by Brad Latham
“Now you sound like a cop.” Hook changed the subject. “Did Lorenzo Jones drink coffee?”
“What a weird question! Sure. It pays to stay alert in the air.”
“Did he carry a thermos in the plane?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you carry a thermos when flying?”
“Sure, if I’m going for more than a spin. Why?”
“How far was Lorenzo going the day he crashed?”
“About 200 miles.”
“Then he would have taken coffee with him.”
“If he remembered.” She was irritated by his questions. “Why?”
“I didn’t find a thermos in the wreckage.”
“Either he forgot it, or it’s out there in the grass. Why do you care?”
“It’s missing. Missing things bother me.”
They walked back toward the hangars, passing her biplane. She seemed to have an inspiration. “Say, you lifted me up. Now I can return the favor. You can’t easily get an overview of where Jones crashed. From the air, it’s easy to spot. How about going for a spin with a lady?”
Lockwood eyed the double-winged beast straining at its tethers. He wasn’t happy about the suggestion. Still, it was part of his job to see all he could.
“How long have you been flying?” he asked.
“I would have crashed by now, Mr. Lockwood, if I was going to. Come on. Are you chicken?”
“No, I just haven’t checked out my insurance policy lately. I don’t know if it includes flying with a woman pilot. Should it?” He smiled.
She frowned. “Women make better pilots than men.”
“Like they make better drivers?”
“Come on, scaredy-pants.”
A challenge. Lockwood saw that he would look as yellow as a lemon if he declined. He never trusted women drivers. But this was no ordinary frail woman. And there was a reason to do it, to get a look from the air at the crash site.
“Anything a dame can do, I can. How do I get in?”
“That’s the old moxie.”
CHAPTER
9
Am I really doing this? Lockwood asked himself as he climbed into the back of the craft behind Amanda. It looked like a seat on the roller coaster at Coney Island, even with a strap to hold you in. The strap looked strong. He put on the pair of goggles she gave him and rolled up his jacket collar.
It didn’t seem they were going very fast when the plane suddenly lifted off the bumpy gravel and headed steeply upward to the right.
Lockwood saw the Old Gold sign that she had spoken of. It said in black letters five feet high: “Old Gold Smokes the Best. Miles Above the Rest. Take a Load Off Your Chest.” Then in smaller print, longhand, was the slogan “Hacking cough from poorer spuds? Then try OLD GOLD, the smoke that refreshes your lungs.”
“Nice sign, isn’t it?” she yelled over the roar of the biplane’s engine. Lockwood was busy with a pad and pencil he had taken from his pocket—not copying the slogan but drawing a map of the marshy areas. He drew it so he could walk there later.
The wind whipped around the tiny windshield and slapped his face like a wet towel. The Old Gold sign was really pointing toward the approach to the Whitestone Bridge. A little access road led up to it through the marshy brush.
What a view! From the skyscrapers of Manhattan to Idle-wild!
A bird flew uncomfortably close and pelted the windshield with a white splatter of dung.
“How’s your stomach?” Amanda’s words were half-blown away by the wind whistling around his little windshield.
He tightened his strap as they made a long slow curve, remembering that aircraft have to lean to make turns.
“Not bad.”
Was that her laugh? She pulled the plane up sharply, which left his stomach behind, and headed straight into the noonday sun. They seemed to stall out, sputtering, then the plane fell backward toward the ground.
Lockwood tried not to yell, but did. “What are you doing?"
“Shortcut,” the lady pilot said. “Don’t worry, everything’s under control, see?”
She banked the plane out of the stall, and the engine roared violently as they pulled up fifty feet short of the swamp and leveled off just over the brush.
“Are you trying to be funny?” he shouted.
Amanda laughed. “Just trying to see what you’re made of, Mr. Lockwood. After all, aren’t I a woman driver? Want to go back down?”
“No, first you take me over the crash scene, “okay? If you can handle it.”
They did a gentle arc and ahead, from about two hundred feet up, Lockwood saw a burned spot on the verdant landscape. Not much to see. It was off in the opposite direction of their ascent and to the left of the Old Gold sign. Quite a sharp turn for a plane taking off. Had Lorenzo been suicidal, after all?
Just a burned spot below. Lockwood fixed its location in relation to the Old Gold billboard, the field, and the road on his little pad. He would find a map and mark it when he got back to terra firma. If he got back!
“Want a low pass?” she asked.
“Yes. Let’s go down.”
She made another lower-wheel. They zoomed past the crash site. Just burned grass and a few scraps. Then the wind sock zipped past and the tires screeched and threw up the gravel. Something let go inside Lockwood’s tense wrists. He saw that his knuckles were white from gripping the sides of the seat.
His knees felt a little wobbly, but he tried not to show it as she helped him down off the plane.
“Well, how did you like the ride? Can the little woman drive okay?”
“Reminded me of the war.”
She laughed. “I just wanted to see if you could hold your cookies.”
“Where did you learn to fly like that?”
“I used to barnstorm at county fairs with a stuntman. He’d stand on the wing.”
“This other guy still alive?” Lockwood brushed his suit.
“Of course. He’s in the Army Air Corps, as a matter of fact. How about a spot of java, Mr. Lockwood? I’ll tell you more about—whatever you want to know.”
With the ground firmly beneath him, Lockwood began to regain his composure. “Why not? Lead on.”
They walked over to a small shack adjoining the main hangar, in which was an old seat from a 1920s Dodge and a scattering of chairs, motors, and magazines. She picked a thermos off a battered desk and poured his coffee into a cup from the sink.
“Not much in the way of a restaurant, but we make a mean cup of coffee. Percolator’s in the main hangar.”
It was as good a nickel’s worth as he had ever had, only not too hot. “Good thing I like it black.” Lockwood needed the brew.
“Now you’re talking! A tough guy, that’s what you are, Lockwood. You should be a pilot.”
“Call me Bill. You’re a tough lady. And a pretty one. Very pretty.”
“Well, cheers. Thanks for the compliment. Here’s to more of the same.”
Lockwood spent the next two hours snooping, while Amanda worked on her plane. He walked to the end of the runway.
Using the little sketch he had made in the air, he found the way to the crash site in the tall weeds. There was nothing left but two bolts. The high weeds might be hiding more though. Lockwood put the two bolts in his pocket. Nowhere in the weeds did he find the thermos that Lorenzo had carried in the plane with him, not even after a full two-hour search.
Of course, it could have been thrown a few hundred feet, but Lockwood doubted it. He saw the tracks of a tractor and a spent fire extinguisher. The tractor had obviously dragged the wreckage back to the little service road of the big Old Gold sign, then along a dirt road to the runway. He finished looking about the burned area, then walked along the tractor ruts, scaring toads and a few field mice. Not a piece of wreckage and definitely no thermos along the gouged tracks, nor along the access road to the sign.
At one point he was directly under the huge girders of the spuds sign. No place to hide anything there.
Just raw metal, rusting a bit.
Not finding the thermos was much better than finding it, in Lockwood’s estimation. Someone who might have poisoned Lorenzo’s coffee, say, would be most anxious to retrieve that thermos with its telltale traces of whatever had been used.
For a while, the theory he had been forming—that Lorenzo might have been poisoned—had seemed farfetched. Lock-wood had been hoping that someone along the way would tell him that Lorenzo had been suicidally depressed. That would be enough to get Transatlantic off the hook, coupled with the erratic way Lorenzo veered at takeoff. Hell-bent on killing himself.
That trouble was that Lorenzo had been a cheery son of a bitch. Lockwood stood there in the weeds and pondered. I wouldn’t let anyone I poisoned fly off with the evidence of my crime, a thermos, to be found later. Whoever did it would have been a fool. Or perhaps, just perhaps, they hadn’t expected Lorenzo to drink his poisoned coffee so soon.
That could be it. The killer would have expected Jones to be in the air miles away when he drank the poisoned coffee. The crash then would have been in some deserted area, especially if Jones had been headed upstate, as was stated.
Yeah. The thermos would have been consumed by fire along with the body and the plane. But here, where the plane had crashed too close to the airfield, maybe someone had rushed out and found the thermos.
Satisfied that he had checked thoroughly for the thermos, Hook went back to the runway.
He walked back to Amanda, who was still fooling about in her engine compartment with a wrench.
“Amanda, I went looking for that thermos, but it’s not at the crash site, nor in the wreckage. Who went out to the crash scene?”
Amanda frowned. “Boy, what a suspicious mind! Maybe Lorenzo just didn’t take it with him on that flight?”
“Could be.”
“Well, the FAA guys went later with a tractor. Me and Rodney went right away. Rodney’s a mechanic. Rodney cut him out of the wreck. Pretty heroic. It was burning. Stinky came, too.”
Lockwood said, “Maybe I’ll ask him a few questions.”
CHAPTER
10
“Well, there’s Stinky.” Amanda pointed toward a kid. “He was crazy about that baseball player.”
The kid was tall for his age, about sixteen years old. He had a serious look and was carrying a full set of wrenches. He was dressed in brown surplus Air Corps coveralls, smeared with grease, and had freckles and brown hair. He gave Lock-wood a look that could kill as he approached him.
“Who are you? You look like a cop. I talked to the FAA already. They don’t believe me ‘cause I’m a kid.”
Lockwood never liked teenagers who sneered. The kid wiped his running nose on his coverall sleeve and continued talking.
“Lorenzo couldn’t have crashed, he had to have been bumped off.”
“What makes you think that?”
“ ’Cause I checked out that biplane myself. I’m studying aviation. And I’m an expert, see? And he checked it, too, and he wasn’t drunk or nothing—that’s why.”
Lockwood pulled out his badge. “You know what this is?”
The kid studied it, sneered again. “Yeah, a phony cop’s badge. So what?”
Damn, thought Hook, struck out again.
“I’m an insurance investigator. I have suspicions just like yours. If you want to have whoever killed Lorenzo Jones fried in the electric chair, you’ve got to help me, okay?”
The kid smiled for the first time. “You believe me?”
“Sure I do.” Lockwood put his arm over the kid’s shoulder, and they walked together. “Listen, what do you like to be called? Is Stinky okay?”
“Stinky’s fine. What’s your name?”
“They call me Hook Lockwood, but Bill’s my first name.”
“Hook?”
“On account of my left hook, kid. I used to box.”
“Gee. Let’s see your fists.” The kid was impressed.
“Is there some place we can talk, in private, Stinky?”
“My place,” the kid suggested.
“My place” turned out to be a makeshift Boy’s Club tarpaper-and-sticks shack in back of the main hangar. Still, there was a chair and enough light through the cracks in the walls to light a Camel. The kid took one, too, and spoke between coughs.
“I just know he couldn’t fly that bad, Hook.”
“Yeah, but I have to have something specific. Was anyone after Lorenzo? Did someone he know have something against him?”
The kid laughed, shook his head. “Not that I know.”
Lockwood now saw why the cops didn’t believe him. The kid felt guilty about not seeing anything wrong with the plane and besides he was a kid. And he had nothing specific, just a feeling.
“Did you see the plane go down?”
“Yeah.” The kid turned his sneakers into the gravel floor, looked sad. “It nosed over and went straight down.”
“Stinky,” Hook confided, “you might, as I said, be right. I heard Lorenzo was a great pilot. Listen, if someone did that to Lorenzo, I mean to catch them. I need some information. My next question might sound silly.”
The kid looked surly again, but didn’t say anything.
“My question is: Did Lorenzo take a thermos with him in the plane that day?”
“Why?”
“It’s important.”
“Yes, he did. Mrs. Jones filled it with coffee. Lorenzo was to go up to Albany for a package. He was late getting off. All these people were here to see him off. His boss, Cyrus Wade—that ugly-faced guy—and Mrs. Jones. I don’t like her. Wade was telling him to be careful because he needed him to pitch.”
“Mrs. Jones gave Lorenzo a thermos?” Lockwood pressed.
“It was Lorenzo’s thermos, Hook. She filled it for him from the old percolator over in the hangar.”
“Did you watch her fill it?”
“Of course not. Why?”
“Just hoping.”
“Lorenzo was late getting off because a plane was landing. He likes coffee. So he unscrewed his thermos and had a cup before he took off.”
“What?”
“Well, why not? What’s so important about drinking a cup of coffee?”
Hook’s mind went wild. This would explain what had been bothering him. He thought it unlikely that Lorenzo would have drunk the coffee just as he was getting the plane off the runway. That Lorenzo drank from the thermos before he took off would explain the immediate dive of the plane—the poison hit his intestines. The killer, if he or she were watching, must have seen the fire crew rush off to the crash and realized that the thermos might not be consumed by the fire. And realized he or she had to retrieve it.
“Did Mrs. Jones look upset when Lorenzo drank the coffee?”
“No. Why?”
“Nothing.”
“She poisoned him! That’s it, isn’t it?” The kid leapt up.
Lockwood stared into space. Could the kid be right? Mrs. Jones had filled the coffee thermos.
“Yeah, the only trace would be in the thermos. And someone had taken it from the wreck. Maybe,” Lockwood mumbled. “But this is just a theory of mine, Stinky.”
Lockwood admonished Stinky to keep his mouth closed about all this. The kid agreed.
Lockwood next went over to two guys who were fooling with a plane with the oil leak.
One had the look of a mechanic, as Lockwood would picture one: strongly built, firm-jawed, steady, and with energetic eyes. He held a huge wrench like a caveman might hold a dinosaur bone before he whacked you one. Or maybe the guy’s five o’clock shadow just gave him a primitive look.
The caveman was Rodney Kepper, and the pilot was Hank Deacon, a small, effeminate blond man with a nervous look and thin hands. Lockwood made him out to be some rich creep with a penchant for flying.
Deacon was from out of state, so he wasn’t important. He had made an unscheduled stop. But Kepper was one of the people Amanda had said were present the day of the crash.
&n
bsp; Kepper gave Lockwood five minutes after Lockwood told him who he was. Seems Transatlantic insured Rodney Kepper also, and Kepper didn’t want to jeopardize his policy.
“Yeah, I was here, but I just saw the smoke, that’s all. I was in the hangar. Heard screaming and went out to take a look. Stinky was crying, Mrs. Jones was screaming, and Wade was taking it coolly, just standing there. Stinky loved that guy. Lorenzo got Stinky a pass to the games and taught him about planes and all. Stinky and Amanda and I ran out to the wreck. It was hopeless. I burned my hands.”
“What’d you see at the crash?”
“Well, by the time we got the portable extinguishers playing on the plane, it was way too late for Lorenzo. I cut him out, after smashing what was left of the cockpit window.”
“What next?”
“Amanda vomited. The body wasn’t pretty, what was left of it. We just let the plane burn.”
“Did anybody happen to see a thermos?”
Kepper’s eyes became like slits. “Mister, you’re asking about a thermos, and I just was talking about a man dying. What kind of guy are you?”
Lockwood had to admit it sounded callous. “But it may be important,” he finished.
Kepper didn’t accept that. Or maybe he wanted to stop talking. He gripped the huge wrench tighter and said he was through talking.
Lockwood thanked him and gave him his card. Not that he figured he would ever hear from Kepper.
Now to give Amanda a little bit of her own medicine. Lockwood made his way back to the hanger where Amanda, smiling like the Mona Lisa, had slipped into a green dress she filled out well for the ride he had promised.
“Will this do? It’s all I keep at the field.”
“Fine.” It was fine. “Much better than the coveralls.” He marveled at the transformation. She didn’t look tough at all now, and he had that old feeling. This independent woman! A few years older than Robin, a lot more knowledgeable. He wondered about this guy in the army that used to be her buddy in air shows. Maybe they had been lovers. Probably.
They got in the Cord and roared off. “She has twelve cylinders,” Lockwood said.