by Gavin Lyall
I had a short sentimental moment of wanting to strip her down and bring her back to being Beautiful Dreamer again. But die idea passed: she had more ‘improvements’ to come, yet anodier job to do. And at her age, that was glory enough. Iwent back to work with an uneasy feeling that the same thought might apply to pilots.
By five o’clock, when my mechanics started showing symptoms of raging thirst, we had a rough idea of how the system worked, even if not why, and had found two leaking joints, a sticky valve, and a shaky pump. After an hour of overtime rates we had the pump stripped and knew what parts we needed. I sent an AircraftOn-Ground cable to North American in California asking them to air-freight spares if they had any left, then called it a day.
Diego still hadn’t shown up, which was odd if he really wanted to meet the Mitchell – but not so odd if he’d found something else twenty years old and rather less modified. Aeroplanes ran a bad fourth to sex in his life.
By the time I’d cured my own thirst and went over to collect the jeep from the cargo pier, we were into the short tropical twilight. The tall lights around the loading bay came on as I walked across, turning the concrete blue and cold in contradiction to the soft warm air. Everybody else had gone – cargo planes, without passengers to worry about, work union hours -and all the sheds were locked except the last, which never held anything but my jeep and a few cargo trolleys.
I drove round the end of the terminal pier heading for the back gate, slowing up for a last look at the Mitchell. She stood there, dark, lonely, but with that watchful look all nosewheel aeroplanes have, unable to sit back and rest on their tails. A cluttered old lady on sentry duty…
Hell, I was getting sentimental about that box of junk. Still, I didn’t have any other aeroplane to get sentimental about now. Or maybe it was because she’d once fought a war.
I was about to pull away when I remembered the heap of plastic covers that I’d used to stretch over the Dove’s engines and cockpit when she was standing in the sun. Without the Dove, they’d sat in the back seat of the jeep all week, and I was lucky nobody had pinched them. There are enough Jamaicans for whom a few square feet of plastic are halfway to a house. Now, maybe, the Mitchell could use them. I got out and yanked them off the seat.
Then I knew what had made Diego late.
He’d been there some time, so he just stuck out over the side of the jeep, stiff as the plank from the side of a pirate galleon. Then the drag of the covers, as I dropped them, toppled him over and he fell with a sound I can hear again whenever I close my eyes. I closed my eyes then, too.
When I had them open and focused again, he was lying beside the back wheel, in the curled, crunched shape set by the space behind the jeep’s front seats. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to know, I rolled him so he balanced on his back, and in the dim back-glow of the neon lights on the far side of the cargo pier I could see the splatter of black blood on his white shirt front. When I looked closer, there wasn’t just one hole, but dozens of small ones.
Then I started the long walk back across the bright cold concrete to the warm lights of the terminal. Except that I ran a lot of it.
SIXTEEN
‘A shotgun,’ said the inspector. ‘When you think about it, that tells us quite a lot.’
There were two of them: an English inspector and a Jamaican sergeant. The inspector was a man with pale cold eyes, a neat little moustache, clipped hair, and the general finicky-tough look you get from Englishmen who come out to be cops in somebody else’s country. He was wearing a summer suit, but made it look a lot smarter than the sergeant’s uniform. The sergeant was a long, loose man with a thin bony face and big solemn eyes.
It was nearly ten o’clock and we were still up in an office near the top of the control tower. A dusty-white room lined with the usual maps covered with the usual coloured strings and wax-pencil scribbles. There was an old travel-agent’s model of a DC-7C on the desk and the inspector couldn’t keep his hands off it: twizzling it on its stand, flicking the propellers.
The sergeant said gravely: ‘Not many shotguns in Jamaica, sir.’
‘Exactly. It’s not anative weapon. That’s one thing. Second, it means premeditation; you don’t just happen to have a shotgun with you. And finally, it means he wasn’t killed here.’
He looked at me, with the hint of a triumphant smile behind the toughness, waiting for me to ask why.
I said: ‘You mean the noise?’
He frowned and spun a couple of propellers quickly. ‘Yes, exactly. I know the airport’s a noisy place, but they’d still have heard a shotgun up here. If he was killed here some time last night.’ And he nodded out of the window towards the end cargo shed, 200 yards away.
In the cold neon light there was a little huddle of vehicles: ambulance, police jeep, motorcycles, and dark figures moving slowly around them, measuring, searching, conferring – probably telling each other that a shotgun would have been, heard up in the control tower.
I said: ‘You’ve got a perfect place for a murder just outside: the road to Port Royal. There isn’t a house on it for five miles. So why don’t you throw him in the bushes or chuck him in the sea there? Why go to the risk of bringing him into the airport and dumping him in my jeep?’
He flicked another propeller and gave me a crafty look. ‘Perhaps he wanted to throw suspicion on you – had you thought of that?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t see that, either. If he knew my jeep was a safe place to hide the body, he’d have to know I was away for the night – in Colombia. So I’d have an alibi anyway.’
‘Ah yes.’ He flipped back through his notebook. ‘An alibi which will be backed up by an American girl lawyer, who will be here shortly. An American – girl – lawyer.’
He made it sound like an insult. ‘
It had been a long, full day. I felt like yawning, thought about not, then went ahead and yawned in his face.
‘You don’t seem very interested! ‘ he barked. ‘I thought this man was a friend of yours.’
I shrugged. ‘I was teaching him to fly twins. I was making money out of him.’
The sergeant said: ‘You had your aeroplane confiscated in Santo Bartolomeo the other day.’
The inspector jerked around. ‘Where d’you hear this?’
The sergeant waved a long thin hand in a helpless gesture. ‘I just heard it around, su’.’
The inspector glared, then turned back to me. ‘So you didn’t have an aeroplane any more at the time?’
‘True. But at the time I was still in Barranquilla.’
‘Ha.’ He twizzled the model into a flat spin. ‘Well, what d’you suggest?’
‘That he was waiting for me last night. He’d wait by my jeep because that’s the one place he couldn’t miss me. Somebody shot him and stuffed him under the covers as the nearest hiding place.’
He smiled thinly. ‘You’re forgetting the noise, aren’t you? Have you ever heard a shotgun?’
The sergeant said: ‘He must have, sir. Fighter pilots train with shotguns and clay pigeons. Something about learning deflection shooting.’
The inspector jerked around again. ‘I suppose you just heardthat around, too?’
The sergeant smiled apologetically.
I said: ‘Maybe it wasn’t a shotgun.’
‘You really think so? I know doctors are wrong most of the time, but not even a doctor could get a shotgun wound wrong.’
I just shrugged again. I could perhaps have added something to his store of knowledge on the subject, but his sneer at J.B. had got me niggled. Andhe was supposed to be the detective around here; let him detect something. Or ask his sergeant.
I just said: ‘It’s still the simplest solution.’
‘Possibly,’ he conceded. ‘But let’s consider the motive. What can you offer?’
‘From some hints he dropped, he’d got a sex Ufelike a tomcat with reheat. Maybe he picked on somebody whose husband owned a… a shotgun.’
‘Yes’ – he nod
ded – ‘yes, that’s possible. A planter, somebody who lives out of Kingston. Somebody who’d need a shotgun for the mongoose.’
Oddly, the mongoose is a pest in Jamaica. Somebody brought them in some time back – probably from India – to get rid of the snakes. They did that, then started on the chickens as a dessert.
‘But,’ the inspector added, ‘why come out to the airport to ki U him?1 Because you couldn’t have found him to kill him anywhere else in the last few days: he’d been up in Ochoríoswith Whitmore. And probably when Luiz drove him down last night, they stopped for a drink in Kingston – and at one of Diego’s boozing-places, because Luiz wouldn’t know Kingston. And if you were an angry husband, you could have been haunting Diego’s favourite joints the last few days, waiting for him. Then all you had to do was trail him to the airport, wait until Luiz went back, come quietly up in the dark cargo shed, and – bang.
Still assuming it was a shotgun, of course.
I was getting tired, and he was still supposed to be the detective. ‘I don’t know.’
He smiled. Above us, in the control room, a loudspeaker echoed, and far off I heard the whistle of a Viscount on the approach. The ten-thirty from Miami.
The phone rang. The inspector snatched it up, grunted several times, put it down.
Then he stood up. ‘Your witness is here, Mr Carr. Miss – ah – Penrose. And Mr Luiz Monterrey. I’ll lead the way.’
We wound down the concrete stairs. J.B. and Luiz were waiting on the edge of the loading area, escorted by a small posse of uniformed police.
J.B. saw me and said immediately: ‘If they’re trying to involve you, Carr, you don’t have to say a damn thing without a lawyer present. If you haven’t got your own man, I probably know enough Jamaican law to help out.’
The inspector was staring at her as if she’d sprouted a forked tail and spat on Moriarty’s Police Law into the bargain.
Before he could explode, I said: ‘Skip that. Just tell the man where I was last night.’
‘In Barranquilla,’ she said crisply. ‘If you don’t like my word, you can check the hotel, the airport authorities, the guy we bought a plane off, and the charter pilot who flew us in. You want their names?’
‘Later, perhaps later.’ He cleared his throat, then turned to Luiz. ‘And if you’re Mr Monterrey, I believe you drove the dead man down last night?’
Luiz opened his mouth, but was drowned by the sound of the Viscount rolling up to the ramp behind him. When its engines died, he said: ‘We came in by the back gate, past the flying club, at about seven. We had a drink in the terminal, then I left about half-past nine. I’d parked my car over there’ – he nodded at the cargo pier – ‘and he walked over with me, and said he’d wait a while. He still thought Señor Carrmight come in that night.’
‘I see.’ The inspector turned to me. ‘Were you planning to come back last night?’
‘If the plane had been in better shape, I might have. As it was…’
He nodded, then announced: ‘I understand you all knew the dead man. So I will now ask you to make a formal identification. You may be called on to repeat diis at the coroner’s inquest.’
Luiz and I started simultaneously to protest on J.B.‘s behalf. But she cut us off: ‘I’ve had dead clients before.’
The inspector marched us off across the bright cold concrete towards the group at the cargo shed.
When we were lined up outside the ambulance, the sergeant gave a couple of orders in the broad Jamaican he saved for talking to constables, and somebody opened the doors and put on the lights.
In turn, we stepped up inside, looked, stepped down. It was warm inside the ambulance and it smelt of something. When I got down, I could feel the cold sweat on my forehead.
The inspector said softly: ‘I’d have thought you’d seen dead men before, Mr Carr – in Korea.’
‘No. Pilots only kill them. You don’t see them.’
He grunted, then raised his voice. ‘Do you identify this man?’
J.B. said: ‘That’s the man I met as Diego Ingles.’
He frowned at her careful legal phrasing, then turned to me. I nodded. ‘That’s Ingles.’
Luiz said: ‘Yes.’
A constable in a white motorcycle crash helmet handed over a bunch of papers. The inspector thumbed through them, picked out a small booklet. After a moment he said: ‘I have a passport here, found on the dead man. The full name appears to be Diego Jiminez Ingles.’
I said: ‘Say that again.’
He looked at me, surprised. ‘Does this contradict anything you understood?’
Not now; not any longer. I should have remembered, of course; Spanish custom uses both father’s and mother’s family names – but it puts father first. The son of Juan Smith Jones is Roberto Smith Brown – it’s the middle name that matters. I should have remembered.
‘Jiminez,’ I said slowly. ‘Perhaps that changes your case for you a little, Inspector.’
‘Ibeg your pardon?’ He looked annoyed.
This was carrying Jamaican disinterest in the rest of the Caribbean a bit far.
‘Jiminez, for Christ’s sake. The rebel leader in the República Libra. Diego must have been his son.’
He glanced at the sergeant. ‘You didn’t hearthis-?’
Tveheard of the man Jiminez, sir,’ the sergeant said – a little reluctantly. ‘But I hadn’t seen the passport, of course, sir.’
The inspector glared down at the passport as if it should have Son of well-known rebel leader stamped on it. ‘This is a Venezuelan passport.’
I said: ‘So his mother’s family was Venezuelan. And probably loaded. That’s maybe where Jiminez is getting his backing. And you let him in here, without noticing a thing.’
‘I wasn’t teaching him to fly,’ he said stiffly.
Then I knew where all my troubles had come from. The FBI knew who Diego was, the Repúblicaknew. It just hadn’toccurred to them I could be stupid enough not to know. So I’d been written down as a rebel.
So I’d lost the Dove.
Then I remembered something else and swung round on J.B. ‘You must have had his name on a contract. He was working for-‘
‘No. He wasn’t on contract – Eady plan, you remember? He was strictly off the budget, just helping out for drinks and expenses.’
I frowned at her, at the ambulance, finally back at the inspector.
He said: ‘How did you mean – this changes the case?’
‘My God – I was teaching him to fly twins. He must have been planning to fly arms or something into the Repúblicaand they guessed it.’
He made a noise in his throat. ‘So you think he was -assassinated?’ he asked distastefully.
‘Well, at least it’s a thought.’
He did some deep detecting on the thought, then smiled. ‘But that would mean sending in a… a murderer, probably by airline. Andthat would mean trying to carry a shotgun through the Customs. They couldn’t-‘
‘Forgetabout shotguns. Haven’t you ever heard of a snake pistol?’
He hadn’t; not on an island where the mongoose is the problem.
I sighed. ‘Just take an ordinary revolver – a thirty-eight or bigger – bore out the rifling, pull the bullets out of the cartridges. Put in a wad, fill them up with birdshot, seal them with wax or soap – and you’ve got a shotgun pistol. Spreads enough to kill a snake at twenty paces with a snap shot. And it’ll kill men at short range – if you’re the sort who couldn’t hit a battalion of barn doors at ten feet.
‘Andit’ll fit in your pocketand it doesn’t make any more noise than an ordinary thirty-eight. And the Republica’s snake country.’
There was a long hush while everybody looked at me.
Then the inspector said: ‘How do you happen to know this, Mr Carr?’
J.B. said quickly: ‘You don’t have to answer-‘
‘The hell with that. I converted my own revolver in Korea. I’m a lousy pistol shot; with a snake gun at least I could kill s
nakes.’
The inspector turned to the sergeant. ‘You didn’t happen to know about snake pistols, did you?’
The sergeant gave me a reproachful stare, then shook his head. ‘No, sir,’ he said sadly.
The inspector came back to me. ‘Some people might think you withheld this significant information for a remarkable time.’
‘Some people might think / was supposed to be the detective around here.’
His eyes glittered. ‘You wouldn’t happen to carry a snake pistol these days?’
Steam started to come out of J.B.‘s ears. I just smiled sweetly.
Luiz said quickly: ‘Inspector, my friend – let me make a small suggestion. Possibly you should not worry so much about Señor Carr, but go and ring one of your ministers and tell him that you have a murder which will, tomorrow, bring the Venezuelan consul, a rich family in Caracas, quite possibly the Repúblicaand most certainly some American newsmen from Miami – all asking awkward questions.’
The inspector stared. He hadn’t thought about the international aspect of Diego’s death – no local would. But no island is an island.
Luiz smiled with infinite Spanish sadness. ‘Politics, you1 know, my friend.’
The inspector suddenly knew. He held the wordpolitics on his tongue a moment, despising the taste of it. Then, reluctantly, he swallowed.
‘None of you will be leaving Jamaica, of course,’ he said officially.
‘We got a picture to finish,’ J.B. pointed out.
‘Ha. Very well – you can go.’ He swung around and marched off towards the terminal. The sergeant gave me a final sad look, and ambled after.