The Second Assassin

by Paul Christopher

  ‘Missed you at the poker game last week,’ said Jane.

  ‘Blame it on Hitler,’ Busch answered. ‘Every time he invades someplace I have to stay up half the night writing something new and interesting about the son of a bitch.’

  ‘Think there’s going to be a war?’

  ‘Of course. Germany’s whole economy is based on it now. It’s too late for him to turn all those tanks into plowshares.’

  ‘We going to get involved?’

  ‘When it becomes economically useful.’

  ‘You really believe that?’

  ‘Sure I do,’ said Busch. ‘Wars are good for business. When this one is good for American business we’ll get right into it.’

  ‘You really are a cynical bastard, aren’t you?’

  ‘Cynical enough to know you don’t want to sit around chatting about foreign affairs.’ He grinned. ‘You can read Time for that.’

  ‘Or Newsweek,’ Jane parried. Her coffee arrived and she lit a cigarette.

  ‘So,’ said Busch, ‘tell me how your first love arrived at the morgue.’

  Jane told him, right through to her conversation with Hat Rack Levine. ‘I can see all the pieces,’ she complained, ‘I just can’t see the connections.’ Jane lit a second cigarette and sat back in her chair. Above her the turrets of the magic castle floated like the fairy-tale remnants of some forgotten kingdom, in a mythical time of chivalrous knights when corpses didn’t turn up in Jersey ditches. ‘You’re the hotshot analyst. What do you see?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Busch, letting the fingers of his right hand smooth the linen tablecloth in front of him. ‘Let’s put it in order. Joe Shalleck, who’s right up there on the top of Dewey’s shit list, tells a young lawyer working for Fallon and McGee named Howard Raines to go down to Havana. He stays there long enough to do whatever it is Shalleck told him to do then he turns around and comes back. Raines gets professionally whacked then dumped in a ditch behind a New Jersey roadhouse. Am I missing anything?’

  ‘Not so far.’

  ‘Okay. The body gets discovered, the New Jersey cops call in the New York cops because the lawyer is from Manhattan and they really don’t want any part of it. Your friend Hennessy is assigned to the case and somewhere along the line he’s told to go easy, maybe even put a lid on the whole thing. He thinks the whole thing stinks like the Fulton Fish Market so he tweaks your ear and gives you the keys to the young lawyer’s apartment.’ Busch paused and stared across the table at Jane. ‘Hennessy the kind of guy who’d set you up?’

  ‘Set me up for what?’

  ‘To take a fall.’

  ‘No. We’ve been friends for a long time. He wouldn’t do something like that.’

  ‘Not even to cover his own ass?’

  ‘No.’ Jane frowned. ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘A straight Mob hit they wouldn’t bother with the phony queer stuff, trying to make out that Raines was the victim of some kind of pervert love spat. It’s the cop angle that bothers me.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘When was the last time you heard of any police force handing a case over to another one? The Jersey cops should have been fighting for Raines. Instead they hand him over without a whimper and the New York bulls proceed to sweep it under the rug. Raines sits in the icebox at Bellevue for a month and then he gets shipped off to Hart Island with a number instead of a headstone. Case closed and forgotten. Sound about right to you?’

  Jane nodded. ‘That’s the way it seems to be going.’

  ‘Maybe not. Maybe you just have to ask the right questions.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as, why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why did he go to Havana? What did he do there that got him killed?’

  ‘From what I can tell, Raines was pretty much a nobody at Fallon and McGee.’

  ‘Perfect for a messenger. Disposable after doing his job, like toilet paper.’

  ‘And delivering the message gets him murdered?’

  ‘Makes sense if you want to protect the person the message was delivered to or cover up the fact that it was delivered at all. Makes sense if a guy like Shalleck wants to distance himself from whatever’s going on. Makes sense if it’s a big enough deal that someone big in the cops is stepping on the whole thing.’

  ‘It still doesn’t add up.’

  ‘Ask another question.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as, why did the manager of the Rustic Cabin call the Hoboken police? The proper jurisdiction would have been Tenafly or Fort Lee – they’re a hell of a lot closer.’

  ‘The fix was in?’

  ‘Right from the start. It’s like beads on a string. Forget the Mob. This is political.’

  ‘Explain,’ said Jane. ‘I’m a photographer, not a pundit.’

  ‘Shalleck is a Mob lawyer but he’s also a Democratic Party lawyer. Who runs New Jersey like it was his own personal country? A Democrat named Frank Hague. Where does Hague live? Hoboken, which is run for him by the McFeeley family from the mayor all the way down through the police department and the city commission. Do a bit of careful digging and dollars to doughnuts you’ll find out it was a McFeeley who got called by the manager of the Rustic Cabin.’

  ‘You’re trying to tell me that the Democratic Party is going around murdering people?’

  ‘No,’ Busch answered. ‘But it would appear that they have something they very much want to hide.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Tuesday, April 25, 1939

  Washington, D.C.

  John Bone sat at one of the long tables in the eighth-floor South Reading Room of the Library of Congress Annex on South Second Street and continued to make his neatly pencilled findings in a three-ring student’s notebook. He had been working in the annex for the past two days and had collected a great deal of the background information that he felt was necessary to complete his task. In Europe or in Latin America such information was a tightly guarded secret. Here it was available by consulting the thirteen thousand trays in the Card Index Room across the hall or the Newspaper Reference Room on the ground floor.

  According to various newspaper accounts and several volumes Bone had checked describing royal tours by previous English monarchs, security around the royal figures was surprisingly light. When travelling within England the king and queen had only their personal constables for protection, both from A Division of the London Metropolitan Police. In the case of the king, the policeman was a man named Hugh Cameron, while the queen’s policeman was named Giles. Both the royal bodyguards had offices in Buckingham Palace and, unlike the rest of their colleagues in Scotland Yard, Giles and Cameron were invariably armed with Belgian Browning nine millimetre automatic pistols worn in underarm shoulder rigs. Cameron had been a royal bodyguard since 1932, Giles since 1934. Prior to that both had been uniformed policemen. Both were much taller than either the king or queen and both came from strongly athletic backgrounds.

  On trips abroad the king and queen travelled with an added contingent of Special Branch officers as well as the bodyguards but for the most part the only real function of the Special Branch men was to coordinate security efforts with the police of the city or country where the royals were travelling. According to what Bone had read so far, this meant that the bulk of the security duties during the Canadian portion of the royal visit would fall to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, while in the United States, the onus, at least from a federal point of view, would be on the State Department and a little-known force of agents known collectively as the Bureau of Secret Intelligence.

  The Bureau had originally been created to investigate passport and visa applications but over time their operations had expanded to include security for U.S. diplomats abroad and the well-being of foreign dignitaries, diplomats and heads of state visiting the United States. Bone smiled at the thought. The broadening of the Bureau’s mandate was presumably to avoid such embarrassing incidents as the assassination of the Yugoslavian king,
Alexander Karageorgevic, on French soil.

  Reading between the lines, however, Bone saw that even if every one of its forty agents was assigned to the royal party the Bureau could not hope to provide any real security for the king and queen. While they were with Roosevelt they would fall under the protective umbrella of the White House Secret Service Detail, but since the majority of their time in the United States would be spent in Washington and New York, responsibility for the royals’ safety would fall chiefly to the Washington Metropolitan Police, the New York State Troopers and the New York City Police Department. In other words, it was a logistical, tactical and jurisdictional nightmare. This was complicated even more by an itinerary that included side trips to Mount Vernon in Virginia, a possible cruise on the Potomac aboard the presidential yacht, as well as travel by train, motor car and even the Warrington, a U.S. navy destroyer. Initially, Bone had been surprised to discover that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and its publicity-hungry director were playing no active role in the royal tour. Now he knew why – the security plan for the visit was a ship without a captain and unless Hoover was at the helm he wasn’t interested in simply being part of the crew.

  The protection of the United States president was also a matter of public record and as far as Bone could see the general security around Roosevelt would be very little altered by the presence of King George and the Queen Consort. At all times, whether at the White House, the Warm Springs, Georgia, polio spa or the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York, the president would be guarded by the White House Secret Service Detail headed by Colonel Edmund Starling, an ex-railway detective who had been with the White House detail since 1914 and directing its activities since the Coolidge administration. In addition to the official detail Roosevelt also had two private bodyguards from his days as governor of New York – Gus Gennerich, an ex-New York City policeman and Earl Miller, a veteran of the New York State Troopers.

  Day or night the White House detail consisted of a minimum of eight agents and sometimes as many as thirty. The presidential motor cars, mostly Lincolns, Packards and Cadillacs, were all bulletproof with extra-wide running boards and exterior handles for up to six agents and the vehicle used by the president was always guarded front and rear by Secret Service cars, each one carrying four agents, all armed with automatic pistols, sawed-off shotguns and Thompson sub-machine guns. Roosevelt considered the safeguards excessive but there had already been one attempt on the president’s life in February 1933 in Miami, shortly before his inauguration. Colonel Starling was on record as stating that there would be no president assassinated while he was head of the detail. Bone glanced at the tall window on his left then checked his wristwatch. It was past six and daylight was beginning to fade. He reached out and switched off the little parchment-shaded lamp at the front of the table. He closed his notebook and stood up, a faint smile on his face. Colonel Starling’s statement would soon be put to the test.

  Taking the elevator down to ground level, Bone exited the annex building, stepping out into a light spring rain. Slipping the notebook under his jacket, he turned up his collar, crossed Independence Avenue then followed First Street as it ran behind Capitol Hill. The dull skies and the rain had driven almost everyone from the sidewalks and the city was quiet except for the hissing of tyres from passing taxicabs on the wet streets. Continuing down towards D Street, enjoying the misty rain, Bone thought about the trail he was leaving behind and wondered if it was cause for significant worry. He’d travelled from Louisiana to Washington by train, paying for a drawing room under the name of Nash. Arriving here he’d booked into his hotel under the same name and so far he hadn’t been asked to formally identify himself to anyone and doubted that he would be.

  At the Library of Congress he’d continued to use the name Nash, explaining to the librarian he’d dealt with that he was a reporter for the Oakland Tribune, using the facilities of the library to research the upcoming arrival of the king and queen, scheduled to arrive in six weeks or so – hence his interest in the couple and his request for detailed information about them and also about President Roosevelt. It was unlikely that the librarian would even remember him after six weeks but his requests for both books and periodicals would be on file somewhere. Given the monumental importance of his targets he could presume that any investigation following the completion of his work would be incredibly thorough and there was no doubt at all in Bone’s mind that Hoover’s FBI would be the agency in charge. While his visits to the Library of Congress as Charles Nash of the Oakland Tribune might not be noticed, they would however be noted and a fragile hidden link would be established. It was a link he could not abide.

  Bone crossed Louisiana Avenue to North Capitol Street, turning into the anonymous eight-storey bulk of the Hotel Continental. Retrieving his key he rode up to his room, packed his single small case and rode back down to the lobby. He checked out of the hotel, shook off the doorman who offered to get him a taxi and walked across Capitol Plaza to the gigantic white granite arches of Union Station. Stepping out of the rain and into the grand concourse that stretched the length of the station, he purchased a sleeping car ticket to New York as Bill Joyner, a name he’d seen on the jacket of the assistant manager at the front desk of the Hotel Continental. An hour later, with darkness falling and the rain coming down much harder, the New York train left Washington. By the next morning Charles Nash and Bill Joyner would be no more and finally, after years of faithful service, Edwin Dow, petroleum geologist, would vanish as well.

  * * *

  Jane Todd sat in the Schrafft’s at Forty-seventh and Fifth, waiting for the Sinatra kid to show up. The waiter from the Rustic Cabin was supposedly doing a fifteen- minute singing spot at WNEW, a few doors down on Fifth, but he was already an hour late. The restaurant was its usual genteel self, lots of padded leather, artificial flowers and a menu to suit the needs of matrons out shopping, blue-haired old ladies and their equally ancient dogs searching for something sweet and soft enough to slip past their dentures and through their digestive tracts. Jane was already on her third pot of tea and her second plate of chocolate-covered biscuits, which was going to give her a complexion just like Ricky the soda jerk in Walgreens if she didn’t watch out. She ate the last one on the plate, silently cursed herself for agreeing to meet in a place where they didn’t sell beer and lit a cigarette.

  According to the information she’d received from Hat Rack, Sinatra wasn’t really a kid at all, he was just a young-looking twenty-four. He was determined to be the next Crosby but so far the best he’d done was a brief stint as one of the Hoboken Four, now the Hoboken Trio, and his present job as singing waiter and emcee at the Rustic Cabin. He was married to a girl named Nancy and his mother’s nickname for him was Slacksy because he bought so many clothes. The mother really was an abortionist, presently on parole for almost butchering a teenager. She was also a long-time ward heeler, doing favours for the local pols and the people in her Madison Street neighbourhood. She thought Frankie was a fool for trying to be a singer, but on the other hand he hadn’t had any other kind of job since he was seventeen, so she’d called in a couple of favours and made sure he got a membership in the Musician’s Union local so he could keep on singing at the Cabin and even do some side work like the WNEW spots.

  Sinatra slid into the booth across from Jane, a big, tight grin on his thin face. He was wearing a dark green suit, a white shirt, a blue-and-white polka-dot bow tie and a pork-pie hat. He took off the too-small hat and dropped it onto the seat beside him. His hair was slicked down and shiny with hair cream, showing off his round, protruding ears. With his big forehead and his knife-sharp high cheekbones he looked like some sort of bright-eyed rodent. He shot his cuffs a couple of times, making sure Jane saw the big gold and onyx links he was wearing and he gave her a practised look that probably worked pretty well on seventeen-year-old girls. It was even working a little bit on her. She crossed her legs under the table and tried not to think about it. When Sinatra spoke Jane could te
ll that he’d spent a fair amount of time putting a polish on his voice and shaving off the corkscrew New Jersey vowel sounds.

  ‘You’re the chick I saw at the Cabin.’ He gave it just enough sneer to irritate but not quite enough to anger.

  ‘You’re the singing waiter.’

  ‘I ain’t no waiter. They don’t hire waiters to sing on the radio, do they?’

  ‘And they don’t get chicks to snap pictures of corpses.’ Jane smiled.

  Sinatra ignored the comeback. ‘Dolly said I should talk to you.’ Dolly, Jane knew, was the mother. A twenty-four-year-old who did what his mother told him meant either she was a tough old lady or he was a mama’s boy. Maybe both.

  ‘Why would she want you to do that?’ asked Jane. It was a serious question, not a taunt.

  ‘Because that guy getting whacked and thrown in the ditch ain’t what you think and Dolly and some other ginks don’t want you to get the wrong idea.’

  ‘What would the wrong idea be?’

  ‘The wrong idea would be that Mr Moretti or his people had anything to do with the dead guy and him getting that way.’

  ‘Everything about it says it was a Mob hit, Frankie.’

  ‘It’s Frank, not Frankie, and the guys that dumped the body weren’t from any Mob I ever heard of.’

  ‘You saw it happen?’

  ‘I saw the body being dumped.’

  ‘You told the cops you were taking a piss in the ditch and that’s when you saw the body.’

  ‘Nice dirty mouth on you.’

  ‘I like it. Why didn’t you tell the cops what really happened?’

  ‘What I tell the cops is what I tell the cops.’

  ‘So you did see it happen?’

  ‘Not him getting whacked. I told you that. I saw him get dumped. Maroon Lincoln, couple of years old. New York plates.’