Flynn, p.13
Flynn, page 13
part #1 of Flynn Series
“I know.”
“Some smart guy I am. I never caught on.”
“Newspapers still don’t print the absolute truth of everything,” said Flynn. “There’s still some decency left.”
“I always wondered what ‘Forker’ meant.” “It means Tucker,’ ” Flynn said gently.
“What else, Frank? Quit forking around.”
“A man named Nathan Baumberg,” Flynn said. “Vice-president of Zephyr Airways. In charge of aircraft maintenance. Either is or was involved with the Jewish Defense League.”
“Phew.”
“Precisely. However, I can’t quite put this together. He had the motive, the opportunity, and, of course, the wherewithal. However, we have not developed evidence yet that Baumberg knew, or could have known, that Rashin al Khatid, the Ifadi Minister of the Exchequer, was aboard that plane, traveling under another name, on a U.S. passport, buying a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of arms for the Republic of Ifad.”
“JDL Intelligence isn’t that good, Frank.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“Furthermore, the JDL would never do a thing like that. Kill over a hundred innocent people—”
“I wouldn’t think so,” said Flynn. “I’m sure not. But any fringe section of its members, or ex-members might. Trouble with a group like that, they can’t always control their members. Especially their ex-members. People who left the JDL with one discontent or another.”
“What would their purpose be in blowing up the plane—punitive?”
“Is there any way,” Flynn asked, “they could stop the sale of arms by murdering Rashin al Khatid on his way home with a quarter of a billion in his pocket?”
“Funny you should say that, Frank. One of the two things I have to tell you is that the sale of arms to the Republic of Ifad was canceled today.”
“It was?”
“It was.”
“All of it?”
“The whole quarter of a billion.”
“Who canceled it? The United States?”
“No. The Republic of Ifad. No reason given. The United States was expecting to go through with the deal.”
“There’s no way anyone could have expected otherwise,” Flynn said.
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“So maybe they were scared off.”
“Maybe they were.”
“Tell me, sir, has there been any announcement from Ifad concerning the death of their Minister of the Exchequer?”
“Not yet.”
“Odd.”
“Not so odd. The guy was traveling on a phony passport. Don’t worry. He’ll die next week in an auto accident in the Zol Desert.”
“Then,” said Flynn, “there’s another intriguing lead. It has to do with a son who is a compulsive gambler. Always before his father’s paid his debts for him. Now the lad is impossibly in debt. Daddy can’t pay. He goes on that airplane, insured for half a million dollars— he thinks, or somebody thinks—and the airplane blows up.”
“Name?”
“Fleming.”
“Judge Fleming?”
“And son. A very sick young man. A very desperate young man.”
“Sounds good.”
“You said that before,” said Flynn. “Two things wrong with it. So far, we haven’t placed the son at the airport. As far as we know, he did not go to see his father off. And young Fleming isn’t talking, voluntarily. Second, the son isn’t the beneficiary of the insurance— his stepmother is.
“And then,” Flynn continued, “we’ve got one hundred and twelve other people aboard that airplane. The above are just the immediately obvious leads.”
“You’ve done well in a couple of days, Frank.”
“We haven’t even begun,” Frank said. “As I said, we haven’t had any real significant break yet. I haven’t heard that bell ring, you know. Soon now, I’ll give these leads to the FBI, all done up lovely in a package, with a ribbon, for them to follow up, and then I’ll go see what else I can find.”
“Don’t despair, Francis.”
“Wouldn’t think of it. But trying to find the reason for the simultaneous deaths of one hundred and eighteen people … it’s like The Bridge of San Luis Rey, if you take my meaning. There’s a single cause, there has to be, but I wonder about so much more.”
“Don’t turn mystical, either.”
“I’ll suppress it. You said you had two things to tell me. What is the other?”
“The United States Navy has reported there was a Russian submarine in Massachusetts Bay, Monday night.”
“You don’t say! The idea of the rocket rears up again.”
“They pursued. The decision not to apprehend the sub was made at the very highest level of United States government.”
“Well, now, there’s nothing mystical about that!”
“But, Frank, no one can figure out why the Russians would do such a thing—blow up an American commercial jet.”
“To demonstrate to the world they can?”
“I think everybody knows they can, Frank.”
“Do you suppose the wee Republic of Ifad is making war-like gestures at the mighty Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?”
John Roy Priddy laughed.
“Well,” said Flynn, “could it have anything to do with the arms sale going to the United States?”
“Nonsense,” said N. N. Zero. “We’re only talking about a quarter of a billion dollars.”
“Pardon my manners,” said Flynn.
“Everybody’s bigger than that.”
“Still and all, as an example?”
“Would you believe it?”
“No.”
“Thought not. Neither would I. You and I botK have too much experience that side of the fence. Anything you need, Frank?”
“Yes. I want photos of Rashin al Khatid, Mihson Taha, and Nazim Salem Zoyad. Copies of their passport photos will do.”
“I doubt it. As you realize, they were purposely made a little blurry.”
“Better than nothing,” said Flynn. “I want to discover what else our boyos did, other than penny-banking, while in Boston.”
“They’ll be on your desk in the morning.”
“Thank you.”
Cocky said, “Grover’s waiting downstairs, in the car, to take you to the airport”
“And to the pawnshops,” said Flynn. “Don’t forget the pawnshops, on the way home.”
Into the telephone, Cocky said, “Inspector Flynn’s office.”
“Ah, Cocky. A lovely, warm cup of Eyebright tea, well-steeped. Good in the gizzard.”
Cocky handed Flynn the phone. “Hess. FBI.”
“This is the President of the United States,” Flynn said into the phone.
“Flynn,” Hess said, “is it true you arrested Mrs, Charles Fleming this morning?”
“Yes,” said Flynn. “It is.”
“You went ahead and did a stupid thing like that, without even informing us?”
“I did,” said Flynn.
“What in Christ’s name made you do a thing like that?”
“I was inspired,” said Flynn. “By staff.”
“You mother-fucking, cock-sucking son of a bitch!”
“Now, now,” said Flynn, “you’re raising your voice.”
“Son of a bitch!”
“Mind your manners,” said Flynn, “or I’ll have to put down the receiver and complain about an obscene phone call.”
“I told you you’re not to do anything without us!”
“I heard you.”
“Then what the fuck do you mean by going out and arresting the wife of a federal judge for mass murder without a shred of evidence?”
Flynn tugged the ruby and diamond pin from his vest pocket—the pin I. M. Fletcher had sent Jenny— and looked at it, turning it this way and that in the light.
“It’s all right,” said Flynn. “I let the lady go, after giving her a nice French lunch.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“The issue is over,” said Flynn. “For the time being.”
“It is like hell! For the last time, Flynn, I’m ordering you to report to the Command Center at the airport, at once!”
” ‘Command Center’? Which do you call that, the broiling conference room, or the freezing hangar?”
“Get over here! Conference room! Now!”
“I wouldn’t go near that airport,” said Flynn, “if you were offering free ice cream to everyone under the age of forty-two!”
Twenty-three
“Airport,” Flynn said. He settled on the passenger side of the front seat. “Command Center. Then on the way home, we’ll stop at a pawnshop.”
“Pawnshop.”
Grover jerked the wheel violently to the left and made the car jump from the curb.
He turned the windshield wipers on. There was a blowing mist.
“How are you the now?” asked Flynn.
The welts on Grover’s face appeared purple in the dark car.
“Well,” Flynn said to the lack of response. “Perhaps you’d report to me the details of your visit to the home of the widow Geiger in Newton?”
“Nothing there.”
“No house? Nothing?”
“No evidence,” said Grover.
“Oh, that!”
“Her husband,” intoned Grover, “one Raymond Geiger—”
“Juan Raymond Geiger?”
“One Raymond Geiger.”
“Oh.”
“—was in the shoe business.”
“I see,” said Flynn.
“He was going to London Monday night, or Tuesday morning, on Zephyr Airways Flight 80.”
“Yes.”
“To have business meetings in London, and then go on to Frankfurt, Germany. They’re a well-to-do family. Big house, Lincoln Continental Mark IV, Mercury station wagon. Lawns. Kids.”
“Then why did the boyo insure himself for five thousand dollars before boarding a plane?”
“His wife says he did that all the time. A superstition. For burial expenses.”
“More superstition.”
“His wife says he made a joke of it—as long as he bought flight insurance and was prepared for the plane to crash, he was sure it wouldn’t happen.”
Flynn said, “I never thought of flight insurance as an object of comedy. The Flemings had a giggle over it, too. I wonder if the insurance people understand they might as well be in the dial-a-joke business? It would save them from having to pay off on their policies, ever.”
“They’re not going to, anyway,” Grover said.
“Oh?”
“Not right away, anyway. Mrs. Geiger showed me a letter she’d received saying the insurance company was withholding all payments until after the explosion of Flight 80 had been completely investigated.”
They were able to move through the tunnel slowly but steadily.
Coming out of the tunnel, Flynn said, quietly, “I wonder if you can tell me what on God’s green earth possessed you to go out to Kendall Green and arrest Mrs. Charles Fleming, especially without fair notice to anyone?”
“The same thing that would have possessed you, if you’d had any police training, or experience.”
Grover showed his badge to the man in the toll booth, and rolled his window back up.
“And what would that be?” Flynn asked, gently.
“Shit,” Grover said. “You and your women.”
“Me and my women?”
“A cop is taught, Inspector”—the Sergeant stressed Flynn’s rank unkindly—“to keep his emotional cool, his detachment, at all times.”
“What a relief,” said Flynn.
“The other day at the Fleming broad’s house, your eyes were all over her.”
“They were.”
“You were big-eyed—” Grover expostulated. “Blind!”
” ‘Big-eyed blind.’ That’s as close to poetry as you’ve ever come, Grover.”
“You had the hots for her. Right away. Deny it.”
“I don’t deny it,” said Flynn. “Whatever it is it means.”
“Jesus. Pink motorcycle. The wife of a federal judge —herself a college teacher, a consultant for the Boston Police—riding a pink motorcycle. Jesus!”
“Yes,” said Flynn. “I was even taken by the pink motorcycle.”
“You didn’t hear a word she said. She virtually confessed, Frank! You didn’t even hear her.”
“No. I didn’t hear her confess.”
“Look, Frank. The Judge was twenty-two years older than his wife. She’s thirty-one. He was fifty-three*”
“I remember your making some comment on that matter.”
“She picks up her husband at his office, drives him to a restaurant on the harbor where they have a late supper and a lot to drink. She drove him to the airport. That’s significant. It indicates she’d had less to drink than he had. The old boy had a skinful.”
“I see.”
Grover placed the car against the curb in front of Zephyr Airways and turned off the ignition.
“Here at the airport she takes out, she thinks she takes out, a half a million dollars’ worth of flight insurance on the old boy. Pretending she didn’t know there was a one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollar limit on flight insurance may have been part of her blind—so she can have some evidence that she didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Yes.”
A state policeman in a slicker was ambling toward the car.
“She sees his baggage checked through, to be put on the airplane. Even she says that it was she who packed his bag and that he never looked into it.”
The trooper banged his fist with extraordinary force against Flynn’s window.
Flynn ignored him.
“Then she says she went home and went to bed by herself and the next morning didn’t even know the Goddamned plane had exploded all over the Goddamned sky just after takeoff.”
Flynn said, “I still don’t see any new evidence.”
The trooper banged on the car window almost hard enough to break it.
Flynn slowly rolled down the window and looked at the cop.
“What do you want?”
“Get this car out of here! No parking against this curb! Move it!”
Flynn said, “No/’ and rolled the window back up again, slowly.
He said, “From what you say, Grover, I still don’t see what possessed you to arrest the Fleming woman.”
Grover said, “Everyone knows the Judge’s son is a compulsive gambler.”
“Everyone?”
“Everyone.”
“I had to find it out, myself.”
The trooper was banging his fist, hard, on the top of the car.
“No offense intended, Inspector,” Grover said, intending an offense, “but you’re not a cop.”
“Ach, well. I’ll be the first to admit that.”
The trooper was banging harder on the car roof.
Flynn rolled down his window halfway.
“Cut that out,” he said.
He rolled the window up again.
“Probably the kid, Charles Fleming, Junior, was heavy in debt again.”
“I suspect he is,” said Flynn.
“Now does it make sense to you?”
“No,” Flynn said. “We don’t know that Chicky was at the airport. Secondly, Chicky is not the beneficiary of whatever insurance there is. His stepmother is.” Flynn began to get out of the car. “I don’t think you know anything more than I do, Grover.”
“I don’t,” Grover said. “But you’re blind.”
“That may be.”
The trooper was at the front of the car, copying down the license number.
“Think of a thirty-one-year-old broad with a pink motorcycle and a fifty-three-year-old husband.”
“I have been,” said Flynn.
He stood on the sidewalk.
Grover shouted at him over the wet roof of the car.
“You can’t tell me that lady had eyes only for her husband!”
“Maybe not,” said Flynn.
The trooper slammed a piece of cardboard against Flynn’s chest with incredible force.
“This is the most expensive ticket you’ve ever gotten, Buddy!”
Flynn let the ticket flutter to the wet sidewalk.
“Now get this car the fuck out of here!”
Flynn said, quietly, “Buzz off.”
Over the car roof, Grover said, “Inspector, you still don’t get the point.”
“Inspector?” said the trooper.
“Mrs. Fleming is thirty-one years old, and her stepson is twenty-six.”
“Ah!” said Flynn.
The trooper moved around the front of the car, toward Grover. “Inspector?” he said.
“Ah!” Flynn was looking across the car roof at Grover. “That’s what you’re thinking?”
“That’s it,” said Grover.
The trooper said, “Is that Inspector Flynn?”
Grover said, “Aw, fuck off.”
Sergeant Richard T. Whelan got into the car, slammed the door, and sat there.
“Humph,” Flynn said to the trooper. “That’s what he’s thinking.”
Flynn took a step to the curb and opened the passenger-side car door. He bent over and stuck his head inside the car.
Behind the steering wheel, Grover was staring straight ahead, arms folded across his chest.
“You believe,” Flynn said, “that Sassie killed the Judge because she’s in love with Chicky?”
“I do,” said Grover.
“By God. If only the FBI had perceived the full clarity of your thinking, they never would have called me to complain!”
On the sidewalk, Flynn flipped the expensive parking ticket with the edge of his shoe toward the state trooper, and said, “You’re littering.”
Twenty-four
Flynn found Paul Kirkman in the corridor of the Zephyr Airways Passenger Services offices.
Even at the end of his workday, Kirkman looked freshly pressed and groomed.
“Hello,” Flynn said.
“Hello, Inspector.”
“I’m not precisely sure what it is I want,” Flynn said.
“Who among us mortals does know precisely what it is we want?” Kirkman grinned. “Come into the office.”
