way she told us, remember, was to start by saying she thought there was something funny going on out there. And she would not be likely to bring that up with the people she was working for. Or with. And one good way to prove I am totally wrong is to find out if Broffski and Hater have been questioned, just as you were. I don't think that pair came here from out of town to talk to you alone.'
I looked at him. 'If I thought for one moment that somebody had... poisoned her...'
'I am not sitting here, Travis, trying to dream up a cheap plot line for a grade Z movie. You asked me to try to make sense out of it. I can malce melodramatic sense out of it, if I make the assumption that both Gretel and Ladwigg were killed. If they weren't, the sense of it all eludes me.'
'~You're serious ['
The Green Ripper
'Enough to want to try to prove it out one way or the other.'
'Where would you start?'
'By finding out if Broffski and Slaterwere questioned too.'
So once again I drove out to Bonnie Brae. I could not have guessed how difficult it would be. Memories of her were of a painful clarity, a vividness in the back of the mind.
Slater, the manager, was out for lunch Stanley Broffski was in his office. What did we wish to speak to him about? the woman asked. I said it involved some negotiations with Herman Ladwigg. She trotted off and soon reappeared, beckoning us in.
Broffski sat behind a big white desk covered with piles of correspondence and blueprints. He was plump to the point of bursting out of his sport shirt. He had black hair combed across his forehead and a Groucho mustache. He had an air of jolly impatience, amused exasperation.
He waved us into chairs, saying, 'Honest to Christ, I wish to hell Herm had the habit of writing things down. Nothing against him, you understand. Nobody ever had a better partner. But he earned around too much in his head alla time! It's driving me up the wall trying to find out who did what to who.'
'I suppose,' Meyer said, 'Lou divided up all the responsibilities you have here.'
'I've got the fat farm and the tennis club, and we'll have a riding stable going pretty soon. They're working on the stalls down there now.' He swiveled his chair half around and pointed through the wide window to an old barn a hundred yards away. Two pickup trucks and a van were parked there, near a pile of fresh lumber. Off to the left a clutch of fatties trotted heavily down a long gentle slope. They were mostly women in their middle years, with a few men and a few adolescents, boys and girls. Despite the age differences, the fat at that distance looked the same, bouncing and flapping under the sweaty shorts and shirts. A lean woman was gal- loping along beside them, clapping her hands, running back and forth.
'We work the tract-house part together,' he said. I mean, we did. Herm handled the land sales. He was a wizard at that. We're all going to miss him Of course, we both worked with the manager, Morse Slater. Morse keeps evening running smooth If he wasn't around at this time, Pd be whipped. We lost a hell of a good girl right after we lost Herm. Some kind of legionnaire flu, they say. She wasn't here long, but Morse says she was the greatest. Everything from doing the billing to teaching tennis. Hell, it's a sound operation here. Everything will turn out roses. We've got a nice community coming along. We're keeping a lot of
The Green Ripper open space, and nothing tacky gets built. What was it you had going with Herm,gentlemen? Was it something to do with the commercial area?'
'Actually,' Meyer said, 'we're trying to find out who it was who flew in almost three weeks ago, maybe November twenty-eighth or -ninth, to talk to Mr. Ladwigg, and flew out the next morning.'
'In a little blue airplane,' Broffski said. His voice was no longer amiable, his face no longer jolly. 'I am getting damn sick and tired of that tucking blue airplane. I am going to close that strip. Who needs it?'
He bounded up and went around us to his office door. 'Morse! Get in here a minute.'
Morse Slater came in, recognized me at once, and came over to me. I stood up, and he shook my hand and said, 'Tm terribly sorry I had to miss the service, Mr. McGee. I thought until the last minute I would make it, but something came up.'
I said, 'Sure. Understood. Meyer, this is Morse Slater. I told you about him.'
As they shook hands Broffski said, 'What's going on? What service?'
'Gretel Howard,' I told him.
There was a sudden look of comprehension. 'McGee! Right. I heard about you from her. What has all this got to do with the tucking blue airplane?'
Meyer said politely, 'Has someone else been interested in it?'
'~e had the FAA out here. You tell them what it was about, Morse.'
We all sat down and Morse said, 'Apparently it was some sort of serious violation of the air safety rules, flying close to a commercial liner, something like that. It was a Mr. Ryan from Washington, a field investigator, and they had traced the plane here. He was a very stubborn mam He couldn't seem to accept the idea that no one except Mr. Ladwigg knew where the airplane came from or who was flying it. He insisted on talking to some of the other employees, and he even had me take him over to the Ladwigg home and let him interrogate Mrs. Ladwigg.'
'Catherine didn't know from nothing,' Broffski said. 'She never saw the guy. She said Herm put him up in the guest wing and talked business in there from the time he arrived until late at night. Herm told her not to bother about dinner, and when she checked the guest wing after the man had left, she found paper bags and cups from one of the fried chicken places down the Drive, so she thinks Herm went out and brought food back. The next morning early she heard Herm drive out in the Toyota. All Herm ever told her was that it was a big deal for a good-sized tract, and they were talk- ing construction and deadlines. Damned imposition for him to go bothering Catherine.'
Morse Slater said, 'Ryan said to me that he wanted to find out if the aircraft had flown in from
The Green Ripper the islands with a load of coke or grass. He said he wanted to get that pilot out of the air. He just couldn't understand why we didn't have some record of the identification on the plane. I showed him the strip, of course. A grassy strip, an old shed, a wind sock, and a padlocked gas pump. There's nobody there to check anything in or out.'
'We let Ryan look through Herm's desk notes and appointment calendar,' Stanley Broffski said. 'He said he'd come back with a subpoena if we didn't. There wasn't a clue.'
'~hen was Ryan here?' Meyer asked.
Slater stared at the ceiling for a moment. 'Last Thursday, the thirteenth. He disrupted the day, most of it.'
'Remember his whole name?' Meyer asked.
'Ryan, Howard C. In his forties. Pale, broad, soft. Very autocratic. An irritating fellow.'
'A still don't understand why you two men are here,' Broffski said. 'Why should you give a shit who flew in and out in that airplane? What should it have to do with you?'
I reached into the deepest pocket in one of the old bags of tricks and came up with a useful inspiration. I leaned forward, adjusting my face to maximum leaden sincerity, and I secretly apologized to Gretel. 'Mr. Broffski, I was able to be with Gretel for a little time every hour, while she was dying. Toward the end there, she came sort of half-awake, and she said, 'Blue airplane. Blue airplane.' I thought she was out of her head from the fever. If she wasn't, then she was trying to tell me something, I don't know what it was, and then when I heard from somebody at the funeral that a blue airplane had landed here the week before she died, I thought... well, it wouldn't be any harm in asking, because you were her friends.'
'No harm! No harm at all!' Broffski said. 'She was one terrific personality. She had star quality around here. Now I know why you're asking, but I still don't see what it has to do with anything. Herm knew who came in, and it seems as if whoever it was wanted to keep a real low profile.'
'I wonder why,' Morse Slater said, frowning.
'who knows?' Broffski said. 'Maybe some kind of deal he wasn't ready to tell us about. So if somebody is still interested, they'll contact us. If they do, I hope it's better than that Brussels deal of his.'
'Brussels?' Meyer asked politely.
'Twenty acres, undeveloped, on the west side of the property,' Slater said. 'We're holding a ten per cent deposit in an escrow account. The purchaser is something called the Morgen Group. Morgen with an 'e.' '
'fascinating name,' Meyer said.
'What's so fascinating about it?' Broffski asked.
'It's an obsolete land-measurement term which used to be used in Holland and in South Africa A morgen is approximately two acres, and the translation, of course, is 'morning.' It derived from ap
The Green Ripper proximately how much land one man could plow with horses in a single morning.'
Broffsti stared at him. 'You got a lot of stuff like that in your head? What line of work are you in?'
'Em economist. Semiretired.'
'The address is a bank in Brussels. I tried to pick it up where Herm left off, and I made four phone calls to that bank. They deny any knowledge of the Morgen Group. All they
