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 would say is I should write to that name care of the bank, and if there was a Morgen Group, it would probably be delivered to them. I sent a cable, and the call-back on it said it was undeliverable. I wrote, and we're waiting."
Meyer nodded and said, '`The Morgen Group is probably equivalent in law to what we call a blind trust here. And Brussels is quietly taking the place of Switzerland. Their secrecy is guaranteed by Belgian law. They have number accounts and investment services and they have no reverse interest, as the Swiss do. Thus, with a blind trust, there is a double layer of legal confidentiality. Impenetrable."
'Cathy so secret?" Broffski said. "Harm told me that a bunch of Belgians wanted to build their own hotel-club on the twenty acres, so the members could come here on vacation."
"Maybe it was going to be a front for something," Slater said.
Broffski looked across the desk at Slater, a look of annoyance and derision. "Sure. Right here in our back yard they are going to build a warehouse for the drug business. Or a studio to make porn movies.'9
"Sorry," Slatersaid. But he didn't look sorry.
Broffski sighed. "Well, there isn't anything I can do about it. The land sits there. Eleven months from now we can take the money out of escrow and put the land on the market again. Or develop it. Whatever." He stood up and reached across the desk. "Sorry we can't give you any more help." He shook hands, and we went out with Morse Slater.
"Can we look around the property?" Meyer asked.
"Certainly," he said, and gave us a brochure with a map of Bonnie Brae, showing the existing roads and the ones to come later. He pointed to the area on the map where the Belgians had planned to buy and maybe still would. We thanked him and went out into the silver daylight, squinting against the high hard dazzle of the sky.
78
6
We walked across a field to the airstrip. We walked through a healthy growth of sand spurs and stopped and picked them off socks and pants cuffs when we got to a cleared space. Meyer thumped the surface of the landing strip: with his heel.
"Probably some kind of soil cement," I said. '~You plow it up, mix the cement with the dirt, grade it, water it, roll it down. Quick and easy."
We could hear the unrhythmic whacking of a lot of hammers as workmen were framing a house a hundred yards away.
Meyer said, "If Ladwigg was coming over here to the strip from those houses there, cross-country, he would have to pass that patch of bushes and palmetto over there."
We went over to look for tire tracks. They would be about three weeks old. There was a faint pattern in the heavy grass, a mark of rugged tread in dried mud, and some grease stains on the tallest grass.