by Otto Penzler
“What field would that be?”
“Gates House Farm. Fellow named Hi Gates leased me the use of the land. It’s a perfect setting for Wings of Glory.”
I nodded. Hi Gates was the shiftless son of a moderately successful farmer who’d died a few years back. Hi, with a broken marriage and a drinking problem behind him, was on the lookout for any money-making scheme which would be labor-free on his part. The idea of filming a movie in one of his idle fields would appeal to him.
“What do you need me for?” I asked.
“Some of the stunt work in the picture’s going to be dangerous. A parachute jump and a plane nosing over on takeoff. I want a doctor standing by and we didn’t bring one with us.”
“Look here, I’ve got my own patients to tend to. I can’t neglect them to watch you making a movie.”
“I’d only need you for a few days, during the stunt shooting, and I’d pay you well. They could come get you if there was an emergency.”
I had to admit that the past week’s business had quieted down to the birth of two babies to farm wives. There was no real reason why I couldn’t accept his offer, especially since I knew my nurse April could hold down the office and notify me if I was needed. “All right,” I decided finally. “But I couldn’t spare more than three days.”
“Good! I’ll need you Wednesday morning, out at the Gates House Farm. Nine o’clock sharp!”
Granger Newmark was gone before I realized that he hadn’t mentioned how much he’d be paying me. But by that time I knew I was hooked.
On Wednesday morning I left April in charge of the office, with instructions for reaching me, and drove my six-year-old Pierce-Arrow Runabout over the rutted roads to Hi Gates’s farm. Even before nine o’clock the place was alive with activity. And sure enough—there was a flying machine at one end of the long field.
Newmark greeted me with enthusiasm and explained that the aircraft was a D. H. 60 Moth, a biplane with two open cockpits and a single engine. Though it looked just like the planes I remembered from the Great War, he told me it had been developed only two years earlier by Captain Geoffrey de Havilland, a British officer.
“It’s perfect for the picture,” he said enthusiastically. “Looks like those wartime crates all the barnstormers fly, but it’s safer and it has a new sixty-horsepower Cirrus engine inside. Best of all, we can tow it along the road with its wings folded, so it’s easy to move from place to place during shooting.”
Gazing down the grassy runway toward the distant woods I was reminded of one landscape feature worth noting. “The haunted oak,” I said aloud.
“What?”
“That old oak tree—the one that’s partly dead. Some folks around here say it’s haunted. Supposed to have been planted over the grave of a Revolutionary War traitor back a hundred and fifty years ago. I doubt if it’s really that old, though.”
Granger Newmark studied the distant tree, which stood alone some distance from the woods. “Ugly-looking thing,” he agreed. “Can’t think of a way we could work it into the script, though. Has it ever killed anyone?”
Though the question was asked in jest, I had a serious reply. “Boy fell from it a few years back and broke his neck. For folks around here that was enough to revive all the old superstitions.”
A tall handsome man in a pilot’s costume joined us then. I recognized him even before the introductions as a silent-screen favorite, Robert Raines. Newmark performed the introductions and Raines shook my hand firmly. “I hope I won’t be needing your services, Doc.”
“Hear that voice?” the director asked, aglow with pleasure. “When the women of America hear it, we’re going to have ourselves a big big star! Half the silent actors will be out of work once the public hears their squeaky little voices!”
Raines grinned boyishly at the compliment. “It’s just the voice that God gave me. I do the best I can with it.”
“Are you going to be jumping?” I asked, noticing the parachute strapped to his back.
“We’re using a double for the actual jump,” Newmark explained. “Can’t risk our big star on anything like that.”
“Don’t know as you should risk anyone,” I said. “There’s not much treatment I can give if his chute doesn’t open.”
“Don’t be silly!” Newmark sputtered. “People were parachuting before there were airplanes! It’s perfectly safe.”
His statement seemed like such a downright impossibility that I admit I laughed at it. Later when I looked it up I found out he was right—there had been parachute jumps from hot-air balloons before the year 1800. I learned quickly that Granger Newmark rarely made mistakes.
About then we were joined by a young man dressed exactly like the star. “This is our double,” Newmark said. “Charlie Bone.”
Bone’s rough, angular face bore little resemblance to the star’s handsome features, but I could see they shared a similar height and build. The camera’s eye on a distant falling figure would see them as one. “How are you?” Bone asked me, not expecting an answer. His interest was already elsewhere. “See those clouds rollin’ in? Could be trouble.”
“My cameras are ready to roll,” the director said. “We’ll need a shot of you two climbing into the plane, and then the takeoff. You jump out as soon as you can, Charlie, and Raines will bring the plane in.”
“You can fly this thing?” I asked the star.
“Oh, sure. I’m a lot more comfortable flying it than being a passenger. We’ve got some stunt footage we’ll stick in later, though. I don’t do stunts.”
I watched the two men go off, side by side, as Granger Newmark explained the scene. “In the film Bone plays the pilot and Raines is his barnstorming partner. Raines is going up for a parachute jump even though a doctor has warned him the thin air could cause him to black out.” He smiled apologetically. “Sorry we’ve shot the doctor scene already or we could have used you, Doc.”
“Acting’s a bit out of my line.” The fliers had reached the biplane now and been joined by a dark-haired young woman in a long flowered dress. “Who’s the girl?”
“Angela Rhodes. Our leading lady. This is her first picture, actually, but I think she’s going to be a big star.”
I watched her adjust the star’s scarf, just as a princess might have done before her knight rode off to joust. Then both men were into the plane with a wave and the director shouted, “Camera! Action! Take one!” Raines waved from the front cockpit.
The cameraman followed the plane as it taxied into position and then took off. For the first time I noticed that Hi Gates had been watching too, standing just a bit behind me. “Hello, Doc,” he said when I turned to him. “Never thought they’d be shootin’ a movin’ picture on my farm.”
“I hope you’re getting a good price for it, Hi,” I told him. “These movie companies got piles of money.”
“Don’t you worry, Doc.” He spat some tobacco juice at the ground. “They don’t out-fox ol’ Hi. My daddy taught me a thing or two ’bout business afore he passed on.”
I doubted if anybody had ever taught Hi Gates much of anything, but I didn’t disagree with him. “How you been making out here by yourself, Hi?” I asked. Overhead, the plane was circling back after its takeoff.
“Good as can be expected. I keep hopin’ Dorie’ll come back, but I guess there’s not much hope of that.” Dorie was the wife who’d left him when he started to drink heavily. The last anyone had heard she was living up in Maine with her sister.
“Maybe she’ll read about them shootin’ this film at your farm,” I said.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Nearby, Granger Newmark was standing at the cameraman’s side. “Keep focused on the plane! Don’t miss a thing! He’ll jump now when they come over the field again.”
The biplane with its two open cockpits had become a mere speck in the sky as it climbed high enough for the parachute jump. As I watched from the ground, glad that I wasn’t up there, Angela Rhodes came over to join our group. “Is
n’t it dangerous?” she asked Newmark.
“No more dangerous than falling out of bed.”
I saw a tiny speck detach itself from the plane and start to fall. Then a cloud of white billowed up behind it as the parachute was released. The falling figure was caught beneath a gently falling mushroom and began drifting slowly toward us. “Perfect!” Newmark shouted. “He should land right on the field in front of the camera!”
But the clouds that had gathered on the horizon were moving in now, and the wind was picking up. As the parachute neared the ground we could see it was drifting farther off course, toward the old oak tree at the edge of the field.
“Why doesn’t he steer himself?” Angela asked. “He’s going to hit that tree!”
“Charlie!” the director shouted, but his voice must have been lost in the gathering wind. The parachute came down in the upper branches of the tree, snagged by some of the dead limbs that stretched toward heaven. And beneath it, hanging from his harness some ten feet from the ground, was the limp body of the stunt man, Charlie Bone.
“Let’s get him out of there!” I shouted, leading the others toward the tree. Just then I didn’t care if I was ruining the scene. There was something about that limp body, swaying at the end of the parachute harness, that had galvanized me into action. “Somebody get a ladder,” I called to them, reaching the tree before the others.
Hi Gates ran off toward the barn as I tried to boost myself onto a lower limb of the tree. Already I could see the blue of Bone’s face, and the tongue half out of his mouth. I managed to climb high enough to feel for a pulse, but there was none.
“What is it?” Granger Newmark called from the ground. “What’s wrong?”
I climbed a bit higher in the tree, reaching out toward the white scarf around his neck. But then I felt something else, and drew my hand away. I came down from the tree just as Hi Gates returned carrying a ladder. “Cut him down carefully,” I instructed. “And then leave him here on the ground. I have to call Sheriff Lens.”
“My God, do you mean he’s dead?”
“Yes, Mr. Newmark, he’s dead. And there’s a piece of wire knotted around his scarf. He’s been murdered.”
I phoned Sheriff Lens from the Gates farmhouse and then walked back to the body. The cast and crew were gathered around in a circle, watching while Newmark worked to unknot the wire from Charlie Bone’s neck. “You’d better leave that for the sheriff to see,” I advised. “It won’t do Bone any good now.”
“But—but how could it have happened?”
I stared up at the old oak tree. “Damned if I know.”
The biplane was circling the field and finally Newmark waved it in for a landing. I think we were all wondering what Robert Raines would say when he saw the body. Because we knew we had witnessed a murder with only one possible explanation. Charlie Bone had been strangled in the plane before he jumped—there was no other way. And Robert Raines was the only person up there with him.
We watched as Raines came running over to the circle, pushing his way through to stare at the body. “What happened to him?” he asked.
“He’s dead,” I said. “Strangled by a wire around his neck.”
“Strangled! Here on the ground?”
“Before he reached the ground. His chute snagged in the tree and when I climbed up to free him he was already dead.”
He stared at me with unbelieving eyes. “But he was alive when he jumped! He had to be, to pull the rip cord!”
“That’s right,” Granger Newmark agreed. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
I saw Sheriff Lens arriving in his car, and I decided I could wind this thing up quickly. “You could have strangled him with the wire and dumped him out of the plane—and used a second wire or a string to pull open the rip cord when the body was free of the plane.”
Raines strode up to me, hands on hips. Close up like that, he was intimidating. “You think so, Doc? I was in the front cockpit, remember? You tell me how I could have strangled someone sitting in the rear cockpit, several feet behind me, while the plane was in the air, then attached a string to his rip cord and dumped the body out of the plane. Go ahead, tell me!”
I’d forgotten about the cockpits, but now I remembered that he spoke the truth. I remembered him waving from that front cockpit as the plane took off. He was right—he couldn’t have strangled Charlie Bone.
But no one else could have, either.
It was an impossible crime.
Sheriff Lens was not to be put off so easily. “You’re telling me the damn tree killed him, Doc?”
“No, I’m not telling you the tree killed him. Trees don’t strangle people with pieces of wire—not even haunted trees.”
“All right, then—who did? He sure didn’t commit suicide.”
“No,” I agreed. “People can shoot or stab or poison themselves, but it’s impossible to strangle oneself to death. You’d pass out before you finished the job.”
“Unless you hanged yourself. How about this, Doc—the wire was attached to the chute and when it opened the wire was pulled tight and choked him to death.”
“A nice theory, except that the wire’s not attached to the chute now. Besides, I’ve just examined the neck under that scarf and there’s no evidence that the pressure came from above. Something like you suggest would have almost torn the head from his body. There’d be evidence of it.”
“So how was it done, Doc? You’re the expert on these impossible crimes.”
“But I’ve never seen one quite as impossible as this.”
There was something gnawing at my memory, though, and I went in search of Granger Newmark. Sheriff Lens could content himself with prowling around the oak tree till I returned. I found the director with his star, Angela, and I suppose you could say he was comforting her. He took his hand off her shoulder as I approached and frowned at me. “What is it now, Dr. Hawthorne? A bill for your services?”
“My services aren’t finished yet. I was wondering about that plane Raines and Bone were in.”
Newmark gazed out at the field where the Moth biplane stood. “What about it? We won’t be reshooting the scene, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“I’m wondering if the plane has one of those automatic pilot gadgets I been reading about.”
This brought a smile to the director’s face. “So my star could have set it and climbed back along the fuselage to strangle Bone? Not a chance! There’s no autopilot on it, and Raines would be scared to death to try a trick like that anyway.”
I learned later that although the automatic pilot had been invented in 1910, it was not widely used on planes till after 1930. Newmark was telling the truth—there was no autopilot on the Moth. It was another good idea gone awry.
“Why are you so interested in who killed him?” Angela Rhodes asked me. “It’s no business of yours.”
“I was hired to minister to the ill and injured. I failed in that, quite badly.”
Newmark smiled. “We won’t hold it against you.”
“What about the film you shot? Can you get it developed? It might give us a clue.”
“The film has to go down to New York for processing. It’ll be days before we see anything. You think we carry a darkroom along with us?”
I could see they had turned against me, as if somehow the impossible death of Charles Bone was my fault. And maybe it was—I did seem to attract murder with increasing frequency in those years.
Sheriff Lens was busy questioning Hi Gates, digging into a possible motive for the crime, and I decided that was the smart thing to do. Worrying about the how of it would get me nowhere. Maybe the why would prove more profitable.
“He was stayin’ here at your farmhouse, wasn’t he?” Sheriff Lens asked. They were in the tool shed near the barn.
Hi Gates nodded. I could smell his breath and I realized he’d been drinking again. For all I knew, maybe he never stopped. “Sure, I got three bedrooms upstairs just goin’ to waste. I wait for Dorie to come
home an’ that’ll be never, so I rented them out to some o’ the cast and crew. Bone and that cameraman, Zeedler. And one of the extras.”
“Any trouble between him an’ the others?” the sheriff asked.
“No trouble I could see.”
“No fights, drinking?”
“Hell, they’d only just got here this week.” Gates looked sly, though, as if he wasn’t telling us everything.
“Let’s go up to the house,” I suggested, “and take a look at Bone’s room.”
With the sheriff walking a little bit ahead of us, Hi Gates lowered his voice. “I got somethin’ you’d want to see. Don’t want Sheriff Lens to spot it, though.”
When we entered the house I told the sheriff to go over Bone’s things while I lingered behind. What Hi Gates produced was a tattered scrapbook full of clippings and credits which had obviously belonged to the dead man. “See this? I got it from his room.”
“You stole it?”
His face fell a bit. “I found it when I was cleanin’ up this mornin’. But I knew old Lens would say I stole it. Look at it!”
Charlie Bone had worked in silent films during most of the twenties, according to the clippings, appearing frequently in popular two-reel comedies and thrillers. He’d played the part of the old man in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, and of Edward Stapleton in The Premature Burial. There were clippings of his work as a stunt man and double too, and a gravure photograph of him standing with Robert Raines. They were wearing identical pirate costumes for a scene in Captain Blood, the 1925 swashbuckler.
“Interesting, but I don’t see—”
Hi Gates reached over my shoulder and pulled something loose from under the Captain Blood photo. It was a fuzzy picture of a man and woman, naked, in a bed. “Dirty pictures,” he announced triumphantly. “Look at the other side.”
There were words written on the back that had been crossed out hurriedly. “Remember this? If you don’t want me to—”
Hi Gates was pulling more pictures free from their hiding places in the album. They were much the same, or at least they seemed to show the same couple in various poses. All were too fuzzy and underexposed for clear identification, and none of these had writing on the back.