Читать книгу The Bessie Blue Killer - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

Mother sounded nervous and Lindsey apologized for leaving the house without telling her, but all in all she handled it pretty well. No hysterics, no confusion, no allusions to Lindsey’s long-dead father as if he were alive and expected home at any moment.

Lindsey explained that he’d been called out of Walnut Creek by a work emergency and he’d be home in a few hours.

Mother had dressed and breakfasted and was waiting for Mrs. Hernández to come and take her shopping. She was so happy that her son was home from Colorado, she wanted to make a big dinner just for him.

Lindsey told her that he’d promised to have dinner with Marvia Plum in Berkeley.

Mother said, “Oh, that nice colored girl. Well, she can come and eat at our house. She can sit right at the table with us.”

Lindsey pressed his hand to his forehead. He was phoning from the same desk where Lawton Crump had given his statement to Sergeant Finnerty. The evidence squad were packing their gear, preparing to leave the airport. Mr. Crump was gone, Doc High was gone, and Lindsey was going to have the pleasure of breakfasting with Elmer Mueller while they went over the contents of the Bessie Blue case folder.

Mueller insisted on their taking the Cadillac over to the main terminal.

They found a table in the snack shop and sat surrounded by commuters headed for LA or San Diego or Seattle. Lindsey got himself an English muffin and a cup of coffee. Mueller ordered bacon and eggs up and a prune Danish, and proceeded to dip the Danish in the egg yolk.

Mueller had the peculiar talent of always looking just a little bit dirty and just a little bit greasy.

“So, how you like SPUDS?” Mueller tore off a gob of egg-covered Danish with his teeth. He hadn’t shaved and a yellow blob adhered to the stubble just below his lip.

“It’s all right.” Lindsey wanted to limit the conversation to business. “Look, fill me in on Bessie Blue and this McKinney fellow. Lieutenant High showed me what happened, but what’s really going on? What does it mean to International Surety?”

He still had the case folder in his attaché case, and he still hadn’t had a chance to read it. He should have studied it on the flight from Denver; he was annoyed with himself for that, but he promised himself that’s he’d clear a couple of hours and give the paperwork a thorough examination.

“Bessie Blue? Name of a B-17. I don’t know what the name means, ask a jig and see if he’ll tell you.”

Lindsey felt his jaw clench. “Please, Elmer.”

Mueller looked up, surprised. “What?”

Lindsey lowered his voice. “Jig.”

“Oh, right. I keep forgetting what a good liberal boy you are, Hobie. Don’t ask a jig.” Mueller looked at Lindsey with something that might have been an impish grin. “Ask an American Africoon.”

Lindsey shoved himself to his feet and left. All the way to the exit he heard Elmer Mueller laughing. He took a cab back to North Field and climbed into the Hyundai. He was entitled to desk space at the Walnut Creek office, and to admin support. Meaning that Ms. Wilbur would handle his mail and keep him posted on company gossip. But he wasn’t going in today. There was a chance that Elmer Mueller would show up.

As long as he was in Oakland, he drove to Lake Merritt and parked near the Kleiner Mansion. The mansion was closed at this hour so he found a bench on the grassy bank and opened his attaché case. There were joggers and dog-walkers on the footpaths and ducks on the lake.

The Bessie Blue folder was in standard International Surety format, with plenty of paperwork. The company had computerized its operations in recent years, but cautious heads still insisted on keeping hard copies of everything, and a series of computer virus scares had left the corporate structure in a state of electronic paranoia.

The umbrella policy was made out to Double Bee Enterprises, as Lindsey had expected after talking to Lieutenant High. The policy covered all equipment, personnel, and operations of Double Bee and all its officers, employees, consultants, agents and independent contractors engaged in lawful activities in behalf of the company in the course of the development, production, post-production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of the film tentatively titled Bessie Blue.

The coverage included the insured’s operation at Oakland International Airport, all grounds and facilities thereof, travel and transportation to and from, and other related movements and activities taking place at any location throughout the entire universe.

Lindsey laughed. A jogger in spandex and headband stared. Lindsey turned to the policy appendixes. Double Bee Enterprises listed the airplanes it was going to use in Bessie Blue. A Stearman PT-17, a North American AT-6, a Lockheed P-38, a Bell P-39, a Curtiss P-40, a Republic P-47, a North American P-51, a Boeing B-17F, a Messerschmitt 109, a Focke-Wulf 190, and a Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero.

There were photos of all the aircraft. Wonderful machines, all of them packed with character. They were like something from another age. They were as real to Lindsey as suits of armor or Roman catapults would have been.

Where in the world were they going to get a fleet of fifty-year-old warplanes, in flying condition?

Study the folder, study the folder. They’d taught him that from his first day with International Surety, and they’d drilled it into him all over again at the SPUDS seminar. Desmond Richelieu would be proud of him.

Right. Aircraft to be provided by the National Knights of the Air Historical Association and Aerial Museum of Dallas, Texas. One more question answered.

There were signatures from all sorts of corporate officers at Double Bee and at International Surety. Every item in the policy carried a separate dollar value. The whole policy faced out at $100,000,000.

Lindsey’s ears rang.

He shook his head, placed the airplane photos, the appendixes and the policy itself back in the folder inside his attaché case, and snapped the brass locks on the case. He locked the attaché case in the Hyundai and found a restaurant on Grand Lake Boulevard.

A late breakfast by himself was a lot pleasanter than his abortive early one with Elmer Mueller.

When he phoned Oakland police headquarters he was able to reach Lieutenant High. He had the number of High’s private line and was able to avoid the Broadway bureaucracy. High agreed to see him. Lindsey headed across town.

There was even a visitor’s badge ready when he hit the front desk. Upstairs, High greeted him. “You should have come over earlier, Lindsey. You missed the show.”

Lindsey asked what show that was.

High grinned. “You could have attended the autopsy on Mr. McKinney. You’re following up on that, of course. Have you ever attended one?”

Lindsey shook his head.

“Always interesting. Always the same, and yet always different.”

“Coroner must have been in an awfully big rush.”

“Well, yes. We don’t usually get to post mortems this fast, but Sergeant Finnerty had an interesting theory about the McKinney killing. The evidence squad hasn’t brought in its report yet, so we don’t know about that, but I thought we should get the PM report on the victim as quickly as we could.”

Lindsey grunted. He was sitting in a hardbacked chair next to High’s battered desk. Homicide in the Oakland Police Department worked out of a crowded, fluorescent-lit bullpen that would have driven Lindsey crazy if he’d had to spend his days there. Maybe that was what kept the detectives out on the job. Maybe it was a deliberate device intended to discourage them from lounging at their desks.

He didn’t believe that for a minute. “What theory was that?” he asked. “Sergeant Finnerty’s theory.”

“Narcotics.”

Lindsey closed his eyes. “Every story in the paper seems to be about narcotics.”

“Right.” High picked up a ball-point pen and stuck the tip of it between his teeth. He studied the pen for a moment, then laid it carefully on his desk and sighed. “You think that tobacco craving will ever go away? Or maybe the headshrinkers are right, pipe smokers just want their mother’s breast.”

“Narcotics,” Lindsey reminded him.

“Well, we get pretty close to a homicide a day here in Oakland. That’s no match for LA or Chicago. Half a dozen cities beat us, but then we’re not nearly as big a city as they are. Most of the homicides are related to narcotics. Not the users. Well, sometimes we’ll get somebody so strung out, he’ll kill for a fix. But not often. Mostly it’s the dealers. It’s turf wars, just like Prohibition. God, I wish I could smoke my pipe. First the doctor gave me hell, then they started passing laws about where a peaceful law-abiding citizen can smoke his pipe.”

Lindsey nodded vigorously, willing High to get back to the point. Eventually he did.

“Most of our gang activity is organized around the drug trade. Some of our enlightened citizens still have this image of young idealists in tie-dyed shirts and long dresses smoking nature or taking pills that will show them God.”

He shook his head.

“The reality is crack houses and Uzis. Toss-ups. You know what a toss-up is?”

Lindsey said no.

“Lowest form of prostitute. We get young women—and I mean really young, twelve, thirteen, even younger—young women so desperate for crack, they stay in the crack houses. They live there. They don’t have any money. They have sex with the customers for a hit of the stuff. Most often they perform oral sex because it’s quicker, they don’t have to get undressed or lie down first. They get lesions in their mouths and throats from the hot crack smoke, then they give some user a blow job and the semen gets in the lesions and they wind up with HIV. God, I wish I could smoke my pipe.”

“Sergeant Finnerty thinks that’s what happened at the airport, to Mr. McKinney?”

“We had one woman a few weeks ago, couple of crack dealers were fighting over who got sidewalk rights in front of her house. She went out and tried to chase them away, they killed her. Right there, on the spot, just pulled out their automatic weapons and killed the poor woman.”

“Finnerty’s theory?” Lindsey said.

“These old airplanes are coming up from Texas for this movie they’re making here in Oakland. Most of the stuff comes up from South America, a lot of it comes via Mexico. Most of the heroin still comes From Asia, but crack is a cocaine derivative. You knew that, right?”

Lindsey nodded.

“Right. I knew you knew that. The coca grows mainly in South America, and they bring a lot of cocaine in by air. If they could get it as far as Texas, Sergeant Finnerty thought, they could load it onto those old airplanes. Nobody thinks they’d be carrying cargo. They’re museum pieces, they’re just for this movie, right? So why not use them to carry the cocaine? Who would suspect?”

“Sergeant Finnerty?” said Lindsey.

“Right.”

“But none of the planes have arrived yet, have they?”

“No. I think they’re due in tomorrow. Mrs. Chandler would know that. But Sergeant Finnerty thinks that Mr. McKinney might have been involved. So we were really eager to see the post mortem on Mr. McKinney. Just in case he’s a user himself. Most of the dealers aren’t users. Especially at the higher levels. They’re too smart to get hooked on their own wares. But at the lower levels.… Well, Sergeant Finnerty thought Mr. McKinney might be a user. So we rushed the autopsy.”

“And?”

“He was pretty clean. Coroner found a little cannabis in his bloodstream, and a little alcohol. My guess is that Mr. McKinney was not a happy individual. Well, look, a man in his sixties, seventies, he’s lived all these years and worked all these years. He feels as if he’s paid his dues, he’s entitled to some kind of recognition. Am I right? What do you think, Lindsey?”

“Okay.”

“And here’s Mr. McKinney, sweeping up a hangar and swabbing out urinals at the airport. I can understand his wanting to start the day with a little fortification. A little something added to his morning coffee. A joint before he leaves the house. Then down the freeway, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump from Richmond to Oakland, and it’s another day, another dollar.”

“What about the crack?”

“Nothing to indicate he was involved at all.”

“But those planes are coming in from Texas tomorrow.”

High smiled. “We’ve already talked to the Feds. They’re all over those airplanes. Even as we speak, Lindsey, even as we speak. You didn’t think I’d tell anyone about this now, do you, if we were going to wait until they arrive to check them.”

“Of course not,” Lindsey said. “Certainly not.”

High pushed himself to his feet. “Come on, Lindsey. I’ll treat you to a cup of Oakland’s finest legal stimulant.” He led the way to a coffee machine. He held up his hand. “My treat.” He fished a coin from his pocket and slipped it into the machine. “I forget how you take it.”

Lindsey pushed the buttons himself. When the machine had made his coffee he took a tiny sip and moaned.

“You ever read Jim Thompson?” High asked. “Used to write paperback books. He wrote a book once about a deputy sheriff who tortured people by making them listen to clichés for hours on end. It isn’t the heat, it’s the humidity. He’d say that as if he’d just thought of it, it was some kind of profound discovery. The child is father to the man. He used to torture people that way.”

Lindsey said, “I don’t think I ever read him.”

High said, “I always thought that deputy sheriff missed something. He should have offered his victims machine-brewed coffee. Too many chefs spoil the broth. That kind of thing. And treat his victim to a cup of this oily-tasting muck.” He looked at Lindsey with soft, watery eyes. “Did you say you had another appointment, Lindsey?”

Lindsey said, “Actually, I have to make a phone call.” High started to say something but Lindsey headed him off. “No, it’s all right, thanks. I’ll use the pay phone in the lobby.”