Later in the morning, McGurk locked his office door at headquarters and dialed a special number.
"It's okay now, sir," he said. The response was not pleasant.
"Well, look, sir, I'm sorry," said McGurk. "It was the first time. Sure the outside doors should have been locked. He never should have gotten in. It won't happen again. Yes, sir, I know it was an imposition on you. Yes, sir. I know, sir. Well, I guarantee we won't be overheard again and you won't have to entertain anyone like him again in your home. I'm sorry if he disturbed Janet, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, Commissioner. We won't make any mistakes any more."
CHAPTER TWELVE
During the night, while Remo slept on a bed piled high with 4,800 black socks, the press was reporting another wave of killings. The assassination teams had struck again-and this time the pattern had changed.
The first change came in West Springfield, Mass., where the killers left a clue. It was a small square of blue and white striped material and it was found clutched tightly in the hand of Rogers Gordon.
Gordon was the oldest living member of the planning board for America on Parade, one of the country's biggest commercial fairs, and his rank gave him the privilege of riding the overhead cable car through a ceremonial paper ribbon to open the week-long celebration.
Gordon was supposed to ride alone, but at the last minute he invited into the cable car two men with official badges who had accompanied him up the two flights of stairs to the loading ramp. The car moved away from the platform, sliding smoothly along the overhead cable toward the paper strip stretched across the cable between two utility poles. Several hundred people watched from below. Many of them were radio newsmen broadcasting remotes on the opening of the Exposition.
A cheer went up from the crowd as the golden cable car smashed through the thin paper ribbon. Then, over the cheer, a few faint cracks were heard, and all the eyes looking skyward saw Gordon lean against the edge of the car for a moment, reach out behind him toward the two men, and topple over the side.
He landed atop a radio station trailer, plummeting through its thin plastic roof, coming to rest on a small table at which an announcer, Tracy Cole, sat sipping coffee and broadcasting the morning's events at breakneck speed. Rogers Gordon had four slugs in his chest. Even with those, he might have lived a few moments longer, long enough to have told someone that the two men who had presented themselves at his home that morning were not really federal agents who had uncovered his gun-running business; but the cigar smoke in the tiny broadcasting mobile studio effectively prevented anyone from breathing. Rogers Gordon spoke in death, though. As his hand slowly opened, it offered up to Cole-who didn't miss a beat in his delivery-the tiny blue and white patch of material. Police later announced that Gordon must have ripped it from the shirt of one of his killers, both of whom escaped in the confusion.
The clue was the first change in pattern, the first time in the wave of violence that a clue had been left behind.
Another change was discovered in Newark, where the body of an assistant to the mayor was found in the living room of his home in a residential section along the city's shoreline, a jerry-built conglomeration of instant blight.
There were three slugs in his head, one through each eye and one through the mouth, gangland's traditional imprint on the squealer silenced. Staring at the dead body like an unblinking eye was an open wall safe. It had been hidden behind a $2.98 print of a Hieronymus Bosch painting mounted in a $129 gilt frame. It was the only piece of artwork in the entire house except, of course, the bowls of plastic fruit on every table.
The wall safe was empty. The city official's wife had been away visiting relatives, had found the body when she returned home and called the police. When they questioned her, she was hysterical and sobbing, not so much from grief as from relief that she was not home when the killers arrived, because she had no doubt that she would have bought the farm too.
No, she tearfully told the police, there had been nothing of value in the wall safe. Just some old mortgage papers, her husband's military record-a bad conduct discharge-and a pair of bronzed baby booties from their first grandchild.
The police nodded, dutifully wrote down what she said and did not believe a word of it. For it was common knowledge that the assistant to the mayor was the man to deal with for a "license" to run a bookmaking shop in town; that he was the man who personally collected the weekly dues from every bookie in town, and that even though he technically collected the money and passed it on to higher-ups, a certain amount of shrinkage inevitably occurred and that shrinkage had made him a very rich man. There was no doubt that the safe had contained a great deal of money.
"A hundred thou," one detective said.
"Sheeit. Five hundred thou," his partner said as they were walking to the car.
"Sheeit, yourself. Maybe a mill."
That overstated the case somewhat. The safe actually had contained $353,716, mostly in large bills. But it was a robbery-the first time money had been taken in the wave of assassinations.
Money and a clue also figured 3,000 miles away. Floorboards had been pried loose and money stolen from its hiding place under them in a Los Angeles brownstone owned by Atrion Belliphant, a Hollywood director whose films always failed but whose lifestyle was fed and financed by the world's largest system of producing and selling pornographic films, a system based largely upon inducing drug addiction in young girls.
His body had been found by his fifteen-year-old red-haired mistress when she awoke from a heroin-induced sleep. Police knew money had been taken because several cash wrappers were found in the flooring cavity under the loose boards.
And again a clue. In Belliphant's hand was a jade and gold cufflink which he must have ripped from the shirt of the killer who had jammed a battery-operated vibrator into Belliphant's mouth and down into his throat, and then turned it on, letting the movie-man jiggle-strangle to death.
A pocket and a cufflink.
Two hordes of cash.
A new pattern.
At the moment, they sat in a pile on the desk of Inspector William McGurk in a small office off the old police range and gymnasium on Twentieth Street and Second Avenue.
McGurk had just finished counting the money and putting it into a large metal strongbox. He wrapped each pile of money in a piece of waxed cloth and carefully tightened them with rubber bands. From a small white memo pad on his desk, he snatched two pieces of paper and wrote down the amounts in each pile. $353,716. $122,931.
He slid the sheets under the rubber bands of the corresponding packets of money.
From his center desk drawer, he took two envelopes. Into one he put a jade and gold cufflink. Into the other, larger envelope, he put a blue and white striped shirt. It was missing a pocket. He also put into that envelope a purchase receipt from a small men's shop in Troy, Ohio, which specialized in tailor-made clothes. He put the two envelopes on top of the piles of cash in the strongbox, locked the box, and placed it in a small floor safe that stood in the corner, its open door showing the empty interior. He locked the safe, then turned around with a self-satisfied expression and walked around to sit at his desk. He looked up as a knock came at the door. "Come in," he called.
The door pushed open and a big beefy man came in, wearing the dark blue, shadow-striped suit that was, all over the country, a uniform for high-ranking police officers. McGurk smiled when he saw the man.
"Brace," he called, rising from his seat to offer a hand. "Good to see you. When'd you get in?"
"About an hour ago. I met the rest of my team on the plane."
"Did you bring them?"
"No. They're waiting at the hotel."
McGurk waved his visitor to a seat. "When's your plane back?"