Hot Red Money

by Baynard Kendrick

  Ballistics was asked: What caliber is this shapeless bullet? What type of a weapon was it fired from—revolver? Automatic? Rifle? Machine gun? Can you name the manufacturer of the weapon? Foreign or American?

  Daily endless questions to the Document Section: What make of typewriter was this written on? Were these two letters written on the same machine? Are these two inks the same? Can you determine the watermark on this charred piece of paper?

  What kind of powder?

  What kind of hair? Human? What was his, or her, race, age, sex, and is the wave natural? Was it pulled out, cut off, or singed off? Is it bleached or dyed? Did these two hairs come from the same person?

  Everything applicable in the modern scientific world of the atomic age was pressed into use to answer the never ending queries. Catalytic tests for blood employed luminol and oxidants, benzidine and phenolphthalein. The Teichmann test, and the Takayama test reduced the blood specimen to crystals visible on a slide under a powerful microscope.

  Paints scraped from a fender were identified by densities, pigments, microchemical testing, and spectographic analysis.

  One oldtime safecracker had been said to remark after his conviction of cracking a post office safe: “Once you could wear gloves and not leave fingerprints and be okay. Now they tell you where and when you bought the gloves and identify you by dust you left from the sole of your shoes, the fumes of the soup you used to blow the crib, the marks of your drill, the pattern of the seat of your pants where you sat on the floor, and a hair you scratched out of your eye brow.

  “It’s getting so a man can work hard all his life learning his job and still not be able to make a dishonest living!”

  On Tuesday morning, Homicide Suffolk was notified of the Federal interest in the death of Igor Sandor, alias Aaron Turlock.

  On Wednesday morning the sharpened eight-inch piece of flexible metal extracted from Igor Sandor’s heart arrived in the FBI Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

  It was routed to the Metallurgical Laboratory of the Physics and Chemistry Section, and turned over to Special Agent Richard A. McDonald, Ph.D.

  A superficial examination disclosed the fact that the lethal piece of metal was steel, probably cold-rolled, and that the larger end had been sawed from a longer piece with a hacksaw. The smaller end had been sharpened to a needle point with a file.

  Using a microscope illuminator, photomicrographic pictures were made of the tool marks left by hacksaw blade and file. Now from those pictures either tool could be possibly identified if found.

  For a short time McDonald stared at the deadly eight inches lying on the table in an effort to figure out what it might have been cut from. Inside of his mind it had almost rung a distant bell. It was irritating, because he felt he knew the original source exactly—something very familiar—but for the moment it was a blank, just as he sometimes lost the name of a very old friend whom he hadn’t seen for years.

  He started a silent game of twenty questions: A curtain rod? Brass, and no taper. A towel rack, dimestore variety? No. Usually alloy and again no taper. A fishing—?

  McDonald called one of his assistants, an ardent outdoors-man. “Does that look like it might have been cut from a steel casting rod, Joe? Those are bloodstains on it so handle it carefully. It’s in from the New York office.”

  Joe looked it over without touching. “Steel rods are usually hollow for lightness.”

  “Don’t they make solid ones?”

  “Yes, but they’re heavy and often square.”

  “What would your guess be, Joe?”

  Joe squinted at it some more. “What about an aerial off a car?”

  “They’re hollow, brass, copper alloy, nickled or chromed.”

  “I mean a whip aerial.”

  “Wait a minute!” McDonald was excited. “I think I’ve nailed it down.” He called Special Agent Murtrie in Electronics, who was in charge of designing new field equipment to enable agents to communicate with each other while on foot, or talk back and forth to their office or a car.

  “Murt? McDonald in Metallurgy. Do you remember that Russian short-wave transmitter we seized in that spy round-up last year? Didn’t it have a solid cold-rolled steel aerial on it about fourteen inches long? Good. I think I’ve got part of another one—another aerial. Eight inches sawed off of one. Only this one wasn’t used for transmitting; it was used to kill a man. Is that machine still in your department? Good. I’d like to borrow it to make a comparison. It will be a bullseye if I can prove this is a piece of a similar machine.”

  An hour later, a small segment of the aerial from the spy transmitter and the eight-inch weapon had been mounted in a block of Bakelite, and the block cut away until the metal was barely exposed.

  Then came the arduous task of grinding down block and metal with a series of abrasive papers each finer than the last, and each effectively removing the scratches of the one before.

  At last the metal shone like a mirror to McDonald’s eye, but under the microscope the last abrasions from the finest paper were still distinct and clear.

  Then the metals were put on a wheel and polished with levigated alumina, the finest abrasive known, until even under the microscope not a scratch on the mirrorlike surface could be seen.

  Now a final step was necessary to reveal what McDonald wanted to know: Were those two pieces of metal both manufactured from the same source by the same steel mill in Russia.

  An etching solution was poured over both of the polished surfaces, and instantly began to attack and eat into the metal at the boundaries of each grain. Slowly under the metallographic microscope the crystal structure of the metal began to appear.

  McDonald almost shouted. The crystal structure, the etching pattern, the visible phases of the different components, and the inclusions of those infinitesimal foreign bodies found in all metals, were identical in both pieces of steel.

  A spectrographic analysis, using the piece of the aerial and the eight-inch one as electrodes and photographing the spectrum of each of the samples, offered further confirmation. If two samples yield identical spectra there is no longer any doubt that their composition is identical—no matter what that composition may be.

  McDonald hurried to get Ed Waters, S.A.C. of the New York office on the inter-com telephone. Waters might want to move fast. The official report wouldn’t be in his hands until the following day.

  There was a conference in Ed Water’s office at four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. Present, in addition to the S.A.C., were Special Agents Len Ducro, Monty Wells, and Octavus Ball.

  Monty Wells had fourteen years of service all over the country. He was a tall, lean, angular man with a bony face and an aristocratic look in his eye. Capable, quiet, decisive and experienced, Waters thought him one of the best.

  Octavus Ball had heavy shoulders, sandy hair, an executive face, and a pair of prize-fighter’s fists that should have been registered with the police as deadly weapons.

  Luckily for many high school kids, Octavus had learned at the early age of twelve to control a temper that was constantly blowing out a cylinder head when some first year Latin student discovered, as they all did, that Octavus Ball’s careless parents had wished on their eighth child the natural moniker of “Eight Ball.”

  Now at the age of forty, after ten years with the FBI, Octavus didn’t even clench his fingers when addressed by the odious term. He merely smiled phlegmatically, and added the offender’s fatuous features to the long line of faces that he had mentally placed in the life-sized silhouette target on the pistol range to be gunned down with glee. Why get upset by the nickname “Eight Ball” when it had made you one of the fastest and deadliest shots in the FBI?

  “I got a report in from the lab.” Ed Waters turned his attention from a file he’d been studying to the three agents. “Len’s told you about the assignment he was on in the Amity Rest Home, hasn’t he?”

  Monty and Octavus nodded.

  “It was a toughie,” Waters said. “And Len
did as well as he could. A nice job. It wasn’t his fault that we didn’t get as much as we hoped for. The subject, Igor Sandor, alias Aaron Turlock, was murdered night before last between midnight and one a.m. We’ve learned a lot of facts from the missile used to kill him.” Waters looked down at the papers on his desk, his strong face grave. “I’ll brief you three on what we know. The boss wants the man who killed Igor Sandor apprehended, if it takes every agent and every resource of the FBI—and we want every Communist underground comrade who’s been feeding him information for the past ten years. When we’re ready we’ll hit them all from coast to coast in a single day. That’s the only answer left to give to the question ‘Why did Igor Sandor have to die?’ ” He stopped abruptly and sat staring out of the window at a patch of leaden sky over Second Avenue.

  “What do you know about this spy, Ed?” Monty Wells asked after a moment, with the privilege of long service. “Anything you don’t want to tell, right now? You seem almighty sure he’s pure Russian, and not an American Communist pressed into service.”

  Waters swung back from his window gazing. “We’re working with the police on this, Monty. Lieutenant Jagowski of Homicide in Suffolk County, gave me an interesting report here! The killer got into the grounds of Amity Rest Home by using a pair of wire clippers—a smooth professional job. Evidently Sandor was expecting him or wasn’t surprised to see him, or they had some prearranged signal that caused Sandor to open his window—”

  Octavus Ball asked: “Have you any description of this spy-killer at all?”

  “None,” Waters said quickly. “Or you’d have had it by now. There’s a chance that he has a contact name—‘Pringle.’ You remember our last spy, Golikov?”

  “Who could forget him?” Ball asked. “He used the name ‘Lamb’ as I recall. I thought when he went up for thirty years last November the MVD might lay off for a while. So this is another?”

  “Bigger and better, I’m afraid, Octavus,” Waters said. “Special emulsified films that can be crammed into hollowed out nickels and lead pencils, coded short-wave radio messages and all. Sandor had passed out three nickels and a pencil to the man who killed him. The report I got from the lab in Washington a couple of hours ago proves definitely that the eight-inch piece of sharpened steel shot into Sandor’s heart at close quarters was cut from the fourteen-inch aerial of a Russian manufactured short-wave sending set similar to the one found in Golikov’s artists supply shop. Lieutenant Jagowski believes it was fired from a hollowed out tube with a powerful spring.”

  “Why not use a dart from an air pistol?” Monty asked. “Didn’t this Pringle go a long way around to get over the hill?”

  “I think I can answer that one,” Len Ducro said. “Take it from me, this Sandor had kept himself alive through a lot of tough going. He was a paranoiac in my opinion, and crafty and suspicious as hell. Now, he had to be killed without noise, by shooting through an inch by an inch-and-a-half opening in a diamond mesh screen.

  “Sandor gave Pringle the nickels and the pencil—at least, they haven’t been found.” Len told how many of the patients concealed trinkets in their rooms. “After Pringle got the nickels and the pencil, the next step was to get Sandor. That entailed getting him close to the screen again without arousing his suspicion. He’d have flushed at the sight of an air pistol, or any kind of a gun, or a crossbow—dropped to the floor out of range close under the window sill, and started to scream.”

  Ball said: “Also it would take some fancy shooting to pot anyone accurately through a wire mesh screen. You’d be handicapped even if you shoved a pistol barrel in. No leeway to move it around and aim.”

  “That’s exactly my point, and the one Lieutenant Jagowski made,” Len continued. “The police think that Pringle told Sandor he had a message for him—instructions, maybe, or a letter from his wife. It doesn’t make any difference. He said he’d roll it up and push it through the screen. So he shoves in a slender metal tube that he’s wrapped in a sheet of white paper. Sandor reaches for it and—click!—it’s all over.”

  “For Sandor,” the SAC said. “This is where we begin. You’ve worked on espionage cases before, Monty. But I want to warn all three of you that this isn’t the same thing. The Soviets are learning new techniques every day—building up a deadly, efficient machine.

  “Colonel Alexandrovitch Golikov, of whom we were speaking, spoke excellent English—good enough to run a nationwide Russian spy ring for eleven years from his artists’ supplies shop in Brooklyn. But he still had an accent.” Waters paused to let that sink in.

  “I don’t think Pringle has an accent. I don’t think an accent will pass muster with the Comintern today. My belief is that Pringle has stepped into Golikov’s shoes, and that his disguise is complete self-effacement.”

  “Do you think he’s an American?” Len inquired.

  Waters shook his head. “The Soviets learned to keep clear of the American Communists as much as possible after the Smith Act trials in 1948 when they found out how many informants we had planted in the ranks of the Communist Party, U.S.A. It’s not easy for a United States Party member to become an espionage agent today. Russia wants to know: What’s his background? Can he be disciplined? And mainly, does he have access to confidential data? Also, it may take years to check him and break him in.

  “What they’re concentrating on now is building illegal networks and planting their own sleeper agents like Golikov. Of course they demand assistance from the Party here—that’s priority number one—servicing this foreign spy. Supplying false passports, fake birth certificates and identification papers, technicians, if he needs one, feeding and clothing him until he’s on his feet. Maybe setting him up in a business for a cover.”

  “Do you think that Pringle is in some business like Golikov was?”

  Waters pursed his lips and stroked his chin. “I’m inclined to question that, Monty. Golikov didn’t get away with it. We turned him up as a concealed agent, and businesses have tax returns to make, and licenses to buy. Less attention might be drawn to a workman with a smaller income.”

  “Just what do these illegal networks concentrate on, Mr. Waters?” Octavus Ball inquired.

  “Literally everything. The Boss says in his book Masters of Deceit—a book that every one in this country should read—that we’re strategic spy target number one for the Soviets. Not only do they want certain blueprints or military operational plans; they’re interested in an army manual, the political views of a clerk in an industrial firm, the security regulations of sensitive facilities and government buildings, or incidents in the life of a prominent person that might be used for blackmail.”

  “And Pringle?”

  “The nickels and the pencil passed out of that window to him, by Sandor, contained films with details of rocket valves being manufactured by Crescent Valves, Inc. for the Navy, so far as we can judge. Sandor worked there as Assistant Production Manager under the name of Aaron Turlock. The plant is owned by Jason Philips, whose daughter Dr. Marian Rheinemann owns and operates the Amity Rest Home. We’ve had the plant under surveillance now for some time, but we’ve been concentrating on the management since Naval Intelligence and the Department of Defense had given Turlock, and Bruno Vogl, the production manager, clearance. As a matter of fact, Turlock had tipped us information about employees in other plants he’d worked in, which helped to put him in the clear.”

  “Do you mean he double-crossed you, Mr. Waters?”

  The S.A.C. reflected on that. “Not exactly. It’s a chance we have to take with any informant, but we certainly can’t be restricted on the sort of information we can accept. It would hamstring us, just as it would military intelligence or the C.I.A. Somewhere along the line Sandor turned against this country. As I said before, we’ll never know the cause.”

  “Where do you want us to take this up, Ed?” Monty Wells asked.

  “A young man, a Lebanese, was stabbed to death in an alley off Charlton Street in Greenwich Village last Monday night—a week
ago. His name was Beshara Shebab. He was the son of the Director of the Banque du Shebab-Syrie, in Lebanon, according to information received from the C.I.A.

  “Shebab was trying to sell information to a reporter on the Globe-Star, Maury Morel—information about a Russian agent in this country now, with unlimited Soviet money at his disposal in numbered accounts in banks in Switzerland and Lebanon. Morel was with Shebab in the Beirut Café on Washington Street. They left separately—Shebab climbed out of the washroom window. A few minutes later Morel, who was to meet him outside, found his body in the alley. Morel was cracked over the head and spent the night in St. Vincent’s.”

  “Isn’t Maury Morel that expert on Communists? The writer who won the Pulitzer Prize?”

  “Yes, he is.” Ed Waters quieted Lennie with a wintry look. “He’s even more than appears on the surface. I expect him eventually to lead us to Pringle, and I don’t want him questioned, contacted, or tipped off in any way. Is that perfectly clear.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now, you three can divide this up among you in any manner you think best. I’m putting Monty in charge of the detail. First: I want Mrs. Aaron Turlock found, her son, Nikki, and her car. Through her and possible bloodstains in the car, I want proof that Aaron Turlock was out of Amity Rest Home the night that Beshara Shebab was murdered, and that Turlock killed Shebab himself, or was there at the time and knew who did. You can probably match Turlock’s prints with some the police lifted from the café. The police will be glad to cooperate, and you’ll need them.

  “Second: I want the dope on Abul Khaled, the owner of the Beirut Café. I think he’s running a Party drop for messages. Maybe a deep freeze—where underground comrades can hide away. He’s running something out of line, that’s for sure. Maybe narcotics. Find out. Put enough heat on him and you may unearth Pringle. That’s all boys. Good hunting. On your way!”