Seven Silent Men Page 10

  Tina Beth snapped on the record player, then still lying fully extended turned her head, gazed intently back at her naked bottom, studied it for a bit, shifted her stare to her legs, smiled to herself, finally looked up into the flushed face of her husband. “We can’t much fault a person for that, can we, Billy Bee?” She spoke in her little girl’s voice. The opening strains of “Yesterday” softly drifted from the portable’s speakers. “For being lustfully inclined like Tricia says Edgar is?”

  Billy Yates, his stare frozen on a barely visible tiara of golden pubic hair, managed to shake his head.

  Tina Beth tittered her childlike titter. “Billy Bee, you got an inclination in doin’ that naughty word to me?”

  Eyes transfixed, Yates nodded.

  “An itsy-bitsy inclination or a great big powerful inclination?”

  “Powerful.”

  “I don’t believe you one bit.” Tina Beth swiveled around on her stomach, propped her chin on an open hand only inches from her husband’s lap. “Show me how powerful?”

  Billy Yates tentatively felt for the drawstrings of his pajama pants.

  “Standin’ up,” she chirped. “Show me standin’ up.”

  He rose, stood at bed’s edge facing her, uneasily searched for the drawstrings, found them, gave a weak tug, followed by a stronger tug. The pajama pants dropped away.

  Tina Beth studied his erection with all the intensity of a child viewing a new sight. Then she let out a low and appreciative whistle.

  The instrument went limp.

  “I told you never to whistle at me,” Yates nearly yelled, clutching up the pants as much to hide his shame as in anger. “Neither men nor women are animals to be whistled at!”

  “… Yer right, Billy Bee, and I apologize.” Tina Beth flopped over on her back, wriggled toward the head of the bed, wriggled up into a sitting position with her knees drawn up to her chest and pressed tightly together. “I’ve been nothin’ short of wanton.” Her lips formed into a pout. “I don’t know what overtakes me at times. Whatever it is, I’m goin’ to fight it fierce.”

  Tina Beth slowly parted her raised knees. “I won’t ever go showin’ off this ol’ tantalizer no more neither,” she pledged, lowering both hands over her private parts. But not completely over. A slight space was left between the forefingers and thumbs of the two clutching hands. A space where the color pink was vividly discernible. A moist and luminescent pink. Pink ridged by occasional strands of blonde hair.

  Despite her pout and downcast eyes, Billy Yates knew that Tina Beth knew exactly where he was looking, where he was incapable of not looking. He knew that she knew he knew this. That she wanted him to know. That this convoluted and infantile rut of “I’ll-show-you-mine-but-don’t-look” had invariably heightened his passion and hers. He knew that she knew these machinations weren’t necessary. Not to arouse him at least. She knew all that she had to do, one way or the other, was display a little bottom … clothed or unclothed. Sashay in full regalia. Flash a flank. Whatever, he was lost.

  Tina Beth glanced at Yates, feigned a gasp, again lowered her eyes, this time demurely. “Billy Bee?” she asked, managing to produce a 100 percent bona fide blush. “Is that there adorable creature trying to tell me something?”

  Yates peered down upon his revitalized lust, attempted to cover it up.

  “Billy Bee, why you trying to hide all that glory from me?”

  He didn’t know, couldn’t answer, looked helplessly to the bed.

  Tina Beth turned over, lay on her stomach staring back at him. Lay with a pillow under her. With her sublimely naked bottom propped high and thoroughly on display. “You sure what yer hiding ain’t fer me?” she asked quietly.

  “Be right back.”

  Once in the bathroom applying Pepsodent to his toothbrush and temporarily free of his wife’s influence, Yates called out, “I never want to hear you whistling at anyone, home or out! Persons who come from prime background like yours don’t go around whistling! And I don’t want you swearing! Swearing’s for floozies and tenant farmers!” After a rapid brush, rinse and gargle, he added, “And you oughta find a better crowd of women to have lunch with!” He stepped out of the pajama bottoms which had fallen to his feet, snapped off the bathroom light and headed into the dimly lit bedroom. Dimly and blue lit.

  Somewhat to Billy Yates’s surprise, Tina Beth had changed the bulb in the nightstand lamp during his brief absence. A blue light now burned. The record on the softly playing phonograph had been switched to the Beatles’ “Let It Be.”

  “I don’t want you repeating dumb gossip, either.” He moved past a portable floor speaker. “I don’t care who’s sleeping with who, dumb gossip is not to be believed.”

  “Hush,” Tina Beth ordered as he fell into her outstretched arms. “I like this town,” she said, squeezing him tight. “I feel good here. Lucky.” She squeezed harder. “Oh, Billy Bee, we’re going to have the biggest and best life anybody ever had. We’re going to have kids, if you want, and a proper house and all the things a proper young couple should have. Cats and dogs and goats even, and everything, I know it. We’ll never be away from one another. You won’t be preoccupied and distant. And you won’t get into trouble, ever again, will you, Billy? Promise me you—”

  Billy Yates silenced his wife with a kiss, trapped her wagging tongue under his own, sucked it back into his mouth pressing it tightly between his lips, bit her tongue. Bit gently. Slowly. Began biting more rapidly. Harder. Began squeezing her bottom.

  The telephone rang and was ignored.

  Billy bit her lips. Bit quickly. Began biting and kissing her chin and neck.

  The telephone gave up, lapsed to silence.

  Tina Beth seized his head in both hands, kneaded her fingers in the thick curly hair, pushed slowly and persistently … as she did, steered the biting, licking, kissing face down her neck and over a breast and onto her stomach, maneuvered his lips down to her ridge.

  Billy bit along the edge of the hairline. Intensified his grip on her bottom. Raised his head. Simultaneously raised her as well. By the bottom. Held her several inches above the sheets. Pressed his thumbs into her skin. Gently twisted his hold, forced the dangling legs wide apart.

  Gasping his name, she threw her arms flat and outstretched onto the bed. Gasping, she told him how much she loved him.

  Someone knocked at the door. Continued knocking.

  Billy Butler Yates paid no heed. He had Tina Beth where he wanted her. By the bottom.

  She thrust her pelvis higher, grabbed his hair and tugged him toward her, shouting out his name and her love for him.

  Someone else started shouting from beyond the door. “Yates, this is Jez. Sorry to bother you, but we gotta get a move on.”

  “Go ’way!” Billy yelled.

  “I can’t. God beckons.”

  “… What!”

  “God wants to see us! Or vice versa … on TV! We have to go rent a TV set.”

  FIVE

  Never, in response to an FBI invitation, had so many journalists and photographers and television news cameras crowded into the Justice Department’s ground-floor Great Hall at Washington, D.C. Far more media people than the allocated one hundred and fifty seats could accommodate. Excited people. J. Edgar Hoover, in an unprecedented move, had called a mass press conference. Only once before, that anyone could remember, had Director Hoover faced reporters … in 1968, when he responded to Martin Luther King’s allegation that the Bureau was being “laggardly” in its enforcement of Civil Rights legislation. Hoover, at the time, termed the black leader “the most notorious liar in the world.” The King rebuttal had occurred in the Director’s private fifth-floor offices, where a relatively small press corps had been brought together. Here, in the Great Hall, over two hundred members of the national and international media were jockeying for elbow room and noisily speculating on what the Director’s forthcoming message might concern. Overwhelming consensus held he would be announcing his long-anticipated retirement as
head of the FBI.

  At 9 A.M. sharp, Tuesday, August 24, some forty-eight hours after the alarm had sounded at Mormon State National Bank, he entered. J. Edgar Hoover. Promptly. Looking tired and drawn and older than his seventy-six years. But striding strong and flanked by the associate director of the Bureau, Clyde Tolson, and followed by the assistant to the Director, A. R. Roland. Jowls a-jiggle and bulldog lips pursed, Director Hoover mounted the dais. Halted before a cluster of microphones. Squinted out beyond a bobbing thicket of camera lights and lenses. Blinked into the flood of upturned faces. Loosened his jaw and pointed a friendly finger and offered a “Hi there, Pileggi, haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.” Pointed farther back with a “Good to see you, Jane.” Peered down at the cameramen and photographers directly in front of him and suggested, “What say you keep low, fellows, and give the cheap seats behind you a break.” When people laughed at this, Director Hoover laughed too, which was something almost no one ever recalled him doing in public. When he threw a half salute and winked at his audience, which absolutely nobody ever recalled him doing before, many were prompted to clap. More clapped. And damn near everyone clapped.

  J. Edgar Hoover let them clap on for many moments before raising both hands for silence, which he got. He pinched the tip of his nose. Wet his lips. Looked off at nothing. Grew pensive. Shot his cuffs. Squared his shoulders. Leaned into the microphones.

  “Evil sleeps with one eye open,” Edgar told them. “It distinguishes neither between adult or child or God or democracy. It co-joins with atheism and alienism and amorality and opportunism both here and abroad. Commingles, piratically, with the pious and political. This very morning, fishing trawlers belonging to Communist Russia were spotted near Little America examining the glaciers. Examining, or trying to melt them, I ask you? We know one thing, they won’t be building churches out there. We know …”

  Clyde Tolson, unseen by all except A. R. Roland, touched Edgar gently on the elbow.

  Edgar resquared his shoulders and intoned that he had called this meeting to make an announcement of great importance to himself and the FBI and the nation, but before he did so, he wished to share a few thoughts.

  “There are those in high and respected places who would have you believe that in a society such as ours there is no longer need for federal operations such as the FBI. That the FBI’s fiscal funding should be drastically reduced, if not abolished. I tell you those funds must be increased. I tell you that experience persuasively shows us that effective law enforcement must stand as a paramount cornerstone of a just and progressive society. I tell you that the forces of evil are on the march. I tell you that our nation suffered grave and unparalleled threats to its freedom and internal security this last year. From without, forces antagonistic to a free government sought through espionage and other clandestine-type activities to weaken the United States and its contribution to the defense of the Free World. From within, shocking excesses of criminal activity, organized and otherwise, and violent attempts to subvert democratic processes and promote racial discord lacerated our society. Destructive acts of senseless rebellion by increasing numbers of our youth and widespread contempt for properly constituted authority greatly supported the causes of lawlessness and subversion throughout the country.”

  Edgar stopped and looked away.

  A smattering of applause broke out.

  “There are those who say that crime is on the decline and what crime there is is a matter for local, not federal, law enforcement. I tell you criminal activity is on the rise. Not the simple crime of our parents’ and grandparents’ day but sophisticated and ever-changing crime. The contemporary federal lawbreaker has the intellect and skill to prevail over nearly every modern technological and strategic deterrent … except one. The FBI. Today more than ever before we are the last and first defense against sophisticated law-breaking. This was demonstrated only hours ago, vividly.”

  Hoover folded his hands in front of him. “Over the last weekend the Mormon State National Bank in Prairie Port, Missouri, was burglarized by a gang of brilliant and dangerous criminals who effected a spectacular and successful getaway. The felons’ identities and whereabouts remain unknown. Local law-enforcement and banking officials cursorily estimated the money stolen to amount to under ten thousand dollars. Thorough follow-up work by the men and women of the FBI has just revealed this figure to be far, far too low. The FBI has established that prior to the robbery, under the strictest of security and therefore unknown to local authorities, a shipment of used currency belonging to the United States Treasury Department, and earmarked for destruction at a federal incinerator at St. Louis, was shunted to the Mormon State National Bank for overnight safekeeping the evening of the robbery. This money is also missing and assumed to have been stolen by the perpetrators of the Mormon State Bank theft. No serial numbers are recorded. The shipment was carried in an armored semi-trailer truck leased from the Gulf Coast Armored Security Corporation and, due to its unusual size, took over an hour to unload and store at the Mormon State National Bank. The minimum estimated value of this missing money is thirty-one million dollars … I vow to you the FBI will not rest until we bring the felons to justice and recover the thirty-one million dollars …”

  Watching the press conference over a rented television set in their downtown office, the thunderstruck FBI resident agents of Prairie Port could not believe what they were hearing. No one had informed them of the Federal Reserve currency shipment or that the Bureau would be entering the investigation … just as no one had yet informed them that Ed Grafton was en route from Montana to Washington, D.C., and would soon be relieved as head of their resident office. What most every Prairie Port Bureauman did realize, painfully, was the importance of the reestimated bank-theft loss. Thirty-one million dollars was more money than had ever been stolen anywhere in the world.

  SIX

  Pert and comely Nancy Applebridge, a recently hired stringer reporter for United Press, was the first person to reach the eleventh-floor FBI offices in downtown Prairie Port following J. Edgar Hoover’s nationally televised press conference. The one previous Bureau office Applebridge had visited, in her native Chicago, was motion-picture spick-and-span. Rushing into the FBI anteroom in Prairie Port, she found a threadbare rug, two unmatched wooden chairs, a small wood coffee table with a split and reglued surface, and, resting on the table, an uncleaned souvenir ashtray from the St. Louis World’s Fair. The walls were in critical need of new paint. Bending over and peering up through the tiny receptionist window, when the buzzer didn’t work and knocks on the locked interior door brought no response, she saw that the plaster was chipped and cracked along the ceilings beyond … and that seven FBI men, in shirt-sleeves, were dashing about the inner offices picking up and slamming down ringing telephones. What Nancy Applebridge was witnessing, and would later write about, was the end result of a longstanding policy of punitive penury sanctioned against Ed Grafton by his detractors at FBI headquarters.

  No sooner had J. Edgar Hoover announced to the country that $31,000,000 had been stolen from the Mormon State National Bank than the telephones erupted in the Bureau’s Prairie Port offices. Unfortunately, a malfunctioning switchboard for the dozen and a half phones strung across the eight-room suite had not been repaired because, over the last three weeks, Washington headquarters had failed to appropriate often-requested funds for such fixing. An incoming call could ring on any or all of the eighteen instruments … or not one. “Hold” and “Intercom” buttons did not necessarily hold calls or intercommunicate. Nor had Prairie Port been allocated monies to mend its teletype machine to headquarters. The teletype, like the office’s window air-conditioning units, had been on the fritz for two months. A short-wave radio transmitter was operative, but recurring and inexplicable power failures throughout the metropolitan area rendered it ineffective in reaching all but the nearest radio cars. Not that there was much time for radioing.

  Whatever the dismay Strom Sunstrom, Cub Hennessy, Jez Jessup, But
ch Cody, Happy de Camp, Ted Keon and Yates may have registered at learning they had underestimated the largest cash theft in history by approximately thirty million, nine hundred and ninety-three thousand, five hundred dollars was instantly eradicated by a deluge of telephone calls. Phone calls from Prairie Port FBI agents away from the office trying to find out what was coming down. Calls from local media people and national media people and city officials and county officials and state officials and federal officials and law-enforcement agencies across the Midwest, except for the Prairie Port Police Department, which eschewed the Bureau in general and the local office in particular. From professional tipsters and cranks and well-meaning citizens who thought they possessed relevant information regarding the crime. From seers and mystics who had no doubt they possessed relevant information. From amateur sleuths and waiting posses such as the Agatha Christie Garden and Deduction Society of Armbruster, Illinois, and the Covington Vigilant Riding Association of Covington, Kansas. From family and friends. From the masses of unknown curious. Twenty-eight hundred calls in all, before the day would be out, at an office which had never recorded more than one hundred and ten calls in any twenty-four-hour period.

  Assistant senior resident agent John Sunstrom and his six shirt-sleeved subordinate agents, with their switchboard gone haywire, rushed from room to room and ringing phone to ringing phone trying to keep up with the incoming traffic blitz … not noticing in their scramble that a prophetic pattern of mud and the river and exploitation had begun to emerge. The fifth call into the office, logged by Cub Hennessy, was from an overwrought local druggist who requested the FBI come quickly because two mud geysers had just erupted through the sidewalk and street in front of his shop and he had no doubt the robbers were trapped below and up to no good. Ted Keon took and recorded the eleventh call, a tip from a Wayne County farmer with a “talking” mule, a beast which reputedly could tap out messages with its front left hoof and had just let it be known, tappingly, that the missing robbers were hiding on a Mississippi River delta island sixty-one and three-quarter miles downstream from Prairie Port. Butch Cody was recipient of the first “breather” call, number twenty-three, from a whispering voice which identified itself as “TA” and offered, for one million dollars in unmarked paper currency, to name every one of the actual robbers. TA allowed twenty-four hours for his offer to be considered and then hung up. Callers six, nine and fifteen each complained of home electrical power failures and were referred to the Missouri Power and Electric Company by exasperated agents who coded the messages “irrelevant” to Bureau business until Jez Jessup received the second mud alert, call number twenty-eight from the assistant deputy commissioner of the Prairie Port Fire Department, warning that the massive underground flooding not only had caused severe electrical short-circuiting and power failures but had activated a long-dormant mud river under the western section of the city … that three square miles of land in the western section was besieged by mud eruptions and the area was being cordoned off and evacuation procedures were under way … that at least two city councilmen thought the flooding and mud eruptions might be the result of international sabotage and terrorism and that these two council members would like the FBI to drop everything and immediately look into the matter. Cub Hennessy handled call number thirty, a reputed Mississippi River tour-boat captain who wanted to know if any of the missing millions had spilled into the river … and where. Strom took the thirty-third call, spoke to a St. Louis manufacturer of novelties who inquired as to a franchise for official robbery T-shirts. Butch Cody picked up on caller thirty-six, a hydrologist named St. Ives from the Missouri Valley Geological Survey who said the assistant deputy commissioner of the Prairie Port Fire Department had gotten his facts about the mud jumbled, then went on to explain that the geysering of mud in the three-square-mile area in the western section of the city was certainly caused by a subterranean mud river, but that the real danger was that this river was trapped and building up pressure at an enormous rate … that if this pressure wasn’t substantially eased, by yet undetermined means, a mud volcano could rapidly form and erupt with enormous force as had been the case in that area in 1926 … that in 1926 thirty-one people had died in the earthquake effect accompanying the volcano explosions. It was call number forty-one, however, taken by Ted Keon, which was to prove pivotal to the career of John Sunstrom … and to the fate of his resident agents.