City Walls, page 13
Palm dipped her brush and scraped it on the rim of the bucket. “Wings, Hell’s Angels, both Dawn Patrols, and The Aviator.” She sang the titles. “And all that’s after it drove the Germans all the way back to Berlin in 1918.”
“The Sopwith Snipe,” I said. “Someone showed me a picture once, can’t think who.”
But she was talking to the plane now and didn’t hear. “I’ve got feelers out to the Yankee Air Museum at Willow Run; going to take part in the air show next spring and pay off the mortgage on the field. That’s if I get to keep her. Jack’s going to coach me but, honestly, this thing can fly itself. The pilot’s just the passenger.”
“Keep telling yourself that, sweetie,” Flagg said. “That model killed more Yanks than the Spanish flu. It’s a bronco, not a show horse. The minute it figures out you don’t belong in the saddle, boy howdy! Run you straight into the ground.”
“Don’t try to talk me out of it, old-timer. How many hours does this Bentley have left, by the way?” She rapped the side of the nose with the end of her brush handle. It rang like a cathedral bell.
“Been six hundred since its last overhaul; only had a few thousand on it then. The fighting ended before it could get a real workout. The rest of it went into training and winning the war all over again in Hollywood. Put that back!” he yelled. “That dope goes up on a hot date.”
I’d thumped a cigarette out of the pack. I returned it. “Sorry. I got so caught up in the shoptalk. I see now why you brought me all the way out here in the middle of a murder investigation.”
“Don’t pretend you’re bored by a little history,” Palm said. “I’ve seen the car you drive.” She balanced the brush on the edge of the bucket and climbed down. The long muscles in her thighs tensed and slackened. She shucked the gloves, snatched off the bandanna, and shook her hair loose. It tumbled to her shoulders like Tahquamenon Falls. “I can show off the plane anytime. It was just an excuse to get you both here. Jack has an interest in the conversation; his inventory was damaged and his workspace violated. But since his wife answered the phone I wasn’t sure she’d approve. I wasn’t sure she could hear me anyway.”
“Don’t you worry about Edna,” he said. “She fell—”
“Two hundred feet onto a cement factory,” Palm finished. “That drop gets steeper every time you tell it. She can’t survive much more. You know she’s more worried about you than she is about herself. If she found out we were talking about what happened downtown, it might make her mad enough to scotch the Snipe sale.”
I said, “It’s not definite Parrish’s killing has anything to do with Strickling’s. It shouldn’t affect the airfield.”
“Tell that to the FAA,” she said. “Two deaths by unnatural causes, both involving Golden Eagle, my first and oldest client; one by way of a plane in my backyard. The investigation could drag on for a year, and what are the chances City Airport will stay interested in a partnership offer that long? They’ll just wait till I default on the loan and snap the property up cheap.” She smacked an unsmeared section of fuselage with the flat of her hand; the thump reverberated. “I may be barnstorming county fairs and high school football games for my supper till I’m Jack’s age.”
“What’s so bad about that?” he said. “I’d still be doing it myself if I could get insurance.”
My cell rang: I recognized the number. Listening, I retreated to the entrance. My part of the exchange consisted of the same word twice; and that was just to show the connection was working.
I thumbed off, looking around outside. Lunch was in progress. A pair of construction workers sat on folding chairs, playing two-handed euchre on an oil drum surrounded by kibitzers in hard hats. The crew and its equipment didn’t seem to have made much progress against the mounds of gravel and masticated asphalt pushed up along the edge of the property.
I turned back. “Any chance we could continue this discussion somewhere less public than Ford Field?”
Palm pouted; but we left her project.
We walked the quarter-mile to the trailer, Major Jack Flagg outdistancing us both with his lunging stride.
The office was unchanged except for a large-scale drawing of architect’s elevations in blue pencil on newsprint covering the desk like a tablecloth; from the look of the plan, a two-story concourse would occupy the center of the airfield, with identical hangars large enough to accommodate twice as many private airlines as existed at present.
Emmett Yale’s voice echoed in my skull. I said, “Pipe dream?”
She flushed, gathering the plan into rough folds. “Not even that. No one’s supposed to see this until we’ve got the thumbs-up from City Airport. I’m the practical partner; it’s my job to turn my darling ex’s delusions of grandeur into a fiscal reality.” She stuffed the mass of paper into the deep drawer of the desk. “Okay, you’ve seen what I’ve got. Show me yours.”
I glanced at Flagg studying the propeller on the wall. He looked like he was trying to figure out how to straighten it. To all appearances that meant more to him than two murders connected with his livelihood; but then I might have to reach eighty myself to be in a position to judge his order of priorities.
“Where’s your man Càndido?” I asked Palm. “I got the impression last time he did most of the chores around this place.”
“It’s his day off. I didn’t think you struck up a friendship.”
“We got close the last day or two. That was Inspector Alderdyce just now. He followed up a lead I gave him just before you sent for me. I guess this is one of those cases of the cobbler whose kids go barefoot. A man responsible for maintaining a busy place like an airfield ought to pay closer attention to the safety equipment on his own automobile. He got a ticket for a missing taillight assembly just outside Golden Eagle an hour before Gabe Parrish turned up dead in the Major’s office.”
TWENTY-THREE
Outside, a diesel engine started up with a concussive snort, shaking the trailer on its blocks; the lunch break was over. That ended the conference at that location. Communicating by signs, we went out and retraced our steps to the hangar and my car waiting outside.
Rolling away from the plosive racket, Palm in the front passenger’s seat directed me to a place on Gratiot, five minutes away. As I made the turn onto the avenue I caught a glimpse in the mirror of Major Jack in the back seat; he’d traded his non-committal expression for a long pull of worry. He stared at the scenery without visible interest, the muscles of his jaw working at his gum as if that were the most important item on his list.
The building was a pole-barn affair with sheet-iron walls, standing on a plot adjoining the field along its southeast edge. A pedestal supported a decommissioned fighter jet out front, a cigarette-shaped fuselage with triangular wings. Tall white-tile letters running the length of the hip roof told us we’d arrived at THE WINDSOCK LOUNGE.
“It’s a former VFW post,” Palm said. “Jack was its last commander.”
He made a noise between a grunt and a snarl. “Membership kept dying off. Couldn’t get new recruits after we stopped winning wars.”
“The new owners got the idea for the gimmick when they inherited the jet. The plan was to sell the place to the airport, make money off the passengers waiting for their flight, but City turned it down. That was a mistake. I want to take the place over. That’s when and if we come to an arrangement on annexation.”
It seemed to me she was rolling the dice without stopping to see if she’d made the point last time; but high-finance and Heisenberg’s principle were all the same to me. I kept my mouth shut.
A hostess in a pillbox hat, bolero jacket, and a pencil skirt conducted us to the booth Palm requested, in a corner equidistant from the more populated area on the other side of the circular bar and the jukebox pounding the Fifth Dimension playbook over the speakers.
“I’ll junk the Pan Am hoke,” Palm murmured under the beat, “change the name, the works. The jet set’s ancient history. Airline passengers don’t want to be reminded they’re about to pack themselves into a tin can for x amount of hours with a bunch of Amazons calling the shots. It’s probably what blew the deal in the first place.”
Our waitress looked less comfortable in her uniform, which was designed for a smaller woman, but she managed the same square smile. None of us was hungry enough to invite excessive interruption, so we ordered from the drinks menu. Everything was named after a type of combat aircraft. Palm asked for a Spitfire—gin with bitters and a hot-pepper garnish—I unscrambled the “Russian MiG” to mean a vodka martini. Flagg, after tugging at his loose lower lip and staring at nothing, looked up. “Do I gotta call it P-51 Piss to get a beer?”
The square smile flickered, came back. “Bottled or draft?”
“It all comes from the same horse, don’t it?”
She carried away the menus.
Palm looked at him. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I got other things to think about than how to order a Bud Lite.”
She switched her attention to me. “What you said doesn’t make sense. Càndido’s an acquired taste, but he’s serious about his work. He wouldn’t be the first maintenance man to be careless when it comes to his own car, but he’s no killer.”
“Not this side of the border anyways,” said Flagg.
I looked at him this time; but Palm spoke up before I could pump him.
“He came asking for work last year. He had his green card and I was short-handed, so I took a chance on a stranger without references. I’ve never had reason to regret it. He’s a one-man crew.”
Our drinks came. Flagg snatched his mug off the tray while the waitress was lowering it. After she left I asked him how the man had gotten under his skin.
“Jack thinks every foreigner is a spy.”
I looked at Palm. “Amazing. His lips didn’t even move.”
Flagg said, “I been burned before. I hired a migrant for my ground crew in Bisbee back in ’72, when all the talent was in the military. He had that same homemade tattoo on his wrist. I caught him nicking the fuel line on my Beechcraft and turned him over to the law. He spilled. See, he worked for the Colombians, so it was a shock when he found out it’s harder to wriggle out of a jam up here. They hired him to set up a trade route: I was to start shipping junk in my return flights from over the border if I wanted to keep my planes in the air. Crashing one with four people aboard was supposed to get my attention.”
“Càndido’s never tried to shake me down,” Palm said; “not even for a raise. You can’t hang a man because he tattoos his arm and speaks broken English.”
I said, “It wouldn’t make any difference if he wore a tie and talked like Prince Charles. He followed me all the way to my client’s place of business and then again almost back to my office. By then he knew where I was going, so he broke off. He didn’t tail me here. The cops haven’t had time to track him down based on that ticket, but he might have figured out I’d spotted him and got spooked. There’s a BOLO out on his heap, for what it’s worth. With that head start he could be halfway to Toronto in a hot Toyota.”
She stirred her swizzle around her glass. She hadn’t drank from it yet. “What possible reason could he have for killing this man Parrish?”
“The Major was negotiating a fare to fly Clare Strickling to Canada; there’s no law against that, if you don’t ask too many questions. The way it works out, Càndido overheard Jack discussing the deal with his hard-of-hearing wife and decided to cut himself in, but since he couldn’t be expected to do any flying, he arranged to meet Strickling to collect payment as a go-between, planning to kill him as soon as he was sure he had the cash on him, dead men being preferable to dissatisfied customers. That was supposed to happen in Strickling’s apartment, but plans changed when I stumbled in and the mark got antsy and changed the location to the Golden Eagle hangar. That wasn’t a problem, though, because an airplane propeller’s as good as a gun if you’ve worked around an airfield long enough to learn a few things. Disabling the security cameras was one. He could do that and blame it on the construction crew; it had happened often enough even they couldn’t deny it.
“All very tidy; except I wasn’t part of the deal, and got the money first.” I looked at them both. “That’s new information. Even the cops don’t know that part. Càndido saw me pick it up; had to, or he’d have got it himself. He couldn’t fight me for it and make me a witness who could identify him, and he couldn’t kill me out there in the open even if he had another airplane in his pocket for backup. So he decided to shadow me, hoping I’d lead him to it.”
She’d stopped stirring. “So much for Strickling—if you’re not just spinning a yarn. Why Parrish?”
“That was my fault; I’ve dealt with blackmailers before, and should have known by things he said in Flagg’s office that he’d seen the murderer in the act and was looking for a payoff. I surprised him in Flagg’s office. He was expecting Càndido. They had an appointment.”
Flagg set down his mug and used a gnarled knuckle to whisk foam from his upper lip. “But if he knew the Mex didn’t get the money—” He stopped. “Sure. It’s dark in that hangar. You can’t see a damn thing looking out into bright daylight.”
I nodded. “Being hidden inside—which of course Parrish denied he was, not wanting to cut me in on what he knew—he’d have seen who started up that plane and set it rolling, but not me standing outside. The sun was reflecting so bright off the cabin windows I couldn’t tell if anyone was in it. It would’ve been in his eyes. He didn’t see me pick up the money. That’s what he was after in return for keeping his mouth shut.”
Palm drank then, using her thumb to hold the swizzle out of the way like a spoon in a coffee cup. She swallowed and put the glass down half-empty; shook her head. “I don’t buy it.”
Neither did I, now that I’d heard it from my own lips. It fell short in one important particular. But I didn’t say anything. You don’t attract business by admitting your mistakes.
TWENTY-FOUR
She made up for lost time; when I looked again, her glass was empty. “This morning I had only one murder to worry about,” she said; “now it’s two, plus a direct connection to the first by way of an employee of this airfield. Remind me not to ask you for any more updates.”
I said, “It might not be as bad as all that. Look at Northwest: the unsolved strangulation of a stewardess, a planeload of dead passengers, and a plot to cut the lone survivor out of a settlement; all that against it, and it took simple bureaucratic incompetence to drive the company into receivership. Even then the suits all bailed out with golden parachutes—which as metaphors go is almost moronically ironic.”
“Northwest could afford to drag its feet. I can’t. The feds can knock me out of the air and not have to worry I’ll come back at them with an army of lawyers.” She reached across the table to touch my hand. “What’ll it cost to hire you to make this go away?”
I hated to do it; not because I needed another client, but because her fingers felt so smooth and warm on the back of my hand. I disengaged myself and patted hers. “Your money’s no good. I’m still with the original firm. All I have to do is deliver an ironclad double-murderer and I can retire until the next pushover job comes my way.”
Major Jack made that noise like a punctured blimp: the one that meant he was amused. He signaled the waitress for another round.
“This one’s on me. I duked it out with Chairman Mao, ran medical supplies to Haiti, and had my last rites read to me in a burn unit in Frisco, but this is my first homicide case. Let those sonsabitches in New York say my memoirs ain’t commercial now.”
“I’ll take a raincheck.” I had a text from Alderdyce. He’d had Càndido brought in for questioning.
* * *
There was a time factor involved, so I asked Palm if she’d take Flagg back to his office. She shook her head.
“All I’ve got is the bike. I traded my Toyota for it to save on mileage; that’s how tight my budget is since I took on the airfield.”
Flagg said, “I ain’t brittle. I can ride on the handlebars if you don’t want me copping a feel from behind.”
“Operating a motorcycle in Detroit is hairy enough without a passenger along to break my concentration. I won’t take the chance of destroying a national treasure.”
I got up, cutting the Major off in mid-sneer. Too many years had passed since he’d ridden the edge for him to appreciate the situation. Caution isn’t fear. It’s a response conditioned by experience.
“I’ll buy that round later.” I laid cash on the table. “This one’s on the client. The Healy Building’s on my way. I’ll drop you off.”
He unslung his bomber jacket from the back of his chair, sliding his arms into the sleeves in that overhead gesture I could never manage. “Kids. Think dying of old age is a good thing.”
* * *
I found Alderdyce drinking water from a flimsy plastic bottle in front of the same window I’d sat behind last time, looking at myself in the trick mirror. He’d put on an autumn-weight brown suit and a yellow necktie with one of the shirts he had made special to accommodate the planes and angles of his torso. On the other side of the glass Càndido gazed without expression at the black detective sergeant I’d met before, sitting across from him polishing his glittering gold-rimmed eyeglasses with a special cloth. The plainclothesman looked less crisp today, in his shirtsleeves with damp circles under the arms. The suspect by contrast sat as immobile as a hood ornament.
“They’re born that way,” the inspector said, “our brothers south of the border. Either that, or they rented Wrestling Women versus the Aztec Mummy too many times. You could strike a match off their conscience.”
“Uncooperative, I’m guessing.”
“Worse. He knows he’ll be out of here in time for siesta. Liberation, mi amigo; she’s on her way.”
He was running out of xenophobic slurs, I could tell. I broke his rhythm.
