The Balloon Man Page 6

  Davy remembered that explorers also liked blueberry muffins and led his puffing steed away. Egbert gave Max a grateful look.

  Max watched them with a fond smile. Davy was walking slowly and administering encouraging pats to the camel. He was a good-hearted kid, once he was reminded of the frailties of animals less energetic than a three-year-old human.

  He didn't blame Davy for lingering. It was a beautiful morning, with blue skies and a gentle breeze just cool enough to be refreshing. He'd have liked nothing better than to spend the day playing with his son, helping his wife with the wedding gifts, and even listening to Jem Kelling's lies about the good old days. If it hadn't been for that damned parure …

  Hands in his pockets, he wandered down the drive toward the road. Should he go to Boston with Jem and Egbert and leave Sarah to deal with the tent people? He didn't doubt she could, but he hated to leave her alone. Max had the check all written, but he was planning to let Sarah be the one to hand it over. He'd missed watching her intimidate the tent crew; he could only imagine what a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool fifth-generation Kelling might look like when in the process of having to part with a rental fee. Maybe he should call Brooks back and ask him to come to Ireson's Landing instead. There wasn't much point in going to Boston. He'd left a message for his man in Paris, Pepe Ginsberg (pronounced “Geens-bair”). Pepe hadn't been in the office; he seldom was, since he had to cover a large territory—France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia. He'd been instructed to check his answering machine daily, though, and would return Max's call as soon as he could.

  It would take even Pepe a while to get results, Max knew. The last known address of the astute buyer of the necklace had been in Amsterdam, but that had been seven years ago. She might have moved, or been on vacation, when she died. She might not have left a will. People often didn't.

  Max realized that, absorbed in thought, he had reached the end of the drive. He turned to retrace his steps and found himself blinded by a sudden eclipse.

  7

  Max Bittersohn was not a man to panic. After the first flabbergasted second he realized the vast, choking cloud of total blackness was only some misguided half-wit's notion of a joke. He had recognized the acrid stench of a smoke bomb—not the baby-size kind he had once, in his distant, misspent youth, set off under the kitchen window when his mother was making latkes, but a much larger variety, like the simulation hand grenades used by the military in training recruits and by the motion picture industry in lending an air of authenticity to vampire flicks and burning buildings.

  His mother hadn't been amused, either.

  One good thing about smoke was that it could not be corraled. The air was still dark as the underneath portion of a witch's lingerie, but Max could feel the breeze against his face. The cloud would disperse in due course; all he had to do was stay right where he was, near the bottom of the long, steep driveway. The real danger from a situation such as this was in growing impatient. One or two false steps might put him out in the road, directly in front of a car with a disoriented or understandably frantic driver behind the wheel. Any sensible driver would stop or pull off the road when he found himself unable to see past the windshield, but even a sensible driver might panic under those hellish conditions.

  Even as the thought entered his mind he saw a pair of headlights on high beam pierce the blackness. The vehicle zigzagged across the road, missing him by about four feet, and bounced off a telephone pole or a tree trunk.

  Max started forward, then forced himself to stop. The smoke was beginning to show signs of thinning out and moving on, but he still couldn't see across the road, and if another car hit him while he was trying to go to the assistance of the driver, it wouldn't do him or the victim much good. He called out, “Anybody hurt?”

  The answer was a burst of sound from the engine and a squeal of tires as the maniac in the vehicle reversed, turned, and roared off into the artificial night. Max waited, wincing, for another crunch, but heard nothing.

  He headed back up the drive as fast as safety dictated. The house was at the top of the hill; it might have escaped the worst of the smoke. Sarah was bound to be worrying about him, though, and the police had to be notified as soon as possible. Too bad he hadn't thought to bring a flashlight, but how could he have known that sudden night would descend?

  He ought to have known something would go wrong, Max thought sourly. He'd been a cockeyed optimist to assume that the reappearance of the rubies was a harmless, isolated incident, to be investigated at his leisure. He'd had enough experience with art treasures to know that objects so valuable carried a trail of danger and crime. The smoke bomb had to be related to the rubies; it was too much of a coincidence that some nitwit would pick that morning to play a sick joke. There had to be a reason for someone wanting to shroud the place in darkness.

  One reason leaped to mind. Max broke into a run and immediately regretted the decision when he tripped over something and fell heavily onto his hands and knees. He fumbled around and found the offending object. It was Davy's alligator.

  The next thing he ran into was Sarah with a battery lantern in her hand and no doubt a steely glint in her eye, though it was still too dark to make out such details.

  “You idiot!”

  Max heard the catch in his wife's voice as she dropped the lantern and threw her arms around him. “What do you think you're doing? You could have fallen and broken your leg again. Where did this black cloud come from?”

  “It wasn't me,” Max protested.

  “I didn't suppose it was. Max, you are limping. What happened? Did I hear a crash? What were you doing down there?”

  Max explained what had happened as they made their way toward the house. “Though I'm damned if I can explain why it happened. Was there any trouble at the house?”

  “Not unless you consider a sudden volcanic eruption trouble. We dashed around closing doors and windows, so the awful stuff didn't get into the house, but we couldn't see a thing outside.” Sarah managed a feeble laugh. “Davy adored it.”

  “Martians?”

  “Of course. It's thinning a little, isn't it?”

  “Seems to be. I'd better go back down and see if there's any sign of that fool driver. How about you calling the police?”

  Sarah wasn't falling for any of that he-man stuff. “How about you sitting right here on the steps and resting your leg? You said the car had gone.”

  “Okay, if you say so.” Max was quite willing to bask in wifely concern. With all of them running around checking doors and windows, a would-be intruder would have been spotted immediately. “You might bring me one of the portable phones.”

  In addition to the official instruments in the office there were telephones, corded and cordless, all over the house. Max ran up ferocious bills keeping in touch with his personal secret service connections at strategic points at home and abroad. Sarah opted for a cordless one, those being of the sort that the neighbors could tap into should they desire to do so, as they frequently did. It was neighborly gestures like this that kept the Bittersohns' popularity rating high. They seldom had time for socializing, so the least they could do, Sarah argued, was stay in touch via this modern version of the old party line. She carried the phone out onto the step, pushed the 911 button, passed the handset over to Max, and asked him to give Sergeant Jofferty her regards.

  Max knew everybody on the local police force. He was a third-generation immigrant from Saugus, and everybody knew his brother-in-law, Ira, the only honest garage owner in the area, and his uncle Jake, one of the few honest lawyers in the area. Max had a more intimate acquaintance with the local constabulary as a result of his involvement in several local crimes, most of them involving Sarah. She and Sergeant Jofferty had formed the foundation of a warm friendship on that fateful day when her elderly first husband and his autocratic mother had hurtled over a cliff into the sea in their 1920 Milburn Electric.

  Jofferty sent his regards to Sarah, and then listened in only mild surprise
as Max told him what had happened. He'd got used to peculiar goings-on at the Kelling place.

  “Smoke bomb? You mean one of those things we used to set off on Halloween?”

  Max admitted he'd set them off, too, and explained the difference between those examples of boyish joie de vivre and the industrial-size variety that had been used. He could give no accurate information as to how long a smoke bomb took to disperse and was not inclined to acquire such data the hard way, but he didn't think it would take very long unless the wind backed around and blew the cloud inshore again, which it probably wouldn't. In fact, it was dispersing rapidly. However, he advised Jofferty to take it easy when he approached the Kelling place, since there had already been one accident, though it obviously hadn't been serious.

  What with one thing and another, Sarah was kept on the doorstep longer than she'd expected to be. A mitigating circumstance was that Max was holding her within easy kissing range while getting on with his telephoned report. The circumstances proved to be so distracting that they were still sitting there when the police car drove up and Jofferty got out.

  “All clear now,” he reported unnecessarily, since they could see for themselves that the worst was over. “You folks okay?”

  “Yes, except for Max's leg,” Sarah said. “Let me have a look, darling.”

  “What happened to ft?”

  “I fell over Davy's alligator,” Max said. Knowing Sarah would do it herself if he didn't, he rolled up his pant leg. Sarah let out a cry of distress.

  “Darling, that's a terrible bruise. You couldn't have done it tripping over Davy's toy.”

  “It's a long story,” Max said. “Why don't you come in and have a cup of coffee, Jofferty?”

  “Thanks, but my wife's decided I'm drinking too much coffee and I've got to cut down. The heck of it is, she's right.”

  “Tea, then, or milk or mead, or anything that suits your fancy. This may take a while. By the way, was there any sign of that idiot who crashed his car?”

  “Nope. To tell you the truth, Max, I didn't bother making out a report on that. The car couldn't have been damaged much or the guy wouldn't have been able to drive it, and nobody else was involved.”

  The steps were getting cold. Sarah was about to suggest they go indoors before Max got a chill in his fractures when she saw a truck approaching. “Finally, there are the tent people. They said they'd be right over.”

  “Maybe they were held up by the smoke bomb,” Max said.

  Jofferty looked out across the lawn toward the sprawl of crumpled fabric. “How come they didn't pack the tent up yesterday? When my niece got married the caterers were in such a hurry to finish up they practically grabbed plates and glasses out of people's hands. My sister-in-law had a fit about it.”

  “They would have done it yesterday if the balloon hadn't landed on the tent,” Sarah explained.

  “Balloon? Gosh, Mrs. Bittersohn, you people sure lead confusing lives.”

  “This is going to take even longer than I thought,” Max said. “Mind if we get the tent business over and done with first, Jofferty? I'm getting a little confused myself. You've got the check, haven't you, Sarah?”

  “Yes, dear. I'll go and get it while you find out how good you are at terrorizing tent makers.”

  Accompanied by Jofferty, Max started off across the lawn toward the tent makers' truck. It was a sorry-looking affair, rusty around the fenders and sagging around the edges. One of the back tires was almost bald. The man in charge, or so Max supposed him to be, came to meet them. Like the others, he was wearing a pair of grubby white coveralls with yellow trim. The words “Omar Inc.” had been applied, also in yellow, across the chest.

  “Sorry, Mr. Kelling,” he began.

  “Bittersohn,” Max said.

  “Oh? Sorry again, Mr. Bittersohn. We would of been here before this, but I'm short-handed, one of my guys walked out on me yesterday, and then we ran into this weird black cloud, if you can believe it—”

  “I believe it.”

  “—and José and Willoughby were late anyhow, they don't own cars, and the bus they usually take was full up and wouldn't stop, and the next one—”

  “That's all right,” Max said loudly. “So long as you're here. How long will this take?”

  He shouldn't have asked. The foreman was an embittered man, with a lot on his mind. His explanation ended in a tirade. “How do they expect me to get good people when they pay peanuts and only hire part-time? Look at that bunch of bumbling jackasses. Half of 'em are senile and the other half are illegal. I swear, I don't know what the world is coming to. The time is out of joint.”

  “Oh, cursed spite,” Max agreed politely. Maybe it did take a steely-eyed Kelling to get this bunch moving. What was taking Sarah so long? He decided it would be unmanly to wait for his wife to do the job for him. Squaring his shoulders, he suggested that the bunch of bumbling jackasses might get on better with some expert leadership and led the way toward the heap of fabric. The men weren't even bumbling. They stood in a huddle, muttering among themselves.

  “Well, get on with it,” the foreman said irritably. “What are you standing there for?”

  “Uh—we don't know what to do with it, Mr. Mortlake.”

  The speaker, a gaunt, grizzled man of advanced years, gestured toward the nearest fold of fabric.

  “Don't know what to do with it? Damn it, Willoughby, I spent a good ten minutes yesterday showing you how to roll up a tent.”

  “Yessir. It ain't the tent, Mr. Mortlake. It's the body. We don't know what to do with it. You never told us what we was supposed to do with bodies.”

  Sarah could have sworn she'd put the check in her purse. It wasn't there. She went through the drawers of the dresser and nightstand, her search considerably hindered by Davy, who trotted at her heels, demanding that she admire the drawing he had made of a flying saucer, complete with Martians. Finally she located the check in the pocket of the shirt she had worn on the day in question and was able to turn her full attention to her son.

  “It's a beautiful drawing, darling” she said warmly. “Now I have to give Daddy this check. I'll be right back.” I come, too.

  Sarah couldn't think of any reason why he shouldn't.

  Somehow she wasn't surprised to see that nothing had been done. The men, including her, wonderful husband and the able Sergeant Jofferty, were standing perfectly still, staring blankly at the folds of fabric. Bless their hearts, men did have a way of engaging in endless discussions about how things ought to be done instead of getting on with the job.

  Max turned, started, and came hurrying toward them. “Go back to the house, Sarah. Don't let— Here, you young rascal, where do you think you're going?”

  He caught Davy by the collar and held on to him, despite his protests.

  “What's the matter?” Sarah asked faintly. She had known when she saw the look on Max's face that something was wrong.

  He hesitated, trying to think how to tell her without informing Davy. His intellectual son knew as much Yiddish as he did English, which was quite a lot for a three-year-old, and he was equally accomplished at pig Latin. “Our initial assessment of the aeronautical occurrence was erroneous. The evacuation of the premises was not complete.”

  “My God! Do you mean…” She got hold of herself Davy had stopped squirming and was looking at her in alarm. She forced a smile. “What Daddy means, darling, is that the men are very busy and we'll just be in the way. Let's go and—and make more blueberry muffins, shall we? Your faithful camel ate them all, and Uncle Jem will want some for breakfast.”

  “What about muffins for me?” Max demanded with false heartiness.

  The performance convinced Davy, though. He gave his father a measuring look. “Will you be a camel?”

  “You strike a hard bargain, kid. All right, a camel it is,” Max promised. “Hurry up, now, because I'm getting very hungry. Sarah, you might ring Brooks and tell him we won't make it this evening.”

  Sarah nodded. �
�Here's the check. You won't be long, will you?”

  “No longer than I can help, süssele. Have I mentioned lately that I love you?”

  Sarah stood on tiptoe and gave him a quick kiss. “Me too, as Davy says.”

  “Me too,” Davy echoed.

  Max waited until they were well on their way before he went back to the awestruck audience. Jofferty had his notebook out, but he wasn't getting much information out of the witnesses. The foreman kept shaking his head and muttering.

  “Poor old Mac. What a way to go.”

  “How do you know it's him?” Jofferty asked patiently. It was the third time he'd asked the question, but he knew he had to wait till the witness had recovered from the initial shock. This was a nasty one. The damned balloon must have landed on the face of the corpse.

  This time he got through. “Well, sure it's him. He's wearing one of our uniforms, and Mac was the only one who didn't show up this morning.” He swallowed and averted his eyes from the battered remains of the face. “He's the same height and build, and there's that finger he mashed yesterday when he dropped his end of the pole, the pinkie on the left hand. Poor old Mac, he was a lousy tent maker, but he tried.”

  And what a lousy epitaph, Max thought, staring at the pathetic remains. The defunct tent maker hadn't been a young man. The hair that wasn't stained ugly brown was pure white. He knelt and ran his hand over one of the twisted legs.

  “Don't touch anything,” Jofferty said automatically. “Sorry, Max, I wasn't thinking. That's what I'm supposed to say at a crime scene. Not that this is one.”

  “Are you sure?” Max didn't look up.

  “Well, it sure isn't murder. I mean, trying to mash a guy by dropping a balloon on him is a damned unreliable way of killing him. I rode in oe at the country fair once—once was enough for me, I cant stand heights—and the balloonist, if that's what you call him, said only an expert could guide the thing, and even an expert couldn't bring it down on a precise spot unless…” Jofferty pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his perspiring brow. He'd seen plenty of mangled bodies in his time, including that of Alexander Kelling, but he never would get used to them.