The Shut Mouth Society (The Best Thrillers Book 1) Read online

  “We’re getting killed on this Douglass thing. Now the mayor wants a cop who can claim to be his friend. You know, we’re not a racist city and all that. He’s rip-roaring mad. Can you fly back tomorrow? I’ll pick you up at LAX.”

  “Tell the chief I’m on vacation.”

  “You’ll be on suspension is what you’ll be. Come on, Greg, where the hell are—”

  “Gotta go.” Evarts hung up.

  When Evarts returned to the table, Baldwin asked, “Learn anything?”

  “Plenty. I’m no longer a person of interest in that Rock Burglar thing, and someone managed the news media around the Boston episode. The dead have been identified as henchmen for drug lords, so they dismissed it as a gangland hit. That’s why we’ve only seen subdued news coverage.”

  “Who’d cover that up?”

  Evarts waved down the waiter and ordered another beer. After all, they didn’t need to drive. A loud racket drew his attention outside, and he saw that rain pounded the cars and pavement. It looked like they would run instead of walking the hundred yards back to their motel.

  He waited until the waiter had returned with his second beer before he continued. “The police would’ve easily reconstructed the scene as an assassination attempt, and although the dead killing team had drug-related police records, they would’ve pursued the targets as assumed gangland members. Our prints were everywhere, so someone squashed the investigation. Only the union had the motivation for a cover-up, because if we got identified as assassination targets, it would lend credibility to the Shut Mouth materials—if we ever got to release them.”

  “Can they cover up a crime that significant?”

  “Sure, with enough pull in either the mayor’s office or the police department. I guessed as much when the DTCC computer let me into their building.” Evarts took a long draw of beer.

  “That’s not all bad news. At least we’re not being chased by the police.” Baldwin studied him. “Why are you upset?”

  “I discovered who planted that parking receipt at the Rock Burglary.”

  “Who?”

  “Lieutenant Clark.”

  “He works for you, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but the union must have got to him. Dickhead’s older than me, so maybe he didn’t want to wait around to see if I retired early.”

  Evarts watched the heavy rain hit so hard it bounced up almost a foot from the hood of the car outside his window. After another swig of beer, he continued to look out the window as he talked. “He told me to fly back and he’d pick me up at LAX. The bastard kept asking where I was, so how did he know I needed to fly? When he said I should get you back as well, it clinched it for me.”

  Evarts turned to Baldwin. “Nothing puts us together except forensic evidence in Boston, so I asked him about the shooting, and he knew too much.” Evarts looked out the window again. “You’ve seen the television coverage. Barely mentioned. Why would a Santa Barbara cop know about a Boston gang shooting?”

  “You need to hire a better class of subordinates.”

  Evarts laughed, but he didn’t feel happy. “Civil Service regs. What’s a fella gonna do?”

  “What is a fella gonna do?”

  “Thinking about it.” He did. “I’m inclined to open a channel with Detective Standish but keep Clark on the line. He could prove useful if we want to feed the union misinformation.”

  “And when you get back, promote Detective Standish to Lieutenant Clarks’ job. I liked her.”

  “I forgot. She interviewed you at the Douglass house.”

  “Yeah, she won’t sell you out.” Baldwin winked. “She likes you.”

  Chapter 42

  After dinner they sprinted across the parking lot to their room. They got as drenched as if they had stood for five minutes in a full-throttle shower. When they got inside the room, Baldwin started cursing that she had been dumb not to change before the rain.

  “Let’s put on something dry, and we’ll take these clothes to the dry cleaners tomorrow,” Evarts suggested.

  “They’re ruined!” she shouted. “At least mine are. Since you don’t care about your appearance, yours are probably fine.”

  He checked a sharp retort. “Why don’t you go into the bathroom and change? You’ll feel better after you’re dry.”

  “I’ll feel better after we get out of this mess. We didn’t find anything useful today. Goddamn it, I don’t—”

  Just then a clap of thunder shook the room so hard that Evarts glanced out the window, expecting to see a tree incinerated. He heard another goddamn and turned around to see the bathroom door slam behind Baldwin.

  He changed into a pair of shorts and tee shirt and hung his own clothes up to dry in the metal rack that served as a closet. The rack hung outside the bathroom door, and he heard Baldwin crying. When she finally opened the door, she was dressed in the beach gear he had bought her. She held the new clothes they had bought the day before in a wad and tossed them on the floor under the clothing rack.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You didn’t deserve that.”

  He thought she looked forlorn. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just such a letdown.”

  “It’s the weather. It would depress anyone.”

  “This was our big hope. Since the beginning, we thought the Evarts documents would give us a weapon. Now—” She plopped onto the bed.

  “I only scanned them. We’ll study them more thoroughly in the morning.” Hoping that talking about history would brighten her mood, he asked, “How do you think Evarts got hold of those Lincoln documents?”

  “He probably found them in the White House basement or a closet after Johnson took control of the Executive Mansion.” Her voice still had an edge, but she seemed calmer.

  “That stuff about Seward was fascinating. Did you learn anything else today?”

  “Learn?” He saw her mentally flip through the pages again. “Small details, confirmation of suppositions, but mostly behind the scenes maneuvering of public events already recorded by the press of the day.”

  “Any specific event?” Evarts saw that the diversion had worked.

  “The 1860 race that elected Lincoln president. The files contained only letters from his political operatives, not his responses.”

  “Where would his responses be?”

  “Lost, I suppose. The people who managed his campaign never passed them on to us. It would be like Lincoln to issue instructions that they be destroyed.”

  “A shut mouth man.”

  “Exactly. He always pretended that things happened accidentally or required little effort on his part. He took meticulous care to orchestrate events. Lincoln agonized over speeches and then helped propagate the myth that he scratched them out on the back of an envelope. He also sought advice from everyone on his major addresses and then allowed each one of them to think they had contributed far more than they actually did.”

  She got up from the bed and went over to the tiny faux wood table by the window. “Caspar Weinberger once said it was amazing how much a person could accomplish in Washington if they didn’t care who got the credit.”

  “But you found no more startling revelations?”

  “Only that Lincoln knew his operatives’ plans, but no historian believed him innocent of political maneuvering. The first step in Lincoln’s plan was to convince his party that they had to win Illinois to gain enough electoral votes to take the White House. After he accomplished this, he persuaded them to hold the Republican convention in Chicago to help win the state. Once he gained that concession, he used local advantage to manipulate the convention to his ends. His strategy was to appear as if he wasn’t running prior to the convention and to court delegates only as an alternative if the convention deadlocked. Then he engineered a deadlock, packed the galleries with loud partisans using forged tickets, and bought support by aggressively using patronage.” Baldwin took a deep breath. “He suckered them onto his turf, quietly built a superb campaign team whil
e he pretended to be a harmless hick, and then bribed his way past all the front-runners.”

  “So, he captured the nomination,” Evarts said. “What about the presidential race?”

  “The convention was the race. Lincoln and every savvy politico knew that Douglas would split the Democrats, and whoever won the Republican nomination would win the White House. Lincoln only won forty percent of the popular vote to become our first minority president. The other sixty percent got split between Douglas and a proslavery Southern Democrat.”

  “I thought Douglas was proslavery.”

  “So did the northern abolitionists but not Southern Democrats. Douglas wanted to be president, so he curried favor with the South by engineering the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Later he tried to straddle the slave issue. Slaveholders on a roll would brook no wavering—none. So they convened a second convention, and two Democrats ran against Lincoln.”

  Evarts loved it when she got passionate about history. Her head bounced, her emerald eyes flitted to and fro, and her gestures became lively. Evarts must have smiled, because she said, “What?”

  “You’re beautiful when you’re excited.”

  “I’m not beautiful.” She took off her glasses and blushed. “Cute maybe, but not beautiful.”

  He leaned across the table and gave her a gentle kiss on the lips. As a reward, he received one of her wicked smiles. Evarts never thought history could be an aphrodisiac, but she grabbed his hand and drew him toward the bed. They made love for the first time since Des Moines. The thunder, lightning, deafening rain, and other dangers that lurked outside made the bleak room seem cozy. They felt protected and alone together. Instead of wild abandon, their caressing and quiet lovemaking drew them together in an emotional bond that fixed the evening in his memory forever.

  Chapter 43

  In the morning, Evarts went out and brought back coffee and pastries. They decided to work in the room on the material they had copied. The summer storm had cleaned the skies and streets but hadn’t reduced the humidity. It would be a good day to stay indoors with air-conditioning.

  Baldwin was already sitting at the little table when he came into the room. He handed her a cup of coffee and said, “I need to go to a bookstore and buy a copy of The Tempest.”

  “Already have it. I downloaded an electronic copy onto my computer.”

  “The whole play? I didn’t know you could do that.”

  “Shakespeare’s copyright expired centuries ago.” She turned the laptop toward him so he could see.

  Evarts sat down and sipped his coffee as he leafed through the encoded pages. Of the pages he had copied yesterday, one had two sets of numbers separated by white space. He suspected that the set of numbers at the bottom of the page were written in a different hand, so he wanted to start with that sheet. He found it and pulled the laptop toward him.

  While he used the computer, Baldwin read the copies of the William Evarts documents. Translating the numbers on the bottom of the page took him two hours. By the time he finished, he was sure that he had gotten the message right. Now he knew for sure that the notes at the bottom of this page had been added recently.

  He had made notes in a word processing file, and now he hit Save and stared at the screen a moment. He had found one more clue in an unending string of clues, but he wasn’t thinking about unraveling the next level. He had to figure out how to tell Baldwin what he had discovered and in what sequence. He walked to the telephone, where he picked up a tiny tablet, and then returned to the table to make some notations. When he finished, he closed his work file and snapped the lid shut.

  He stood again, stuffed the tablet in his back pocket, and stretched. “I’m going for more coffee. Want some?”

  She had her head buried in one of the documents and just nodded.

  Just as he was about to open the door, her voice stopped him. “Greg?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you read this document?”

  He came over and looked down at it. “Probably not. I only scanned most of them. Why?”

  “This puts a different slant on the supposed William Evarts deal. It offers an acquittal in the Johnson impeachment in exchange for dropping the treason charges against Jefferson Davis. A president for a president, so to speak. The document also talks about a cessation of plundering, but it appears at the bottom, almost like an afterthought.”

  “Doesn’t that fly in the face of a grand conspiracy between a bunch of rich New Yorkers and aristocratic plantation owners?”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Well, a bunch of Yankees wouldn’t care about Davis, would they?”

  “You’d think not, but Horace Greeley and Cornelius Vanderbilt were the moneymen behind the Davis defense. When the courts consented to bail, each of them contributed twenty-five thousand dollars—a huge sum in those days.”

  She seemed to puzzle that over for a bit. “If Davis escaped treason, then the rest of the rebellion leaders would probably receive pardons and get their plantations back. That would provide them the wherewithal to repay their New York debts.” She swiveled around in her chair and looked up at him. “I’ll bet Evarts and his advisors thought that if the Southern part of the coalition reclaimed their legitimate wealth, they’d quit stealing other people’s money. It sure makes more sense than just getting an empty promise from them to quit stealing.”

  “But how could they pull off a deal like that? Wouldn’t it take a lot of people in the know?”

  “Not as many as you might think. Lincoln appointed the Radical Republican Salmon Chase as chief justice of the Supreme Court because he didn’t want him as an opponent in the 1864 presidential race. Chase had been his secretary of the treasury and a royal pain in the ass because of his outsized presidential ambitions. The man would do anything to gain New York backing.” Baldwin paused dramatically. “Chief Justice Chase presided over both the Johnson impeachment and the Davis treason trial.” Then she waited another couple beats and added, “And William Maxwell Evarts defended Johnson and prosecuted Jefferson Davis.”

  “You mean Evarts was the one to let Davis go?”

  “He pleaded nolle prosequi, or unwilling to pursue. But yeah, probably with the approval of Johnson and others, your great-great-grandfather was the one to give Jefferson Davis his get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  Evarts pointed at the paper in her hand. “And that document says it was a quid pro quo for Johnson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think the Shut Mouth Society got it wrong?”

  “No, but they got outsmarted. The union predecessors got the plantations returned, freed their figurehead, crippled Johnson, and then continued to plunder to their heart’s content—at least through the Grant administrations.”

  Evarts left the room deep in thought. He didn’t know what to think about this new development. Up to now, he had thought his ancestor had been a crafty player in the highest political arena. Now Baldwin had intimated that these cagey union conspirators had gotten the upper hand on the Shut Mouth people right out of the gate.

  He wanted more than coffee. He wanted to call his police department. When the dispatcher answered, he got put through immediately to Deputy Chief Damon.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I thought you didn’t want me around.”

  “Abraham Douglass is old news. If you remember, you have a job here. What is this, some kind of juvenile snit?”

  “I have a personal issue. One I’d prefer not to discuss. Put me on vacation. I have three weeks coming.”

  “You’re already on administrative suspension. I don’t know if I can get it changed to vacation. Why’d you run?”

  “Long story, but you’ve got to trust me for a few more days. I’ve got something I need to handle, and I want more time. Is it true I’ve been cleared of that Rock Burglar thing?”

  “Yeah. But the chief’s still upset that you took off. He thinks you might be hiding something else.”

  “My p
roblem isn’t police business. Can you put me on vacation? Talk to the chief.”

  “I’ll try, but you’re not giving me much to lay in front of him.”

  “Okay, listen, I got pissed off and went on a surfing trip along the coast. At first, I just wanted to clear my head, but now I’ve found a woman. One I think might turn into something serious, and I want to give it a chance. Get me some time … please.”

  Evarts listened to a long hesitation and then heard a reluctant, “All right.”

  “One other thing. I’ve been thinking about the Rock Burglar. Someone at the department tried to frame me. I want you to check the schedule of the rest of the force to see if anyone has a pattern that tracks to the robberies.”

  “You suspect someone on the Santa Barbara force?”

  “I think implicating me might have been a diversionary tactic.”

  Damon paused again. “Okay. You might be right. I’ll put someone on it.”

  “Can I make a suggestion?”

  “Sure.”

  “Detective Standish.”

  “Good choice. She should be clean.”

  After Evarts hung up, he thought about what he had just done. Was it peevishness? If word got out that he had initiated a broad internal investigation, he would have trouble with his fellow officers. Unless they found something—then that news would override all else.

  When he returned ten minutes later, he slid the cardboard coffee cup over to her and said, “I need to interrupt you.”

  She put her finger in the middle of the document to indicate where she had stopped reading. “What?”

  “Put that down … please.”

  Now she looked worried. “What is it?”

  “I have a message from your parents.”

  She looked confused for a moment and then glanced at the computer. Her eyes looked scared when they returned to his. “You deciphered a message to me?”

  “Yes. It’s very short, but I thought you should read it before we try to figure out what the rest of it means.”

  “Give it to me.”