The Sandler Inquiry Part 56

Then to the fifteenth.

He scanned page one. He saw nothing of the airplane crash which Leslie had mentioned. Nor was there anything on page two or three.

He scanned to the index and saw nothing there. Then, meticulously, he began again at page four, ready to read every headline on every item in that day's edition. At the bottom of page eight in a quarter-column story hidden in a corner, he saw it. CARACAS TO MIAMI FLIGHT MISSING, read the small headline. 39 ABOARD. Thirty-nine lives, relegated to page eight. The story gave virtually no details, nor any list of pa.s.sengers.

Thomas moved quickly to the next day's edition.

There, this time on page twelve, he found a further elaboration.

The Avianca flight had crashed sixty minutes after takeoff, going down in clear weather into the Caribbean. The final sentence of the short article implied that sabotage had not been ruled out as a reason for the crash.

Thomas anxiously cranked the microfilm spool for the next edition's coverage. But there was none. Nor was there any further mention of the crash in any succeeding day's Times.

He sat there for several minutes trying to draw some implication from the way the story had evaporated from the newspaper. Then he returned the spool and prowled through a microfilm index and directory until he found what else he wanted.

The Miami Herald. For the same dates.

In the Miami newspaper the crash had made the front page, since several Florida residents were lost in the crash. On page two of the Herald of June 16, Thomas found what he'd been seeking all along.

A pa.s.senger list.

Anxiously he read down. It was alphabetical. He quickly skipped through to the middle. To the M's. Then he saw it.

McAdam, George F, Kilnwick, Surrey, England Of course, he thought to himself An English address instead of a Swiss one. He skipped to the end of the list -the last name in fact.

Leslie McAdam, or at least the young woman whom he knew as Leslie McAdam, was as good as her word. It read: Whiteside, Peter S." Oxford, Oxfords.h.i.+re, England Thomas then scanned the list more carefully. He saw no other names he recognized. Nor were there any other British subjects on the flight.

Thomas removed the spool of microfilm and for several minutes sat before the viewer with the spool of microfilm in his hand. He said nothing and barely moved. Mentally he tried to sort details, to find a flaw in someone's version of the story. He'd met a credible George McAdam. And he'd met a Peter Whiteside who, if not genuine, had to be part of a hoax of staggering proportions.

And Leslie McAdam? The woman he had encountered in the charred skeleton of his office, the woman who'd raised gooseb.u.mps on the back of his neck when she'd related her story, the woman with the savage scars across her throat?

She, too, was credible. Every bit as credible as the other two. Yet at least one side was lying outright. Someone was dead, someone else was alive. And like the elusive Arthur Sandler himself, who was alive yet couldn't possibly be, each side was a ghostly contradiction of the other. In a world where everything had to be black and white, Thomas was dealing only with emissaries of the gray regions.

Thomas returned the spool of microfilm that he'd held in his hand. Then he proceeded to the biographical files. And from there, over that afternoon and the entire next day, he withdrew every available shred of material on two men.

Arthur Sandler. And Thomas's own father.

He hid himself at a remote table in an isolated corner of the archives.

He examined even the most infinitesimal details of two lives. He sought, above all, any crosscurrents he could detect, hidden, salient, or otherwise. He sought corresponding patterns to their lives, public or private.

He waited for some great truth or revelation to leap out at him, for something unseen to become abruptly visible, for something long overlooked to become suddenly and stunningly understood.

Instead, nothing. Only the ordinary.

Arthur Sandler, the industrialist. William Ward Daniels, the attorney. Linked together in only the most obvious manner, a client lawyer relations.h.i.+p.

Or was it?

On the third day, a Tuesday, Thomas returned to the Times archives. He searched for implications: He would examine not what he saw, but what he didn't see. And slowly, a small portion of the darkness lifted.

1954, frozen for eternity on microfilm. Thomas could remember the year. His eleventh birthday had been in October and he could remember the catch Willie Mays had made off Vic Wertz in the World Series.

Eleven years old. He recalled the family home in Westchester County.

Back then, William Ward Daniels was still a certifiable hero to his only son. So what that in that year Daniels, Senior, was defending a sleazy character named Vincent De Septio?

The boy never knew about it. Until now.

The name De Septio rang a distant bell for Thomas. Somewhere he'd seen the name before. Recently. Very recently. Within the search of the previous two days.

He began the paper chase again from the beginning. And he was well into the afternoon when he discovered where he'd first seen the name.

De Septio, had been a client in 1938, 1939, and 1940. Each time he'd.

been arraigned on various charges involving currency violations. just as Sandler had been, thought Thomas as he reread the scant, un detailed mention of Vincent De Septio, a Runyonesque underworld character who, for his imitative talents with pen and voice, was known as Vinnie the Parrot. Thomas muttered to himself, wis.h.i.+ng those extensive files which had been destroyed by arson could some way be reclaimed from their ashes. Who was De Septio? What could his father's files have told Thomas?

He pondered it for a moment. Then, quickly looking back to notes he'd made on the life of Arthur Sandler, he posed to himself another unanswerable question. Why, he wondered, did it happen that De Septio was a client at the same time as Sandler? What was the connection, if any, considering they were operating in the same realm of criminal activity?

Thomas returned to another file in the Times archives, his palms wet with anxiety now, and withdrew a meager file on a middle echelon crook named De Septio.

Once again, the file spoke through what it left unsaid.

A brief biographical sketch traced De Septio's birth to Palermo in 1920. He entered the United States with his parents two years later, settling in New York City in an ethnic enclave around Mulberry and Ca.n.a.l. By the late 1930s De Septio had earned himself a solid police record, yet, unlike that of many of his peers, nothing touching on physical violence. De Septio's art was that of the swindle or, by 1940, the skillfully forged check.

Everything was predictable enough, Thomas noted. Then after recurring legal trouble which threatened to set him on the gloomy side of prison walls, De Septio happened upon an attorney who could work miracles.

William Ward Daniels represented De Septio.

And William Ward Daniels somehow managed to get three separate indictments dismissed.

Dismissed not in court, Thomas noted with increasing incredulity. But by a special prosecutor. A man named McFedrics, the special prosecutor for espionage cases, the man before whom the F.B.I. agents had once dragged Sandler.

Then a gap. Nothing in the biography accounted for the years after 1941. No deportation order, no armed forces. Nothing.

Then De Septio surfaced in the 1950s. He'd been indicted. He'd gone to William Ward Daniels for help. And apparently he'd received it.

The year was 1954 and again De Septio had involved himself with bogus money. In the autumn of that year his case had gone to court. And, according to newspaper accounts of the day, William Ward Daniels had managed to stall the trial date into November.

Then something had happened, though the newspapers and chroniclers of the day were unable to tell exactly what.

On November eleventh, Armistice Day, court had not been in session. On the twelfth, the court had never convened. And on the thirteenth, Vincent De Septio's case was dismissed.

Thomas sat down slowly in a wooden chair in the archives and tried mightily to grapple with what he was reading. What he saw before him was clear, yet carried no explanation. It was self-explanatory, yet was wide open to so many potential interpretations. And both stories, the De Septio story and the Sandler story, had been almost side by side within the same day's newspaper. November 12, 1954. But with no apparent link.

On that crisp day in November, some twenty-one years before Thomas Daniels sat in a grim quiet newspaper archive piecing together forgotten events, a man thought to be Arthur Sandler -who, like De Septio had been a counterfeiter in his day-had been gunned down on a fas.h.i.+onable Manhattan side street.

On the day thereafter, De Septio had been issued from Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C.

a pardon exonerating him from all crimes past and present, thus ending his problems with the local a.s.sistant U.S. Attorney.

And even more cryptic, noted Thomas Daniels, was what followed.

Nothing. A gap which "tended to the present.