Marion, madam librarian…
In the morning, after a hot shower, I saw one of those homey, red-sided Bob Evans restaurants at the interstate interchange. Back home in Los Angeles, Terri would have insisted on our usual morning fare of yogurt, granola, bean curd, and green tea. I'd be hungry again an hour later, but it would have been a healthy hungry. Bob's menu had yogurt, granola, and some whole wheat, but I guess Ohio had never heard of bean curd or green tea, because there was none to be found. My baser instincts took over and I forced myself to down four cups of high-test coffee and a really big plate of country biscuits and gravy. Nope, you just can't beat that fine mid-western cuisine. The cholesterol took at least three months off my life, but that Ohio stuff would stick around all day; probably well into the next one, too.
Over my last cup of coffee, I realized I had a ton of questions, but not very many answers. What about those obituaries? The identical names? The private funerals no one attended? Common graves at the cheap end of a country cemetery? A surly sheriff, a greasy mortician, and a lawyer? The empty house and office? Like any good engineer, the vacuum of an unanswered question, much less a whole flock of them, drove me nuts. If I couldn't compute something, measure it, or put a wrench on it, I couldn't ignore it no matter how hard I tried. Questions? Questions, but no answers. And when you have questions you can't answer, the best person to go see, is your friendly, neighborhood librarian.
The phone book at Bob's counter showed that the main public library was downtown. It opened its doors at 9:30 A. M., and I was there. It was one of those big, neo-classic white marble affairs that had been surrounded by taller and more modern steel and glass buildings. I parked in the rear lot and went in the back door only to find the recently renovated interior was as modern and trendy as the exterior was classic. It was filled with primary colors, florescent lights, computer terminals, plastic chairs, and formica tables. From the directory on the entry wall, I saw the building contained a senior center, playrooms for kids, video tapes, audio tapes, CDs, an auditorium, meeting rooms, big civic displays, and a coffee bar. Somewhere in there, I figured they had to stock a few books.
The Reference Room was on the third floor. I trudged up the open staircase to the reference desk wearing my most helpless smile and asked for directions to the newspapers. The lady librarian gave me the kind of look she usually reserved for slow third graders. She jabbed her yellow #2 pencil behind her ear, slipped off her tall stool, and escorted me back through the brightly colored techno-maze to the periodical shelves that lined the back wall, the last refuge of the reader. She explained they kept paper copies of the local dailies for the past three months, piled in neat stacks on the shelves. After three months they were recorded on microfilm, going all the way back to 1896, and were filed in a row of file cabinets near the bank of microfilm readers that ran down the center of the room. Looking at the stacks of newspapers and the storage cabinets, I figured the last three months would more than do for starters.
I had no idea what I was looking for, but I knew I would find it in the obituaries and I knew the Greene Funeral Home would be at the bottom of it. Settling in at a table, I began with the current issue of the Daily News and started thumbing my way back, day-by-day, focusing on the local news, particularly any fatal accidents, and of course the obituaries. I went through the last week of newspaper stories and found nothing about a Peter and Theresa Talbott being killed in a bloody automobile accident out on the Interstate, or killed at a railroad crossing, by a cement mixer, at a bridge abutment, or any other place. Would that have been a big story in a town of a million and a half? Two dead in a bloody smash-up? Hard to say, but based on all the junk news they did carry, I couldn't believe it wouldn't at least have made the local section of the newspaper. There was an expose about cow-doping at this year's state fair, a story about the Governor's upcoming marketing trip to Tanzania, two pages on the Ohio State football team practice, and a big ad for the Cucumber Festival in Emporia, but the early and violent demise of that local accounting giant, Peter E. Talbott and his lovely wife Theresa did not appear to have made the editor's cut. If the funeral and the burial was a closed and very private affair, it looked like the automobile accident was too. Funny, but that was exactly what I expected.
I neatly refolded the sections of the newspapers, returned the stack to the shelf, and carried the next few week's over to the table with a soft “Thump.” I sat down, wondering why libraries always bought the hardest chairs in town. They might be modern and trendy, but no human being could take more than an hour or so in one of them. My backside was used to a modern, ergonomic work station chair and trying to find a soft spot in one of these molded, hard-plastic monsters was hopeless. They probably special-ordered them from the Marquis de Sade Furniture Company. I gave a painful sigh and shifted my butt again, but this was going to be a long, painful morning.
Day-by-day, week-by-week, I worked my way back through the month, poring over the obituaries. There must have been thirty to forty of them each day and I noticed there were at least a dozen different funeral homes in town plus their branches. Doing a rough count in my head, the Greene Funeral Home in Peterborough must handle maybe five to ten percent of them. Throw in the services, the coffins, the embalming, the flowers, the wakes, the hearses and limos, and the burials, it made a nice piece of business, I thought, enough to keep Lawrence Greene in colorful silk ties for the duration. Each time I came across his name, I paid particular attention to the details. After all, next to air currents over airplane wings and non-linear dynamics, if I had read anything over the past year it was obituaries.
I read them and reread them. The devil was in the details, but I saw nothing odd about the dozens of funerals Greene had handled, how the people had died, where they buried them, or the causes of death. Like the other funeral homes in the area, most of Greene's clients were quite old, in their seventies and eighties, and that wasn't what I was looking for. They came in every size, race, occupation, and background. You had to give him that much. Greene was an equal-opportunity mortician. He did old people and young, children and young adults, men and women, white and black, and the written obituaries were as varied as the people described in them.
Some of the obituaries ran to several paragraphs, some even longer, listing all the civic groups that the deceased had belonged to and listing the sometimes numerous surviving relatives, best friends, military records, hobbies, dogs, cats, and anything else the family could think of. Sometimes they mentioned charities and memorials where donations could be made in lieu of flowers. Usually that was a clue as to how someone died. From the names and titles, I could see these people had died from every conceivable cause, with memorial donations recommended to every charity in town. In stark contrast, some of the obituaries were a brief two or three sentences. Other than that, I saw nothing unusual in the ones for Greene's. No pattern. No hint of anything out of the ordinary in any of them. And as the morning slowly passed, I began to think I was the one who was nuts, a crank and a paranoid who was looking for goblins under the bed when there weren't any there to find.
In fact, I had to go back a full eight full weeks before something unusual did catch my eye. It was just one more obituary in the long line of the hundreds I had scanned over the past hour and a half, but this one jumped right off the page:
SKEPPINGTON, RICHARD C., age 52, of Columbus, died Tuesday at the Varner Clinic following a tragic automobile accident. Mr. Skeppington, formerly of Atlanta, was a warehouse supervisor with a local trucking company. By authority of Ralph Tinkerton of Columbus, Executor. (See also SKEPPINGTON, JUDITH M., wife, accompanying). Funeral services for both at 10:30 AM today, Greene Funeral Home, 255 E. Larkin, Peterborough. Internment, Oak Hill Cemetery, following.
That sounded eerily familiar, and his wife's death notice was just below:
SKEPPINGTON, JUDITH M, age 48, of Columbus, died Sunday at Varner Clinic following a tragic automobile accident. Loving wife of Richard (See also SKEPPINGTON, RICHARD C., above.) Retired after thirty years as a schoolteacher in the Atlanta area. By authority of Ralph Tinkerton of Columbus, Executor. Funeral services for both at 10:30 AM today, Greene Funeral Home, 255 E. Larkin, Peterborough. Internment, Oak Hill Cemetery, following.
Interesting, I thought. And not very original. The language was almost a boilerplate to Terri's and mine. Another automobile accident. Husband and wife, both dead. Again, the ever-popular Varner Clinic and the Greene Funeral Home. Burial at Oak Hill Cemetery by the authority of that eminent local barrister Mr. Ralph Tinkerton of Columbus, Executor. Suddenly, the hard plastic chair wasn't nearly as uncomfortable. I leaned back, positively clucking to myself now. I had found something. Amazing. And with that happy realization, the frustration seemed to melt away. I eagerly pulled down the next stack of newspapers and waded into them at a more leisurely pace, knowing that I had found the link and convinced that I would find a whole lot more if I kept at it.
I worked my way back through a full ten months of newspapers, between the stacks of newsprint and the microfilm reader. In all those issues, I found three more bell ringers. Two of them were pairs of husbands and wives who had died together in various accidents. There was a Mr. and Mrs. Thomas K. Pryor formerly of Phoenix, Arizona. He was a retired autoworker who managed the Hampton Inn on U. S. 40 in Hilliard, near Columbus, until his death. The other couple was Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Brownstein formerly of Portland, Oregon. He was a retired carpenter. Mr. Pryor was fifty-seven years old and his wife twenty-six. Mr. Brownstein was forty-four and his wife was forty-two. One couple had died in a car wreck and one in a boating accident out on Buckeye Lake. I guess they threw in the boat to prove they had a touch of originality. The last obituary was for a single man: Edward J. Kasmarek, thirty-two years old, formerly from Chicago. He was an automobile mechanic with Jeffries Honda in Grandview, Ohio. Every one of them had the red flags of the Varner Clinic, the Greene Funeral Home, Oak Hill Cemetery, and the honorable Ralph Tinkerton, esquire as executor.
I got up and stretched. It was a nice little package they had put together, I had to admit. A perfect little scam. Who would ever notice? Other than the typesetter at the newspaper, who reads the thousands and thousands of obituaries you see in a big city newspaper during a typical year anyway? And once read, who would ever remember the details? Especially in the plain vanilla ones? It was clever. Very clever. And it was definitely a scam. But why?
Looking down at my notes, I could see what they were doing and I even knew how they were doing it, but I didn't have a clue as to why. What could they possibly be accomplishing? I read them over again and recognized a few more similarities. They were shorter than most of the other obituaries and lighter on details. None of them listed any living relatives. No relatives meant no one to quibble over the fine print, like the identity of the bodies, and that was important. I also noted that all seven people had died at the Varner Clinic. Add in the two Talbotts and that made nine people, none of whom had a photo in the obituary of the deceased. To be fair, only about half of all the others in the paper had photos, but none of the Varner Clinic ones did, but even the IRS would consider fifty percent versus zero to be a “statistical anomaly.” And all nine had the key elements: they were younger, it was an accident, Varner issued a death certificate, Larry Greene and his pals in the black suits boxed them up, there were no photographs, they had a private service, they had all been planted under one of those pretty green awnings in the back row of Oak Hill Cemetery, and Ralph Tinkerton, Esq. was the executor.
I sat back and thought about that for a moment. Ralph Tinkerton of Hamilton, Keogh, and Hollister. What was it Lawrence Greene called him? The managing partner in one of “our finest law firms.” He said I should be careful running around “impugning his reputation.” I figured the managing partner of a big downtown law firm would charge three or four hundred dollars per hour easy. So why would a public transit staffer, a motel desk clerk, a car mechanic, a carpenter, and a low-end bookkeeper hire high-priced legal talent like that to handle their estates? Pro bono? Hardly. It made no sense.
I stared down at the obituaries again. What could be the link? Different ages, different hometowns, all big cities far away from Columbus, and each one in a different occupation. Mostly lower income. Fairly generic jobs. Sometimes when you can't see something that's right in front of your nose, you have to ask yourself what isn't there. There was no next-of-kin. Like my own Columbus funeral, I doubted there was any audience, either. No one knew these people and no one else knew or even cared what was going on. They had all come from some place else, some place far away, and they all died in Columbus, mostly from accidents. But why? It wasn't for the money, or at least not mine or the dumb schlep who lived on Sedgwick, because neither of us had any.
Mr. and Mrs. Richard C. Skeppington, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas K. Pryor, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Brownstein, Mr. Edward J. Kasmarek, and the new “Talbotts”. Could it be medical malpractice? Over a ten-month period, did the quacks at the Varner Clinic screw up a whole bunch of operations and accidentally kill all nine of them? Was this some new way to cover up botched surgeries? Was there some new disease cutting a swath through the Great Buckeye Heartland? One that would strike down a husband and the wife at the same time? Maybe biological warfare from Michigan? Nah. There were Health Departments and Centers for Disease Control for all that stuff. Eventually someone would wonder what happened to them. Someone would start asking why so many people were going in the Varner Clinic and coming out dead. Besides, how did that explain me or Terri? We had never set foot in the Varner Clinic. And what was the Varner Clinic to begin with? A fat farm? A nursing home? Maybe a drug rehab center or a private surgery theater?
That left me stumped, so I tried to work my way through it logically a second time. First, scratch any good problem and you will find a lawyer lurking underneath. That was a given. Second, it was impossible to hatch a conspiracy of any size without a really big law firm to confuse things and muddy-up the waters. Still, any self-respecting lawyer's motivation was always money, and lots of it. Could it be that the eminent Ralph Tinkerton, Executor Extraordinaire, had been cleaning out his client's trust accounts and decided to clean out the clients, too? Nah. Any big corporate lawyer worth his salt could figure out a hundred ways to skin a trust account without spilling a drop of blood. Terri and I had no money and neither did CPA Talbott. I couldn't explain it. Why would someone in Columbus, Ohio want people to think Terri and I were dead to begin with? Suddenly, I sat bolt upright. That wasn't it. Terri already was dead and due to that old LA obituary from my trip to Baja, maybe they thought I was dead too. Maybe this whole thing had nothing to do with the names or biographies in the obituaries. Maybe it was all about the bodies. Someone was making people disappear by planting them under the names and IDs of people who were already dead, figuring that no one in Columbus would notice. Who would, especially if the people were already dead and buried halfway across the country, like Terri and I were. If the real people were dead and buried in Atlanta, Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago, who would ever know?
What was it Talbott's neighbor said? That old, gray-haired battle-axe in the denim work shirt? The Talbotts moved in about six months ago, husband and wife, a decent interval after Terri's funeral and my almost-funeral out in LA. The other Talbotts would have started living here in Columbus, living openly under phony IDs, right after that. In Pete's case, he was running an accounting business and using my name. That took help, the kind of big league help that a prominent law firm like Hamilton, Keogh, and Hollister and its managing partner Mr. Ralph Tinkerton could easily provide. Yes, the eminent Ralph Tinkerton was definitely worth a second look.
What were those names Gino Parini threw at me back in the parking lot in Boston? Jimmy Santorini and Rico Patillo? Weren't those the names he mentioned, along with East Orange and Bayonne, New Jersey?
Carefully and without making a sound, I tore the Skeppington obituaries from the newspaper and slipped it into my shirt pocket. I fed the printer a couple one-dollar bills and got copies of the ones on microfilm and then I walked over to the long row of encyclopedias. I tried the Britannica, the Americana, and Colliers, but I found no reference to any Jimmy Santorini. I looked him up in Who's Who, with no better results. Finally, I turned to the big green leather and gold lettered volumes of the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and began flipping through the recent issues. I didn't find very much until I got back almost a year and found a flurry of stories. I jotted down the references in Time, Newsweek, and several pieces in the New York Times. I went to the magazine racks and it didn't take me long to find the stories.
Jimmy “the Stump” Santorini was the mafia boss of eastern New Jersey, or he used to be. Lots of color pictures of a short, dark, very dapper-looking guy with a big cigar clamped grimly between his teeth trying to hide his face from the cameras. He had been an underling of the Gotti Mob across the river in the Big Apple and he was up to his eyeballs in the docks, trash hauling, drugs, prostitution, and the unions in Newark, Hoboken, and Jersey City. They called him “the Stump” because of his build and because nothing could knock him down. Probably cute and cuddly like old tree bark, too.
Unfortunately, the last couple of years had not been kind to poor Jimmy. First, he got himself in a bruising power fight with the Patillo Mob out of Philadelphia. That cost him a lot of his coastal New Jersey territory like Bayonne and East Orange and most of his prestige fighting them off. Rico Patillo, Bayonne, and East Orange? Those were the rest of that grease-ball Parini's puzzle pieces and it was all starting to fit now. After Patillo finished battering him, the Feds grabbed what was left and “the Stump” found himself locked away in the big, new, federal maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois along with a gaggle of his former lieutenants and muscle. Jimmy was none-too-happy about it, and none-too-happy that the Patillos moved in and took over most of the Jersey side of the River with him gone. However, locked up in the cornfields of central Illinois doing fifty-five years to life, there wasn't much poor Jimmy could do about it. He was fifty-three years old when he went in and his prospects didn't look good for him to make to one-hundred and eight.
Jimmy Santorini's troubles started with a series of prominent U. S. Senate Hearings on organized crime. I vaguely remembered all the dramatic TV coverage — bright lights, politicians with make-up, and a ton of demagoguery. A flashy new Senator from Illinois named Hardin led the charge, tanned, fit, and white capped teeth flashing. When he finally got the gumbas under oath in front of the cameras, he patiently painted them into a tight little corner. Someone had done his homework, because the hearings blew the lid off the Santorini mob and goosed the Justice Department into what they later described as, “one of the most intense investigations in the history of the Department.” A year later, “the Stump” was wearing a not-too-stylish orange jump suit in a broom closet of a cell in Marion.
Big trial. Big name lawyers. Lots of press. What finally put Jimmy behind bars was the defection and testimony of several of Santorini's top “button men”: Richie Benvenuto, Johnny Dantonio, Paul Mantucci and Clement “the Mole” Aleppo, topped off with a bean counter named Louie Panozzo. Without them, the Feds would never have made their case. With them, it was a slam dunk. Apparently, the Federal Witness Protection Program sounded better than spending twenty-five to life behind the razor wire at Marion in the cage next to Jimmy. It was a good thing Marlon Brando was dead, though. Omerta must have died with the Godfather.
Looking at the more recent news stories, I found some dealing with the investigation, the arrest, and the trial, but not much after that. The trial lasted months, but the half-life of a mob trial is only a week or two once it was over. Besides, it was mostly a New York/ New Jersey story to begin with. With the exception of a few quick blips, it faded as fast as Jimmy's suntan inside Marion. The New York Times put the best wrap on it:
“When all is said and done, after all the prosecutors and politicians have done their final preening for the cameras, after all the big name lawyers have cashed their 7-figure checks and the reporters have written their last word, putting Jimmy “the Stump” to the Federal pen had all the permanence of throwing a rock into a big lake. Not that Jimmy Santorini didn't get what he deserved, but after the big splash, the hole in the pond quickly fills back over, the ripples fade to nothing, and some new “wise guy” has muscled his way in to take his place. In the end, we must ask ourselves, “What difference did any of it make?”
I returned to the Reference Desk and found the same polite librarian sitting on her stool, staring across the counter at me.
“If I wanted to find out about a lawyer, do you have a book or something I could look him up in?” I asked.
“Some people have the damnedest hobbies,” she commented, straight-faced. “Why on earth would you want to do that?”
“Oh, I'm just curious,” I smiled. “I want to make sure I'm hiring the right one, you know.”
“You mean the one with the sharpest teeth?” She asked without blinking. “Well, each to his own. Come along, we'll see what we can find.”
She led me back into the labyrinth of the reference shelves and paused in front of a long row of thick, yellowy-gold, black-lettered tomes. “That's the new edition of the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory,” she offered proudly. “All thirteen volumes, divided by State and City. It'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about every law firm and every lawyer in the Country — except which ones are honest and which ones ought to strung up and hung.”
She looked up at me and flicked her finger against my shirt pocket where I had hidden the obituaries I ripped out of her newspapers. “Just don't go tearing anything out of these babies, okay? 'Cause if I catch you, it won't be pretty.”
“Yes, ma'am,” I said as she turned and walked away, leaving me standing there with an embarrassed grin on my face.
I had no idea there were that many lawyers in the country. Each volume of the Martindale-Hubbell set contained well over a thousand pages and each page consisted of two columns of very small print. It really made you wish for an open hunting season to thin out the herd. The thick, middle volume contained North Dakota, Ohio, and Oregon. Lawyers. They're nothing if not logical. In the middle of the thickest part containing Ohio, after hurrying past all the dead weight of Cincinnati and Cleveland, I found the long, alphabetical roster for Columbus.
I flipped to the H's and found the heading for Hamilton, Keogh, and Hollister in big, bold, italic letters. Under the name was the address, Suite 1400, Fidelity National Bank Building, 147 South High Street. In smaller lettering I read, “General Trial, Appellate, and Federal Practice, Criminal, Federal Procedures, Business, Commercial, Corporate, Labor, Employment, Taxation, Estate Planning, Bankruptcy Probate, Real Estate, and Insurance.” It didn't mention chasing ambulances, getting scumbags off the hook, or being on the O. J. Simpson Dream Team, so how good could they be?
Below the heading, I saw a long list of “Members of the Firm” which ran to eight pages, not including the Associates. The first among the many was:
Tinkerton, Ralph McKinley, Managing Partner, Hamilton, Keogh, and Hollister, Columbus, 2004-Present. Born Amarillo, Texas, September 9, 1961. Admitted to the Ohio Bar, 2003. Also member in Texas, New York, Florida, and New Jersey; U. S. District Court, U. S. Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit, and the U. S. Supreme Court. Education: University of Texas, (BA, 1983, Phi Beta Kappa) Harvard Law (JD, 1993, magna cum laude) Editor, Law Review. Adjunct Professor Georgetown. Special Counsel, U. S. Justice Dept. Past President, Association of Prosecuting Attorneys. Former U. S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, 2001-04. Assistant U. S. Attorney for South Florida, 1998-01. Special Counsel, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1996-98. Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1993-96. Captain, Special Operations, U. S. Marine Corps, 1983-90, Central America Military Assistance Command.
Very impressive. Tinkerton was not your basic homegrown Buckeye. No, he was a transplanted Texan and ex-marine who went on to be a top-level Fed, a heavy-duty criminal prosecutor, U. S. Attorney, and an agent in the FBI. Hardly one of your typical family law snakes who lived on wills, deeds, and divorces, the kind you'd expect to find handling the minor executor duties of an autoworker, a motel desk clerk, a car mechanic, a warehouse supervisor, or a carpenter. Nope, there was no way a Ralph McKinley Tinkerton would come within five miles of the Skeppingtons, the Pryors, the Brownsteins, Edward J. Kasmarek, or Mr. and Mrs. Peter E. Talbott of Columbus, Ohio, unless he was about to throw them in the slammer, or get them out.
The more I looked at Tinkerton's entry, the less sense it made. I looked at my watch. It was nearly noon and 147 South High Street was only a few long blocks away. They say you can tell a lot about a person from the books he reads, the company he keeps, and the way he keeps his office. I wondered what that would tell me about Ralph McKinley Tinkerton.