CHAPTER II

        John Burgdart closed his small grey Samsonite "trim­line" brief­case, replaced the phone receiver to its cradle and walked toward the door of the third floor office of Robert Stonewell.  Beneath his shoes he could feel the carpet springing back toward him with each step; plush carper... only the finest.  It was too dark to see the color, but he knew it was one of the rich colors that such executive offices always had.

        The brass hinges on the solid oak door didn't even make the lightest creak as he pulled it toward him.  At first there was a slight brushing sound just as the door swung to the high carpet, but that faded.

        In the marbled floored hallway he made a licking sound as his heels first stepped onto the uncarpeted floor.  But the first click made him aware enough to take all of his steps in the "T" form of silent walking that he'd been trained in and had used so often.  Each step he took was a concen­trated effort of movement.  It was slow and could have seemed painful if he'd been thinking about it.  Each step was a mimic of the hundreds he taken in train­ing walking in heavy boots over thin rice paper so that the paper would neither tear nor ripple with noise.

        He had been using this oriental discipline for so many years that it was almost effortless.  So the only noise at all in the hallway was a delicate spring of tumbler-pins slipping back into place as he removed a long metal pick from the lock at Stone­well's office.

        The inside of the lock in the door knob at the office was made up of fourteen tumbler pins.  Each pin was rounded on the bottom and stacked against the other pins like a roll of coins on edge.  Facing the lock, the left side of each pin as well as half of the top was also rounded.  But from the center of the top, the circle cut sharply with a radius to the center of the circle.  At 90 degrees from that radius another radius stretched cut to the right side of the circle and came to a rounded stub-like point.  Six of the fourteen stubs had tiny springs stretched on them to the body housing of the lock.  Inserting a key, with a code of notches cut out (as is the case with any key), the extending notches of the key would depress the spring stubs and thus release the lock.  The stubs that were not springing would be passed over by the higher notches in the key.  With a 14-tumbler look there are mote than 558 million key possibilities.

        But a skilled lock man, with the right tool in his hand to push down the spring stubs and a keen eat to listen to the right stubs go down, could be inside such a locked office in less that a minute.  This too was a dis­cipline that Burgdart had adopted as a second nature that would take a little or no effort of concen­tration.

        He "T-stepped" silently along the hallway toward the elevator.  As he walked he removed his white cotton gloves and replace them with the tightly fitting leather ones from his pocket.  Then he carefully folded the white gloves and slid them into his coat pocket beside the pick...the same sport where the leather gloves had been.

        He stopped at the elevator door and reached into the other outside pocket of his coat for a special key to open the shaft door.  This key was more like a pole with a round cross at its tip.  They key was used to wind open, manually, the shaft door.  And one the key had been removed, the springs of the door would roll the elevator shaft closed again.

        The elevator was exactly where he'd left it during business hours, one floor below.  Of course that is the way it should have been.  It was late at night and no one should have been in the building.  Customers never came up to the executive offices and the security guards knew that Stonewell was working late.  They assumed that one elevator that was not parked and locked on the ground floor was for his use.

        The guards never made rounds of the upper floors.  Why make rounds in an office building for a department store?  They made their rounds on the lower shopping floors.  There security was needed.  There had been, over the years, a few cases of break-ins and even of customers trying to spend the night in the store and break-out.  So on the shopping floors there were security men making rounds.

        Burgdart stepped inside the shaft and seated himself beside the two pulleys on the roof of the elevator car.  Careful to guard against any unnecessary sound, he let the big white shaft door return to the closed position.  He was careful too not to lean against any moveable parts of the elevator and not to touch the pulleys or their cables.

        All was quite.  He flicked a light from a disposable lighter to check his watch.  It was 3:35 a.m.  When the lighter's flame died and he returned it to his pocket, the only light in the shaft came from the tiny threads of florescence that seeped through the cracks at corners of the elevator car.

        It would still be a long night.  He would remain on top of the number three elevator until the next morning when the offices of Stonewell and Moore would open.  But, like the other acts tonight, he was used to long nights.

        After to body had been discovered and the police had been cal­led...and the initial frantia had calmed, he would slip down through the roof escape hatch into the elevator car and ride to the ground floor just like any on of the hundreds of customers who rode the elevators shopping on the lower floors all day, every day.

        It all went very smoothly and according to plan; but then it always did.

        By noon on the next day John Burgdart was high over middle America on a special flight back to Washington.  When he arrived in his office at the 17th Street foot of K Street in the north­west part of the nation's capitol, Wednesday's Atlanta Journal was already on his desk along with a stack of other newspapers.

        He quickly read the front-page Atlanta story about the suicide of southern department store tycoon Robert Stonewell.  After a quick scan-read of the story he re-read it, this time watching every word carefully.

        It was all there.  The police had come to answer the call from Stone­well's secretary who had discovered the body when she arrived for work.

        Polly Bently matched the chauvinistic stereotype of the "old maid secretary."  She'd faithfully served Stonewell for more than twenty years.  She'd been his right hand.  She had been the person who took care of all the mundane work that a big shot like Stonewell couldn't bother himself with.  It was her key that always unlocked the executive office door.  She always made his lunch arrangements and remembered for him birthdays, anniver­saries and other important dates for his family.  She even sent the gifts for him and signed his name.  Polly knew everything there was to know about the man.

        She knew more than his family knew.  After all, he spent only night or nine hours of the day with his family at home.  But the other three quarters of his life was spent at the office.  Ant thus, it was spend with Polly.  A very long time ago when they were both younger and full of their own ideas there had been a night or two of office passion.  But they were not lovers now.  She was just the secretary.  But she was a very good secretary.  When Robert Stonewell died, a part of Polly Bently surely died with him.

        The newspaper story reported that Miss Bently had discovered the body, collapsed over his desk with his own gun in his hand and his brains scat­tered across the desk top like spilled soup, when she had unlocked the executive office doors and begun turning on lights.

        They story did not report her horror followed by her grief.  Nor did it report the strange odor that violent death leaves be­hind ...and that it had been that odor that had first drawn Polly toward her boss's office.

        The story continued that Stonewell had been working late on some sort of account matter and that the police inves­tigation of open ledgers on the desk had shown evidence that Stonewell had been sweetening his own pot from company funds for about three years.

        Polly told the police that she knew the man better than anyone and there was no way he would ever do such a thing, but the investigators wrote her statement off as the grievings of a secretary who'd found her boss dead.

        Besides, the whole story of his suicide could be seen clearly on his desk in the blood-splattered company records ledgers.  Stonewell, having been notified of an IRS audit, had made a desperate last-minute effort to fix the books before they were to be examined.  But the figures in the books showed that over the past three-years he had been so careless that there would be not hope of correction at this late date.  Unable to face what this would do to his business, to his family, to his partner in Kansas City and to himself, Robert Stonewell had taken his own life.

        One paragraph in the newspaper story reported that the Fulton County Governor had ruled that Stonewell died from a self-in­flicted gunshot wound.  A final sentence in that paragraph added that as a matter of police routine certain chemical tests had been made on the dead man's hands and those tests were being sent the FBI's Washington crime lab to determine if the proper amount of gunpowder residue had been left for a suicide victim.  This was routine.

        Burgdart smiled at the thought of an FBI test.  The idea of the FBI investigating anything had stuck him as being funny ever since he'd been promoted to this job he held now.  An FBI test... ha.

        The newspaper account concluded with the standard obituary notes and listings of his civic deeds.  But nowhere in the story was the mention that he had been one of the key founders and backers of CPRP...The Campaign to Prevent Re-election of the President.  Of course his political life was his own business.

        The truth was that his CPRP activities were the reason he was on the front page of this Atlanta paper.  The Journal had a policy against printing anything about suicides except for the obit.  But they could not overlook someone as important as Stonewell.  But the almost-secret list of organ­izers of the CPRP was not public record.  The paper had a copy but it was "off the record" information for "deep background" use only.  So even though the paper, and most of Atlanta, knew of Stonewell's importance to the CPRP there was no official tie that the paper could make between him and the organiza­tion.

        Burgdart smiled at the omission.

        About two hours after Atlanta police officers had been called to the Peachtree Street office building to investigate the suicide, Henry Moore received a phone call in his Kansas City office.  Kansas City is the central time zone and Moore had just arrived for work when the Atlanta store had already been open for an hour.

        Moore explained to the Georgia detectives on the phone that Robert Stonewell had run the company's southern operations with a free hand and as a separate corporation just as Moore had done with the northern operations.  He explained that while both companies and both stores (and their chains) shared the same name they were in fact two different companies chartered in two different states and joined only by the mutual trust fund and intra-mixed board members and stock­holders.  He explained to the investigator that Moore had owned a huge department store chain in the Midwest and Stonewell had owned a like chain in the south and that for buying purposes as well as national advertising, catalogs and marketing they had formed this confed­eration and called both stores "Stonewell and Moore."  And, while the stock­holders were the same, the distribution of shares was greatly dif­ferent. In effect, Moore owned and operated his chain and Stonewell did likewise in the south.

        "Yes," Moore told the detective he was aware that the south end of the company had been losing some money for about three years, but he had attri­buted to the different economical market in the south.  And besides, it wasn't really any of his business since he was only a minority stockholder in the Stone­well operation.  He certainly had know way of knowing that Bob had been skimming off the top.

        Moore had told the police the truth.  He was indeed shocked at Stone­well's death.  When his secretary told him that a Georgia police detective captain was on the phone his first thought had been that Bob had somehow found out about his skimming funds.

        Henry Moore was a degenerate gamble with about $250,000 in markers outstanding in Vegas.  His monthly trips to the desert were always comped by the hotel...even down to the plane ticket and the women.  So he knew there were no reports there that could nail him.  But Stonewell was a sharp man and even though the ho­tels in Vegas would never betray Moore because they knew he would be good for his markers and many more in coming years, somehow Stonewell might have added it up.

        So in that sense, Henry Moore was relieved when the police told him that his business partner had killed himself.

        John Burgdart folded the Atlanta paper and tossed it in the trash can behind his desk.  He quickly scanned stories in the other major city daily papers that were stacked on his desk and as he finished with each paper he tossed it too into the can.

        It was 3:45 in the afternoon when John Burgdart left his office.  He had finished work on his report of this special assignment and that report was already on its way, via special messenger.

        The messenger of course did not know what he was delivering.  And John was on this way home.

        The classified advertisements section of The Atlanta Journal began on page D-12, behind the sports pages and the Wednesday food ad sections... many pages beyond those that John Burgdart had read.

        Beyond the classified section listings for legal notices, lost and found, business services, wanted, help wanted, positions wanted, instruc­tion, real estate ads, rental ads, cars for sale, trucks for sale, boats  for sale, livestock...and all the other business classifications, were the "for sale by individuals" ads.  There were the ads that private individuals tan for a reduced rate to sell the junk they had in their attic, or that they'd out grown.

        Burgdart scanned a dozen newspapers every day that he was in his office.  He almost never looked at the classified sections.  And on the rare days that he might scan the classified page or two, it would certainly not be the cheap ads that he would look at.

        And in a sort of ironic twist, that was a shame.  Because on this day had he scanned those cheap ads he would have read a small ad placed from the hamlet of Ludowici, several hundred miles south of Atlanta.  Obviously the ad had been placed in the largest paper in the state in hopes of attracting a buyer who might have a need or interest in this special product.

            FOR SALE....Antique pistol and case.  Fancy trim.  Eng­raved.   Cap and ball type.  Very old but very good condition.  MAKE AN OFFER.  Call Procter's  Texaco, Ludowici, Georgia  (912) 555-2831, ask for Joe Michael.