Jeff,
finds himself in Atlanta Magic
Town
Chapter 16 of Magic Town ...
Sunday, 10:18 AM: A Plan Emerges
Jeff is
baffled at how this room filled with smart people can’t seem to make sense of
the case. He realizes that they are doing
it all wrong! Jeff is certain they can’t solve the case, so why are they even
trying … all they need to do is catch the bad guys and figure it out later! He
remembers a story from Sherlock Holmes and a plan emerges. Shonna realizes
there’s something they don’t know about the layout of Magic Town
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Author contact: Chris Lamela,
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Magic Town, Chapter 16
Sunday,
10:18 AM: A Plan Emerges
The next hour found the table with many a scratching head, fingers to
chins, lots of frowns with just a few smiles thrown in, more scribbles on paper.
Jeff’s mind wandered as he listened. For some reason it popped into his
head as he remembered a broken electric can opener his grandmother once gave
him when he was a kid. The motor worked, you could hear it, the can opening
part didn’t turn. He took it home, pulled it apart thinking he could fix it.
When he opened it up there was a collection of gears, maybe six gears from the
motor to the cutter. The largest gear had four teeth missing in a row, the gear
trying to drive it had nothing to grab onto. He had counted over six hundred
teeth on all those gears, only four missing teeth caused the whole machine to
fail. They could have been four teeth missing randomly and it would have still
worked, but when all four were missing in a row, failure.
Jeff sat up. “We’re doing this all wrong, we’re missing a clue. Maybe
four.” He looked at Shonna who looked back at him, the room quieted. “Details,”
he said. She gave a slow knowing nod.
“Look, we’ve got all the clues, we’re just not paying attention.” There
were half-nods around the table. “Any of you even read Sherlock Holmes?” This
was answered with stares. “Any of you go to seventh grade?” Groans.
“Look, you guys think I’m wacky here, but Sherlock Holmes was constantly
saying, ‘You have seen the same clues that I have, I just pay attention to
them.’ I think we have all the clues, but that we are just not paying
attention. Sorry, but you are looking at a man that read all fifteen hundred
pages of Sherlock Holmes stories, there is a lot of wisdom in there.”
Silent stares.
He looked around the table with an incredulous expression, “Come on
guys, you’re supposed to be the professionals here, I’m only your amateur at
best.” He waved his hand at the chart of names. “That chart is speculation.” He
frowned, “Sorry, but it’s speculation.” Nods around the table. “Like Shonna
said, we need to know what we know. Look, Shonna, we sat for how long yesterday
morning watching people go in an out of that house?”
She shrugged.
He pulled across a paper with a drawing of the house with little figures
showing where the bodies were, studying it. “You have a list of names you
recognized, right? Let’s start with that. That’s what we know!”
“Wait, we’ve got better than that!” Arnie stood up, walked out of the
room returning a minute later with a stack of photographs in one hand, a small
stack of papers in the other. He gave an apologetic look for not thinking of
this sooner as he set them in the middle of the table. The color photographs
were from Shonna’s camera, each one of a person leaving the house the morning before
with the time etched in black numbers by the camera onto the film, on each was
a yellow sticky note taped to the upper corner with either a name or a question
mark. The photos had been enlarged to show the faces more clearly, the
resolution was stunning.
The photographs were laid out on the table in chronological order, duplicates
were put into a stack on the side. Jeff pointed to one that was nothing but a
picture of an arm with a snake tattoo. “That’s Snake Arm,” Shonna looked over
to Jeff, “the one you commented on when he came out of the house, remember? I
asked them to blow that up. Is that the tattoo you saw Friday night going into
the club?”
Jeff leaned over the photo, “Yeah, I think so, it was pretty dark, I
just saw it real quick.” He stared at it, “But, yeah, I’m pretty sure. It’s an
unusual tattoo, right?”
“Okay, we’ll get to Snake Arm. But first we need a timeline. But wait,
we need one more thing.” All eyes turned toward her. “As we begin this, we need
to take some notes, we need to keep a list of questions that come up.”
Yvonne the dowdy brunette pulled out a pad of paper and pen, “I’ll play
recorder, help me when we come across a question, okay?” Everyone nodded
turning back to Shonna.
“Now let’s get the timeline.” In less than ten minutes they had created
the timeline of the stakeout. Yvonne created a single sheet, lengthwise with a horizontal
line drawn through the center, little marks with the time and lines drawn down
to show who was exiting using the times on the photographs.
“Okay,” Shonna pulled the stack of papers in front of her, pulled one
out handing the rest to Yvonne, “Can you put these in the same order as the
photos?” Yvonne took the stack, shuffling through them. Jeff leaned over seeing
police reports, realizing they were rap sheets, police records with names on
top, rows of dates followed by text on each line.
“Snake Arm,” Shonna read, “name is William Smith. Alias,” she read,
“lots of aliases, but here’s Snake.” She smiled. “Makes sense. Two armed
robberies, three, let’s see, four drug convictions. Two stints.” She frowned
studying the page. She looked around at the photographs as though connecting
two thoughts, pointing to a photo. “Well, look at this, the judge was Harold
Thompson every time.” Necks craned to look at the photo. “Well, he did time, so
the judge didn’t go very easy, did he?”
Someone interjected, “Or maybe he did!” There was a murmur of agreement.
Yvonne sat flipping through the pages she had organized. “Well, what do
you know, the good Judge Thompson is on three of these bad guys’ sheets. He was
the go-to judge, huh? There’s what, thirty criminal judges in Atlanta Superior
Court, right?” approving nods around the table. “How is it he is he the judge
these guys all went in front of?”
Arnie leaned forward to look at the sheets in Yvonne’s hands, “Actually,
that’s more innocent than it looks. The prosecutors have their favorite judges they
keep trying to steer cases to even though the system is supposedly set up to
prevent it.”
Shonna put down Snake Arm’s file. “Okay, let’s do this carefully.” She
pulled the timeline in front of her. “In order.”
Shonna motioned to Yvonne who handed over the rap sheets. “Let’s see.
Our good friend Pick. Name, Peter Michaelson, two robbery arrests, no
convictions. Drug arrest, no conviction. Weapons. No conviction. Petty theft,
no conviction.”
Jeff’s eyes got wide. “You mean I was hanging out Friday night with a
felon?”
Shonna smiled looking at Jeff
sideways, “Felon maybe, but not a convicted
felon.” She read the page, flipped to the next page. “Any guess who the judge
was every time? The honorable mister Thompson.”
Jeff leaned forward with a concerned expression, “What about Perkins.”
Shonna turned to him, “I don’t even know his name, so we’ve got
nothing.”
“Payroll records?”
“We pay him in cash.” She shook her head regretfully, “I don’t even know
his last name. How did we do that?”
The room was quiet except for an occasional flipping of a photograph or
page.
She frowned, almost talking to herself, “How did that happen?” She shook
her head, “But so much of the business is done in cash, I guess it never occurred
to me.”
Jeff pondered, turning to her, “It just really bugs me the way he looked
so surprised to see me last night when I opened the curtain at the bar, the way
he busted in on us when we were with Antonio.” Turning to Shonna, “You saw his
face, that creepy expression. What was that?” He thought for a second, “And the
way he was so surprised to see me at that house yesterday morning. He looked
stunned.”
“It sounds like you are one surprising guy!” she laughed as the room
chuckled.
Her expression lightened as she looked at Jeff in an assuring tone,
“Look, I’m a pretty good judge of character, and he’s okay,” she nodded as
though to convince Jeff, “I’m pretty sure.”
The room was perfectly quiet as everyone studied the photos, some faces with
fingers to chins. Jeff could hear the din of voices from the operations room.
He glanced at his watch seeing time slipping away.
Shonna found herself slowly flipping through pages, picking up the notes
from the meeting with Antonio last night. She motioned with her left hand to the
stack of ledger sheets Jeff had found in the congressman’s stinky coat, “Now
let’s correlate this all together.” She stood up, moving along the table laying
down the twenty sheets with the daily reports.
They went through the timeline again which had the names of the people
in the house, everyone was candid with amazement at who had come out, someone
jumped up volunteering to make more notes on the ledger sheets as names came up
which were attached to initials on the sheets in some semblance to the
timeline. The honorable Judge Thompson, a Federal judge, four councilmen, the
police chief with three captains, the mayor with two of his aids, a couple
unidentified people, Pick, finally Snake Arm and some other man. Of course there
was Perkins at the end of the timeline.
Shonna reached over picking up the congressman’s business card with the
writing on the back. “Hand me a blank paper, someone?” it was passed over to
her. The card’s writing in blue ink had ten lines of initials, next to each a
percentage number. She copied the initials onto the paper, the percentages next
to each set of initials, added them, underlining the bottom number in the
column writing the total below it: 100%. “Okay, listen, I will read the
initials here, someone tell me the name that corresponds. I think this may tell
us what the congressman was up to.”
Shonna read a set of initials, a name was called out. She went down the
list until it was complete. When that was done she stared at the page setting
her fingers lightly on the page, closed her eyes, her head up slightly with
intense concentration. Jeff watched as though the page was some kind Ouija
Board that would move Shonna’s fingers around on the page to spell out the true
meaning of some mystery laying before her. Jeff remembered as a teenager how he
and his friends played with Ouija Boards, it was always the strange kids or the ones living with a
divorced mother who owned one; they always had all the cool stuff. He recalled
how mysterious messages would always materialize before his eyes without fail.
He never got over his suspicion that his fellow player was guiding that little
cursor to make all those messages appear. Some of those messages were quite
lude. He suspected his friend, he just never wanted to rule out that the Ouija
gods had a dirty sense of humor.
Shonna gasped, “He was going to cut out everyone but these ten people!”
Her eyes flew open dashing around the table furtively, “Quick! Hand me the
member roster!” The roster was handed across the table to her.
She looked at the roster anxiously comparing it to her Ouija notes. “He
was going to cut out twenty-two members!” Everyone craned to look at her pages.
“Look! This roster list has thirty-two names, right? We know who they
are. And here, this card in his writing has only ten names with percentages
that equal one hundred percent! The top entry is FS, for Frank Schedz with
fifty percent next to it! That greedy
bastard! Look here! The mayor, police chief, Judge Thompson, these other
names are all the big players. Look at the ones being left out: the city
council, the other judge, and all these other clingers on. Holy shit! Antonio
was right! This was going to lead to nothing but a massive blood bath!” She
shook her head staring at the pages.
“No wonder they murdered him!”
The room erupted into voices that went on for ten minutes until they
sounded like a big bowl of voice soup being
poured into Jeff’s ears, warm sloshy aural liquid rolling down his ear canals
with vowels bumping against consonants creating a resonant concoction yielding
no meaning to his ears.
Jeff sat back to make sense of all he had heard. Yes, what Nancy
This wasn’t getting them any closer to a plan.
The voices continued as Jeff found himself tuning out the room.
He
shook his head, they were no closer than when they started. He tried to think
about what he knew about crime realizing he didn’t know squat. All he knew was
what he read in the newspapers. Also in his book reading, he’d read lots and
lots of murder mysteries. He tried to think: The Pelican Brief by Grisham?
No. Agatha Christi, maybe something like Murder
on the Orient Express? No. Who else, who else? There had to be some
detective book somewhere that could help here. Lord knows that’s all he’d ever
studied about crime––if you could call that studying––compared to Shonna’s two
degrees in law enforcement he felt almost flaccid in his abilities as he looked
around at the people circling the table.
But
he knew they were doing it all wrong!
They
were trying to solve the crime when there was not enough information to solve
it! Why?
It
occurred to him that they could have a thousand pages of numbers and names, was
that even evidence at all? It was obvious to him that they just could not solve the crime…so why were they even
trying?
All
they really cared about was how to capture the bad guys, then try to solve it later. He knew that it sounded backwards, but
that is exactly what they need to do.
Take them all out at once.
Antonio’s words kept bouncing around in Jeff’s head.
The ideas flew as voices continued. No plan emerged. The voices droned
on. Jeff fell deep into thought.
All he could think was did it really matter if they figured out all
these silly little details when all
that mattered was that they found a plan to get all these yay-hoos. And do it
like Antonio said, all at once! How would they do that without these guys having
to traipse all over Atlanta and northern Georgia, maybe even down to goddam
Miami kicking down doors only to give everyone a chance to lawyer-up then have to deal with a long drawn-out prosecution probably
getting in front of judges who were on the payola anyway? He sat back smiling
that he had at least figured that much out.
Suddenly Jeff sat up, “Take them all out at once!”
The room silenced. All eyes turned to Jeff.
“That’s it! Sherlock Holmes!” He heard a muttered oh brother not Sherlock Holmes again.
“No, wait, listen! Really!” He turned to Shonna, “Remember last night!
Antonio said that we needed to find a way
to take them out all at once!” She furrowed her brow trying to picture
where Jeff was leading.
“So we need to take them out all at once! It’s simple!” Jeff went on to
explain the genesis of an idea that just flashed into his brain from the great
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He explained about how in the story The Scowrers––he was actually surprised
he remembered the name of the story––an undercover agent, “Of course we don’t
know he’s the undercover agent, arranges a meeting of all the bad guys so they
can all be arrested at once. How the men had taken over this valley so that all
the citizens were too scared to confront them. The hero of the story had
infiltrated the gang, acted like he was participating when he was really
warning people, witnessed crimes that he was helpless to stop. But he was
patient. He was waiting.”
He looked around the room at faces in rapt attention. “So the main
character arranges for all the bad guys to be in one room so they can all take
part in the murder of––” he tried to remember the name, “yeah, Birdy. Birdy
Edwards. All the bad guys show up armed to the teeth so they can each put a vengeful
bullet into this Birdy Edwards guy who is about to take down their vast
criminal enterprise.” He smiled, “And that enterprise was almost exactly like
our bad guys here!” He reflected, “Amazing how things don’t change much,”
glancing around the nodding room. “Anyway, he gets all the bad guys into a room
and he says he will be right back to bring Birdy Edwards into the room so they
can all ceremoniously take turns shooting him, but instead he walks back in and
says, ‘I am Birdy Edwards’, before the bad guys can react rifle barrels come
crashing through windows and they are all busted at once!” He sat back with a
big grin in an utterly silent room.
“Okay, but how do we do this?” came a voice. The table arose to a
cacophony of noise again with all sorts of ideas flying back and forth. Jeff
felt a little hurt that there was no acknowledgement of his great idea that was
soon lost in the din of voices where he could hardly tell what was being said.
The voices turned into a racket beginning to almost reach a frantic level now
that they had a semblance of a plan. They simply could not come to any kind of
consensus about how to do this.
Jeff mulled the words that he had read in Sherlock Holmes, what was the
strategy that the character Birdy Edwards had used for the successful
conclusion of the story?
What was it?
What was it?
“Bait!” The room quieted instantly as Jeff sat back smiling, every face
turned to him again.
“We need bait!”
In just fifteen minutes the plan was made, Arnie motioned toward Jeff as
all heads followed his fingers. “Shonna, where did you get this guy?”
Everyone sat back almost on queue. The room sighed.
As they got up, Jeff’s right hand met every other hand with a warm
chorus of thank you’s and best of luck. It was agreed that they would put the
plan into action, would meet again at five for an update. Jeff smiled hearing
“Sherlock Holmes plan” as people filtered out of the room.
Jeff followed Shonna into the big operations room which had even more
bodies than before, even more activity. He glanced at his watch which said ten
minutes after eleven. Shonna walked into the room, put up her hands announcing,
“Everyone!” All heads turned toward her, hands cupped over phones, eyes away
from screens, “We got our plan! Everyone on my core ops team, conference room,
five minutes!”
She turned toward Jeff, “This is just logistics stuff, it’s going to
take a while, you can sit in if you like, but maybe you want to go outside and
get some air.” He nodded as she waved to a man standing near the back door,
“But you can’t go out alone, even into the back yard. And stay near the house!”
The man stepped up. She asked him to accompany Jeff into the backyard for a few
minutes, he nodded turning toward the back door. Jeff smiled at her, turning to
follow the man outside.
Jeff was glad to be outside in the warm morning air, surprised at this pleasant
temperature so early for a November the day. He walked back and forth for a
couple minutes, stood still almost wishing he smoked. He smiled to himself, maybe
a meerschaum pipe with rag tobacco would be good right now! He was pretty sure
that Sherlock Holmes and Watson, too, would be very proud of what he had done
this morning in that meeting. “Yeah, even though I ripped them off!” he
chortled to himself out loud.
The man outside with him never once tried to make conversation so Jeff just
walked back and forth across the long veranda with wide flagstones under his
feet. The sun was out, facing the other side of the house; this side of the
house in shadow, still warm though. It occurred to him for the first time that
this coming Thursday is Thanksgiving. He tried to remember what the plans are,
spending the next few minutes trying to remember what his wife had told him. He
guessed that it would be all the usual people, were they going to host family
or were they going? He hoped they were going because he knew that when he got
home he was going to want to sleep for a week. No way could he picture himself
peeling potatoes, chasing to the store nine times around to bring home three
forgotten items with each trip. He was pretty sure that Wednesday would find
him with a little slip of paper at the grocery store as he tried to find nutmeg
on the spice rack wondering why they couldn’t do a better job of putting the
spices in alphabetical order, whether this or that brand was his wife’s
favorite. God, what he wouldn’t give to be standing in front of a Spice Islands rack that very second.
He looked out across the large yard lined with tall bushes on every side
seeing a ten foot-tall stone wall behind them with a foot-tall decorative metal
railing on top with sharp points every ten inches or so. That made sense. There
was a wide lawn with a fountain in the middle with the usual stone female
spouting water out of her finger tips. He tried to remember, Aphrodite or
something.
It felt good to breathe fresh air, he found himself taking deep breaths
as he paced slowly back and forth, a few times glancing at the man who brought
him out there, wishing he would make conversation. There was a small stone bench
with ornate scrolling around the edges. He glanced at his watch, it was almost noon.
Jeff glanced at the door to see Shonna just coming out waving him in, the
man turned to follow Jeff as he walked back into the house. Shonna turned to
thank the man leading Jeff by the arm to a table on the other side of the room,
pointing to a computer screen.
“Do you remember the layout of Magic Town
“It’s not that complicated, is it?”
“There’s something we don’t know, you would think as much as I have been
inside that building that I should know.”
She pointed to the computer screen at the room they had met Antonio in the
night before. “Here’s the room we were in last night,” she traced the outer hallway,
“here’s the back door.” Jeff nodded. “But there’s another door.” She pointed to
a door, the back exit they had gone out the first night, then to a wall at the
end. “The plans from the city don’t show it, but there’s actually a door there.
I realize I’ve seen that door a hundred times. I’m surprised that I never paid
attention.” She leaned forward as though a door would suddenly appear on the
screen. “Any ideas?” He shrugged. “We decided there’s a piece missing from our
information, that the door there has to go somewhere. It’s not on the city
plans so it must have been put there after it was built.”
“How do you figure it goes somewhere? It could be a closet.”
“We’ve had a watch on that place for weeks, know everyone coming and
going.” Jeff leaned toward the screen, turning to look at her. “The problem is
that there are more people coming out than going in. People coming out of the
club that didn’t come through the front or back doors.”
“So you think––“
“We think there’s another exit. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“So what does that mean?”
She turned to him with a smile, “I know how much you like Magic Town
He stepped back with his hands out, “No, no, no, I’m not going back
there.”
“Listen, to me.” She held him by his arms, her golden eyes looking
intently into his, “We made a mistake with all that planning we did this
morning. “Remember the list of things we know, names and all?” He nodded. “We
forgot someone.”
Jeff closed his eyes trying to think of who was on that paper, he
shrugged. “Missing someone. Are you sure?” She nodded. Jeff tried to figure out
who they could have missed, looking at Shonna, “Okay, I give up. Who?”
“You!”
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