The Union Club Mysteries (6 page)

Griswold had been absent from the Union Club for several of our postprandial sessions, but now he sat there, to all appearances sound asleep. His shaggy white mustache puffed outward regularly under the force of his exhalations.

I said, "He can't have been away on business. He
must
be retired."

"Retired from what?" said Baranov skeptically. "You don't believe all those fairy tales he tells us, do you?"

"I don't know," said Jennings. "Most of them seem quite plausible."

"That's a matter of opinion," said Baranov. "For one thing, all those tales of spy and counterspy—I'll bet he gets them out of his imagination. Look here, I'm sure he's never left the country. What kind of a spy would never leave the country? What's there to do in the United States?"

Griswold's glass of scotch and soda, quite full, suspended midway even as he slept and (as ever) in no danger of spilling, moved slightly, as though operated by remote control, in the direction of his lips. It moved further and finally reached those lips. Griswold, with no sign of having awakened, sipped delicately, removed the glass and said, "I don't admit I have never left the country."

His eyes opened and he said, "And if I had never done so, there would still be plenty to occupy an agent right here at home. There is an honorable list of those who died right here under the Stars and Stripes—like Archie Davidson, to name just one."

Archie Davidson [said Griswold] never left the United States, something which you uninformeds seem to think is true of me. Throughout his dozen years of service for the Department, however, Archie was never without something to do.

Does it occur to you gentlemen that there are well over a hundred foreign embassies and an even larger number of consulates in the United States?

Every single one of them must gather information that is of service to their nation, as our embassies and consulates do abroad in the service of our nation. Information gathering must be carried out more or less clandestinely and, in the case of a number of embassies, illegally, and for purposes that menace the security of our country.

Furthermore, the internal political battles of various nations are fought out on the territory of the United States. Various terrorist groups, or dissidents, or freedom fighters (they're called different things, according to viewpoint) operate here.

All these things must engage our attention and Archie was an excellent worker: unobtrusive, skilled and persuasive.

That he be persuasive was important, for one of the tasks of any skilled agent is that he manage to gain the confidence of someone on the other side. Someone working for the enemy is clearly a particularly reliable source of information, whether he is a defector on principle, a greedy fellow in search of money or other rewards, or simply an overconfident blabbermouth. Naturally, a defector on principle is the most reliable source and the one most likely to take large risks.

There was no one like Archie for finding the enemy who would work with us out of conviction and, at the time under discussion, he had one. We knew none of the details, of course, but the Department was pretty sure he had one. It was the easiest way of accounting for the nature and reliability of the information he fed us. ' Nor did we try to find out what his source was. It makes sense not to do so.

When one has a spy in the enemy camp, the fewer who know his identity, the safer the spy and the connection. Even if the agent were to communicate the identity to a thoroughly reliable co-worker, the communication itself would be a point of weakness. Messages can be intercepted and interpreted, words overheard, gestures understood. The behavior of two people can serve as a more reliable lead for enemy eyes, than the behavior of one, the behavior of three still more so, and so on.

It is best, then, if there is a thin line between agent and enemy informer, a
very
thin line. If only the agent knows the informer, that is best. The informer himself feels more secure if he is confident that only one person knows what he is doing. He will then speak more freely. Archie had the ability to inspire that kind of confidence and he could do so because he had the conscious knowledge that he never double-crossed.

It was a very special loss to us when Archie was killed.

There was no way of telling that he had been killed in the line of duty. No one left a calling card. He was merely found dead in a doorway in a dubious street of one of our large eastern cities.

He had been knifed, and the knife had been withdrawn and was gone. His wallet was also gone, and it might be taken for granted that it was an ordinary mugging.

That is what the local police took it for, at any rate. Archie was not a well-known person; he had a professional unobtrusiveness and his cover was that of a clerk in a liquor store, so there was no reason for the police to give it special attention or for the press to stir much.

Nor could the Department take a very active interest. In the first place, we didn't find out about it till well after the fact. In the second, it would have been counterproductive to adopt too high a profile in the matter.

The killing
might
conceivably have been an ordinary mugging with no connection whatever to Archie's work. In that case, it would certainly be a bad move to allow anyone watching the Department (and of course we are under surveillance by dozens of groups of undesirables) to learn, definitely, that Archie was an agent. That could lead them to other agents and could endanger much of our work. In particular, it might endanger the enemy informer that Archie was using and that we might perhaps salvage.

Then, too, we didn't really care whether Archie was killed by an ordinary mugger or by the enemy. We don't deal in revenge at the Department. We're not going to waste our time finding out who killed one of our men so that we can kill in return. Our work is more important than melodrama of that sort. Besides, even if Archie were killed, let us say, at the orders of an important foreign embassy, the actual murderer might well be a hired hophead, who wouldn't even remember the details of the hiring.

No, what was important to us was Archie's work, not Archie. And the most important part of his work at the time he was killed was his link to the enemy informer— that thin line that was so thin it stretched between two people only, and that was snapped when one of those two people was killed.

Unless, of course, Archie had somehow managed to give information that could allow us to reconstruct the thin line. It didn't seem likely that he could have done so, but it would have been his duty to do so if he could and this therefore had to be followed up.

Naturally, I was the one sent to deal with the police. My air of calm authority always worked well with them and smoothed the troubled waters that inevitably arose when the local law-enforcement people thought they were going to be overwhelmed by the Feds.

I spent considerable time in indirection that served to obscure the exact reason why Washington might be interested, but I won't bother you with that. I will tell it far more directly than it actually was.

I said, "Was he still alive when he was found?"

"Hell no. He'd been dead at least three hours." "Too bad. It's always nice when there's still life in them and they can say something."

"You mean like 'The man who killed me was—' and then they croak before they can get the word out?"

"We like them to get the word out. He didn't leave any messages, I suppose?"

"You mean, written in his own blood on the sidewalk?" The homicide man seemed to be trying to get a rise out of me, but I didn't oblige. He said, "There was some blood soaked into the jacket he was wearing, but none near or on his hands. What's more, there was nothing scrabbled in the dust; no words formed out of banana peels and other garbage. Listen, his wallet was gone and it was all we could do to work out his identity."

"His pockets were searched?"

"Of course."

"Anything interesting? Do you have a list?"

"I have better than that," said the detective. "Here's the stuff itself." He upended a plastic bag and let it all spill out on his desk.

I went over the material. Keys, change, a small pocket comb, a memo book, an eyeglass case, a ball-point pen. I looked through the memo book. There was nothing in it, though several of the leaves were torn out. A good agent puts as little on paper as possible. If for some reason he must record something, he gets rid of it as soon as possible.

"Anything else?" I asked.

The detective shook the plastic bag wordlessly. A little wad of paper fell out to his apparent surprise. I picked it up and spread it out. It said in straggly capital letters: CALL TAXICAB.

The paper was from the memo book. I used the ballpoint to make marks on a piece of scrap paper on the desk. It was the right color and thickness.

I said, "Was this written after he was stabbed?"

The detective shrugged. "Could be."

"Which pocket was this found in? Was it found wadded? Where was the pen?"

We had to locate the officer who had first found Archie and the detective who had then arrived on the scene. The results seemed conclusive. The paper, wadded, was in the left jacket pocket; the fountain-pen with Archie's right hand holding it in the right jacket pocket. If no one had considered all this, it was because no importance was attached to the murder.

It was clear, however, that Archie's last effort, like the good agent he was, gave us important information. It had to be some reference to his contact, some way of reconstituting the thin line.

I considered. Archie didn't say which taxicab to call. Was it a particular company? Did he use a particular company and could we find out which it was? Was there some message we could gather if we used the Yellow Pages and turned to the "taxicab" entry? Or was it something else?

I thought very intensively for a minute or so and then took a course of action that located the enemy informer and reconstituted the link. Before the other side located the informer and dealt with him, we had had time to gather some important items of information that helped in the satisfactory resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. So it was a happy ending—

"No you don't," I said, tramping hard on his shoe to keep him awake. "You haven't told us the important thing."

Griswold frowned. "Certainly, I did. I took a course of action that located the enemy informer and—''

"Yes, but
how?
What taxicab company did you call?"

"I didn't call any. Good God, man, don't tell me you don't understand. When you make a local phone call, you dial seven numbers. Each number, from 2 to 9, has three letters associated with it, dating back to the days when exchanges had names. We have ABC in the 2 position, DEF in the 3 position and so on. It's possible to give a telephone number in terms of letters if there are no 1's or 0's in it. There are no letters at all associated with 1; and only a Z associated with 0 on
some
dials.

"So I didn't call any taxicab company. I dialed T-A-X-I-C-A-B, which in numbers is 829-4222. That was the contact point. Undoubtedly, Archie found it easier to remember the word than the number combination and when dying, the word was all he remembered—so he scrawled it in desperation."

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Baranov rustled his paper with definite annoyance as we sat within the august confines of the Union Club that evening. He said, "There's been another gang killing in Brooklyn."

"What else is new?" I asked, unimpressed.

"Well, damn it," said Baranov, "now they'll put in who knows how many police man-hours on the case while valuable police work languishes. Who cares if one gangster kills another? Let them."

"It sets a bad precedent," said Jennings sententiously. "Murder is murder and you can't let it go. Besides, you don't really know it's a gang killing till you investigate."

"Then again," I added, "hardly any of them are ever solved, so maybe the police don't waste too much time."

"Yes, they do," responded Baranov hotly. "There's plenty of waste, however little time they spend on it. No one involved will talk and the police aren't allowed to beat it out of them. Even close relatives of the victim won't talk, the damn fools. You'd think they'd want to see the murderer caught."

It was at this time that Griswold stirred. His soft snore ended in a brief period of near strangulation and, recovering, he smoothed his white mustache with the hand that wasn't holding his scotch and soda.

He said, "Of course they want to see the murderer get his, but not by police procedure. They want it by gang vengeance, which is more sure in any case. The criminal ethic depends on the closed mouth. Without that, the forces of society learn too much and they all suffer. There was the case once—"

For a moment, it looked as though he might drop off again, but Jennings, who was seated closest, kicked his ankle and Griswold's eyes opened wide. With a soft "ouch" he continued—

There was the case once [said Griswold] of Eighty-eight Jinks. He was christened Christopher, I believe, but he was a pianist by talent and the way he stroked the eighty-eight keys rechristened him. At least, no one ever called him anything else but Eighty-eight to my knowledge.

He might have become a great pianist, too, many people thought. He could play anything he had ever heard, in any style, and could improvise chords that would tear your heart out. He had a good voice, too. Something was missing, though. The drive wasn't there. And he drank quite expertly and that ruined what chance remained.

By the time he was thirty-five, he was making a precarious living by tinkling the keys in various barrooms and second-rate night spots, and running errands for the gangs. He was a gentle guy even when he was the worse for drink—which was most of the time, though that never seemed to get in the way of his fingers on the keyboard.

The police knew him well and laid off him generally. He never made a nuisance of himself, so there was never occasion to lodge a drunk-and-disorderly charge against him. He did not use drugs or push them; he had no part in the operations of the ladies of the evening, who infested the establishments for which he played; and the errands he ran for the boys were innocuous enough as such things go.

Sometimes the police did try to pump him for something, but he would never talk.

One time he said, "Look, fellows, it don't do me any good to be seen with you. It ain't just me. I got a sister who works hard, and she's married and got a little kid. I ain't no credit to her and just my being alive does her enough harm. I don't want to bring her anything worse. I don't want her hassled and she'll
be
hassled if anyone thinks I'm with the cops too much."

And that, of course, is one reason why people are so closemouthed even when you would think that it would be to their interest to talk. It never is. Talking is the unforgivable sin and the strikeback is not only at the talker, but at those near to him.

So the police let him alone, because they saw his point and knew he wouldn't talk and that he didn't have anything to talk about anyway.

Which made it sad when he was knocked off.

He was found with a knife in his back in an alley. When the police got there he was still alive, because for once the knifing was reported. At least someone called in to say there were cries of help from the alley. Whoever called didn't leave his name, of course, and hung up quickly, but we don't usually get even that much in that neighborhood. Generally, the corpse is found only well after the fact, after which everyone in the neighborhood gets glassy-eyed when questions are asked and a surprising number of them turn out not even to speak English.

The police never found out why Eighty-eight was knifed. Anyone would have thought he was harmless enough. On the other hand, there are internal politics in gangs, as anywhere else, and some errand that Eighty-eight had run might well have discomfited a gang member in some way.

The policeman who was on the scene knew Eighty-eight well, and once he found the poor fellow alive, sent out the call for an ambulance at once. Eighty-eight stared at the policeman peacefully, with no look of concern in his eyes.

The policeman said, "We'll get you out of here, Eighty-eight. You'll be all right."

Eighty-eight smiled. "What are you talking about, cop? I'm dying. I'll be all right? When I die, I'll be all right. I'll be down in hell with my friends and my hopes, and if they've got a red-hot piano down there, I'll manage."

"Who did this to you, Eighty-eight?"

"What's it to you, or to anyone?" "Don't you want to get the rat who did this to you?"

"Why? If you get him, does that mean I heal up? I die anyway. Maybe he did me a favor. If I had guts I'd of done this to me myself years ago."

"We've got to get him, Eighty-eight. Help us out. If you're dying, it won't hurt you. What can he do to you? Dance on your grave?"

Eighty-eight smiled more weakly. "Probably won't find no grave. I'll just be dumped on the garbage heap— with the other garbage. They won't dance there; they'll dance on my sister. Can't have that. I'd appreciate it if you'd just let it be known I didn't say
nothing."

"We'll say that, Eighty-eight, don't worry. But make it a lie. Just give us a name, or a hint, or a sign with your head. Anything. Look, Eighty-eight, it could help me out on my job and I won't let on you did anything."

Eighty-eight seemed faintly amused. "You want help? All right, how's this?" His fingers moved as though they were tapping on invisible piano keys and he hummed a few notes of music.

"What's that?" asked the policeman.

"Your hint, cop. I can't talk no more."

Eighty-eight closed his eyes and died en route to the hospital.

They called me in the next day. It was getting to be a habit with them and I didn't like it. I had work of my own to do and helping them brought me thanks, but nothing tangible. I couldn't even get a traffic ticket fixed out of it.

I said, "A gangland killing? Who cares? What's the difference if you solve it or not?" The natural reaction, in other words.

I was talking to Carmody, a lieutenant in the homicide division.

He said, with a growl, "Do I have to get that from you? Isn't it enough we get it from idiots in general. For one thing, the guy who got it was a poor bastard who harmed no one but himself and who deserved better of life—but let's not be sentimental. Look at it this way—

"If we can pin this on someone, we shake up the organization he belongs to. That might amount to nothing. We might not get a conviction, or, if we do, the gang carries on without him. But there's a chance—just a chance— that the shake-up will work cracks in the organization. We might be able to take advantage of those cracks and bust it wide open and pick up the pieces as far as Newark. We've got to play for that, Griswold, and you've got to try to help us."

"But how?" I asked.

"We've got a lead to the killer. I want you to talk to Officer Rodney, who was with Eighty-eight Jinks—he's the dead man—before he died."

Officer Rodney did not look happy. Having a lead he could neither understand nor communicate was no road to advancement.

Painstakingly, he told us of the conversation with Eighty-eight, the same conversation I myself have just described. I don't know how accurate his account was, but, of course, it was the tune that counted.

I said to him, "What kind of tune?"

"I don't know, sir. Just a few notes."

"Did you recognize it? Ever hear it before? Can you name it?"

"No, sir. I never heard it before. It didn't sound like it was part of a popular song or anything like that. Just a few notes that didn't sound like anything."

"Can you remember it? Can you hum it or sing it?"

Rodney looked at me rather horrified. "I'm not much of a singer."

"We're not holding auditions. Just do your best."

He tried several times and then gave up in complete misery. "I'm sorry, sir. He only sang it once and it was like nothing I ever heard. I can't come up with anything."

So we let him go, and he looked relieved at the chance of getting away from questioning that made him seem helpless.

Carmody looked at me anxiously. "What do we do? Do you suppose we could have him put under hypnosis? He might remember then."

I said, "Suppose we did, and he remembered the tune and we recognized it and saw the relationship to a suspect. Could we introduce it all as evidence? Would Rodney survive cross-examination? Would it be convincing to a jury?"

"No, to all three. But if we were satisfied we knew who it was, we could try to break him down—find motive, means and opportunity."

"Do you have any suspects at all?"

"There's a neighborhood gang, of course, and they include three men we have good reason to think have been involved in past killings."

"Get after all three, then."

"Not convincing. If you're after all three, none are scared, since we're clearly in the dark. And it might be someone else altogether, too. If we knew one man and zeroed in on him and him alone—"

"Well," I said, "what are the names of the three suspects you just mentioned."

He said, "Moose Matty, Ace Begad and Gent Diamond."

"In that case," I said, "we may not have a problem. Get Officer Rodney and get us both to the nearest piano."

We located a piano in the studio across the street and I said to Rodney, "Listen to this, officer, and tell me if this is what Eighty-eight hummed." I tapped out several notes.

Rodney looked surprised. "It does sound like it, sir! Could you do it again?"

I did it again. "Just this one more time, officer," I said, "or you'll start believing it to be the tune no matter what I play. Now is this it?"

"Yes it is," he said in excitement. "That's it exactly."

"Thank you, officer. Good job and I'm sure you'll get a commendation for it.—Lieutenant, we know who the murderer is, or at least we know who Eighty-eight said it was."

Well, I don't know whether there were repercussions as far as Newark, because I didn't follow the case thereafter, but I understand they got the murderer and even put him in prison, which is a happy ending. Officer Rodney got a commendation; Lieutenant Carmody got the credit; I got back to my own work; and all of you, of course, see what happened.

*
      
*
      
*

"No, we don't," roared Jennings, "and don't go to sleep on us. This time, Griswold, you have gone too far and you're simply putting us on. How could you reconstruct the notes and how could you use them to spot the murderer?"

Griswold snorted. "Where's the need for explanation? There are only seven notes and then the eighth starts the series over again—
do, re mi, fa, sol, la, ti,
and then
do
starts it over. Well, they are also expressed as letters: C, D, E, F, G, A, B, and then C again. You've heard of 'middle C and the 'key of G' or 'D minor and so on.

"Very well. It is possible, though not usual, for a name to consist only of the note letters of A through G. Ace Begad is an example, and as soon as I heard it, I felt sure he was the murderer. I spelled the name in musical notes:
la, do, mi, ti, mi, sol, la, re
or A, C, E, B, E, G, A, D, with a short pause between the third and fourth notes and Rodney recognized the combination when I played it—and that's all there was to it."

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