Target Lancer

CHAPTER 14

Thursday, October 31, 1963

Just after nine A.M., at the Secret Service office, the two Pickpocket Detail cops recommended by SIU chief Dick Cain arrived for a meeting with Chief Martineau.

I knew Lieutenant Dan Gross and Sergeant Pete Shoppa, but not well. They had reputations as smart, tough detectives, both in their late thirties, with the vaguely bored yet somehow alert eyes all seasoned cops seemed to possess.

Shoppa was a blocky, pockmarked and balding cigar smoker, and his blue suit was something J.C. Penney sold him several seasons ago, the blue and white paisley tie probably a Christmas present from around ’59. Horse-faced, sandy-haired Gross was tall, or at least taller, and better dressed-his brown J.C. Penney suit was this year’s model, his tie properly narrow and a darker brown. No law required that Chicago detective teams always be Mutt and Jeff pairs, but if there had been, Gross and Shoppa didn’t break it.

Theirs were the kind of unremarkable faces in the crowd just perfect for pickpocket work … and surveillance.

Gross was a friendly type, the first to offer his hand as we stood in the no-man’s-land of Martineau’s office between the chief’s desk area and the conference table. Martineau had stepped out to check on some telex info he was expecting, and we three Pickpocket Detail veterans had his big office momentarily to ourselves.

“You know, Nate,” Gross said with a grin, “they still talk about you over on the Detail.”

“They talk about me lots of places,” I said, returning his smile.

Shoppa said, “Of course nobody over there ever really worked with you, Heller. I figure everybody you ever worked with on the PD is dead by now.”

He offered his hand, too, and there was just enough of a smile on that stogie-pierced, pockmarked pan to tell me this was his version of friendliness, too.

I said to him, “Pete, most of the guys I busted are dead, too. Kind of makes the whole exercise seem a little irrelevant.”

Shoppa frowned at that. A little too philosophical for his speed, I guess.

Martineau came in, the formidable chief moving with considerable energy, and in his shirtsleeves for a change-like most of the agents in the SS office, he wore a short-sleeve white shirt under his suit coat, despite the time of year. The office tended to be warm, the old steam heat in these soon-to-be former headquarters apparently having one setting: inferno.

Eben Boldt trailed in after his boss, quietly spiffy in a charcoal suit and black necktie. Introductions between Martineau and the two police detectives had already been made, but Boldt was a new addition. There was an awkward moment, then I introduced Eben as both an agent and my partner on the current investigation. Polite smiles, nods, and handshakes were traded, but no remarks, friendly or otherwise.

That didn’t make the two cops bigots necessarily-more Negro cops were coming onto the Chicago force all the time, another part of Commissioner Wilson’s revamping of the department, and the white cops hadn’t figured out yet how to behave around these dusky interlopers.

Martineau, however, knew just what Eben’s role was.

“Ebe,” he said, “get us some coffee, would you?”

There was the slightest tightening around the agent’s eyes, then a nod, and he went out.

Martineau had a manila folder with him, and he rested it in front of him as he took the head seat at the conference-room table, gesturing for us to find chairs.

We did.

“Has Chief Cain or Captain Linsky filled you fellows in at all?” Martineau asked.

The two cops were at Martineau’s right, and I was opposite them. They both shrugged, Shoppa knocking some ashes off his stubby cigar into a glass ashtray with the Secret Service emblem in the bottom.

“The captain just said that you were shorthanded,” Gross said, “what with the President coming to town Saturday.”

“Said you might need some surveillance help,” Shoppa said. “Implied it might have something to do with JFK’s visit. But that’s all.”

“You’ll need a full briefing, then,” Martineau said.

He opened the manila folder and passed them a set of 5-by-7-inch photos of the suspects-the two Cubans and two white boys.

“We believe these men to be highly trained assassins with high-powered rifles. A hit squad. And their target is Lancer.”

“Lancer?” Gross asked.

“That’s Secret Service code,” I said, “for President Kennedy.”

I’d picked up around here quick.

Shoppa, looking over the photos, wore a smirk with a cigar stuck in it. “Jeez, a couple of spics called Gonzales and Rodriguez. That narrows the friggin’ field. What are the white guys’ names? Smith and Jones?”

Martineau’s expression barely registered his displeasure with Shoppa’s manner, but I caught it. I doubt Shoppa did, but if he had, he probably wouldn’t give a shit.

The SS chief said, “This is not your direct assignment, gentlemen, other than to be on the alert if your surveillance subject should come in contact with any of these individuals.”

“This,” Gross said, tapping the picture in front him, “is why you’re shorthanded. You’re focusing on this threat, and need us to cover for you on some other bozo who’s made a crank call or something.”

Martineau said, “That’s not wrong, but we have new background on this ‘bozo’ that makes it vital we take him seriously. First, however, I’ll have Nate brief you on how we got where we are with Mr. Thomas Arthur Vallee.”

That middle name was news to me-Martineau really did have info he hadn’t yet shared.

Eben came in with a tray of cardboard cups and a pitcher of coffee, and everybody helped themselves as I told them how Lieutenant Berkeley Moyland of the Chicago PD had alerted us to Vallee’s spouting off about Kennedy, and laid out in some detail the conversation I’d had with the subject at the Eat Rite yesterday, winding up with the discovery of the two M-1’s, the.22 revolver, and the several thousand rounds of ammunition at his rooming house.

No wisecracks from Shoppa and no remark from Gross, either-they just exchanged dark glances at the mention of all that firepower.

And now Martineau dipped into his manila folder for a picture I hadn’t seen before: a Marine Corps photo of my breakfast club buddy, Vallee, looking very young but otherwise much the same-prominent forehead, glazed eyes, tiny pinched anus of a mouth.

“Not who I want dating my sister,” Shoppa said.

Gross grunted. “Looks like the kind of nut who’d want to take a potshot at the President.”

“We know a lot more about him today,” Martineau said. “This is all fresh intel that even Nate and Ebe are hearing for the first time.”

I glanced at Ebe, seated beside me, and he shrugged. Apparently he didn’t know any more than I did.

Martineau glanced at various papers that he’d extracted from the manila folder, but did not read from them, rather summarized. His ability to do so from material he’d only recently received was impressive.

“Thomas Arthur Vallee joined the Marines at age fifteen,” he said. “That’s right, gentlemen-he lied about his age. He’s thirty now. During the Korean War, he suffered a head injury, thanks to a mortar round exploding nearby, which got him discharged from the Marines in 1952. Traumatic brain injury. Complete VA disability. This jibes with what Mr. Vallee shared with Nate in casual conversation.”

I asked, “What about his claim that he re-enlisted? How does a guy with a brain injury and complete disability get back in uniform?”

“I have no idea,” Martineau admitted. “But it’s true that, after two G.I. Bill years at a community college, he was able to re-enlist, in 1955. He was honorably discharged in ’56.”

Gross frowned. “After one year?”

Martineau nodded. “It was a physical disability discharge again. Military doctors classified him…” And now he did read from a document. “… ‘an extreme paranoid schizophrenic.’”

“Which is medical jargon,” Shoppa said, “for screwier than a shithouse rat.”

The chief did not disagree, and again referred to a sheet. “Vallee’s mental condition, the psychiatric evaluation says, is ‘manifested by preoccupations with homosexuality.’”

“So the kid’s a queer,” Shoppa said, sucking on his cigar, “as well as a nutcase.”

“His landlady mentioned male guests,” I said, “and he had some reading material that fits that notion. But since when does a homosexual get an honorable discharge from the Marines?”

Martineau had an answer: “His psychiatric evaluation further finds indications of ‘organic difficulty’ that may relate to that mortar-shell incident in Korea.”

Shoppa said, “So a shell exploded and turned him homo? That’s a new one.”

“I’m out of my depth there,” Martineau said. “But there’s worse on his record than just perversion-his psychiatric evaluation also notes ‘homicidal threats’ and ‘chronic brain syndrome associated with brain trauma.’”

“This is just peachy,” Shoppa said.

“So,” I said, “he gets his honorable discharge because the Marines blame themselves for his mental condition.”

Gross asked, “What else do we have on this character?”

Martineau shrugged. “We know that Vallee is, or was, a member of the John Birch Society. We also know he drives a Ford Falcon with New York plates-he moved back to Chicago from Hicksville, Long Island, in March-and of course we know his home address. We don’t have his work address as yet.”

Eben said, “His place of employment is a printing facility of some kind in the Loop. We’re checking out every possibility by phone, emphasizing any plants on the parade route. There’s an agent working that angle right now.”

Martineau said to the two cops, “We would like you men to get right on this. Get over to that rooming house and once Vallee shows up, stake him out, and don’t let loose of him. If you can find a way to get him off the street, do it.”

“You want him off the street,” Shoppa said, rolling his cigar around his mouth, “he’s off the street.”

Martineau raised a calming hand. “Keep in mind Mr. Vallee hasn’t committed a crime.”

“Yet,” I said.

Martineau lifted his eyebrows, then continued: “One of the saddest and most frustrating situations a Secret Service agent faces is knowing that someone threatening a president’s life has not committed an illegal act. Nor is it illegal for Mr. Vallee to have those rifles, that handgun, and that ammunition. He’s protected under the Second Amendment like the rest of us.”

A knock at the door got our attention.

Martineau called, “Yes?”

One of the anonymous crew-cut, dark-rim-glasses-wearing agents stuck his head in. “We have Vallee’s workplace, Marty. It’s the IPP Litho-Plate Company.”

“Good,” Martineau said. “Tell me you didn’t tip our hand. I don’t want this getting back to Vallee.…”

“No,” the agent said, crisply. “Nothing was given away. This was just a routine check, as far as IPP is concerned. Vallee works on the third floor as a lithographer, which apparently means he changes the paper in a big machine.”

“Nice job, Fred. What’s the address?”

“West Jackson Boulevard. 625 West Jackson.”

Martineau whitened.

Ebe groaned, and I said, “Well, fuck a duck.”

The agent in the doorway frowned and said, “That’s on the motorcade route, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” Martineau said rather numbly. “Thank you, Fred. That’ll be all.”

The door shut, and the two cops didn’t seem to be getting it. The motorcade route was eleven miles long, after all.

I said, “That address, if I know my Loop geography at all-and we can walk right over there, gents, if you like-is a perfect place to watch the President’s limo make its slow turn from the expressway off-ramp onto Jackson.”

“Ideal for a sniper,” Eben said.

Martineau was on his feet, looking at the map. But he wasn’t saying anything.

“Any of you fellas ex-military?” I asked.

Neither Martineau nor Boldt responded, but both Gross and Shoppa nodded.

“Then maybe you already know this,” I said. “But the way a sniper plans to hit a moving target is by knowing in advance where that target-in this case Lancer-is going to be. The exact point past which the target will stroll by, or maybe drive by in a car. The sniper aims his rifle at a chosen spot and just waits in his nest till the target walks or drives into the crosshairs. That way, a sniper can keep his rifle still as hell, with his only movement the squeezing of the trigger. Saves him from having to move himself and his rifle in sync with that moving target.”

Eben asked, “Does this make Vallee a bigger threat than our team of four assassins?”

Martineau, his back half turned to us as he studied that map, said, “He may be part of that team.”

Shoppa said, “He ain’t Smith or Jones, and he sure as hell ain’t Gonzales or Rodriguez. Listen, we are happy to take Vallee off your hands, Chief Martineau, but are you sure you don’t want your own people on this?”

Martineau was thinking.

Then he wheeled and said, “The AG says our primary suspects are those four: Gonzales, Rodriguez, and-as you put it, Sergeant Shoppa-Smith and Jones. So, yes, take over the Vallee investigation, Lieutenant Gross, which is chiefly a surveillance job at this point. But the moment you see Vallee making contact with any one of those four … call us immediately. Call us right fucking now.”

That was the first time I’d heard Martineau use that kind of language.

Gross glanced at Shoppa, and Shoppa glanced back.

“All right,” Gross said. He was the ranking officer, so it was his decision. “We are on it. Where on Paulina is that rooming house again?”

We gave them the address and they were off.

The cops were barely out of the door, the smell of Shoppa’s cigar still lingering, when another of those crew cuts leaned in and said, “We just got an interesting tip, Marty, courtesy of the Chicago FBI.”

“Yeah?”

“Seems there’s a landlady on the North Side complaining about some ‘spics’ renting a flat from her. She says they have four rifles with telescopic sights in there.”

“Where would we be today,” I said, already on my feet, “without suspicious landladies?”

“Ebe, you and Nate follow this up,” Martineau said.

But Ebe was right behind me, as we trailed the agent out and to his desk, to get that address, grab our raincoats, and go.

The rooming house, oddly enough, was just four blocks south and a couple of blocks east of my town house. The compact nature of the geography of this case was starting to feel weird.

The light-yellow Victorian wood-frame, peak-roofed structure dated to the teens. The landlady lived in the basement apartment of the old three-story, whose outer walls almost touched the newer brick buildings on either side-a twenties-era terra-cotta-trimmed number with offices over a Walgreens drugstore and a nondescript fifties-vintage four-story with apartments over a “New and Used” record shop. Three decades represented by three side-by-side buildings-not unusual in this part of the city.

She met us up the handful of steps on the small porch, a squat woman in her fifties wearing a floral tent and nurse’s shoes, another DP but of Greek extraction. Her features were coarse in a squashed circle face, her hair gray and netted, her eyebrows thick and black with a facial mole perfect for today-Halloween.

I introduced myself, showing her my Justice Department credentials, and, wide-eyed, she pointed past me to Eben Boldt, like somebody about to yell, Fire!

“Is he with you?” she demanded.

“We’re together,” I admitted. “He’s a Secret Service agent.”

She folded her arms like Chief Sitting Bull. “Well, the boy waits outside. No colored allowed.”

Eben’s face turned hard as a carved African mask-a frightening one, at that-also fit for All Hallows’ Eve. He seemed about to verbally explode, so I stepped in.

“Ma’am, he needs to come along. I may require him to take notes for me, or maybe run errands.”

Eben’s eyebrows went up, but so did the heavy black ones on our witchy hostess’s mug.

“Okay, then.” She heaved a wary sigh, then shook a schoolmarmish finger at me. “But you deal with him. I don’t truck with the colored.”

“He’ll be my responsibility,” I assured her, and followed her in. I grinned back at Eben, who sneered at me. He really didn’t have much of a sense of humor.

Again, there was no question of a search warrant. The landlady-whose name was Knockomus, she said, and who was the owner of the building-led us up a flight of stairs.

“They paid for a week in advance,” she said. “Starting Monday.”

At the landing, we followed her to the left, a short trip. You could see a bathroom at the end of the hall, door ajar.

Wondering if I should be getting the nine-millimeter out, I asked, “Is there any chance they’re here now, ma’am?”

“No. I saw them go an hour ago. They never come back till late afternoon.”

We were in front of a door marked 2A.

As she was unlocking it, Mrs. Knockomus said, “I don’t relish this at all. I have to put up with the girls on the first floor-I got two apartments down there, they are whores, those girls-and now it comes to renting to spics.”

Her description of her first-floor tenants as whores was likely less a slur than a job description-we were at Clark and Division, near Rush Street and the older Rialto area, where prostitutes plied their trade.

Mrs. Knockomus opened the door and gestured for me to go in. I did, and she moved in front of Eben, I guess to make sure he was admitted last.

This was a flat that took up the entire second floor. The rooms-there were three-were much nicer and larger than Vallee’s one room. The floors here were hardwood with worn yet still handsome Oriental carpets, and the solid-looking furnishings were probably antiques, the upholstery still decent, the iron bed blessed with a “Home sweet home” comforter that looked hand sewn. Maybe our hostess had hidden depths.

“I should have sold back in the fifties,” she said, scowling at nobody in particular, not even Ebe, “but I missed my chance. This urban renewal thing coming up? I’m gonna snap at that line like a mackerel. Enough of this nonsense with scum-of-the-earth tenants.”

We’d been through all three rooms. No guns, not rifles, not handguns, not in the dresser, not in any of three closets.

“I mean, I don’t mind the girls, really,” she was saying. “The whores keep to themselves and don’t bring nobody home. And I don’t even mind some Outfit guy on the lam, now and then, neither. They dress nice, those type fellas, and they are … what’s the right word? Much more discreet about their weapons. These spics, they just leave their guns lying around! What if one went off and was pointed at the floor and killed somebody, like me for example?”

“I don’t see any weapons,” I said.

She pointed at the windows onto the street. No screens, I noted; no air conditioner. Summer would be rough in this space.

“They was leaned up against there,” she said, indicating the wallpapered area between the windows. “Four rifles. Had those fancy telescopes attached. Like the hunters use.… It’s Kennedy, isn’t it?”

Eben and I exchanged glances. “What makes you think that?”

“Right there,” she said, and pointed to an end table by the couch, “they had a map with street names on it.”

I asked, “The kind of map you get from a service station?”

“No! Hand-drawn. With street names and highways and places.”

“Such as?”

“Such as Northwest Expressway and Jackson and Soldier Field.”

Jesus.

She was smiling at her own cleverness. “The motorcade route, am I right?”

Eben walked over to the table. “No map here now.”

Forgetting herself, she said to him: “And the newspaper is gone, too.”

“What newspaper?” I asked.

“It was on that dresser, in the bedroom.” Now she was pointing in that direction. “With the article about Kennedy coming, circled.”

Not a wall collage, but telling enough.

I said to Eben, “Show her the photos.”

He took the four suspect shots from his inside suit-coat pocket and handed them to her. She paused before accepting something from him-he might have been a Zulu handing her a shrunken head-but finally she took them.

Without hesitation, she said, “That’s the two tenants. Their names on here are correct, the spics-Gonzales and Rodriguez. These other boys, the whites? They aren’t staying here, but they come around in the evening.”

“Often?”

“Twice, at least.”

She had placed all four suspects in this flat.

I asked, “Could the two white guys be crashing here at night?”

“Crashing?”

“Staying all night. Maybe slipping out before you’re up, or when you aren’t looking.”

She frowned, offended. “I’m up at six, mister G-man, and I don’t miss nothing.”

Eben asked, “They haven’t checked out, have they, ma’am, your two tenants?”

“No,” she said, but she was looking at me. “They’re still staying here. I don’t know where they go during the day. What do spics do with their time, anyway?”

“It’s a mystery to me,” I said. “Look, Mrs. Knockomus, you mustn’t say anything to them about our being here. About you having a look in their room. Nothing at all.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” she said. “The only thing I ever said to them was, ‘Seventy-five dollars in advance.’”

I asked her several more questions-did her tenants have a car? Yes, green Pontiac, no idea what model or year. Where did they park it? On the street, best they can. Was there a rear exit? Not one available to the upstairs tenants, as it was off one of the downstairs apartments.

Soon we were on the sidewalk, under a sky that remained overcast on a day cooler than the previous several.

I used the phone booth in the Walgreens next door to report in to Martineau.

After filling him in, I said, “I’m going to recommend a twenty-four-hour stakeout.”

“Fine,” Martineau said. “Saves me the trouble. You and Ebe take the first shift.”

Before doing so, we had lunch at the drugstore counter. Cheeseburgers and fries and Cokes. Around us, mothers were scurrying to buy their kids Halloween costumes-Yogi Bear, Popeye, Casper the Ghost. And all sorts of people were scooping up whatever candy was left for the little ghouls and goblins who’d be ringing their doorbells before too long.

“This sounds real, doesn’t it?” Eben said, meaning what we’d learned at Mrs. Knockomus’s place.

“Does to me.” I dragged a fry through ketchup. “Is this common?”

“Is what common?”

“I’ve been with the Secret Service since Tuesday afternoon, and this is the second time rifles with scopes have turned up in rooming-house flats.”

“There weren’t any guns next door.”

“No, but that sweet old gal saw them. She didn’t imagine ’em or make it up-the guns were there. You know it and I know it.”

He bit into his cheeseburger, chewed awhile, swallowed, then said, “No, it isn’t.”

“Isn’t what?”

“Common.”

We didn’t speak any more of it as we finished lunch. We got a few dirty looks, a white guy and colored guy eating together, but we got served, didn’t we? Hell of a lot better than down south. I wondered if Eben appreciated that.

On the way out, I said, “I want to stop in at that record shop.”

“Why?”

“I’m gonna prove to you I’m not prejudiced.”

“How?”

“I’m going to see if they have Ray Charles Greatest Hits.”

“Are you making fun of me?”

They had a nice used copy.

We sat in the car and started our surveillance-perhaps a little too noticeable, a Negro sitting in a car on the street in this part of town; but with the Secret Service’s limited man power, it would have to do.

Before long Eben asked, “Ever hear Muddy Waters?”

“Heard of him. Plays the blues on the South Side?”

“Yeah. After we catch these pricks, I’ll take you there. Joint called Smitty’s. Nothing against Ray Charles, but you haven’t lived till you heard Muddy.”

“Smitty’s, huh? South Side? Is it safe?”

“Well, I won’t get killed.”

That made me smile.

“Looking forward to it,” I said.

And the boring afternoon officially began.