Calamity (Captain Grande Angil Mysteries)

by Robert G. Bernstein

  After the war, my father left the Army temporarily and bought a surplus DC-3 Cargo Plane, what the Army used to call a C-47 Skytrain. He used the plane to smuggle guns and other weapons to the Jews in the newly established State of Israel. According to my mother, my father was a career soldier and adventurer, but he could not tolerate the British position in Palestine at the time, and he wanted to do something about it.

  He flew guns and refugees into Israel and participated in a number of combat missions during Israel’s War of Independence. The Palmach wouldn’t let him fly his DC-3 because they couldn’t risk having it shot down. They saved the bigger plane for the all-critical resupply missions to and from Eastern and Western Europe. Instead, they gave my father a single engine scout plane with a copilot seat converted to a rack of makeshift explosives. He flew over enemy territory and lobbed homemade bombs out his window at forces of the Arab Legion and then later at mechanized units of the Egyptian, Syrian and Trans-Jordanian Armies, which were mostly led by British Officers. His contribution to the cause was legendary. To honor him and other “Mahal” volunteers the government placed a carved stone plaque in Israel’s most hallowed memorial to the War of Independence.

  As was their lives together, short and intense, so was their first meeting, at an abandoned RAF airstrip in the South of the country. My father had flown in with a mess of Czech rifles, mortars and machine guns, and my mother was part of the crew tasked with unloading the plane and getting the weapons to the Jerusalem corridor. The weapons would be used to defend the convoy attempting to bring food, medicine and other supplies to the one hundred thousand Jews behind the Arab blockade in the Holy City.

  At the end of the war, my father spent months searching for my mother. He located her at a hospital in Jaffa and asked her to marry him. She said yes. He still had his DC-3 and he used it to set up a little cargo business in the fledgling country. They lived in a small flat in Jaffa on a curving medieval street overlooking the Mediterranean, where my mother said they had two blissful years together.

  The beginning of the end came with the start of the Korean conflict and my father’s reenlistment into the U.S. Air Force. He was retrained as a B-29 pilot and stationed at the Lajes airfield in the Azores. I was born in a Quonset hut hospital on the base. As my mother explained it, she was resting in bed on the afternoon of July 23, 1953, after giving birth to me. She had me nestled in her left arm while a U.S. Army Chaplain stood to her right and held her hand.

  5

  It didn’t seem ethical to use any of my retainer to investigate Mrs. Bowers so I decided to take the day off. I realized one day of actual work on my very first case wasn’t going to win me any gumshoe achievement awards, but I needed to learn more about my client and the fire that took the lives of her husband and youngest son. If I didn’t do the homework, my investigation would be akin to paddling around with one oar in the water.

  I rented a cheap compact and headed for Massachusetts. According to the article I read about the fire, the Bowers had lived in a very haughty residential section of an upscale Boston suburb called Weston. A little more research told me that Weston was one of the wealthiest communities in the state. It had the best public school system and the lowest crime rate of any Massachusetts County. The average income per family was over two hundred and thirty thousand dollars, which says a lot when you consider more than twelve thousand people lived there.

  Wind was northerly and blowing a gale, a consequence of a large area of low pressure tracking over the Atlantic. The low kept the temperature in the twenties and the wind chill below zero. I dressed appropriately when I left the house, hiking boots, heavy wool socks, a pair of Levi’s, T-shirt, hooded sweatshirt and my lined, leather motorcycle jacket, but in the car, with the sun beating through my driver’s side window, it was hot as hell. I had to turn off the heater when I hit the Turnpike and when I got to Portsmouth I had to pull over and strip off the jacket and heavy socks and boots. I had already planned for this eventuality and had brought with me a change of socks and some decent sneakers, the L.L. Bean kind with which you can do some hiking. I also had a change of clothes and a shaving kit in an old sea bag, just in case.

  Weston Town Hall is a beautiful New England style brick building with a copper-sheathed bell tower and five, white columns two stories tall at the front entrance. I parked in the lot and walked to the main information desk where a lovely young college grad asked me if she could be of help. I introduced myself as a private investigator from Maine gathering background information on a fatal residential fire in the area and asked if she could direct me to someone who might be able to provide details. This was obviously a curve ball or slider for her because she had to call in her supervisor, a woman of about sixty who clearly viewed me as the enemy. She looked me up and down with apparent disdain, obviously not approving of my jeans, hooded sweatshirt, and leather jacket.

  “Mr. Angil, is it?” she said, scrutinizing the three forms of I.D. I had handed her.

  “It’s Angil, with a hard G.”

  “I see,” she said, her eyes peering over the tops of an expensive pair of reading glasses as if she had just recognized me from a photo she’d seen hanging on the wall of the Post Office. “Sarah tells me you’re looking for information about a fire that occurred in our town twenty years ago. You want to know with whom to talk? Am I correct?”

  “That’s correct, yes.”

  “Well, if I may ask, why do you need the information?”

  “You may indeed ask,” I said, taking a stick of chewing gum from my pocket, carefully removing the gum from its wrapper and sticking it in my mouth.

  We looked at each other for a few seconds.

  “You’re not going to tell me?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “That would be inappropriate.”

  “Well, then, I don’t see that it’s appropriate for me to release any information to you, not without you giving me a good reason.”

  “I’ll give you five reasons, Ma’am,” I counted them off on my fingers. “Reason number one: It’s public knowledge, or should be. Reason two: Even if it wasn’t public knowledge, I’m damn sure you’re not the one to tell me so. Reason three: I haven’t asked you yet for anything specific, just the name of somebody who could help me. So you don’t know what it is you think you’re protecting. Reason four: Guiding a polite member of the public in the right direction is a courtesy any civil servant should perform, provided said civil servant wasn’t a pretentious, nosey bureaucrat with the personality of a cattle prod. And lastly, reason number five: It really doesn’t matter what you do, because I’m now going to walk up those stairs behind you to the General Counsel’s Office and talk to whomever is seated at the reception desk. Feel free to call ahead and warn them of the rude private detective from Maine who’s on his way up.”

  Before I turned for the door I got a wink and smile from the attractive college grad who waited on me when I’d first arrived. She had moved to a file cabinet about ten feet away but was obviously not out of earshot.

  I took the stairs to the second floor and read the office muster at the landing. An arrow led me to the end of the hall where I saw a door with a glass panel that had ‘Town Counsel’ written on it in gold leaf. I knocked once and stepped inside. The sexy-looking legal clerk at the first desk had a phone to her ear when I walked in. She placed it carefully in its cradle and looked at me.

  “Mrs. Jungerson called security on you,” she said.

  “Security, huh? Would that be the elderly gentleman sipping Microwave soup and watching Law & Order reruns downstairs?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That would be Mr. Jungerson.”

  “Aha. Then we won’t have to hurry.”

  “That depends on what you have planned,” she said, and smiled mischievously.

  She wore a wool skirt with a white silk blouse and a loose-fitting knit sweater with an open weave. Pastel colors. I guessed her to be in her middle twenties.

  “I could be your Grand Dad.
”

  “You look like you’re in good shape for a Granddaddy,” she said.

  I liked where this was going but in about five minutes old man Jungerson was coming through the door behind me, and he probably wouldn’t be alone.

  “I’ve always believed that if something is too good to be true, it probably is. So let me tell you why I’m here.”

  She nodded and feigned disappointment.

  “You’re way to young to remember,” I said, “but twenty years ago there was a fire at a house on Meadowbrook Road that killed a man and his youngest son. I’m sure there was an investigation into the cause of the fire, and, well, I’d like to get a copy of the Marshall's report, if there is one, and maybe talk to someone who was around back then.”

  “You’re right, that was way before my time. I was in grade school back then. You should go to the central fire station. Do you know where it is?”

  I shook my head.

  She reached across the desk and grabbed a city map from a folder and very meticulously drew a series of connecting lines starting from where we were at the Town Office to where she wanted me to go. As she drew she told me step by step what to do. Her hair smelled of wintergreen.

  “I’ll call ahead and tell them you’re coming,” she said.

  “You’re not real fond of Mrs. Jungerson, are you?” I said.

  “She’s a notorious gossip,” she said. “I hate her. Everybody does. Mr. Jungerson, the security guard, is a peach. I don’t know what he ever saw in her.”

  “Maybe she’s a great cook,” I said. “I owe you a drink.”

  “I don’t drink, but I eat.”

  “I’ll be back someday to take you to dinner.”

  I left the office and walked down the stairs for the front entrance. I had the map in my hand. On the way out I saw Mr. Jungerson waiting for the elevator. He didn’t seem to be in any great hurry.

  6

  Chief Delquist was in his office. He wasn’t the chief when the Bowers home burned down but he knew where to find the files. He also knew where to find the arson investigator who handled the case back in the eighties, a retired firefighter by the name of Irvin Sonksin. Irvin lived with his wife and two dogs in a small adults-only community in Exeter N.H. We called him from the station to see if he’d be home and his wife said he was duck hunting with some friends but would be back before dinner. I asked if it was all right to stop in to talk about an old case and she seemed thrilled with the idea. I guessed they didn’t have many visitors.

  I thanked Chief Dequist for his time and walked the one and a half miles back to my car at the Town Office parking lot. I almost persuaded myself to risk an encounter with the dreaded Jungerson woman for another chance to see the hot clerk on the second floor, but old man winter was burning daylight and I needed to get to Exeter fast.

  I took Route-93 North out of Boston and picked up I-95 in Lawrence. Route-101 was only a few miles up the Interstate and Exeter was just beyond the toll. It was about three in the afternoon and the sun was already sinking into the West like a rusty steel mooring ball with a hole in it.

  Some places seem to offer a change of scenery when you cross the border but not New Hampshire and Northern Mass. You have to drive sixty miles into the “Live Free or Die” state before you see the outline of the White Mountains. Until then, geographically, the two states looked much the same. Similarly aged tree growth. Similar sprawl. Similar look to the major highways, which is to say, four and six lanes. The Maine and New Hampshire borders are a little different, at least they used to be. Maine was first to outlaw billboards, which cleared the roads of obnoxious advertising. For a long time, the Turnpike, tree-lined with towering pines, had only four lanes. Even today, Route-95 in Maine, called the Maine Turnpike from Kittery to Augusta, remains the State’s only multilane byway.

  Maine has changed plenty in the last twenty years. We still don’t have the billboards, and yet the state has plenty of sprawl and other indiscriminate development. Behind the big pines lining the major roads, the forests are conspicuously barren, having been clear-cut more than once.

  I arrived in Exeter before four in the afternoon. The community was a doublewide trailer park on the shores of what looked like a man-made lake. Homes were about seventy-five feet from each other and most of the trees in the community had been leveled to make room for septic fields. A sign at the entrance constructed of cedar posts and pressure treated lumber had the words “Pleasant Shores: An Adult-Only Community” written on it. It didn’t seem that pleasant to me.

  Nobody was outside when I drove in and almost every house had the telltale light of a TV flashing through its bay window. Some homes had garages and others had car parks with awnings. Almost every property had a thirty foot or better motor home parked in the driveway, and a couple had snow-covered plastic toys and wagons in the yard. I wasn’t sure how that fit into the Adults-Only theme.

  Mr. and Mrs. Sonksin lived across from what was evidently the marina. At present, all the floats and docks had been pulled from the lake and haphazardly stored on the shore. Ice had formed a thin sheen across most of the water, just enough for a bird to stand on. I pulled into the driveway and parked the little white compact. When I got out, Mrs. Sonksin had the front door open and was waving me inside.

  “Come in, come in,” she beckoned. “Get in out this biting cold.”

  As I stepped through the door, which she closed behind me, two perfectly groomed Shih Tzu pups with bows and ribbons in their hair corralled me and sniffed my shoes and ankles. The house smelled of baked beans and roasting meat and I could hear the hiss of a pressure cooker in the kitchen.

  “You must be Mr. Angil,” she said. “We spoke on the phone. Please, come in. Irvin is in the den waiting for you.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Sonksin.” I shook her hand and took off my watch cap. With the sun going down and the temperature dropping I had stopped and put on my hiking boots and heavy socks. I looked down at the floor and noticed the plastic runner on which I was standing. Mrs. Sonksin was in her slippers, and a pair of muddy duck boots rested on a thick rubber shoe tray near the hall closet. I leaned over, scratched both pups behind the ears and started untying my boots.

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  “No problem, Mrs. Sonksin,” I said. “I do it my own home.”

  She giggled. She was in her seventies, wearing a freshly pressed apron over a brown wool skirt, tan blouse and western-style brown and black suede vest. Wire rim glasses hung around her neck on a gold-colored chain.

  “Well, then,” she said. “A gentleman. Thank you.”

  There was plastic covering just about every piece of furniture in the place and not a speck of dust or dirt to be seen anywhere. Mrs. Sonksin had time on her hands.

  “We’ll be heading to Florida soon,” she said. “I’m just getting things put away and covered. I hate to come back to a dirty house, don’t you?”

  “I probably would if I got out more, Ma’am.” I had my shoes off and followed her into the den. The floor was cold.

  Mr. Sonksin sat in a large recliner in front of a forty-three inch plasma TV. He had on one of the sports channels out of Boston and was watching a show on hunting big game on a preserve somewhere in Texas, Iowa or Missouri. I could guess the location based on the terrain and fauna and because the guy on TV was holding up the head of a dead, one hundred and fifty pound Texas Dall Sheep.

  Mrs. Sonksin stepped halfway into the den and said, “Irv, your company’s here.” She turned and walked back toward the kitchen without waiting for her husband to acknowledge her. The Shih Tzus followed dutifully, or because they knew scraps were in the offing.

  “Mr. Sonksin,” I said. “Grande Angil.” I held out my hand. He shook it from his chair. His eyes never left the TV.

  “Look at that ram,” he said. “That’s a big ram.” He looked at me for a second. “All my trophies are down in Florida. We have a house there. Gonna be taking off in a few days
. You just caught us.”

  I nodded, grabbed a hardback chair in the corner and sat next to him. I didn’t see another recliner in the room, or anything else that would lead me to think Mrs. Sonksin was welcome or comfortable in the room.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Your wife mentioned.”

  “Mildred gets crazy about stuff before we go. I have this room and that’s it. She won’t let me keep any trophies here. Women. I tell ya. Can’t live with ‘em. Can’t shoot ‘em.” He laughed. It was more of a snort. “So, what’s this about?”

  He was a heavy man, a roll of fat over his belt but packed on a solid frame. Not the kind of guy who worked out but one who toughened up by spending hours and maybe days in the outdoors. An avid sportsman by the way he talked and looked. He probably hunted white tail deer and wild boar in Florida and fished his ass off. I was a little jealous.

  “Old case of yours,” I said. “I brought a copy of the file if you needed a refresher.”

  “I might. It was a long time ago. What was it?”

  “Fire out on Meadowbrook, by the golf course,” I said. “Two people died, father and his kid.”

  “Oh yeah, the Bowers home. Won’t forget that.” He shut off the television, serious all of a sudden. “What does it say in the report? I’m sure it’s all there.”

  “It says the fire started in the basement, under the stairs. Says it spread quickly and flashed in the foyer and living room of the first floor. Says there was no evidence of arson or fuels that should not have been present.”

  “All true,” he said, shaking his head.

  “But…” I prodded.

  “It was strange, you know. Just one of those cases that didn’t add up. The fire acted like it had been set and set to kill, but I couldn’t find anything. I tried. Believe me. I was sure by the way the placed looked the next day we had a major case of arson and murder. I just couldn’t find the evidence. No accelerant. No source.”