Instead of driving to my office in the McNally Building, I returned home, for there was work to be done to verify my sudden enlightenment. I cannot describe my mood as one of exhilaration. Grim would be closer to the bone—and admittedly a smidgen of humiliation at not having solved the puzzle sooner.
I climbed directly to my oubliette and, donning my reading specs, began poring through my journal, that scrawled compendium of the frivolous and the meaningful. What I sought, y’see, was evidence to lend credence to my theory. No, strike that. It was
not
merely a theory; it was a conviction, a certainty, not an opinion but a faith.
I found evidence aplenty to convince me I had lucked onto Ernest Gorton’s crafty design. And you know, I found myself feeling a grudging admiration for the scoundrel. He had created a criminal enterprise at once simple, almost foolproof, and exceedingly profitable. It required boldness on his part, of course, but it was now obvious he was a man of unlimited audacity.
I jotted a page of brief notes: facts to substantiate my analysis of Mr. Gorton’s illicit activities. Then I sat back and pondered what to do next. I knew my hypothesis must be brought to the attention of Sgt. Al Rogoff and Special Agent Griffin Kling—after all, the Gorton investigation was their baby—but I wasn’t certain how to announce my discovery and which law enforcement officer should be the. first informed. Cops are more protective of their territory than wolverines.
So, as is my wont, I dithered. And a very pleasant dithering it was, lackadaisical and pleasurable. Have you noticed I’ve made no mention of lunch? I had none. Skipped it completely by deliberate choice. Naturally I was famished, but I had recently noted the waistbands of my slacks were shrinking at an alarming rate, and I decided it was time to take a keen interest in my caloric intake.
I returned from a leisurely ocean swim to dress for the family cocktail hour and dinner. That night Ursi Olson served sautéed chicken breasts with grapes and grilled veggies. Dessert was cheesecake with a fresh blueberry sauce. I had two portions of everything—but then I had omitted lunch, hadn’t I?
Despite that holiday afternoon and evening I had not ceased wrestling with the problem of what my wisest next move should be. By the time I retired to my digs after the cheesecake I had made my choice and phoned Sgt. Al Rogoff. I determined he should be present when I revealed my brainstorm. I might never be associated with Special Agent Kling again, but Al’s continuing friendship and assistance were too valuable to cut him out of the loop.
I found him at home and he wasn’t too happy at being disturbed by my phone call.
“Now what?” he demanded.
“What,” I said, “is a complete, logical, and irrefutable explanation of Ernest Gorton’s criminal involvement with the Whitcomb Funeral Homes.”
“Yeah?” Al said, his voice sharpening. “You got a bright idea?”
“More than a bright idea,” I told him. “It’s the trut’, the whole trut’, and nothing but the trut’. Can you persuade Kling to drive up tomorrow? I shall disclose all to both of you then.”
“Can’t you tell me now?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t chew my cabbage twice.”
“What an elegant expression,” he said. “I must remember to use it—maybe in the next century. All right, I’ll give Kling a call and get back to you. I hope you’re not shucking me on this, because if you are, it’s the end of the road for us, buddy.”
“Not the end,” I assured him, “but a new, more glorious era of a close and more trusting relationship.”
“Bleep you,” he said and hung up.
He phoned back in about forty-five minutes. “Okay,” he said, “it’s set. It took some fast talking, but Kling finally agreed to drive up tomorrow morning. Where do you want to meet?”
“Hadn’t thought of it,” I confessed. “Any suggestions?”
“Kling doesn’t like restaurants. He thinks the salt shaker may be bugged. How about my chateau again? At noon.”
“Fine,” I said. “If you feel like it, order up some pizza and beer, McNally and Son will pick up the tab.”
“Of course,” he said. “Naturally.”
We now fast-forward to noon on Thursday. Nothing unusual happened in the interim except that I awoke in time to breakfast with my parents (we had smoked salmon and scrambled eggs) and I arrived at my office at the traditional 9:00
A.M.
, shocking all the fellow employees I encountered and occasioning a few snide comments.
I worked dutifully at listing the billable hours father had requested and recording my own out-of-pocket costs. They would eventually appear on my monthly expense account, which was now beginning to rival the gross national product of Sri Lanka.
I arrived at Chez Rogoff just as the delivery lad was departing, and by the time I parked and entered Al’s snug and pleasantly scruffy mobile home, he was setting out three medium-sized pizzas: meatball, pepperoni, and anchovy. He also provided Coors Light in frosted glass mugs: a welcome touch.
On this occasion Special Agent Griffin Kling rose to greet me and shake my hand. It was similar to receiving a benediction from the Grand Lama, even if he neglected to remove his semiopaque sunglasses. The three of us immediately began devouring hot pizza and swilling chilled brew. I could not resist casting a furtive glance or two at Kling. Have you ever seen anyone chomping a slice of meatball pizza while wearing black specs? An unsettling sight.
Curiously it was he who offered the first revelation.
“We have Gorton’s warehouse under twenty-four-hour surveillance,” he told us. “Last night around midnight a semi pulls up and starts unloading. The sign on the truck says it’s from the Cleo Hauling Service of New York. We got all this on videotape. Okay? So then they start unloading the truck, carrying the cargo inside the warehouse. You know what? Caskets. All colors, plain, fancy, whatever. They had to be empty because two men were handling each one easily. No forklifts. Maybe twenty coffins. The truck was unloaded and took off. Now what do you suppose was going on?”
I laughed. “Easy,” I said. “Mr. Gorton is such a shrewd money-grubber he was having the empties returned.”
Rogoff looked at me. “What the hell are you talking about, Archy?” he demanded.
I took the page of notes from my jacket pocket, spread it alongside my pizza plate, and began my presentation.
“Al, you told me Gorton isn’t tied to the Mafia or the Colombian drug cartels but he’s worked deals with both. He knows how they operate, he knows their problems, and he figured a way to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
“What he did was set up a service for the air-lifting of drugs, guns, and money to distribution centers in New York, Boston, and Chicago. How is contraband ordinarily transported within the forty-eight contiguous states? By courier, car, van, truck, or small planes. But all those are easy targets for arrest and seizure. Individuals and trucks can be stopped and searched. Ditto private cars. And small planes need certification and are supposed to file flight plans.
“But our hero came up with a scam that couldn’t miss. The deceased are shipped out of Florida at an enormous annual rate. Each casket is crated or placed in a carton clearly labeled ‘Human Remains. Handle with Extreme Care.’ Who’s going to open a package like that to verify the contents?
“The dear departed depart from Florida in the cargo holds of legitimate airlines. The coffin, crate, and corpse weigh about four hundred pounds. Gorton learns all this from Oliver Whitcomb, who’s in need of ready cash. Ernest realizes immediately that those caskets can be filled with guns, drugs, or laundered money, providing he doesn’t exceed the usual weight by too much.
“Hey, maybe he was offering his customers flight insurance. If the plane crashed, the airline would have to pay, wouldn’t it? But that’s just smoke on my part. I think the way the scheme worked was this:
“Gorton makes a deal with Oliver Whitcomb. The original caskets are purchased through Whitcomb Funeral Homes. They’re loaded with the goodies in Gorton’s warehouse. Then they’re trucked at night to one of Whitcomb’s three mortuaries. The director in charge, working alone or maybe with a helper on the pad, crates the casket for out-of-state shipment.
“The phony death certificate is supplied by that zonked-out Dr. Omar Pflug. The paperwork and shipping invoices are prepared by the crooked funeral directors. Gorton pays for death certificate, coffin, crating, cost of the airlift, and probably a bonus. What does he care? He’s making a lush profit from his clients, who are happy to pay mucho dinero for guaranteed overnight delivery.
“Ernest Gorton is operating a Coffin Air Express. The CAE. How does that sound?”
Special Agent Griffin Kling finished a slice of anchovy pizza and wiped his lips carefully with a paper napkin. He stood, turned his back to us, leaned to look out one of the small windows.
“You got it,” he said tonelessly. And then he kept repeating obsessively, “You got it. You got it. You got it.”
H
E FINALLY QUIETED BUT
still didn’t turn to face us. Rogoff looked at me curiously.
“How did you happen to come up with that one, Archy?” he asked.
“Genius,” I said.
“Luck,” he said.
“A bit of both,” I admitted. “The question now is, where do we go from here?”
Then Kling turned. I don’t believe he had been listening to my exchange with Al.
“It fits,” the FBI man said. “Our offices up north have checked out maybe a half dozen of the places that took deliveries from the Cleo Hauling Service. They’re all no-goodniks. Funeral homes with bent-nose connections. Guys with records of security frauds. One hustler suspected of supplying guns to terrorists of all stripes. So when you tell me Gorton is running a ratty air express from South Florida, I’ll buy it.”
I was about to repeat my question of what happens next, but Kling would not be interrupted.
“The thing to do,” he said, “is bust that warehouse.”
I glanced at Rogoff and I swear he gave me a quick wink. I had the feeling we were both thinking the same thing.
“Sir,” I said to Special Agent Kling, doing my humble bit, “I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to conduct a criminal investigation—I’m the rankest of rank amateurs—but wouldn’t it be better to seize the loaded caskets after they’ve been picked up by the Cleo Hauling Service at LaGuardia, Logan, and O’Hare? Then you’ll have evidence of interstate shipment of contraband. It’s even possible you may find Gorton’s fingerprints on one or more of the coffins.”
“Nah,” Kling said decisively. “A waste of time. I smell blood. We’ll raid the warehouse as soon as possible—maybe tonight if I can get the go-ahead. I hope Gorton will be there,” he added with savage joy. “But even if we don’t collar him and his soldiers actually loading the caskets, we’ll pull in everyone in sight. Then we’ll go looking for those funeral directors and that Oliver Whitcomb. We’ll lean on them and I guarantee at least one of those bozos is going to cut a deal and talk. We might even be able to pin Gorton for snuffing Rhoda Flembaugh. This is the chance I’ve been waiting for. Listen, I’ve got to run. I want to get back to Miami and get the show on the road. I’ll let you know how we make out. Thanks for the feed.”
Then he was gone. Rogoff and I were left with a few cold crusts from the demolished pizzas. But the supply of beer hadn’t been exhausted and we each had another mugful, slumping down and relaxing. Kling’s presence was daunting; no doubt about it. The man was so perpetually intense it made my fillings ache.
“I don’t like it,” Rogoff remarked.
“The raid on the warehouse?” I said. “I don’t either. The cart before the horse and all that sort of thing. He’s not building a case methodically and logically; he’s the proverbial fool rushing in where angels fear to tread.”
“My, oh my,” Al said. “We’re full of folk wisdom today, aren’t we?”
“Touché,” I said. “But I didn’t hear you making any objections while he was here.”
“C’mon, Archy, think straight. I’m a Palm Beach copper who’s supposed to warn guys who go jogging without a shirt. You want me to tell the FBI how to run a major case? They’d label me a redneck sheriff and put me on their shit list.”
“But you don’t approve of the raid on the warehouse, do you?”
The sergeant shook his head dolefully. “Kling has other options but he’s so hyper about Gorton he’s got to go for the muscle. I’m betting that bust will prove Murphy’s Law in spades.”
I drove away from Rogoff’s assembly-line hacienda reflecting that his foreboding mirrored my own. I have confessed to you on several occasions in the past that I am a lad devoted to the frivolous and trivial. I simply refuse to take anything seriously. I have absolutely no absolute beliefs—other than grated ginger is wonderful on fresh oysters.
And so I found Griffin Kling’s zealotry disturbing. am willing to admit that fanatics have accomplished much of value in the history of the higher primates. Artists, for instance, and poets, composers, architects and such—monomaniacs all—have created wondrous things. But a distressing number of the obsessionally driven have engendered wars, inquisitions, pogroms, and general nastiness that prevent an international chorus of “On the Good Ship Lollipop.”
Exhausted by such sober meditation, I decided the McNally spirits required a goose, and so I used my cellular phone to call Binky Watrous, that
homme moyen sensuel.
(Short translation: a goofball.) Surprisingly he was at home and eager to chat.
“Golly, I’m glad you called,” he said. “Listen, Archy, do you think I should grow a beard?”
“Can
you?” I asked.
“Of course I can,” he said, offended. “It might take some time, but I’m sure I could do it if I set my mind to it.”
“I’m on my way to the Pelican Club,” I informed him—a sudden decision. “Why don’t you meet me there for a spot of R and R, and we can discuss your plans to cultivate facial foliage.”
“You’re on,” he said enthusiastically. “The Duchess wants me to accompany her to a flügelhorn recital, but I shall tell her the demands of my job-training come first. Righto?”
“Righteo,” I said, topping him.
Within the hour we were seated at a table in the bar area of the Pelican. I thought it wise to continue drinking beer, and Binky ordered a mild spritzer with a peppered Russian vodka as a chaser. Nutsy.