Magnolia Gods (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 2) Page 9

  “We’d be coming at this Jap destroyer and the skipper would call back, ‘Good attack this time, Buddy.’ The rounds would start zipping by our plane. Once in a while the hot anti-aircraft fragments ripped away some of the wing fabric, the tears of metal flapping in the screaming wind, and I would yell forward over the noise,

  “ ‘Skipper, worth the trouble?’

  “The answer would come back in the static, ‘This run’s worth the trouble.’

  Then his dad would pantomime dramatically that the torpedo was launched and the plane shuddered with loss of the heavy weight from underneath.

  “We’d try to gain altitude, pushing the aircraft for all she had, straining the engine to get away, like a kid who hits the bully and then runs like hell.

  “You could see them, Mike,” he’d say, talking like Mike was as important as the older men in the room, “shooting at us from down below. I remember one time we flew over a ship and I could see some Jap sailor had his rifle pointed right at my face. I could have reached out and touched him. Just before he pulled off his round, the ship exploded, a ball of flame came up around him and sucked him away. We got away from that too, and then it was over until the next time. Me and the skipper chattered on the intercom. He’d say pretty soon that the run was successful, that our attack was worth the trouble.”

  Mike could not imagine his father ever having been afraid. Yet, his father had seen his son afraid, so afraid he could not move. This event had caused the gap of trust between father and son, and this had caused Mike to doubt himself. Since that event, Mike had the constant worry that the fear would come back. He had steeled himself with courage. In everything he tried, he felt fearless. Yet, he was not secure in one faculty, one strength that he had before the cowardice. Mike could not or would not trust himself to fly again.

  If he kept investigating, he knew he’d meet Bullard again and he had no fear of the man. The play at Aviatrice had been only verbal, but the man had tried to push, to cower him, and Mike had pushed back successfully. Bullard was the kind who would stoop to breaking a man’s legs, to humiliating an opponent. Mike, on the other hand, was satisfied with winning, not maiming. Bullard, Mike knew, had to be watched even when he was down, even when he was beaten because Bullard would never stop. Bullard was driven only by hate. Mike knew that was the man’s weakness but also his strength. He wouldn’t forget that he hadn’t been able to scare Mike. Bullard would make sure they met again, as a matter of pride, of keeping track of adversaries, the way the old Western gunfighters did. It was the kind of tote that only men like Bullard bothered to keep. The tote was his weakness because sooner or later the tote would lead to Bullard’s undoing. Someone stronger than him would kill him.

  Mike pressed the accelerator and the car jumped ahead. Jeremy had run Hiram Jones’ name on the Internet and the address fit with what Mike found in the old lawyer’s files. Hiram was in an apartment in Philadelphia, a poorer area of the city near the former Navy Yard where Lawson’s Research Laboratory had been.

  As they drove into the neighborhood, the people standing on the street followed their progress. Mike’s car was not a new one and it was covered with dust from the dirt roads on the Eastern Shore, but it was better than the decrepit automobiles, some robbed of their wheels, that were parked at the curbs. Mike and Robin decided that she would stay with the car while he went to the address.

  He had to walk two blocks before he found the right apartment number. It was in a building with some of the windows boarded and Hiram’s room was in the back down a hallway lit only by the daylight leaking through a single dirt and spider- web-covered window at the end. Mike walked the narrow hallway, barely wide enough for his large frame, trying to keep the worn linoleum from creaking with his weight. Near a radiator with flaking paint was the Jones apartment. In the dim light, Mike could barely see the number written on the door panel with a black marker. On the floor were piles of free circular newspapers and some stamped letters with a pathway through as if someone had pushed the mail to the side. Mike stooped down and lifted up a dust covered envelope from the bottom of the pile. The letter, a telephone bill, was addressed to Hiram Jones with a postmark more than a month old. Still holding the envelope, Mike started to knock.

  Before his fist hit the door, it opened and in the narrow crack of light, Mike saw the bare shoulder and chest of a man.

  “I heard you coming,” the man said, and in a weak voice that reminded Mike of the questioning tone of a young boy, “What do you want?”

  Sour air came out of the room, the smell of sweat and rotted food. Mike put his hand on the door to hold it open and said, “I want to talk to Hiram Jones.”

  The man started to push the door closed against the pressure of Mike’s hand but changed his mind. His voice wheedled, “He ain’t here. You got some delivery for him?”

  Mike pushed harder and the door swung open. A white man, young, not more than twenty-five Mike guessed, his feet bare and gray with filth, with long tangled hair and dressed only in a pair of faded orange knee length shorts, stood there. The shorts were filthy with stains and spilled food and looked like the man had worn them for days. His right hand still rested on the doorknob while his mouth was open in a dull look.

  Mike handed him the telephone bill. “Some of your mail.”

  “OK, you can come in,” he said, taking the letter slowly, indecisively, putting up no resistance and stepping out of Mike’s way.

  “Hiram Jones,” Mike reminded him.

  The man, his eyes showing some fear now, stared at Mike’s blue blazer.

  “No, that coat don’t look like police.”

  Mike tried a different approach. He held out his hand. “Where does he live now? My name is Mike Howard. Hiram was a witness in a Navy hearing years ago. I wanted to talk to him about it.”

  “You’re another one of them Aviatrice people.” The man drew back.

  Mike handed him his museum card from his wallet. “No. Not from Aviatrice. I’m from a Museum that collects old airplanes.”

  The man held the card looking at it then at Mike.

  Mike asked firmly, “Where is he?”

  “OK. He died from his cancer a month ago. I can take the delivery though. I’m his only relative left. I get all his property.”

  The man stepped to the door. “Wait a minute.” He poked his head out into the hall carefully, looked both ways, then stepped well back inside.

  “Aviatrice was here?” Mike asked.

  “Ain’t none of your business. You ain’t got nothing to leave, you might as well be on your way.”

  The room was stripped of any decoration and lit only by two bare windows. An open door lead to another unlighted chamber. In one corner was a cardboard box with brown paper bags crunched up and thrown around it like someone was practicing throwing baskets. The only other furniture were a sofa, a wicker chair and a glass ashtray on a wooden stand. The ashtray was filled with cigarette butts.

  A young woman, not much out of her teen age years, her hair to her shoulders but matted and stringy, was sitting on the sofa, dressed only in purple panties. She started to put her hands up to cover her breasts then shrugged as if the effort was not worth her time.

  “You better get your outfit on unless you want to go like that,” the man said to her. “It’s time for you to go to work.”

  The woman stood and stretched, her eyes looking ahead, not paying any attention to Mike.

  “Go to Hell, Winkee,” she said, coughing, her voice deep and rasping. She sleepily tried to smooth her tangled hair while her other hand moved her panties down one leg as she padded into the other room. Mike heard a toilet flush.

  Winkee watched Mike quickly glance around the room and said, “We’ve had to sell most of the furniture to pay for Hiram’s burial, if it’s any of your business.” Then in a change of tone, almost friendly, “It’s always hard on the relatives when a person dies, ain’t it?”

  Mike nodded. “Tell me about Hiram and Aviatrice.” />
  “We never knew nothing. It was all Hiram and them people. When he died they come and took his stuff, that’s all.”

  He heard the sound of a box or carton falling off a shelf.

  “You keep to yourself in there,” Winkee yelled.

  “I’m showing him,” she yelled.

  “It ain’t yours,” said Winkee, starting toward her. Just then the woman came back in the room. She was completely naked but was holding a black leather briefcase, very worn and scratched.

  Winkee rushed at her, knocking her down. They grappled as he tried to get the case. They rolled against the sofa which fell back, one of its legs coming off with a cracking noise. Mike could see his business card go flying across the room. Then, Winkee stopped moving, holding his stomach and moaning.

  The woman got to her feet and stood in front of Mike, holding the case, her eyes still glazed but trying to focus on his.

  “You want to pay, it’s yours,” she said. For a moment Mike wasn’t sure what she was talking about.

  She held up the case. “This,” she said.

  “We agreed to keep it for protection,” whimpered Winkee, as he got to his knees.

  “What am I buying?” Mike said, his eyes on hers. Winkee moved up behind her and tried to grab the case. She turned slightly, her bare foot kicking his knee. He fell back on the floor, his hand rubbing the knee, his face furious.

  She turned back to Mike and said, over her shoulder to Winkee, “I took care of Hiram too. It’s part mine. We need the money. You’re always saying how they might come back and you want to get out of here. Here’s your chance. This ain’t no life.”

  She stared at Mike. “How much you got?”

  “A hundred dollars.”

  She smiled, her stained teeth showing, “Two hundred dollars and you get what’s in the bag.”

  Mike pulled out his wallet and counted out the money into her hand.

  She grabbed the bills, counting them one by one.

  “All right,” she said as she reached into the case and took out the first item.

  Winkee spoke. “Hiram was a fool. He done all that work, all those years of work, and they just cut him off like he never existed. They cut me and my lady off too. Just like that they stopped the check.”

  “Shut up, Winkee.” The woman handed Mike an old stock certificate made out to Hiram Jones from the briefcase.

  Mike read, “Aviatrice Corporation, one share common.”

  “That’s all he had,” said Winkee. “He used to look at that and say that he finally bought it because the bastards would never give him any.”

  Then she handed Mike a folded engineering drawing with three views of an engine system. Mike knelt and spread the drawings on the floor while she squatted, watching him.

  She said, “He used to do the same thing. Just kneel there and look at them drawings. Then he’d get up and walk around and around the room waving his hand in the air.”

  Winkee fluttered his arms above his head and added, “Like he was trying to figure them out and couldn’t quite get it. I asked if I could help but he just cut me down, said I wasn’t an engineer and it was a waste of his time to explain anything to me.”

  “You understand them drawings?” asked the woman, staring at Mike.

  “A little bit,” said Mike. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It seems to be some kind of turbine.”

  She put one bare knee on the floor for balance and handed him a photograph. It was a small square black and white picture of a man in coveralls. Mike looked at it and then at Winkee.

  “You’re the Museum man, you figure it out,” said Winkee.

  “Tell him, Winkee,” the woman said, turning and staring at him, her hands on her hips, the case tucked under her arm.

  “That’s Lawson standing next to the plane he stole.”

  Mike looked at the photograph intently.

  “That’s the photograph that Hiram used to show around when he was looking for the airplane,” said Winkee.

  “Show around? What do you mean?” asked Mike.

  “I didn’t mean nothin’,” said Winkee.

  “Hiram was traveling around to the airports all over the East Coast, long before we come here,” the woman said. “Even after we come, sometimes he’d be gone for days. Then he got sick and he didn’t go no more. He just started looking out the window all day, but from behind the curtains so no one outside could see him.”

  “So he thought the seaplane was on land, not in the ocean?” said Mike. He tried to hide the excitement in his voice.

  “I ain’t sayin’” Winkee replied, rubbing his knee where the woman had kicked him.

  “You ain’t hurt,” she said over her shoulder.

  Mike looked at the aircraft. He could see some familiar lines. “This is helpful, because it’s the actual plane.”

  He tapped the picture on its edge as he looked at Winkee. “This picture shows a strange hump coming up from the top of the wing between the engines. Did Hiram tell you what that was?”

  “No, he never did,” said Winkee.

  “Here’s something else.” The woman said, handing him a tissue thin copy of a typed letter.

  “January 11, 1964, West Virginia.

  “Interviewed an old-timer who was near the airport here on July 4, 1946. He remembered the fireworks, he said, but said that no aircraft came in or went out that day or the next. He said he would have seen something as big as a Catalina and especially something that big that was flying real quiet, well, that would have been talked all over town. Said a few of them were around in the last few years for fighting forest fires but nothing like the one I described. Said he would keep an eye out for me.”

  Winkee continued, “He had a lot of them notes. Aviatrice got all the rest of them.”

  “The last thing is this letter he sent to the baby cow. That’s what we called her.” She chuckled as she handed it to him.

  To: Jessica Veal, Aviatrice, New York, New York

  “Now that you have joined your father, I thought I’d bring you up to date on the work I have been doing for Aviatrice for a long time and at your father’s request.

  “As your father has probably told you, I was there when the Navy brought in the raft. I saw the uniform when they took it out of the inflatable. As far as the cigarettes in the pocket, the matches, well, I noted that they were all dry. Too dry if the raft had been bouncing around in the ocean for two days. Somebody put the uniform in that raft. Somebody, maybe Lawson himself, wanted to mislead the people searching for the plane, make ‘em think it went down in the ocean when it really didn’t.

  “I’m sure that the plane, wherever it rests, is rusted and corroded into dust. Any documents that could have been inside her fuselage are dust, and you can rest assured that no one could ever read them. I don’t see why Bernie continues to be worried. Of course, it gives me something to do these days. I haven’t been very well.

  “After the ship was stolen, we thought long and hard about Lawson’s destination and finally decided that if he went to land, and that was likely, then he had to go to some airport somewhere to bring that plane in. The plane was an amphibian so it could land on land or water equally easy.

  “Bernie has wanted me to concentrate on the western airport facilities since he felt that Lawson would be able to hide best out there in the mountains. He has always suspected, you know how your father is, that the plane was landed, disassembled, stored in some warehouse until the suspect could arrange to negotiate for its return.

  “I figure Lawson flew her very low and planned to ditch her as soon as he could to avoid the radar. I think something went wrong and that’s why we were never contacted by Lawson. I think the man was killed. Bringing a plane that size in alone at night probably was too big a job for him. As a result, I think we are looking for a wreck somewhere in heavy underbrush that has just not come to light yet.

  “To do this right I went to see most of the airports in the target area, radius a hundred a
nd fifty or so miles from Philadelphia. As we know, that’s the most he could have flown before the radar began working again. Then I divided the areas up and, over the years, went back, interviewing anyone who was around at the time of the theft. I think Bernie and you will agree, I have been pretty organized. In 1947 to 1957, I worked west to northwest. Then from 1958 to 1968, I worked west to southwest. I took trips in the summer and spent a lot of time in the mountain areas. From 1969 to 1978, I went northwest to north, talked to people up north in the Adirondacks. From 1979 to 1989, I moved into New England. Then from 1990, I’ve been going back over the area of Virginia and North Carolina. Finally, I can go back down around the Delmarva Peninsula, around the Chesapeake Bay where Lawson grew up and had his farm. That area was checked so thoroughly by the Navy that I don’t think we have anyone left to interview. Besides, the local people are very patriotic. They wouldn’t hide a traitor. Those same locals went out of their way in 1946 to let the world know they weren’t proud of living in the birthplace of Lawson. I don’t know much else to tell you. It’s been a lot of work. I’m going to need some more expense money soon.”

  The last page was an answer from Jessica Veal.

  “Hiram, here is your monthly expense check. Keep a low profile but get the job done. I want this cleaned up and off my desk. Bernie is tired of it. He says he wants no loose strings. You know what that means. You know how he cleans out files. Jessica Veal.”

  Mike left the apartment after that. When he walked out, Winkie and the woman were standing in the middle of that bare, smelly room, their lives enriched by the two hundred dollars. As he closed the door behind him, they had already begun to fight. He heard her say,