Seven Silent Men (16 page)

Siren wailing, wheels spinning and skidding, a River Patrol ambulance plowed through the deep sand leading from the access road down to the riverfront swimming area at Prairie Port's South Beach. A burly lifeguard was applying artificial respiration to the corpse of Teddy Anglaterra. Ambulance paramedics took over, gave oxygen to the motionless body. Eight minutes later, at 10:21
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., a first-year intern at Missouri Presbyterian Hospital's emergency room cut away Teddy's shirt and discovered that the dead man's upper torso bore fourteen deep stab wounds. The administrating doctor was summoned. After examining the wounds, as well as the ugly bruises on Teddy's head and chest, the doctor berated the intern for admitting an obvious homicide victim to the overcrowded emergency room of a private hospital. The doctor ordered that the corpse be put back in the ambulance and sent directly to the city morgue. The intern wondered aloud if the police and next of kin shouldn't be contacted. The doctor railed that this was exactly what he was trying to avoid … that there were far more important duties for the hospital's hard pressed staff than getting embroiled in the paper work of processing a murder victim.
Forget the body was ever here
, the doctor raged as he left the room. The intern called the garage and ordered an ambulance to the emergency room. He searched Teddy's pockets. No identification was found in the water-soaked wallet. The ambulance driver appeared and was told to deliver the unidentified corpse to the city morgue as a John Doe and to merely state it was found at South Beach. Later, conscience-stricken by his actions, the young intern called Channel 10, the city's leading television station, and told a desk assistant in the news department that a corpse had been found at South Beach. A murder victim. The desk assistant, inundated by phone calls resulting from J. Edgar Hoover's televised address, couldn't have cared less about the tip, made no notation of having received it. Even if there had been interest, little could have been done. Every news person at the station, and anywhere else in the city, was assigned to the story of the decade … the Mormon State bank robbery.

Rubber-booted scientists from the Missouri Valley Geological Survey dropped through the hole in the bank vault … descended a rope ladder into the mud-crusted cavern … planted tall metal measuring rods firmly into the huge chamber's wet floor, secured other hydrological measuring instruments in the opening in the north side of the cavern as well as in the tunnel mouth on the south wall before returning up the rope ladder. Five minutes later, at approximately 10:41
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., water gushed forth from both openings … and in the incredibly short period of nine seconds reached a level of nine feet.

And stopped.

SEVEN

116s led the master case assignment list. Classification 116, the “FBI's numerical prefix for Energy and Research Development Applicants … background checks on persons seeking employment at the newly built Atomic Energy Commission research laboratories west of the city. 116s accounted for sixty-three of the five hundred and seventy-one cases being investigated by the eighteen agents of the Prairie Port residency at the time J. Edgar Hoover ordered Sunstrom to become temporary senior resident agent in charge as well as to assume personal responsibility for the Mormon State robbery manhunt, a case titled and prefixed: Romor 91.

Gracing the cellar of the numerical count were such esoteric single inquiries as Classification 74, Applications for Executive Clemency; 142, Illegal Use of a Railway Pass; 103, Interstate Transport of Stolen Cattle; 66, Bureau Automobile Accidents. Due to an oceangoing yacht running aground a delta island on the Prairie Port side of the Mississippi River and the suspicious disappearance of the ship's captain, the office was investigating a rare Classification 45 … Crime on the High Seas.

The remaining five hundred and three cases, between the top and bottom of the list, covered another forty-odd classifications equally distributed, more or less, among the major subsections of Civil Rights, Accounting and Fraud, Fugitives, and Employee Security/Special Inquiries other than for the A.E.C. Woefully lacking, in the minds of most Prairie Port agents, were cases involving “pure” or “hard” criminal violations such as bank robbery.

The sixty-three Classification 116 Energy and Research Development Applicant investigations, like Romor 91, had originated in Prairie Port and were, therefore, Office of Origin, or OO, cases whose prime jurisdiction lay with the originating office. Fifty percent of the other inquiries being worked on by Grafton, Strom and their men had originated elsewhere, leaving Prairie Port merely the IO, or Investigating Office, with no control over the case other than to provide requested information and send it on to the OO. Agents of the Prairie Port residency, already invested with more autonomy than most field office operatives, favored OO cases, preferred the control of origin, the insulation from outside meddling.

Personal preferences regarding specific classifications contributed to what Assistant to the Director of the FBI A. R. Roland cited as the “contentious group temperament” of the Prairie Port resident agency. Ed Grafton's abhorrence of Classification 26, Interstate Transportation of Stolen Motor Vehicles or Aircraft, resulted in those investigations receiving the lowest priority possible. Grafton so despised I.T.S.V.s for being “unpure” and “soft” and “demeaning to the integrity of honorable field operatives” that he twice said so on local television interview shows … further denounced I.T.S.V. on one of the two shows as “paltry statistical nonsense created by important headquarters brass monkeys who wouldn't know a field investigation from a dry martini without olives.”

Classification 100, Internal Security, involved the investigation of seditious and hate organizations. Ironically it was Connecticut's Ralph Dafney who felt it questionable that except for some follow-up IO inquiries related to the May 5, 1970, burning of the Air Force Reserve Officers Training Corps building at Washington University in St. Louis, the full effort of the Prairie Port agency's Classification 100 cases were directed at the local KKK. Strom explained that the matter had more to do with Ed Grafton's vendetta against Wilkie Jarrel than the Klan per se … that Grafton wanted to link Jarrel to anything deemed derogatory such as the Klan. And Grafton did eventually establish this linkage. Bigotry, in the circa 1971 FBI of J. Edgar Hoover, was not a stranger. At least not the bigotry of omission. No women and precious few blacks, Hispanics and Jews could be found among the Bureau's 8,548 nationwide agent population.

It was Classification 25, Violation of the Selective Service Act, which rendered the Prairie Port office a divisive cut. Ten of the eighteen agents assigned to the residency had served in the armed forces prior to entering the FBI. The eldest of these men, Madden “Happy” de Camp, had taken part in World War II. The youngest, Rodney Willis, had fought in Vietnam. The remaining eight were veterans of the Korean conflict. All had been officers. All were not of one mind as to the Vietnam War itself, the peace movement, draft dodgers, conscientious objectors and deserters. Nor was there unanimity on these issues among the eight resident agents who had not been in the military. Differences of opinion, in the past, seldom had affected the men's discharge of official duties.

With Vietnam, though, work had been affected. As attitudes polarized, antagonisms grew. Conflicting viewpoints erupted in divisive verbal exchanges. Twice, heated discussions of the war provoked a near fistfight.

Grafton, not unpredictably when matters of this nature boiled over, had walked away … left the tempest to the one person who could calm the waters, Strom Sunstrom. Strom, friend of all … diplomat and father-confessor and house hand-holder who read the men of the office and their wives much as a concert pianist read music … and who at times played them with comparable skill. Strom Sunstrom, the master of everybody's life but his own …

Following J. Edgar Hoover's call to the Prairie Port resident office, a reversal of roles occurred. It was Cub Hennessy and Jez Jessup who attempted to do the calming. It was eternally even-tempered Strom Sunstrom who had exploded and marched, cursing ringing phones and the expulsion of Grafton, across the floor and slammed the door and locked himself in the combination office-conference room he had shared with Grafton.

Jez and Cub allowed thirty minutes to elapse before going to the door and lightly rapping and reminding Sunstrom that much had to be done. No answer came. They persisted. The lock unlocked. The door remained shut. A voice on the other side said to come in.

Strom sat at the head of the conference table with his hands folded together on top of a yellow pad. In front of the pad lay his pipe and tobacco pouch. Resting on a cart to his immediate right was the Magnavox tape recorder. “Didn't mean to be self-indulgent out there, lads.” He sounded like the old familiar low-keyed Strom Sunstrom. “Haggish and rude as well. Forgive me. Haggishness will bring us short shrift now. You're correct. There's much to do. Fetch the others, would you?”

“What about the phones?” Cub asked.

“Take them off the hook, as I said.”

Hennessy, Jessup, Cody, de Camp, Keon and Yates seated themselves around the table. Strom explained how J. Edgar Hoover had ordered him to replace Grafton on a temporary basis as SRA and that Cub Hennessy was to move up and become assistant senior resident agent, and more immediate than this was Romor 91, the investigation of the Mormon State National Bank robbery … Romor 91 was now officially their case … Prairie Port was the Office of Origin … so additional agents would be transferred in for back-up assignment and haughty Denis Corticun would show up and probably try to hog the show but this wouldn't be easily accomplished because of what J. Edgar Hoover had proclaimed to Strom. Beyond Prairie Port being the OO for Romor 91, J. Edgar had designated Strom Sunstrom his own personal proctor in the investigation. His chieftain. His surrogate.

“Let's have at Mormon State, shall we?” Strom paused to watch Rodney Willis and Donnie Bracken hurry into the room and seat themselves at the table. “There's something I'd best get out of the way first, if you'll bear with me.”

Strom rose, began to pace slowly around the table, thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. “I'm not all that adept at speech-making any more. I'm uneasy talking to you right now. I know if all the men were here, I could not say what I wanted to. Could not get it out.

“What I want to say, to tell you, is that I believe Washington wouldn't be too unhappy if we failed with Romor 91. They could be, conceivably, counting on our failing. Maybe not Director Hoover or A. R. Roland, but the rest of the Brass Balls who've been flogging this office for so many years. And why shouldn't they expect this? I would, wouldn't you? We're an odd lot at best. The Brass Balls probably think anything we've achieved is because of Graf … that without Graf to lead us we're nothing. They might even feel with Graf gone there's no reason to continue penalizing him with the likes of us … that they should send all of us packing and repopulate the office with safe and sane agents.

“… Ed Grafton, of all the men I've known, was a remarkable leader. He elicited from us a supreme effort and led as a true leader should lead, by example. He could, quite honestly, do anything we could do better. And he cared about us. That, to say the least, is unusual at the FBI.

“Graf has been banished, and I have been ordered to serve in his stead. I am no leader by experience or design. My skills, whatever they be, lie elsewhere. I know you are my friends and wish me well. I beg you, in the name of that friendship, to face the reality that I am not Ed Grafton. What I can do for you in the four to six weeks allotted to us … and that is how much time I estimate we have to strut our stuff or be deported, or worse … is to estimate the most efficient use of our personnel, of each of your skills. We are, in spite of our troubled histories, a talented bunch. If you bear with me, abide my often rather pedantic approach to matters, maybe I won't let you down as I worry I will at this moment. Maybe, with the help of God or beyond, we might even surprise a Brass Ball or two.”

Preston Lyle, striding in on the conference with a big “Thirty-one mil, can you fucking believe it?” would later confess having felt as if he had violated a prayer meeting at which the pastor was stepping down from a pulpit and the parishioners, heads bowed, were mumbling quiet amens.

“Who died?” Pres wanted to know.

“Sit down and shut up,” somebody or other told him.

Pres complied.

“Now for Romor 91,” Strom announced with noticeable relish. He reseated himself at the head of the table and began passing out yellow pads and pencils. “Romor 91, past and present. What we know, don't know, ought to know and had better damn well find out. Let's recapitulate … and stop me if I'm wrong.

“We know that Mormon State National Bank was not due to officially open until Tuesday, the twenty-fourth of August … which, come to think of it, is today. By the way, is it opening today?”

“No,” Jez answered, “they put it off a week.”

Strom continued. “We know that at approximately four
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. Friday, the twentieth of August, a Brink's truck delivered twenty-one packages to Mormon State which were placed in the vault. We know that two days later, at seven thirty-six
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., Sunday, the twenty-second of August, the alarm went off at Mormon State. We know the alarm system, a Thermex scanning mechanism, indicated that seven or eight perpetrators were in the bank, six downstairs, one or two on the staircase leading up from the vault. We know that splice marks were later found on the main cable of the Thermex system. We know that the vault sank into the concrete floor and that when it was cut open on the top there was already a hole cut in the bottom … a hole through which Brewmeister was seen looking up. We know Brewmeister was washed from sight and found twenty-two miles away on a delta island in the river.