Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery (20 page)

Vendors were packing up their gear. I didn't look left or right until I'd passed through the turnstiles and onto the patio that fronted the parking lot on one side and the elevated walkway to the E train on the other. Then I stopped. I tried on a couple of Mets caps from a wet vendor who clearly wished I'd leave him alone. Careful not to touch the top of the cap once I put it on, I looked back to where Calabash towered over a short man in his mid-thirties, black hair. He wore a blue anorak. As I paid the vendor, I realized I recognized the man. From where? I looked back again. He had a dark Fu Manchu mustache. I didn't remember that, so I tried in two brief glances to picture the face without it.

Jay Kiley! A playwright Billie and I met years ago at a party somewhere. I was being tailed by a
playwright?

EIGHTEEN

"H
EY, ARTIE, WHAT say, dude? I thought that was you."

"Hi, Jay. Long time."

He looked deep into my eyes, his soulful act, and said, "What a tragedy about Billie, what a tragedy."

I nodded and resisted the temptation to scratch my cap. I saw a play of his once at some showcase house. All the women were cardboard, and all the men were him.

"Actually, I've been wanting to discuss that with you. Drink a beer, cry a little, know what I mean?"

I'd hang myself first.

"Actually, I wanted to talk a little business. Funny I should run into you like this. I wanted to talk with you about some photographs."

I didn't respond at all. He clearly sprung that on me to check my reaction. I gave him none.

"What photographs, Jay?"

"Billie's photographs."

"Billie took a lot of photographs."

"Yeah, but these are special."

"How so?"

"Come on, Artie, let's
talk."

I told him to meet me at the Liffey Pub in two hours.

Calabash was sitting at the bar by himself, and Kiley sat in a booth across the room. I had gone home and phoned Sybel, but
there was still no reply. Phyllis had left a message on my machine wondering how I was doing and invited me to call her when I could.

I picked up a draft beer and sat in the booth across from Kiley. "So how you been, Artie?" His brow furrowed with fake concern.

"What did you want to talk about, Jay?"

"Right down to business, huh? I never knew you were such a press-on sort of dude, Artie." He unzipped a leather portfolio and removed an eight-by-ten black-and-white. It was creased and dog-eared, the upper right corner gone. He dried the tabletop with a napkin and then put the photograph down before me. It was Harry Pine in front of Renaissance Antiques, back when there was such a place, taken with a long lens from the same elevated angle. Pine wore a dark knit shirt, light twill pants, and Topsiders, and he was doing nothing in particular, looking west on Eleventh. "Do you know this guy?"

"No."

"You don't?"

"No."

"His name's Harry Pine. Billie gave me this picture, told me the dude's name and that he was a war hero. That's all she knew, but she offered to pay me a hundred a day to find out more."

"When was this?"

"Let's see, this is May...About a year ago. Strange, huh?"

"You tell me."

"Okay. I was between productions. I was up for a grant, but hell, that's all fag politics, so I took the gig. Jay Kiley, playwright sleuth. I got my first lead from this old fart who runs a newsletter about old pilots." And then he stole Bessie's Harry Pine file from the file cabinet. He showed me photos of Harry Pine as a young pilot, the obligatory shot standing in front of his plane and alighting, big smile, after a successful mission. There were
articles about him and a copy of
Stars and Stripes
from 1943. "They don't even look like the same guy, do they?"

He was right.

"That made it tricky, but here was my next clue. I mean, this would make a
great
play." He showed me a faded newspaper photo with no accompanying article. Harry Pine posed in front of a ramshackle wooden building with a sign that said Palm Coast Aviation. He tapped the sign with his fingernail and said, "This was in Moxie, Florida. Moxie, you believe that? Great details. I showed this stuff to Billie, and she said go. Gave me five hundred dollars and said call her from Moxie. I start hanging around the jerkwater airport in Moxie. Check it out, Jay Kiley, ace. Can you imagine me at the controls, Artie?"

"No."

"Actually I thought I cut a dashing figure. Ronald Colmanesque. I took flying lessons. I mean I didn't get a license or anything. I split without paying, thus protecting Billie's investment. I figured that's the way to get the old geezers talking about Harry Pine. Become one of them. You know, Artie, everything's got groupies, everything. There's about twenty old geezers who do nothing but hang around Moxie Field every day. They'd show up about ten with their Igloo Coolers and drink beer under a banyan tree. I don't know, this would probably make a better movie. Your dog's agent, does he handle film scripts?"

"No."

"So once I got these guys talking, they never shut up. I told the geezers I was doing an article for
Esquire;
they started bringing me show-and-tell shit. This Harry Pine was a local legend back in the late fifties. And there was another guy, another hotshot ace from the war around back then. They called him D.B. I learn his name. It's Danny Beemon. So these geezers keep bringing me clippings from old papers, and I begin to piece together this incredible story. You want to hear it?"

"Okay," I said, and put my hands in my lap so he wouldn't see them tremble.

'"You can't kill D.B.' That's what the old geezers used to tell me, and I'm telling you that up front because it's kind of key to the story. You can't kill D.B. Okay. It's 1967, a dark and stormy night. Just kidding. 1967. A plane, a twin-engine something or other crashes on takeoff from Moxie Field. But when cops and rescue units get to the crash site, they find no pilot. Vanished. You know what they
do
find? This is where it gets good. After they put out the fire, they find the airplane's filled to the roof with medical supplies."

"Medical supplies?"

"Yeah, and surgical supplies. They found an operating table, top-of-the-line stuff. About two million worth of stuff in 1967 dollars. Artie—" Kiley glanced from side to side as if someone might be listening. I took it for cheap theatrics. He lowered his voice. "The stuff was all stolen."

"Who owned the plane, who flew it?"

"I'll get to that anon. What I'm telling you now took about two years to come out. Big investigation, widespread scandal. Entire Miami administration toppled as a result. FBI was involved in the case, FAA, you name it. Turns out two doctors were acquiring the stuff from distributers with fake orders from real hospitals. Of course you couldn't do that unless you had some officials in your pocket. The doctors did."

"What were their names?" I knew their names.

He gave me his between-you-and-me-sincerely look. "Harvey Keene and Barnett Osley. You know them?"

"No."

"You don't know any of these people?"

"Not yet. What were they doing with all that stuff?"

"This is where it gets better. It all came out in the trial, see. These two doctors, they weren't in this racket for the loot. They
were redistributing the equipment to small rural clinics throughout Florida. Guess who owned the clinics."

"Keene and Osley?"

"Right, only these were free clinics. They had some state support, but the patients paid nothing. Keene and Osley were performing surgery at their little clinics. They were supposed to have performed organ transplants, shit that New York General would have considered radical. They're doing it free of charge. That organ transplant business, that was never proved, but they were still doing some outside stuff. Here's where it gets better still. The trial becomes this media circus. Everybody's hysterical. You ought to read some of the news accounts." He reached back into his portfolio and thumbed around for an unbearably long time before he removed two photocopies of news articles. "Check it out."

I read both as carefully as my excitement allowed, but they didn't need a close reading. They were not subtle. One called Keene and Osley a couple of Frankensteins, then went on to ask righteously, "How many died under their knives?" The other took the opposite tack. It called them Robin Hoods and charged that they were being persecuted by the AMA for operating free of charge.

"These are two of the calmer ones. But you probably get the picture."

I was beginning to get the picture.

"There were a couple other factors in this trial. One, they're fags. Two, the fags won't talk. Clearly, Keene and Osley couldn't have stolen all that shit without some heavy help. Stand-up guys, these fags. They won't admit a thing. Keene said it was just him, Osley had nothing to do with it. Vice versa, Osley says. If they'd have talked, they'd have walked. They got sentenced to five years, reduced to two, and their licenses were permanently revoked."

"Who flew the airplane?"

"'You can't kill Danny Beemon.' According to the geezers, Danny Beemon walked away from fatal crashes all over the world.
Then he disappears after the fiery crash of a plane full of stolen operating tables on the way to curing poor people. How's that to fuel the fires of legend? You know what those geezers told me half shit-faced under the old banyan tree? They said,
'He'll be back,'
and they all nod sagely, like one day he'll fly in and make their lives beautiful or something. They were like
waiting
for him."

"Where was Harry Pine during the trial?"

"There were no charges against Harry Pine. The airplane was chartered by the doctors. And Danny Beemon, the pilot? Gone. Walked away from another one. Just like the old days, the geezers said. I'll tell you, Moxie Field was a time warp. 1943. Stop the clock."

"So you came back and told Billie all about it?"

"Sure, that's why I went."

"You told her about Danny Beemon?"

"Just like I told you."

"What did she do?"

"Whoa, slow down, Artie. I thought you didn't know any of these dudes."

"I don't. Good story, though."

"Yeah, huh? What did Billie do? She dismissed me. I mean, she paid me well, but it hurt my feelings, Artie. I had just done this bang-up job for her in Moxie, risked ass flying, got prickly heat, now she's giving me the brush without telling me why I did it."

"How did she react when you told her about Florida?"

"She dismissed me. I told you."

"No, I mean personally." Why was I asking him? "What was her mood?"

"Oh. Excited. No, more. Vibrating. She could hardly hold her coffee cup. Look at it from my viewpoint for a minute. I didn't get the grant. Some twenty-year-old Yale postmodernist prick got it. Plus my wife bolts with my life savings. Glum financial outlook for ole Jay. Stealing food from the Red Apple gets depressing after
a while. Billie just gave me five hundred dollars to do a pretty mysterious job. Five bills, no problem, like it was the Con Ed bill. What would you have thought, if you didn't have a rich dog?"

"That there was real money nearby." That's what he wanted to hear. It was my pleasure to give it to him.

"Exactly! But where? I started thinking along these broad lines: If Pine's in New York, why not Keene and Osley? You know how I found out? The AMA. Keene and Osley still subscribe to the journal. Where is it sent? Staten Island. Bright Bay Nursing Home. Ever heard of it?"

"No."

"No?"

"What did you do then?"

"When are you going to know something, Artie?"

"When you get to the punch line."

"Okay. I went back to Billie, and I said, Gee, this is quite some story, old pilots, the Robin Hood doctors, flaming crash, and now I find they all live in the city. I said, this sounds like a great story for
New York
magazine, did she mind if I wrote it? She wanted to know how much
New York
would pay. I told her about two grand. She gave me two grand. Bingo. You loved her, I loved her—God rest her soul—but, Artie, she was after bigger game."

"Pine?"

"She wasn't ready to tell me anything. She said it was personal, nothing to do with money. I decided to test the water, see what was personal and what financial."

"What did you do?" I asked, because he wanted me to.

"I paid a visit to the good doctors out at their place. I told the manager I'd wait, sat down in the lobby and talked to the old geezers. I like old people. I don't want to be one, but I like them. Finally, Barnett Osley arrives, and we have our chat. I'm writing this article for
New York
magazine, and I'd like to talk to him about events in Moxie, Florida. Then, when he put his dentures back, I asked if he could line up an interview with Harry Pine
and Danny Beemon. The geezer about shit his chinos. He hems and haws, and you know what he says? He says, 'We wouldn't want to disturb Danny Beemon, would we?'"

"Danny Beemon? You mean—?"

"Yep. Right there at Bright Bay resides D.B.
You can't kill Danny Beemon
. He's burned to a crisp, Artie, an invalid. I saw him. So Osley says, 'How much would
New York
pay you for an article like that?' I say, about five thousand dollars. Bingo."