The Bessie Blue Killer. Richard A. Lupoff
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his jaw clench. “Please, Elmer.”
“…Oh, right. 1 keep forgetting what a good liberal boy you are, Hobie. Don’t ask a jig.” Mueller looked at Lindsey with something that might have been an impish grin. “Ask an American Africoon.”
The opposite of a good hate is a good love. Sex pops up frequently in Lupoff’s novels. But just as his violence is tempered with pity, his bedroom scenes are laced with tenderness. They are not slipped in merely to titillate. They advance the story and deepen our commitment to two admirable human beings.
It’s trite to say that people read mysteries because the real world is a confusing and chaotic place, and that in these books, at least, order is restored, justice handed down and evil vanquished. Indeed, in Lupoff’s novels the world is plentifully bad, but in the person of Hobart Lindsey simple integrity lends a saving grace, along with a naïveté, a doggedness, a masculine kind of graciousness and even the love of Mother.
In the words of Lindsey’s lover, Berkeley Homicide Investigator Marvia Plum, “We can’t let the haters win.”
More power, then, to the good guys, in fiction as in life. Sometimes, perhaps, they are one and the same. Is Richard Lupoff really Hobart Lindsey? If so, it would support my Nice-ness Theory of Literary Authorship: good books are written by good people, because only they have the gift of empathy, of understanding others, of writing with sympathy. The actual character of writer Richard Lupoff backs up my theory brilliantly, since it is just as superior as that of his creation.
Unfortunately my theory breaks down altogether in considering the entire history of literature in the English language, since so many great works of fiction were written, as everyone knows, by really rotten human beings.
CHAPTER ONE
You only dream in black and white.
You only dream in black and white, but that was okay with Lindsey. The B-17 lumbered through the early morning skies, its four 1,000-horsepower Wright Cyclones droning steadily at 2,300 RPM, the French countryside slipping away, almost five miles below the Flying Fortress’s belly.
Somehow he knew he was dreaming but he didn’t wake up, he kept dreaming. In black and white.
It was one of the 918th’s deadliest missions. The Seventeens were keeping formation, their P-51 Mustang escorts diving and zooming like a bunch of motorcyclists cutting in and out of a highway convoy of heavy trucks. The air was cold and Lindsey’s electric flight suit did little to help.
It was easy going as long as their course lay over Allied-held territory, but once they crossed the frontier into German airspace the Messerschmitt 109s came roaring up to meet them and the 51s broke away to knock them back down.
Lindsey crouched over his single .50 caliber machine gun, scanning the sky for attackers. There was no way the 51s could stop all the Messerchmitts, and once the enemy broke through the fighter escort, the Flying Fortresses had to defend themselves. It was strictly fight or die, and Lindsey had seen too many B-17s die, too many of the big bombers lose engines, lose wings or tails, and spiral down to explode in flames, or simply blow up in midair and rain on the French or German soil in a shower of metal and rubber and human flesh and blood.
A Messerschmitt was coming at the Fortress. Lindsey didn’t need a message over his helmet radio. He swung the .50 at the Messerschmitt. He could see the flashes of the 109’s wing guns as they spit lead at the Fortress. He pressed the trigger and felt his machine gun buck as it spit back at the Messerschmitt. He followed the path of his tracers as they sizzled at the 109.
A puff of black smoke bellied away from the Messerschmitt. Lindsey felt a surge of adrenalin that made his heart pump and his scalp tingle, but the Fortress’s aluminum skin was no match for the Messerschmitt’s deadly rounds. Metal projectiles ricocheted inside the fuselage. Lindsey felt an impact, a solid thump against his foot.
* * * *
International Surety had done it right for once. Hobart Lindsey had spent a career working for the company, starting out as a trainee just weeks after he got his degree from Hayward State. And how long was that?
He sat up in bed. Cletus Berry was pounding him on the bottom of one foot. The TV set in the corner was still playing, some cable station rerunning an old series. In black and white. Twelve O’Clock High. Not even the Gregory Peck-Dean Jagger movie. The TV spin-off. A second-rate imitation of a first-rate copy of a long-ago reality.
Lindsey rubbed his eyes. Back in the room to dress for dinner, he’d put his head on the pillow and fallen sound asleep. Taking an afternoon nap at his age.
He sat on the edge of the bed and calculated his years of service with International Surety. Not that he needed to work it out. He knew it all too well. Still, he’d got his BA in ’75 and here it was seventeen years later. And he was sitting on the edge of a bed in the Brown Palace, the oldest and most prestigious hotel in Denver, Colorado, pulling on his socks and getting ready to attend a graduation dinner at the Broker, one of the finest and most expensive restaurants in the city.
He blinked at Cletus Berry. Berry was black and Lindsey was white. International Surety was not going to run afoul of Civil Rights legislation.
Lindsey hadn’t done so badly for a small-town boy. If you could call Walnut Creek, California, a small town. It had been a small town when he was growing up there, caring for his widowed mother, learning in painful increments the true story of his father’s death. Lindsey’s father had been killed in a MiG attack on the destroyer Lewiston off the coast of Korea early in 1953. It was just weeks before the end of the war, and just weeks before Hobart Lindsey was born.
He had never known his father, never seen him except in a few snapshots that Mother treated as holy relics. A pudgy young man in a sailor’s uniform, grinning happily, his dark curly hair worn a little bit longer than navy regulations called for. But he’d never had to answer for that breach of discipline.
The ship’s anti-aircraft batteries had picked off the two incoming MiGs. One of them plunged into the Sea of Japan but the other crashed onto Lewiston’s deck sending a wave of flaming jet fuel roaring into the battery.
“Better get a move on.”
Lindsey snapped out of his reverie.
“Don’t want to keep the Duck waiting, Bart. You know what a stickler he is.”
“Right.” Lindsey pulled up his socks, pushed himself upright and looked for his shoes. He’d sent them out to be shined, a rare indulgence for him, and he wore his best suit for the occasion. You didn’t graduate from a course like this every day. And in fact, a third of the people who’d started it were back at their former jobs—or out of the company—already.
International Surety had splurged, putting up its employees at the Brown Palace during the seminar, but it had also put them two-to-a-room. Class was all very nice, as the corporate brass were forever reminding their underlings, but International Surety had to protect its resources, and one person didn’t need a room all to himself. Not when he was attending workshops all day and struggling with study assignments and papers every night.
Come to think of it, it wasn’t too different from living in Walnut Creek and attending Hayward State, except for not having a room to himself.
Lindsey and Cletus Berry walked the five blocks to the Broker. A couple of their classmates had been mugged on Seventeenth Street the week before, but they had decided not to let themselves be intimidated, and that was final. But they kept their International Surety name badges in their pockets until they reached the restaurant. They pinned them on when they entered the marble lobby.
The Broker was in an old bank building, and its decor was calculatedly Wall Street. Clearly, International Surety had chosen the location to make a point.
Happy Hour was subdued. Lindsey and Berry drifted apart as soon as they arrived. You had to mix at this kind of corporate function. You never knew who was going to be your boss someday, in a position to do you good or harm.
And Lindsey had already crossed his