Magnolia Gods (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 2) Page 10

  “Don’t you hit my face and body anymore. It’s the only way we got left to make any more money.”

  He had learned that the aircraft might be on land. He wondered what Jessica meant by the term “clearing the files.” If those words meant what he thought they did, no wonder old Hiram had been watching out the window. Files might mean people who were to be thrown out, gotten rid of. Worst case, that might mean that Hiram was a marked man. Hiram might have died from his cancer just in time. Mike wondered if it were just matter of time before Winkee and his woman might also be considered part of the “files.”

  Mike had to assume that Aviatrice was watching that apartment. He knew that he and Robin would be followed from here on. He kept an eye behind him as he left the neighborhood but saw no car following. Mike drove as fast as he could, keeping within the speed limit. He noticed some worry in Robin’s face as she read the material.

  “Don’t you wish you’d stayed out west jumping out of airplanes?” Mike said.

  “Seems like that was a lot safer,” she replied.

  They were going west from Philadelphia. He still kept an eye in his rear view mirror. He had stopped at a drugstore for a brown envelope and some stamps and had mailed the Hiram Jones materials to Jeremy’s home. Perhaps this was unnecessary, he thought, but he felt better with the materials out of his possession. Jeremy would understand and keep them at his place. He also worried about the staff at the Museum. The thought of Bullard coming in and hassling Gladys angered him. He smiled. Gladys might just get the best of Bullard.

  More than ever he had to see Lawson’s secretary from the Navy Yard days. He knew from the lawyer that she had been declared insane. Mike had almost no chance that she would be any more cogent for him than she had for other investigators. Yet, he had to try. He had to see her. He wanted to ask her about Lawson’s motive for taking the airplane. Also he wanted to ask her what she knew about Bernard Law and Aviatrice.

  As he drove Mike thought about the future. From what he had learned at Winkee’s apartment, he surmised that Aviatrice, or at least Wall, Jessica, Bullard, the three of them, were obviously still interested in finding this plane. If they got a report that he had visited Winkee, they’d realize he knew that the plane had probably crashed on land, that it did not explode at sea. He knew now why they wanted to keep others from the undersea research. Someone might figure out that the plane was not there, and that it was on land, someone who was willing to put in more effort that the Navy and Hiram. The question was how nasty would the Aviatrice trio become if professional researchers like Mike and his team actually found the seaplane and got whatever documents Aviatrice seemed so bent on retrieving. He was not afraid but in the last hours he had become more cautious, like a hunter or, he grinned ironically, like the hunted.

  He glanced at Robin next to him as she tried to find another rock station. She was looking for her song, she said. She had the ability to put any kind of danger out of her mind. He smiled, looking at her long hair blowing in the breeze. Memories came back, memories of flying that old biplane with her at the controls, and memories of the nights they had together before she left.

  “Listen to this, Mike,” said Robin. She turned up the volume.

  “In New York, a woman who failed to report for work has been declared missing by her employer, Aviatrice Corporation. Company employees going to her residence called in city detectives when her apartment was found ransacked.”

  “I’ll call Jeremy.” Mike picked up his cellular phone and rang the Museum telephone. Gladys answered and he said hello as he always did.

  “We have visitors and are very busy here today. If you want to speak to Jeremy, you’ll have to call him back later,” she said, in the most formal way she had ever talked to him, as if he were a customer, as if she did not know who was calling, as if she didn’t want to speak to him, and then she ended his call by immediately hanging up on him. Clicking shut his phone, he looked at Robin and suddenly realized that Glady’s was telling him some unfriendly visitors were at the Museum asking questions.

  Chapter Seven

  6 PM, July 1

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  A building doesn’t look crazy. At least most buildings don’t. Therefore nothing convinced Mike that the people inside this place were the slightest bit different from people anywhere else. Serene, it could have been a rest home for the grandmothers and grandfathers of the world instead of a holding place for the mentally ill.

  “Becca Scott. She’s on our watch list,” said the nurse at the information desk. She looked up. “That means she’s about to die.”

  “I’m glad we’re in time,” said Mike.

  “She's my only great aunt,” Robin lied.

  “Yes, she’s one of our older residents,” the nurse said in a high pitched voice that sounded like a series of shrieks. Patients were sitting around the lobby. One young woman in a white robe leaned her head back as she heard the nurse speak, as if the voice were a strong wind forcing her off balance.

  “I'll get you an escort,” the nurse said.

  The white coated attendant who showed them down the maze of corridors was friendly and talkative. They trailed behind and Robin whispered to Mike that the attendant was probably starved for rational conversation.

  “You've come to see our Becca. That's great. First outside visitor for her in a long time who isn't from the local church. Of course, the men from her old employer, the Navy Yard, used to come by, but I haven’t even seen them for a few years. They don’t visit with her anyway. They just look in her door when they come, write in their notebook, and then leave after a few minutes. Those visitors left quite an impression on all of us though.”

  “Why?” asked Robin.

  “The noise from the leather heels of their shoes. People who visit here usually walk very quietly like you folks. Noise disturbs some of our people. One resident confided in me a full two weeks after Becca’s visitors left that he could still hear the noise of those men’s shoes.”

  Bullard would do that, Mike thought. Mike had known men like Bullard before, had fought them in the ring, and recognized the type, a man whose life was based on aggravating weaker people, causing them to be afraid of him.

  “Do you play checkers?” asked the attendant. “That's her game if she sits up long enough. Real weak. Just stays in bed. No more running around town for her, I guess.”

  “Around town?” asked Robin.

  “Oh sure. Becca is one of our vacationers. She likes to slip out for a day or so once in a while. We never can quite figure out how any of our clients get out of the hospital, but they do. Becca always comes back though. Just goes into town for a memory trip down the old streets of her life. One morning she’s gone. Before we can get the authorities to go to work looking for her, she’s back again.” He wiggled his waist. “Maybe even a little you know what. Some of these folks seem never to be too old for that.”

  He stopped at a closed door. “From what we understand Becca was an orphan. She was brought up by a foster mother who wasn’t around very much. My guess, she was abused. Sometimes she talks in her sleep about her mother’s patrons and how she helped out. From what I understand her home was something of a brothel. From the descriptions she tells in her sleep though, Becca seemed to enjoy that life.”

  He stopped and reflected. “When she’ll talk to me, and that’s not often, she says she liked her job with the Navy. She says that her boss was a friend.”

  He looked at Robin with a smile. “I’m so glad someone from her family finally visited.”

  Rebecca Scott’s room was tiny with white walls, no curtains. At the side of the room was a small window, covered with a steel grate, and looking out on the parking lot and front entrance. Mike could see a limb of a tree and a bird on the limb. The bird had his head cocked as if it were trying to see into the room.

  “That same bird is here every day,” said the attendant.

  “Goldfinch,” said Robin.

  Becca took
up only a tiny part of the bed, her body shriveled into a lump in the sheets. Her face was small, but Mike could see the remains of beauty among the wear and tear of old age and hard living.

  “This is your niece to see you, Becca,” said the attendant.

  The old woman said nothing, staring first at Robin then at Mike, her eyes the only part of her body that seemed alive.

  “I’ll leave you folks alone,” said the attendant. He closed the door as he went out. Mike stood by the window while Robin sat on the foot of the bed.

  The old woman suddenly asked the question, “Am I beautiful to you?” and Mike’s smile brought a smile from her in return. Becca reached under her pillow to push something back further out of sight.

  Robin noticed her movement and said, “You’re hiding a book, Becco. People who can read aren’t really crazy are they?”

  The old woman brought out a worn paperback, a romance novel judging from the lurid embrace of the man and woman on the cover, and looked at Robin. “I ain’t crazy enough to think I got no niece,” Becca muttered.

  “No,” said Mike. “You don’t.”

  “You’re here about the Captain,” Becca said. “That’s the only reason anybody comes except the church man and I don’t believe his hogwash either.”

  “I want to know about Captain Lawson. I want to help,” said Mike.

  “I told them before.”

  “Becca, you don’t have to talk,” said Robin. “We’re not from the Navy or Aviatrice. We’re not lawyers. Jesse Lawson hired us to find his grandfather’s airplane, that’s all. If you can help us do that, we’d like to listen to what you have to say.”

  “Jesse, that’s the Captain’s grandson, I expect.” She put her head into her pillow and whispered, “I can’t help you.”

  “Just tell us what you can,” asked Mike.

  “If I tell you, you got to promise me something.”

  “If we can,” said Mike.

  “They bury us out with stone markers in a field out back of the hospital. When I’m gone, you make sure my dust gets put in the ocean.”

  “You’re going to live a long time,” said Robin.

  “You got to promise me.”

  “OK,” said Mike.

  “We’ll make sure, Becca,” said Robin.

  “Sometimes I remember,” Becca said, “But then I forget again.”

  She sat up in her bed. “Cover that vent,” she whispered and pointed at a small grate on the wall. “That’s how they listen.”

  Mike hooked his jacket over screws protruding from the grate.

  “Too late to help the Captain. Maybe I can still help his family. Anyway, I’m too far gone to worry any more about what people will do to me one way or the other.’’

  She straightened her sheet. “Since Captain Lawson stole that airplane,” Becca said, “I’ve told everyone I was crazy. I never let down, never told anybody anything. It was the only way I knew to help him back like he helped me.”

  “You pretended all these years,” said Mike.

  “I loved him. Without him I had nothing. Nothing except getting drunk. That helped with the loneliness sometimes. Nothing else.”

  “You must have loved him a great deal,” said Robin.

  “I only knew him,” she said. “I never knew his wife.”

  She looked hard at Mike. He could see the sanity in her eyes.

  “That woman. His wife. He was lonely even when she stayed up to the quarters. She was hard on the Captain. Hard on the Captain. Didn’t like him at all. So he came to me.” She stopped talking to wipe away the saliva dripping from her mouth.

  “I could never have talked to her anyway. I didn’t want to see her.” She looked plaintively at Mike. “I know now after all these years thinking what I did to their marriage, that she probably tried hard. Then again I have to believe that I could have done nothing different.”

  Mike sat on her bed and stroked her forearm softly.

  She said, “The Captain, he was a great inventor and a brain. No one can take that away from him. All the lies they said.”

  “Do you know why he took the airplane, Becca?” asked Mike.

  She motioned to her small table.

  Mike opened the little drawer. Inside was a manila envelope, well worn as if opened and closed many times. He pulled out a faded newspaper clipping.

  “COMMUNIST STEALS SECRET SEAPLANE

  Famous Naval Aviator Attempts to Deliver ExperimentalAircraft to Soviet Battleship Visiting United Nations Opening

  July 5, 1946

  Yesterday, at 10 PM EST, Captain Edward Lawson, flew off in an experimental unarmed PBY Catalina flying boat, and attempted to deliver the secret airplane to the visiting Soviet battleship Stalin cruising just off the New Jersey shoreline on its way to New York City for the opening of the new United Nations facility at Lake Success, New York.

  The Captain and the aircraft were declared lost at sea in a crash soon after takeoff and Navy teams are attempting to recover the wreckage. The Navy has issued a statement that the Captain has also stolen top secret documents from his office and has destroyed his research laboratory.

  Captain Lawson is expected to be found guilty of espionage. The Navy stated that this is the most important spy case to come to their attention since the end of hostilities in Europe and Japan and indicates an increase in Communist subversive activities targeted at Navy bases.”

  After Mike finished reading, he showed the excerpt to Robin. When she finished she handed it back to him. He put the clipping back in the envelope and replaced it in the drawer. The old woman watched without emotion.

  She said, “He wasn’t a spy. I don’t know why he took that plane. He loved that thing. It was all he talked about.”

  “ ‘Isn’t she pretty?’ he would say pointing to the seaplane. He loved that plane like he loved me, probably more. You probably blame me, kid, but I wasn’t at fault in this one. Before me it was a lady from Baltimore. I never knew her name, but he had her picture with her wearing a white bathing suit stuck up on the instrument panel of the seaplane for a long time. Dark features. I thought she might have been a Spanish lady. She left him, I think, maybe went back to Cuba, because after a while the picture was gone. Then he started staying around the lab on weekends.

  “It was exciting working in the laboratory. Before the war came along, before Pearl Harbor we had a lot of attention from the big shots, from Mr. Wall and the brass, coming in to talk about the new engine Captain Lawson and his team invented. He had several men with him, young engineers, Academy graduates. They would work hard, dreaming of what they called the Giant Boat. Work had been done on a project called the Giant Boat, a seaplane, back in the Twenties in the lab, before the Captain came. Parts of it were still around in storage, the original wing, the boat hull. All of it was outdated, but Captain Lawson and his team thought they could make a better one. The problem was getting enough of an engine on it. I knew that much. They were working with steam power. The lab knew all about steam. They were also working on steam powered launchers for the aircraft carriers.

  “They thought they could get enough power from steam to fly the plane. They knew they had to make the engine light because a lot of the steam engines were so heavy. After Pearl Harbor, the brass wanted to transfer all the engineers away from the Captain. He fought them as long as he could, almost to the end of the War.

  “It’s hard for me to explain because I don’t have the education the Captain had. I only know what I heard all of them talking about, mentioning over and over as they worked on the problems. I got to be cheering, like, for them to figure out answers, you know. We all worked together like a family. It was like we were doing something really special that no one had ever tried to do before. The Captain was the leader and to the younger men he was like a god. I remember the day that Aviatrice delivered the special turbines to be fitted in place of the regular engines on the flying boat. The Aviatrice engineers, we all called them the outsiders, them and their security men t
hat always came along too, would come down. Those days we had to have everything cleaned up and looking good. Usually the Captain hid all the important valves and controllers behind big partitions he had painted the same color as the walls, like camouflage, so visitors didn’t know anything was there.”

  “Tell me about the Captain and Mr. Wall,” asked Mike.

  “Mostly Aviatrice and the Navy stayed away from the lab, because the Captain ordered them to stay away. The Aviatrice people, I remember, never did see his new condensers. Mr. Wall had no idea how well they worked and the Captain didn’t want him to know for a while. He welcomed Mr. Wall for a long time, but then he started not to like Mr. Wall, didn’t want to see him. I don’t really know what caused his dislike but I never liked Mr. Wall myself. Too greasy for me, too slick.”

  “ ‘You’ll get your plane soon enough, Bernie,’ he’d say, and send Mr. Wall on his way. That would keep Mr. Wall away for another month or so.

  “The Captain could fly the seaplane alone too. He’d go out and fly the plane once in a while to test some new part. I don’t understand how they could say he crashed that seaplane. Something on the plane must have broken, because he could fly it with his eyes shut. Most times he went alone too. He liked to fly alone so he could adjust valves without telling anyone. He’d say to me, ‘I don’t have to explain things. I don’t have to tell somebody how to do it. I like to do it myself.’

  “Most of our people, our family, the ones the Captain trusted, were killed in Okinawa in the last days of the war. The Navy needed our engineers to handle the technical equipment they were using on the aircraft carriers fighting the Japanese. Our engineers could run the new equipment. They were stationed on the ships out on the decks with the launchers and the suicide planes killed them.

  “When Hiram Jones came to work early in 1946, he wanted to arm the seaplane, put bombs on it. The Captain had taken off all the guns the day he heard that the engineers were killed at Okinawa. I remember him saying that he didn’t want to see guns anymore, not on his plane. He and Hiram, and later Wall, argued about the weapons being put back.