Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery

by Dallas Murphy

  The Glacier reached out, hooked his fingers in Tex's ruffled shirtfront, and parted it like a curtain, sending shrapnel buttons flying. A look of fierce outrage flashed over Tex's face, and he sent a pointed boot in an arc aimed at the Glacier's balls. It never landed. The Glacier caught the boot in his fist two inches from the target. He lifted Tex's leg skyward. Tex hopped twice for balance before the Glacier, in a movement full of terrible grace, blasted Tex flush in the face with a towering overhand right. We could hear the impact, like a well-hit line drive. He fell hard and lay motionless on the wet sidewalk except for his right foot, which twitched spasmodically. I clapped Blue on the back.

  The Glacier yanked open the driver's door and hauled Dickie out by the collar. Dickie waved his hands in front of his face, pleaded for his life. The Glacier gave him a shove, and Dickie ran, shoes slapping in the puddles. Then the Glacier picked up his tiny umbrella, opened it against the drizzle, and strolled away as if he'd done nothing more strenuous than buy a lottery ticket.

  "Jee-zus!" said Blue.

  Dickie was returning, creeping behind parked cars on the other side of my street, crossing it cautiously to kneel beside Chucky. He pulled Chucky up to a sitting position, but Chucky still had serious trouble with his head. He couldn't hold it up. It hung limply, like Raggedy Ann's.

  I went out. I had to sooner or later; best do it while Tex was on his ass. "Hey, what happened?" I asked. "Did you get mugged? Gee. This can be a tough neighborhood. You know what you should do when that happens? You should fake a fit."

  Dickie, mouth agape, looked up at me. Tex tried, but he couldn't pull it off. Dickie was a skinny-faced little punk in his twenties with greasy black hair that now stood on end like the cartoon man with his finger in the light socket.

  Chucky's eyes were running in and out of focus. The fearful fist had landed on his forehead between his eyes. Ground zero was turning black even as I watched.

  "Hey!" screamed Dickie in a voice laced with hysteria. "That nigger says he's your bodyguard!"

  "Bodyguard?"

  "That big nigger! You didn't see him?"

  Bodyguard? Could he be? My lawyer never called to confirm. Of course he never calls to confirm. "Was this sort of a large fellow?" I queried.

  "Large?...Large?" whispered Chucky. "Did this asshole just say he was sort of large?"

  "He was a Buick!" squeaked Dickie.

  "Yes, that sounds like the fellow. He used to be my bodyguard, but I had to let him go. He was just too big to fit places. Well, here's the pictures Harry wanted." I dropped the envelope on Chucky's thighs.

  "We'll meet again," he managed. "I promise you that." But Dickie largely carried him into the car.

  "Nice to be working with you," I called. I could see through the open side window Chucky's troubled head lolling on the seat back. I waved as they drove off.

  "Hey," I called to the shiny, shadowy street. Blue watched from the window. "Hey, bodyguard."

  "Over here."

  Behind me! I spun. How'd he get behind me? He'd walked off in the opposite direction. What a bodyguard! He stood under his feminine umbrella and loomed over me, even though he was ten feet away. He was ebony black, like a West African. "I'm Artie Deemer."

  "I'm Calabash. Bruce de crooked lawyer say you need some watchin' over. Bruce ain't right very often. Look like he's right this time."

  We shook hands. "Did you say Calabash?"

  "My real name Maurice, but don't call me Maurice."

  "Welcome, Calabash. Come in."

  "Rains a lot."

  "Where are you from, Calabash?"

  "Bahama Islands. I fish. I'm a fisherman. But de fish left. Even de little ones. I'm up here doin' some library studyin'. Make some money while I try to learn about de fish."

  Blue met us in the lobby. "Blue, this is Calabash."

  "Well, you sure did Calabash that dude!"

  "Lotta bad men in dis worl'."

  "Don' I know it," said Blue.

  But I had to be sure. "Blue, can I use the phone in the basement?"

  "Sure."

  "Excuse me a moment, Calabash." I drove the service elevator to the laundry room and called Jerome's Billiard Academy. After a long wait, my lawyer picked up. "Did you send a bodyguard?"

  "Didn't you contract for one?"

  "Yeah, but I could have used a confirmation."

  "Did you want a bodyguard or a phone call?"

  "Losing, huh?"

  "Never."

  "What's he look like?"

  "Well," said my lawyer, "I've seen smaller one-bedroom apartments."

  I was delighted with my new bodyguard.

  FOURTEEN

  THE DEUCE. THAT'S what the jazzmen called it in its heyday, this stretch of Forty-second Street near Eighth, before the clubs went under and society's fabric began to tear. Now dopers, dealers, and droolers patrol the Deuce with malice aforethought. Senseless violence hangs like fog in the lights. The aggrieved, sociopathic, and visibly insane pace aimlessly. Sooner or later the city will clean up Times Square, and that will be worse. Some slippery pinstriper will suck up the air rights, and where there is so much worth preserving, refurbishing, he will choke the Deuce to death beneath a forty-story glass-and-aluminum testament to his dork. All hatless in the gray rain, a squad of Japanese tourists watched with impassive fascination as Western degenerates hawked their wares or themselves.

  On the bright side, Calabash was back there somewhere, and that made my step lighter. An enormous bodyguard does wonders for one's worldly confidence. I should have had a bodyguard during my formative years to beat back the malefactors, thimble riggers, footpads, nuns. Should I father, I'll equip, thanks to Jellyroll, my offspring with bodyguards from birth, make their lives rich in the absence of cold fear. Calabash grew up in Queens, but after his own formative years, his family moved against the traffic back to the remote southern Bahamas by way of the Berry Islands and Eleuthera. His father is presently head of the local town council. "What my Daddy wants me to learn," said Calabash last night, "is if dis is a permanent kind o' ting, dis absence of fish, or is nature jus' shufflin' her feet gettin' comfortable again." Learning costs. I doubled his fee and offered him a room. Jellyroll approved.

  I climbed a dingy flight of wooden stairs cut into the shadows between Souvlaki Heaven and a porno house now showing that old chestnut Rump Humpers (No Ifs or Ands, Just Butts, said the poster) up to a heavily barricaded door. It was covered entirely fattened like an old kiosk, with Eighth Air Force decals and squadron emblems, British rondels, and a spattering of Luftwaffe insignia. I knocked.

  A burly white-haired man looked at me through the chained crack.

  "Artie Deemer to see Buzz. He said to come anytime."

  "Oh, sure. You're the writer." He shut the door to unchain it and offered me a friendly hand when he reopened it. "I'm Buzz." He was a little paunchy, and his jowls were going to flesh, but I could visualize him at twenty in a wartime photograph, another of those credulous 1940s faces, keen-eyed, American, grinning from the cockpit of his Mustang and having the time of his life. People don't look like that anymore.

  Buzz's office was wider than a bowling lane, but not by much. If the porn house had stolen two-thirds of his room, Souvlaki Heaven had taken command of the airspace. It reeked of roast lamb and gyro sauce. The cloying smell had infused the fiber of everything in this room, filing cabinets piled to the ceiling with books, yellowing newspapers and magazines nearing spontaneous combustion, the skeleton of a red Oriental rug, maybe even Buzz himself. He left a redolent swirl of gyro sauce in his wake as he ushered me in.

  "Pardon our appearance," he said. "We're computerizing."

  "Ha!" said a fat woman who sat at the other end of the room behind a typing stand. The loose flesh on her upper arms bounced against her sides.

  Buzz grinned. "This is Bessie," he said, "the heart and heartthrob of this whole outfit. Bessie, this is Artie. He's writing a book about us heroes. It's Bessie here who looked up Danny Beemon for yo
u."

  "Thank you, Bessie."

  There were two other men in the room. They had been sitting on the threadbare brocade settee and had stood up when I entered, partly out of courtesy, partly because the door would have hit them in the knees if they had remained seated.

  "These are my guests, Artie. This is Rainer Hochheim." He was the short round one with happily twitching bushy brows. "Rainer here flew with Adolf Galland at the end. Jets. Uh, do you know Galland, Artie?"

  "Me-262s," I said.

  "Oh, good. You know. Some writers don't know anything. It's hard to talk to them."

  I knew. I grew up on the books. I'd read Adolf Galland's book. He describes the jet pilots who flew under his command at the very end, when the war was lost. Rainer had been one of them, the first jet pilots in the world, rounder now, softer and stiffer. Some forty-five years ago he was a teenager climbing into the cockpit of the first jet and firing up those fearful Junkers turbines. But by 1945 the Luftwaffe didn't have enough fuel for test flights. Rainer and his colleagues learned to fly the jet on the way to combat the daily skyful of Allied bombers with fighter escort. The temperamental machine often blew itself to bits inexplicably.

  "Rainer don't speak a great deal of English," said Buzz. "Say, you don't speak German, do you?"

  "No, sorry."

  "This is Kenny Brewster," Buzz said, his hand on the shoulder of the man who stood beside Rainer. "They used to call him The Hawk on account of that's what he was. We still call him The Hawk."

  The physical opposite of Rainer, The Hawk was tall, well over six feet, and wiry in a western sort of way. We shook hands, then sat down, Hawk and Rainer side by side on the couch, Buzz and me in desk chairs at either end. The narrow room prohibited a circle of seats.

  "The Hawk smoked Rainer's 262 over Wetzlar on Thanksgiving Day, 1944. The Hawk's modest. He says it was just a lucky, full deflection shot, Rainer goin' about seven hundred plus. But Rainer says—least as near as we can make out—that it was a brilliant piece of flyin' by The Hawk. See, Artie, this is their reunion. Reunions between friends and foes alike. We arrange em." It was then that I noticed Buzz had no left hand. He pointed at me and mimed scribbling motions on his stump and said, "Das Book," for Rainer's benefit. He seemed to get it, bobbing his brows in the affirmative.

  Suddenly I felt guilty. These men were genuine. I was not. Had my father survived, he might have attended a reunion here. I might have accompanied him, my small hand enfolded in his large one as we climbed the stairs to this wonderful smelly firetrap.

  "I knew Danny Beemon," said The Hawk. "He was my first commanding officer. I'll bet Rainer heard of him." He turned to Rainer and said, "Danny Beemon," in a loud voice to crack the language barrier.

  "Yes, yes. Of course," he said.

  Sure, the enemy knew Danny Beemon's name. The fighter pilots on opposite sides had more in common with each other than with the civilians they fought for. They subscribed to the same code of professional conduct, they dressed the same, their faces even looked the same in the old photographs, as if their features were formed not by natural gene pools but by the airplanes they flew.

  "Beemon was way out of my league. I ain't just being modest. Danny was born to it. You could tell."

  "How?" I asked.

  "Well, you just could, I don't know. By the way he seemed to wear the airplane while the rest of us flew it. Ninety-nine percent of the guys had to learn to fly fighters. Right, Buzz?"

  "I sure did."

  "Me too. One percent didn't. They were born knowing. They were naturals." The Hawk mimed a dive for Rainer; feet on the rudder pedals, left hand on the throttle and pitch selector, he shoved the stick forward with his right and translated loudly: "Das Natural." Rainer understood the maneuver if not the word.

  "Here's his file." Bessie drew it out of her desk, and Buzz went to get it, a soiled manila envelope full of answers. My heart was beating fast.

  Buzz put on the half glasses that hung from a cord around his neck. Hawk and Rainer sat cross-legged and watched him. The file contained several typed sheets, a sheaf of news clippings, and the cover from Life, July 18, 1944. "See here," Buzz said. "They dragged him home to do a morale tour."

  "Yeah, kicking and screaming," said The Hawk. "But you could see it coming. He was just too handsome to stay."

  "See, Artie, once a hotshot got some ink, well, his flyin' days were numbered. Especially if he looked like Danny Beemon. He became this living advertisement for the war effort, keep up the morale at home, can't risk wasting him in combat. One day you're flying the best airplane in the world with the best friends you'll ever know. You got no morale problem. But the next day you're flyin' home as a passenger to tour airplane factories, shake hands with local politicians who don't know shit, pardon me, Bessie, about how you been spending your youth."

  "Only time being homely ever paid off for me," said The Hawk.

  "Once on a train this senator asked me—he was just trying to make conversation, the jerk—'Have you ever soloed?' Hell, I was a fighter pilot. They only got one seat!"

  Then Buzz showed me a sere yellow newspaper clipping. It was unmistakably Danny Beemon. He stood stage center at curtain call in a tailored dress uniform, the breast covered with decorations. Bob Hope waved and smiled at the audience on Beemon's right. Lana Turner was on his left, her arm entwined in his. Behind Lana, Bob, and Danny, a long line of high-kicking chorus girls showed their stocking seams. "That don't look so tough to take, does it?" asked Buzz, passing the clipping to Rainer and The Hawk.

  "What happened to Beemon after the war?" I asked.

  "Got killed testing jets," said Buzz, searching the file for confirmation.

  "Lot of guys bought it that way," The Hawk added.

  "No," said Bessie. "It says in there he crashed the jet, but he didn't die."

  "Oh, yeah, here it is...Critical condition. Yeah, I guess."

  "But there's the other article." Bessie waddled over to show us. She reached around Buzz's neck to flip through the file. She removed a long clipping and skimmed it. "Remember that British doctor McIndoe?"

  "Plastic surgeon." I'd read about him.

  "I think he sort of invented it back when so many of the RAF boys were getting disfigured in 1940. Here it is, the end of Danny Beemon: 'The C-47 was en route from Muroc AFB to the new McIndoe Burn Center in Miami when it went missing over the Gulf of Mexico. Search planes have been recalled. The airplane has been officially declared lost. Among the dead is Maj. Danny Beemon, the famous ace who was severely injured after his jet crashed in the California desert.'" Her task complete, she returned to her desk.

  "Boy," said The Hawk, "I bet D.B. hated dying as a passenger in a C-47."

  "Yeah," Buzz agreed.

  Rainer nodded solemnly. We sat in silence.

  "I'd say one of the big reasons I'm alive today is the stuff Danny taught me," The Hawk said. "Me and Harry Pine got there together. He was our first CO."

  "Harry Pine," I blurted out. "You knew Harry Pine?"

  "I met him once in London," Buzz said.

  "I wasn't in his league either," The Hawk said. "Well, hell, you're writing a book, maybe you'd like to hear a true story about Harry Pine and Danny Beemon?"

  "Sure."

  "Witnessed this myself. Never forget it. Me and Harry were new, only Harry was one of those natural-born stick-and-rudder guys, and Danny saw it right away. You could tell by the way they looked at each other. So on our first mission, Danny put Harry Pine on his wing to get to know him. We escorted B-17s to Emden, then we broke off and went down on the deck to shoot up this Jerry airfield on the way home. Rainer's boys were getting onto that tactic by then, and they ringed their airfields with light and medium flak guns. We lost some of our best people that way. Only hope was to come in low—I mean low—so the flak guns couldn't bear so well. Jerry got on to that trick, too, and started mounting their guns on towers so they could fire down on us as we came in low. Harry Pine went in on his first run. I was to follow
while other guys shot up the towers. Pine took a round through the canopy. Big cannon shell passed right in front of his eyes and out the other side. If that had happened to me, I'd have crashed and burned right there. Harry just lost a little altitude, but his prop ticked the runway. Destroyed it, of course. Somehow he coaxed the P-47 up to bail-out altitude. You know, Buzz, those were great planes, but they glided like pianos. He bails out and comes down in an alfalfa field not a half-mile from the airfield we're still beating up. You could see Jerry going after him. Trucks, cars, motorcycles, bicycles, converging on him standing in the field like a scarecrow. They want him. We made two firing passes at Jerry, and they kind of lost interest in capturing Harry, least till his friends went away. Then Danny Beemon comes on the horn and says in this quiet voice—I mean, this voice is so calm it seems like he's bored—he says, 'Cover me. I'm gonna pick that boy up.'"

  "Great!" said Buzz.

  "Pick him up? I didn't even know what he meant till I see him swing upwind in a landing approach. He lands in that alfalfa field smooth as silk. Pine jumped up on the wing as Danny turns back for takeoff, then we see Pine climb into Danny's cockpit. They couldn't even close the canopy it's so crowded. They got to know each other, all right, flew all the way back to England like that. On the way Danny comes back on the horn, in that same bored voice says, 'Any of you guys endanger government property like that, you'll be peein' in the snow in Goose Bay, Labrador.' You should have seen the ground crews when two guys climb out of the 47, after they made a perfect landing. Harry Pine was the only man I ever met who could hold a candle to Danny Beemon for plain flying ability." The Hawk leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and thought about his youth.

  "Do you think we could see Harry Pine's file?" I asked.

  "Sure." Bessie went to get it.

  "Funny thing," said Buzz, "there was this other writer in here asking about Harry Pine."

  "There was? When?"

  "Yeah, he was stone ignorant, never even heard of a P-51."