Rocket Science (8 page)

Truefield’s head snapped towards me so hard I could hear his neck crack. His eyes narrowed and his hand went firmly to the butt of his revolver. Doc Milliken gave me a narrow-eyed look and said, “Now what would you know about that, Vernon?”

“I heard a rumor that Dad might have broken the Captain’s arm for him. Maybe he did this to Dad.” I waved back vaguely into the house behind us where Dad still rested.

“I think maybe we shouldn’t discuss this,” said Deputy Truefield in a low, tight voice.

That finally broke through my blues to make me angry. I tolled the litany of my complaints. My dad had been dying in the trunk of my car. Some strong-legged bastard had kicked a harmless old rummy in the ribs, whacked him upside the head, not caring whether he killed or not. Truefield kept trying to pull his gun on me, like I was John Dillinger or something.

I thought about my missing Nazi envelope, about Floyd’s stupid stunt of stealing the aircraft in the first place. I thought about how out of control my life was getting and how fast that had happened.

“You big...big...
goober
!” I screamed at Truefield. I could feel my lips stretch back, spit flying as I yelled. My leg throbbed in time to the angry cadences of my speech. “You talk about arresting me for trying to kill my own father, but when someone with a real reason to do it comes up, you don’t want to discuss it. This isn’t Germany, by God, this is Kansas. We don’t think that way around here.”

Doc Milliken put a hand on my shoulder, his fingers firm and warm. “Vernon, calm down.”

He turned to Truefield, who had his revolver pointed at my chest. “Now Peter,” said Doc Milliken, “put that gun away. Young Vernon’s just upset because something terrible has happened to his father. I suggest you go wait in your patrol car for the Sheriff to arrive. We won’t say any more about broken arms, none of us, until the time is right.”

“You be careful, Vernon Dunham,” said Truefield to me, sticking his left index finger in my face like a little pink gun even as he holstered the pistol. “There’s some pretty big stuff going on. You’re likely to be swept away by it.” He paused, catching his breath. “I want things back to normal here in Butler County. That includes you and your dad, Vernon. So just you take it easy.”

He turned and stomped off the porch, heading back to his patrol car. I watched Truefield open the trunk and get out some rags. He began to clean Dad’s blood out of the back seat. If I wasn’t so angry, I would have gone to help him. I wondered when I was going to get to clean out the trunk of my Hudson.

“Come inside, watch your dad sleep, and wait for the Sheriff,” said Doc Milliken gently. “Or you can go help Peter clean his car. I know what I would do.”

I turned to look at the doctor. He held out another rag and a little glass bottle with a sprayer screwed into the top. Disinfectant.

I thought about Truefield dragging Dad up the stairs. He hadn’t busted my head, he hadn’t taken me in. He’d done right by Dad, regardless of his suspicions about me.

I took Doc Milliken’s rag and headed for the patrol car. As I bent to work beside the Deputy, neither of us willing to speak the other, I wondered what reliable information Truefield had been given about me and my car.

Where he had gotten it?

From whom?

Chapter Five

W
e were in the Millikens’ living room
. It was a tasteful version of what Mrs. Bellamy had aimed for out at the farmhouse, wingback chairs and a horsehair couch, with doilies everywhere and a water clock on the hand-carved mantelpiece, where dolphins chased bare-chested mermaids through walnut-grained waves.

“I’m going to have Deputy Truefield take your father into Wichita to Saint Francis Hospital,” said Sheriff Hauptmann, leaning forward in one of the dining room chairs reversed under him, his hands clutching the chair back to his chest. Hauptmann was a big man, creased skin and folded muscles like a ham out of the can, all crammed into his green uniform. The Sheriff had a tiny little voice for his size, like a kid whispering in church. “That ambulance over at Dunsford Funeral Home won’t be available until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest.”

“It’s getting on to evening, Vernon,” said Doc Milliken from the wingback chair next to Hauptmann’s precarious perch. The doc was being gentle with me, as if I was the one who was sick. I had thrown up in the lilac bush after helping clean Dad’s blood out of Truefield’s patrol car, but that was just nausea. Mrs. Milliken was cooking pork roast in the kitchen, and the smell was making me sick all over again even as my mouth watered from hunger. Seated on the couch, I kept an embroidered pillow pressed to my lap to hide the trembling of my bad leg inside my work pants.

Doc gave me a sidelong stare. “We don’t know how long he was out in the trunk of your car. He might have a concussion, and I still want those X-rays.”

“We won’t find much out else until he wakes up,” squeaked the Sheriff.

There was a knock on Doc Milliken’s front door. “Come in,” called the Doc.

Ollie Wannamaker walked into the room, rubbing his hands together, followed by Truefield who had been outside smoking. With night falling, it was getting a little chilly, even for late September. “Well,” he said. “I’ve been over to the Dunham house.”

“And...?” asked Sheriff Hauptmann pointedly.

Ollie glanced at me. He didn’t work for the Sheriff, but Hauptmann outranked him every way there was. He didn’t like being pushed around. The town cop shrugged. “Place is a wreck.” I smiled sadly and shook my head. “More so than usual,” he added.

“What do you mean?” asked Hauptmann.

“Furniture’s turned over, couple of busted picture frames, that kind of thing. Not like a search, or a burglary. Looks more like there was a knock-down, drag-out fight. Found some fresh boot prints in the yard that didn’t look like Grady’s size nines, either.”

I wondered briefly how Ollie would know my Dad’s shoe size, then realized he’d been looking in closets.

“Your Dad know how to fight?” Hauptmann asked me.

“Yes sir,” I replied. “He bayoneted three Germans in the Somme during the Great War. That was in one afternoon.” I’d seen the stains on that big old knife. It scared the heck out of me, even now, that Dad had kept some German’s heart blood in the tool shed for all these years. He always said it reminded him what he was supposed to do.

“Good thing he’s a quiet drunk now,” laughed Truefield. I wanted to pop him one, but held my ground.

Sheriff Hauptmann looked calmly at Truefield until the Deputy blushed. “Deputy Truefield, why don’t you get started taking Mr. Dunham to Wichita? It’s a long drive. Stay at the hospital with him until they can tell you something useful, then call it in to me.”

“I’ll get my hat,” said Truefield, stepping toward the coat tree by the front door. “Can someone please help me bring Mr. Dunham out to the car?” He was a lot more polite with Sheriff Hauptmann around than he had been before.

“I’ll help,” volunteered Ollie.

“Get some blankets from Mrs. Milliken,” Doc Milliken said. “Can’t have him getting chills in his shape.”

The two policemen clattered and huffed around the house, finding blankets at the direction of Doc’s wife, then fetched Dad from the examining room. I watched from my chair as they carried him out. He didn’t look peaceful now, just pale and ill. Old, he was, that funhouse mirror of who I would be. It made me want to gather him in my arms and weep as if he had been my son instead of I his.

A moment later, I was left alone in the room with Sheriff Hauptmann and Doc Milliken.

The Sheriff and the Doc looked one another in the eye for a long moment. Something that I couldn’t follow passed between them, words unspoken lingering in the air just out of my earshot. Hauptmann cleared his throat.

“Vernon,” he began. “We don’t know each other, but the Doctor here speaks highly of you.”

“Yes sir,” I said noncommittally. I was worried about Dad, sick of Floyd’s airplane, and now Hauptmann’s tone made me feel like I was about to be pitched at like a farmwife facing off with a brush salesman.

“I understand that you and your father don’t get along, and I believe I understand why.”

Now Mom’s ghost was in the room, hanging over me as if she were waiting for Dad. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak right at that moment.

The Sheriff kept talking, his eyes narrowing as the lightly-built dining room chair rocked on its back legs under his weight. “Doc Milliken says there’s no way you felt strongly enough to attack him, let alone try to kill him. The medical evidence points pretty clearly away from you.” He glanced at my legs.

“Yes sir.” I wondered where he was heading — it was time for him to give me the proposition, whatever it was going to be.

Sheriff Hauptmann cleared his throat again. I suddenly realized that unlike Deputy Truefield, he didn’t even carry a gun. Confidence? Power? “Now, this doesn’t release you as a suspect, you realize, but unofficially I’m confident that you didn’t have anything directly to do with the assault on your father.”

I thought about that. “What do you mean,
directly
?” I asked.

The Sheriff leaned his chair perilously far forward. “You have a government clearance from your work at the Boeing plant over in Wichita, is that correct?”

We weren’t supposed to talk about that stuff outside the plant, but the war was over, and the Sheriff seemed to have something important on his mind. He wanted to say something that hung on this point. I decided for Dad’s sake to go along with him. “Yes sir, I do have a clearance.”

“Then I am going to tell you something I wouldn’t normally reveal to an outsider. But in return for my confidence, I need your full cooperation.”

I thought about Floyd Bellamy, and the penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth. I was already deeper than I had ever wanted to go into a bad situation, but there seemed to be nothing for it. Dad was on his way to the hospital in Wichita, somehow because of Floyd’s secret. His beating was connected with the papers, with the airplane. I needed to hear whatever the Sheriff had to say to me. “Yes sir. You have my full cooperation.”

The Sheriff exchanged another significant glance with Doc Milliken. “The United States Army Criminal Investigation Division is here in Butler County, pursuing a highly sensitive matter.”

“I know,” I said cautiously.

“How, boy?” Hauptmann leaned forward in the dining chair he was using, Doc inching forward in his own flowered wingback. “Who told you that?”

“Someone calling himself Deputy Morgan called me on the telephone about Dad, said that Dad had beaten up an Army captain.”

Hauptmann frowned. “I don’t have a Deputy Morgan, son.”

“That’s what Ollie told me.”

“Did he tell you what the CID was looking for?” asked Doc Milliken.

“No, but I think they’re after Floyd Bellamy.” I was a rat, betraying my best friend, not to mention myself, to the Sheriff. But after what happened to Dad, I would much rather deal with Sheriff Hauptmann than the mysterious Captain Markowicz. I still felt miserable about the whole business.

“Floyd Bellamy?” Sheriff Hauptmann looked puzzled.

“Alonzo Bellamy’s boy,” said Doc Milliken. “They have that place out there off Haverhill Road, as you head toward Leon.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Sheriff Hauptmann. “The Bellamys.” He laughed. “Why would the CID want him?” He looked at me sternly. “Is Floyd Bellamy a Nazi sympathizer?”

I was quite surprised by the question, and it must have showed on my face. “No, no.”

I couldn’t even imagine such a thing. Floyd had been an easy, confident liar most of his life, in the name of popularity, convenience and heavy petting back in high school. At least once he had been thief, because there was no legitimate way he could have gotten that Nazi equipment back home. But Floyd was no Fascist, I was sure of that. He loved his good old American freedom way too much.

“Floyd is a ne’er do well, a liar, and most probably a petty thief at opportunity,” said Doc Milliken, echoing my thoughts. “I also understand he is a good Christian, a Kansas Republican, an Army veteran and, sadly, not much different from half the other men in Butler County. He is most certainly not a Nazi.”

Doc Milliken sure knew a lot of what went on around Augusta. More than I might have thought. I wondered what he knew about Floyd’s freight delivery on last Thursday’s Kansas City train. His brother was the railway clerk, but there hadn’t been anything specific on the manifest. Floyd had fed Odus a good line about agricultural equipment. Were these two looking for a cut of that business?

“That’s my friend,” I said with a sigh of relief. “So why is CID here?”

“The CID is in Butler County because there was a cell from a Nazi spy ring based here in Augusta during the war. The cell was responsible for watching the aircraft industry in Wichita. Your kind of work, Vernon.” Sheriff Hauptmann cleared his throat again. “Army counter-intelligence was able to control what they learned and manage the cell’s activities.”

“Why didn’t they just shut it down?”

To my surprise, Doc Milliken answered. “Because the operation would have just started up somewhere else, and it might have taken too long to track it down all over again.”

“Right,” added Sheriff Hauptmann. “Better to manage it and minimize the damage where they could, than let the spy ring get away and set up somewhere else completely unopposed.”

I wondered which of my friends, which of my neighbors, might have been recording my comings and goings during the war. I worked at Boeing, I was an engineer. I observed good security, as far as I knew, but what could a trained spy have ferreted out of me?

“The war is over. Why is Army CID here now?” I asked. “Cleaning things up?”

Sheriff Hauptmann shook his head. “We don’t even know who all the individuals were. And really, that doesn’t matter now. Justice should be served, but like you said, the war is over. No, the problem is the activity level is higher now in Butler County than it ever was during the war. The Army has become directly involved, because it’s a matter of military secrecy.”

I blurted out my questions. “What do you mean, ‘higher than ever?’ Am I suspected of being a German spy?”