A Child's Garden of Death

by Forrest, Richard;

  Lyon picked up the Wobbly doll and handed it to the detective. From his pocket he took the silencer. “This is on loan with the compliments of the State Police Museum.”

  “I’ve got to return it or Norbert will have my head,” Rocco said.

  “Now the tape,” Lyon said and reversed the direction of the cassette player. When the tape passed his pre-determined mark he stopped it and ran it forward on play. “Listen to this.”

  The voice from the speaker was unmistakably Asa Houston’s. “I have come to the end,” the tape intoned. “There are few alternatives left, and I am taking the only course of action open to me. Everything is in order, and the lawyers will know where to look.” The voice stopped. Weak, hardly discernible noise, then the opening of the drawer. Again silence until the faint click of the revolver’s engagement and the shot.

  As it had when he’d heard the original tape in the Hartford police station, the shot startled Lyon. The tape continued running—a muffled pounding on a door, and then silence as the cassette reached the end of the spool.

  “That’s just fine,” Pat said. “But how the hell did you steal the tape from my office?”

  “We didn’t; it’s bur own.”

  “It’s identical to the one I took from Houston’s office that morning,” Pat said.

  “I know,” Lyon said as he inserted another cassette tape in the machine. He ran the machine forward to the spot he wanted and turned up the volume.

  “I have come to the end,” the voice of Houston intoned. “This crap with the unions is breaking my chops. I’m Goddamn ready to meet with the business reps today if it’ll do any good at all.”

  Lyon switched off the machine. “These tapes,” he said and indicated the boxes strewn throughout the room, “come from the Houston Company. It’s a chore, but not difficult, to go through and pick out appropriate words and phrases, re-record them with a gunshot and a little door pounding.”

  For the first time in several days Bea looked pleased. “I get it,” she said. “The murderer went into the office earlier, shot him, put the cassette on with the pre-recorded sequence and then left.”

  “Houston was already dead,” Rocco said, “when two dozen witnesses heard a shot and rushed into the room.”

  “It was all on the cassette,” Pat said. “So when I arrived, the machine was still on, and the playing was synchronized to give the murderer the length of time he needed.”

  “Ah, the light breaks through for the Hartford police,” Rocco said.

  “The murderer made a mistake,” Lyon continued. He inserted the cassette back in the recorder. “Listen to the end once again.” He ran the tape to Houston’s voice and let it play.

  “… the lawyers will know where to look.” The voice stopped. Faint rustling could be heard, then the opening of a drawer, the click of the revolver and the shot.

  “So, I …” Pat started to say until Lyon put his fingers over his lips. The tape continued in silence until the muffled sound of someone beating on the door and then the tape ran out.

  “There’s no body falling,” Lyon said. “Our friend had a hell of a lot of work to do that night, listening to tapes and re-recording sounds. He or she worked it out beautifully except for staging one sound … the body falling. Notice the fidelity of everything else: the sound of the drawer opening, even the revolver. It would have picked up the sound of the gun and the body falling.”

  Pat walked slowly around the room. He hefted the revolver, flipped open the cylinder and extracted the spent cartridge, then handed the gun back to Rocco. He walked over to the tape recorder, examined it, brushed some stuffing from the desk top and sat at the desk to contemplate the mutilated Wobbly. “You know,” he said, “you two guys have done one hell of a job.”

  “Pure intellect,” Rocco said and laughed.

  “Only a couple of problems left,” Pat said.

  “Which one did it?” Bea said. “Helen Houston or Jim Graves?”

  “Couple of problems before we get that far,” Pat said glumly.

  “What’s that?” Rocco asked.

  “Item one,” the small detective said. “The recorder in Houston’s office was on when I arrived.”

  “It was on from the time the murderer turned it on,” Lyon said.

  “The microphone had the record button depressed. In other words, it would have erased over anything else on the tape. How do you explain that?”

  They were silent as Pat walked over to the door and waved the flight bag back and forth over the lock; he admired the clicks as the tumblers fell and opened. “Your electro-magnet idea is fine and dandy,” Pat continued. “I can really appreciate it, except that I examined the doors to the room that day. Houston was a bug, a real fanatic about security and industrial espionage. The buildings have back-up security systems everywhere, all sorts of things, including shielded locks.”

  “Shields?” Lyon asked.

  “That’s right. He wasn’t any amateur, you know. The man was a damn fine engineer and machinist. The door was shielded under the wood veneer. No way your little gadget here would work.” He tossed the flight bag back to Lyon. “Any more ideas, guys?”

  “Well, back to the drawing board,” Lyon said.

  Sunday afternoon Beatrice and Kimberly held the mooring lines securely as Lyon made his pre-flight tests on the balloon. The bag above his head was now filled to tautness and the propane burner was chugging away, pumping more hot air into the balloon envelope. The balloon hovered over the yard at fifty feet, its body straining upward.

  Lyon glanced into the sky toward the top of the envelope. It was taut, the sleeve above the burner fluttering at the right inclination and the ripping panel lines secure. He turned and waved at the waiting women and they released the mooring lines.

  At first the balloon seemed to bounce upward until, after the initial thrust on release, the rate of ascent normalized to a slow, stately ascent. He flipped the toggle switch on the small citizens’ band radio. “Bea, who’s following today?”

  “Kim will follow in the pick-up truck.”

  “Fine. The wind’s southeast at about four knots. I don’t expect a great deal of drift, so ask her to go down route 9 and 9A.”

  Lyon turned the radio off and attached it securely to the edge of the basket. He made a small adjustment to the propane burner slowing the rate of ascent, and checked the rate of southeast drift. It was a perfect day for ballooning, with only faint wisps of cloud layer many hundreds of feet above, the majority of the sky bluish and clear.

  At four thousand feet he stopped the rate of ascent until the balloon seemed to hang motionless in the air, the slight drift hardly perceptible. With the propane burner adjusted to pilot, the world became silent.

  “Bunch of Goddamn amateurs playing games,” Pasquale had muttered as he left the house the night before. “Stick to traffic violations,” he’d yelled back at Rocco as he slammed the car door. “In that area you’re a whiz.”

  The car had driven off with a screech of gravel. Bea had shaken her head while Rocco turned to Lyon.

  “Where to now, old buddy?”

  “I want to talk to that security captain and the foreman who broke in the door,” Lyon said.

  “All right,” Rocco had replied as he climbed into his car. “I’ll pick you up at eight tomorrow.”

  The security control center for the Houston Company reminded Lyon of the fire control center of a large ship he’d once visited. The major difference was that TV monitor screens replaced the sweeping glow of radar scopes, although the dim room with flickering lights and chairs bolted to the floor in front of monitor banks was similar.

  As he greeted them and ushered them into the control center, the security captain had been pleased to see Rocco, a professional who would enjoy the display of gadgetry, and he ignored Lyon. He immediately made Rocco sit in the control chair, and pointed with pride to the various monitors within easy reach of the chair’s occupant. They dutifully listened as he explained the security sy
stems, foot patrols, and TV monitoring of over seventy percent of the plant’s premises. Finally he had asked what they wanted in the way of further information.

  “It’s about the doors to Houston’s office,” Rocco said. “As we understand it, the locks are shielded so that no outside interference can open them.”

  “Of course,” the captain had replied. “On Mr. Houston’s insistence. Otherwise any decent technician could walk through the plant, opening any locked door or area at will.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure that only two keys existed? You have one and Houston had the other?” Rocco asked.

  “I swear to it. My key never left me, and Houston’s was found on his body.”

  “Any chance a duplicate could have been made?” Lyon said.

  “Impossible. The lock would have to be removed from the door, which is one hell of a job in itself. A duplicate key for the tumbler system would then have to be manufactured and the lock replaced. My patrol men would have reported any activity of that nature.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Rocco had said.

  They had talked to Ren Wilson, foreman of the automated assembly line, the first man to reach Houston’s door after the shot was heard.

  “I was at the end of the table, the one near the door to his office,” Wilson had told them. “When we first heard the shot we all sort of sat there—stunned. Then a bunch of us ran for the door. Since I was closest I got there first.”

  “Are you sure the door was locked?” Rocco had asked him.

  “Listen, Chief, I’d swear to it on my mother’s grave. I musta’ tried it half a dozen times before somebody yelled to break it in.”

  As the balloon drifted slowly along the course of the Connecticut River, Lyon was filled with a huge sense of dejection and depression. How many days had it been since he’d been airborne last, had drifted almost along this same route to take pictures of the grave site? Only a few days ago, and yet they seemed no closer to the solution than they had been when the grave had first been unearthed.

  Three bodies found in a grave—one a small child. Martin dead. Now Houston dead. There must be a key somewhere. A key? Lyon laughed aloud.

  He had it. The whole thing fit. The simplicity of the scheme was its very beauty. Now, with this last piece of information in place, the whole murder of Houston fell into an answer. He and Rocco hadn’t been far wrong; all the details except the door and the recorder had been correct, and now, with the answer, proof would be available.

  Lyon looked over the edge of the balloon basket, impatiently scanning the terrain below for a suitable landing area. The balloon had descended to level flight at just below four thousand feet and had drifted several miles downriver. On both sides of the river the land rose harshly from the water’s edge to granite and traprock ridges. He would have to wait until the balloon drifted farther east in order to find a relatively flat piece of ground to use for descent.

  The increase of the engines to full throttle first brought the airplane to Lyon’s attention. Shading his eyes, he glanced toward the sound, but the glare of the sun made the plane invisible in the penumbra.

  A hundred feet from the leading edge of the balloon the plane banked sharply into a deep turn. After completing the steep turn, the two-engine Cessna adjusted course for a direct heading at the balloon. Its position and altitude would carry it directly overhead, on a pass across the envelope.

  He’d had private planes play cat and mouse before, but none as dangerously close as this one. He wondered if the pilot knew that if the plane’s propellers should hit the balloon envelope or rigging, the balloon would immediately deflate and the rigging would hopelessly foul the plane’s propellers, to plummet both vehicles to earth.

  Engine pitch abruptly changed as the pilot throttled back to slow his pass over the balloon. Lyon could only estimate the distance from envelope to plane fuselage as slightly less than fifty feet. Past the balloon the plane eased into a slow 360-degree bank that once again placed it on a direct tangent toward the balloon.

  The pilot had made a slight adjustment in altitude so that the new pass would carry the plane directly over the balloon with less clearance than before. Fear stabbed at Lyon. This was not some pseudo hot-shot pilot playing air games with a new and unfamiliar quarry. The repeated passes, each one at lower altitude, made it quite clear that the plane’s pilot had the destruction of the balloon as a primary objective.

  He flipped the toggle switch of the raid. “Kimberly. Kim. Come in, are you there?”

  “Hello, Big Chief, this is Red Marble.”

  “Listen, kids, get off the band,” Lyon said with as much control as he could muster. “This is an emergency.”

  “I always call Big Chief at three,” was the plaintive reply.

  “Please get off the band for a minute,” Lyon said as the plane made another pass over the top of the balloon.

  “Is masta’ ready to descend from the heavens?” Kim said.

  “Knock it off, Kim. There’s some joker up here playing Red Baron with me. Get to a telephone and call Rocco. It can only be our friend.”

  She sensed the panic in his voice and dropped her sarcasm. “Do you have the plane’s I.D. number?”

  “Just a minute.” He took field glasses from the side of the basket and searched the skies. The plane was coming out of the sun again at a speed that would be close to a stall. As the plane side slipped slightly to correct approach position, he picked out the numbers on the wing and radioed them to Kimberly on the ground.

  “I’ve got them,” she replied. “I can see you about two miles away from my position. From here it looks like the plane will hit you.”

  He crouched down in the rocking basket as the plane, almost directly overhead, approached the top of the balloon. Around the trailing edge of the plane’s wings, liquid poured in a slim, steady stream as the plane passed a few feet over the top of the balloon.

  As rivulets of liquid coursed down the side of the balloon envelope, a drop fell on Lyon’s hand. He tasted it—gasoline. The airplane’s fuel caps were off, and gasoline was siphoning out of the wing tanks, successfully covering a good portion of the balloon’s skin with gasoline.

  The plane banked and approached the balloon again in what Lyon knew would be the final pass. He could see the hand extended from the pilot’s window with the flare gun poised.

  As the flare hit the top of the balloon the gasoline broke into flames with a clap. The plane’s engines whined with throttle increase.

  Looking directly upward through the sleeve into the interior of the balloon envelope, Lyon could see through the micro-thin sheen of the top surface that fire burned along the rigging of the upper circumference. Now, along the sides of the balloon, fire approached the basket as it burned steadily along rigging lines.

  He grabbed the emergency lines leading to the ripping panel and pulled them quickly downward with all the leverage he could muster. A large portion of the side envelope immediately peeled away and the balloon lurched sideways and downward.

  Grasping the sleeve immediately over his head, he yanked it from the envelope, allowing more hot air to escape. Glancing at the altimeter, he saw his height at thirty-two hundred feet with a quick rate of descent. The immediate danger would be quick explosion of the whole envelope, in which case he knew that the remaining portion of the balloon, basket, and himself would immediately plummet earthward.

  His only chance lay in a rapid rate of descent before explosion and complete destruction of the envelope. As large quantities of hot air escaped through the hole caused by the ripping panel, the bag began to sag.

  Two thousand feet and falling quickly. He hurriedly tried to calculate the rate of descent and correlate that against parachute descent, the critical survival factor.

  Several of the rigging ropes on the right side of the envelope broke away above the supporting ring, and one end of the basket dipped precariously.

  Thirteen hundred feet. The slanted downward trajectory of the balloon
slid along the path of the Connecticut River. He looked skyward and could see the airplane disappearing rapidly over the northern rim of hills.

  Eight hundred feet. The rate of descent was faster than any he had ever experienced. From above he could hear portions of the envelope shredding. As more rigging lines gave way, the basket tilted further to an almost vertical position. With both hands he grabbed the supporting ring overhead and held on, knowing that it would remain until the last line parted.

  He was below the hill and ridge line to each side of the river. The altimeter and other instruments had fallen from the basket, but he estimated height at two or three hundred feet above the north-south line of the river.

  If it held for a few more seconds he would reach the water. Then the danger would be in becoming enmeshed in the envelope and remaining rigging lines, many of which now flapped dangerously.

  Thirty feet above the waterline Lyon let go of the supporting ring and dropped free from the balloon.

  He hit the water feet first, and the impact shuddered through his body. His feet brushed river bottom silt, and looking upward he could see the translucent surface light far above, as he began the slow and interminable rise to the waterline.

  He gasped for air as his head broke the surface and he weakly trod water. Turning toward downstream, the path of the balloon, he saw that the surface was undisturbed. The balloon had either exploded before striking the water, or else had sunk immediately.

  The shoreline was over a hundred yards away and it might have been ten miles, he thought, as he began slow strokes through the water. A fisherman in a small boat rowed nonchalantly toward him and Lyon raised an arm, shocked to see for the first time that his arms were blackened and burned.

  The fisherman’s oars dipped cleanly through the water as he approached. “I’ve heard of balls of fire,” the man said as he pulled alongside Lyon, “but that was ridiculous.”

  Twelve

  The ghosts of Lyon Wentworth held him tightly by the hands. The two little girls, one with hair of gold, the other dark as night, led him across the grassy field.