Exceptional Clearance

by William Caunitz

  She unfolded the criminal record sheet, read it, and then looked at the mug shot. “Sweet-looking guy. Love his skinhead cut. I see most of his collars have been federal, mostly by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.”

  “Holman’s in the bomb-selling business. Soothsayer gave me four names. Holman’s was at the top of the list.”

  They watched a man walking his dog.

  “I want you to do a stroll-by, see if he’s inside the bar.”

  “Right, Lou,” she said. As she got out, Agueda looked back at him as if she were about to say something. Apparently changing her mind, she reached inside her coat, lifted her sweater and released her two-inch Cobra from her in-skirt holster, and stuck it into her coat pocket.

  Strolling past the bar, she glanced inside and continued on for a short distance before slipping into a shoemaker’s doorway. Peering out, she gave him the high sign that Holman was inside. Vinda came over to her.

  “He’s alone at the end of the bar,” she said, as he joined her inside the doorway. “I didn’t see anyone else except the bartender.”

  Vinda checked the time: 12:15 A.M. “When we hit the door, I want you to secure the bartender.”

  “How are we going to play this drama out?”

  “Like Frank and Jesse James.”

  The smell of spilled beer was rank in the air when Vinda threw open the door. They stepped inside, saying nothing, their grim faces giving nothing away.

  Holman’s hands were curled around a mug of dark ale; the bartender was counting the day’s receipts.

  Glaring at the strangers, Holman’s hands slipped away from the mug and fell to his sides.

  Agueda slid out her revolver, locked the door, and closed the Venetian blinds across the front window of the bar.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doin’?” the saloonkeeper asked.

  Agueda leveled her weapon at the barman. He raised his hands. Agueda motioned him out from behind the bar.

  Vinda walked over to Holman, carefully rested the canvas sack on the bar, and said, “I want to see those hands of yours, Holman, and when you bring them up, make sure they’re empty.”

  “Who are you?” Holman whispered, putting his hands flat on the bar.

  Vinda did not answer; he yanked back a barstool and sat facing the bomb dealer.

  The barman broke the moment by lifting the bar cutout and stepping out from behind the bar. Agueda pushed him through the double doors into the kitchen. She switched on the lights. Cockroaches scurried into crevices. She ordered the barman to sit on the floor in front of the cold, unused restaurant oven. Reaching into her coat, she withdrew two pairs of throwaway handcuffs, Spanish-manufactured and without traceable serial numbers, that the Whip had given her. She shackled the saloonkeeper’s left hand to the oven’s handle. With the other pair she cuffed his right hand to his left ankle. Looking down at the hog-tied man, she decided not to waste time frisking him, that he couldn’t reach for any weapon in that state, so she switched off the light and left.

  An elevated subway train rumbled in the distance.

  Agueda waved Holman off his stool and over to the raised area of the bar that held some battered tables and chairs. Vinda picked up the canvas sack and followed, then grabbed a chair and slammed it down in front of the steam pipes running down the wall. “Sit!” he ordered Holman.

  The bomb dealer’s cold gray eyes fixed on Vinda. Lowering himself onto the chair, Holman fixed his eyes on Agueda’s revolver. “Big, isn’t it?” she said.

  Holman licked his lips. Vinda reached into the sack and pulled out a pair of latex gloves. Snapping them on his hands, he saw Holman’s puzzled expression, and grinned to himself. He figures we can’t be cops, and he’s trying to make out who we are, he thought. Vinda took out three sets of cuffs and a length of nylon cord. He handcuffed Holman’s wrists through the back slats of the chair, and then cuffed his ankles to the chair’s legs. Unfurling the rope, he passed it around Holman’s chest and hog-tied him to the pipes.

  Turning his back on Holman, he moved slightly to his right so the man could see him remove what looked like the ingredients for a bomb: a glob that resembled bluish mashed potatoes, electrical wire, AA batteries, a travel clock, a screw, a screwdriver, and a slender silver tube. He placed them on the table and turned to see the terror in Holman’s eyes.

  “Who are you?” Holman demanded again, vainly struggling against his bonds.

  Now placing himself so that Holman couldn’t see what he was doing, Vinda called out, “Time?”

  “Oh-oh-forty-six hours,” she answered.

  “We’ll set it for oh-one hundred,” Vinda said, tightening a screw in the face of the travel clock.

  Holman struggled against his bonds.

  Vinda moved so that the bomb man could see the assembled device. He placed it carefully inside the sack and carried it over to Holman and placed it on the floor under the chair.

  Forcing a steely calm into his voice, Holman asked, “What do you want?”

  Stepping back, Vinda said, “Only a name.”

  “Who?”

  “The man you sold the Semtex to.”

  “Eleven minutes,” Agueda called out.

  Holman’s breathing had become irregular, causing his chest to heave erratically. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Vinda turned to Agueda. “Get the door.”

  She rushed to the entrance, snapped open the lock. “What about the barman?”

  “What about him?” Vinda asked. Looking at Holman, he said, “Send me a postcard from hell.”

  He rushed for the entrance.

  “Wait!”

  Vinda stopped, swallowed a smile, turned slowly. “What?”

  “I don’t know his name.”

  Vinda walked back. “Tell me what you do know.”

  Holman hesitated, bit his lips, and finally said, “In ’62 the Agency hired me on as a contract employee and shipped my ass to Saigon, where they billeted me in an apartment near the Embassy. My job was to customize explosive charges for South Vietnamese Special Forces. The Agency would give me the order and I’d fill in at Long Ton, a CIA base thirty-five miles out of Saigon.”

  “Why did they hire a civilian?”

  “We were just getting started over there. I wasn’t Army or Agency, therefore I was deniable if I got myself killed or captured. They needed me because the South Vietnamese could never get it into their heads that you needed different-shaped charges to take out different kinds of targets.”

  “Five minutes,” Agueda called out.

  “Skip the preliminaries, and get to my man,” Vinda ordered.

  “There weren’t many of us over there then. The watering hole was the Blue Bird on Tu Do Street. A slimy stripper joint where you could get a beer and a blow job for ten bucks. Anyway, everyone’d be in civvies, and the unspoken rule was, you didn’t ask the next guy what he did, or who he did it for. The guy you’re looking for was in the Blue Bird almost every night, singing Irish ballads and carrying on like the rest of us, only he never went with any of the ladies. ‘Call me Dinny’O,’ he used to tell us. Never knew his real name, or who he worked for. Now for God’s sake let me go!”

  “Describe him,” Vinda said.

  “About five-eight or -nine. Heavyset, yet not fat, you know what I mean. Thick brown hair and brown eyes. You know, just a regular-looking guy, nothing out of the ordinary, no distinguishing marks or anything. Wait, the ears, yeah, his ears stuck out from his head.”

  Vinda sensed that the man in the chair was playing games with him. Before leaving the scene of the explosion, Vinda had cut off the identifying edges from a copy of the composite sketch that contained the NYPD’s logo and serial number, so that only the sketch of the perp showed. He took it out and held it up to Holman. “Is this your friend Dinny’O?”

  Holman studied the sketch. “I’m not sure. It could be him. Only my guy’s face is chubbier now, and his eyes are closer together. But I gue
ss it could be him. I’m not sure.”

  “Did you stay in touch with him after you came home?”

  “Naw. Ten, twelve years go by, and one day I’m sitting at the bar of the Ambassador in L.A. and this guy plops down on the next stool and says, ‘Don’t you recognize your ol’ buddy from the Blue Bird?’ I look at the guy and can’t make him. Then he says, ‘It’s Dinny’O.’ After all those years it was him. We bullshitted for a while, and I gave him Fitzgerald’s address and phone number.”

  “Did you ever do business with him?”

  “Five years ago he stopped by. I sold him Semtex and delay detonators.” He squirmed against his restraints.

  “When did you sell him the Semtex this time?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Vinda again showed him the composite, demanding, “Is this the guy you sold the Semtex?”

  “He looks different in the drawing, but I guess it could be him.”

  “What else did you sell him?”

  “Claymores and fragmentation grenades.”

  “Where did you deliver them?”

  “I didn’t. He picked them up here in a rented truck.”

  “Where do you store the stuff?”

  “One minute,” Agueda called.

  “In the kitchen freezer and the basement,” Holman blurted. “Cut me loose.”

  “Cut yourself loose,” Vinda said, rushing for the entrance.

  Four minutes later, as the unmarked car drove into Roosevelt Avenue, Agueda looked at the Whip and said, “I bet that was the longest minute our Mr. Holman ever spent.”

  “He’s still sitting there sweating out the big bang. I bet when he does get free, the first thing he’ll do is change his Jockey shorts.”

  Agueda gave him a rueful glance and said, “By selling that plastique to him, Holman became a principal to a multiple homicide. We should have arrested him.”

  “He would have walked at his arraignment. We just got done violating a dozen laws and civil-rights statutes, not to mention department regulations. Skinhead wouldn’t have been so concerned if he thought we were on the Job. There are other ways of taking that guy out,” he said, fishing around in his pocket for quarters. He told her to stop at the next public telephone booth.

  She saw one a few blocks away and drove up to it. He pushed open the door and started to get out. She reached out and drew him back by the arm.

  “What?” he asked, looking at her.

  “Nothing, John. I was just wondering if you needed change.”

  He looked at her with mingled sadness and tenderness. “What I need is to get back the last ten years of my life.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Vinda’s face sagged with fatigue, and his late-tour mouth had the consistency of cotton balls doused with rancid butter. Six o’clock in the morning, and he, Agueda, and Marsella were installed in a window booth inside the Road Show Diner at Tenth Avenue and Fifteenth Street. Steaming coffee, crisp bagels, and eggs over easy helped assuage the foul tastes in their mouths.

  Agueda watched with mild amazement as Marsella smothered his eggs in ketchup.

  After returning to temporary headquarters at the scene of last night’s explosion, Vinda dispatched Moose and Hagstrom to the hospital to interview a witness who had regained consciousness. He wanted to talk to Marsella for a few minutes, so he asked him and Agueda if they’d like to have breakfast.

  The waitress came over and refilled their cups. Agueda took her pocketbook and slipped out of the booth. “I’m going to powder my nose.”

  The lunch counter was shoulder-to-shoulder with truckers. Waitresses rushed around taking orders, pouring coffee, slapping roving hands.

  Vinda pulled a napkin from the holder and placed it in his saucer to soak up the coffee that had spilled from his cup. He looked at Marsella. “You still dancing with Hagstrom?”

  “Not to worry, Lou. I get off on living on the edge. I’ll dance around with her for a while and then dump her.”

  “The lady carries a gun; suppose she doesn’t want to be dumped?”

  Sopping up egg yolk and ketchup with a chunk of bagel, Marsella answered, “I’ve been playing these games for a lotta years, Lou. I’m a pro at it. Won’t be any problems with Joan. One of these days I’ll give it all up, and play house with the wife.”

  “No, you won’t, game players always play games,” Vinda said, piercing an egg yolk with his fork.

  Agueda returned. The men stopped talking. Sliding into the booth, she asked, “Did I interrupt boy talk?”

  “Naw,” Marsella said, tossing a chunk of bagel into his mouth.

  “Negative results,” Agent Gus White said quietly, squeezing into the booth fifteen minutes later. “Where is the rest of the team?”

  “You just missed them,” Vinda said. “They’ve gone home for a shower and a change of clothes. We’re meeting at the office at oh-nine hundred. Now, what did you mean by negative results?”

  “I ran a check through VICAP, our Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, and our psychological profiling file of criminal personalities, and our MO files, and I’ve contacted every field office in the U.S., and have come up with a big zero. There is nothing, official or unofficial, on anyone like this guy.”

  The gum-chewing waitress came over. “What’ll it be, sport?”

  “Poached two on blueberry muffin,” White said.

  “You got it, sport,” the waitress said, pouring coffee into the FBI man’s cup.

  Dumping sugar into his cup, White said, “After you got me up at that ungodly hour this morning, I went directly into the office and checked the hot sheet. Your little explosion was number one on the list.” Taking his time stirring, he looked across the table at Vinda and said, “The ATF boys made a big bust in Queens last night. A big haul of explosives.”

  “Really?” Vinda said, drinking coffee.

  Continuing to stir his coffee, White said, without looking up, “The official version is that acting on a tip from a reliable CI, they hit this dump where a hump named Holman attacked one of the agents, necessitating the lawful use of force, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You know the rest of the fairy tale.” Raising his cup to his mouth, he added slyly, “I’m happy to see you didn’t leave your balls in purgatory.”

  Vinda smiled. “Will Holman do time?”

  “Long and hard.”

  Clasping his hands together in front of his mouth, Vinda leaned forward. White put his cup down and did likewise. “My vampire has changed his MO,” Vinda whispered.

  “Oh, shit,” White said, making the connection. “The explosion was your guy?”

  “Yeah. Holman was his supplier. According to Holman, my guy was in Saigon in ’62, went by the name Dinny’O, and hung out in a slime pool called the Blue Bird on Tu Do Street. Holman didn’t know if this Dinny’O character was military or Agency. Can you check back? See if you can come up with a name, maybe a photo.”

  “That’s a lot of years ago. There were a lot of spooks over there then. And it doesn’t sound like you got the guy’s work-name.”

  “Someone alive hadda know this guy, and somewhere there is a pedigree on file for him. You’re my only hope. If I don’t get a line on this guy’s past, I got no hope of putting a finger on him.”

  “Hey, John,” White burst out. “How come you keep saying it’s a guy? Could be a woman.”

  “No way, Gus. Women don’t kill this way.”

  NINETEEN

  The police commissioner glared at the five superchiefs sitting around the oval table in response to his calling an 1100 conference. The sleepy and worried brass, all of whom had been at the explosion scene, squirmed impatiently in their seats, waiting for the detective from the Intelligence Division to complete his daily electronic sweep of the room.

  “Are you going to take forever?” snapped the PC.

  “Just a few more minutes, Commissioner,” the detective said, passing the wand of his electronic bug detector over the molding. Several long minutes passed before the detective pr
onounced the room clean, hurriedly gathered up his equipment, and left.

  The PC stiffened. Clasping his hands on the table in front of him, he began talking in a low, deceptively calm voice. “Gentlemen, the hotel association has informed me that as of oh-nine hundred this morning, every major hotel in this town has a sixty-percent cancellation rate, which they directly attribute to our incompetence.”

  His nostrils flared, and his fingers tapped the table impatiently. “I can also tell you that our retail stores are really hurting. And as I am sure you are all aware, the media is full of nothing else but Jessica Merrill and her alleged brush with death. Now they’ve got this ‘mad bomber’ stuff. Also, for those of you who are brain-dead, let me advise you that almost every feminist group in town is screaming for our heads.”

  The chief of patrol lifted his hand in protest. “Commissioner, I think—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” the PC said, “I want results. I want an arrest.” His eyes bored in on Leventhal. “Talk to me, Sam.”

  Leventhal leaned forward in his chair. “Every television station and newspaper has agreed to run the composite. I’ve assigned my XO and twenty detectives to run down every name that Vinda and his people come up with.”

  “What else?” asked the PC impatiently.

  “Vinda has come up with some promising leads,” said the C-of-D. He looked directly at the chief of patrol and added, “If the media ever found out about what we got …” He let his implied warning hang in the charged air.

  The PC picked up the gauntlet and hurled it at Agent Orange. “If anything discussed in this room leaks, I will know the culprit, and will forthwith reduce him to his highest civil-service rank and ship his ass to Brooklyn North, where he’ll be the permanent late-tour duty captain.”

  The chief of patrol looked down at the blank pad of paper in front of him as if some priceless truth were inscribed on it.

  “Continue,” the PC ordered Leventhal.

  “Vinda has come up with a name: Dinny’O. Our perp might have been in Saigon in ’62. The FBI is checking that out. Vinda has also come up with skin scrapings from under Kate Coswell’s nails, and he’s identified the high-order explosive used—Semtex.” The chief of detectives went on to brief them on all aspects of the investigation. When he finished, he leaned back and asked, “Any questions?”