5 - Choker: Ike Schwartz Mystery 5 (6 page)

Chapter 10

Blake had interviewed the altar guild members after church. His confrontation with Barbara Starkey had taken time and he missed a few, but he felt certain that one of them knew where or how the silverware might have disappeared. The following morning, he called the Sheriff’s office. By then, Frank Sutherlin had already heard about the possible theft from his mother. He said he’d look at the safe and check the building security that morning. Blake had to smile. The church, as everyone except Frank seemed to know, was a sieve when it came to security. He’d ordered the locks changed once the previous year, much to the consternation of over half the congregation, who believed that they had an intrinsic, if not canonical, right to possess a key to their church. Within six months, the number of keys in circulation had returned to, indeed, exceeded the original number, and any hope of security went away.

The unhappy truth was that within their memories, churches had never been locked. In the past, sacred places were considered safe from pilfering and petty theft. Not so anymore. Now churches routinely locked their doors and in many cases had installed elaborate security systems. Blake knew of one that had a pressure sensor placed under the church’s expensive antique chalice, which had been on display in the side chapel. Lift it from its spot, and it triggered an earsplitting siren. One night a thief stole both the chalice and the alarm system that went with it.

Frank Sutherlin was as soft-spoken as his mother was loud. He looked at the safe, declared it pointless to take fingerprints, and said he’d ask around. He suggested a preliminary call to the insurance company might be in order.

“You know anybody missing a cat?” he added.

“A cat? What kind of cat?”

“Black one, I think.”

“Esther Peepers is missing a black cat. Answers to the name of Odin. No, that’s not right, but something like that, though.”

“Old Mr. Peepers was named Ogden. You think she named it after him?”

“Ogden. That’s it. It’s been missing for maybe a week. The cat answers to Ogden.”

“Not anymore, it don’t.”

“How’s that?”

“Deader than a chunk.”

“That’s too bad. Someone will have to tell her.”

“I reckon that falls into your purview, Rev.”

“Maybe it wasn’t her cat. There must be dozens of black cats in the area.”

“And dogs too. Don’t forget the dogs.”

“True. Someone told me a couple up at the college are missing their dogs. I think I’ll wait a week or so, in case the pussy shows up. No sense in alarming the old lady for no reason.”

“Right. Say, Rev., what do you know about pentagons?”

“Well, it’s been a while since I studied geometry. Five sides, very difficult to bisect the interior angle, and…why do you ask?”

“No reason right now. Just ran across one and I can’t explain what it’s doing in the bottom of a sinkhole is all.”

Frank left, and Blake stood staring out the window. He still had to ask Mary about the trip up the Skyline Drive. He dialed her number at work.

“When can you pry yourself loose from the job to go for a drive?”

“Where?”

“Up on the parkway to look at the leaves.”

“Just the leaves?”

“Well, we might take a picnic and a walk on one of the paths and…”

“A walk?”

“And whatever.”

“I’ll think about the ‘whatever’ and let you know. Not today, though. Wednesday I have a half-day. Is that good?”

“Perfect. Wednesday it is.”

“I meant to say something to you Sunday, but you were pretty tied up. You need a haircut.”

“I do?”

“You’re shaggy.”

“You think? I like shaggy.”

“It makes you look like a superannuated hippie.”

“I don’t like the barber in town, and Roanoke is too far to drive just for a haircut.”

“You go see Lee Henry. She’ll fix you up.” Mary gave him the address and directions and said she’d set up the appointment.

“Ask her for the story.”

***

Blake looked at the scrap of paper in his hand and then at the mailbox. The address on the paper matched that on the paper. Something didn’t compute. Mary had sent him to get his hair cut by Ms. Henry. He expected a salon of some sort, but he found himself on a country road on the outskirts of Picketsville staring at an ordinary split-level house with an oversized garage attached. Between the garage and the house he thought he could just make out a doorway, and it had a sign hanging in it—one of those ready-made available at the hardware store—black with florescent orange letters that spelled OPEN.

He turned into the drive and pulled forward to the garage where a graveled parking area had been created. He glanced at the door and its sign, shrugged, and exited his car. Over the door he saw another, smaller sign, hand-painted, he guessed, in similar hues as the house paint, declaring
Lee Henry—Stylist
. He’d found the right place.

Once inside he recognized the chair and smells of a barber shop/beauty salon—wet hair, mousse, and an olio of scents, some left by previous customers, others lingering in the air from hair sprays, conditioners, and shampoo. A woman in her fifties, he guessed—he couldn’t tell her age with any certainty—greeted him with a smile.

“You must be my friend Mary’s man. She called for your appointment.”

“Yes, that would be me. How’d you know?” She lifted an eyebrow and wagged her hand, palm down, across her throat. “Ah, the collar. I forget sometimes.” She waved him into the chair.

“That thing will have to come off, honey,” she said. “You let the clock run too long since your last cut and I gotta work on that neck of yours.”

He eased the clerical collar from the gold-plated collar buttons at the back and front of his shirt.

“Well, land’s sake, will you lookit them? I didn’t know they still made them collar buttons. My old granddaddy used to have some of them in his dresser drawer. He said they was for when he had to wear a boiled shirt, whatever that is, to some fancy do at the Elks.”

“She said I should ask for ‘the story.’”

“The what?”

“She said I should expect to hear a story sometime during the session. She said I should try not to seem shocked—that you sometimes got a little bawdy. Is that true?”

“Bawdy? Well, now that you mention it, bawdy might be the word. But I don’t go over the line, well, not with Mary and…well, you being a preacher and all. I’ll have to be careful there, too.”

Blake wondered sometimes at a societal attitude that sometimes criticized clergy for not being of the world and then systematically refused to include them in it for fear of offending them. Men, and women, too for that matter, would tell the most outrageous stories to their doctors, lawyers, coworkers, barbers even, but clammed up the instant a clergyman or woman hove into view. The Caesar’s wife syndrome, he supposed.

“I promise you, I will not be offended. Before I started wearing my collar backward I spent time in locker rooms with football players, and you’d be surprised at the jokes seminarians tell.”

“When was the last time anyone took a look at this mess?”

“Sometime in August, I think. Mary said I looked shaggy and I should have you trim me up a bit.”

“Shaggy ain’t the word I’d use here, Rev. And trim won’t cover it by half. Okay, I’ll just put on some good old Johnny Cash. You just relax and let Lee work her magic.”

She punched buttons on a CD player in the corner, and The Man in Black began a gospel tune. Blake wondered if she’d saved that one for “the preacher” or if gospel happened to be the next in the selection. She clucked disapprovingly while she combed and snipped at his hair. Johnny segued into “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

“You hear about the blonde in the bar and the suicide?” she said.

At last—the story. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s a blonde joke. I can tell it on account of this month, I’m a blonde. See this man comes into a bar one night and orders a drink. There’s this good-looking blonde next to him, and he’s thinking up a good pick-up line to use on her. The late news is on the TV over the bar, and they’re showing a scene where this guy is on a building ledge fixing to jump. Cops is talking to him, folks are yelling ‘jump, jump.’ Never could understand that, yelling for someone to kill themselves. Well, anyway, there he is teetering over the edge. The guy turns to the blonde and says, ‘I’ll bet you twenty dollars he jumps.’ And she says, ‘You’re on.’ So they watch a while, and sure enough the guy jumps off the building.

“The woman slides a twenty down the bar to him. ‘You win,’ she says. ‘Hey,’ he says, ‘I can’t take your money. I already saw this on the five o’clock news.’ ‘Me, too,’ she says, ‘I just didn’t think he’d do it again!’” Lee dissolved into laughter. As with many story-tellers, she was her own best audience. Blake smiled. He had a repeatable story.

“So what’s up with your missing silver?”

“You heard about that?”

“I hear most things in my line of business. People like to talk and somehow don’t think telling me counts as lettin’ out a secret or such.”

“Well, Frank Sutherlin says he’ll ask around. That doesn’t sound like much, though.”

“In this town, askin’ around will get you more information than that CSI routine.”

“Mmm…he wanted to know what I knew about pentagons.”

“Why’d he do that?”

“Says he found a bunch of fire pits in a sinkhole out in the park.”

“Oh? Out in the sinkhole?”

“You know it?”

“Well, sure. Back in the day when we was kids, that’s where we’d go to…you know. We called it The Passion Pit, ain’t that something?”

“Kids still go there?”

“I expect so, but of course the whole game is changed. Kids don’t have to sneak around like we done, so maybe not so much any more.”

Kids in the sinkhole.

Chapter 11

Ike flew to Eastern Bay and circled the area he’d marked on the map as the most probable location for Nick’s downed aircraft. He hoped to find an altitude that would enable him to penetrate the water’s surface visually and perhaps catch a glimpse, a hint, of the plane. At one point, he thought he saw a shape that would serve but it was fleeting. Still, he jotted down the coordinates. Later he’d have Trent Fonts fly the plane, and he’d look again. He turned north and headed for Martin State.

As he made his turn, a flash of light caught his attention. It came from the land. Nothing remarkable in that, a windshield reflecting the sun, perhaps. It could also be a pair of binoculars aimed skyward. He shook off the thought. Too many days and nights in the Company had rendered him permanently paranoid. He settled into the routine of guiding the plane toward its destination and let his mind wander. Nick Reynolds had seen something in or on the water, and it seemed sufficiently important to try to warn Charlie. On the water meant a boat or ship of some sort. A submarine would be out of the question. The Navy’s tracking system would have located, identified, and probably made it surface long before it made its way into the bay. But Nick had seen something and deemed it important enough to make the call. A boat doing what? Dropping someone or some people off? To row ashore and…or maybe picking someone up? But why would that result in his plane being downed, if in fact, that’s what happened. Was he so absorbed in the object on the water he lost altitude and spiraled in?

Martin State loomed on his horizon. He cleared for landing and taxied to Brett Aviation. Trent waited for him in the hangar’s shade.

“I may have something for you,” he said, as Ike climbed down from the high-wing’s cockpit.

Ike smoothed out his slacks and breathed in the smells of kerosene and engine exhaust. Without much in the way of skyline to provide some shade, the airstrip shimmered in the late September sun and caused him to squint, in spite of his sunglasses. He ought to get a set of real aviator sunglasses. After all, if you’re going to be a pilot, you ought to look like a pilot.

“What would that be?”

“I located the beach on my map, you know, the one where I thought I saw the tail section washed up, and then went online to a website that plotted the bay’s tides. They had an archive section, and I found the tides for the time we think Nick went down. Then—I’m guessing now, you understand—I plotted them, like, backward and got a fix on where that piece of tail section may have gone into the water.”

Ike was impressed. “They have web sites that do that? Show me.”

The two men went into Trent’s office, and he spread out his chart. Ike took his out and did the same. Trent’s smaller circle would fit neatly into Ike’s larger one.

Progress. Maybe.

It also coincided with the general area where Ike thought he’d seen the shadow.

“We should get some divers and go look,” Trent said.

“Too soon. Look, the radius of that circle, as small as it seems on the map, is at least three and a half miles. I make that out to be about eleven square miles. Maybe more if you allow for the possibility of a greater or slower air speed that night, or wind. No, we have to narrow it down a whole lot more before we call in divers.”

“But if you spotted the wreckage, wouldn’t that narrow it down?”

“I saw a shape, a shadow, a…something, in the water. I didn’t see the bottom and it could have been anything—an old island that hasn’t quite washed away—anything.”

“If it were that, wouldn’t your boater’s charts show it?”

Ike realized they would. He hadn’t brought that map along and he regretted it. He’d have to check on it when he returned to the cottage that afternoon.

“I’ll check, but first, let’s fly Nick’s line and see if you can see what I saw.”

***

Trent’s voice crackled over the head set, “I don’t think you need any more flight instruction, Ike. Maybe more hours would help and, of course, since I don’t know what the Air Force put you through, I don’t know what your emergency plans might be.”

“Bail out, mostly.”

Trent grunted.

Eastern Bay appeared on their horizon and Ike dropped down to five hundred feet.

“How low can I go before I get into trouble with the FAA? What’s the limit? We weren’t taught that in the spy flying school.”

“None—if you’re crop dusting—otherwise, prudent and nonintrusive.”

“Meaning?”

Trent rolled his eyes heavenward and recited: “Except when necessary for takeoff or landing, no person may operate an aircraft below the following altitudes: (a) an altitude allowing, if a power unit fails…oh, never mind, I’ll keep you legal.”

“How about you take us down as low as you can and fly us like a crop duster back and forth over this area?”

“Roger, that.”

Trent was a skillful pilot and sure enough, he handled the plane like a crop-duster—no mean feat as those planes are designed with a huge lift-to-drag ratio that allowed them to climb quickly and fly slowly. On the fourth turn, Ike thought he saw the glint of light from the ground again. It seemed to come from the land near a wooded plot that bordered the water.

“Did you see that?” he asked.

“See what?” Trent flew the plane with absolute concentration. He wouldn’t have noticed.

“Thought I saw a flash of light.”

“Water sparkles, and up here it’d look like a flash.”

“No, it came from land.”

Trent shrugged. “I don’t see the shadow or whatever either.”

“Tide’s running out. Silt from the rivers and creeks muddies things up.”

“The photos taken the day before and after showed a barge over there.” Ike pointed toward the shore.

“Not there now.”

“No, there’s something else in about the same position. What is that?”

Trent took a pass at the object in the water. “Duck blind.”

“Like for hunting?”

“Right. You have to get a permit to use them, and they are limited as to how many and when you can shoot.”

“Funny place for a duck blind. It faces the deep water. I thought duck hunters shot over shallow water.”

“Not my hobby. Bow and arrow for deer, now that’s hunting.”

“Fly over the place where you saw the tail section.”

“Where I thought I saw the tail section, you mean.”

“If you think you saw a piece of airplane, I’m guessing you saw a piece of an airplane.”

Trent turned the plane inland and pointed to a narrow strip of sand a mile in. “Over there just beyond the pier.”

The narrow strip extended on either side of a pier. A work boat was moored to the end, but Ike didn’t see anybody on or near it.

“Not there now.”

“Nope, it was gone the next day.”

“Nobody reported a piece of wreckage even when the missing plane was on the news for days?”

“Nope.”

Ike shook his head. “Something’s amiss here. Why wouldn’t you report something like that?” Trent shrugged again.

“About your tide charts…there’s a problem. Unless you know for certain when the piece of airplane touched land—”

“I know. I can’t be sure enough to backtrack…it could have floated further in, then washed ashore on the way back out when the tide turned.” Trent looked disappointed.

“We’ll stay with your best guess for now. I think we’d better get back to Martin State. I’ll come back here later by car. I need to talk to the people on the ground. Someone must have seen something.”