Johns bent over him and hit him again and again until he was sure the man was dead. Then he left the washroom, jammed the door with a piece of wire, and went back to his seat.
At his seat he picked up his two suitcases, the large one with the money, and the small one with the parachute hidden inside the innocent-looking cushion cover. In Mobile, while he had waited for Marion to arrive, he had put on the parachute harness under his clothes. Now he walked forward to the pilot’s compartment. His watch said they would cross the coast in less than three minutes.
The pilot looked back at him. “No passengers in here,” he said.
“We should be crossing the coast,” John S. Johns said.
“Couple of minutes,” the pilot said, “you can see it dead ahead.”
“Yes, I see it,” Johns said. He placed the small suitcase where he could reach it quickly next to the escape hatch. The large suitcase he placed beside the small one. Then he took out his pistol.
“Open the escape hatch,” Johns said.
The pilot stared at the pistol. “You’re crazy.”
“Open it.”
The pilot set the automatic pilot and bent to open the hatch. Wind rushed through the cockpit. The pilot stood up. “Where’s my co-pilot?”
“I knocked him out,” John S. Johns said.
“Why?” The pilot stared at him. “So you jump, they’ll pick you up in a day. What’d you do? Rob someone?”
“Right the first time,” Johns said. “And no, they won’t pick me up. I’m afraid this is arranged.” He looked below, they were already inside the coast of Mexico. He said, “Go back to your seat. Quick!”
The pilot went back and took the plane off automatic. “Turn back toward the sea.”
“What?” the co-pilot said.
“Turn back out to sea! Now!”
Johns waved his pistol. The pilot began to turn the plane. When the plane was heading back toward the line far below where the land met the sea, the pilot looked at Johns.
“Your boat better be close. We’ve got maybe gas for half an hour,” he said.
“You won’t need it. Set the automatic pilot.”
The pilot slowly set the automatic and turned in his seat to face Johns. “Now what?”
“Now you crash, I’m afraid.”
The pilot looked at the pistol. “You’re going to shoot me?” he asked, his lips white.
“Oh no, not that,” Johns said. “If I wanted evidence left in the plane I could have planted a bomb. It would have been easier. But this crash is going to look like a simple crash—no injuries that couldn’t come from a crash. Not to the people or the plane.
“That’s why I didn’t shoot your co-pilot. They’ll never wonder about one missing body. With any luck the sharks will get all of us… I mean you.”
And John S. Johns looked down. The plane was nearly back to the edge of the sea below. He stepped forward and hit the pilot. He moved so quickly the pilot did not have a chance. He hit the pilot twice more. The pilot lay still. The plane continued to fly toward the sea.
Johns put his pistol in his trouser pocket, took off his suit jacket and his shirt exposing the parachute harness, and bent down to open his small suitcase.
He stood there bent over for a long time. When he straightened up he held a small envelope in his hand. He stared at it, and he stared down at the three bottles of champagne in his suitcase.
On the envelope he read the words: For A Wonderful Honeymoon to My Love. The words were in Marion’s sprawling, childish handwriting. John S. Johns opened the envelope. He read the words aloud in the humming silence of the pilot’s cabin.
My darling, I’ll be your pillow forever. And what’s a honeymoon without champagne and a silk robe for my man. Love, Marion. P.S. Don’t be mad. It was an awful old cushion, too hard and lumpy.
John S. Johns looked down at the open suitcase. Next to the champagne bottles there was a box wrapped in white gift paper. A silk robe, of course. Bought in New York, probably. And he had given her the money.
He bent over the pilot, but the man was dead. He had hit the man very hard. He looked at his watch. Perhaps twenty minutes before the gas ran out. He began to laugh. He sat there and laughed for a long time. He laughed as he looked at the champagne bottles, and at the big suitcase filled with money.
John S. Johns laughed until the motors sputtered, coughed, and went dead. The plane veered off at a sharp angle and headed down for the sea. In the cabin the passengers began to scream. He began to scream with the others.
MINK IS FOR A MINX
by Tighe Jarratt
CHIP STACK OGLED THE CABANA photo of the glamorous Mrs. S. E. T. Harrison for a full minute, gave three seconds each to the pages of the insurance report, and returned his lecherous thoughts to the photo.
“A minx without a mink is like a fish without its scales,” he said. “I’ll bet she has been raising hell.”
Richard Ramsey, chief of Claims and Settlements, rattled the check on his desk. “Seventeen thousand dollars worth of hell, and I have no excuse to hold up the settlement.”
Stack snapped his thumb against the bottom of his cigarette pack to make one jump into his shark-shaped mouth. “You’re being taken! That was the old coat check switcheroo, without trimmings. Some broad walked in with a rat and checked it early in the evening. Then Mrs. Harrison arrived and checked her mink. The two met in the powder room or at the bar and exchanged coat checks. Then the broad walked out with the mink and left the rat for Harrison.”
“The switch could have been a sleight,” Ramsey said. “There’re still some artists around who could take the dentures out of your mouth and stuff it with a baked potato. Or the coats may have been physically switched on the hangers in the checkroom. Or the check girl may have palmed Mrs. Harrison’s proper check and sneaked it to some accomplice. There’s a third possibility. In the confusion of the dinner rush, the check girl may have made an honest mistake and given the coat checks to the wrong parties.”
“Or maybe the mink was a muskrat in disguise!” Chip Stack jeered.
Ramsey shrugged his bony shoulders. “In any case, we’re liable and we’re paying.” He scaled the check expertly into the Outgoing box.
“If you’re settling, why call me in?” Stack grunted.
Ramsey removed his rimless glasses to polish them. “Because if the coat girl made an honest error in the rush and got the checks mixed up, then some career girl in the muskrat bracket is walking around with a seventeen thousand dollar mink on her back—and she is not technically guilty of one damn thing. What we need now is the special aptitude of a shamus who will go to practically any length to get the clothes off some frightened woman’s back. Naturally, we thought of you.”
“I always cherish your high opinions of me,” Chip acknowledged. “You boys want the coat back, but you don’t dare go after it. What are you going to do with an old coat?”
“Return it to Mrs. Harrison with the suggestion she relinquish the new one she will have by then.”
Chip Stack chortled. “You may know the insurance laws, but you sure don’t know women! You’d have a better chance getting the settlement returned by her old man.”
“The age of miracles is past,” Ramsey said dryly. “He happens to be on the board of our own bank, and he didn’t get there without learning that bona fide settlements cannot be repossessed. Just bring in the old coat and you’ll earn your fee.”
Stack poked on his hat and raised his chubby body erect with the surprising ease of a seal surfacing. “I have a terrific streak of chivalry,” he confessed. “I’d much rather bring you in the money.” He punched out his cigarette and moved toward the door with his rolling, carefree gait.
Ramsey’s drill voice pinned him on the doorsill. “You might bear in mind that if you get arrested for blackmail, illegal entry, or named as a correspondent, we don’t know you.”
Chip Stack bowed. “A man appreciates that solid, old school-tie type of loyalty.”
&n
bsp; He sauntered around to the investigation file room and got the scuttlebutt on the check girl. Bonded without a question. Not a blemish on her record in six years of checking at the plush spas. Supporting a crippled brother. Savings account. No addiction to alcohol, drugs, or gambling. No steady boy friends—shady or otherwise.
And a real cute trick, fore, aft and sidewise. It was amazing what the files of an insurance company could produce.
Stack found Rosa Antonelli cleaning house, with a smudged nose, a towel tied in rabbit ears around her head, her skirts tucked up peasant fashion, her feet bare and dirty from mopping. It took a special type of girl to look good under those circumstances. She was the type.
She made him a cup of java, talking from the kitchenette. It was clear she was worried as hell over her bond and future jobs.
She called with a catch in her voice, “I suppose you think I made a mistake in the checks or the coats, too—unless you think something worse! But I want to tell you, Mr. Stark, there was no mistake of any kind.”
“Now take it easy, Rosa, and I’ll try to clear you,” he advised.
She brought his coffee, her eyes shining with gratitude. “I don’t know why. Everybody else has good as called me a thief!”
He took her hand reassuringly and seated her opposite, where he could enjoy her knees. “Let’s just recall the evening.”
“Well, it was rushed, but I was alone on the checkroom. When I’m alone, I never handle more than one party at a time. So I couldn’t have gotten any checks mixed up except right in the Harrison party.”
She thought back a minute. “The Harrisons came in late. They had to wait for a vacant table at the bar. By that time, the back check racks were full and I was using the very front ones, with the check numbers near two hundred. Mr. Harrison’s number was one ninety-two, for instance.”
Rosa Antonelli spoke rapidly and had her facts in order. But of course, she’d already recounted the facts half a dozen times to police, routine insurance investigators, the bonding company, her bosses.
“The Harrisons were late leaving and there weren’t many coats left. All the other coats were where they should be, on the front racks. But Mrs. Harrison handed in check thirty-six, and it was the last coat on the back rack. You see what I’m getting at?”
Stack nodded. “She shouldn’t have had check thirty-six to begin with. But if there had been some error in the check stubs, the coat for thirty-six should still have been on the front rack.”
The check girl nodded, but tears filled her eyes. “I tried to say that, but nobody would listen. Mr. Harrison was sure I was a thief, and wanted me thrown in jail right then. And Mrs. Harrison was telling the manager that she’d certainly given me back the same check I gave her.”
Stack laid a hand upon her knee to stop her. “Mrs. Harrison gave you her own check? I mean, in that kind of restaurant, isn’t it usual for a lady’s escort to carry both checks?”
“Yes it is and that’s what I was trying to make her see—that some smart operator might have seen her tuck the check in her evening bag, and pulled something when she laid it on the bar, maybe. If she’d only listened, maybe she could have remembered who sat next to her or stood behind her or if she laid her purse down in the powder room—”
Rosa choked up suddenly. “But all they wanted to do was blame me!” she sobbed.
“Now,” Stack said sympathetically, “I’m not blaming you, and maybe you’ve solved the whole thing without knowing it.”
“Oh, Mr. Stack!” She reached his hand impulsively and hugged it against her neck. “If you’d just tell that to the bonding company, I’d do anything—”
“Hrrrrumm,” he nodded. “Well, I’ll need quite a little help from you. Private and confidential, of course.”
“Any time you want to see me,” she agreed with the vaguest hint of color in her cheeks. “And I’ll tell you something, Mr. Stack, if I had been stealing, I’d have wanted the imitation, not that lavish mink of Mrs. Harrison’s.”
“Do you have any recollection of the woman who checked the other coat?” he asked.
Rosa shook her head. “I’ve tried and tried but can’t remember. But it was still a lovely coat, Mr. Stack. Compared with the Harrisons, she may have been dirt poor, but she still must dress very beautifully.”
“Maybe you’ll have a coat like that someday,” Chip said, and smiled.
“Oh! I’d really do anything—” she burst out.
“Hrrrumm!” he said again.
He made some chitchat to relax her and then took a taxi to his apartment, where he could pursue investigation reclining with a Scotch and phone. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that the culprit was Lili Harrison herself, in spite of her husband’s wealth. Women just didn’t pick up their own coat checks when escorted by their husbands.
However, he double-checked with some fairly reliable gossip mongers, and came up with what he expected. S.E.T. Harrison had been badly hurt in last summer’s stock crash and had been raising hell about household expenses ever since. He’d gone further and reduced the staff of his oceangoing yacht to a skeleton crew just big enough to keep the vessel in commission.
When a yachtsman was driven to that deprivation, he would certainly deny his wife the extravagance of a new coat he considered unnecessary. But Lili Harrison was not the kind to see it in that light. The mink was well-known and four years old. She had always made a particular point of trading in for a new one a year ahead of the time interval that was customary with most wealthy women. The easy alternative to the impasse was to sock the insurance company.
As far as the method went, that was easy to figure. The question was, who had been her trusted confederate, or confederates, and how could she be sure of trusting them?
In this case, that factor alone eliminated her maid. It required well-oiled underworld connections to sell a coat like that, and a maid would not have them. And she’d not dare wear the coat herself. So the coat would be valueless for purchasing her timeless silence.
Chip Stack mixed himself another drink and considered that the check girl had supplied that answer, too. She was the only one who had noted that the switched coat, although of very moderate value, must have belonged to a very well-dressed woman—the kind of a woman who could wear mink if she had the money. One who moved socially high enough so that her appearance in a refinished mink would not arouse too much curiosity.
That sounded like some poor but social friend of Lili’s, just the kind of friend a rich woman would have. That kind of a friend could be trusted eternally, because her own social position would be involved, and because she’d lose the mink if she made one slip. The old mink would be her reward for helping Lili Harrison gain a new one.
Chip Stack was satisfied with his picture and phoned an old friend who moved on the fringes of the Gold Coast crowd in Westchester. Adroitly, he learned that Lili Harrison had just such a playmate, a girl named Valerie Snowden, married to a fatheaded cousin of that prominent family, without the brains or gumption to make them a decent income. What it boiled down to was that Valerie’s good times were largely the result of knowing Lili Harrison. As might be expected with such a dumbun husband, Valerie liked her martinis and the ponies. She was damned good-looking, too, the friend added.
That was too bad, Stack considered. He did have his streak of chivalry—he hated framing pretty women.
He hopped in his Mercedes Special and drove out to Westchester. The upper crust would not do their bar hopping at obvious, popular places, but such communities were invariably dotted by discreet little back-lane bistros where they were relatively safe in letting down their hair. One such place always led to another.
It took four days and nine bars to pick up the haunts of Valerie Snowden. It was an unduly long time for Chip Stack to reconnoiter, but he was handicapped by not daring to mention the Harrisons or Valerie Snowden even casually. Just a whispered rumor that a stranger was interested in them might get that mink buried deeper than a skunk’s hide.
>
He might have eased things by a little social name-dropping, but that could be a trap, too. So he let himself appear in a character role that wouldn’t expose him to too many risks—that of a well-heeled, self-made man on a little loup while away from the wife. A man without any social pretensions, and quiet enough not to alarm the Gold Coast strata.
He was a good tipper and did much of his drinking in the off hours when the bartenders had time and freedom to talk, and it was the bartender with the passion for the ponies who first mentioned her. They’d been talking horses for two days when Chip Stack expressed the opinion that long shots were smarter betting than favorites.
“Now that’s a funny thing for anyone who knows the ponies to say,” the bartender argued. “But maybe there’s something to it. We have a customer, a Mrs. Snowden, who’s making a mink coat on longshots. She picks ’em, too. She’s got it almost made.”
“I’m not that good,” Chip chuckled. “I ought to get her system.”
Privately, he was blessing the devil for the break. He’d been growing afraid that she was a home drinker and a kind of uppity wench who wouldn’t speak to the hoi poloi. But it was now assured that she did make the rounds and was not above chumming with a bartender, which meant that she often stopped by alone.
They had some more random talk and then a couple entered from the side door. The bartender confided with a mutter, “The longshot lady and her useless.”
Seating herself, the girl looked Chip Stack over with the open curiosity of her kind about a stranger who had invaded a more or less private club. She and her husband joshed the bartender in friendly fashion while they had a martini.
Then leaving, she laughed, “Henry, you’d better pick a damned good long shot for me tomorrow. I’ve got everything but the collar on that coat!”
So, Chip Stack thought, she’s using the ponies to set up the explanation of how she came by Lili’s coat when she begins to wear it. Lili Harrison got her check and new coat. They figure the investigation’s over, and all’s clear now for Valerie as soon as she gets a new collar to disguise the coat around the home neighborhood.
Mink Is for a Minx Page 13