Connie

Paul Fox

Description

Meet Rick Marshall, a former B-17 pilot now scraping a living as a private detective. Along with almost everyone else that day, he hears the massive explosion over the Golden Gate Bridge as a Lockheed Constellation disintegrates in a fireball and falls into the bay. He's hired by a local underworld boss to find out who killed his wife, a passenger on the doomed 'Connie.' This is a major break for Rick who normally handles divorce cases and debt collecting. Against his will, Rick is assigned an assistant, a six-foot-tall blonde from Iceland who likes to wear men's suits. Inga is a looker, she's very handy with her fists but maybe she's there just to make sure Rick only finds out so much. There's also the problem posed by Rick's wife. She's having an affair with her boss, and her boss is into some very shady land deals in the Napa Valley. Can Rick solve the biggest case he's ever had and save his marriage? Who can he really trust? This is The Connie - complex, compelling, and more noir than a moonless night.

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
• Date de parution: 08 janvier 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781645758891
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Connie
The Rick Marshall Files
Paul Fox
Austin Macauley Publishers
2021-01-08
The Connie Author’s Note Chapter One Chapter Two Douglas P. Brady Import And Export Chapter Three Chapter Four Mona ’ s Where Girls Will Be Boys Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven 2703 Dunkley Street, Portland Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Candlestick Point. 8.00 p.m. Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty - One Chapter Twenty - Two For the Best Cut ’ s at the Best Prices – Best Choose Bridger Chapter Twenty - Three Chapter Twenty - Four Chapter Twenty - Five Chapter Twenty - Six Chapter Twenty - Seven Chapter Twenty - Eight Chapter Twenty - Nine Chapter Thirty
The author, Paul Fox, was born and raised in the UK and immigrated to Canada in 1993. He worked in sales for a major Canadian energy company for over twenty years. He’s an avid collector of all types of detective fiction and mysteries. The Connie is Paul’s first foray into this genre. He is currently working on the second Rick Marshall Mystery. Paul has previously published a comic crime caper set on a Caribbean cruise ship called Going Overboard .
For Dad
Copyright © Paul Fox (2021)
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Ordering Information
Quantity sales: Special discounts are available on quantity purchases by corporations, associations, and others. For details, contact the publisher at the address below.
Publisher ’ s Cataloging-in-Publication data
Fox, Paul
The Connie
ISBN 9781645758884 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781645758877 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781645758891 (ePub e-book)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020909839
www.austinmacauley.com/us
First Published (2021)
Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
40 Wall Street, 33rd Floor, Suite 3302
New York, NY 10005
USA
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Author’s Note
This story is set in 1952. The language and attitudes of the narrator and characters regarding race, culture, and gender are contemporary to that time and may be disturbing to some.
Chapter One
I didn’t see the explosion but just like everyone else in San Francisco on Friday the 4th of July, I heard it. Unlike most everyone else in San Francisco on that day, I knew what it was. I’d heard a large aircraft blow apart before, only from much closer than this one. On the 4th of July 1952, the plane that blew up over the Golden Gate Bridge was a Lockheed Constellation with forty-nine passengers and nine crew on board. There were no survivors. The plane that blew up just off my port wingtip in 1943 was a B17 called ‘Suzie Q.’
One minute it was right there alongside us over Bremen and the next minute large chunks of it were tumbling to the earth eleven thousand feet below us. The explosion took out my port outer engine and a large chunk of the wing. On the homeward leg over the North Sea, my port inner caught fire. I managed to put my B17 down in a Lincolnshire potato field but not before the fire had given me second-degree burns on the left side of my head and my left hand. We were lucky I guess; you know what they say: any landing you can walk away from is a good landing. I didn’t think so at the time.
The passengers and crew of the TWA Connie weren’t so lucky. I didn’t know any of them personally although a lot of long-haul TWA pilots were ex B17 guys like me. I was soon to become very familiar with some of the victims of that explosion, but I didn’t know it at the time.
Since the war I’d had a number of jobs, most of them involved selling household gadgets door to door or driving trucks full of gadgets warehouse to warehouse. I did okay at sales, I wasn’t too proud to play the ‘wounded vet’ card but there were a lot of us out there doing the same thing. You couldn’t make a decent living at it. I couldn’t get a job flying for anyone. I was partially deaf, and the fire had done quite a bit of damage to my inner ear. All the medical examiners I spoke to (I spoke to a lot) said they couldn’t clear me to fly because they were afraid damage to my left ear would affect my spatial awareness when flying on instruments or at night; so, no more night flying for me.
I answered a ‘help wanted’ ad and joined The Homer Georgeopolous Detective Agency and I know Detective Agency sounds very Sam Spade but in truth I got a job helping one old Greek guy chase down younger American guys who owed clients’ money or cheated on their spouses. There is a surprising amount of both going on in San Francisco, who knew? Three months into the job and the old guy croaks following some broad up the steps on Lombard Street. His second heart attack I was told. His widow, Mrs. Georgeopolous didn’t want anything to do with the business (who can blame her?) So I sort of took over the client list and carried on. I pay the rent on Homer’s old office and I slip his widow a few dollars every now and then to help her out.
What can I say? I’m a soft touch! I don’t have a cute dame as my receptionist; I don’t have any kind of dame as a receptionist. I do all my own filing, accounts, and typing and I do all the legwork. I did get in contact with an answering service that took my calls and saved my messages. This was a God-send and it means that I don’t have to keep calling in at the office to pick up messages.
I sometimes sleep on an army surplus cot behind the desk when work keeps me out late and I don’t feel like driving all the way back to Oakland. I can`t afford to have the name changed on the door and I can`t afford new letterhead or business cards so I`m now known in some circles as Rick the Greek. This is not like in the movies, well not like any movie I’ve seen.
I learned the tricks of the trade as I went along, they don’t do night school classes on chasing down cheating husbands. That’s not a bad idea though, is it? They would always be busy because, let’s face it, most married guys I know would cheat on their wives if they thought they could get away with it, and most of the guys I follow think they are doing just that; getting away with it; the women too. That’s until the 8 x 10 glossies drop on the doormat.
I was just coming out of the Buena Vista Cafe on Hyde Street when the Connie went down. It’s a classy joint; friendly staff that don’t chase you out of the door when you’re watching someone on the street. I was following a guy who was allegedly seeing his sixteen-year-old niece. I say allegedly because I hadn’t caught him with his pants down yet. It was only a matter of time, she was a honey, looked a lot like Lauren Bacall when she first got into movies only with more going on up-front if you catch my drift. So, I’m a few yards behind the two of them heading west, he’s got his arm around her waist in a very friendly manner. He’s got no idea he’s being followed. His mind is on other things and they are wrapped up tight in the fluffy white sweater the blonde is wearing.
When the explosion came, most of us in the street froze; some actually ducked. It was like an atom bomb went off over Alcatraz. It felt as if the loudest crack of thunder ever heard was echoing around the bay. I forgot all about Mario Vitali and his sixteen-year-old niece and hurried down the hill toward Hyde Street Pier.
When I got to the pier, there wasn’t much to see, just the backs of hundreds of people all looking west toward the Golden Gate Bridge. I asked around. No-one had actually seen the explosion; everyone had heard it sure enough, but I couldn’t find an eyewitness if my life depended on it. After maybe twenty minutes the crowd began to thin a little. That was when the police turned up. Three black and whites skidded to a halt by the entrance to the pier all squealing tires and wailing sirens. A Whole schlock of uniforms tumbled out of the cars and hurried through the crowd to the end of the pier.
They came back to the cars a short while later escorting maybe three or four people all of them carrying cameras. I knew one of them; Sammy Kirk was ex-navy, lost his left leg at Pearl. He made his living now taking pictures of couples walking on Hyde Street Pier. You know the kind of thing, happy holiday snaps for a buck, developed overnight, present your ticket at this display stand.
I caught his eye as the police led him toward the black and whites. He was deathly pale; his eyes were rimmed with red. He looked as though he was back on the U.S.S. Virginia that Sunday morning. He looked like hell.
I would have followed Sammy to the police station, but I had another appointment at a real station. I had to be at Southern Pacific’s Third and Townsend Depot to meet the Coast Daylight express from Los Angeles. My wife Josephine was returning from a three-day business trip with her boss, Jacobus den Hamer. Ko den Hamer (as he liked to be called) was a property developer who was looking to get into real estate in some place just to the north of the Bay area called the Napa Valley. Apparently, he planned to switch a bunch of orchards from producing apples to growing grapes. It seemed like a crazy stunt to me, but Ko den Hamer Developments was inv