Magnolia Gods (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 2)

by Thomas Hollyday

  “His men killed two people,” Mike said. He filled Tim in about the murders of Winkee and his girl.

  “I didn’t know about that,” said Tim.

  “Can you get the girl to call the police and let them know she’s all right?”

  “I’ve told her to do that. She’s just too afraid.”

  “The police are looking for us for murders we didn’t do. I don’t think we have a chance in hell if the police get us. We’ll disappear in jail, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’m afraid you may be right. You’d have a tough time anyway. I wish I could help you. I’d like to tell you what I know about the case, what I should have told you when you came to the company the other day.

  Mike listened as Tim related the story. “I had just come to work at Aviatrice after the War. Aviatrice was refinanced and enlarged to build new designs to fight the Soviets. It had a lot of European as well as American money in it.

  “German?” asked Mike.

  “I guess so. Everyone hated the Communists.” Tim went on, “When we heard about the explosion and the destruction of the seaplane, all of us thought that Lawson was in this all alone. We thought he had turned into a nutcake. “

  Mike told him about the papers. “Did you know that Lawson didn’t crash in the ocean? At least Wall didn’t think so, and he had Hiram Jones looking for the seaplane all these years. Documents were on board that Wall wanted back.”

  “No, no, I didn’t know that.”

  “The man and his wife who were murdered. They were killed because they told us.”

  “You know for sure somebody here at Aviatrice killed them?”

  “You read me loud and clear.”

  “Wall was so damn adamant about Captain Lawson. It always bothered me that he was so certain Lawson was guilty.”

  “Why didn’t you look into it?”

  “I guess I just didn’t think Aviatrice could do something like this. I always wondered about Hiram Jones, too. He wasn’t much of an engineer, yet Wall would get up and leave important meetings just to see him. They’d be in Wall’s office for hours at a time.

  “Now that I remember, I thought something else was odd. I went aboard that Soviet battleship. Old British lend lease ship. The Stalin, they called her. Most of the instructions were still in English. Imagine a Soviet crew who could hardly speak English sailing an antique British ship with the instructions not in Russian. Thank God the war was over. The Communist Party member who showed us around was all smiles. Nothing was secret about that old tub. She was laid down in 1915. She was a relic with bottom plates rusted so thin a collision with a codfish would have sunk her. The Russians were proud of her though. They brought her on a training cruise to New York to visit the new United Nations. They had all her flags flying.

  “I had a hard time believing that Lawson would risk his neck to fly to that ship, much less try to land beside her and talk to those sailors. The case was all so shapeless with no real proof of anything. Just ideas, claims, threats. I guess I always thought that smarter people than me somehow knew the facts about how guilty he was.

  Tim was silent for a moment. “Bernie Wall got worse and worse even during the first years I was in the company. He’s a sick man.”

  “Sick?”

  “Word is that Bernie got syphilis from a high class call girl he met in London after the war. He was always the man for the women. The disease has made him crazy. He’s seen doctors for years, but this version of it can’t be cured. I think it was some type the Nazis cooked up in their labs. The whore was imprisoned in the camps in Germany and those experimental doctors gave it to her. Out of revenge she went after the highest level men she could right after the war ended, ex-Nazis as well as Allies. She was in London, operating on her own, sleeping with the higher quality patrons.

  Tim sighed, “I guess Bernie’s so sick that the only reason that he stays alive is his incredible hatred of Lawson and his family. That hatred keeps him from giving in.

  “He’s got his daughter Jessica working with him. She shaved off all her hair so she could be like him, bald. She wears a wig. The staff call her “bigwig” behind her back.”

  A small light signaled the battery was running down on the phone but Mike did not interrupt Tim.

  Tim went on. “I remember talking to Bernie after the theft of the seaplane. The raft had been found, and we were all pretty sure that the plane had gone down. Picture a beautiful mahogany paneled office, with a stale cigar smell and dim lights. Outside a woman sat at a desk chain smoking and answering the telephone. She brought me into the room, and I sat in front of his large desk. I remember the small airplane models in silver that were all over the desk. Wall came up from behind me. The man sneaked right up on me. I never heard him coming. I was good at hearing people around me so you know this man was quiet. First thing I knew he was there.

  “‘Tell me about Captain Lawson,’ I asked him.

  “‘What can I say?’ Wall replied. ‘The man worked for the Navy all these years, seemed to have good relationships with our people when we sent down equipment for the Navy to test. All of it went by Lawson. He was the big man at the Navy Lab.’

  “Wall said ‘The Navy wanted to build the planes, thought they could do it cheaper. We were in competition with the government. It’s a no win game for private enterprise and we did not like it. The Navy did not understand and when the war came along it was all swept under the rug, so to speak. Now that the war is over, men like Lawson still want the Navy to build some of the planes, especially the Giant Boat.’

  “Tell me about the Giant Boat,” Mike interrupted Tim.

  “That’s what the plane was that he stole. A prototype. The only thing it did not have was the power source.”

  “Power source?”

  “Yes, it ran on steam. The principle was there, all the equipment worked out, the valves especially, but unfortunately the plane didn’t have enough power to lift all the heavy steam equipment and still have some energy left to lift the bombs.”

  “So what was the power source to be?”

  “The same stuff we dropped on Japan.”

  “Atomic power? Wouldn’t the radiation be hard to contain in an aircraft, and what about the heavy shielding?”

  “The Giant Boat would have been more dangerous to fly, but even more dangerous to our enemies.”

  “What did Lawson think about this?”

  “That was the whole problem. Lawson had gotten to be pretty much of a peace person. He lost a lot of his engineers in the war, and he was against any more war. As a result and because Lawson didn’t want the project to leave Navy control, I could see that Bernie already had no use for Lawson. You got to understand that Lawson was pretty famous among the engineering crowd. He was the top man on flying boats, and on steam propulsion, knowledge needed for moving into atomic powered flight. The idea that was popular for a while, I guess, was to build big seaplanes, put reactors in them to power steam engines, and take off far out at sea where radioactivity would be away from the population. Anyway, Wall didn’t seem to care about this. He seemed to have no interest in why Lawson did what he did, no comments about the technology. He just had this mission to build this Giant Boat, and Lawson had crossed him. He was upset that someone had not followed his orders. He cared nothing about why, just that Lawson did not follow orders and should be punished. Wall is that kind of man.”

  “You started to get some doubts about Lawson’s guilt?” said Mike.

  “Yeah, I had questions, no doubt about it. Not your father though.”

  “What did he say?”

  “All he knew was what he saw in the papers. He figured the guy was a traitor and that was it. He took the Navy line.”

  Tim was silent for a few moments. “Look, son, I’m sure you didn’t do these terrible things, but I don’t know any way to help you. It isn’t like the days when you were learning to fly. I’m too old.”

  “You’ve done enough, Tim. Just keep your head down.”
/>   “By the way, you’d be interested in what we found out from the Soviet records that just opened up.”

  “What do you have?”

  “The Russians had a nickname for Aviatrice.”

  “What?” asked Mike. The phone was dying.

  “Avarice.” Tim’s voice was weak and then stopped as the battery went dead.

  Mike turned to Robin who was walking beside him. She looked at him. He said, “He’s hiding Jenni. She’s safe.”

  “Thank God.”

  “He’s got to keep her hidden for her safety. We’re on our own.”

  Robin nodded.

  Mike’s face was grim as he threw his useless phone into an open trash can.

  Chapter Nine

  10 PM, July 1

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  They had walked out from the center of the city. The buildings were smaller in this section of town and along the street were small shops, convenience stores, and liquor outlets, some of them still open. Bus stops were spaced further apart. A crowd of late commuters had just exited the bus at the stop one block in front of them and many people were streaming by them rushing home. On the street few cars went by at this time of the evening.

  Robin pulled Mike’s arm.

  “In here,” she said. She led him into a store with cardboard signs advertising used clothing. Inside, in the dim light, a smell of soap and dry cleaning chemicals pervaded the stuffy air. Newly cleaned and refurbished pants and shirts, draped in dusty plastic wrappers, hung in disorganized rows from the shop ceiling and along the walls, while racks of tossed unkempt pants and shirts stretched at least forty feet to the back of the room.

  A young Chinese woman in a black dress decorated with sequins filed her nails behind a counter to their left. In front of her were piles of crumpled dresses that she was in process of folding and putting on hangers. She did not look at them but said, in weak English, “We are getting ready to close.”

  “Let’s start in the back,” Robin said over her shoulder, a touch of excitement at buying clothes evident in her expression as though she had put aside thoughts of all the danger pursuing them. Mike followed her along a narrow aisle between racks of winter coats until they were out of sight of the front door and the attendant.

  “We can get a few things here,” she said. Searching through a pile of clothing, she found a pair of worn jeans, with one knee ripped open, and tossed them to Mike. She reached for a red silk shirt, threw it too, and said, “Here. This goes with the pants.”

  Robin herself stripped except for skimpy black panties that had a bright red butterfly on the back. She began holding different outfits in front of her, finally pulling on a pair of yellow jeans and rolling up the bottoms over her toes.

  “Hurry up, Mike. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  He pulled the shirt over the jeans and quickly buttoned it. A full length mirror was beside them stuck back among the shelves, and he stood in front of it.

  “Handsome,” she said, studying the fit on him.

  “Ok, you need sunglasses,” she said. “Also you have to let your hair tousle down the sides of your face.”

  Robin paid for the clothes and they rushed back to the street. In the evening another crowd of hurrying men and women had discharged at the bus stop. As they passed a dumpster, Mike threw away their old clothes.

  “Rule one,” she said, as they moved quickly. “Change clothes often.”

  “That what your father taught you?” asked Mike.

  “Police bulletins mention clothing. If you change clothes a lot, the job is harder for the police to nab you.”

  “Your father told you all that stuff when he was hiding out, when you were a little girl up in Nova Scotia.”

  “Yes.”

  “What else should we do?” asked Mike.

  “Always be part of a crowd. Don’t stand around alone.”

  He smiled, shook his head. “What about our getting a car?”

  “That’s where we’re going,” she said.

  As they walked, inspecting carefully the faces of the people they passed, he said, “You’ve come back into a real mess, Robin.”

  “I want to be here.”

  “Wait,” Mike said as they came to a pay telephone. He called Jeremy.

  “Your friend is safe,” said Mike as he heard Jeremy on the other end.

  “Best news I’ve had all day. I’ll talk fast,” said Jeremy. “I’ve come on some new information. I found another name in the old records. This person may be able to help.” From his tone Mike knew the phone was tapped.

  “I’ll be in touch,” said Mike.

  “Gladys is in charge as always. I’ll check out the new name.”

  As Mike hung up, he wondered who the new person was. His mind drifted to thoughts of the Museum and he chuckled.

  “What?” said Robin.

  “I was thinking of Gladys telling off those detectives.”

  Mike suspected the police had swarmed all over the place as well as his house. The police wouldn’t find much there at that Victorian three decker on the outskirts of Wilmington, with the old carriage house out back. All they’d see in the house were rooms decorated with pictures of his father’s heroic career. Out back they’d find a training facility out in the barn where Mike had hung workout and training equipment from the rafters and stretched the ropes for a small ring to try to impress his father with his boxing prowess. His background as a boxer had prompted his classification as a killer. Boxers weren’t killers, but he knew this would be a hard sell given the murder scene in Philadelphia. He wondered how nasty the Aviatrice men, probably led by Bullock, had been to the staff. Thank God for Gladys. She would tell him off.

  Robin’s father had told her of a place, an old three story brick row house. Some of the Americans in Nova Scotia were servicemen as her father was. These fugitives were from the Philadelphia area, absent without leave from Fort Dix, in nearby New Jersey. The house had been a safe hideout where they had been helped to escape to Canada. Oddly, long before the days of the Vietnam War, her father said that the house, owned by the same family for over two hundred years, had been used during another turbulent time to help escaping slaves in the Underground Railroad.

  The part of Philadelphia to which Robin had directed their travel for the last two hours was the most run down they had yet visited. The streets were worse, more cluttered with wrecked cars and garbage, than the avenues in the neighborhood where Hiram and his former nephew and the nephew's girlfriend rented their squalid apartment.

  Around them, though, were the summer signs of inner city life. Children played in the streets and men and women sat in doorways, watching the children. Prostitutes and dealers worked the doorways and some of them called to him, or whistled at Robin. She, in turn, whistled back. Police and ambulance sirens bleated by from time to time, causing the two of them to hide by staring into store windows until the cars passed by. The heat was exhausting, pouring up from the sidewalk as they trudged on.

  They reached a section of the city where renovation had taken place. The street was cleaner and the parked cars were of better quality.

  “This is the place,” she said, looking up at a house number. The building, like the ones on both sides of it, had been recently rebuilt, with a wooden door at the top of new concrete steps. The first story windows were covered with ancient iron bars, painted with fresh black paint. Robin led him up the steps as they squeezed by two young black girls sitting and playing pick up sticks. The children watched as Robin pressed the doorbell button. Mike heard the buzzer echo inside the house.

  Just then a shining blue car, a Lexus, pulled up and parked at the curb. A tall white woman in business suit and carrying a polished leather briefcase got out and approached them. She stood below them on the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, her neck back, looking up to them.

  “What do you want?” she asked in a commanding tone.

  “Are you Janet Snow?” Robin said.

  “Yes.�
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  “We’re from Mr. Johnson,” Robin said.

  Robin had told Mike those words were the old password used by the soldiers seeking refuge.

  The woman stared at Robin for a moment, then started up the steps. She stopped halfway up and again her eyes moved over Robin. Mike thought she might be trying to see if Robin had a gun. Mike realized that she was an elderly woman even though she appeared at first glance to be in her forties.

  Robin said, “We’re not police.”

  In the momentary silence, the little girls smiled at Mike and he winked back. Then the woman moved again, squeezing by all of them as she inserted her key in the door. As she moved by him, Mike smelled a strong flowery perfume, perhaps a magnolia scent. The door creaked back, showing a large hallway in the dimness.

  The woman motioned them inside and to a parlor on the right side of the entry. The room had stuffed furniture and was lit with yellow light by a small lamp to the side of the room. It was tidy and smelled of strong soap. At the end of the room over a fireplace was a great painting of a clipper ship sinking in a wild storm, men falling out of the wreck, full white sails tattered in the hurricane and darkness.

  Robin said, “My father told me about that painting. He said I could get help from you.”

  Mike tensed, ready to go back out the door with Robin, if the woman went for her telephone.

  “What did your father do?” she finally asked, staring at Robin.

  “He left the United States because of Vietnam.”

  “If I did know what you are talking about, what do you want from me?”

  “The police are looking for us for something we didn’t do. We need a car to get out of the city.”

  “That’s a lot you want. How do I know you’re not here to rob me? Maybe I should just turn you in.”

  “I was told you were a good lawyer. You should know if we are telling the truth. Otherwise, we’ll leave right away,” said Robin.