Читать книгу The Bessie Blue Killer - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

You only dream in black and white.

You only dream in black and white, but that was okay with Lindsey. The B-17 lumbered through the early morning skies, its four 1,000-horsepower Wright Cyclones droning steadily at 2,300 RPM, the French countryside slipping away, almost five miles below the Flying Fortress’s belly.

Somehow he knew he was dreaming but he didn’t wake up, he kept dreaming. In black and white.

It was one of the 918th’s deadliest missions. The Seventeens were keeping formation, their P-51 Mustang escorts diving and zooming like a bunch of motorcyclists cutting in and out of a highway convoy of heavy trucks. The air was cold and Lindsey’s electric flight suit did little to help.

It was easy going as long as their course lay over Allied-held territory, but once they crossed the frontier into German airspace the Messerschmitt 109s came roaring up to meet them and the 51s broke away to knock them back down.

Lindsey crouched over his single .50 caliber machine gun, scanning the sky for attackers. There was no way the 51s could stop all the Messerchmitts, and once the enemy broke through the fighter escort, the Flying Fortresses had to defend themselves. It was strictly fight or die, and Lindsey had seen too many B-17s die, too many of the big bombers lose engines, lose wings or tails, and spiral down to explode in flames, or simply blow up in midair and rain on the French or German soil in a shower of metal and rubber and human flesh and blood.

A Messerschmitt was coming at the Fortress. Lindsey didn’t need a message over his helmet radio. He swung the .50 at the Messerschmitt. He could see the flashes of the 109’s wing guns as they spit lead at the Fortress. He pressed the trigger and felt his machine gun buck as it spit back at the Messerschmitt. He followed the path of his tracers as they sizzled at the 109.

A puff of black smoke bellied away from the Messerschmitt. Lindsey felt a surge of adrenalin that made his heart pump and his scalp tingle, but the Fortress’s aluminum skin was no match for the Messerschmitt’s deadly rounds. Metal projectiles ricocheted inside the fuselage. Lindsey felt an impact, a solid thump against his foot.

* * * *

International Surety had done it right for once. Hobart Lindsey had spent a career working for the company, starting out as a trainee just weeks after he got his degree from Hayward State. And how long was that?

He sat up in bed. Cletus Berry was pounding him on the bottom of one foot. The TV set in the corner was still playing, some cable station rerunning an old series. In black and white. Twelve O’Clock High. Not even the Gregory Peck-Dean Jagger movie. The TV spin-off. A second-rate imitation of a first-rate copy of a long-ago reality.

Lindsey rubbed his eyes. Back in the room to dress for dinner, he’d put his head on the pillow and fallen sound asleep. Taking an afternoon nap at his age.

He sat on the edge of the bed and calculated his years of service with International Surety. Not that he needed to work it out. He knew it all too well. Still, he’d got his BA in ’75 and here it was seventeen years later. And he was sitting on the edge of a bed in the Brown Palace, the oldest and most prestigious hotel in Denver, Colorado, pulling on his socks and getting ready to attend a graduation dinner at the Broker, one of the finest and most expensive restaurants in the city.

He blinked at Cletus Berry. Berry was black and Lindsey was white. International Surety was not going to run afoul of Civil Rights legislation.

Lindsey hadn’t done so badly for a small-town boy. If you could call Walnut Creek, California, a small town. It had been a small town when he was growing up there, caring for his widowed mother, learning in painful increments the true story of his father’s death. Lindsey’s father had been killed in a MiG attack on the destroyer Lewiston off the coast of Korea early in 1953. It was just weeks before the end of the war, and just weeks before Hobart Lindsey was born.

He had never known his father, never seen him except in a few snapshots that Mother treated as holy relics. A pudgy young man in a sailor’s uniform, grinning happily, his dark curly hair worn a little bit longer than navy regulations called for. But he’d never had to answer for that breach of discipline.

The ship’s anti-aircraft batteries had picked off the two incoming MiGs. One of them plunged into the Sea of Japan but the other crashed onto Lewiston’s deck sending a wave of flaming jet fuel roaring into the battery.

“Better get a move on.”

Lindsey snapped out of his reverie.

“Don’t want to keep the Duck waiting, Bart. You know what a stickler he is.”

“Right.” Lindsey pulled up his socks, pushed himself upright and looked for his shoes. He’d sent them out to be shined, a rare indulgence for him, and he wore his best suit for the occasion. You didn’t graduate from a course like this every day. And in fact, a third of the people who’d started it were back at their former jobs—or out of the company—already.

International Surety had splurged, putting up its employees at the Brown Palace during the seminar, but it had also put them two-to-a-room. Class was all very nice, as the corporate brass were forever reminding their underlings, but International Surety had to protect its resources, and one person didn’t need a room all to himself. Not when he was attending workshops all day and struggling with study assignments and papers every night.

Come to think of it, it wasn’t too different from living in Walnut Creek and attending Hayward State, except for not having a room to himself.

Lindsey and Cletus Berry walked the five blocks to the Broker. A couple of their classmates had been mugged on Seventeenth Street the week before, but they had decided not to let themselves be intimidated, and that was final. But they kept their International Surety name badges in their pockets until they reached the restaurant. They pinned them on when they entered the marble lobby.

The Broker was in an old bank building, and its decor was calculatedly Wall Street. Clearly, International Surety had chosen the location to make a point.

Happy Hour was subdued. Lindsey and Berry drifted apart as soon as they arrived. You had to mix at this kind of corporate function. You never knew who was going to be your boss someday, in a position to do you good or harm.

And Lindsey had already crossed his boss, Harden at Regional, more than once. He’d done a lot of good for International Surety, saved the company plenty of bucks in earlier cases that he’d handled. A claims adjuster didn’t just shuffle papers and authorize checks. It was his job to get the facts, to track down the truth when a claim had a peculiar odor to it. Especially if it was a big claim.

Trouble was, when Lindsey saved the company six-figure amounts on stolen collectibles, he outshone Harden. Ms. Johanssen at National was aware of Lindsey’s work, and of the fact that he’d done it despite Harden’s obstructionism.

Harden had managed to squeeze Lindsey out of the district office and had replaced him with the odious Elmer Mueller. Now Lindsey was completing the training seminar for International Surety’s corporate troubleshooting team. They gave it a fancy name—Special Projects Unit/Detached Status—and a funny logo, a russet potato with SPUDS lettered across it. Everybody in SPUDS got to wear a little cloisonné potato on his lapel.

Still, Lindsey knew that the team had been the graveyard of careers.

Lindsey found himself standing next to a thin, pale woman from Grants Pass, Oregon. She’d hardly spoken during the course, had sat far from Lindsey. He let his eyes flash to her badge.

Aurora Delano, right. Beneath her name, her home town. Practically a neighbor. Behind her, a white-jacketed bartender was doing slow business.

“So, Hobart, you had enough of this? Eager to get home to California?”

Lindsey grunted. “This is too much like being back in college. And I’m a little worried about Mother. She—”

The bartender caught Lindsey’s attention. Aurora Delano was holding an empty glass, Lindsey noticed. The bartender flashed a question with his eye. Lindsey said, “Aurora, would you like a—”

She turned toward the bartender and held up her glass. “Refill, sure.”

The bartender said, “And you, sir?”

Lindsey said, “The same. I’ll have the same as the lady.”

The bartender made Aurora’s empty glass disappear and placed a clean ones on the bar. He turned both glasses upside down, wet the rims and dipped them in a bowl of salt. He reached under the bar for a jug and ran a blender of greenish liquid and crushed ice before he filled both glasses. Lindsey paid for the drinks. International Surety ran a no-host bar.

Aurora said, “We never got to talk during the course. I don’t mind Denver, but I’ll be happy to get out of here.”

Lindsey said, “And go back to Oregon. How do you feel about working in SPUDS?”

Aurora said, “No way I’m going back to Oregon. I only went there because his work was there. I’m a southern girl.”

Lindsey was surprised. “I would have guessed New York.”

Aurora smiled. Her long, thin face was surrounded by a wash of auburn hair. Definitely the Katherine Hepburn type. “A lot of people think that. I was born and raised in New Orleans. That’s why I took the SPUDS job. Get out of Grant’s Pass. Get out of range of my ex. I talked Ducky into sending me back to Louisiana.”

The way she said it, it sounded like a little girl’s name. Like Lucy Anna.

“And your ex is going to stay in Oregon?”

“I hope to hell he does! Besides, SPUDS will be a change. It gets pretty dull, paying body shops to pound out dented fenders and replace broken windows. Not to mention comforting grieving widows and greedy offspring with checks.”

Lindsey smiled. He raised his glass. Aurora did the same and they touched rims. Lindsey took a sip. He could taste the salt from the rim, then the drink itself. It was bitter and pulpy. Grapefruit juice. “This what you always drink?”

“Around International Surety, you bet it is. On my own time, that’s something different.”

There was music coming over concealed speakers, something totally unidentifiable and equally undistinguished. Lindsey’s musical tastes had been growing in recent months, largely due to the influence of a Berkeley police officer he’d worked with on a couple of his more interesting cases.

Now the music—Lindsey decided it was a Gershwin medley played on a soupy synthesizer—was interrupted by a polite chiming. It was the signal to proceed to the dining room. Lindsey hoped that the meal would be better than the usual corporate mass-feeding.

Inside the private dining room Lindsey found his assigned seat. Happily, Aurora Delano was to be his dinner partner. He spotted Cletus Berry at another table, recognized the others in the room from the classes and work groups of the past weeks. The music had resumed. Either Lindsey had been mistaken or the tape had segued from Gershwin into Jerome Kern.

The food was not as bad as Lindsey had feared, if not quite up to what he’d hoped. Aurora Delano was an interesting conversationalist, going on about her ex-husband and how they had climbed the Himalayas, rafted down the Snoqualmie, explored the Great Barrier Reef. It took her a while to get around to the reason for their split.

Lindsey didn’t have to say much. As quiet as Aurora had been during lectures on coordination with local probate courts and investigation of motor vehicle registration records and IRS involvement in insurance claims, she had plenty to say across the lamb chops and watercress.

There was even wine on the table, and the SPUDS in their dark suits, male and female, seemed to be allowed that much leeway. It had become a survival tactic in the corporate world. No more drunken revels. Now you stayed as sober as a judge, because if you didn’t you might let your guard down for a moment and that could be fatal.

“Well, he was a great guy, my ex.” Aurora sipped her wine. “He was a great guy. He designed nuclear triggers for a living, and he was good at it. Made a nice living, too. Then the bottom fell out of the market for nuclear triggers. Blooey. No more Evil Empire. No more money. All of a sudden, instead of the headhunters sniffing after him, he had to start sending out résumés.”

Lindsey didn’t have to ask a question. He popped a forkful of Lyonnais potatoes into his mouth and followed it with a sip of ice water.

“He was hot stuff as long as the money kept rolling in. Those guys make a lot of money, you know. Nuclear trigger designers. Get treated like royalty. President of the United States comes around to the shop. Puts on a white lab coat. Gives the boys a little pep talk. Serving the cause of freedom. Making the world safe for our children and our grandchildren. Holding the forces of tyranny and oppression at bay.”

“I’ve seen the clips,” Lindsey said.

“They start to believe it themselves. You know that? Those Stepford Husbands with their sports cars and their big houses and their pert little wives with the big station wagons.”

“You drive a station wagon?”

“The Red Octopus dies and Uncle Sam doesn’t need all those weapons factories anymore and they have to start looking for an honest job.”

Lindsey didn’t pursue the station wagon.

“You know what?” Aurora put down her glass, picked up her fork, speared a piece of lamb chop and chomped down on it. Lindsey couldn’t tell whether she was nodding in agreement with some thought she’d had or if the motion of her head had to do with chewing the piece of lamb chop. “All of a sudden, nobody wants nuclear trigger designers. And there’s not much positive transfer of the skills.”

“What did he do?”

“He had a couple of offers from universities. For about a quarter what he was making.”

“What did he do?”

“He called some of his old buddies. You know, they network, those nuclear trigger designers. I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe he wasn’t as popular as he thought with his old buddies. Maybe they didn’t like him. Maybe there’s just no work out there.”

“So what did he do?”

“He took it as long as he could.”

“Yes.”

“Then he couldn’t take it any more.”

“Yes.”

She picked up her glass again and looked at Lindsey. The roll baskets were empty. The waiters were clearing away the dinner plates. At the head table a major corporate big shot, Ms. Johanssen from National, was looking around. Clearly, she was getting ready to make a speech.

Lindsey asked Aurora, “What did he do?”

The spotless white linen tablecloths were still spotless. International Surety people ate carefully at corporate banquets.

Desmond “Ducky” Richelieu, the director of International Surety’s Special Projects Unit/Detached Status, was on his feet, waiting for the room to quiet so he could introduce their distinguished guest, Ms. Johanssen from National.

The murmured conversation dropped to a dead silence. Huh, maybe it was Cole Porter, not Gershwin and not Jerome Kern either.

Aurora Delano said, “He came home from a job interview. I knew it had gone badly and the poor lamb was so upset, he had to do something. So he broke my arm.”