by Dale A. Dye
The door refused to budge. What was he thinking? There were no unlocked doors in the projects. Spike spun to look for another escape and saw the two shooters stop in their advance. One of them was dropping a speed-loader into his revolver and the other was on a knee taking up a good sight picture. Ripping the Nikon from his neck in desperation, Spike heaved the camera at his assailants and then launched his body after it, hoping to bull through in the other direction. It would likely get him killed but it was all he could think of at that moment. The fact that they hadn’t already drilled him was an outright miracle. As he charged into the flash of their weapons, he felt a stab of pain in his left arm. It spun him around and Spike fell to the concrete, curling up and ready to absorb the killing rounds he knew were coming.
A ragged volley of shots boomed and echoed in the dark alley. Spike curled tighter anticipating the pain but nothing hit him despite the continuous roar of gunfire. Maybe he still had a chance to run for it. Spike looked up to see one of the shooters lying face down on the ground in a puddle of blood. The other man was running in his direction but he wasn’t shooting. Spike rolled toward the alcove wall but he didn’t make it. Something heavy hit him hard and pinned him to the ground. It was one of the shooters and he was dead weight.
“Police, Spike! You OK?”
He tried to answer but his response was muffled by the heavy black man lying across his body. Spike shoved at the weight and glanced toward the dark end of the alley. He blinked into the glare of a flashlight and saw Eddie Miller and four other St. Louis Metro cops heading in his direction with smoking pistols leveled.
Spike scrunched up against an alcove wall and tried to calm himself. The legs of his trousers were blood-soaked, but he didn’t feel much besides the pounding of his heart against his chest wall. Eddie Miller crouched beside him examining the wounds while the other cops examined the two men who were down in the alley. He could hear the wail of several sirens in the distance.
“I told you it was stupid to come down here without an escort.”
“How bad am I hit?”
Miller lit a smoke and poked it between Benjamin’s trembling lips. “Cheap Heart it looks like.” Miller was examining the scrapes, bruises, and blood-stains on his friend’s body. “You caught some buckshot in the lower legs, but I think most of the blood is his.” Milled nodded at the nearest shooter who was being photographed. “We’ve got an ambulance on the way to take a look at the legs and that one on your arm.”
“Lucky…”
“Damn right you’re lucky, Spike. These guys were loaded for bear…shotguns and pistols. There’s all kinds of hardware laying around back up the alley.”
Spike noticed one of the shooters had survived. He was propped up moaning against the opposite wall where one of the cops was administering first-aid. Back-up units were flooding the area and investigators were on scene with cameras and tape by the time the ambulance arrived. Miller waved at the EMTs rushing in their direction pushing a gurney. They took a quick look at Spike and then turned to the wounded shooter who seemed to be in much worse shape.
“Who the hell were those guys?” Spike asked Miller as other attendants got him on a gurney and shoved it toward their vehicle.
“Beats me...but we’ll find out pretty damn quick. I got a call from Willy Pud in New York. He said for me to check on you and I’m damn glad I did. I’ll tell you all about it later…or he can. He’s flying back to St. Louis soon as he can get on a plane.”
“Listen, Eddie…” Spike said just before they got him into the ambulance. “This wasn’t just some mugging deal. Those guys were out to kill me…and they knew what they were doing.”
“OK, Spike. We’ll get all that in your statement. Just let them take you down to the hospital and take a look. I’ve got to face the shooting team tonight, but I’ll be by to see you after my shift.”
He was watching his friend being loaded into the ambulance, when the Watch Commander approached. “You’re gonna have to face the team tonight, Eddie, you know the drill. It looks like a righteous shoot to me. Don’t worry about it.”
“I think we need to call the detectives on this, Captain. There’s more to this than what it looks like.” Miller pointed at the expended cartridge casings and the discarded weapons being inventoried and photographed by the Metro shoot team. “I’m betting these guys were hired hitters.”
“Shit like this happens all the time down here, Eddie. Or do you know something I don’t know?”
“Reason I ran by here to check was because a buddy of mine called and said there’s a guy in town might want to kill Spike Benjamin.”
The Watch Commander looked around at the carnage. He’d seen this kind of slaughter before. It wasn’t unusual for the projects, but what Sgt. Eddie Miller said was unusual. “OK, I’ll call homicide and alert them. One of the detectives will get hold of you at the precinct.”
j
With the exception of the long, painful bullet burn on his left arm and another across his back, Spike Benjamin felt surprisingly fresh and vital after his close encounter in the projects. All it took to get him released by the Emergency room docs at Deaconess Hospital was eight stitches and several yards of gauze and tape. He declined the offer of a pan full of buckshot one of the surgeons had dug out of his calves and rode with an escort cop down to police headquarters to make his statement. That drill took two hours longer than his hospital stay, but he told the homicide investigators everything he could remember about the incident. He was able to identify his assailants from a stack of known felons one of the detectives showed him. He knew who it was trying to kill him in the projects, but he had no idea why. When it was over, he left the precinct with more questions than he’d been asked.
Limping his way out of the building, Spike was stopped by a young St. Louis Post-Dispatch beat reporter he knew, an up-and-comer who was a big fan of Spike’s work. “Hey, Spike…big night for you, right? OK if I call you about it later?”
“You gonna do a piece on this deal?”
“Maybe a little something…won’t get much ink. You know how it goes with shootings down in the projects, right? Business as usual…”
Spike sat thinking in the police cruiser that was carrying him back to his town house. The shooters were Andre Leon Kingston and Edwin Meshach Burton, two bad-ass black dudes with long rap-sheets. One of the detectives said both men had been known to work as muscle for hire, collecting debts or guarding dope dealers on the streets. What no one could quite get a handle on was motive. Why try to kill a guy like Spike Benjamin? Interestingly, it turned out that both of them were Vietnam Veterans. That revelation set Spike thinking about stories he’d done on Vietnam and particularly veterans having a hard time and turning to crime in St. Louis. Could something carrying his byline have spurred the attack?
He was running down an inventory of the stories he’d written, the photos he’d taken over the years when they arrived at his place. There was a cruiser with two Metro cops in it parked on the street outside his building. They waved and rolled down a window to let him know there was now a rotating watch set, and there would be a car right outside until further notice. If Spike needed anything all he had to do was call their dispatcher.
The red light on his answering machine was blinking as he entered his town house. The message was from Willy Pud in New York which was surprising since the last Spike had heard Willy Pud was in Washington. What was not so surprising given the day’s events was that former Colonel Justin Bates Halley was in St. Louis. That explained a lot and sent chills up Spike’s aching spine. So now there was a motive for the attack on him. Halley was behind that. He hired the hitters. And a guy like that wouldn’t quit.
Benjamin wandered into his living room, stared at the picture of Salt and Pepper on the wall over their work table, and then began to slowly climb the stairs toward his darkroom. He slipped the vital negative out of its hiding place in his darkroom procedures manual and carried it down to h
is desk. He flipped open his address book and then got an envelope from the desk drawer. When it was properly addressed and stamped, he carried it outside and down to the loitering police car.
“I appreciate you guys hanging around out here. Rough day for me.”
“Glad to do it, Spike. Any friend of Eddie Miller’s…you know how it goes.”
“And speaking of Eddie Miller,” the second cop said. “We just got a call. He’s out at the airport picking up somebody. He said he’d come by and see you tonight.”
“Thanks,” Spike said and handed over the envelope. “I hate to be a bother, but could one of you guys get this in the mail for me?”
Back at his desk, Spike reached for the phone and dialed the number listed in his book for Stanislaus Pudarski on South Calumet Avenue in Chicago.
j
“I can’t believe it, Eddie.”
“Believe it, buddy. They damn near got him. If you hadn’t called and if I hadn’t swung by to check on him, we’d be planning a funeral for a friend.”
Eddie Miller steered his cream-puff Oldsmobile, a legacy of his days as a family man, onto I-70 and maneuvered into the slow traffic lane. He wanted to use the trip to talk privately and decide how they were going to proceed with the Salt and Pepper investigation now that things had taken a violent turn.
Willy Pud sat quietly in the roomy front seat, glancing idly at the blinking blue ribbon of runway lights as they drove away from Lambert-St. Louis Airport. He was worried about what he’d started, the jeopardy that now faced him and two very close friends.
“What are you thinking?”
“Just trying to connect the dots, Eddie. It’s gotta be Halley, right? Spike makes inquiries about the guy, I try to get in to see him in New York, and no joy on either effort. He’s hiding from us because he knows what we want. And then all of a sudden he turns up on our doorstep. Next thing, a couple of dudes try to whack Spike for no apparent reason.”
“Yeah, no cop in his right mind is gonna buy the story that it was anything besides a contract hit. Fucking goons like Kingston and Burton don’t bother with heavy artillery for a simple shakedown. Halley hired them to get Spike, pure and simple. Crime scene guys found a stash of cash in the car registered to Burton’s mother. It could be dope money, but nobody’s buying that given what happened.”
“We gotta find that guy before he does something else…something a little more successful.”
“I’m working on it, but without any clear evidence to tie him to this deal, it’s gonna be tough to call in police assets, you know? He’s a respected businessman so we’ve got to walk softly. We can’t just bust in and start accusing him of conspiracy to commit murder…even if we can find him. And you know he’s hid out somewhere or registered under a false name if he’s in a hotel. Halley’s got enough bucks to keep himself out of sight.”
“Shit, I should have gotten where he was staying from his assistant.”
“Well, I’ve got some feelers out. I’ll keep looking for him.”
“It would be a damn sight easier if we just spilled the whole story…”
“And who’s gonna believe it, Willy Pud? Think about it. We’d be trying to convince people that some respected businessman who used to be an Army officer in Vietnam hired a couple of goons in St. Louis to kill a guy because he’s investigating a story about two American turncoats…a story which we can’t prove.”
“I get your drift.”
“Maybe we’ll get something from Burton. He’s in no shape or mood to talk right now, but that won’t hold when he takes a look at what’s facing him in court. If we can tie him to Halley and get a confession that he hired the two hitters, the whole picture changes.”
“And Halley lawyers up to swear it’s a false allegation and he’s innocent of everything and Burton’s is just trying to save his hide.”
“I’m open to any relevant suggestions.”
“Look, Eddie…” Willy Pud scrunched around in the seat and fired a smoke with the dashboard lighter. “We need to deal with realities here. This isn’t just a crusade for justice and truth anymore. There’s a bastard out there ready to kill us. I think we’ve just got to drop it for while. I can’t go on asking you and Spike to help me with this when there’s a chance one or all of us might get killed in the effort. It ain’t worth the risk.”
“Never thought I’d hear you say something like that.”
“Well, that’s what I think and there it is.”
Eddie Miller swung off the highway, jammed the Olds into park, and turned to face Willy Pud. “What you gotta do is let me and Spike make our own decisions about whether we quit or not. We’re both Vietnam Veterans, right? We got a little skin in this game too. Fuck Halley. I’m not afraid of that sonofabitch…and I know Spike isn’t either. Now do you want me to wheel around and take you back to the airport? Or do we continue the march?”
LOS ANGELES
“Shaeffer here…”
“It’s Dick Simpson at the Pentagon, Sergeant Major. Welcome back to the World.”
“Thanks, Dick. Glad to be back. Thailand ain’t quite the R&R center it used to be.”
“You got anything I might be interested in seeing?”
Sergeant Major Shaeffer twisted to glance over his shoulder at the stacks of files, photographs, and supposedly physical evidence that filled every spare space in the small office he kept in his San Fernando Valley home. He still had no good idea how to get it all effectively organized, but he’d been working on that diligently since he returned from Southeast Asia. He would dearly love to just hand it all over to the Defense Department’s Office of POW and MIA Affairs.
“I’m up to my ass in alligators right now, Dick. I want to try and get this stuff a little more organized before I submit my report, but I’m tempted to just box it all up and ship it to you.”
“Why not just do that, Shifty? We can cross-check with our stuff and maybe help you make some sense out of it.”
“Well, I just wanted to sift out some of the bullshit, Dick. There’s just so much sad garbage involved. If I didn’t know that before I went to Bangkok, I sure do now.”
“Well, you know best what you’ve got, I guess. And our policy hasn’t changed. We’ll run down anything that looks promising.”
“Did you get anything on that ring and note I sent?”
“Yeah, that’s why I called. I think we found the owner…or found out who used to own it anyway.”
“Any chance we’ve got a live one still over there?”
“Not likely, my friend. There’s nobody on the MIA list with matching initials. We ran a cross-check and came up with one matching name. Cleveland Herbert Emory, Junior, which is the name on the note you sent. So we checked out the jeweler in New York. The ring was one of a pair made for Emory’s father, who has the same name and a matching ring. He’s CEO of Emory Technology. Unfortunately, Emory Junior was KIA in Vietnam.”
“So the guy who gave me the ring and the note was lying. Damn, I would have sworn he was telling me the truth.”
“Don’t feel bad about it, Shifty. Hell, everybody wants to believe there’s some guys left alive over there, a few that the gooners are keeping for leverage of something. Nobody wants to just write it off, at least none of us who served over there do. We just keep looking and hoping.”
“You sure the kid was KIA, Dick?”
“About as sure as we can be. Records indicate be was killed on a recon mission in April 1970 on the Cambodia cross-border deal. Closed casket remains consigned to his father and buried in a private family plot on Long Island.”
“Well, that’s one we can check off a long list.”
“You want me to forward the ring to Cleve Emory in New York?”
“No, a father shouldn’t get something like that in the mail. Hold onto it, Dick. I’ll pick it up when I bring all this other stuff to Washington. I’ll take the train down and deliver it to him personally so he’ll know how w
e got hold of it.”
NEW YORK
“He’s still in St. Louis, Mr. Emory; I spoke with him yesterday afternoon.”
“Can you reach him or do I have to do it personally?”
Eileen Winter straightened in her chair and grabbed for a notebook. Cleveland Herbert Emory was in a foul mood and he sounded like he was looking for a head or two to roll. If her boss was in that kind of hot water, the splash would cover a lot of people.
“I can make a call right away, Mr. Emory.”
“You do that, Eileen. And you tell Justin Halley that I want him on the first thing smoking out of St. Louis for New York. No excuses…if I have to send a jet for him, I’ll do it.”
“I’ll tell him, sir.”
“And you tell him I want him in my office for a meeting immediately after he lands. That’s tomorrow morning and I don’t care what shape he’s in.”
“Can I tell him what it’s all about, Mr. Emory?”
“No you can’t Eileen. You just tell him to be here tomorrow if he wants to continue working for Emory Technology.”
ST. LOUIS
Willy Pud grabbed the phone Spike Benjamin was waving at him distractedly with one hand while the other tapped at his keyboard. “It’s Eddie…wants to talk to you.”
“What’s up, Eddie?”
“You need to get down here now, man, before they put this guy back to sleep.”
“Somebody gonna watch the place?”
“There’s a black-and-white should be pulling up out front now. Get the picture in the den and bring it with you. Come to Deaconess and check in at the security wing.”
“Bring Spike?”