Chapter 23 #2
Chief Judkins arrived while they were still eating.
Daisy was embarrassed to be caught in a dressing gown, but he was either too polite to appear to notice or too preoccupied to notice.
He was persuaded to sit down to a waffle and a cup of coffee.
Then he and Alec put their heads together, and Daisy went to change into the dress Mrs. Fisher had made her.
It was a rather ghastly mustard yellow wool, clashing horribly with her blue costume jacket, but it fitted reasonably well and she was far too grateful to quibble. Anything rather than Jake’s trousers.
Judkins drove her and Alec out to the airfield in a Model T with police insignia. (Mr. Fisher swore he would join them there after calling at his office.)
On the way, Alec told Daisy the Chief had made some telephone calls and discovered that news of the pirating of the post office plane had been circulated to Investigation Bureau field offices all over the country.
“But no one seems to have made the association of the pirate with Eugene,” he said.
“They had a report from a farmer somewhere in Illinois of it landing to refuel at an emergency airfield.”
“That’s all? Isn’t Illinois somewhere in the middle of the country?” Daisy asked.
“Midwest,” Judkins confirmed over his shoulder.
“But it must have come down more than once, mustn’t it, darling?”
“Yes, if he’s coming all the way to Oregon. But remember how few people we saw. Pitt would force the pilot to stick to emergency fields well away from towns.”
“I suppose all he had to do was threaten to shoot him if he landed at a proper aerodrome. Unless he decided to stop somewhere else and come home by train. Or just stay somewhere else.”
“I sure hope not,” said Judkins. “I got a federal agent coming down from Salem just to pinch this guy.”
“If Pitt had hopped off somewhere en route, the pilot would have reported by now,” Alec argued.
“Not if Pitt made him fly to Mexico,” Judkins pointed out. “Or shot him.”
Daisy shivered. It would be bad enough if Pitt just didn’t turn up, after all the fuss. But what if Rosenblatt and Gilligan were right that Bender was Carmody’s murderer, and her pursuit of Pitt had caused the death of the pilot?
Alec put his arm around her shoulders. “There’s plenty of time yet for him to arrive,” he said comfortingly. “The pilot had no one to relieve him, so they would have had to stop for him to rest.”
They drove up to the airfield building and stopped beside a large and gleaming Packard. Two police officers came over to salute Judkins. As Alec and Daisy got out of the Ford, Dipper, Bessie, the reporter Ernest Haycox, and another man—Earl Simmons, Daisy guessed—emerged from the hangar.
Those who had not met were introduced. Simmons wanted to tell Daisy about his wife, who often flew with him. “I dropped Mrs. Simmons off by plane Saturday in
Salem to visit with relatives,” he said. “She’ll be real sorry to have missed you. She’d have been mighty pleased to meet the real English aristocracy seeing she married a fake Earl! And you a flyer, too.”
“Not really,” said Daisy, smiling at Haycox, who hovered at her side, notebook in hand, anxious to interview her. “I’m not a pilot.”
“No more is Mrs. Simmons. But Miss Coleman’s been telling me how you helped her navigate through the mountains. Now I gotta admit, I never flew across the Rockies. Miss Coleman’s gonna take me up for some stunts while she’s here. Before Mrs. Simmons comes home,” he added with a wink.
They turned to look at Bessie, to find her standing quite still, staring into the northern sky.
“There’s a plane coming,” she said. Squinting against the glare, Daisy made out a distant dot.
Everyone fell silent, and a faint buzz came to her ears.
“Sounds like it’s a DH-4,” said Bessie. “That’s what the post office flies. ”
Dipper swung up his binoculars. “It is. That’s him.”
“Everyone under cover,” snapped Chief Judkins. His men herded them into the building.
All except Alec, who stayed outside conferring with Judkins, to Daisy’s dismay. The two officers joined them, then all four moved out of sight.
Daisy was on tenterhooks. Dipper was indignant. “Dash it!” he exclaimed, standing behind her at the window, “I could have helped if they’d just told me what to do.”
“Me too,” said Haycox.
“Don’t go out now, for heaven’s sake,” said Daisy. “If Pitt sees people around he might decide not to land. Or you might put Alec and the others in danger.”
For what seemed an age, nothing happened.
Then the drone of the approaching plane penetrated the walls.
It grew louder, and suddenly the biplane appeared, a few feet above the grass, crossing in front of the building.
The post office insignia was plain on its side.
It really was the pirated aeroplane. Daisy exhaled on a long sigh.
She had not quite believed it until that moment.
The wheels touched down, bounced, settled again. As the plane slowed, the tail came down and the skid slid across the grass. Just before the plane moved out of Daisy’s field of view, the pilot turned his head for a quick glance behind him.
That was when she realized there was no figure sitting in the rear with the mailbag.
Where was Pitt? If he had abandoned ship before reaching Eugene, why had the pilot come here? Was it a different aeroplane after all, perhaps the first of a new air mail service to Oregon?
Where was Wilbur Pitt?
The plane taxied back into view, close enough for the engine noise to make the window panes vibrate. It stopped on the tarmac. Silence came as a shock. The pilot clambered down with what looked like weary haste, and started towards the building at a lumbering run.
As one, Dipper and Haycox moved towards the door, but Alec and Judkins intercepted the pilot. They exchanged a few words. Judkins waved his arms and headed for the plane, while Alec and the pilot came on towards the building.
Daisy was torn between watching what happened outside and going to meet Alec. She stayed at the window long enough to see Judkins and his officers approach the biplane,
crouching beneath the illusory protection of its canvascovered wings. Then she turned away as Alec and the pilot came into the room.
“Let the man sit down,” said Alec as everyone crowded around, babbling questions. “Yes, Pitt’s on the plane. He’s asleep.”
“And not likely to wake without he’s shaken,” said the pilot in a gravelly voice, flopping into a chair and taking off his helmet.
He looked badly in need of sleep himself, his eyes red-rimmed, his hands trembling.
The urge to tell his story was stronger.
“He’s stayed awake two nights, holding a gun on me.
I didn’t sleep too good, I can tell you, and every time I woke up, there he was with his eyes wide open and that goddamn gun pointing at me.
He threatened to burn the mail, too. And he talked, boy, did he talk.
Say, anything to eat and drink around here? ”
“There’s usually something in the icebox,” said Simmons, hurrying out.
“What did Pitt talk about?” Daisy asked. All she really wanted to know was whether he had shot Otis Carmody.
“Pitt’s his name? He didn’t tell me. Mostly he went on about his book. He’s written this goddamn—excuse me, ma’am—this book, see, and he quoted me miles and miles of it. Geez, what a load of bull!”
“Here.” Simmons returned, carrying a box and a bottle. “It’s not much.” He opened the box to reveal several semi-mummified doughnuts. “And a root beer. I can put on coffee.”
“That’d be dandy, thank you, sir.”
“And I’ll take you into town and buy you a good meal soon as Chief Judkins gives the O.K.”
The pilot was already devouring doughnuts before Simmons
finished speaking. He paused only to wash down the crumbs with root beer, whatever that might be. Simmons went off to make coffee; Dipper, Bessie, and Fisher returned to the window; Alec, Daisy, and Haycox stayed with the pilot.
“What else did Pitt say?” Alec asked as the pilot finished off the bottle.
“He was shooting off his mouth about his cousin. Seems he had this cousin born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who was always putting on side. The guy laughed at his book, and that really got his goat, but if it wasn’t for the bad blood between ’em going way back, I guess he wouldn’t have shot him. ”
“He shot his cousin?” Daisy demanded, wanting confirmation but already feeling tension drain from her. Everything she had done, and persuaded other people to do, was justified, after all.
“Yeah, didn’t I say? That’s why he was on the run.
Said he didn’t mean to kill him, just show him he was serious and make him stop saying the book was baloney.
Only he—the cousin—fell down an elevator shaft and broke his neck.
Pitt was sure he did it just to louse him up, like he was always doing when they were kids together. Nutty as a fruitcake, if you ask me.”
“Darling,” said Daisy, turning to Alec, “you’d better go and cable Whitaker and tell him to release poor Lambert!”
Judkins brought Pitt in, looking like a sleepwalker between the two burly officers. He looked harmless enough, and they had not bothered to handcuff him. He was carrying his suitcase, clutched to his chest with both arms.
“It just has a bunch of papers in it,” Judkins said to Alec. He patted his pocket. “I got his gun. Mrs. Fletcher, ma’am,
this is the man you saw kill Otis Carmody?”
Closing her eyes, Daisy took her mind back to the lift lobby and her brief glimpse of a fleeing man’s face. When she opened her eyes, that face was in front of her, blinking back at her unseeingly.
“This is the man I saw running away in the Flatiron Building in New York City just after Carmody was killed,” she said with confident precision.
“And he told me he shot his cousin,” the pilot affirmed.
“Well, that about wraps it up,” Judkins said with a sigh of relief.
At that moment, Pitt focussed on Ernest Haycox, busy with pad and pencil. “You’re a writer?” he croaked, thrusting the suitcase at him. “Here. Take this. My book. You understand, don’cha? You’ll see it gets published?”
“Gosh,” said Daisy as the police led Pitt away, “I think maybe I don’t want to write a novel after all!”