Hoch's Ladies

by Edward D. Hoch

  “This is Rita Bloom. Susan Holt.”

  Rita was in her early twenties, a fresh-faced young woman with hair the color of Iowa corn tassels. It wasn’t until she opened her mouth that Susan recognized the unmistakable New York accent. “I came out here to attend Drake University and after graduation I just stayed,” she explained when Susan questioned her. She had a way of gesturing as she spoke. “It’s so much more open than Manhattan.”

  Looking around at the cornfields, Susan had to agree with her. “You ever been up in one of those?” she asked, gesturing toward the rapidly deflating balloon after removing her helmet.

  “Oh, sure! Philip took me up a couple of times. It’s not so bad after your first flight.”

  A red pickup truck had turned off the road and was bumping across the field toward them. The side of the door read Glen’s Auto Repair, and Rowe identified the man who jumped out as Glen Leavor. “Glen picks up all the pieces for us, transports the baskets and bags back home.”

  Leavor was around thirty, dark-haired and with a shadow of beard on his chin. Susan imagined he was quite the hit with local ladies who might find Philip Rowe beyond their reach. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, making a halfhearted effort to tip his baseball cap. “Want to give me a hand with this basket, Phil?”

  The two of them lifted the wicker carriage by carrying handles near the bottom and hoisted it onto the truck. Glen helped gather the collapsed balloon into a cylinder and pack it into its carry sack.

  “We’re having drinks at our place for the balloonists,” Duncan Rowe told him. “When you deliver that stuff come in for some refreshments.”

  “I’ll do that,” Leavor said. “See you!”

  “He’s a big help,” Philip said as the truck pulled away, heading for a big green balloon that was just landing nearby. “We all chip in to pay him.”

  “Do you always have a party after flights?” Susan asked.

  Duncan Rowe smiled. “Sometimes. This one’s partly for your benefit, so you can meet some of the people. They’re a great bunch. Most would do better than me in New York.”

  The Rowe house was situated on a small rise at the end of an impressive driveway. Despite some colonial touches, it was a modern home with spacious rooms and a state-of-the-art kitchen. “Duncan’s wife Diana passed away last summer,” Rita Bloom explained as she and Susan entered through the kitchen door. “It was a great shock to everyone.”

  “Had she been ill?”

  “Not ill. She was—”

  Duncan entered just behind them, ending the conversation. It was obvious that he took great pride in the house and he insisted on giving Susan a tour while they waited for the others to arrive. “I hope I can lure you away from all this for our fall promotion,” Susan told him. “It’s beautiful country here.”

  “Especially beautiful seen from the air.” He showed her his oak-paneled den, where posters and photos of balloons in flight dominated the room. There were shelves of books on the sport, too, and a few gold trophies Duncan had won. Susan paused over a framed picture of Duncan and a handsome middle-aged woman holding one of them. There were other pictures of her on the walls.

  “Your wife?” Susan asked.

  “Yes.” He said nothing more on the subject.

  They returned from the tour to find the house filling up with men and women, mostly in their thirties and forties. They were handsome, athletic people with the money to buy, maintain, and fly the balloons she’d admired earlier. Duncan introduced her to a few of them before his nephew called him out to the kitchen where there was a problem with the hors d’oeuvres.

  She found herself finally with a slender, bearded young man with the appearance of a sea captain. His name was Kevin Nova and she immediately recognized it. “You’re Pegasus! I mean you have it on your balloon!”

  “That’s right,” he confirmed with a smile. “How’d you know?”

  “I was up with Duncan today and he pointed it out. I remembered your name. That’s quite a balloon!”

  “Thank you. It always attracts attention at the races. And you must be the lady from the New York store that’s going to fill the place with our balloons.”

  “Well, pictures mostly. But we do hope to have one or two deflated bags, along with their baskets and accessories. I think it would be a great attraction.”

  “Do you want Pegasus?”

  Susan made a snap decision. “I do, if I can think of a way to display it.

  Our ceilings—”

  “I was in Mayfield’s once on a trip to New York. Isn’t there an area between the first-floor escalators that’s quite high and open?”

  He was right, of course. “We have about fifty feet there,” she agreed. “But your balloons are higher than that when inflated.”

  “We could partially inflate them, enough to show the design, and hold them up with wires. It’s got to be faked somehow anyway, since I doubt that you want the burners going to heat the air.”

  “How else can you keep them inflated?”

  “With gas. Some European balloonists still use hydrogen or helium, though hydrogen is very dangerous. You don’t want a fire. A small amount of helium would do the job. We don’t have to fly off anywhere.”

  “We certainly don’t want a fire,” she agreed. ‘This is a fairly dangerous sport, isn’t it?”

  Kevin Nova smiled down at her. He was half a head taller than she and when he stood this close she was quite aware of having to look up at him. “Why do you say that?”

  “Duncan mentioned a Bruce Manchester who fell out of his balloon last week.”

  “Yes. A terrible tragedy, but it was no accident. I was right below him when it happened. Just before he fell I’ll swear I heard a loud crack like a gunshot. Then his body came hurtling past me.”

  “You’re saying he was shot?”

  “I don’t know. The autopsy found no bullet wound. But that’s what I heard.”

  “You think he shot himself?”

  “Or someone else shot him.”

  Susan shook her head, trying to grasp it. “But he was alone, wasn’t he?”

  “He was alone,” Nova agreed. “The balloon got tangled in the treetops

  and had to be hauled out by Leavor and some others. It was a mess. But then Manchester was something of a mess too after falling a couple of thousand feet. Of course, when there was no bullet wound, no one believed my story of hearing a shot.”

  “It must have been something else. His foot might have hit something in the basket as he fell.”

  “Nothing would make that noise. Besides, he wasn’t the first accident.”

  “He wasn’t?” She had the feeling she was about to learn something she’d rather not know. “Duncan’s wife Diana died the same way last summer.”

  Glen Leavor and some others had arrived while she talked with Nova, and the repairman announced that everyone’s balloon had been safely recovered and delivered. Apparently some of the group kept their equipment at home in the garage while those cramped for space rented storage sheds nearby. Susan spotted Rita Bloom just handing Leavor a drink and went to join them. He was the sort who kept his baseball cap on in the house but he seemed pleasant enough as he conversed with Rita.

  “Listen, Glen,” she was saying, “if I can go up in one of those things anyone can. I’ll get Philip to take us both up next week.”

  He held up his free hand in mock alarm. “No, I feel safer on the ground. Sometimes when I pick up the bags after an accident they’re punctured and shredded. I don’t want to be in one if that happens.”

  “I hear there was an accident just last week,” Susan interjected. “Manchester’s balloon was punctured.”

  “It ran into a tree,” Leavor said, taking a sip of his drink.

  “Could something have punctured the bag before Manchester fell?”

  Rita smiled at her. “You’ve been listening to Kevin and his story about hearing a shot. When they couldn’t find a bullet in Manchester, Kevin decided it must ha
ve punctured the envelope and the sudden deflation threw Bruce out of the basket. But it couldn’t have happened that way. First of all, he wouldn’t have heard a distant shot so clearly. Whatever he heard, he thought it came from right above them, where Manchester’s basket was. Second, a tiny bullet hole wouldn’t have deflated that huge envelope so quickly. It would have been more like a slow leak.”

  “The balloon drifted on for several minutes after Manchester fell,” Glen Leavor confirmed. “I was watching it from the ground with the others in their chase cars. The burner was off and it just gradually drifted lower until it got snagged in the trees.”

  “Someone told me Mrs. Rowe died the same way last summer.”

  Rita seemed to pale a bit at the words, but she was quick to correct them. “No, Diana’s death was entirely different. It was a terrible blow to Duncan.”

  “Didn’t she fall from a balloon?”

  It was Leavor who answered. “That was suicide. She left a note for Duncan. He has it framed. She’d flown with him and knew how to handle the balloon. That day she took it up without any chase car. She knew she wouldn’t need one.”

  “It was terrible for him,” Rita confirmed. “He was a wreck for months.”

  “I’m glad to see he seems to have recovered,” Susan said.

  “He’s getting there, slowly.”

  Duncan Rowe joined them at that point and the conversation ceased. He’d had a few drinks and Susan could see it was no time to talk business. “Could we get together tomorrow,” she asked, “and go over the contract?”

  “Contract? Sure, anything for you. Want to go for another ride with me?”

  “I don’t think so. Tomorrow I’ll stay on firm ground.”

  He let his eyes wander over the other guests, finally settling on Nova. “Kevin, are you going up tomorrow?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” the bearded man replied. “I’ll race you, one on one.”

  “Ah, Duncan—”

  “I’d lay money on that race!” Leavor announced. “Five hundred on Duncan to win!” Within minutes his bet was covered by the others. They agreed on a ten A.M. race, weather permitting.

  “I never thought balloon racing was a gambling sport,” Susan remarked to Duncan Rowe. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” It was time to call it a day.

  She was up early and left her motel by nine, hoping she could catch Duncan at home before the race. But when she reached the house only Rita Bloom was there, loading the dishwasher with breakfast things. “You just missed him. Philip is driving him over to the launching field where we were yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry,” Susan admitted. “If there’s going to be another champagne celebration after this one I’ll never get my contracts signed.”

  “We’ll try to keep him under control.” There was something grim about her tone of voice that Susan couldn’t help noticing. “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, nothing. Philip says it’s foolish, that I read too many detective stories.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’m worried about this race. I keep thinking there might be another accident, like what happened to Mr. Manchester last week.”

  “Why should there be another?”

  “Well, that’s the part Philip says is foolish. You see, Duncan was supposed to take that balloon up. It was called the Star-burst, with a dark blue envelope and random white spots for stars. At the last minute Mr. Manchester wanted it so they switched and Duncan took Daisy like he usually does. If someone did kill Mr. Manchester, maybe they were after Duncan.”

  It sounded crazy, but Susan had learned that the truth was often crazy. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get over there.”

  The field, when they reached it, presented a quite different sight from the previous day. There were almost as many cars and onlookers, but now only two of the hot-air balloons were in position and fully inflated. “Pegasus and Daisy,” Rita observed. “There they are.”

  Susan drove past the waiting Pegasus, barely acknowledging Kevin’s wave from the basket. She parked up close to Daisy and darted across the trampled grass to the big red-and-white-striped balloon. “Duncan! Wait!”

  “Wait for what?” he asked, turning the fuel valve up a bit. “You can’t join me today, Susan, much as I’d like you to.”

  She gripped the edge of the basket from the outside, examining every inch of it, searching for anything out of the ordinary, but it was exactly as it had been the previous day. Certainly there was no danger there, no frayed ropes or loosened fastenings.

  “We have to release it,” Philip shouted. “Kevin is taking off.”

  “All right,” she said with a sigh, letting go of the basket, smothering her fears with a smile and wave to Duncan. “Good luck!”

  Daisy was off the ground only seconds after Pegasus, rising straight up into the clear morning sky. “Come on, if you want to chase it,” Philip yelled to Rita and Susan. They piled into his white convertible and took off. The course was to be ten kilometers—six miles—across the open countryside over flat farmlands with a minimum of trees, he explained as he drove. It was a short race as races go, but the one-on-one challenge had been more sport than serious competition.

  Susan glanced back to see a line of cars following them. She recognized Glen Leavor’s red truck and the chase car for Kevin’s balloon. Most of the others had been at Duncan’s house the previous night. High above them, the colorful balloons had drifted far apart. It was difficult from this angle to tell which was in the lead.

  Philip turned onto a side road to better follow his uncle’s route, and then it happened without warning. Suddenly a tiny speck was falling from the basket of the red and white balloon.

  It took Susan just an instant to realize that the speck was a man and the man must be Duncan Rowe.

  They found his body in the center of a cornfield, after searching the lanes of knee-high stalks until they spotted him sprawled on his back staring at the cloudless sky. Rita screamed and tried to run to him, but Philip held her back. Susan, seeing there was nothing she could do here, glanced back at the road where Leavor’s truck had just pulled up.

  She ran back to him and said, “Duncan’s dead. Let’s go after that balloon.”

  “What for?” he asked blankly.

  “Something killed him. I want to know what.”

  Leavor headed back onto the main road and sped toward the area where the red and white balloon was beginning to lose altitude. Kevin’s Pegasus balloon had continued on course. Apparently he was unaware of what had happened. “These things need radios,” Susan said.

  “They use cellular phones to communicate during formal events, but this was just fooling around.”

  “It wasn’t fooling around for Duncan,” she reminded him grimly. “I know. I didn’t mean—”

  “There was his wife last summer and Bruce Manchester just last week.

  They have to be connected.”

  The balloon Daisy was losing altitude at a faster rate. It just missed a stand of trees and bounced across a dirty road into a ditch. They reached it within minutes. Susan and Leavor were both out of the truck, running toward it as the red and white envelope settled down around it.

  “Looks all right,” Leavor announced, pushing some of the deflated fabric out of the basket. “I can’t see what went wrong.”

  “Neither can I,” Susan admitted, “but if he jumped, something made him do it.”

  “Here come some of the others. We’ll get this onto my truck. I’m sure the police will want to examine it.”

  With a little help Leavor quickly loaded the basket into his truck and collected the envelope into its cylinder. Susan rode back with him and they encountered Kevin Nova on the way, flagging them down from his chase car. “What happened?” Nova asked Susan, the blood drained from his face. “I heard—”

  She nodded. “Duncan is dead. He jumped or fell from his balloon. We don’t know what happened.”

  “Just like Manchester.”

&nb
sp; “It appears so.”

  “Are Philip and Rita back at the house?”

  “They’re with his body,” Leavor told him. “It’s in a cornfield about a mile back along this road.”

  “Go on. We’ll follow you.”

  Someone had called an ambulance and it arrived just as they did. Rita was sobbing now, with Philip trying to comfort her. A state police car had arrived on the scene and Philip asked Susan if she could drive Rita back to Duncan’s house in the convertible. It was no time to explain that New Yorkers rarely drive even if they have a license, so she agreed. It was like another rental car. Once they were under way, the blond young woman stopped crying and settled down. “Philip was very close to his uncle,” she explained. “I feel very sad for him.”

  “Have you known Philip long?”

  “Since last summer. We met in Des Moines just after I graduated from Drake. He’s been wonderful to me.”

  “Did Duncan have any enemies? Is there anyone who would want to kill him?”

  “No one. He was very popular, especially among the balloonists.”

  “Yet I feel that someone or something forced him to jump. Manchester’s death the week before is too much of a coincidence, especially since he went up in the balloon Duncan was planning to pilot.”

  “You know, they used to write mysteries like this, with locked rooms and impossible crimes. They don’t do it so much anymore.” She began warming to the subject as Susan drove. “I’ve read some stories about killing somebody like this.”

  “In a balloon?”

  “No, no, I don’t remember one of those. But there was a young woman on a balcony once who fell to her death. It turned out the killer, on another balcony, used a bullwhip to yank her off and send her falling. He wrapped it around her neck and pulled.”

  Susan nodded. “Kevin Nova was right below Manchester’s balloon, and claims to have heard a shot. It could have been the crack of a bullwhip.”

  “Except he wouldn’t have said that if he did it. And besides, he was far away from Duncan’s balloon today. Bullwhips and lassos just wouldn’t have worked. If it’s murder it has to be some other method.”