Death Instinct - Jed Rubenfeld [84]
“At what?”
“At a wall. Leaving marks on it.”
“Firing a machine gun at a wall?” said Littlemore. “In the middle of the bombing?”
“Did I mention that I also saw the shrapnel flying through the air so slowly I could make out the individual pieces?”
“No, you didn’t tell me that, and don’t mention it again. They’ll lock you up with Eddie Fischer.”
Detective Littlemore was restive as he paced the cramped offices shared by Homicide and Special Crimes. Overcrowded desks vied for space with overstuffed filing cabinets. Typewriters clacked. Men yelled at one another, their complaints mostly jocular. The joking irritated Littlemore. A week had passed since the Wall Street bombing, and they had made no progress. Loose threads dangled everywhere.
There was Fischer, now confined in a sanitarium, whose prescient warnings remained unaccounted for. There was Big Bill Flynn, determined to hang the crime on Italian anarchists even though each piece of evidence Flynn came up with was thin as cheap typing paper. Then there was Attorney General Palmer—or rather, where was Palmer? Everything Littlemore knew about the Attorney General would have predicted Palmer’s seizing control of the case, giving press conferences, taking the spotlight. Instead Palmer had passed through town for a night on his way to a family holiday—why? Finally, there was the fact that the attack seemed wholly unmotivated. If there was a target, it appeared to have been the Morgan Bank, yet Littlemore had identified no individual or organization with the right means and motives for attacking Morgan in so blunderbuss a fashion.
“Hey, Spanky,” Littlemore called out.
“Sir?” replied Roederheusen.
“Go over to the Mexican consulate,” said Littlemore, “and get ahold of a guy named Pesky something or other. Pesky-air-uh, I think. I want to talk to him.”
“Say, Cap,” called out Stankiewicz from his desk, “I found the cards.”
“What cards?”
“The filing cards we made on Wall Street.” Stankiewicz was holding a stack of handwritten note cards made at the scene of the bombing—one card for each of the dead. “You remember, you thought there was somebody who was killed who should’ve been on the casualty list, but he wasn’t on the list, so you asked me to find the cards.”
“Give me those,” said Littlemore irritably. He flipped through the note cards. “The guy was a Treasury guard. Name began with R.” Littlemore found what he was looking for. “Here he is: ‘Riggs, United States Treasury.’ Now where’s that casualty list?”
Stankiewicz fished through the papers piled haphazardly on his desk. “I had it a second ago.”
“Tell me you didn’t lose the casualty list,” said Littlemore.
Stankiewicz handed the detective the stapled, typed, many-paged document.
Littlemore went through it, checking both the alphabetical listing and the page specifically naming government officers killed in the blast. “No Riggs,” said the detective. “What happened to ‘Riggs, United States Treasury’?”
“Guess they missed him.”
“They?” asked Littlemore. “Who’s they? Didn’t you type this list?”
“Not exactly.”
“Who did?”
“Um, the Feds did. A couple of agents came over the day after the bombing and asked if we had a list of the dead and wounded. I said sure and let them have a look—you know, at the handwritten list, which we made from the cards. They volunteered to have it typed up for us over the weekend. They said they had typists who would do a nice job. So I—”
“You gave the Feds our list?” asked Littlemore, incredulous.
“I’m not too good with a typewriter, sir. I figured it would come out better this way.”
“You figured you were too lazy,” said Littlemore. “What kind of Feds? Flynn’s boys?”
“No, sir. They were T-men,” said Stankiewicz, using the shorthand name for Treasury agents.
A second letter from Colette arrived on Thursday, but it turned out she must have sent it before receiving Younger’s reply.