The Bessie Blue Killer. Richard A. Lupoff
on You Bet Your Life.
“I don’t know. That, uh, that would go through Walnut Creek. I don’t know if we carry a policy on him.”
High said, “I meant to ask you about that. Thought you ran your company’s office out there. What’s this fellow Mueller doing in your job?” He jerked a thumb toward an overdressed individual who had seated himself at a makeshift desk near one wall. A mug of something steamed invitingly in front of him. He was filling out papers attached to a clipboard.
Behind Mueller a metal door led to another, smaller room. It was an old-style office complete with filing cabinets, girlie calendars and a hot-plate. A black man in civilian clothes and a gray-haired woman were hunched over a metal desk with a uniformed sergeant. Lindsey could see only the woman’s back. She wore a heavily quilted vest over a plaid shirt. The male civilian was talking and the sergeant was writing, nodding, looking up from time to time, obviously to ask a question, then bending once more to write when the man answered.
Lindsey said, “I guess I should talk to Elmer. He’s got my old job, Lieutenant—Doc. I’ve been sort of kicked upstairs. Working out of Denver now.”
“Just like Perry Mason!”
Lindsey smiled. He handed High one of his new business cards. It was the first one he’d ever used.
“Special Projects Unit,” High read. He looked up at Lindsey. “Very impressive. Congratulations. They paying you a lot to do this?”
Lindsey shook his head.
Elmer Mueller looked up from his clipboard. He didn’t seem surprised to see Lindsey at the murder scene. Their eyes caught and held briefly. Lindsey nodded. Mueller returned to his papers.
High steered Lindsey away from Leroy McKinney’s cadaver. “Can’t say I like your Mr. Mueller too much, Lindsey. He used to run an insurance agency in Oakland.”
“I know.”
“Never quite got in trouble with the law. Certainly never got into my bailiwick—Homicide. But a lot of the boys at Broadway and Sixth know him. Boys and girls, excuse me. Men and women. Martians. Too many times over the years, we’d get involved in something messy and shake hands with Elmer.”
Lindsey grunted. He didn’t like Mueller either but he didn’t want to run down another International Surety man.
“Well, before we get back to the case at hand,” High said, “if Elmer is your company’s man on the spot, what can I do for you, Lindsey? You’re not here just out of curiosity, are you?”
“Hardly. As a matter of fact, I just started this new job and I’m afraid I’m in trouble already. I was supposed to prevent losses on this project. Bessie Blue. You know about Bessie Blue, Doc?”
“Just a little. I expect I’m going to learn a lot more about it.”
“International Surety wrote an umbrella policy for Bessie Blue. Anything goes wrong on the project, mechanical failure, equipment loss, public liability, we have to pay.”
“Just like Lloyds of London.”
“Close enough.”
“I guess you’re in trouble, then, with Mr. McKinney.”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to study the case folder, then get together with Mueller. What happened to—the victim? And what’s the matter with his hand?”
“What happened, almost certainly, was a monkey wrench. Come on over here.”
The wrench lay a few yards from the body. It had been marked off with white tape, too. The wrench was made of some dark metal, maybe cast iron, and its head was discolored with the same red goo that had seeped into the cavity in the middle of Leroy McKinney’s forehead.
“It’ll be bagged and taken away and tested,” High said. “If we’re lucky we might get some useful fingerprints off it. And we’ll compare the blood from the wrench and from the victim, run a genetic scan just to make sure. But I’d give big odds that we’ll get a match.”
“Do you know…?” Lindsey asked half a question.
“What? Who, when, why, how? You know us, Lindsey. There’s not much difference between a detective and a newspaper reporter. Speaking of which, the Oakland Trib was already here, reporter and photog, and Channel 2. Ask me an easy one.”
Lindsey said, “Okay. Who found the body?”
High nodded toward the office where the uniformed sergeant and the civilians were still huddled over the metal desk. “Mr. Crump and Mrs. Chandler.”
Lindsey studied the trio as best he could. The male civilian was wearing a leather jacket like a World War II aviator. Lindsey saw that he was gray-haired, like the murder victim. He was nodding and gesturing in response to the police sergeant’s questions.
Lindsey said, “Did they do it?”
High managed a small laugh. “That would make things easy, wouldn’t it? I don’t know who did it. My guess is, somebody who was known to the victim. Look at that. Hit him right between the eyes, no sign of a struggle. How could somebody get that close, with a heavy wrench in his hand, and the victim not try to fight back, not try to escape, not even put up his hands to ward off the blow?”
Lindsey forced himself to look at the corpse again, then waited for High to resume.
“The body was already cold and rigor had set in when our kids got here. So McKinney had to be dead several hours when Chandler and Crump found him. Unless they killed him and stood around for five or six hours before they phoned it in. Which, I’ll admit, is not impossible. We’ll have to check whereabouts. There’s not much security around here, like there is over at the passenger terminal. But I think we’re looking at a third party.”
Lindsey peered through the glass at Chandler and Crump and the police officer. He said, “Still, who are they?”
“He’s our movie star. Lawton Crump. One of the original Tuskegee airmen. You ever hear of the Tuskegee airmen?”
Lindsey moved his head uncertainly. “Might have seen something about them. I think it was on PBS. I don’t watch much PBS.”
High said, “Yeah. World War II outfit.”
Lindsey said, “He’s still got his jacket.”
High grinned. “Hardly any Negro combat troops at the start of the war. Mostly they used them for service troops. Cooks, laundry, mechanics. You know. There was a lot of agitation to let Negroes fight. We had a whole Nisei brigade, and the Japs were the enemy. The blacks had been here for hundreds of years, why couldn’t they fight for their country?”
Lindsey shook his head. “You tell me.”
“Somebody even got the cockeyed idea that Negroes could learn to fly airplanes and go into combat. So they set up this segregated training base in Alabama, and pumped out whole units of black fliers. Called them Tuskegee airmen. Now they want to make a movie about them. Times change.”
“And Mr. Crump was one of the Tuskegee airmen?”
“Pleasant, soft-spoken elderly gentleman of the colored persuasion.” High nodded toward the office again. Through the windows it appeared that Crump and the uniformed police sergeant were concluding their business. “Flew everything we had. Or so I’m told. It was before my time, Lindsey.”
“And the woman?” Lindsey asked.
“Mrs. Chandler? She’s from Double Bee Enterprises. They’re the outfit making the movie.”
“I don’t see any cameras. Or any airplanes, for that matter.”
“They haven’t arrived yet. You’ll have to get the details from Mrs. Chandler or Mr. Crump. She’s the producer, he’s their technical advisor. In fact, I think the movie’s pretty much about him. But they’re merely the advance party. McKinney