Magnolia Gods (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 2) (12 page)

She stared at Mike. “How much you got?”

“A hundred dollars.”

She smiled, her stained teeth showing, “Two hundred dollars and you get what’s in the bag.”

Mike pulled out his wallet and counted out the money into her hand.

She grabbed the bills, counting them one by one.

“All right,” she said as she reached into the case and took out the first item.

Winkee spoke. “Hiram was a fool. He done all that work, all those years of work, and they just cut him off like he never existed. They cut me and my lady off too. Just like that they stopped the check.”

“Shut up, Winkee.” The woman handed Mike an old stock certificate made out to Hiram Jones from the briefcase.

Mike read, “Aviatrice Corporation, one share common.”

“That’s all he had,” said Winkee. “He used to look at that and say that he finally bought it because the bastards would never give him any.”

Then she handed Mike a folded engineering drawing with three views of an engine system. Mike knelt and spread the drawings on the floor while she squatted, watching him.

She said, “He used to do the same thing. Just kneel there and look at them drawings. Then he’d get up and walk around and around the room waving his hand in the air.”

Winkee fluttered his arms above his head and added, “Like he was trying to figure them out and couldn’t quite get it. I asked if I could help but he just cut me down, said I wasn’t an engineer and it was a waste of his time to explain anything to me.”

“You understand them drawings?” asked the woman, staring at Mike.

“A little bit,” said Mike. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. It seems to be some kind of turbine.”

She put one bare knee on the floor for balance and handed him a photograph. It was a small square black and white picture of a man in coveralls. Mike looked at it and then at Winkee.

“You’re the Museum man, you figure it out,” said Winkee.

“Tell him, Winkee,” the woman said, turning and staring at him, her hands on her hips, the case tucked under her arm.

“That’s Lawson standing next to the plane he stole.”

Mike looked at the photograph intently.

“That’s the photograph that Hiram used to show around when he was looking for the airplane,” said Winkee.

“Show around? What do you mean?” asked Mike.

“I didn’t mean nothin’,” said Winkee.

“Hiram was traveling around to the airports all over the East Coast, long before we come here,” the woman said. “Even after we come, sometimes he’d be gone for days. Then he got sick and he didn’t go no more. He just started looking out the window all day, but from behind the curtains so no one outside could see him.”

“So he thought the seaplane was on land, not in the ocean?” said Mike. He tried to hide the excitement in his voice.

“I ain’t sayin’” Winkee replied, rubbing his knee where the woman had kicked him.

“You ain’t hurt,” she said over her shoulder.

Mike looked at the aircraft. He could see some familiar lines. “This is helpful, because it’s the actual plane.”

He tapped the picture on its edge as he looked at Winkee. “This picture shows a strange hump coming up from the top of the wing between the engines. Did Hiram tell you what that was?”

“No, he never did,” said Winkee.

“Here’s something else.” The woman said, handing him a tissue thin copy of a typed letter.

“January 11, 1964, West Virginia.

“Interviewed an old-timer who was near the airport here on July 4, 1946. He remembered the fireworks, he said, but said that no aircraft came in or went out that day or the next. He said he would have seen something as big as a Catalina and especially something that big that was flying real quiet, well, that would have been talked all over town. Said a few of them were around in the last few years for fighting forest fires but nothing like the one I described. Said he would keep an eye out for me.”

Winkee continued, “He had a lot of them notes. Aviatrice got all the rest of them.”

“The last thing is this letter he sent to the baby cow. That’s what we called her.” She chuckled as she handed it to him.

To: Jessica Veal, Aviatrice, New York, New York

“Now that you have joined your father, I thought I’d bring you up to date on the work I have been doing for Aviatrice for a long time and at your father’s request.

“As your father has probably told you, I was there when the Navy brought in the raft. I saw the uniform when they took it out of the inflatable. As far as the cigarettes in the pocket, the matches, well, I noted that they were all dry. Too dry if the raft had been bouncing around in the ocean for two days. Somebody put the uniform in that raft. Somebody, maybe Lawson himself, wanted to mislead the people searching for the plane, make ‘em think it went down in the ocean when it really didn’t.

“I’m sure that the plane, wherever it rests, is rusted and corroded into dust. Any documents that could have been inside her fuselage are dust, and you can rest assured that no one could ever read them. I don’t see why Bernie continues to be worried. Of course, it gives me something to do these days. I haven’t been very well.

“After the ship was stolen, we thought long and hard about Lawson’s destination and finally decided that if he went to land, and that was likely, then he had to go to some airport somewhere to bring that plane in. The plane was an amphibian so it could land on land or water equally easy.

“Bernie has wanted me to concentrate on the western airport facilities since he felt that Lawson would be able to hide best out there in the mountains. He has always suspected, you know how your father is, that the plane was landed, disassembled, stored in some warehouse until the suspect could arrange to negotiate for its return.

“I figure Lawson flew her very low and planned to ditch her as soon as he could to avoid the radar. I think something went wrong and that’s why we were never contacted by Lawson. I think the man was killed. Bringing a plane that size in alone at night probably was too big a job for him. As a result, I think we are looking for a wreck somewhere in heavy underbrush that has just not come to light yet.

“To do this right I went to see most of the airports in the target area, radius a hundred and fifty or so miles from Philadelphia. As we know, that’s the most he could have flown before the radar began working again. Then I divided the areas up and, over the years, went back, interviewing anyone who was around at the time of the theft. I think Bernie and you will agree, I have been pretty organized. In 1947 to 1957, I worked west to northwest. Then from 1958 to 1968, I worked west to southwest. I took trips in the summer and spent a lot of time in the mountain areas. From 1969 to 1978, I went northwest to north, talked to people up north in the Adirondacks. From 1979 to 1989, I moved into New England. Then from 1990, I’ve been going back over the area of Virginia and North Carolina. Finally, I can go back down around the Delmarva Peninsula, around the Chesapeake Bay where Lawson grew up and had his farm. That area was checked so thoroughly by the Navy that I don’t think we have anyone left to interview. Besides, the local people are very patriotic. They wouldn’t hide a traitor. Those same locals went out of their way in 1946 to let the world know they weren’t proud of living in the birthplace of Lawson. I don’t know much else to tell you. It’s been a lot of work. I’m going to need some more expense money soon.”

The last page was an answer from Jessica Veal.

“Hiram, here is your monthly expense check. Keep a low profile but get the job done. I want this cleaned up and off my desk. Bernie is tired of it. He says he wants no loose strings. You know what that means. You know how he cleans out files. Jessica Veal.”

Mike left the apartment after that. When he walked out, Winkie and the woman were standing in the middle of that bare, smelly room, their lives enriched by the two hundred dollars. As he closed the door behind him, they had already begun to fight. He heard her say,

“Don’t you hit my face and body anymore. It’s the only way we got left to make any more money.”

He had learned that the aircraft might be on land. He wondered what Jessica meant by the term “clearing the files.” If those words meant what he thought they did, no wonder old Hiram had been watching out the window. Files might mean people who were to be thrown out, gotten rid of. Worst case, that might mean that Hiram was a marked man. Hiram might have died from his cancer just in time. Mike wondered if it were just matter of time before Winkee and his woman might also be considered part of the “files.”

Mike had to assume that Aviatrice was watching that apartment. He knew that he and Robin would be followed from here on. He kept an eye behind him as he left the neighborhood but saw no car following. Mike drove as fast as he could, keeping within the speed limit. He noticed some worry in Robin’s face as she read the material.

“Don’t you wish you’d stayed out west jumping out of airplanes?” Mike said.

“Seems like that was a lot safer,” she replied.

They were going west from Philadelphia. He still kept an eye in his rear view mirror. He had stopped at a drugstore for a brown envelope and some stamps and had mailed the Hiram Jones materials to Jeremy’s home. Perhaps this was unnecessary, he thought, but he felt better with the materials out of his possession. Jeremy would understand and keep them at his place. He also worried about the staff at the Museum. The thought of Bullard coming in and hassling Gladys angered him. He smiled. Gladys might just get the best of Bullard.

More than ever he had to see Lawson’s secretary from the Navy Yard days. He knew from the lawyer that she had been declared insane. Mike had almost no chance that she would be any more cogent for him than she had for other investigators. Yet, he had to try. He had to see her. He wanted to ask her about Lawson’s motive for taking the airplane. Also he wanted to ask her what she knew about Bernard Law and Aviatrice.

As he drove Mike thought about the future. From what he had learned at Winkee’s apartment, he surmised that Aviatrice, or at least Wall, Jessica, Bullard, the three of them, were obviously still interested in finding this plane. If they got a report that he had visited Winkee, they’d realize he knew that the plane had probably crashed on land, that it did not explode at sea. He knew now why they wanted to keep others from the undersea research. Someone might figure out that the plane was not there, and that it was on land, someone who was willing to put in more effort that the Navy and Hiram. The question was how nasty would the Aviatrice trio become if professional researchers like Mike and his team actually found the seaplane and got whatever documents Aviatrice seemed so bent on retrieving. He was not afraid but in the last hours he had become more cautious, like a hunter or, he grinned ironically, like the hunted.

He glanced at Robin next to him as she tried to find another rock station. She was looking for her song, she said. She had the ability to put any kind of danger out of her mind. He smiled, looking at her long hair blowing in the breeze. Memories came back, memories of flying that old biplane with her at the controls, and memories of the nights they had together before she left.

“Listen to this, Mike,” said Robin. She turned up the volume.

“In New York, a woman who failed to report for work has been declared missing by her employer, Aviatrice Corporation. Company employees going to her residence called in city detectives when her apartment was found ransacked.”

“I’ll call Jeremy.” Mike picked up his cellular phone and rang the Museum telephone. Gladys answered and he said hello as he always did.

“We have visitors and are very busy here today. If you want to speak to Jeremy, you’ll have to call him back later,” she said, in the most formal way she had ever talked to him, as if he were a customer, as if she did not know who was calling, as if she didn’t want to speak to him, and then she ended his call by immediately hanging up on him. Clicking shut his phone, he looked at Robin and suddenly realized that Glady’s was telling him some unfriendly visitors were at the Museum asking questions.

Chapter Seven

6 PM, July 1

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

A building doesn’t look crazy. At least most buildings don’t. Therefore nothing convinced Mike that the people inside this place were the slightest bit different from people anywhere else. Serene, it could have been a rest home for the grandmothers and grandfathers of the world instead of a holding place for the mentally ill.

“Becca Scott. She’s on our watch list,” said the nurse at the information desk. She looked up. “That means she’s about to die.”

“I’m glad we’re in time,” said Mike.

“She's my only great aunt,” Robin lied.

“Yes, she’s one of our older residents,” the nurse said in a high pitched voice that sounded like a series of shrieks. Patients were sitting around the lobby. One young woman in a white robe leaned her head back as she heard the nurse speak, as if the voice were a strong wind forcing her off balance.

“I'll get you an escort,” the nurse said.

The white coated attendant who showed them down the maze of corridors was friendly and talkative. They trailed behind and Robin whispered to Mike that the attendant was probably starved for rational conversation.

“You've come to see our Becca. That's great. First outside visitor for her in a long time who isn't from the local church. Of course, the men from her old employer, the Navy Yard, used to come by, but I haven’t even seen them for a few years. They don’t visit with her anyway. They just look in her door when they come, write in their notebook, and then leave after a few minutes. Those visitors left quite an impression on all of us though.”

“Why?” asked Robin.

“The noise from the leather heels of their shoes. People who visit here usually walk very quietly like you folks. Noise disturbs some of our people. One resident confided in me a full two weeks after Becca’s visitors left that he could still hear the noise of those men’s shoes.”