sucks.

  Driving now through University Hospital’s private underground parking lot toward the morgue’s loading platform in the distance, Cub Hennessy still thought it was Ned who would be waiting for him. Pulling to a stop, he saw that the man sitting in civilian clothes with legs dangling over the edge of the dock wasn’t Ned Van Ornum. It was Frank Santi.

  Cub had seen Santi in newspaper photos and on the television newscasts but for some reason never in person, except at the Mormon State bank the Sunday after it was robbed. Cub’s impression had been of a very tall man with a small head. Climbing the cement steps up to the loading pier and watching Santi stand, he saw that the recently ensconced chief of Prairie Port police was shorter and stockier than previously supposed. His shoulders were extremely broad and powerful-appearing. Santi’s head was indeed small, his features almost delicate.

  “Special agent Hennessy?” He ambled toward Cub with an amazingly long arm extended. “Harold Hennessy?”

  “I’m Hennessy,” Cub said, shaking hands.

  “Frank Santi.” The chief spoke in an unrushed, somewhat high-pitched voice. “Thank you for coming out so late. If you’ll follow me, there’s something you might be able to help us with.”

  Santi led the way down the morgue’s corridor in those long, loping, slightly pigeon-toed strides of a former high school basketball player whose team made it to the state finals.

  No one was in the autopsy room. No one alive, that is. Four of the six dissection tables held cadavers. Uncovered cadavers. Naked and waxy-looking corpses lying on their backs with an identification tag tied to a toe. Cub didn’t relish seeing dead bodies. He followed Frank Santi across the autopsy room. The chief of police walked directly between the two lines of operating tables, stopped beside three of the corpses.

  “This seem familiar?” Santi handed Cub a slip of paper with the numbers 476-3312 on it.

  “That’s my phone number,” Cub told him. “An unlisted number.”

  “I know, we had it traced. Is that your printing on the paper?”

  “No.”

  Santi walked to one of the mobile tables in the corner, spun it around, ripped off the covering. “Know him?”

  Cub glanced down at a bald-headed man, half of whose face had been exploded away … a badly decomposed corpse who, nonetheless, was still recognizable to him as being Willy Carlson.

  Cub realized Ned Van Ornum might have disclosed their intended sharing of Willy to Frank Santi, that Ned could also have told his boss about Carlson being an FBI informant. It was equally possible Santi knew nothing of either arrangement. Hoping the latter was true, Cub chose to lie. “No, I don’t know him,” he told the police chief as he turned away from the corpse. “Maybe if there was more of him left …”

  “Take another look, would you?”

  Cub did. “… No, I don’t know who he is.” Sensing Santi was watching him rather than Willy Carlson, he waited several moments before looking up.

  Frank Santi shifted his gaze to the dead man. “Not too pretty, huh? The river never helps. They found him in the river. He was probably killed a few days after the Mormon State robbery, on Tuesday or Wednesday, August twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth. Then he was weighted down and dumped into the river. Whatever was holding him under gave way, and he floated to the surface. Mister Hennessy, do you have any idea how he came to have your private phone number?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t mean to pry into official FBI operations, but could you tell me whether you use that phone for Bureau business?”

  “Sometimes. It’s more a private line my wife can reach me on at the office.”

  “… Or at home, if she happens to be out?” Santi suggested. “The phone company said you had an extension at home a
s well as at the office.”

  “At home it’s so my boss can get me,” Cub explained good-naturedly. “Chief, am I being interrogated?”

  Santi showed a stiff, prudish grin. “I guess so.”

  “Anything I can help you with I will. Don’t be afraid to ask.”

  “Thank you, Mister Hennessy.” Sand’s large hand reached up and scratched at a small ear. “Mister Hennessy, is it conceivable that, in some way, you could have had dealings with this man?”

  “I come across a lot of people, chief, as you do. He may have been one of them. But it wouldn’t have been anything important. Anything I remembered.”

  “No one you knew well, is that right? No one bald you remember?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I suppose it’s not all that easy to forget a bald man, is it? Sorry to have bothered you, Mister Hennessy.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t help out.”

  “May I have that phone number back?”

  Cub returned the slip of paper to Santi, watched the chief stare down at the number, then up at him, then back to the paper. And Cub realized something he knew he should have seen from the beginning … the slip of paper was dry … showed no sign of ever-having been wet … Willy Carlson’s corpse, according to Chief Santi, had been in the river for some time.

  “Where did you find that paper?” asked Cub.

  “In his apartment.”

  “You know who he is?”

  The grin flickered. “His fingerprints came down a few hours ago,” Santi said. “He’s a pal. An old pal of lots of people. Willy Carlson is what he goes by mostly. Ever heard of him?”

  “No.”

  “He was a character, Mister Hennessy. A local character. Great horseman. Loved the beasts and rode them in a fair number of rodeos. His nickname was Cowboy. All in all, Willy was a pretty good egg. Only problem was, he stole. He tried legitimate work from time to time, particularly work around horses, but he was addicted to thieving. Nothing big. Penny-ante B&E’s and small-time hustles. He did some light time for a questionable smuggling scam. Then three years back he reached for the stars and got collared on an armed job. He was paroled from Statesville Penitentiary five months ago and went to one of those new rehabilitation programs run by the university. Counseling, confession and lots of pretty young criminology coeds to lay. It looked for a while as if some of it was working, that Willy had settled down, sociopathically speaking. Had rejected thievery. But obviously he was up to something he shouldn’t have been … or he wouldn’t be lying over there with half his head missing, would he? Have any ideas what it could be, Mister Hennessy?”

  Cub experienced the same uneasiness he felt when Santi had asked him to take a second look at Willy’s corpse. Something about the chief had momentarily changed when he just said: “Have any ideas what it could be?” Not a change of intonation or of voice or of phrasing. Nor was there a difference in Santi’s generally placid expression. “No,” Hennessy answered, trying to figure out what the difference was. “Why do you think he was killed?”

  “Maybe it was sex,” the chief said. “Willy was sick that way. An exhibitionist. Maybe he flashed the wrong person and instead of getting blown got blown away.”

  It was Santi’s eyes that changed, Cub told himself. Santi had a way of making his eyes go dead, of looking at you as if he was blind, as if he was saying, “I’m listening, go ahead and lie.”

  “I suppose you could be killed for flashing,” Cub said.

  Santi looked down at the corpse.

  “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” Cub told him.

  “Good night, Mister Hennessy.”

  “Good night, chief.”

  Cub knew before he started walking that he would have the feeling Frank Santi was staring at him every step of the way out … would have bet that before he reached the door Santi would tell him what he really had on his mind.

  “Mister Hennessy,” Frank Santi called when Cub was passing the last of the dissection tables. “There is one detail.”

  Cub stopped, turned around, stood beside the naked corpse of a wizened old woman, only one of whose eyes were open. He waited for the chief of police’s next words.

  “About Willy Carlson,” Santi said. “He had a sideline I forgot to mention. One he picked up in prison and continued on after his parole. Willy had become a rat. A professional informer. An informer-for-hire when he got back here to Prairie Port. And he had several takers. He ratted for the county liquor commission against a go-go bar operation. That was from June seventh to June thirtieth of this year, and he got paid one hundred and seventy-five dollars for his trouble. From June nineteenth through July twenty-sixth he ratted across the river for the Kentucky State Crime Commission against the whorehouses over near Paducah. His fee was four hundred dollars. The Paducah houses paid him three thousand during the same period to rat for them about the state crime commission. Between July and early August he had three more gigs, and then he picked up some very fancy clients indeed. It’s all in here.” Santi held up a ledger. “We found this in Willy’s room. He recorded each job as neat as can be. Date and price all set down like he was planning to have his books audited and pay taxes. Willy ‘Cowboy’ Carlson, if you hadn’t figured it out, was a crackpot. Mad as a hatter. Luckily for the police department, we knew it. What we didn’t know was he kept a ledger on the madness.”

  The eyes with which Santi watched Hennessy were not at all blind or impassive. They stalked Cub. But the voice droned on as matter-of-factly as ever. “Willy managed to show some discretion in his account-keeping. He didn’t enter names as such. He put down initials or phone numbers. In some instances, both initials and numbers.” Santi peered into the open ledger. “It’s the last page that might be of interest to you. Only three entries appear. The second entry from the top has both initials and a phone number and shows that some weeks ago Willy received five hundred dollars for a snitch job. The number is the same one as on the slip of paper we found in Willy’s room … your unlisted phone number, Mister Harold Hennessy. But the initials before the number aren’t HH. They are CH. CH as in Cub Hennessy?”

  Cub waited for Santi to look up from the ledger, trying to think of something to say. But the chief of police continued gazing down. “The last entry in the ledger, after you, is Friday, August twentieth. No phone number is given. No amount of payment received. Only the initial: M. If you feel foolish learning you’ve popped up on a tinhorn hustler’s books, Mister Hennessy, you’re going to feel even worse. The entry directly under your initials and payment … is for the Mormon State bank robbery.”

  Frank Santi ripped the page from the ledger, came forward and handed it to Cub. Cub studied the three neatly printed listings:

  8/7

  VO

  476-1881

  150

  8/19

  CH

  476-3312

  250 + 250,

  8/20

  M

  “Who is M?” Cub asked.

  “A man named Marion Corkel. Heard of him?”

  Cub shook his head and gave the page back to Santi.

  “Aren’t you going to comment on the first entry, Mister Hennessy?” the chief asked. “On the one hundred and fifty dollars VO paid Cowboy on August seventh?”

  “What about it?”

  “VO is Ned Van Ornum.”

  “Is it?”

  “We set you up, Mister Hennessy. Ned and I set you up.”

  Cub said nothing.

  “We meant to embarrass you and Mister Grafton severely, Mister Hennessy. When the time came. Meant to slap the FBI’s wrist as hard as we could for reaching in and trying to recruit a police officer. Meant to teach you a lesson you’d never forget. All of you and your kind.”

  “You’ve succeeded.”

  Frank Santi lit a match, held it to the page torn from the ledger … let the page go up in flames.

  “You’re destroying physical evidence.” Cub, even before the sentence was complete, felt fooli
sh for saying it.

  Santi watched the ashes float to the floor.

  “I’m saving your ass is what I’m doing, Mister Hennessy. Your ass and the police department’s ass. Or would you prefer the media let the world know how the FBI and the Prairie Port Police Department had a Mormon State bank robber in their employ at the exact time Mormon State was looted? That neither the FBI nor the police had an inkling Willy Carlson had anything to do with Mormon State … and probably never would have an inkling?”

  Cub, again, had nothing to say.

  “I’m afraid, Mister Hennessy, that you and your Mister Hoovers and Mister Graftons have won out again. I have no choice but to hand you the case … hand you, most likely, all of the robbers and an outside co-conspirator. I damn your luck. It should have been my luck. Thank the river. Talk about coincidence, the key to it all floated in right after Willy. He’s up there waiting for you.”

  Chief of Police Frank Santi pointed to the staircase.

  Two women sat on a wood bench in the small, gray-green room at the top of the stairway leading down to the main room of the morgue. The younger, seventeen at the most, was pregnant and in widow’s weeds and weeping. The older woman was as tearless as the prairie itself. Her gingham dress was faded. Her white bonnet, frayed. The casket opposite them lay open. The corpse inside was water-bloated to the point of being unrecognizable. Standing against the far wall with his arms folded as Cub entered was Ned Van Ornum.

  “This is Mister Hennessy of the FBI,” Ned told the women. “He’s the one who will help you now. Cub, this is Natalie Hammond. That’s her husband, Samuel J., in the box. And that’s Sam’s mom, Ida.”