Authors: Harry Bingham
There have always been folks that like to boast the New World has always been precisely that. No kings, no aristocrats, nothing to stop a guy starting with nothing and ending with the world. It’s a good theory. One with plenty of truth. But also some holes. And Miss Penelope Marie Corinna Anne DeMontfort Hamilton was one of them.
Her family could trace its American lineage back to one Sir Christopher Hamilton, an aristocratic adventurer from the court of Charles II. The family had bought land, bought slaves, got lucky, stayed smart, made money. They’d ridden out good times and bad times. On their estates, blacks came to be treated, not well exactly, but not as badly as most places. And, by the time Penelope Hamilton landed her plane in Captain Rockwell’s backyard, the family was one of the most prosperous, respected and influential families in the old Confederate South.
But that type of family brings its own problems.
Pen Hamilton was expected to dance well, dress well, ride well – and above all marry well. Her dancing was OK. Her riding was good. But now, at the age of twenty-four, she had so far shown no interest at all in hitching herself to any of the eligible young men who came marching through her parents’ Charleston mansion like so many well-scrubbed soldiers.
Where other girls fell in love with men, Pen had fallen in love with planes. She flew competitively. She flew for fun. She flew because being alone in a cockpit made more sense to her than any other way of being alive. So far, as one of the few female fliers in America and the world, she had set the women’s altitude record, the women’s speed record, and a clutch of long-distance firsts. And so far, despite her impressive haul of records, she had never encountered a male aviator who had treated her as anything other than a curiosity. At best, she was a novelty. At worst, some kind of gender-twisting freak.
Until she’d met Rockwell.
He’d been surprised, of course. Anyone would have been. But he’d treated her just as a regular flier. He’d admired her landing and said so. He’d admired her plane and said so. He’d been unimpressed with her ignorance of her engine and come pretty close to saying that too. In the short time they’d spent together, Pen had felt connected with Rockwell in a way she’d never felt connected with any flier or any man before.
Which was why she was in a state of shock, when she strolled down to her own private airfield one morning to find her favourite plane, the Curtiss racer, sitting idly on the grass.
‘How come this is here? You sent a truck? I thought I said –’
‘No, ma’am,’ said the mechanic. ‘Guy brought it in. This morning. I figured you knew.’
‘A man, your height, blue eyes, blond hair cut very short?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘What time? When did he leave?’
‘Came in eight o’clock, thereabouts. Left again right after.’
‘You didn’t tell him to come up to the house? He didn’t ask to come?’
‘Guy seemed in a hurry to leave, ma’am. Asked for a ride to the railroad.’
Pen looked at her watch. It was after ten now. The train out had left at nine. She bit her lip, unreasonably upset. She’d made a connection with Abe. She’d been sure of it. She didn’t mean that Abe had to go falling in love with her … but not even to call in and say hello? Not even to spend ten minutes chatting about his flight? It was rude, downright rude.
‘Ma’am…’
The mechanic looked awkward, keen to avoid Pen’s direct look.
‘Yes?’
‘You just might want to check the airplane over.’
‘Why? There’s nothing wrong with it, is there?’
‘Oh no, nothing like that. She seems in good shape and all…’
He trailed off and Pen, keen to be on her own anyway, left the shade at the edge of the hangar and walked over the clipped grass to the little racer.
For a second, she didn’t know why she was there. The plane had just flown up from Miami. Its little raked-back windscreen needed wiping down. No doubt the great Captain Rockwell would want her to fuss over the distributor blocks, whatever they were. But there was nothing unusual.
Nothing, until she happened to glance into the cockpit, into the angle of the rudder bar.
There lay a little tumble of rose petals, pale pink, pretty. She moved to touch them: they were still soft, but already beginning to wilt.
He’d come with roses. Seen the house. Ditched the roses. Run.
Pen felt suddenly angry. In the end, the great war hero had proved himself as small as any other man. A hero in the cockpit, he was a coward in matters of the heart. Men were men. Planes were planes. Pen knew which she liked the best.
The newspaper which Willard wanted to check was filed in a high mahogany bureau slotted with a dozen low drawers. In front of the bureau was a tall thin man with a thin greyhound face. The man wasn’t reading a newspaper or looking for one. He didn’t look like he could read one without moving his lips.
‘Excuse me, please,’ said Willard.
The man said nothing.
‘I said excuse me.’
The man’s deep brown greyhound eyes looked slowly up into Willard’s and there was a half-second of pointless, meaningless confrontation. Then the man produced a matchstick, held it up like a conjuror, then placed it with exaggerated care in the side of his mouth. He moved away. About sixteen inches, just enough for Willard to open the drawer.
Willard opened the drawer, got the paper, ignored the man.
The brief newspaper report confirmed what he’d already learned from the coroner’s report. The day that he died, Arthur Martin had been driving alone. There were no witnesses as to his speed or manner of driving. What was clear, however, was that the driver had lost control of his vehicle and crashed into a road-side tree. The
Times
report contained a photo showing the car buried in the trunk of a substantial maple tree. The driver’s head had been struck by the steel bar across the top of his windshield. The blow had been fatal. Verdict: death by motor accident.
Willard’s anxieties began to subside, but there was one further check he had to make. He surreptitiously clipped the photo, then drove up into Connecticut towards New Haven. His big Packard flew along, its tyres humming a private tune of satisfaction. Birds sang. The air was sweet.
He found the road where the accident had happened: tree lined, rural, quiet. The tree which had claimed Arthur Martin’s life was easy to pick out: a big old maple, split by lightning. A car had rammed the tree. Its driver had died. The story was sad but simple.
Willard began to relax. The tension that had been gathering in his back, legs and head for longer than he cared to remember began suddenly to release. He pulled the photo from his pocket to check his memory one last time. He stared at it, then was about to put it away, when a leap of horror jumped to engulf him.
The newspaper photo showed Martin’s Studebaker jammed up against the trunk of the tree. But the tree stood just fifteen feet back from the road. Given the angle at which the car had struck it, Arthur Martin must have left the road
at right angles.
For his death to have been an accident, one would have to believe that Martin had tugged his car around a full ninety degrees without loss of speed and accelerated at top speed into the trunk.
Willard went cold. His back tightened. The birdsong died.
Willard climbed into his Packard and, on an open stretch of road, Willard tried the manoeuvre himself. He couldn’t do it. The thing was impossible. To turn the full ninety degrees, Willard had to bring his automobile down to just fifteen miles an hour. At that speed, Martin could have damaged his fender, but not a lot else. If, on the other hand, Martin had been dead before his car went anywhere, somebody could have put his body in the car, put the car in the field opposite the maple tree and driven it full tilt across the field, over the road and into the tree.
And that was when Willard knew it. Arthur Martin hadn’t died in a car accident. He’d been murdered.
Abe snapped awake.
He was lying under a single blanket on the hangar camp bed. Something had woken him, but he wasn’t sure what. He listened in the darkness. The tin roof around him was noisy in any sort of breeze, but the air outside was still and, aside from a few creaks and aches, the hangar was quiet. He sniffed the air. He could smell gasoline and castor oil; airplane dope and the smell of paint; yesterday’s bacon and tomorrow’s coffee.
Perhaps it had been nothing. In his dreams, Abe had been flying over Pen’s house again. He remembered the masculine stiffness of the controls. She must be strong to fly a plane like that. But in the dream, the whole episode had got muddled up. The roses, the plane, the girl, the mansion. Abe had had the feeling of searching for something and not finding it.
He was about to lie down again when he heard a sound from outside. Something metallic, the click of a car door maybe. Abe felt for his boots and flying jacket and pulled them on over his nightshirt. He found a flashlight and slipped it into a pocket. Then, groping along the workbench, he found a crowbar, four feet long, claw-headed and heavy. He picked it up and crept around Poll’s oustretched wings to the hangar door.
Another car door opened and closed. There was a low muttering of voices. In places where the overlaps on the tin roof were inadequate, Abe caught glimpses of a flashlight. On just the other side of the door, the voices gathered and stopped.
‘We knock first?’
A second voice said, ‘We don’t need to. We’re friends, ain’t we?’
The door pushed open. Abe held his bar back, ready to swing. There were two flashlights outside, prodding the ground. Abe saw legs: two or three pairs, dark shoes, dark pants. The door into the hangar had just been punched straight through the wall. The front arch of the hangar was braced by a solid steel girder. In the centre of the arch, a gently sloping ramp made it easy for Poll to climb in and out, but here at the side, the girder formed a hurdle a full five inches high. One of the men moved forwards, caught his foot, and began to topple. Abe kicked hard at the pair of legs still standing, grabbed a handful of coat and jerked. The second man crashed forwards onto the first. Abe raised his crowbar and flicked his flashlight on.
The first face he lit up belonged to Bob Mason, who was lying on the ground, trapped under the second man’s body. Everyone was swearing at everyone. Abe lowered his bar.
‘Evening, Mason. You should have said you were coming.’
He turned on the electric light. There were four bulbs in the hangar, none of them shaded, but it was a big space and the light was dim and heavy with shadows.
‘Christ, Rockwell. That any way to treat a pal?’
Abe shrugged. He turned his back on his visitors and made for the little wooden table by his bed. He got out a bottle of whisky and two glasses. He poured one for himself and one for Mason.
‘Nice place,’ said Mason, pulling out a cigarette.
Abe waited till Mason’s cigarette was lit, then pulled it from his mouth, dropped it on the floor, and stamped it out. He jerked his thumb at the aircraft and the barrels of gasoline and oil.
‘Not here.’
Mason picked up his whisky glass and turned to the two other men who were hovering silently behind him.
‘What are you boys drinking?’
The goons spread their hands and looked pained by the unrehearsed difficulty of the question.
‘They’re not drinking here,’ said Abe.
Mason pulled a face and leaned forwards, speaking confidentially. ‘All right, I’ll level. It’s a shithole you’ve got yourself here. A shithole, but a nice business.’
‘Wrong. Not
a
nice business.
My
nice business.’
‘I got some friends who are interested in it.’
‘Mason, did your mom never teach you the word “no”?’
‘Very interested. I should have said very.’
‘These guys?’ said Abe, pointing to the goons. ‘They’re interested?’
‘Not them exactly.’
‘Then they can get lost.’
Mason hesitated. Abe pulled his jacket open, revealing his nightshirt and nothing else. No gun.
‘OK.’ Mason turned to the goons. ‘Outside.’
‘In the car,’ said Abe.
Mason nodded. The goons left.
When the hangar door clanged shut, Abe said, ‘I don’t care what business you’re in. I’ve got a business I’m happy with. I don’t want partners. I don’t want money. I don’t want help. I don’t want you.’
Mason shook his head and rolled his whisky around his glass. ‘Maybe we’ve got things you need. Maybe things you don’t even know you need.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. Only not.’
‘You sell your hooch to a guy named De Freitas. Bootlegger to the speakeasies on the north side of town.’
Abe shrugged. It was true. So what?
‘I wonder how much you know about De Freitas’s business. He has to pay a cut to the cops, of course. But that’s not the payment which matters.’ Mason waited for a response but didn’t get one. He continued anyway. ‘He has to pay for his patch. He pays us. My friends and me. That way, De Freitas has all the trouble of selling hooch. Trouble and the occasional inconvenience when the cops forget what a nice guy he is. Meantime, my friends and I enjoy the profit.’
Abe rubbed his hand over his face. Even with the electric bulbs, the room was too gloomy to see Mason’s face properly. Abe dug out an oil lamp and lit it. Mason smiled.
‘Maybe I will have that cigarette. If I promise not to drop it on your nice shiny airplane.’
He lit up and watched Abe’s face for a second or two. Abe was listening.
‘So just suppose that we got tired of making room for De Freitas, then you wouldn’t have much of a business now, would you?’
‘He’s not the only whisky seller in America.’
‘No, but the way I figure it, you know plenty about flying planes. You probably don’t know a whole heap about the way liquor is sold in this fine country of ours. There are plenty of De Freitases, but not many with liberty to pick their suppliers.’
There was a moment’s long silence.
The two men stared at each other. Mason pulled on his cigarette, then held it up for Abe’s inspection. The cigarette was only a quarter-burned. Mason drew on it one more time, so the tip glowed orange, then flicked it deliberately towards the aircraft. Abe got up, stamped out the butt and returned to the table.