TWENTY-SIX

From the moment he swam ashore, Yates had puzzled over what to report about Jez Jessup’s complicity with Mule, Rat and Wiggles. It was almost inconceivable to Billy that J. Edgar Hoover would knowingly be party to such a conspiracy. Yet if it was true, if Hoover was involved, absolutely no one in the FBI would believe it … or anyone in the media … unless far more corroboration was available than Jessup’s final watery statements.

Should the Hoover connection be deleted from the report, Yates still foresaw other problems. Any mention of Jessup’s actual activities might reveal to the Silent Men that he knew even more about them and their plot … far more than when they had tried to kill him before and got Brew instead. Besides the danger to himself and Tina Beth this could incur, he was worried the Men might panic and withdraw, cover their tracks. He very much wanted the Men, and was fairly certain he had established a direct link between them and Mule, Rat and Wiggles: Freddie, the voice on the telephone. A voice that could possibly be female and belong to Sissy Hennessy. If Sissy was implicated, Cub Hennessy might be too. He doubted if Cub was a member of the Men itself, but he could be an ally. If he wrote a report eliminating Hoover but including Jessup’s role, how could he avoid letting Cub see it? Cub was second-in-command of the residency. How could he avoid letting Corticun, whom he always mistrusted, see it as well? A third consideration was crucial to Billy’s thinking: the raw facts themselves, without any mention of Jessup or Hoover, would be all that was needed to stop the fraudulent trial of Otto Pinkny. So he’d give up little and avoid possibly compromising himself by not telling the real story of Jez.

When Billy Yates began typing up his report he wasn’t aware that Strom Sunstrom was dead. Nor would it have made any difference. Billy detailed what happened hours before in the tunnels and caves and what was discovered there … an account in which Jez Jessup’s true role as abettor of the criminals and traitor to Romor 91 was changed to co-investigating agent with Strom and Yates, a man who had sacrificed his life in the line of Bureau duty.

… On completion of the report Billy Yates collapsed and was taken to the hospital, where he slept for three days. Jez’s corpse was found downstream in the river, and Strom Sunstrom’s body washed into the shunting station under Lookout Bluff and was discovered there. Cub Hennessy was made temporary senior resident agent in charge of the Prairie Port office, and Denis Corticun was placed in control of Romor 91. The two of them, with a contingent of Bureaumen, attempted to examine the underground areas described by Yates, but ongoing salse rumblings forced them to keep their distance. Media preoccupation with the eruptions made it easier for Corticun to downplay the deaths of Strom and Jez, who were officially cited as being accidentally killed in a tunnel cave-in and flooding while on a routine investigatory assignment. Their funerals were small and private. Rat Ragotsy’s body was recovered from the Mississippi River a hundred and ten miles below Prairie Port, where rural authorities, dismissing him as a drowned vagrant, laid him to rest in the local potter’s field. No one around Prairie Port much noticed that he was missing or that Wiggles and Mule seemed to have dropped out of sight.

When Yates, in his hospital room, later learned that the United States was proceeding with the trial of Otto Pinkny, he put on his clothes and went to Cub and Corticun and protested. He was taken by the two FBI men down into the tunnel and caves, shown that little of what he described in his report existed as he described it … that the entire subterranean panorama had changed or been demolished … that the corpses of Little Haifa and Windy Walt and Worm Ferugli and Meadow Muffin were nowhere to be seen … that not a single item of equipment or a dollar of stolen money could be found.

Billy Yates lodged a formal letter of complaint over the impending trial of Otto Pinkny with Cub and another with Denis Corticun. Never to them nor anyone else did Yates reveal what he felt he knew about the Silent Men or Jessup’s complicity with Mule. This made him appear all the more intractable, more irrational, when Cub and other members of the residency pointed out he couldn’t really expect the government to call off Pinkny’s trial on his uncorroboratable say-so. Billy paid them no heed, sent letters off to Washington, sharply stating the wrong man was about to be prosecuted. He was placed on extended convalescent leave, which he refused to take. The first day of the Pinkny trial he barged into the courtroom and damned the proceedings as a sham. He was forcibly restrained and placed back in a hospital under observation. While there, he had Tina Beth go out and write down the numbers of various pay phones around the city.

Ed Grafton called at 5 A.M. and told Cub Hennessy when and where he wanted to meet him. Cub arrived at the cemetery at dawn, found Grafton standing at the twin graves of Strom and Alice Sunstrom.

“They do not belong here,” Grafton told Hennessy. “This is alien clay. Send them home to Virginia, where they’ll be happy. Where Priscilla is. Put them with Priscilla.”

Cub recalled hearing once that Strom’s first wife was named Priscilla … that Priscilla was Alice’s sister. “Yes, I’ll see to it.”

“Where’s Jez?”

“Over in the Baptist section.” He indicated a hillside tract of burial ground. “We can drive if you want.”

Grafton shook his head, laid on the graves two of the three floral arrangements he had brought, bowed his head, stalked off toward the hill.

“Where have you been, Graf?”

“You weren’t told?”

“Not a word since you left. Strom tried finding out. He always got double-talked.”

Grafton’s strides were long and determined. “They put me out into what’s left of the wilds. The wilderness. I like that. Plenty of bear and moose and trout. No crime, less Brass Balls.”

Grafton knelt at Jessup’s grave and placed his flowers. “Never thought I knew you were Edgar’s angel, eh, Jez man? From the day you were sent, I knew okay.” He patted the soft earth. “Thanks for keeping me out of trouble.”

He stood and faced Cub. “Jez was supposed to make sure I didn’t get done in by the Brass Balls or Jarrel. It should have been me watching out for him. What happened?”

They started down the hillside, with Cub saying, “Jez, Strom and the new agent, Yates, went down in the tunnels and got caught in that mud volcano. The damn thing explodes with them in it. Explodes and floods the tunnels. Strom dies inside one of the tunnels. Jez and Yates make it out and Jez drowns in the river … in the Treachery.”

“I heard,” Grafton said, “that Jez had a gun wound.”

“He got that inside the caves and tunnels. According to Yates they were tracking some of the early suspects in the Mormon State crime. They got into a chase and gunfight with them. Jez was wounded in the gunfight.”

“You said ‘according to Yates.’ Does that mean you don’t believe there was a chase and shooting?”

“I believe that part okay. I just don’t believe those three had anything to do with Mormon State.”

“I’d like to talk to Yates.”

“So would we. He’s escaped.”

“Escaped?”

“The thing in the tunnels and caves was too much for him. He flipped out. He was ranting all kinds of blather. Rushed right into the courtroom and tried to disrupt the Pinkny trial. They put him in the hospital under guard. He climbs out a window and jumps three stories down into the back of a truck filled with mattresses … a truck his wife, Tina Beth, was driving. That was three days ago. He and his wife are gone.”

“… What happened to Alice Sunstrom?”

“She committed suicide.”

“Why?”

“She was never all that well upstairs, you know that.”

“I heard she was raped.”

Cub sighed. “And her female parts badly mutilated.”

“What have you done about it?”

“Nothing yet, but we will.”

“Why did Yates run into the courtroom and try to disrupt the trial?”

“I told you, he was off his rocker.”

“How did he disrupt the court trial?”

“He barged in shouting Pinkny hadn’t robbed Mormon State.”

“Did he say who had?”

“He claims it was Mule, Rat and Wiggles.”

“Who are they?”

“Boy, you really have been in the wilderness. They’re three of the early suspects in the case.”

“The ones Jez, Strom and Yates were following in the tunnels? The ones who shot Jez?”

“Yes.”

“But you said those three had nothing to do with the robbery.”

“I’m telling you, Graf, it’s Otto Pinkny. Otto Pinkny did it, not those three—”

“Then why would Strom, Jez and Yates bother following them in the tunnels and caves?”

Cub was ready with the answer. “Yates was always coming up with something or other to prove Rat, Wiggles and Mule were the real gang. But their being in the tunnels and caves meant nothing. Rat had a history of scavenging the tunnels for any kind of loot he could find. Mule and Wiggles were third-raters too. Why the hell wouldn’t they forage in washed-out tunnels in the wake of big floods? It’s a perfect place to find junk.”

Graf considered, then began walking away.

“Where you going?” Cub asked.

“Back to the wilds … to my moose and bear and trout.”

Billy Yates was placed on “leave without pay” by the Prairie Port resident office. A week after that, with his whereabouts still unknown; he was listed by Denis Corticun as a “missing person,” and alerts for him went out to law-enforcement agencies across the land.