Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery (27 page)

"He and the FBI are stepping all over each other to get at you. I'm supposed to be bait."

"Gee."

"You know about that, too, don't you?"

"Actually, yes."

"Just like you knew about the wires."

"Yeah. What was Cobb's ploy supposed to be?"

"I tell you Jones is working for the Colombians. Then, when you kill him, they arrest you, using the tape as evidence."

"Not blindingly bright, but it doesn't matter much now. By the way, who gunned Ricardo?"

"I don't know."

"You were there, weren't you?"

"How do you know what the cops are doing?"

"I got employees on the force. A friend name of Sal Loccatuchi. That young man loves to fly. Can't get enough."

What would Cobb think about that, his own partner? That argues for remaining in one's Morris chair, where the corruption of the world at large is merely an abstraction, but I didn't go into that under the circumstances. "What do you need us for?" I asked. "You knew about this from the beginning."

"Funny you should put it like that, Arthur. The beginning's what I don't know. The one crucial question. Namely, who in hell's this Billie Burke?"

I looked at him and he at me. The shades had closed his face. Eyeless, it had turned stony, impassive. What
did
he know about Billie? "She was Danny Beemon's daughter."

The take was almost comic. "Huh?"

I repeated the statement, and his face jumped to form a lot of little Os, his mouth, his brows—"Liar!" he screamed.

I pulled the Family Snaps from their envelope inside my jacket. I showed them, shuffling slowly, one by one, Danny and Eleanor Beemon and young Eleanor with her puppy named Petey. "That's Billie Burke," I said.

He batted the photographs from my hands. "You
had
these? You fuck!" He choked, and that turned to violent coughing. The bottom dropped out. The right wing tripped over the left. The sky swirled and from behind, screams. Photographs fluttered weightless before our faces. Pine regained control, and the black plane flew level. The floating photos dropped around us.

His entire body, even his legs, trembled, and his face went ashen, the same colorlessness of death I had seen on Billie's face. His sunglasses hung at a bewildered angle by a single earpiece, and he brushed them away, sent them clattering down between the rudder pedals with the back of his hand. Then a wave of crimson, like a wine spill on real linen, seeped up from under his collar, over his ears, and upward beneath his hairline; by the time it was done, even his bald crown blazed red. His head began to bob up and down as if that motion might throw off the red spill.

"I'm
Danny Beemon, goddamnit!"

Awareness slid up the back of my neck with a chill.
He
was Danny Beemon? I sat there trying to figure out what that meant, while Beemon sat motionless behind the controls. The red retreated, and the crazy head bobbing ceased. Quietly, in my ears, Danny Beemon said, "Please pick up my pictures, Arthur."

I did so.

"Now leave them on your seat as you get the fuck out of my cockpit."

I did that, too. I climbed out through the cutaway bulkhead into the passenger compartment—

Jones
. He sat in the first seat starboard side, and Chucky sat behind him. Where did they come from? I stopped, shocked, halfway through the bulkhead and stared stupidly at Jones. He averted his eyes, leaving his sharp beak in profile. He looked exactly like Ichabod Crane. Chucky shouted something at me, but I lost it in the engine noise, louder back here than in the cockpit.

Sweating deeply, I made my way to the third seat portside behind Sybel and Calabash. Jellyroll joined me. I stank sourly.

Sybel knelt on her seat and faced me while Calabash crouched in the aisle beside me. "He's not Harry Pine. He's Danny Beemon," I said.

"Danny Bee—?" Sybel gasped.

"Where'd
they
come from?" I asked.

Calabash pointed at the solid bulkhead forming the aft end of our compartment. So the passenger list for this flight had all been planned, invitations issued simultaneously.

"Did you tell him about Jones?" Sybel asked. She seemed to be thinking, and I was grateful again for that.

"He knew," I said. "He's got Loccatuchi in his pocket."

"Where are we going?" Sybel wanted to know. "We seem to be going somewhere."

"The Bahamas."

"De Bahamas?"

"A place called Dutch Frigate Shoals."

Calabash shook his head.

"You've heard of it?"

"I heard of it, okay. Bod fockers own de whole island. Dey don't allow no boats to land. Snapper fisherman I talk to was once sinkin' off de Shoals. Boat come roarin' out. De fisherman tink he bein' rescued, but he ain't. Dey towed his sinkin' boat 'bout five miles seaward and left 'im. He sunk, but he lived to tell de tale o' Dutch Frigate Shoals."

Great. Energy vanished. Nothing exhilarating back here, only sunless gloom, engine noise, Jones and Chucky. We would simply vanish from the face of the earth, Jellyroll too, in the prime of his career. Calabash might get a few bod fockers—I might get a few myself—before they overwhelmed us, dumped our bodies well wrapped in anchor chains off the cliff edge of the continental shelf.

"You don't know how to fly, by any chance?" Sybel ventured.

"I only read the books."

She turned and faced forward. Calabash returned to his seat. I stroked Jellyroll's head with phony reassurance.

Head framed in the sunlight, Danny Beemon turned and grinned the same affable grin at his captive crew. "Hey, Jonesey, come up with me," he shouted.

Jones didn't move until Chucky gave his seat a shove from behind. Jones climbed into the right-hand seat beside his boss. We watched silently. Then Chucky yelled something at me, but the noise garbled it.

"What do you want!"

"Four-eyes, tell that big fucker to put those guns away before they go off and hurt a white person!"

Calabash returned to crouch in the aisle beside me. "Since dere ain't much else to do, I might as well crush dat cowboy, don't you tink?"

"Enjoy yourself."

Calabash calmly turned and went for Chucky. Something exploded, and the sound, well above the pain threshold, slammed around the confined space. The airplane staggered, slewed, then fell. Sybel screamed. Jellyroll, with a clipped yelp, was thrown from my lap to the floor. For an instant, I thought Calabash had shot Chucky, but there he was, like the rest of us, screaming, and bouncing to and fro. The explosion had originated in the cockpit! Beemon? Had Jones shot Beemon?

No. The airplane leveled off, and with it the engine noise; the monotone returned, and we welcomed it, hope for survival at least until we arrived at Dutch Frigate Shoals.

"Chucky." Beemon turned aft and called. Chucky picked himself up from under his seat and staggered forward. He leaned in to talk to the pilot, then began to yank at Jones's shoulder, but Jones fought him. No. The difficulty in dislodging Jones was due to his dead weight. Jones's head, eyes open, lolled in a way no living head could, a Raggedy Ann head, as Chucky pulled his upper body from the seat and dragged him by the armpits aft along the short aisle. A yellow plastic handle protruded from the center of his chest. Blood, still on the move, soaked his clothes all the way under his crotch. Numbly, we watched Chucky, averting his eyes from his load, open a hatch in the bulkhead, enter himself, then drag Jones through. His heels hooked on the bottom of the hatchway. Chucky reached an arm out the hatch and one by one lifted them in by the shoes. Did we
really
just see that?

Chucky returned and flopped in the portside seat. He was shaken, shoulders heaving for breath. When he caught it, he called forward, "Whenever you're ready, Chief." Then he looked at me.

A loud rush of air and an ear-popping pressure change, then abruptly it was over, pressure and noise back to normal. I suddenly had to sleep. I didn't want to know what caused that change. I felt the edges of hysteria brush across my brain as a caution not to try to figure it out. Jones was just
back there
, where you don't want to go even briefly, even to relieve this throbbing pressure from the bladder, back where they store the people with screwdrivers in their hearts. Just sleep. Windows would have helped, sunlight to cut the psychic darkness, the dream of blood-soaked crotches passing by, but there were no windows, a tube of riveted aluminum, that was all, louder than the IRT express bearing us to an island full of bod fockers. Sleep will turn all that to a sunny
beach. Suddenly that fucking Chucky was beside me, poking me in the arm muscle, disturbing my sleep.
"What!"

"Did he say where we're going?"

"Dutch Frigate Shoals."

"Shit," muttered Chucky, standing, returning to his seat.

"Wait, what's going to happen when we get there?"

"He didn't tell you?"

"If he told me, I wouldn't be asking, would I!"

"You take a peek behind that wall, four-eyes." He flopped in his seat and lit a cigarette. Sybel asked him for one. He complied. I didn't want to look back there, but I did. I twisted the recessed latch and punched the little door open. I waited for my eyes to adjust. There was a catwalk leading around them, not much more than a crawl space, but Jones was gone. A catwalk. Around the bombs. Four bombs, squat and black with little propellers on the nose, toggled to a strong tripod frame above the bomb-bay doors, which had opened for Jones, I concluded, but now were closed.

We must be over the ocean
, I reasoned sluggishly, where Jones would never be found. I was relieved. I felt a strange and giddy happiness. We weren't being delivered to our deaths on this Dutch Frigate Shoals. It was going to be them, not us! It felt like a gift.

TWENTY-SIX

I
 CLIMBED INTO the right-hand seat. He had taped the photographs of his family to the instrument panel, and now he was crying silently to himself. Like the copilot in the war movie, I looked away from him in deference to the sanction against masculine tears my generation inherited from his, as I put on the earphones. I watched the ocean, on which the late afternoon sun shimmered in blinding contrast to black-and-white war movies.

A high-pitched whine made my ears itch. I followed the sound to its source, a thumb-round bullet hole in the side window inches from Beemon's temple.

"I think she wanted me to kill her, Arthur."

"You—? Did you?"

He nodded.

I'm uncertain what happened then. Did I fall asleep? Absurd. Yet day became night, and I missed the change. Her own father had killed her. When he said so with that short nod, I was squinting into the sun, but when my awareness returned, sea, sky, and horizon were gone, no stars or moon, blackness. The only light in our world glowed red for night vision behind the old-fashioned dials, and the red bled eerily through the photos taped over it. He was saying something, speaking to me as if it were unremarkable that day should vanish into night during a nod of the head.

Billie's "I'm dead" note was duct-taped above the compass and under the row of photographs. He pointed to the note, tapped it with his fingernail, and he said, "She knew what you'd
do. She knew her man. The photographs, they're all about my life, but this note is all about you."

"What do you mean?" I asked as if I didn't know.

"My daughter set it up. The whole goddam thing. Somehow she learned I was alive, then she set it up so I might kill her. But she had to have somebody to tell me who I'd killed or else her revenge wouldn't work. You with me, Arthur? You look a tad bilious. Think how I feel. But you were the man for the job."

"I don't believe that," I lied, and D.B. laughed at me.

This had been a family affair from the beginning, and I was nothing more than the gentleman caller.

"Acappella Productions," he was saying. "I looked it up. It means alone, without accompaniment, but you and I, we know she had a hell of a lot of accompaniment. Only we didn't know that's what we were."

"Tell me what happened."

"When? You mean the night she died?"

"Don't say it that way. She didn't just die, like from a stroke."

"I found her tied up in the tub. I went to her apartment, because that's where all my employees flocked when I threw a scare into them, and I found her tied and gagged with her own panties. Jones did that, left her like that while he went looking for the photos. She looked at me standing over her and began to choke, so I removed the gag. She wasn't choking. She was laughing."

I pictured the scene played out against the night as if it were the wide screen, Billie contorted, probably in pain, but laughing at her father.

"She said, 'You're dead, Pop.' Pop. She actually called me that. Course I missed the joke at that point. Right then I was thinking here's this grifter all tied up, helpless, but she's acting all out of character for a grifter caught in the act. Put yourself in my place, Arthur, what would you have done?"

"Hell, under the circumstances, I'd have drowned her. Only way to teach a grifter."

"I didn't intend to drown her, Arthur. I wanted to find out some things. How did she know about the doctors, the whole Florida business? What were these photographs she said would hang me? I had my life to protect, Arthur, so I ran some water in the tub. Put her face in it. She drowned. I look back on it, I'm convinced that's the way she wanted it."