The Hindenburg Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,72

to him, as he stood staring out at the fuming, smoldering wreckage across the airfield. The sky was a vast emptiness, overcast, no stars.

“What do you mean?”

“Funny.” He patted his cigarette case of Gauloises in his shirt pocket. “These things made the trip, and I could use a smoke right now… but I haven’t got a light.”

Wind blew the strands of hair. “Why are you mad at me?”

Not looking at her, Charteris said, “I’m surprised he lived through it long enough even to make it to this first-aid station. I’m surprised there was anything left to identify.”

“Who?” Her brow was knit. “Who are you talking about?”

Now he turned to her, looked down into the deep blue eyes in the lovely black-splotched face. “Eric Spehl—your boyfriend.”

She frowned—and he realized she was deciding whether or not to continue the masquerade; but the day, the evening, had gone on too long, and they had been through too much, together and apart. And, most of all, they were both just too damned tired. Sighing, her eyelids at half-mast, she all but said, No games, no more games.

“How do you know?” she asked.

“I write mystery stories, remember?”

“How, Leslie? How do you know?”

He shrugged. “No one big thing—several small things, Beatrice… That is your real name, isn’t it? Beatrice Schmidt?”

That he knew this much unsettled her, clearly; but she recovered, saying, “Yes… but I have rather come to like ‘Hilda.’”

“I… I’d rather come to like Hilda, myself.” He twitched half a smile. “I am a little disappointed. You’d think a German girl, at least, would be a natural blonde. You’re the ‘older’ woman, the dark-haired leftist ‘tramp’ who turned young Eric Spehl political.”

She laughed but no sound came out; then she said, “I should have hidden my leftist beliefs.”

“You tried, but you must feel them very deeply—there really was a patriotic lover who died in the Spanish Civil War, wasn’t there?”

She nodded. “Our cause is just.”

He glared at her. “You killed and hurt a lot of innocent people tonight, trying to make some stupid grandiose point.”

But she merely smiled, faintly. “Did we? Or was it you, interfering in a plan that left unmolested would not have taken a single life? And would have struck Nazism a terrible blow?”

Now he laughed, only it turned into a cough; the smoke taste filming his mouth was nasty. “Maybe you’re right. But you and Eric’ll have to take responsibility for Willy Scheef.”

She frowned, puzzled, apparently genuinely so. “Willy… ? I know nothing of this.”

“You know, that’s just possible. You may not even know that Eric threw poor Willy overboard.”

The eyes widened; the whites were bloodshot. “He did what?”

“As I said, Beatrice… Hilda… it was a lot of little things—there’s the irritation you displayed when Eric paid his little unscheduled visit to A deck, for my autograph. Today, discovering that you, like Eric Spehl, were a devout Catholic… you let it slip in our little Ascension Day chat. Then there was the fact you were visiting your sister, to help her with her new baby—yet your address was the Hotel Sterling. That just didn’t sit right…. And of course you were so frightfully worried about the postponed landing—perhaps knowing that a timer was ticking away on a bomb that had been set without those interminable delays factored in.”

Her eyes, still wide, had tightened, now. “Those tiny things told you… ?”

“No. One slightly larger thing did. This is how Willy gets involved. You don’t know about the midnight beating, do you?”

Again, she seemed utterly bewildered. “Midnight—what are you—”

And he told her about Willy Scheef, at Eric Spehl’s bidding, coming to the cabin to deliver a message by way of a beating.

“The message Willy delivered was ‘Stop what you’re doing,’” Charteris said, “but I made the mistake of thinking the message meant I should back off my investigation. Why should I be warned so late in the game? Less than a day left? How much detective work might I still do, and anyway, nothing I’d done had been very effective, had it? But the warning didn’t refer to my investigation… did it, Hilda?”

“I do not know.”

“Oh, well, perhaps—but I think you can figure it out. When I spent the night in your cabin, when we had that early-morning interruption by a steward, supposedly wanting to make the room up… that was no steward… that was Eric Spehl, sneaking a visit to his sweetheart.”

She said nothing.

“Eric knew you were going to keep an eye on me, Hilda, but he didn’t think sleeping with me