Air Force Eagles by Walter J. Boyne

pilot made. Porterhouse steaks and bourbon whiskey had padded Baker's big frame just as blackmail and bribes had padded his bank account.
    They watched each other as carefully as two sumo wrestlers about to grapple. McNaughton eyed Baker's horse blanket-plaid sport coat, his white plastic belt, and brown and white shoes.
    "Rushing the season a bit, aren't you?"
    "Nah, this is my Little Rock outfit, looked right at home there." He sipped his drink watching McNaughton carefully, trying to see how much Troy already knew, how little he could tell and get away with, selling his information as a dishonest bartender dispenses drinks, short-measured and watered.
    "It's all there, Chief, enough to send this cockie to the chair."
    "Proof?"
    "Chief, if I'm lying, I'm dying! It ain't like this guy was no Sherlock Holmes or nothing. He never could've gotten away with this if he didn't have the coroner and the chief of police in his pocket. He's got to be a little bit nutso."
    Baker had worked with Naval Intelligence during the war, an inquisitor running "special" security checks on people in sensitive positions. It was better than a college education; he learned how to pick locks, break into homes, bribe police officials and in general acquire the criminal talents necessary to be a skilled private investigator. Baker assumed all his subjects were guilty; if they weren't, he was content to frame them. He cultivated evidence like a crop, and if the yield was poor, he planted more.
    "The dumb broad never had a chance! He'd had her so isolated for years that people thought she was crackers."
    "Sum it up for me. I'll go through this stuff myself later."
    "Sure. First he gets her isolated, like I say. Then he begins to spread rumors about her threatening suicide."
    McNaughton interrupted. "Dick, how do you know that?"
    Baker lolled back in the chair, picking his nose with practiced enjoyment. "I talked to her beauty operator, a good-looking doll named Leah Fanning. Mrs. Ruddnick stops coming in, and when Leah calls, old man Ruddick tells her, 'Mrs. Ruddick is not well. She tried to kill herself.' Other people said the same thing."
    "When was all this?"
    "Hell, that's the amazing thing—he started this whole caper in 1942, worked on it for years. I checked with their druggist, nice old guy named Kallme. 'Kallme for Drugs' was the sign for his shop. She was getting more and more prescriptions filled for all kinds of stuff—bromides, morphine, everything."
    "He told you this?"
    "No, Chief. I talked to him first—then I had to break in and look through his records. Everything neat and tidy on three-by-five cards. All the prescriptions were from the coroner. I checked him out; he's a rummy on old Milo's payroll."
    "Go on."
    Baker paused to finish his drink, handing the glass to McNaughton to refill. "Anyway, Ruddick spreads the rumor a couple a' times about her killing herself, once even has an ambulance come out and haul her to the hospital to pump her stomach. Then one day she's found in the garage, the old La Salle's engine running, vacuum cleaner hose attached to the tailpipe."
    "Any autopsy?"
    "Not so you could notice. Papers full of her 'long brave battles with illness,' lots of stuff like that. So he inherits everything."
    "Pretty well fixed?"
    "Yeah, on paper. But he's land poor, and he has lots of expenses. I don't know who all he's paying off, or bribing or what, but I think he's hurting for cash."
    McNaughton's eyes went up. "I guess you busted in the bank, too?"
    Baker smirked. "No, but I did go through his desk drawers; found his checkbooks, all of them, back for years. He's got neat handwriting and keeps good records. He's spending a bundle on art, all to a New York importer, and he's tunneling dough to a lot of local politicians, plus he's funding the state Ku Klux Klan organization all by himself."
    McNaughton paused to savor the information. Even if the murder was impossible to prove, the stuff on the Ku Klux Klan was dynamite. If