I nodded. “Drink to the departed and hatch plans to scatter his ashes from the sky.” Before today I’d imagined Ed’s in-theevent envelope containing a desire for his ashes to be scattered from the Mozzie in some memorable locale where ash-scattering wasn’t legal. That’s happened before. The TAF is not the most letter-of-the-law-abiding bunch that ever flew.
According to Lauren, they’d been up swapping tall flying tales until well past midnight. Ed had made it to his bedroom. In the dark before dawn, he’d called 911 saying he thought he was having a heart attack. It was too late when the paramedics arrived. He was already gone.
The front room of the Air Base Inn looked aeronautically cozy, with armchairs, a fireplace, and a long shiny propeller mounted on the wall over the fireplace mantle. The propeller wavered as my eyes teared up. But Lauren was right. Pilots of the adventurous stripe do appreciate the value of a natural death in old age.
Then that damn uncertainty scratched at the back door of my mind again. Had Ed really died a natural death?
Naturally caused or not, now that I knew exactly where Ed’s death had happened, I had second thoughts about spending tonight in that very room. I considered curling up in the Navion’s back seat for the night. As it turned out, though, the Air Base Inn had a room available. An attendee flying his airplane from Oklahoma was grounded behind a cold front loaded with thunderstorms. So the room he’d reserved for tonight could be mine.
Lauren gave me a quaint brass door key for my room. I also asked for, and received from Lauren, a key for Ed’s room. At the end of a hallway with forest-green carpet bordered with a design like swirling propellers, I located room number B-25, turned the brass key in the lock, and took a deep breath before I entered.
An oil painting and a set of photographs of, yes, B-25’s, in all their twin-tailed glory, hung on the walls. A pair of bedside lamps had been crafted from aluminum bomber parts, and the bedspread pattern was a designer version of beige, brown and mauve camouflage. The decor picked up on the World War II role of B-25’s in the North African desert. Ed would have gotten a kick out of this room. His stuff seemed comfortably settled in, as though he’d return any minute. I located two changes of clothes in the closet and a toiletry kit in the bathroom. On the spare bed his scuffed old briefcase lay open, displaying tools and fabric swatches. No doubt he’d been talking shop with other TAF members.
Ed’s best bomber jacket hung neatly on the back of a chair. I checked the jacket pockets and found some folded $1 and $5 bills, his Leatherman pocket knife, and, in an inside zippered pocket, a small light bulb, probably from an aircraft instrument panel. That was Ed. He always had a few spare bills, the knife from his naval aviator days, and a small aircraft part or two in his pockets, but never a pointy tool that could rip an airplane’s upholstery if he sat down in a seat to work on the panel. I slipped the little bulb into my own pocket. Maybe I could find out if it was for the Mozzie.
Nothing in the neat, nostalgic room suggested malice, much less murder. And Ed had been in his seventies. Maybe he’d just heard a supernatural air alert—the signal for his soul to fly with no time to preflight, just kick the tires, light the fire and brief en-route to eternity.
But there was something he’d wanted me to find.
Ed always told me, Don’t just see what you expect. Look hard before you decide what you see. Look hard. Eventually I learned what he meant. An aircraft mechanic has to observe the minute mechanical details of an airplane. Aircraft repair work isn’t the place for comfortable assumptions that blind you to reality.
Life neither, he would have said.
“What about death, Ed?” I whispered. Sitting on the edge of the spare bed, I put my face in my hands and cried.
Most of the TAF had gone away on a field trip to San Marcos, an hour away by van. San Marcos is where the Commemorative Air Force—a bigger, but Mozzieless, warbird organization—bases one of their squadrons. The TAF’s temporary absence was fine by me. After I dried my tears and washed my face, I didn’t want to encounter the TAF all at once, or Guy Oldenshaw too soon.
In the Inn’s library, though, I discovered a solitary TAF member. This turned out to be Mike Boudreaux, the TAF historian. No wonder he’d gravitated to the library. It had a prize collection of Texas air history materials, which Boudreaux was investigating with the restless energy of a ferret, flipping through books and magazines and leaving them open on coffee tables and on the floor. He broke off to supply me with details about Smiley’s fatal crash.
Surprise. It happened fifteen years ago today. The TAF reunion was in Smiley’s honor.
Smiley had been flying his own airplane, a single-engine Mahler Tern, returning alone from Dallas to TAF headquarters at the Brazoria County Airport southwest of Houston. He never made it. The Tern crashed in a pasture a mile from the airport. The National Transportation Safety Board never conclusively determined the reason for the crash. At least not to anyone’s satisfaction except their own. The engine had been fuel-starved. Pilots make grim jokes about dying in a smoking hole in the ground, but Smiley died in an only slightly smoking hole, just a few minutes from home.
Fuel starvation usually means pilot error, i.e., running out of avgas. But the Mahler Tern’s warning system had failed to indicate the low fuel problem. The crash was followed by a lawsuit brought by Smiley’s widow. She, or rather her high-powered product-liability attorneys, won, and won big, big enough to make the Mahler Aircraft Company reel. Mahler later went bankrupt. That was a pity, because Mahler had made good aircraft.
Boudreaux cordially cursed gold-digging lawyers. Then he added, “It was a lucky break for Guy Oldenshaw.”
I asked, “Would Smiley have been the Mozzie’s chief pilot if he’d lived?”
“There’s people in the TAF who’d tell you differently—but Smiley was a better pilot.” Boudreaux spoke with the crisp conviction of someone whose mind is nailed firmly shut.
The TAF was like many other volunteer flying organizations. The love of flying brings together strong-willed people who spend countless hours of their own time hell-bent on having fun. In that environment, grudges burned out by time and fate can leave hot embers in the ashes. “It was a pretty heated rivalry?”
Boudreaux snorted. “Heated yes, pretty, no. Pilots seeing an opportunity to fly a rare military airplane are like cutthroat trout. The Mozzie is one lure that the biggest and baddest of them will fight over.” He fidgeted. “Ed was hinting around that he knew something to make me revise my history of the Mozzie. Do you know what he had in mind?”
“Don’t know a thing about that, sorry,” I managed to say.
But I was looking hard. Now I felt sure there was something to find.
* * * *
My guest room was number P-51. A framed poster of a jaunty P-51 Mustang graced the wall. The other decor followed the theme of wild horses. A cable television lived in an antique wardrobe, and the Weather Channel showed the cold front that got me a room in the Inn already biting into Texas with bright blue teeth. It looked like high time for me to secure my Navion for the night.
The most direct route to the ramp took me through the Inn’s parlor and out through double doors onto the ramp-side veranda. On the veranda, I recognized a shock of silver-frosted hair on a man relaxing in one of the rocking chairs. He was somebody I knew—Perry Tucker, a friendly competitor of Ed’s in the restoration and repair business. To my knowledge, Perry didn’t belong to the TAF.
“’Afternoon, Cana.” His wave invited me to sit in the other rocking chair. “I sure am sorry to hear about Ed.”
Glad to see his friendly face, I asked him, “What brings you here?”
“I just happened to have a little vacation planned this weekend.”
Right. More likely he’d gotten wind of the reunion in the early planning stage, and reserved himself a room at the Inn this weekend because he intended to angle for some maintenance work on the Mosquito, which would be a feather in his professional cap.
I brought up the subject of Smiley’s last flight. Perry soon told me more than Ed ever had about what it had been like for Ed. It happened late at night. Smiley had abruptly radioed that he had an emergency. Ed had been alone in the TAF’s hangar, working while listening to the Brazoria County airport radio frequency. So Ed heard Smiley’s last transmission. Smiley crashed a mile from the TAF end of the airport. The ambulance and the Sheriff took a long time to get to the crash site. It was in the back end of a big, gumbo-dirt pasture, and there’d been a lot of rain that week. The emergency vehicles bogged down. Ed, scrambling cross-country on foot, got there first. Smiley was already a very dead man.
“It shook Ed up,” I said. “He never talked about it.”
The approaching cold front loomed like a lumpy gray wall in the sky. Under the edge of the clouds, the setting sun glared. “Men will tell a sympathetic woman things they won’t never tell another man,” Perry said wisely. “If he didn’t describe his feelings about that crash to you, he felt bad, all right.”
“I understand Ed and Smiley were friends from their naval aviator days.”
Perry’s eyes glinted with amusement. “In the Navy, Ed’s nickname was Snake. Him and Smiley was good pilots on duty and hell on wheels off duty. Snake was the craftier of the two, and Smiley was the brazen one. They got into plenty of mischief, but always got each other out again. Maybe at the end too,” Perry concluded, with a suggestive lift of his eyebrows.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t meant to disrespect the dead, but after Smiley crashed, I heard tell that Ed had found something bad at the scene and made it go away.”
I blurted the inevitable question. “Something bad like what?”
Perry rocked his chair a couple of times before he said, “Drugs, most likely. A Mahler Tern is the best airplane there is for running drugs in and out of Mexico.”
Interesting! But it had to be filed under Rumors, Airport, Unsubstantiated. You want grapevine? Forget beauty parlors and PTA’s—there’s nothing more prolific than the grapevine in the flying community. These guys, and mostly it is guys, can out-gossip your Aunt Edna.
On the other hand, drug-running is toward the top of the list of things that can get a pilot killed.
With a thin creak, the big orange windsock atop the Air Base Inn wheeled around. Incoming cold front! I ran to my Navion to secure it, attaching a tight rope on each wing tiedown loop and a chain hooked to the tail. A gust lock immobilized the rudder and I looped the seat belt around the control yoke to keep the ailerons from flapping in the wind.
Leaving the Navion safe and snug for the night, I approached the Mozzie. I made eye contact with the line boy doing guard duty, so he knew I intended to mind my manners, and then I walked around the Mozzie, wondering what the old warbird would tell me if she could talk. I reverently avoided the oil-puddled pans under the three-bladed Rolls Royce engines. Drip pans are badges of honor for any radial-engine airplane. For this particular airplane, drip pans with actual dripped oil were on the order of the stigmata of Our Lord. Mozzies are rare now because they were made out of wood—a design decision spurred by wartime metal shortages.
Wood’s good, Ed had told me. Resilient. Same for all aircraft parts. Even light bulbs. Under temperature stress, heat or cold, or something pointy hits it, instrument panel bulb filament’s gonna break, sure. But nothing about an airplane is as breakable as you think. I took the little bulb from my pocket. In the fading light of day, I could see a broken filament. I could also read the part number, and it wasn’t a British military spec number. So it wasn’t a bulb for the Mozzie’s instrument panel. It also wasn’t one we’d keep in inventory at Tate Aviation.
All of a sudden the wind on the ground gusted up like the backdraft of Siberia. The cold front was now a stack of dark clouds across the sky. The line boy cursed but stuck to his post. I scurried back into the Air Base Inn. Cold air blew indoors with me.
I definitely hadn’t been thinking clearly when I packed today, because it never crossed my mind to include a jacket. Well, I was going to regret that.
The TAF had returned from San Marcos. The Inn resonated with voices. A tall man, trimmer of physique and crisper of clothing than most of the TAF, brushed past me on his way out to the ramp. I watched him order the line boy to double up the Mozzie’s tiedown ropes. He himself clipped gust locks onto the ailerons and rudder. That was Guy Oldenshaw. He looked the part of Chief Pilot, I thought. Acted it too—not taking any chances with the airplane.
When Oldenshaw turned back toward the Inn, I ducked through the Inn’s front room and past the dining room. A garlicky good smell wafted through the hallway. The reunion supper was scheduled for tonight. I’d skipped lunch, or rather, forgotten it. Now my mouth watered. Lauren had told me to expect wonderful culinary fare from her husband, the co-owner of the Inn, and she’d chirped that I didn’t need to worry about what I wore to dinner, not at all. Every guest at the Inn was family. I visualized eating dinner in my oil-stained old jeans and thin polo shirt. Underdressed, cold, and at the table with the TAF reunion, including Smiley’s old rival Oldenshaw. Ugh.
One day at a chilly airshow, Ed had loaned me his best bomber jacket. He’d grinned and said, Here, Canna Lily, so you don’t freeze! I’m a well-endowed woman, and the jacket made me look good, not like a pan handle wrapped in a potholder. I still had the key to Ed’s room in my pocket, so I went down the hall to room number B-25. Opening the door, I took two absent-minded steps in, and froze.
The room had been ransacked wall to wall and ceiling to floor. Ed’s briefcase was spilled across the spare bed. His changes of clothes and his jacket were thrown on the floor. The closet and chest of drawers gaped open.
I ran down the hall to the front room, where a fresh fire blazed in the fireplace and Perry Tucker was chatting up two TAF guys. Perry gave me a sharp look. “Something wrong?”
Unlike earlier when I did a half-baked job of packing, my brain was working now. Ed’s room had been ransacked, but good. It was as if somebody had looked for something they hadn’t found. But what wasn’t there to find? Everything that had been in the room earlier, I’d left in place. Except for one thing. “I have some unfinished business of Ed’s. I need to know what aircraft a certain part is for.”
“I can check the part number in the registry. Excuse us, gentlemen.” Perry pulled a laptop computer out from under his armchair. I read off the bulb’s part number and watched over his shoulder. When he hit the enter key, a short list of aircraft and instruments came up—the approved uses for the little bulb with the broken filament.
Perry gave a suppressed little start of interest. The list included the fuel-warning indicator light on a Mahler Tern.
* * * *
Ed’s best bomber jacket smelled like Aramis cologne and Cuban cigars. My eyes teared up at the dinner table. After I devoured two yeasty rolls my stomach felt less hollow, and the garlicky, winey beef stew tasted good. I started being able to register my surroundings. The table was made of varnished wood; the centerpiece was a silver vase holding half a dozen soaring stems of bird-of-paradise. Besides myself and Perry Tucker, five Anglo men with graying, white, or no hair, plus two black TAF aviators, a Chinese guy, and another woman sat around the table. The TAF was more diverse than I’d expected. They seemed a few cuts above their rakehell reputation. Maybe in the past fifteen years they’d settled down, without Snake and Smiley being in the inner circle.
But one or more of the TAF members had ransacked Ed’s room. According to Mike Boudreaux, Ed had been dropping hints about a revelation. That could explain why, but it didn’t go much of the way toward who.
Boudreaux had a nervous, jumpy manner, looking around at everything and everyone except me sitting there in the bomber jacket. I remembered him in the library earlier, how he’d been glancing through the books and magazines with the heedless intensity of a ferret. The things in Ed’s guest room had been scattered like ferret litter. Maybe Boudreaux hadn’t been able to resi
st the temptation to investigate Ed’s room. Particularly not if I’d left the door unlocked in my grieving daze after the first time I went in there. I’m used to motel room doors that lock just by closing them. But room number B-25 had an old-fashioned door locked by turning the brass key, and I did not remember doing that. By failing to lock Ed’s room I might have made it easy for somebody else to get in.
If Boudreaux was the one who searched the room, it might have been an attempt to scratch an old itch of curiosity—to resolve a secret suspicion half as old as me. Perry Tucker’s sky-blue eyes met mine across the table, but he didn’t say a word about Smiley or the Mahler Tern, while the TAF feasted on stew, drank Hill Country wine, and toasted Snake Tate and Smiley Miles. Thunder rumbled outside, like the artillery of a distant war.
The TAF regaled each other with airshow anecdotes. Then they told me about the Mozzie being invited to fly over the Mosquito Festival in Clute, Texas. The TAF had taken Clute up on the invitation to buzz the festival-goers.
“How low’d you go?” Perry asked.
Oldenshaw answered. “Five hundred feet. That’s plenty low enough to thrill the general public. The Mosquito Festival rewarded us with several plush toy mosquitoes including Culex, Vexans, and Asian Tiger—my favorite, it’s got fuzzy stripes—and an invitation to return next year!” Oldenshaw’s smile was smug and sweet at the same time.
That was when I made up my mind about Oldenshaw.
After dinner the group broke into animated clumps in the parlor. Boudreaux avoided me while he flushed pink up to the sparse roots of his hair. He’s the room ransacker, I thought with impatient disapproval. Then I gave a mental shrug. Boudreaux didn’t matter now. Just before dinner I’d gone back into room number B-25, determined to get the jacket, and I’d straightened everything up. Nothing was missing. Boudreaux had ferreted but he hadn’t damaged or stolen anything. I’d also talked to the New Braunfels Police Department. They explained how Ed’s body had all the signs of massive heart attack. So I’d replaced Ed’s things exactly where he’d left them in room number B-25, with the tools of his trade organized in his briefcase. Then I’d put some wildflowers from the grass beside the runway in a glass of water on the bedside table. For tonight, room number B-25 would be a memorial to Ed’s life.
Dead and Breakfast Page 9
