George Chesbro: Shadow of a Broken Man

Using the pause control between each question and answer, I played the Barnes tape into the machine, then scanned the readout. The parts of Barnes's story where he talked about Rafferty's supposed death were consistently skewed toward the high end of the graph.

According to the machine, Harold Q. Barnes had been lying through his teeth.

Dirty Harold bothered me all night. There was a recurring dream in which I had somehow become a film director; Barnes was an actor who couldn't remember his lines. He was naked, sitting in a pool of grease and gnawing on a hamburger while I harangued him.

"Are you now, or have you ever been, an architect?"

No answer.

"Are you an actor, Harold? Are you acting ? What the hell are you all about, Harold?"

No answer.

The alarm rang precisely at eight. I slapped it into submission and went back to sleep. The phone woke me up fifteen minutes later.

"You'd better get your ass down here, brother," Garth said in his cheery morning growl. "I think I've got something that'll interest you."

"You said ten."

"I'm saying now. Where's your sense of dedication? Get it down here!"

"All right. Let me get some coffee."

"Bring coffee," Garth said. The line went dead.

I fell into my clothes and made my way downtown to the station house. Garth was sitting at his desk, studying the contents of two pea-green manila folders. He held out his hand as I entered and I stuck a container of coffee into it. He didn't look up.

"What have you got, Garth?"

He motioned for me to sit down as he passed one of the folders over for me to see. "Read it, Mongo," he said seriously.

The field report on the investigation into the murder of Dr. Arthur Morton was about as brief a report as I'd ever seen; all it contained was the bare facts of Morton's death.

The neurosurgeon had been killed by a single bullet in the brain. The bullet markings indicated that it had come from a gun equipped with a silencer, which probably made the killer big-league professional. The caliber of the gun was British. There had been no signs of a forced entry into the office, and as far as the investigating officers could tell, nothing had been taken or disturbed. There had been no clues, no suspects. The title page of the file was stamped UNSOLVED.

Garth didn't object when I took out my notebook and wrote down the name of Morton's widow, along with a few other details. "There's not a whole hell of a lot here," I said.

"That's what I thought would interest you. Whoever killed him was no amateur."

"Obviously. Morton decided to stroll into his office at three-thirty in the morning so he could get himself killed by a professional." I pointed to the second folder. "What's that?"

"Oh, this?" he said with a gesture of mock surprise. "This is Victor Rafferty's file."

"Victor Rafferty had a police record?" My voice reflected my shock.

"No," Garth said. "But there was a Missing Persons report filed on him."

"What's the date?"

"August 15, 1969." "The same day that weird picture outside his house was taken." I reached out for the folder. "Can I see?"

"No," Garth said, placing his hand on it. "This is pretty heavy; it's flagged."

"A Missing Persons report flagged? Who flagged it?"

Garth looked grim. "I can't even discuss it. I'm probably risking my job just having this file on my desk." He rose. "I've got to go to the john. Just remember, you haven't seen any police files on Morton or Rafferty. Understood?"

I winked. "Understood."

Garth walked out of the office and I opened the Rafferty file. The first thing that caught my attention was a line that read REPORTED BY________. It had a code number instead of a name.

I was suddenly conscious of Garth looking over my shoulder. "I thought you'd gone to the head."

"I'm still there."

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to the number.

"I don't know," Garth said evenly.

"What the hell do you mean, you don't know? Don't you work here?"

"It's a code number that has something to do with the Feds. That's why it's flagged. Ordinary detectives like your humble brother aren't even supposed to look at these things. My guess is that it's the D.I.A.-Defense Intelligence Agency."

"Can you find out for sure?" I asked.

"No way."

"Who would put a number like that on?"

"The Commissioner, m'boy, and you're not going to question the Commissioner."

"Garth, do you think the Feds could have been after him?"

"It looks that way."

"So, with government agents presumably after him, Rafferty shows up on a Sunday at his metallurgy lab to inspect the furnaces." I tapped the report. "Doesn't make much sense, does it?"

"Not when you put it that way."

"It wasn't even his wife who reported him missing."

"Maybe she didn't miss him," Garth said wryly.

"She might have known where he was, or at least why he left."

Garth shrugged. "Why don't you ask her?"

"I can't," I said, suddenly feeling foolish. "That's one of the conditions of my employment. Her present husband's the one who's interested, and he doesn't want me to talk to her. He says he's worried about his wife's mental state, and I believe him."

"She must have a lot of answers."

The phone rang. Garth picked up the receiver and began speaking with the person on the other end. I took the copy of the newspaper photo out of my pocket and studied it. It was as inscrutable as before, but I was convinced Rafferty had been somewhere nearby when the picture was taken. If true, it meant he'd probably had something to do with the two men on the ground.

"Rafferty was picked up," Garth whispered, his hand over the receiver.

"Where?"

"It's in the report."

Garth continued his telephone conversation and I resumed my reading. What followed in the report was even more intriguing. Rafferty had been picked up by ambulance in a restaurant on the morning of Saturday, August 16. He'd been taken to Roosevelt Hospital-where he'd escaped from the custody of an officer named Patrick O'Connell. There was no report from O'Connell, and no indication of how Rafferty had escaped from what was described as a maximum-security ward. There was also no mention of why Rafferty had been taken to the hospital, or why a Missing Persons had been filed in the first place.

There was a name: Lippitt. Below the name was a telephone number. I copied it down.

"Interesting, isn't it?" Garth said drily as he hung up.

"Why isn't there a report from this O'Connell?"

"It could have been pulled," Garth said, looking directly at me. "Or he could have been ordered not to write one up."

"Why do you say that?"

"The file is flagged; top priority, very sensitive."

"You recognize the area code on this telephone number?"

"Washington, D.C.," Garth said quietly. "There was a directive to call that number the moment anything turned up on Victor Rafferty." Garth rose and walked to the window. He stared out at the blaring traffic, the pedestrians, the hookers, the pimps, the thugs and murderers, all caught up and swirling in the polluted bloodstream of New York City. "I don't like it, Mongo," he said at last. "The whole thing stinks. Why don't you get your ass to Acapulco?"

"My ass will be toasting in Acapulco soon enough. First it would be interesting to hear what this Lippitt has to say."

Garth turned back from the window. "I don't like your being involved with it, Mongo."

"You know," I said, watching him, "the Morton investigation just doesn't make it. It was closed out three days after Rafferty's supposed death, which makes it just about the shortest unsolved murder investigation on record. You think it got choked off?"