Vixen 03

  The living room of the house had a high-beamed ceiling with a bedroom loft. The decor was an expensive conglomeration of art deco furnishings. Pitt felt as though he had stepped back into the nineteen thirties. Lee scurried into the kitchen and quickly returned with two opened beers. Pitt couldn't help noticing there were no labels on the bottles.

  "Hope you like home brew," said Lee. "Took me four years to get just the right blend between too sweet and too bitter. Runs about eight percent alcohol by volume."

  Pitt savored the taste. It was different from what he expected. If he hadn't detected a slight trace of yeast, he would have pronounced the taste fit for commercial sale.

  Maxine set the table and waved for them to come around. She set out a large bowl of potato salad, a pot of baked beans, and a platter of thinly sliced rounds of meat. Lee replaced the rapidly emptied beer bottles with two fresh ones and started passing the plates.

  The potato salad was hearty with just the right amount of tartness. The baked beans were thick with honey. Pitt did not recognize the meat or its taste, but found it delicious. In spite of the fact that he had eaten with Loren only an hour before, the aroma of the home-cooked meal inspired him to put it away like a farmhand.

  "You folks lived here long?" Pitt asked between mouthfuls.

  "We used to vacation in the Sawatch as far back as the late fifties," said Lee. "Moved here after I retired from the Navy. I was a deep-water diver. Got a bad case of the bends and took an early discharge. Let's see, that must have been in the summer of seventy-one."

  "Seventy," Maxine said, correcting him.

  Lee Raferty winked at Pitt. "Max never forgets anything."

  "Know of any wrecked aircraft, say within a ten-mile radius?"

  "I don't recollect any." Lee looked at his wife. "How 'bout it, Max?"

  "Honest to Pete, Lee, where's your mind? Don't you remember that poor doctor and his family that was all killed when their plane crashed behind Diamond? . . . How's the beans, Mr. Pitt?"

  "Excellent," Pitt said. "Is Diamond a town near here?"

  "Used to be. Now it's only a crossroads and a dude ranch."

  "I recall now," Lee said, reaching for seconds on the meat. "It was one of them little single-engine jobs. Burned to a crisp.

  Nothin' left. Took the sheriff's department over a week to identify the remains."

  "Happened in April of seventy-four," Maxine said.

  "I'm interested in a much larger plane," Pitt explained patiently. "An airliner. Probably came down thirty or forty years ago."

  Maxine twisted her round face and stared unseeing at the ceiling. Finally she shook her head. "No, can't say as I ever heard of any air disaster of that magnitude. At least not around these parts."

  "Why do you ask, Mr. Pitt?" Lee asked.

  "I found some old aircraft parts in Miss Smith's garage. Her father must have put them there. I thought perhaps he found them somewhere nearby in the mountains."

  Charlie Smith," Maxine said wistfully. "Godresthis soul. Heusedto dream up more schemes to get rich than an unemployed embezzler on welfare."

  Most likely bought them parts from some surplus store in Denver so's he could build another one of his nonworking contraptions."

  "I get the impression Loren's father was a frustrated inventor."

  "Poor old Charlie was that." Lee laughed. "I remember the time he tried to build an automatic fishing-pole caster. Damned thing threw the lure everywhere but in the water."

  "Why do you say 'poor old Charlie'?"

  A sorrowful expression came over Maxine's face. "I guess because of the horrible way he died. Didn't Loren tell you about it?"

  "Only that it was three years ago."

  Lee motioned to Pitt's nearly empty bottle. "Like another beer?"

  "No thanks; this is fine."

  "The truth of the matter is," Lee said, "Charlie blew up."

  "Blew up?"

  "Dynamite, I guess. Nobody never knew for sure. About all they ever found they could recognize was one boot and a thumb."

  "Sheriff's report said it was another one of Charlie's inventions gome wrong," Maxine added.

  "I still say bullshit!" Lee grunted.

  "Shame on you." Maxine shot her husband a puritanical stare.

  "That's the way I feel about it. Charlie knew more about explosives than any man alive. He used to be an Army demolitions expert. Why, hell, he defused bombs and artillery shells all across Europe in World War Two."

  "Don't pay any attention to him," said Maxine haughtily. "Lee has it in his head Charlie was murdered. Ridiculous. Charlie Smith didn't have an enemy in the world. His death was an accident pure and simple."

  8

  "Everyone's entitled to an opinion," Lee said.

  "Some dessert, Mr. Pitt?" asked Maxine. "I made some apple turn-overs."

  "I can't manage another bite, thank you."

  "And you, Lee?"

  "I'm not hungry anymore," Raferty grumbled.

  "Don't feel bad, Mr. Raferty," Pitt said consolingly. "It seems my imagination got the best of me also. Finding pieces of an aircraft in the middle of the mountains ... I naturally thought they came from a crash site."

  "Men can be such children sometimes." Max gave Pitt a little-girl smile. "I hope you enjoyed your lunch."

  "Fit for a gourmet," Pitt said.

  "I should have cooked the Rocky Mountain oysters a little longer, though. They were a bit on the rare side. Didn't you think so, Lee?"

  "Tasted okay to me."

  "Rocky Mountain oysters?" asked Pitt.

  "Yes, you know," said Maxine. "The fried bull testicles."

  "You did say 'testicles.' "

  "Lee insists I serve them at least two times a week."

  "Beats hell out of meat loaf," Lee said, suddenly laughing.

  "That's not all it beats hell out of," Pitt murmured, looking down at his stomach, wondering if the Rafertys stocked Alka-Seltzer, and sorry now he'd skipped the fishing.

  At three o'clock in the morning Pitt was wide awake. As he lay in bed with Loren snuggled against him and stared through the picture windows at the silhouetted mountains, his mind was throwing images inside his skull like a kaleidoscope. The last piece of what had turned out to be a perfectly credible puzzle refused to fit in its slot. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east when Pitt eased out of bed, pulled on a pair of shorts, and quietly stepped outside.

  Loren's old Jeep was sitting in the driveway. He reached in, took a flashlight from the glove compartment, and entered the garage. He pulled the drop cloth aside and studied the oxygen tank. Its shape was cylindrical, measuring, Pitt guessed, slightly more than one yard in length by eighteen inches in diameter. Its surface was scratched and dented, but it was the condition of the fittings that attracted his interest. After several minutes he turned his attention to the nose gear.

  The twin wheels were joined by a common axle that was attached at their hubs like the head of a T to the center shaft. The tires were doughnut shaped and their treads relatively unworn. They stood roughly three feet high and, amazingly, still contained air.

  The garage door creaked. Pitt turned and watched Loren peek into the darkened cavern. Heshinedthelightonher. She was wearing only a blue nylon peignoir. Her hair was tousled and her face reflected a mixture of fear and uncertainty.

  "Is that you, Dirk?"

  "No," he said, smiling in the dark. "It's your friendly mountain milkman."

  She heaved a sigh of relief, came forward, and gripped his arm for security. "A comedian you're not. What are you doing down here, anyway?"

  "Something bugged me about these things." He pointed the beam of light at the aircraft fragments. "Now I know what it was."

  Loren stood and shivered in that dirty, dusty garage beneath the silent cabin. "You're making a big deal over nothing," she murmured. "You said it yourself: the Rafertys had a logical explanation for how this useless junk got here. Dad probably picked it up at some salvage yard."

  'Tm not
so sure," Pitt said.

  "He was always buying up old scrap," she argued. "Look around you; the place is full of his weird, half-finished inventions."

  "Half finished, yes. But at least he built something from the other trash. The oxygen tank and the nose gear he never touched.

  Why?"

  "Nothing mysterious about that. Dad most likely was killed before he got around to them."

  "Possibly."

  "That's settled, then," she said firmly. "Let's get back to bed before I freeze to death."

  "Sorry, I'm not through here yet."

  "What's left to see?"

  "Call it a pebble in the shoe of logic," he said. "Look here, at the fittings on the tank."

  She leaned over his shoulder. "They're broken. What did you ex-pect?"

  "If this was removed from an obsolete aircraft at a salvage yard, the mounting brackets and the fittings to the lines would have been disconnected with wrenches or cut with either a torch or heavy shears. These were twisted and wrenched apart by great force.

  Same goes for the nose gear. The strut was bent and severed just below the hydraulic shock absorber. Strange thing, though: the break did not happen all at once. You can see that most of the ragged edge is weathered and corroded, while a small section at the top still has a new look to it. Seems as if the main damage and the final break occurred years apart."

  "So what does all that prove?"

  "Nothing earth shattering. But it does indicate that these pieces did not come from an aircraft-salvage yard or a surplus store."

  "Now are you satisfied?"

  "Not entirely." He easily lifted the oxygen tank, carried it outside, and deposited it in the Jeep. "I can't manage the nose gear by myself. You'll have to give me a hand."

  "What are you up to?"

  "You said we were driving down the mountains into Denver for a shopping spree."

  "So?"

  "So while you're buying out the town, I'll haul this stuff over to Stapleton Airport and find somebody who can identify the aircraft it came from."

  "Pitt," she said, "you're not a Sherlock Holmes. Why go to all this trouble?"

  "Something to do. I'm bored. You've got your congressional mail to keep you busy. I'm tired of talking to trees all day."

  9

  "You have my undivided attention nights."

  "Man cannot live by sex alone."

  She watched in mute fascination as he scrounged two long boards and propped them on the lowered tailgate of the Jeep.

  "Ready?" he asked.

  "I'm not exactly dressed for the occasion," she said, a chill in her voice and goose bumps on her skin.

  "Then take off that thing so you won't get it dirty."

  As if in a dream, she hung her peignoir on a nail, mystified as to why women instinctively indulge men in their juvenile idiosyncrasies. Then the two of them-Pitt in his shorts, Congresswoman Loren Smith in the nude-heaved and grunted the dusty nose gear up the makeshift ramp into the back of the Jeep.

  While Pitt chained up the tailgate, Loren stood in the dawn's early light and gazed down at the dirt and grease smudged across her thighs and stomach and wondered what it was that possessed her to take a mad lover.

  Harvey Dolan, principal maintenance inspector for the Air Carrier District Office of the FAA, lifted his glasses to the light and, detecting no smears, clamped them on a pyramid-shaped nose.

  "Found them in the mountains, you say?"

  "About thirty miles northwest of Leadville, in the Sawatch range," Pitt answered. He had to speak loudly to be heard above the roar of the forklift that was carrying the nose gear and oxygen tank from the Jeep through the huge, yawning door of the FA A inspection hangar.

  "Not much to go on," said Dolan.

  "But you can offer an educated guess."

  Dolan shrugged noncommittally. "You might compare it to a police-man who's found a small lost child wandering the streets.

  The cop can see it's a boy with two arms and two legs, approximately two years old. The kid's clothes are J. C. Penney, and his shoes are Buster Browns. He says his first name is Joey, but he doesn't know his surname, address, or phone number. We're in the same boat, Mr. Pitt, as that cop."

  "Could you translate your analogue into factual detail?" Pitt asked, smiling.

  "Please observe," Dolan said with a professional flourish. He produced a ball-point pen from a breast pocket and probed it about like a pointer. "We have before us the frontal landing gear of an aircraft, an aircraft that weighed in the neighborhood of seventy or eighty thousand pounds. It was a propeller-driven craft, because the tires were not constructed for the stresses of a high-speed jet landing. Also, the strut design is of a type that has not been built since the nineteen fifties. Therefore, its age is somewhere between thirty and forty-five years. The tires came from Goodyear and the wheels from Rantoul Engineering, in Chicago. As to the make of the aircraft and its owner, however, I'm afraid there isn't too much to go on."

  "So it ends here," Pitt said.

  "You throw in the towel too early," said Dolan. "There is a perfectly legible serial number on the strut. If we can determine the type of ship this particular nose-gear model was designed for, then it becomes a simple matter of tracing the strut's number through the manufacturer and establishing the parent aircraft."

  "You make it sound easy." i

  "Any other fragments?"

  "Only what you see."

  "How did you come to bring them here?"

  "I figured that if anybody could identify them, it would.be the Federal Aviation Administration."

  "Putting us on the spot, huh?" Dolan said, grinning.

  "No malice intended," Pitt said, grinning back.

  "Not much to go on," Dolan said, "but you never can tell; we might get lucky"

  He made a thumbs-down motion toward a spot circled with red paint on the concrete floor. The forklift operator nodded and lowered the pallet holding the parts. Then he wheeled the forklift backward, cut a ninety-degree right turn, and clanked off toward another corner of the hangar.

  Dolan picked up the oxygen tank, turned it over in his hands in the manner of a connoisseur admiring a Grecian vase, and then set it down. "No way in hell to trace this," he said flatly. "Standardized tanks like this are still produced by several manufacturers for any one of twenty different aircraft models."

  Dolan began to warm to his task. He got down on his knees and examined every square inch of the nose gear. At one point he had Pitt help him roll it to a new position. Five minutes went by and he didn't utter a word.

  Pitt finally broke the silence. "Does it tell you anything?"

  "A great deal." Dolan straightened up. "But not, unfortunately, the jackpot answer."

  "The odds favor the proverbial wild-goose chase," said Pitt. "I don't feel right putting you to all this trouble."

  "Nonsense," Dolan assured him. "This is what John Q. Public pays me for. The FAA has dozens of missing aircraft on file whose fates have never been solved. Any time we have an opportunity to mark a case closed, we jump at it."

  "How do we go about laying our fingers on the make of aircraft?"

  "Ordinarily I'd call in research technicians from our engineering division. But I think I'll take a stab in the dark and try a shortcut. Phil Devine, maintenance chief over at United Airlines, is a walking encyclopedia on aircraft. If anyone can tell us at a glance, he can."

  "He's that good?" asked Pitt.

  "Take my word for it," Dolan said with a knowing smile. "He's that good."

  "A photographer you ain't. Your lighting is lousy." A nonfiltered cigarette dangled from the lips of Phil Devine as he studied the Polaroid pictures Dolan had taken of the nose gear. Devine was a W. C. Fields-type character-heavy through the middle, with a slow, whining voice.

  "I didn't come here for an art review," replied Dolan. "Can you put a make on the gear or not?"

  "It looks vaguely familiar, kind of like the assembly off an old B-twenty-nine."

&nbsp
; "That's not good enough."

  "What do you expect from a bunch of fuzzy pictures-an absolute, irrefutable ID?"

  10

  "I had hoped for something like that, yes," Dolan replied, unruffled.

  Pitt was beginning to wonder if he was about to referee a fight. Devine read the uneasy look in his eyes.

  "Relax, Mr. Pitt," he said, and smiled. "Harvey and I have a standing rule: we're never civil to each other during working hours.

  However, as soon as five o'clock rolls around, we cut the hard-assing and go out and have a beer together."

  "Which I usually pay for," Dolan injected dryly.

  "You government guys are in a better position to moonlight," Devine fired back.

  "About the nose gear . . ." Pitt said, probing quietly.

  "Oh yeah, I think I might dig up something." Devine rose heavily from behind his desk and opened a closet filled from floor to ceiling with thick black-vinyl-bound books. "Old maintenance manuals," he explained. "I'm probably the only nut in commercial aviation who hangs on to them." He went directly to one volume buried among the mass and began thumbing through its pages.

  After a minute he found what he was looking for and passed the open book across the desk. "That close enough for you?"

  Pitt and Dolan leaned forward and examined an exploded-view line drawing of a nose-gear assembly.

  "The wheel castings, parts, and dimensions"-Dolan tapped the page with his finger-"they're one and the same."

  "What aircraft?" asked Pitt.

  "Boeing Stratocruiser," answered Devine. "Actually I wasn't that far off when I guessed a B-twenty-nine. The Stratocruiser was based on the bomber's design. The Air Force version was designated a C-ninety-seven."

  Pitt turned to the front of the manual and found a picture of the plane in flight. A strange-looking aircraft: its two-deck fuselage had the configuration of a great double-bellied whale.

  "I recall seeing these as a boy," Pitt said. "Pan American used them."

  "So did United," said Devine. "We flew them on the Hawaii run. She was a damned fine airplane."

  "Now what?" Pitt turned to Dolan.

  "Now I send the nose gear's serial number to Boeing, in Seattle, along with a request to match it with the parent aircraft. I'll also make a call to the National Transportation Safety Board in Washington, who will tell me if they show any lost commercial Stratocruisers over the continental United States."