The old man nearly choked on his last words. He reached for his cigarette pack; Ellis Loew, holding a glass of water, got to him first. Lesnick gulped, coughed, gulped; Dudley Smith walked into the dining alcove and tapped the filing boxes and typewriters with his spit-shined brogues–uncharacteristically idle footwork.
A horn honked outside. Mal stood up to thank Lesnick and shake his hand. The old man looked away and pushed himself to his feet, almost not making it. The horn beeped again; Loew opened the door and gestured to the cab in the driveway. Lesnick shuffled out, gulping fresh morning air.
The taxi drove away; Loew turned on a wall fan. Dudley Smith said, “How long does he have, Ellis? Will you be sending him an invitation to your victory celebration come ‘52?”
Loew scooped big handfuls of files off the floor and laid them out on the dining room table; he repeated the process until there were two stacks of paper halfway to the ceiling. “Long enough to suit our purposes.”
Mal walked over and looked at their evidence: information extraction thumbscrews. “He won’t testify before the grand jury, though?”
“No, never. He’s terrified of losing his credibility as a psychiatrist. Confidentiality, you know. It’s a good hiding place for lawyers, and doctors covet it too. Of course, it’s not legally binding for them. Lesnick would be kaput as a psychiatrist if he testified.”
Dudley said, “You would think he would like to meet his maker as a good patriotic American, though. He did volunteer, and that should be a grand satisfaction for someone whose next life looms so imminently.”
Loew laughed. “Dud, have you ever taken a step without spotting the angles?”
“The last time you did, counselor. Captain Considine, yourself?”
Mal said, “Sometime back in the Roaring Twenties,” thinking that mano a mano, brain to brain, he’d favor the Dublin street thug over the Harvard Phi Bete. “Ellis, when do we start approaching witnesses?”
Loew tapped the file stacks. “Soon, after you’ve digested these. Based on what you learn here, you’ll be making your first approaches–on weak points–weak people–who’d seem most likely to cooperate. If we can build up an array of friendly witnesses fast, fine. But if we don’t get a fair amount of initial cooperation, we’ll have to put in a plant. Our friends on the Teamsters have heard picket line talk–that the UAES is planning strategy meetings aimed at coercing exorbitant contract demands out of the studios. If we get a string of balks right off the bat, I want to pull back and put a decoy into the UAES. I want both of you to think of smart, tough, idealistic-looking young cops we can use if it comes to that.”
Chills grabbed Mal. Sending in decoys, operating, had made his rep at Ad Vice–it was what he was best at as a policeman. He said, “I’ll think on it. There’s just Dudley and me as investigators?”
Loew made a gesture that took in his whole house. “Clerks from the City pool here to handle the paperwork, Ed Satterlee for the use of his contacts, Lesnick for our psychiatric edification. You two to interrogate. I might get us a third man to prowl for criminal stuff, rattle cages, that kind of thing.”
Mal got itchy to read, think, operate. He said, “I’m going to clear up some loose ends at the Hall, go home and work.”
Loew said, “I’m going to prosecute a real estate man for drunk driving on his son’s motorcycle.”
Dudley Smith toasted his boss with an imaginary glass. “Have mercy. Most real estate men are good patriotic Republicans, and you might need his contribution one day.”
o o o
Back at City Hall, Mal made calls to satisfy his curiosity on his two new colleagues. Bob Cathcart, a savvy Criminal Division FBI man he’d worked with, gave him the scoop on Edmund J. Satterlee. Cathcart’s take: the man was a religious crackpot with a wild hair up his ass about Communism, so extreme in his views that Clyde Tolson, Hoover’s number-two man at the Bureau, repeatedly issued gag orders on him when he served as Agent in Charge at the Waco, Texas, field office. Satterlee was estimated to earn fifty thousand dollars a year in anti-Communist lecture fees; Red Crosscurrents was “a shakedown racket”–”They’d clear Karl Marx if the dough was right.” Satterlee was rumored to have been bounced off the Alien Squad for attempting a kickback operation: cash vouchers from interned Japanese prisoners in exchange for his safeguarding their confiscated property until they were released. Agent Cathcart’s summation: Ed Satterlee was a loony, albeit a rich and very efficient one–very adept at advancing conspiracy theories that stood up in court; very good at gathering evidence; very good at running outside interference for grand jury investigators.