"Who owned the plane, who flew it?"
"I'll get to that anon. What I'm telling you now took about two years to come out. Big investigation, widespread scandal. Entire Miami administration toppled as a result. FBI was involved in the case, FAA, you name it. Turns out two doctors were acquiring the stuff from distributers with fake orders from real hospitals. Of course you couldn't do that unless you had some officials in your pocket. The doctors did."
"What were their names?" I knew their names.
He gave me his between-you-and-me-sincerely look. "Harvey Keene and Barnett Osley. You know them?"
"No."
"You don't know any of these people?"
"Not yet. What were they doing with all that stuff?"
"This is where it gets better. It all came out in the trial, see. These two doctors, they weren't in this racket for the loot. They were redistributing the equipment to small rural clinics throughout Florida. Guess who owned the clinics."
"Keene and Osley?"
"Right, only these were free clinics. They had some state support, but the patients paid nothing. Keene and Osley were performing surgery at their little clinics. They were supposed to have performed organ transplants, shit that New York General would have considered radical. They're doing it free of charge. That organ transplant business, that was never proved, but they were still doing some outside stuff. Here's where it gets better still. The trial becomes this media circus. Everybody's hysterical. You ought to read some of the news accounts." He reached back into his portfolio and thumbed around for an unbearably long time before he removed two photocopies of news articles. "Check it out."
I read both as carefully as my excitement allowed, but they didn't need a close reading. They were not subtle. One called Keene and Osley a couple of Frankensteins, then went on to ask righteously, "How many died under their knives?" The other took the opposite tack. It called them Robin Hoods and charged that they were being persecuted by the AMA for operating free of charge.
"These are two of the calmer ones. But you probably get the picture."
I was beginning to get the picture.
"There were a couple other factors in this trial. One, they're fags. Two, the fags won't talk. Clearly, Keene and Osley couldn't have stolen all that shit without some heavy help. Stand-up guys, these fags. They won't admit a thing. Keene said it was just him, Osley had nothing to do with it. Vice versa, Osley says. If they'd have talked, they'd have walked. They got sentenced to five years, reduced to two, and their licenses were permanently revoked."
"Who flew the airplane?"
"'You can't kill Danny Beemon.' According to the geezers, Danny Beemon walked away from fatal crashes all over the world. Then he disappears after the fiery crash of a plane full of stolen operating tables on the way to curing poor people. How's that to fuel the fires of legend? You know what those geezers told me half shit-faced under the old banyan tree? They said, 'He'll be back,' and they all nod sagely, like one day he'll fly in and make their lives beautiful or something. They were like waiting for him."
"Where was Harry Pine during the trial?"
"There were no charges against Harry Pine. The airplane was chartered by the doctors. And Danny Beemon, the pilot? Gone. Walked away from another one. Just like the old days, the geezers said. I'll tell you, Moxie Field was a time warp. 1943. Stop the clock."
"So you came back and told Billie all about it?"
"Sure, that's why I went."
"You told her about Danny Beemon?"
"Just like I told you."
"What did she do?"
"Whoa, slow down, Artie. I thought you didn't know any of these dudes."
"I don't. Good story, though."
"Yeah, huh? What did Billie do? She dismissed me. I mean, she paid me well, but it hurt my feelings, Artie. I had just done this bang-up job for her in Moxie, risked ass flying, got prickly heat, now she's giving me the brush without telling me why I did it."
"How did she react when you told her about Florida?"
"She dismissed me. I told you."
"No, I mean personally." Why was I asking him? "What was her mood?"
"Oh. Excited. No, more. Vibrating. She could hardly hold her coffee cup. Look at it from my viewpoint for a minute. I didn't get the grant. Some twenty-year-old Yale postmodernist prick got it. Plus my wife bolts with my life savings. Glum financial outlook for ole Jay. Stealing food from the Red Apple gets depressing after a while. Billie just gave me five hundred dollars to do a pretty mysterious job. Five bills, no problem, like it was the Con Ed bill. What would you have thought, if you didn't have a rich dog?"
"That there was real money nearby." That's what he wanted to hear. It was my pleasure to give it to him.
"Exactly! But where? I started thinking along these broad lines: If Pine's in New York, why not Keene and Osley? You know how I found out? The AMA. Keene and Osley still subscribe to the journal. Where is it sent? Staten Island. Bright Bay Nursing Home. Ever heard of it?"
"No."
"No?"
"What did you do then?"
"When are you going to know something, Artie?"
"When you get to the punch line."
"Okay. I went back to Billie, and I said, Gee, this is quite some story, old pilots, the Robin Hood doctors, flaming crash, and now I find they all live in the city. I said, this sounds like a great story for New York magazine, did she mind if I wrote it? She wanted to know how much New York would pay. I told her about two grand. She gave me two grand. Bingo. You loved her, I loved her—God rest her soul—but, Artie, she was after bigger game."
"Pine?"
"She wasn't ready to tell me anything. She said it was personal, nothing to do with money. I decided to test the water, see what was personal and what financial."
"What did you do?" I asked, because he wanted me to.
"I paid a visit to the good doctors out at their place. I told the manager I'd wait, sat down in the lobby and talked to the old geezers. I like old people. I don't want to be one, but I like them. Finally, Barnett Osley arrives, and we have our chat. I'm writing this article for New York magazine, and I'd like to talk to him about events in Moxie, Florida. Then, when he put his dentures back, I asked if he could line up an interview with Harry Pine and Danny Beemon. The geezer about shit his chinos. He hems and haws, and you know what he says? He says, 'We wouldn't want to disturb Danny Beemon, would we?'"
"Danny Beemon? You mean—?"
"Yep. Right there at Bright Bay resides D.B. You can't kill Danny Beemon. He's burned to a crisp, Artie, an invalid. I saw him. So Osley says, 'How much would New York pay you for an article like that?' I say, about five thousand dollars. Bingo."
It hit me physically, the realization. It drove me back in my seat. That was the blackmail! Osley went straight to Pine after Kiley shook him down, and that puts us to the evening of Billie's murder. The Palominos and Jones were summoned to the country, where Chucky told them that somebody was trying to blackmail Harry Pine's friends, and here was the blackmailer sitting across the table from me.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing. Tell me, Jay, when did you talk to Barnett Osley?"
"When?...Last weekend. Friday or Saturday."
Billie died Sunday night.
"Have you told me everything now?"
"Huh? You all right?"
"Just fine. Is there anything else?"
"Hell, yes. There's the photographs."
"Exactly what photographs. Jay?"
He was growing exasperated, but that wouldn't be the half of it.
"Jay, how do you know about those photographs?"
"What? Billie told me, how else?"
"I don't see why she'd tell you about them. You said yourself she was very secretive about everything. Why would she tell you about the photographs?"
"Then you have them?"
"No, I told you, I never heard of them."
His shoulders sagged, his brow wrinkled. I thought he was going to cry. "I n
eed those photographs, Artie."
"Yeah, do you? What do you plan to do with them?"
"Take them to Harry Pine."
"Good idea. Run your New York magazine scam?"
"No. It's too late for that."
"Too late is right. It's blown up in your face, hasn't it? Burned down, more precisely. You pissed off a few people with your New York magazine scam, and now they want the photographs, or else, right? Billie didn't tell you shit about the photographs. Harry Pine got to you, right?"
"His thugs did. Very hard fuckers, Artie. Please, I need those photographs."
"You know, Jay, I think you're right," I said, standing. "You have a helluva story here. But you better write fast." Then I walked away.
I set my untouched beer on the bar beside Calabash, who didn't even glance at me. "Follow the prick," I muttered to Calabash. Then I went home.
I greeted Jellyroll for all of thirty seconds and left him with a woebegone look on his face as I made for the phone. Danny Beemon was alive at Bright Bay. I called Gordon Jainways.
NINETEEN
GORDON JAINWAYS SAT morosely in the cab in the depths of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. "What are we going to do if he is there?" Gordon demanded with a glare.
"Do? I don't know. Talk to him. About Billie."
From the middle of the Verrazano Bridge, I could see nothing of the Downtown towers, Manhattan lost in the murk.
"What do you propose? Do you propose we barge in on him and peer into his burned face? 'Is that you under there, D.B.?'"
My proposal didn't seem quite that crass until he spelled it out. It was easily that crass.
Nothing had changed at Bright Bay. Probably nothing ever changed except the grinding turnover of residents. I peeked in. The lobby was full of old folks. Gordon was at the desk talking to the receptionist. He was to draw her away by asking for his sister, leaving the way clear for me to slip into the residence wing, but the lobby was too crowded.
The receptionist stood up and tinkled a little bell. "Dinner is served," she announced.
Obsessives need to remain flexible, ever ready to modify crass plans when an even crasser alternative arises. Perhaps the receptionist would leave her post; perhaps she would even join the others for dinner, leaving me to slip into the residence wing unseen by anyone. I waited five minutes, then entered the empty lobby. I could hear the clank of dishes and the mix of elderly voices from the rec room as I slipped through the double doors that separated the residence wing from the lobby. I ignored the sign that said PRIVATE in gilded letters. The hall extended deeper than I had imagined, then turned to the right. I began to knock on doors. When no one answered, I opened the doors. None was locked. Each room was a simple single like a college dorm room, personalized with sweet touches of home and heart, framed photos of loved ones, down comforters, toiletries and private objects, the mementos of long lives, the past fixed and the future predictable; but those poignant fragments didn't dissuade me. A woman approached, shuffling down the hall on her aluminum walker. I recognized her. Elwood Dibbs had put a flower in the top buttonhole of her sweater. What was her name? Dibbs had asked her about her feet. Mrs. Florian.
"How do you do?" I said.
"Good evening," she smiled, and continued her trek to the dining room. When she passed through the double doors and into the lobby, I continued my search. I knocked on number 10. No answer. I opened it. A Raggedy Ann doll sat propped against the pillow on the neatly made bed. I went inside. Her clothes, dresses mostly, were hung in perfect order in the doorless closet. They smelled gently of flowers. Jasmine?
Then I saw the framed photograph above the headboard. A large photograph, perhaps fifteen by twenty, and slightly grainy for that reason, it showed Billie and her mother, the two Eleanors, in a room standing arm in arm, smiling. What room? I stepped closer. It was Billie's studio. Unmistakably. They looked happy together. When was this picture taken? I left before I started to cry. Never before last Sunday night had my life been so filled with intense and quickly changing emotion.
I opened six more doors, numbers 11 through 16, before I took a break, turned right, and walked to the end of the long hall. Two more double doors. I pushed them open, and the hallway changed completely. The floor inclined slightly, a rubber runner for traction, to still another set of double doors, but these were different. These were made of polished aluminum, with small glass ports reinforced with chicken wire between the panes. A janitor's bucket on wheels was propped against one door, holding it open. I looked in.
It was an operating room! Tanks of oxygen and other gasses, a high aluminum table with a circle of powerful lights suspended from the ceiling above, machines with little green windows overlaid with red grid lines, many other gadgets and arcane apparatus, most of which appeared as hulking, vague shapes, since only one small fluorescent light was on. The doctors were still doing it.
"Excuse me, sir—"
"Ha!"
He was a lanky Hispanic guy about sixteen. He wore a white uniform and carried two spray bottles of cleaning fluid. "Oh, sorry, didn't mean to scare you."
"That's okay."
"I'm sorry, sir, but guests aren't allowed back here."
"I guess I'm lost. I'm looking for Danny Beemon."
"Beemon...Beemon? Don't know anybody by that name."
"He was burned a long time ago."
"Oh, sure. That must be Ace."
"Ace?"
"He likes you to call him Ace. He's in seventeen."
"He is?"
"Back down the hall right where it turns left." He pointed.
I nearly ran.
Number 17. The door was closed. I knocked. No one answered, so I gently opened the door.
He sat in a wheelchair silhouetted against the dull light from the picture window. Head hanging, he seemed to be sleeping. Across the arms of the chair lay a metal dinner tray, but instead of food the tray contained pieces of a plastic airplane model, the fuselage already assembled. It was a Hawker Typhoon. Other plastic planes hung from the ceiling on nearly invisible monofilament strings, single-engine fighters, all of them, all meticulously painted, an instant frozen from a forty-year-old dogfight in miniature. His hand moved. He wasn't sleeping. He looked up at me.
His face was scarred and twisted. His upper lip was gone, or fused into the flesh above it, exposing teeth and gums. Except for a tiny tuft above his left ear, he had no hair, and his right ear was absent entirely. When I was a boy, an older neighbor taught me to assemble plastic models, airplanes, ships, cars, my interest following his. Barrett was his name. He's dead now. When Barrett's models broke or when he simply grew tired of them, he'd arrange them on the garage floor, squirt on lighter fluid, and set them on fire. We younger boys would gather to watch, say, the Forrestal burn while we imagined the real thing. "Neat," Barrett would say as the flames buckled the flight deck. I thought of Barrett and his sacrifices at that moment because when they were over, when only a puddle of charred plastic remained, they looked exactly like this man's face. The fingers of his right hand, which reached for his Typhoon, were fused into a claw. The hand stopped in mid-movement when he saw me.
"I—I beg your pardon. Wrong room." I closed the door and stood trembling on the red carpet in the silent hallway. I don't know how long I stood before, mechanically, I began phase two of my plan. I really didn't have the stomach for it anymore, but we had come this far...Could Gordon recognize anyone under all that scar tissue, let alone a man he hadn't seen for decades? Did he need to? Wasn't it clear who the burned man was?
I returned to one of the empty rooms I had already violated. Phase two depended on the phones. I hoped for private lines independent of the switchboard. The room I chose in a random fog had a phone with a number on the dial different from that of Bright Bay. It took ten rings or so before a woman answered, "Good evening. Bright Bay, may I help you?"
"Could I speak to Mr. Gordon Jainways? He's visiting Eleanor Burke."
"Oh, yes. I believe he's in the dining
facility. Please hold."
Gordon answered in a voice filled with trepidation.
"I found him. I found him."
"Oh, yes, I see," said Gordon.
"Room 17. You go through the double doors to the right of the desk."
"Oh, yes, I see."
"Can you get away? Unseen?"
"Yes, that will be fine." He hung up, and I waited in the hall seemingly for a couple of days before Gordon pushed open the doors. He barely glanced at me.
"They've got an operating room!" I squeaked. "The end of the hall. Keene and Osley—they're doing it again." But Gordon didn't respond to that news; he wouldn't even look at me.
"Room 17 is this way." And he fell in behind me as we marched off.
I knocked on number 17, then pushed the door open for Jain-ways. Gordon stiffened at the sight framed in the dreary harbor light. They stared at each other for a long time, me peeking in like a sick joke. Then Gordon said, "Good God, D.B., is that you?"
The burned man began to cry. Then I realized there was someone behind me. Flowers. Jasmine? I spun. Face-to-face with Eleanor Beemon, who said, "Excuse me, please," and stepped into the room. She said nothing more. She walked past her brother as if he were a stranger and knelt painfully down beside the wheelchair. She put her arms around Danny Beemon's neck, and he, still sobbing, lowered his face into her jasmine-scented gray hair. All four of us held that tableau.
"Eleanor, it's me, Gordon." But she didn't look up.
A hand grabbed the back of my shirt and jerked me sharply away from the door, shoving me into the opposite wall. It was Elwood Dibbs, and his face was contorted with rage. I saw him take a wrinkled handful of Gordon's tweeds between the shoulder blades and yank him nearly off his feet, out the door. Dibbs closed it quietly, then turned on us. The tips of his ears glowed like embers.
"Get out!" He shot a finger at the double doors. We started walking that way like scolded boys caught at the bathhouse peephole.
Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery Page 15