The Mammoth Book Of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits Part 59

"Maybe," I allowed. "I know someone stabbed him in the Place Pigalle section of Paris, employing an Apache knife."

In the dark, she lit a cigarette. Her hair was a smouldering copper.

"I read that, too," she said softly.

"But the murderer who took his money left his wallet," I went on. "A French Apache wouldn't do that. He wouldn't risk the few seconds it would take to separate leather from greenbacks. He'd walk away with the billfold and safely dispose of it later. The robber wanted Jack Diamond identified beyond any question. And the way his heart was jugged repeatedly suggested a personal grudge, not common robbery. A woman spurned might do it that way, for instance."

She pinched the cigarette dark. Her tone of voice blurred. "Why don't you come downstairs for a drink? We can talk about it over a bottle of Xerxes wine."

"Sorry. It's not in the cards."

She lunged in that moment. I was ready. There was a chair beside me. I had moved it into place beforehand. I flipped it up by the back, and jammed the legs toward the low shadow coming at me.

She hit it hard. I heard a sharp thuck of a noise. When I twisted the chair hard, the stuck blade came with it.

Then and only then did Spooky Spookins shriek.

I expected to be mobbed. Instead, the house simply cleared in a stampede of unsteady heels. Maybe my yelling "Vice squad!" turned the trick.

And that was all there was to it. Except for fighting a pair of handcuffs onto the erstwhile Mrs Jack Diamond's struggling wrists. One after the other, I managed it. She scratched and clawed and snapped her white teeth at me with every exertion. She nipped me once, but it was worth it to hear those steel teeth catch.

I dragged her from the attic, not caring how I did it. Behind us, the dressfitter's dummy swung in the emptiness, swung on a length of clothesline wrapped around the broken neck that no tailor's dummy should ever have . . .

"Mary McNulty was leading the d.a.m.nedest double life you could imagine," I told the Chief next morning. "Two names, and an appropriate auto for each of them. She read cards as Madame Diamond, and sang in saloons under the name of Spooky Spookins. Between those occupations, she vamped suggestible college girls for her Sapphic love cult."

The Chief was a worldly man. But I had him stumped. He was examining the Apache lingue I'd taken off Dolly Diamond the night before. The thin curved blade was snapped off.

"Dolly Diamond was what they're calling a tin Lizzy now," I explained. "Otherwise, a d.y.k.e. I imagine the late Jack Diamond was the first to uncover the truth. So he divorced her, citing mental cruelty to cover his profound embara.s.sment at having married a gold-digging daughter of Sappho."

The deepening furrows on the Chief's freckled brow told me the picture was starting to develop. "You're certain this woman stabbed Jack Diamond?"

"As certain as you can be when you know you'll never prove it in a court of law," I admitted. "The Diamond wren got her hooks into this Carmine Novelli. He was professionally known as a Bohemian restaurateur, but that was just a blind. He operated a tea room down in Greenwich Village. Still does, as a matter of fact. Served tea and light lunches while canny young things read the cards of school girls, blue-haired matrons and the odd social lion. Did a roaring business. Dolly stabbed Jack Diamond so he wouldn't expose her past and thereby gum up her marriage plans. Once she learned all she could from Novelli, Dolly ditched him and returned to Boston to set up shop for herself. She took the stage name Spooky Spookins to conceal her jaded past and make a new name for herself with a fresh generation of good-time gals."

"Where does the Reynolds girl fit into this?"

"Like her father said, she fell in with a bad crowd. Spoiled daughters of privilege who know no bounds and respect no laws, natural or manmade. Maybe Helen Reynolds met Dolly Diamond the fortune teller, or maybe she was first introduced to Spooky Spookins, the jazz singer. It doesn't really matter. One way or another, she found herself in that pink and purple harem room, lubricated by bathtub gin, and drowning in the kind of perfumed baccha.n.a.le where you and I would never be welcome."

The Chief actually shuddered. Well, he'd come of age long before the days of Flaming Youth and Jazz bands. It was a new era. Besides, he was long married to the same loyal woman.

I resumed my report. "Somewhere along the way, it all got to be too much for Helen Reynolds. Personally, I'd like to think she had a sober moment and couldn't face what had become of her. She slipped off during an orgy of unconventional love-making and hanged herself in Dolly Diamond's attic, too ashamed to face her iron-handed Irish father, and knowing how large an inconvenience her body would be to her corrupter."

"What is the Diamond woman saying about the affair?"

"That Helen Reynolds fell madly in love with her and couldn't abide all the other women and drinking and carousing. But that might be pride talking. Her story is that she was so shocked to find her chum swinging from an attic rafter that she got drunk and stayed that way until she could figure out who to call about the corpse. Either way, she's facing a nice variety of morals and other felony charges being an unlicensed fortune teller among them which should keep the up-and-coming generation of Harvard co-eds on the straight and narrow for a good long while."

The Chief sighed deeply. "I will have to find a tactful way to break the truth to our client."

I had given that particular conundrum some overnight thought. "Tell him that his daughter hung herself in the pa.s.sionate throes of unrequited love. Only leave Dolly Diamond out of it. Tell him it was a Harvard boy out of Houston named Kit Ragland, known to his drinking companions as Rags. Paint him as a tender-cheeked son of Texas who affects a pince-nez and vicuna coat, a whiz with the ukelele who is currently struggling to raise his first moustache. Old Man Reynolds won't like it, but he'll get over it in time. And since he's bound to pull the expected social strings to keep his daughter's suicide strictly out of the papers, it should all stick."

"What about Dolly Diamond? Eventually, she might talk."

I picked up my hat to go. "Dolly Diamond is looking at a long stretch at the State women's reformatory. Knowing her, she should make out very well up there."

The Problem of the Tin Goose EDWARD D. HOCH.

Among the fads and extremes that typify the 1920s, such as marathon dancing and flagpole sitting, were the aerial stunt-pilots, or barnstormers as they came to be known. These really "took off" in the 1920s, with such pilots as Clyde Pangborn and Pancho Barnes. Ormer Locklear started one of the original flying circuses in 1919. By 1927 new safety regulations had limited the death-defying stunts and the fad began to fade. Not before, needless to say, Edward D. Hoch's famous doctor of the impossible, Sam Hawthorne, finds himself facing another bizarre mystery. You'll find more Dr Hawthorne stories in Diagnosis: Impossible (1996).

"What was I goin' to tell you about this time?" old Dr Sam Hawthorne asked as he poured two br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.ses of sherry and then seated himself in the worn leather armchair. "Oh, I know it was the flying circus that visited Northmont. That was a wild time, I'll tell you, with murder committed in what could be called a flying locked room. It all began, I suppose, with a romance that blossomed quickly between a barnstorming pilot and a local girl . . ."

It was a hot, cloudless July afternoon (Dr Sam continued) when I strolled over to the offices of the Northmont Bee to place a cla.s.sified ad in their weekend edition. I was trying to sell my tan Packard runabout that I'd owned for a little over two years. It was a fine car but it had never replaced my beloved Pierce-Arrow that was destroyed by fire in a botched attempt to kill me back in February of '28. Now I'd been lucky enough to purchase a beautiful 1929 Stutz Torpedo, almost like new, from a doctor in s.h.i.+nn Corners who'd lost a bundle in the stock-market crash. The Packard would have to go, so I decided to run an ad offering it for sale.

"That's sixty cents," Bonnie Pratt told me as she finished counting the words. "This sounds like a good deal. I should come out and take a look at it myself."

"Why don't you?" I urged her. "It's over at my office now."

"Oh, I've seen you driving it," Bonnie said. She was a pert young redhead who'd been working at the Bee since she'd dropped out of college when her father died about a year before. The Pratts were good people, and though I didn't know Bonnie well she was the sort of pretty girl who got noticed in a town as small as Northmont. "But maybe I will come over later," she added.

Because I enjoyed chatting with her I lingered a while after I'd paid my sixty cents. "What's the latest news, Bonnie? Give me a scoop."

She returned my grin and said, "You have to buy the paper, Dr Sam. You don't give out free diagnoses, do you?"

"No," I admitted, "but can't I have a peek at the headline?"

"Oh, all right." She relented and held up the afternoon edition. "It's all about the flying circus that's coming to town on the weekend."

"We don't have an airport," I protested. "Where are they going to land?"

"At Art Zealand's Flying School. Look at these pictures. There's a Ford Trimotor, the one they call the Tin Goose because of its all-metal body. They'll actually be taking pa.s.sengers up in that one, for a twenty-minute ride across the county and back. And this is their stunt biplane. They'll take you up in that too if you're brave enough five dollars for five minutes. They've got the Ford Trimotor and two of these biplanes in the circus. It's quite a show."

"Those barnstormers have been popular for years," I said. "I wonder why they never came here before."

"Because Art Zealand didn't have his flying school till now," she answered reasonably. "They had no landing field. But aviation's the coming thing. People are flying across the country. I have an aunt who traveled from Los Angeles to New York last year in forty-eight hours! They flew by day and transferred to trains at night because it's too dangerous to fly after dark. She was on the maiden flight and Charles Lindbergh himself piloted the plane."

"You're really excited about this, aren't you?"

"I sure am," she conceded. "They're going to let me interview Ross Winslow for the Bee. He's the head of it. Look how handsome he is."

The head of Winslow's Flying Circus was an attractive fellow with curly black hair and a pencil-thin mustache. Looking at his picture on the front page of the paper I was struck by the notion that men like Ross Winslow were the forerunners of a whole new world. They were the ones that girls like Bonnie Pratt hankered after, not dull country doctors like myself.

"I'd like to meet him," I said. "The only experience I've had with fliers was back in '27 when they shot part of a moving picture here."

She nodded, remembering. "I'd just gone off to college. Look, if you're interested you can come with me Friday to meet him. They're flying in around noon."

The idea intrigued me. "Let's see how things go. If Mrs Haskel doesn't have her baby I should be able to get away for a few hours."

So that was how I happened to accompany Bonnie Pratt out to the Zealand Flying School on Friday noon to watch the big Ford Trimotor and the two smaller planes settle down for perfect landings on the gra.s.sy field. Art Zealand was there to greet them himself, of course, looking like his idea of a World War flying ace with a white silk scarf wrapped around his neck. Art was in his mid-thirties, about my age, and like me he was unmarried. He'd moved to Northmont a year or so earlier to start his flying school and there were unconfirmed rumors of an abandoned wife and children somewhere down south. He was pleasant enough when the need arose but kept to himself much of the time.

"Good to see you again, Sam," he greeted me as we drove up in my new Stutz Torpedo. "The doctoring business must be pretty good these days," he added, patting the car's s.h.i.+ny black fender. The body itself was tan, the contrasting red upholstery on its twin seats matching the red wheels. It was a flashy car for a country doctor, but it was my one extravagance.

"I figure I need something good for these b.u.mpy country roads," I replied.

"I'll bet you could buy an airplane cheaper than that car."

We went off across the field to welcome the barnstormers. Ross Winslow was easy to spot climbing down from the lead plane, waving and walking forward to shake hands. Bonnie Pratt was highly excited as she introduced herself and me. "Hope we don't need your services, Doc," Winslow joked, shaking my hand with an iron grip. "But then I don't guess we will. If I fall off a wing up there, you won't be able to do much for me."

Art Zealand had met Winslow before and he pointed out the area where the three planes should be parked. There was some discussion about the crowds that might be expected and a low-keyed conversation about Winslow's share of the gate. Apparently Zealand guaranteed him a flat sum of a few hundred dollars plus anything he earned from the plane rides.

I turned my attention to the other members of Winslow's Flying Circus, who seemed to be three in number. Two were men a bit older than I a blond fellow with a scar on his cheek, whose name was Max Renker, and a short jolly fellow named Tommy Verdun. But my real interest centered on the fourth member of the team, a long-haired blonde named Mavis Wing who gave me a slow smile like nothing I'd ever seen in Northmont.

"I can't imagine women barnstorming and walking on wings," I said when I'd found my tongue.

"Oh, we do it, Dr Hawthorne." The slow smile was back. "Lillian Boyer has her own plane with her name in big letters on the side. That's what I'm aiming for. My name's really Wingarten, but that wouldn't look good on the side of a plane, would it?"

"You could just use your picture. That would be enough," I replied gallantly.

"Oh, come now, Dr Hawthorne you're something of a flirt, aren't you?"

Before I could pursue the subject, Winslow gave them instructions for parking the planes and Bonnie and I went off with him for the interview. Art Zealand had provided a table and chairs in the hangar, where Bonnie took rapid notes as Winslow spoke.

"Max and Tommy both flew in the war," he explained, "so they're a leg up on me. I took pilot training but it was all over before I ever got to France. The three of us got together nearly ten years ago and decided to try barnstorming. You've probably read about Sir Alan Cobham, the famous European barnstormer. His circus has performed all over the Continent and we hope to do the same thing on this side of the Atlantic. There's a lot of compet.i.tion, of course, and we try to outdo each other dreaming up wild stunts."

"What about your planes?" Bonnie asked without looking up from her notes.

"In this country we all use Jennies, those little biplanes with the double set of wings. They're JN-4D trainers the Army built near the end of the war. By the time they were finished the war was over and the government started selling thousands of 'em for as little as three hundred dollars each. A lot of us who flew in the war, or who trained to fly like me, went out and bought ourselves a plane. Max and Tommy and I started with three Jennies but last year we traded one in for that Ford Trimotor transport. We found out that after watching our stunts the crowd was really ready to fly. We'd have thirty or forty people lined up for a five-minute ride in a Jennie, so we decided that if we could take up ten at a time, for a slightly longer flight they'd still pay five dollars and we'd make a lot more money."

"Tell me about your stunts," Bonnie urged. "That's what'll get the people out."

"Well, we start out by buzzing the town with the two Jennies while Max and I walk out on the wings. Then Mavis does her wild act, actually hanging by one arm from a wing while I fly the plane. That's been known to make people faint. Tommy Verdun is our clown and he's liable to do anything. Sometimes he dresses up like a woman and waits in line for a ride in one of the Jennies. The pilot gets out and Tommy gets in and pretends the plane is taking off with him at the controls, out of control. It's guaranteed to get screams out of the spectators. Then I wind things up by transferring from one plane to the other, either using a rope ladder or walking across, wingtip to wingtip."

"Do you make good money at this?"

Ross Winslow snorted. "h.e.l.l, no. We do it because we love it. Somebody said the most dangerous thing about barnstorming is the risk of starving to death, and he's right. We were going to give it up this year, but they say the country's heading into a depression and where would we find jobs? We figure if we can keep at this for another year or two, till the airlines really get established, they'll take us on as commercial pilots. Then maybe we'll start making real money."

"What about Mavis Wing?"

"She's great. Wait till you see her up there. Mavis joined us last summer and business shot up right away. There's nothing like seeing a girl hanging from that plane to get the crowds cheering and biting their nails. I make her keep her hair long so they know she's a woman from a distance, and she wears knickers so they see a little bit of leg."

"It sounds like a great show," Bonnie said. "I'll be here bright and early tomorrow."

As we were preparing to leave Winslow asked her, "What's there to do in this town at night? Got any good bars?"

"With Prohibition?" she asked in mock horror.

"Come on I'll bet you know the places to go."

"There's a lunch counter where you can get a shot of whiskey in a coffee cup. Will that do?"

"For starters. Will you go with me?"

She hesitated only a second. "Well sure, I guess so."

"Fine. Can I pick you up at your office?"

"In your plane?"

He chuckled. "Art said I could use his car while we're in town."

So it was decided. I drove her back to the Bee office in my Stutz, amazed that Ross Winslow had gotten a date with her so easily and wondering why I'd never thought to ask her for one myself.

The Northmont Bee was published on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons, with the Friday edition being designated for the weekend. Of course, back in those days most people worked at least a half day on Sat.u.r.days, but the Friday edition still had the most readers of the week, which is why I'd run the ad for my car in it. Friday evening brought several interested callers, and one of them the son of the town banker came by on Sat.u.r.day morning to close the deal.

With the car sold I felt I could relax for the weekend. Mrs Haskel's baby still hadn't made it into the world and showed no signs of doing so before Monday, so I decided to close the office early and take my nurse April out to the flying circus.

"You mean to say I'll get to ride in your new car?" she asked. I think that was a bigger treat for her than the prospect of seeing the barnstormers.

"It's the only car I've got now," I told her. "I sold the old one this morning."

"If I'd had the money I'd have bought it myself. You take good care of your cars, Dr Sam."

She was thrilled by the ride in the Stutz, holding down her hair as the wind whipped through it on the way to the flying school. When we arrived a little before noon, I saw that the adjoining field was already crowded with parked wagons and automobiles. Their noise made the horses nervous, but as the planes flew back and forth in their opening salute the crowd roared its approval.

"Everyone in town must be here," April said.

Sheriff Lens and his new wife Vera were there, and I was pleased to see them. Married life had made the sheriff almost a stranger, though I was glad to see he was still his old self. "Doc, Vera was just sayin' the other day we gotta have you over for dinner some night. We been back from the honeymoon six months and the only time we seen you was at that church social in the spring."

Vera took up the urging. "How about next week, Sam? What evening is best for you?"

I knew Vera was still working at the post office and I was reluctant to force dinner preparation on her at the end of a working day. "Maybe Sunday would be good. A week from tomorrow?"

"Perfect," she agreed. "Do I get a ride in your new car?"

"Of course."

April tugged at my sleeve. "Look, Sam!"

The two Jennies had landed but now one had taken off again, and I saw a figure with long blonde hair, a white blouse, and knickers edging out on the wing. It was Mavis, beginning her act. I left April with the sheriff and Vera and walked around the fringes of the crowd for a better view. I'd reached the hangar area, nodding now and then to familiar faces in the crowd, when I encountered Bonnie Pratt standing beside Ross Winslow. He was wearing a short leather flying jacket and had his arm lightly around her waist. "h.e.l.lo, Bonnie," I said.

"h.e.l.lo, Sam." She edged free of his arm.

"That was a nice opening," I told Winslow. "I thought you'd be up there flying for Mavis."

"Max is flying her today. After Mavis does her stunts I'll take some pa.s.sengers up in the Tin Goose."

Zealand came into the hangar, looking troubled. "Can I see you alone, Ross?"

They walked back to the office together and I said to Bonnie, "So you showed him the town last night. Did he enjoy it?"

"I think I'm in love with him, Sam. He's so handsome and das.h.i.+ng. I feel like he's a war hero. The local boys just don't compare to him."