Kill or Cure Read online

  Waving the Bullingsworth notes before the heavy lights of TV camera crews, who were paid overtime for the pre-dawn work, a local politician of minor rank talked ominously of the “most treacherous act of government interference in the history of our nation.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  HIS NAME WAS REMO and he intended to interfere with local government very much. He intended to make it do its job.

  He rested his toes in the brick crevices, and with his charcoal-blackened hands pressed against the rough brick, kept his balance outside the window. He could smell the heavy fumes of Boston. He could feel the vibrations of the traffic down below in the dampish night street through the building wall, and he wished he were in some place warm and sunny, like Miami Beach. But his assignment was Boston. First things first.

  A passerby, fourteen stories below in front of the hotel, would never see this figure pressed into the wall, for he wore black shoes, black pants and black shirt, and his face and hands were blackened with a charcoal paste given him by the man who had taught him that the side of a building could be a ladder if the mind knew how to use it as one.

  Voices came from the open window near his right kneecap. The window should not have been open, but then the two detectives and plainclothesmen hadn’t done their job very well from the beginning.

  “You’re sure I’m okay here, fellas?” asked a man in a rough, thick voice.

  That was Vincent Tomalino, Remo knew.

  “Sure. You got us with you all the time,” said another man. Must be one of the cops, Remo thought.

  “Okay,” said Tomalino, but his voice lacked conviction.

  “Wanna play some cards?” asked one of the cops.

  “No,” said Tomalino. “You sure that window should be open?”

  “Sure, sure. Fresh air.”

  “We can use the air conditioner.”

  “Lookit, you guinea stool pigeon, don’t tell as our jobs.” It struck Remo as amusing that those officers with the heaviest service to the Mafia were always the freest to use terms like “guinea,” “wop,” and “dago.”

  Upstairs probably had some psychological report on that. They had reports on everything it seemed, from parking-meter graft in Miami Beach to ex-Mafiosi who were going to be rubbed out because they planned to talk.

  Tomalino was going to talk.

  On this, there were several opinions. The district attorney promised the papers Tomalino would probably spill, but the three policemen had promised the local capo mafioso that he wouldn’t. These opinions were really just opinions because it had been decided in an office in Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, that Vincent “The Blast” Tomalino not only would talk, but he would tell everything he knew with a pure heart.

  “I want to check the window,” said Tomalino.

  “Stay where you are,” said one of the cops. “You two keep him on the bed. I’m going to check the roof.”

  Remo looked up to the roof. Surprise, surprise—here it came. A rope swooped out in an arch and slapped back against the side of the hotel. It paused there a moment, a head peered over and the rope descended, right past Remo’s knee. He heard the hotel room door open and close, and assumed the officer was going up to the roof to get his payoff immediately after the job was done.

  A large body grunted its way over the ledge and using hands and feet like clumsy logs lowered itself down the rope. Remo could smell the man’s meat-eating breath from five feet away. A carbine which could be handled with one hand was strapped to the man’s back. And there was something metallic around his waist. What was it? Remo peered more closely. The man had attached a pulley to his waist so he wouldn’t fall.

  Remo couldn’t get the idea of meat out of his mind. He hadn’t had a steak for two years. Oh, for a juicy-fat crisp steak, or rich thick hamburger, or a slice of quivering roast beef oozing its juices from a delicious red center. Even a hot dog would be great. Or a slice of bacon, a magnificent slice of bacon.

  The meat-eater’s right foot touched the top of the window and still he did not see Remo. He reached for the carbine on his back and since he seemed to be having trouble, Remo helped him.

  “It’s stuck,” said Remo, reaching up, but not for the carbine.

  He got the pulley with his right hand, snapping it off, and since there was no need for loud unpleasantness, he took out the meat-eater’s throat with a thumb on the way down.

  Like a water-filled balloon from a conventioneer’s window, the meat-eater plummeted—arms and legs flailing noiselessly—to the pavement below. Concrete and killer were joined with a muffled splat.

  Remo climbed up the rope, which he did not need but thought appropriate for his greeting on the roof.

  “I didn’t hear nothing,” came the voice from the other side of the ledge. It was the voice of the policeman who had left the room.

  “Hi, there,” said Remo pleasantly, rising over the ledge. “I’d like to borrow your head for a few minutes.”

  Blackened hands moved faster than sight. There was a short, wrenching sound on the roof. Then Remo departed through the roof door and scampered down the steps with something in his right hand behind his back, dripping.

  When he got to Tomalino’s room, he knocked.

  A patrolman answered the door.

  “What do you want?” asked the patrolman.

  “I want to impress upon you and your charge in the room about talking from a pure heart. I think you will agree with me, after few moments of explanation, that truth is the most valuable thing we have.”

  “Get out of here. We don’t need religious nuts.”

  The door started to close in Remo’s face, but something stopped it. The patrolman opened the door again to get a better slam, but something stopped it again. This time he looked to see what the obstruction was. The religious nut in the black suit with the blackened face and blackened feet was holding only one blackened finger in the way, so the patrolman decided to break that finger by slamming the door with the full force of his body.

  The door reverberated against his shoulder and the religious nut pushed it open, and shut it behind himself with one hand. Something dripped red from behind the nut’s back.

  The patrolman went for his gun and the hand did indeed reach the holster. Unfortunately, its wrist connection was rather weak at the time, suffering a cracked bone and a severed nerve. The other patrolman, seeing the speed of the hands, flattened his palms upward.

  Vincent “The Blast” Tomalino, a short plug of a man, with a stub of a face, begged for mercy.

  “No, no.”

  “I haven’t come here to kill you,” said Remo. “I have come here to help you speak from a pure heart. All of you sit down on the bed.”

  When they had done so, Remo lectured them as a school teacher—discussing duty, oaths taken for duty, and an oath that would be taken at a trial shortly where Tomalino would be a witness.

  “Purity of heart is most important,” Remo said. “The detective who is not here had gone up to the roof to do a bad thing. A very bad thing. The bad thing lacked purity of heart.”

  The three men eyed the growing red puddle behind the religious nut’s back.

  “What was this bad thing? I will tell you. He was going to take a payoff for someone to kill you. So were these two other officers.”

  “The bastards,” said Tomalino.

  “Judge not lest ye be judged, Mr. Tomalino, for you have been negotiating with your former boss to perhaps not speak with a pure heart.”

  “No, no. I swear. Never.”

  “Do not lie,” said Remo sweetly. “For this is what happens to people who tell untruths and do not act with purity of heart.”

  With that, Remo took what he had been holding behind his back, and placed it on Tomalino’s lap.

  Tomalino’s jaw dropped and tears filled his eyes as he went into shock. One of the patrolmen vomited. The other gasped.

  “Now, I must ask you to tell an untruth. You will tell no one about this visit, and you two
policemen will do your duty, and you, Mr. Tomalino, will speak with a pure heart.”

  Three heads couldn’t nod hard enough. The fourth was beyond nodding and, knowing that the lesson was well-learned, Remo left the room and shut the door behind him.

  Down the hotel foyer, three doors down, Remo opened a door he knew would be unlocked. He went to a bathtub that he knew would be filled with water and a special cleansing lotion, then washed his hands and face and feet. As he washed, gobs of plastic peeled from his cheeks, changing the contour of his face until now he was almost handsome. He dropped the black pants and shirt into the toilet where, touching water, they dissolved. He heard the police sirens fourteen stories below. He flushed the clothes, emptied the bathtub and went to the closet where a once-worn suit, slightly rumpled as if it had spent a day in the office, hung. He threw it on the bed and opened the bureau drawer where there was a set of underwear, his size; socks, his size; wallet with identification and money; and even a handkerchief. He checked to see if it were clean. Who knew to what extent Upstairs would go to assure secrecy?

  Remo opened the wallet and checked the wax paper seals. If they were broken he was to discard the identification and say—if he were stopped for questioning—that he had lost his wallet, referring all inquiries about him to a firm in Tacoma, Washington. Should this be done there would be a reference from that firm that, indeed, a Remo Van Sluyters worked for the Busby and Berkley Tool and Die.

  Remo opened the seals with his thumb. He looked at the driver’s license. He was Remo Horvath and his card said he worked for the fund-raising firm of Jones, Raymond, Winter and Klein.

  He checked the closet for his shoes. The ding-dongs upstairs had unloaded well-used cordovans on him again.

  As he dressed, he mused over the morning’s headlines.

  HERO COP GIVES LIFE TO SAVE INFORMER

  or

  MANIAC AX WIELDER ATTACKS HERO COP

  or

  A BLOODY MESS AT TOMALINO

  He walked out into the foyer which was now a confusion of blue uniforms, many of them with brass insignia on the shoulders.

  “What happened, officer? What happened?”

  “Stay in your room. No one’s leaving the building.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  An officer with a broken wrist limped out of Tomalino’s room. Why a limp, Remo would never understand. Yet injured people, when they knew they were being observed, often limped.

  “We’re holding people for questioning,” said the higher ranking officer, who looked at the injured patrolman. The patrolman shook his head, which meant to Remo that there was no identification of him as the killer.

  But there was a brief interrogation nevertheless. No, Remo had not seen anything or heard anything and what right did the police have questioning him?

  “A witness was almost killed tonight and one officer was,” the interrogating officer said. “Right next to you.”

  “Goodness gracious,” said Remo and then, turning to anger, he demanded to know what right the police had to keep witnesses in hotels where ordinary citizens stayed hoping to be safe. What was wrong with the jails?

  The officer couldn’t wait to end the unproductive questioning.

  Remo left the hotel complaining about violence, crime in the streets and safety for the average citizen. He could not walk underneath the Tomalino window, however, for that was cordoned off by police barricades. A large mound was in the barricaded area. It was covered by a sheet.

  One precaution Remo did not take. He did not bother to wipe his prints off the objects in the room he used for changing. There was no need. Police couldn’t check out his fingerprints, least of all with the FBI file. Nobody cross-referenced the prints of men who were certifiably dead.

  CHAPTER THREE

  IN ANSWERING QUESTIONS OF the Washington press corps, the presidential press secretary appeared serious, yet unworried. Of course, the charges were serious and they would be looked into thoroughly by the Justice Department. No, this was not another Watergate, the press secretary said. He said that with a crisp smile. Any other questions?

  “Yeah,” replied one reporter, rising. “The incumbents in Miami Beach are charging that your government has been attempting to frame them.”

  “That was not a charge nationally,” said the press secretary.

  “It may well become one. They say they have indications that an organization called the Greater Florida Betterment League was just a front for secret and illegal government investigations, including wiretaps and bugging.”

  “The Justice Department will look into that.”

  The reporter would not sit down. “This morning, when the local sheriff’s office broke into the League headquarters in Miami Beach, they found records leading to the National Betterment League’s offices in Kansas City, Missouri. That place turns out to be financed by a U.S. government educational grant. This educational grant doesn’t appear to educate many people, but it managed to spend over a million dollars in Miami Beach alone last year. Now what does that mean?”

  “It means that will be looked into also.”

  “Another thing. There’s the possibility that this country goes around murdering its citizens. An employee of the Greater Florida Betterment League, one James Bullingsworth, was found dead with an ice pick in his ear. According to Miami Beach officials, he had been seen previously with a notebook saying he was going to become the political kingpin of the city. What do you have to say about that?”

  “Same as to everything else. We most certainly are going to look into this. That is, the Justice Department will uncover everything.”

  “The Justice Department is involved in this thing, according to the charges of the administration in Miami Beach.”

  “The local government of a minor Florida city is not the major concern of the White House,” the secretary said, unable to keep the edge out of his voice.

  “And what is this secret organization called Folcroft?” the reporter asked. “Apparently it was behind the whole scheme.”

  “Gentlemen, this is leading us nowhere. The Justice Department is investigating. You know where to reach the attorney general.”

  “It’s not the where of reaching, but the who of reaching,” cracked the reporter, and the press corps broke up in laughter.

  The press secretary smiled wanly.

  In the Oval Room of the White House, the President watched the press conference live on television. When the reporter mentioned the word “Folcroft,” the President’s face became ashen.

  “Do we have anything like that, Mr. President?” said a trusted aide.

  “What?” said the President.

  “An organization called Folcroft.”

  “There is no organization called Folcroft that I know of,” said the President. And, technically, he was telling the truth.

  Several hundred miles away on the Long Island Sound, in a sanitarium called Folcroft, one of the social researchers heard the name mentioned on radio and wondered out loud if “we have anything to do with that mess in Miami Beach?” He was assured by his colleagues that this was impossible and they must be talking about some other Folcroft, not the Folcroft Sanitarium famous for its research in changing social patterns and their psychological influence upon the individual in an urban-agricultural environment.

  “But wasn’t that Kansas City educational grant one of ours?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” said a colleague. “Why don’t you ask Dr. Smith?”

  And when the researcher heard the name of the director of the Folcroft Sanitarium and thought of that thin, parsimonious gentleman, he was forced to smile.

  “No,” he admitted. “We couldn’t have anything to do with that Miami Beach mess. Could you imagine Dr. Smith involved in anything like that?” And they all laughed for it was known that Dr. Harold W. Smith did not approve of off-color jokes or misspending of a penny, much less political espionage.

  Dr. Smith did not eat lunch in the Sanitarium ca
feteria that day and his prune-whip yogurt with lemon topping sat unclaimed by any of the other staff. Ordinarily, untouched yogurt would be discarded at the end of the day, but the kitchen help was instructed to save his cup, for Dr. Smith would eat it the next day. It was in the kitchen that he was known to give his sternest lectures on waste not, want not. It was also in the kitchen, usually after a salary raise had been denied, that the kitchen help prepared the prune-whip yogurt with liberal dashes of spit.

  They would then steal gleeful looks as waste not, want not Smith ate his lunch. Had they known the forces the stuffy gentleman commanded, the saliva would have dried in their mouths.

  Dr. Smith was not having lunch. The door of his office was locked with instructions to his secretary that he would see no one. Dr. Smith was busy waiting for a telephone to ring. At this stage, there was nothing more to do.

  He looked through the one-way glass windows out at the Long Island Sound. He had sailed there several times in the sunshine. From the sound, his windows looked like giant bright reflectors. A friend had asked him why his windows shone so brightly and his answer was that at Folcroft, we know how to keep them properly cleaned. He wondered if the next tenants would replace them with two-way glass.

  Smith sighed. What had gone wrong? There were so many breaks in the chain, no one should have been able to put it together, but here were these cheap politicians in Miami Beach announcing CURE’s activities like so many weather forecasts.

  How did it happen? Miami Beach had been their breakthrough. For over two years, CURE had been drawing in raw reports from FBI agents,CIA agents, agricultural, postal, IRS and SEC investigators, and feeding them into a computer, programmed to collate and interpret them, and then sending its conclusions on to Kansas City in code. No one should have known, but he realized what had happened.

  Smith had become careless. He had failed to build into the system an automatic destruction of the computer printouts and someone had filed them, then someone had gone through them and pierced the code.