The Wizard of Death (21 page)

Eggs Benedict appeared from under chafing dishes as Lyon sliced off thick slabs of crumb cake and Damon poured more wine. Everyone ate ravenously, and Lyon suspected they had been up long before him.

Tapping his glass for silence, Damon stood at the foot of the table. “And who will do first honors?”

“I will.” Robin went over to a lowboy and pulled a long, thin package from its place behind it. She marched solemnly toward Lyon, handed him the package, and stood by his side awaiting his response.

As he accepted the package, he looked up into Robin's smiling face. She shifted her weight slightly, and with arms akimbo and hands along the bottom edge of her black bikini, she allowed her elbow to brush lightly against Lyon's shoulder.

Robin was the exuberant eighteen-year-old daughter of Lyon's illustrator, Stacey Thornburton. While chasing over the hills of North Carolina after some beast or other, Stacey had managed to fall from his jeep and fracture his leg in two places, and Robin had been dispatched north with the latest batch of preliminary sketches for Lyon's next children's book.

The proximity of the young girl's bronzed body made Lyon regret that he and Bea hadn't locked the bedroom door and been late for breakfast. The thought was shattered when a sneakered foot careened off his ankle.

“Open the package, dear,” Bea said.

The gift wrap fell away to reveal a charcoal portrait. “Hey, that's marvelous. The way I'd like to look, or maybe the way I looked ten years ago.” He half-stood to give Robin a buss and felt her lips linger on his a brief moment.

“NEXT!” Bea yelled and leaned over to whisper in Lyon's ear, “For a moment, I thought you were going to have her for dessert.”

Rocco Herbert handed him a package. “To help on the next case.”

“THERE WON'T BE A NEXT CASE!” Bea said as Lyon unwrapped a book containing the complete works of Dashiell Hammett.

“Thanks, Chief. Next time we'll both be as hard-boiled as Sam Spade, right?”

“WRONG!” Bea said.

“And now for the
pièce de résistance.
” Damon stepped through the door and returned in a moment carrying a bulky package as tall as himself. “Actually it's not just from me,” he said as Lyon began to remove the wrapping surrounding the oversized gift, “but from everyone at Cedarcrest Toys.”

“My God!” Lyon said as the last of the tissue fell away to reveal a six-foot Wobbly doll. The benign monster, a creation from his first children's book, stared out over the group with a ferocious but essentially kind visage.

Robin clapped. “That's fantastic.”

“Isn't it,” Bea said with a half-smile at the young girl.

“The first of its kind,” Damon said. “A couple of department store buyers saw it in my office the other day and are fighting to have orders filled.” He poured more wine. “This time a toast to Robin's father, designer of the first Wobbly.” He raised his glass. “And at the risk of sounding mercenary—the most successful item I have in all our lines, although most aren't as big as this fellow.”

Lyon looked over the rim of his glass toward Damon Snow at the foot of the table. The toy manufacturer and their weekend host was tall and thin to the point of gauntness. The deeply etched features on the elongated face often made Lyon think of Ichabod Crane.

As Lyon admired Kimberly Ward's gift of a bottle of Dry Sack sherry, Bea left the room and returned with a live white duck in her arms. As she thrust it toward Lyon, the outraged bird voiced its indignation.

“If this is lunch, count me out.”

“Darling, you've forgotten the Montgolfiers.”

“The French balloonists?”

“Uh huh. And what did they send up in their first hot-air-balloon flight?”

A broad smile creased Lyon's face. “A duck and a chicken.”

“Let's look outside.”

The empty hot-air-balloon bag of the Wobbly II lay properly stretched out along the ground. A wicker gondola, with teakwood control panel and leather along its base, stood upright at the end of the balloon envelope.

Lyon stared awestruck at the new basket. “My God, it's beautiful! Where did you get it?”

“I had it made. BALLOON GONDOLAS ARE NOT EXACTLY SOLD IN THE SUPERMARKET!”

Bea needed a new battery for her hearing aid, but he decided not to comment. “We'll have to try it out.”

“I thought you would, but first look at this.” She ran her fingers along the small control panel.

“A built-in propane lever.”

“No more cricks in the neck from having to use the lever over your head.”

He shook his head. “I always thought you hated my balloon.”

“I do, but as long as you persist in your madness, you may as well go in style.”

He turned to the others, who stood smiling in the background. “I'm going up; let's inflate.”

Out of long-practiced habit, Bea and Kim began to spread the balloon envelope as Lyon started the portable air compressor and directed its flow into the bag.

“I need a turkey.”

Kim and Bea shook their heads simultaneously and continued studiously to unfold the envelope.

“I'll be chaser,” Rocco offered.

“I'll help if you'll tell me what the turkey does,” Damon said.

Lyon spread the balloon bag's opening and beckoned to Damon. “You go inside and extend your arms as wide as you can. That helps the thing fill faster.”

Damon shrugged and stepped inside the balloon. “I've never even seen one of these things before.”

“Ah, I'd suggest you step back a little further.”

“He's obviously never seen one, or he wouldn't volunteer to be the turkey,” Rocco said.

“What's that?” Damon asked from inside the balloon.

“Never mind.”

Compressor air began to riffle the sides of the balloon and fill it out. Lyon picked up the heavy propane burner, adjusted the feed and lit the pilot light. He held the burner across his body, braced his feet, and pointed the nozzle through the balloon opening.

“Hold it wide, Damon,” he said and pulled the propane-release lever. As the burner lit with a roar, a jagged three-foot flame jutted into the balloon.

“My God! You've singed my eyebrows.”

“Get back a little further and hold it wide.” Lyon pulled the lever again for a three-second whoosh of flame.

“I was his turkey once,” Rocco said. “Never again.”

“Do you have to do it this way?” they heard Damon yell over the burner's roar.

“No, but it's faster.”

The burner's intense flame heated the air inside the balloon, which quickly began to fill and take shape. In minutes the fifty-foot-long envelope rounded into circular form and rose upright. Lyon attached the guy wires sewn into the balloon's surface to their brackets on the basket, then mounted the propane burner on its gondola brace, immediately beneath the balloon opening. At periodic intervals he gave short bursts of propane, until warm air had filled the balloon to its full size.

The inflated balloon revealed the large Wobbly face painted on its surface. The twenty-five-foot-high monster grinned out over the group.

“How did you get it from our barn?” Lyon asked as he made final adjustments to the basket attachments.

“Rocco brought it down last night.”

As the basket began to bob from the ground, Lyon climbed aboard. “There's room for two. Anyone for a ride?”

They looked at him in sober speculation.

“You're not conning me again,” Damon said.

“Why does that sign on the side say ‘experimental'?” Robin asked.

“The Federal Aviation people require it. It's not a certified aircraft.”

Robin's eyes slowly traveled the length of the large sphere dominating the yard. “I think I'll go for a swim,” she said and ran toward the beach.

“No takers?” Heads shook as they declined. “Then I hope you'll excuse me for a while.”

“Can we stop you?” Bea asked.

Lyon began his preflight checks and, as always, marveled at the simplicity of the device. He pulled on the lines that were sewn into the nylon envelope, coverging down toward the balloon's opening or appendix. He checked the appendix, where the lines were attached to the load ring, which supported the basket and the propane burner immediately over his head. His periodic firing of the burner would heat the air within the envelope and cause the vehicle to become buoyant. The craft's rate of ascent or descent would be controlled by the amount of propane burned and by the release of hot air from the bag through the panel, a portion of the envelope that opened and closed at his tug on a line. For an emergency descent, Lyon could pull the red cord of the ripping panel, a portion of the bag that, torn away, would spill large amounts of hot air into the atmosphere.

The gondola held a large propane tank and a few instruments: propane gauge, temperature gauge, compass, altimeter, and a variometer. The final piece of equipment was a CB radio.

Lyon pulled the lever for a five-second burn and felt the basket lift from the ground. All was in order, so he signaled to Bea to cast off the mooring line.

After another short burn the balloon began a rapid and noiseless ascent. The clear morning was nearly windless, and the progress was straight up, with little drift. At chimney height Lyon looked down at the dispersing group on the ground. Damon was walking slowly toward the boat house, Bea has gone into the main house, while Robin was a flash of arms twenty yards offshore. Kim had spread a blanket on the sand and lay face down in the warmth.

“You'll never get sunburned this time of the morning,” Lyon heard Rocco yell at the basking Kim.

“I don't burn,” the black woman retorted with a snort. Kim had been Bea Wentworth's administrative assistant for several years when she was in the state Senate, and now, after his wife's election to the office of secretary of the state, Kim had been appointed deputy secretary. Kim had accepted the appointment with protest, bemoaning the fact that somehow it wasn't quite in keeping with her activist positions to handle corporate registrations for the state of Connecticut.

Rocco walked toward the pickup truck which would act as balloon chase vehicle. He squeezed his two-hundred-eighty-pound frame into the driver's seat and, from years of habit as Murphysville's chief of police, flipped on the truck's CB radio.

The balloon rose silently as it separated itself from the world below. Spotting clouds at fifteen hundred feet that were scudding in an easterly direction toward the water, Lyon leveled at six hundred feet by minute burns of propane. He found himself drifting slightly toward the west along the coastline, at a speed of four knots.

He felt a nostalgic twinge as he passed over the beach house. They had surprised him with a ceremony for a day he had intended to let pass without ceremony. They were the ones he felt closest to: his wife; Rocco, his oldest friend, who had served with him in Korea; Damon Snow, a business acquaintance at first, now becoming a friend; and Robin. The Wentworths had welcomed Lyon's illustrator's daughter when she had arrived for her visit, as if she were a partial and temporary replacement for the daughter they had lost so long ago.

His thoughts of Robin were unsettling. He had the vague fear that her lingering looks and mild flirtations had taken on a different character than that of surrogate daughter. He smiled; the thoughts of the long-limbed young girl were a sure sign of his approaching middle age.

Lyon leaned on the edge of the gondola to watch the slowly passing panorama. Over the water, to the east, the sun balanced on the horizon and cast red streaks across the sound. Looking due south he could see Orient Point, Long Island; below him were passing the cottages along the shore of Lantern City.

He flipped on the CB radio. “Rocco, I can bring her down at the Lantern City football field in half an hour.”

“I'll be there.”

“Thank you.” He flipped off the radio and placed it back on its mountings and let himself become immersed in the feeling of freedom as he merged with the sky.

The distant pitched whine of a low-flying aircraft destroyed the mood, and he turned to glare toward the offending buzz as occupants of a sailboat might at a power launch. The plane approached from the east, directly out of the sun, and he could catch only fleeting glimpses of it as it banked.

There was only one person in the state who flew such a garishly painted Piper. Tom Giles, long-ago classmate and Hartford attorney, had often passed the Wobbly II in his early-morning flights. Occasionally, when they came across each other at parties given by mutual friends, they would argue the respective merits of their craft.

Tom had come to the party after all. As Lyon watched, the small plane changed to a southeasterly heading. He thought it amusing that Tom still found it necessary to satisfy some inner need by flamboyant displays of his flying, as if adult life had never been quite fulfilling, never so successful as the triumphs of his younger years.

Those early weeks at Greenfield Preparatory had been painful for Lyon. The first day had begun badly. Warned by an alumnus that white bucks were “in,” Lyon had arrived for the first day's classes wearing a pair of his father's white medical shoes. The situation had deteriorated from there, and he quickly discovered that his status as a “Townie” was somewhere between a Typhoid Mary and a Russian spy, and on some days he wasn't quite sure of the exact order.

They caught him in the third week. He had rounded a corner in the locker room and inadvertently stumbled on several of his classmates smoking. In his naïveté he had undoubtedly looked shocked at this abuse of the rules. Four of them had jumped him.

“They've gone,” were the first words Tom Giles had spoken to him. “Get up off the floor.”

Lyon looked up, brushed away the residue of a bloody nose, and saw Tom sitting on the radiator, with one knee pulled up under his chin. “I'll cream them,” Lyon had mumbled in youthful bravado.