The Underground Lady

by JC Simmons

  VonHorner walked up, carrying a bottle of cognac and three glasses, and it was not yet noon. He motioned to a small wooden table with four Adirondack chairs. He put the bottle on the table, wiped thin lips with the back of his hand. His smile had the expression of a coiled rattlesnake, dangerous to the last hiss. He poured a small amount of the brown liquid into each glass, set the bottle back down. "Hadley Welch. What do you want to know?"

  "Did you kill her?"

  "Why in the world would you think that I killed her? Hadley Welch took off from her farm in her little airplane and crashed. The wreckage was never found."

  Hebrone leaned forward. "The man asked if you killed her?"

  He gave back an empty gaze, but in his eyes there was only a distance, a distance as deep as the morning's hazy, winter sky. "No, I did not kill her."

  "Someone sent the daughter an anonymous letter saying her mother was murdered. We found out who sent it, but he died before we could talk to him."

  "Too bad."

  The man was lying to us. His eyes were like sleet. I saw in them the dangerous void he hid so carefully. It was an emptiness his enemies had reason to fear. It was an emptiness about to be filled with the murder of Hadley Welch.

  "His name was Avis Shaw. Ever hear of him?"

  "No."

  "Someone didn't like the fact that Sunny Pfeiffer hired me to look into her mother's disappearance. They sent me a warning to stop by hanging a coyote from my front door and saying they would kill my friends and me. When that didn't work, a note was left on my kitchen table. You wouldn't know anything about this?"

  "I would not."

  "We found out who hung that poor animal, Mr. VonHorner. If it leads back to you, sir, not even God will be able to help you."

  I heard a faint scream, and looked up toward the house. The small woman was running toward the dock in a waddling motion. It would have been funny but for the fact that as she neared us, I could see she had a pistol.

  She waved it in my face, squealing, "You no come! You no come!"

  I moved to one side, undecided whether to try to take her or pass on by. My indecision made me slow. Not Hebrone. He took the gun from her with a motion I never saw. It seemed to surprise the woman. She stared at the hand that held the gun as if she could not understand why it was gone.

  VonHorner looked up at the hawk sitting in the live oak. "Gentlemen, you better leave."

  As we drove away from the house, I said, “Now that was interesting."

  "We need to find out more about that slant-eye. Do we know if she is VonHorner's wife? Were they together when the Welch woman went missing?"

  "Good questions. We'll get your 'in-country' buddy, Sheriff Adams, to find out for us."

  "Have him run this through ballistics." He pulled out the pistol taken from the woman.

  "You kept the gun?"

  "Nobody asked for it back."

  "When they discover it's gone, they'll want it returned. May even accuse us of stealing the thing. What kind is it?"

  "S&W, Combat Masterpiece, thirty-eight caliber. They were built from the forties until seventy-three. They beefed up this frame and made the three fifty-seven Combat Magnum, like the old model sixty-six you carry. That woman didn't know how to use it, for that we can be thankful. This one has been around long enough to have a history, though. If the sheriff finds it was used in any illegal activity, it could be something with which to squeeze VonHorner."

  "Not bad thinking."

  "Why don't we swing by the airport, and see Sanders? He may know if the slant-eye was with VonHorner early on."

  "Again, good thinking."

  "Well, we have some time to kill."

  "Yeah, that's the chief business of life – killing time."

  ***

  Earl Sanders was away on a trip, but his wife Annie had never heard of the woman we described as living with Gerald VonHorner and was certain that he was not married while working for them twenty-five years ago.

  We dropped the Smith and Wesson pistol off at the sheriff's office. John Quincy Adams promised to let us know as soon as the results were back.

  As we left Decatur and neared Union, Hebrone said, "I'd like to take the Stearman and make a run over where her runway was located, simulate those last few minutes of the flight."

  "You expect to see something after twenty-five years?"

  "No, it's an existential thing. Couldn't hurt."

  "Okay, we'll go tomorrow after the funeral. Now we have to find you a coat and tie to wear. Rose's orders."

  Hebrone cracked a rare grin. "Yeah, Rose. What a woman. She reminds me of a man I knew in 'Nam. We called him Nickel Tap. He used an ice pick to kill. For those who needed his expertise, there was none better. He could pierce an ice cube without it shattering, hold it up, and lick it like a Popsicle. Standing behind a person, he could hit kidneys, lungs, and heart in less than two seconds. A victim didn't know they were dead until the pain hit moments later. None of them knew what happened, but all knew why. Kind of reminds me of Rose."

  "That image will make me sleep good tonight."

  Chapter Fourteen

  When I arrived at Rose's, Hebrone met me at the door dressed in one of my sport coats and a tie. This was the first time I'd ever seen him so attired. I almost laughed.

  "Come on in. Welcome to the party. Rose is fussing. She seems a little tense."

  "Rose was born tense. It works for her."

  Sunny came into the room. She was dressed in a black blouse and a rather short, loose, dark skirt. Propping one of her feet on an armrest of the couch, she hiked the skirt up to her waist, and adjusted her hose. Upon seeing her legs, I became suddenly transiently ischemic. They were nice legs, and her hair was long and soft, her skin ivory against the black fabric, eyes jade, and lips the color of pomegranates.

  Hebrone saw me looking at Sunny and nodded.

  Rose rushed in. "Jay, good, you're on time. I hope you brought your car so we can all ride in comfort?"

  "I did."

  "Oh, Shack called. He has a sick cow, won't be joining us."

  "How fortunate for him."

  Rose shot me an ugly glance. "Let's go. I don't want to be late."

  I thought about making an inane comment about old man Shaw not going anywhere, but didn't.

  There were a lot of people at the funeral home. The town folk of Union were like that, supporting their dead in a reverent way, showing respect for the survivors. We got in line to file past the casket while Rose signed the registry. She introduced us to the widow, who looked dazed, not truly sure of the death of her husband. It was a look I'm sure I would have if someone close to me died.

  The service was appropriately short with a couple of songs and a eulogy by a local preacher. We followed the hearse to the cemetery and stood around as a few more words were said. A song or poem, I couldn't remember which, came to mind:

  Cold art thou O death, yet I was thy Lord and thy Master

  My body sinks fast to the earth, my soul to heaven flies faster.

  There was a loud boom, like the rolling in of an ocean wave. The hearse door had been shut.

  Rose said something to the widow, then joined us. "We are welcome to come by the house for a discussion about her husband – tomorrow. Today would be inappropriate."

  Driving from the cemetery, Rose said that Avis Shaw was a strange old man. I guess life makes everyone strange if you live long enough. Being strange was not something Rose could hold against anyone. After all, she herself was strange.

  At a four way stop, Rose pointed to a newspaper rack next to a gas station. "I want to get a paper."

  Pulling up next to the rack with my side of the car, I saw Rose take three quarters out of one of those little oval-shaped, rubber, squeeze-open, coin purses. "My God, Rose, that thing looks like the external parts of the female vulva. I haven't seen one of those in thirty years."

  Rose never cracked a smile. "The coin purse or a vulva?"

  Sunny and Hebrone broke up la
ughing. I got out and purchased a paper, my face red.

  ***

  We ate lunch with Rose and Sunny, then announced that we were going to fly over the route last flown by Hadley Welch the day she went missing. It seemed to make sense to them, though I still did not know what we could achieve. Rose made us promise to fly over her house, but not so low as to frighten the animals. We promised.

  It was almost three o'clock when we reached the airport. The sun was already low in the sky. The weather pattern had not changed in a week, the same interval between dawn and sunset, the long, quiet days, the monotonous hierarchy of sun and moon across the blue heavens. A time that young, uninitiated pilots call boring.

  Our preflight was thorough, a ritual ingrained into every fledgling aviator who was impatient to become airborne. Years ago, my instructor, in an enduring southern drawl, would growl, “It's better to be on the ground, wishing you were in the air, than in the air wishing you were on the ground."

  While Hebrone drained fuel from one of the tanks to test for contamination, I walked a few yards away and looked at the Stearman. There was a deafness and dumbness in my own inability to describe what I saw before me. I do not, even after thousands of hours aloft, have enough feelings to respond to this wonder.

  "You fly from the front," I said to Hebrone. "I'll direct you along the flight path from the rear."

  The takeoff was uneventful, and we climbed westbound up to fifteen hundred feet heading for my small farm. Hebrone's control inputs, when he did not wish to fly upside down on takeoff, were smooth and gentle. When handling an aircraft, one should caress it, not rape it.

  "Turn left ten degrees. There, that's the cottage. Just south is the fence row with the old runway alongside."

  "I see it. We'll come back around, fly down the fence row, eastbound. According to the radar track, she turned north just after takeoff, circled around over her land, then climbed up to two thousand feet on a heading toward Meridian. She then, for some unknown reason, attempted to return to her landing strip."

  Hebrone flew low over where the grass strip used to be, climbed out, circled north around the cottage, then headed toward Meridian. At two thousand feet, he leveled off, and a minute later the engine quit.

  "I hope you did that?"

  "Yes, I want to see if she could have made it back to her strip had the engine failed."

  "You could have informed me that's what you had in mind."

  "That wouldn't have been any fun."

  We were able to glide back to the strip with room to spare. Someone with Hadley Welch's reported flying ability would have had no trouble making a safe landing, even without power.

  We climbed away and circled over the area for half an hour, giving Hebrone time to satisfy his existentialism.

  "Let's overfly Rose's place."

  Hebrone headed north, and soon we saw Rose and Sunny standing in the back of the house waving. Pulling the power back, we glided down to eight hundred feet, rocked the wings, and flew away.

  Back at two thousand feet, we headed for the Union Airport. I relaxed as evening loomed quickly out of the east like a great silken curtain. The air was smooth and the sonorous beating of the engine lulled me into a state of suspended life, which so often accompanies easy flight. I had often wondered if regular exposure to this phenomenon might permanently affect one's personality when they returned to earth. It was as if all unhappiness and responsibility had been quietly jettisoned into the depths below. Occasionally it had seemed that time itself held still and I experienced a haunting sense of eternity, of never having done anything else or having been any other place except in this exalted situation. When you fly you get a feeling of possession that you couldn't have if you owned all of America. You feel that everything you see belongs to you, all the states are put together, and the whole is yours. Not that you want it, but because, when you are alone in the plane, there's no one to share it. It's there and it's yours. It makes you feel bigger than you are, closer to being something you've sensed you might be capable of, but never had the courage to seriously imagine.

  "We just blew the oil all to hell," Hebrone said, in a quiet, calm voice.

  My immediate reaction was to look at the oil pressure gauge. It was rapidly moving toward zero. The oil temperature was climbing into the redline.

  Again, in a calm voice, Hebrone said, “I'm shutting the engine down before it seizes. I have the runway in sight. I think we can make it."

  Up front, I could see his windscreen was covered with oil, and it was streaking alongside my cockpit. I wanted desperately to take over the controls.

  We were below a thousand feet, now, and I knew it would be close, if we made the runway. The tops of the trees loomed up and were menacing. I felt the airplane skid sideways and knew that Hebrone could no longer see forward. Then the airplane straightened out and I heard him say, “Piece of cake." The wheels touched gently down on the grass runway. We rolled to a stop.

  "Good job, Captain Opshinsky."

  "Yeah. Now we need to know why that oil cap blew. I have a good idea, and if I'm right, the stakes have just been raised."

  Leaving Hebrone with the airplane, I walked back to retrieve my truck and pull the Stearman to the hangar. It had been a fateful day. What if on the return flight Hebrone had not climbed up to two thousand feet, had only gone to fifteen hundred? What if the oil cap had blown while we were circling over the dense woods of my farm, or over Rose's place? Why had I allowed Hebrone to fly today? Would I have had the skill to skid the airplane sideways in order to see the runway to land with the windscreen covered with oil? Maybe what Ernest Gann said was true – Fate is the Hunter.

  We hooked the tailwheel of the Stearman to the truck and started to tow it to the hangar. A few golfers from the country club gathered alongside the runway, gawking at what we were doing.

  "Isn't that the banker from Decatur? The one we talked with the other day?" Hebrone pointed to a group of four men.

  "Yes, that's Peter Pushkin. Wonder why he's up here playing golf?"

  "Good question," Hebrone said, as Pushkin turned away when we passed abeam of the men.

  We pushed the Stearman inside the hangar and examined where the oil cap had blown away allowing the oil to siphon out in the hundred mile-an-hour wind.

  "That cap was secure, I double-checked it."

  Hebrone looked at me. "I know. That's not why it blew. When we drain what's left in the bottom of the tank, I'll tell you what happened."

  There was only about a quart left in the tank, and it was frothy and milky-looking.

  "Someone poured water in the oil tank. When the oil got hot enough, the water turned to steam. Something had to give. In this case, it was the oil cap. It wouldn't have taken much water, a pint or two. Somebody tried to kill you, Jay."

  "Who would know to do this? How did you know…?"

  "I've worked with Air America on some clandestine jungle operations. This was taught to me by an old aviation mechanic in Laos."

  "We're looking at someone who had aviation mechanical knowledge, knows about me and my airplane, and that we're looking into Hadley Welch's disappearance."

  "There are some background checks we need to do. Earl Sanders, Gerald VonHorner, they fit the profile. We need to know about the other players – the animal hanger, the lawyer, the banker, and let's not forget a Naval Aviator."

  "Well, you are right about one thing, the stakes just got a lot higher."

  It was dark now, and there was nothing more we could do at the airport. We headed for the cottage.

  "You need to put locks on these hangar doors."

  "Never saw a need, until now. If someone wants in, you can't keep them out."

  "True, but at least you'd know they'd been there."

  Checking the mailbox on the gravel road in front of the cottage, I found a package from the FAA Office in Jackson. It was the report on the investigation of the missing PA-18.

  While I built a fire, Hebrone opened and read the file, w
hich was an inch thick.

  "This is bureaucracy at its worst. Form after form filled out by different investigators, all saying the same thing – nothing. The aircraft remains missing and the investigation is still open."

  "I expected as much, but we needed to see it. Are you ready to go to Rose's?"

  "What do you intend to do about the engine on the Stearman?"

  "I'm going to call Earl Sanders."

  "What if he's involved?"

  "He's not."

  "Take me to the girls."

  When I returned after dropping Hebrone off at Rose's house, I dialed Earl Sanders' number. Annie answered. She put Earl on the line.

  "Someone tried to kill me today. Poured water in the oil tank of the Stearman."

  "Did the engine seize?"

  "No, and I'm fine, thank you."

  "I know that. You wouldn't be calling me, otherwise."

  He had a point.

  "What do I need to do to the engine?"

  "Where did you come down?"

  "Managed to deadstick back into Union International."

  "Always the comic. You did good getting back to the airport."

  "Hebrone was flying."

  "I should have known. You probably wouldn't have made it."

  "Funny."

  "I'll bring a mechanic up tomorrow. We will flush out the engine, add fresh oil, do a test run, then a compression check. Shouldn't be a problem. How high did the temps go?"

  "To the redline."

  "Well, the compression check will tell us if there's any damage. How long till overhaul?"

  "Over a thousand hours. You coming with the mechanic?"

  "Yes. I haven't seen your farm, be a good opportunity."

  "Yeah. I'll give you the fifty cent tour."

  "Okay. And, Jay…"

  "What?"

  "I'm glad you landed safely."

  "Thanks."

  After hanging up the phone, I sat for a moment thinking about Earl Sanders. We'd been friends for a long time, and I was ashamed of doubting, even for a brief moment, his wishing to harm me. It was simply necessary to list all the people who could remotely be responsible and eliminate them, one by one. I picked up the file from the FAA, and read each report, hoping to find something that had been overlooked. There was nothing. Where the hell was that airplane?