‘Uh-huh. Just before Claire left to go home.’
‘And the Cessna Skymaster was parked and tied down and empty?’
‘Yep. Parked right where yours is now.’ Ezra pointed, and Dees pulled back a little. The mechanic smelled quite a little bit like a very old Roquefort cheese which had been pickled in Gilbey’s Gin.
‘Did Claire happen to say if he called a cab for the pilot? To take him to a motel? Because there don’t seem to be any in easy walking distance.’
‘There ain’t,’ Ezra agreed. ‘Closest one’s the Sea Breeze, and that’s two mile away. Maybe more.’ He scratched his stubbly chin. ‘But I don’t remember Claire saying ary word about callin the fella a cab.’
Dees made a mental note to call the cab companies in the area just the same. At that time he was going on what seemed like a reasonable assumption: that the guy he was looking for slept in a bed, like almost everyone else.
‘What about a limo?’ he asked.
‘Nope,’ Ezra said more positively, ‘Claire didn’t say nothing about no limbo, and he woulda mentioned that.’
Dees nodded and decided to call the nearby limo companies, too. He would also question the rest of the staff, but he expected no light to dawn there; this old boozehound was about all there was. He’d had a cup of coffee with Claire before Claire left for the day, and another with him when Claire came back on duty that night, and it looked like that was all she wrote. Except for the Night Flier himself, Ezra seemed to have been the last person to see Claire Bowie alive.
The subject of these ruminations looked slyly off into the distance, scratched the wattles below his chin, then shifted his bloodshot gaze back to Dees. ‘Claire didn’t say nothing about no cab or limbo, but he did say something else.’
‘That so?’
‘Yep,’ Ezra said. He unzipped a pocket of his grease-stained coverall, removed a pack of Chesterfields, lit one up, and coughed a dismal old man’s cough. He looked at Dees through the drifting smoke with an expression of half-baked craftiness. ‘Might not mean nothing, but then again, it might. It sure struck Claire perculyer, though. Must have, because most of the time old Claire wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.’
‘What was it he said?’
‘Don’t quite remember,’ Ezra said. ‘Sometimes, you know, when I forget things, a picture of Alexander Hamilton sorta refreshes my memory.’
‘How about one of Abe Lincoln?’ Dees asked dryly.
After a moment’s consideration — a short one — Hannon agreed that sometimes Lincoln also did the trick, and a portrait of this gentleman consequently passed from Dees’s wallet to Ezra’s slightly palsied hand. Dees thought that a portrait of George Washington might have turned the trick, but he wanted to make sure the man was entirely on his side . . . and besides, it all came out of the expense account.
‘So give.’
‘Claire said the guy looked like he must be goin to one hell of a fancy party,’ Ezra said.
‘Oh? Why was that?’ Dees was thinking he should have stuck with Washington after all.
‘Said the guy looked like he just stepped out of a bandbox. Tuxedo, silk tie, all that stuff.’ Ezra paused. ‘Claire said the guy was even wearin a big cloak. Red as a fire engine inside, black as a woodchuck’s asshole outside. Said when it spread out behind him, it looked like a goddam bat’s wing.’
A large word lit in red neon suddenly flashed on in Dees’s mind, and the word was BINGO.
You don’t know it, my gin-soaked friend, Dees thought, but you may have just said the words that are going to make you famous.
‘All these questions about Claire,’ Ezra said, ‘and you ain’t never once ast if I saw anything funny.’
‘Did you?’
‘As a matter of fact, I did.’
‘What was that, my friend?’
Ezra scratched his stubbly chin with long, yellow nails, looked wisely at Dees from the corners of his bloodshot eyes, and then took another puff on his cigarette.
‘Here we go again,’ Dees said, but he produced another picture of Abe Lincoln and was careful to keep his voice and face amiable. His instincts were wide awake now, and they were telling him that Mr Ginhead wasn’t quite squeezed dry. Not yet, anyway.
‘That don’t seem like enough for all I’m tellin you,’ Ezra said reproachfully. ‘Rich city fella like you ought to be able to do better’n ten bucks.’
Dees looked at his watch — a heavy Rolex with diamonds gleaming on the face. ‘Gosh!’ he said. ‘Look how late it’s getting! And I haven’t even been over to talk with the Falmouth police yet!’
Before he could do more than start to get up, the five had disappeared from between his fingers and had joined its mate in the pocket of Hannon’s coverall.
‘All right, if you’ve got something else to tell, tell it,’ Dees said. The amiability was gone now.
‘I’ve got places to go and people to see.’
The mechanic thought it over, scratching his wattles and sending out little puffs of ancient, cheesy smell. Then he said, almost reluctantly: ‘Seen a big pile of dirt under that Skymaster.
Right under the luggage bay, it was.’
‘That so?’
‘Ayuh. Kicked it with my boot.’
Dees waited. He could do that.
‘Nasty stuff. Full of worms.’
Dees waited. This was good, useful stuff, but he didn’t think the old man was wrung completely dry even yet.
‘And maggots,’ Ezra said. ‘There was maggots, too. Like where something died.’
Dees stayed that night at the Sea Breeze Motel, and was winging his way to the town of Alderton in upstate New York by eight o’clock the next morning.
5
Of all the things Dees didn’t understand about his quarry’s movements, the thing which puzzled him the most was how leisurely the Flier had been. In Maine and in Maryland, he had actually lingered before killing. His only one-night stand had been in Alderton which he had visited two weeks after doing Claire Bowie.
Lakeview Airport in Alderton was even smaller than CCA — a single unpaved runway and a combined Ops/UNICOM that was no more than a shed with a fresh coat of paint. There was no instrument approach; there was, however, a large satellite dish so none of the flying farmers who used the place would have to miss Murphy Brown or Wheel of Fortune or anything really important like that.
One thing Dees liked a lot: the unpaved Lakeview runway was just as silky-smooth as the one in Maine had been. I could get used to this, Dees thought as he dropped the Beech neatly onto the surface and began to slow it down. No big thuds over asphalt patches, no potholes that want to ground-loop you after you come in . . . yeah, I could get used to this real easy.
In Alderton, nobody had asked for pictures of Presidents or friends of Presidents. In Alderton, the whole town — a community of just under a thousand souls – was in shock, not merely the
few part-timers who, along with the late Buck Kendall, had run Lakeview Airport almost as a charity (and certainly in the red). There was really no one to talk to, anyway, not even a witness of the Ezra Hannon caliber. Hannon had been bleary, Dees reflected, but at least he had been quotable.
‘Must have been a mighty man,’ one of the part-timers told Dees. ‘Ole Buck, he dressed out right around two-twenty, and he was easy most of the time, but if you did get him riled, he made you sorry. Seen him box down a fella in a carny show that came through P’keepsie two years ago. That kind of fightin ain’t legal, accourse, but Buck was short a payment on that little Piper of his, so he boxed that carny fighter down. Collected two hundred dollars and got it to the loan comp’ny about two days before they was gonna send out someone to repo his ride, I guess.’
The part-timer shook his head, looking genuinely distressed, and Dees wished he’d thought to uncase his camera. Inside View readers would have lapped up that long, lined, mournful face.
Dees made a mental note to find out if the late Buck Kendall had had a dog. Inside View readers also lapped up pictures of the dead man’s dog. You posed it on the porch of the deceased’s house and captioned it BUFFY’S LONG WAIT BEGINS, or something similar.
‘It’s a damn shame,’ Dees said sympathetically.
The part-timer sighed and nodded. ‘Guy musta got him from behind. That’s the only way I can figger it.’
Dees didn’t know from which direction Gerard ‘Buck’ Kendall had been gotten, but he knew that this time the victim’s throat had not been ripped out. This time there were holes, holes from which ‘Dwight Renfield’ had presumably sucked his victim’s blood. Except, according to the coroner’s report, the holes were on opposite sides of the neck, one in the jugular vein and the other in the carotid artery. They weren’t the discreet little bite marks of the Bela Lugosi era or the slightly gorier ones of the Christopher Lee flicks, either. The coroner’s report spoke in centimeters, but Dees could translate well enough, and Morrison had the indefatigable Libby Grannit to explain what the coroner’s dry language only partially revealed: the killer either had teeth the size of one of View’s beloved Bigfeet, or he had made the holes in Kendall’s neck in a much more prosaic fashion – with a hammer and a nail.