Читать книгу The Bessie Blue Killer - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

The telephone’s burbling woke Lindsey from a strange sleep. It was wonderful being in his own home, in his own bed. Mother was asleep in her room, and he’d spoken with Marvia the night before and made a dinner date with her.

But in his dreams images of Aurora Delano became confused with Mrs. Blomquist’s white powdery face. B-17s tumbled through the wartime sky, spiraling downward to crash into German munitions factories. A bomber’s smashed wing became Aurora’s shattered arm. The bomber, its stressed metal wings replaced by human limbs, circled over the Oakland Coliseum, threatening thousands of baseball fans.

The voice on the phone was female and remotely familiar. Lindsey hadn’t identified it as that of Mrs. Blomquist before she said, “Stand by for a call from Mr. Richelieu.”

Lindsey blinked at the clock. It was an hour later in Denver, but still, he couldn’t expect Richelieu and Mrs. Blomquist to be at work this early. What—

“Lindsey, get yourself together and start earning your paycheck. They beat you to the punch.”

Lindsey said, “Mr. Richelieu? I’ve just—”

“Never mind what you’ve just. I should have sent you back there early, or put someone else on this thing.”

“You mean—”

“Bessie Blue.”

Lindsey said, “Who?”

“Haven’t you read the case folder yet?”

Lindsey could only stammer.

“Good grief, feed ’em red meat and send ’em to the best of schools and they still don’t know a damn thing. That’s the name of the star airplane. And of the movie. Bessie Blue. They’ve already got their film crew in Oakland and they’re at work at the airport. Look for North Field. Find out what’s going on. Elmer Mueller’s already there, talk to him and take charge of the case. But don’t step on Elmer’s toes, Lindsey.”

“Yes, sir. But what happened?”

“Somebody got himself killed on the set. You just came through that airport, you must barely have missed the party. It’s still going on. Get your tail out there and see what’s happening. You’re off to some great start in SPUDS, Lindsey. Well, what are you waiting for?”

“You’re talking to me, Mr. Richelieu.”

“I don’t care. You should be on your way to Oakland by now. Try to get there before everybody else leaves. What do you think—”

Lindsey took him at his word, cradled the handset and headed for a quick shower. Minutes later he was en route to Oakland. The Bessie Blue folder, still unread, lay in his attaché case on the seat beside him. It was still dark out, the first rays of dawn raising a mist off the hills beside the freeway.

The Hyundai’s dashboard clock said it was four-thirty AM. Lindsey had turned on an all-news station and heard all about a threatened strike by supermarket clerks and a People’s Park protest is Berkeley. There was a piece about the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln sailing from Alameda with its battle group for maneuvers in the Pacific. Made sense. America had to be defended against aggressive Easter Islanders, or maybe swarms of penguins attacking from the South Pole.

He switched to a jazz station. That was one thing Marvia Plum had done for him. She’d introduced him to something besides the discordant screeing that he’d thought synonymous with the word.

It was easy to find the Bessie Blue set. There were half a dozen police cars with their roof-lights flashing red and blue. Lindsey parked the Hyundai behind them. A TV news-van was pulling out of the lot as Lindsey pulled in. There was another vehicle there, a coroner’s wagon. The body might still be in place. Lindsey had never seen a fresh murder victim. He shuddered at the thought, but something else was going on inside him.

He felt his heart pounding and his blood pumping through his body. This had to be an adrenalin rush. He’d been involved with murders twice before, and there was nothing like the excitement they produced. He was getting addicted.

He’d parked the Hyundai in a square clearing behind an aircraft hangar. At first the surface looked like blacktop but then Lindsey realized that it was an old type dirt-and-gravel lot where they sprayed a layer of oil every now and then to keep down the dust. Talk about poisoning the earth!

The police cars were pulled up near the hangar. At the end of the line was a decade-old Cadillac. Area lights illuminated the parking area. They were bright enough for Lindsey to read the vanity plate on the Caddy. SURETY-1. That had to be Elmer Mueller’s car.

The hangar’s huge rolling doors were closed and only a smaller metal door, the size of a normal house door, stood open. A uniformed Oakland policeman stood outside the door. His features looked Chinese. He was big enough to play a bad guy in the World Wrestling Federation. He stopped Lindsey. “Can’t go in, sir. Crime scene.”

Lindsey tried to talk his way past the cop. He flashed his International Surety ID. Insurance credentials usually got him past cops. This one chose to be difficult.

Twenty feet away a figure in a brown tweed jacket and slacks was paced back and forth. His face was directed down as if he was studying the hangar floor. His hair was thick, dark, curly, unkempt.

Lindsey kept trying to talk his way past the cop. The cop raised his voice.

The rumpled man turned, startled. He recognized Lindsey at the same time that Lindsey recognized him. He headed for the doorway, put his hand on the officer’s arm, said, “Let him in, Walter. This is Mr. Lindsey. He helps us out sometimes.”

Walter touched one finger to the bill of his uniform cap and let Lindsey pass.

“Walter Chen,” the smaller man said. “Good young officer. Bright future. How are you, Lindsey? You don’t mind if I call you that? I feel as if we’re friends, after that Duesenberg case. I remember we put you through a lot on that one. But it all came out in the end, didn’t it? It always does. Well, not always but usually. You’re here because of Mr. McKinney?”

“I don’t know. I—It’s nice to see you again, Lieutenant High.”

“Doc. I’ll just call you Lindsey—you like that better than Hobart, I recall. You call me Doc, right?” The two men had shaken hands, then Doc High patted the pockets of his tweed jacket, looking for his forbidden pipe and tobacco pouch.

Lindsey smiled.

“Caught me, eh?” High grinned sheepishly. He was several inches shorter than Lindsey and a few years older. Compared to the blue-uniformed Walter Chen he had looked tiny.

Lindsey said, “Is Mr. McKinney the, uh, victim?”

“Looks like it. Name on his coveralls, ID tag with a photo and his name. Leroy McKinney. Resident of Richmond. Come on, you want a look, you’d better look now. Coroner’s here, crime scene technicians are almost finished, Mr. McKinney will be leaving in a few minutes.”

He took Lindsey by the elbow and steered him across the oil-stained cement floor. The hangar was cavernous and had the feeling of age. North Field was the older part of Oakland International, dating from the daredevil era when Earhart and Hegenberger flew out of Oakland to make their Pacific hops, back in the days when airplanes were exotic machines and aviation had the charisma of professional sports or MTV stardom.

The body lay face-up, presumably where it had fallen. The forehead was caved in and brains and blood had filled the unnatural cavity, forming a horrifying triangle with the staring eyes. The brains and blood looked like scrambled eggs in dark ketchup. Lindsey’s stomach lurched and he turned away.

“You all right, Lindsey?”

Lindsey pulled a folded handkerchief from his trousers and mopped his brow. He felt uncomfortably chilly, despite his sudden outburst of cold sweat. He shoved the handkerchief back into his pocket. “I’m okay. It was just—”

“Understand. You’ll start taking it in stride after you’ve seen your first few hundred.”

“I don’t want to see that many. I’ve seen enough.”

“You don’t want to look at Mr. McKinney? Up to you, but you never know what you’ll notice. Sometimes.…” He gestured vaguely.

Lindsey turned back and looked at the body. The technicians had marked its position with white tape. The man was black and elderly. His short hair was mostly gray. His head was tilted slightly and one hand rested against his cheek. Lindsey could imagine this old man as a sleeping child long years ago, lying with his cheek nestled against his hand. There was a startled expression on his face. His other arm lay outstretched, the elbow bent so the hand lay palm-up, even with the face. The fingers were horribly deformed, clawlike.

Lindsey felt a chill. The hangar was chilly. An old-fashioned woodstove did little to dispel the cold and damp of the previous night. North Field was built on marshy flatlands and men had died in the cold that crept in from the Oakland Estuary and San Francisco Bay.

“You have to pay a claim on this fellow?” High cocked his eyebrow at Lindsey like Groucho on You Bet Your Life.

“I don’t know. That, uh, that would go through Walnut Creek. I don’t know if we carry a policy on him.”

High said, “I meant to ask you about that. Thought you ran your company’s office out there. What’s this fellow Mueller doing in your job?” He jerked a thumb toward an overdressed individual who had seated himself at a makeshift desk near one wall. A mug of something steamed invitingly in front of him. He was filling out papers attached to a clipboard.

Behind Mueller a metal door led to another, smaller room. It was an old-style office complete with filing cabinets, girlie calendars and a hot-plate. A black man in civilian clothes and a gray-haired woman were hunched over a metal desk with a uniformed sergeant. Lindsey could see only the woman’s back. She wore a heavily quilted vest over a plaid shirt. The male civilian was talking and the sergeant was writing, nodding, looking up from time to time, obviously to ask a question, then bending once more to write when the man answered.

Lindsey said, “I guess I should talk to Elmer. He’s got my old job, Lieutenant—Doc. I’ve been sort of kicked upstairs. Working out of Denver now.”

“Just like Perry Mason!”

Lindsey smiled. He handed High one of his new business cards. It was the first one he’d ever used.

“Special Projects Unit,” High read. He looked up at Lindsey. “Very impressive. Congratulations. They paying you a lot to do this?”

Lindsey shook his head.

Elmer Mueller looked up from his clipboard. He didn’t seem surprised to see Lindsey at the murder scene. Their eyes caught and held briefly. Lindsey nodded. Mueller returned to his papers.

High steered Lindsey away from Leroy McKinney’s cadaver. “Can’t say I like your Mr. Mueller too much, Lindsey. He used to run an insurance agency in Oakland.”

“I know.”

“Never quite got in trouble with the law. Certainly never got into my bailiwick—Homicide. But a lot of the boys at Broadway and Sixth know him. Boys and girls, excuse me. Men and women. Martians. Too many times over the years, we’d get involved in something messy and shake hands with Elmer.”

Lindsey grunted. He didn’t like Mueller either but he didn’t want to run down another International Surety man.

“Well, before we get back to the case at hand,” High said, “if Elmer is your company’s man on the spot, what can I do for you, Lindsey? You’re not here just out of curiosity, are you?”

“Hardly. As a matter of fact, I just started this new job and I’m afraid I’m in trouble already. I was supposed to prevent losses on this project. Bessie Blue. You know about Bessie Blue, Doc?”

“Just a little. I expect I’m going to learn a lot more about it.”

“International Surety wrote an umbrella policy for Bessie Blue. Anything goes wrong on the project, mechanical failure, equipment loss, public liability, we have to pay.”

“Just like Lloyds of London.”

“Close enough.”

“I guess you’re in trouble, then, with Mr. McKinney.”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to study the case folder, then get together with Mueller. What happened to—the victim? And what’s the matter with his hand?”

“What happened, almost certainly, was a monkey wrench. Come on over here.”

The wrench lay a few yards from the body. It had been marked off with white tape, too. The wrench was made of some dark metal, maybe cast iron, and its head was discolored with the same red goo that had seeped into the cavity in the middle of Leroy McKinney’s forehead.

“It’ll be bagged and taken away and tested,” High said. “If we’re lucky we might get some useful fingerprints off it. And we’ll compare the blood from the wrench and from the victim, run a genetic scan just to make sure. But I’d give big odds that we’ll get a match.”

“Do you know…?” Lindsey asked half a question.

“What? Who, when, why, how? You know us, Lindsey. There’s not much difference between a detective and a newspaper reporter. Speaking of which, the Oakland Trib was already here, reporter and photog, and Channel 2. Ask me an easy one.”

Lindsey said, “Okay. Who found the body?”

High nodded toward the office where the uniformed sergeant and the civilians were still huddled over the metal desk. “Mr. Crump and Mrs. Chandler.”

Lindsey studied the trio as best he could. The male civilian was wearing a leather jacket like a World War II aviator. Lindsey saw that he was gray-haired, like the murder victim. He was nodding and gesturing in response to the police sergeant’s questions.

Lindsey said, “Did they do it?”

High managed a small laugh. “That would make things easy, wouldn’t it? I don’t know who did it. My guess is, somebody who was known to the victim. Look at that. Hit him right between the eyes, no sign of a struggle. How could somebody get that close, with a heavy wrench in his hand, and the victim not try to fight back, not try to escape, not even put up his hands to ward off the blow?”

Lindsey forced himself to look at the corpse again, then waited for High to resume.

“The body was already cold and rigor had set in when our kids got here. So McKinney had to be dead several hours when Chandler and Crump found him. Unless they killed him and stood around for five or six hours before they phoned it in. Which, I’ll admit, is not impossible. We’ll have to check whereabouts. There’s not much security around here, like there is over at the passenger terminal. But I think we’re looking at a third party.”

Lindsey peered through the glass at Chandler and Crump and the police officer. He said, “Still, who are they?”

“He’s our movie star. Lawton Crump. One of the original Tuskegee airmen. You ever hear of the Tuskegee airmen?”

Lindsey moved his head uncertainly. “Might have seen something about them. I think it was on PBS. I don’t watch much PBS.”

High said, “Yeah. World War II outfit.”

Lindsey said, “He’s still got his jacket.”

High grinned. “Hardly any Negro combat troops at the start of the war. Mostly they used them for service troops. Cooks, laundry, mechanics. You know. There was a lot of agitation to let Negroes fight. We had a whole Nisei brigade, and the Japs were the enemy. The blacks had been here for hundreds of years, why couldn’t they fight for their country?”

Lindsey shook his head. “You tell me.”

“Somebody even got the cockeyed idea that Negroes could learn to fly airplanes and go into combat. So they set up this segregated training base in Alabama, and pumped out whole units of black fliers. Called them Tuskegee airmen. Now they want to make a movie about them. Times change.”

“And Mr. Crump was one of the Tuskegee airmen?”

“Pleasant, soft-spoken elderly gentleman of the colored persuasion.” High nodded toward the office again. Through the windows it appeared that Crump and the uniformed police sergeant were concluding their business. “Flew everything we had. Or so I’m told. It was before my time, Lindsey.”

“And the woman?” Lindsey asked.

“Mrs. Chandler? She’s from Double Bee Enterprises. They’re the outfit making the movie.”

“I don’t see any cameras. Or any airplanes, for that matter.”

“They haven’t arrived yet. You’ll have to get the details from Mrs. Chandler or Mr. Crump. She’s the producer, he’s their technical advisor. In fact, I think the movie’s pretty much about him. But they’re merely the advance party. McKinney was a janitor here. We have to find out what he was doing in this hangar. The maintenance boss vouches for him—that he’s legitimate. But he wasn’t scheduled to be working in this building. The signs are that he was killed here, not just brought here and dumped. So—what’s the story?”

Lindsey grinned. “You’re the Hawkshaw, Doc. You tell me.”

High shrugged. “I’ll tell you this. Mrs. Chandler and Mr. Crump found him. They arrived at the building together. Crump spotted the body first and got a good look at it, then he called us. He’s really upset.”

“I don’t blame him.” Lindsey shuddered.

Inside the office the sergeant and the two civilians rose and headed toward the door, back into the hangar. Simultaneously, a coroner’s squad lifted the remains of Leroy McKinney onto a folding gurney and headed out of the hangar.