Bum Steer

by Nancy Pickard

  So astonished was I by that piece of unexpected information that I completely forgot about the broken picture frame on the counter behind me.

  It was dark by the time we took off.

  The metal shed at the end of the runway on the ranch held a four-seater airplane, a Beech Debonair Slight called it, that he said Cat sold to him when Cat got too sick to fly it himself. All three men, I learned, had pilot’s licenses, although Slight was a little vague about whether or not he and Carl had kept theirs current.

  The little plane had dual controls, which made me smile to myself: as if I could use the extra yoke that was right in front of my chest or those big silver rudder pedals at my feet! Fat chance. I’d crash before I figured out what to do with them. There was a fat little blue notebook stuffed up under the left rudder pedal, I saw, undoubtedly to keep tinhorns like me from stomping on it and throwing us into a spin.

  I was nervous at the start of this flight, but not nearly so much as I’d been flying out to the ranch. Heck, I was an old hand at this now, and besides, it wasn’t even raining.

  “Copilot ready?”

  “Check,” I yelled over the roar of the engine and the whap, whap of the propellers.

  “Door locked?”

  “Check.”

  “Seat belt on?”

  “Check.”

  “Barf bag ready?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  We taxied straight onto the dirt runway, heading into a light south wind. I suspected that what we were doing was illegal, as there were no lights on this field, but by the time I had that thought, we were already in the air.

  Slight glanced over at me. “Whoopee.”

  I smiled at him.

  He climbed straight ahead. Then he started a long, easy turn, still climbing, to the east. We got partway into it when suddenly the plane skidded under us, refusing to turn any farther left. It was the funniest feeling, like sliding across ice. Unnerving as it was, it was kind of fun, and I grinned at him.

  “What was that?” I yelled over the noise.

  But Slight, who looked surprised, didn’t answer.

  He pulled us out of the skid and we flew straight ahead, continuing to climb. At 3,500 feet, he attempted another left turn. Again, we skidded, and this time, before he pulled us out of it, the back of the plane dipped down and the nose came up. I felt a sickening looseness, but Slight brought us out of it, straightened us out, and got us going straight ahead again. I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. “Wha’s going on?”

  “I’m taking ’er on up” he yelled.

  Clearly, for some reason, this plane wouldn’t turn left. I didn’t know how frightened to be, didn’t have any context into which to place this terror. Logic tried to override fear: Couldn’t we just circle the field, making right turns, until we were lined up with the runway to land again?

  Slight glanced over at me.

  He looked worried.

  My instincts immediately told me to shut up—for God’s sake don’t distract him. And I no longer worried about how frightened I should be. I just plain was.

  The altimeter inched up toward 7,500 feet.

  Suddenly I was horribly aware of the fact that I had put my life in the hands of this near-stranger. Just because he claimed to be a pilot didn’t mean he was a good one. At the moment, he looked nearly as panicked as I felt. I had to fight my own urge to grab the wheel and wrest control of the plane from him. Helpless to do anything, I looked back at him with a gaze of complete and completely false confidence: I believe in you, that gaze was meant to say, you can do it.

  We were now flying over a little town whose lights twinkled innocently below us. Rock Creek? I thought of families sitting down to supper in those dining rooms below us, of babies in their cribs, and mothers bending over them and dogs howling up at us from backyards, and I thought that none of them knew what danger they were in at that moment, and I willed us far away from them.

  Slight’s left hand shifted on the yoke.

  Oh, Lord, he was going to try another left turn.

  I watched his hands delicately twist the wheel to the left, barely, barely. I braced myself for the terror to come. He turned it a little farther and we started to skid again. A gust of wind came up under the right wing, tipping us left as we continued to skid. Slight tried to compensate, but suddenly we were nose up again, and then some sort of warning siren was screaming at us. I didn’t know much about flying, but I knew enough to recognize that we were going into a stall and what follows a stall is a dive and what follows a dive is a crash. Sure enough, from our nose-up position, we suddenly plunged nose down. I was pressed back against my seat; my gaze was locked on the floor of the plane.

  “No left rudder!” Slight yelled.

  Well, at least I’d know what killed me.

  And then it hit me: ohmigod.

  I kicked my left foot forward, battling the pressure of the dive, until I managed to knock the little plastic notebook loose from under the left pedal in front of me.

  Immediately Slight regained left-rudder control.

  After another couple of heart-stopping moments, he brought us smoothly out of the dive.

  When we were flying level again, I reached down for the notebook. It was about seven by five inches and maybe two inches thick, a spiral-bound owner’s and operator’s manual of some kind. I held it up for Slight to see. I pointed to it and then down to the rudder pedal.

  His eyes widened, and his mouth dropped open.

  Then he attempted another left turn.

  This time it worked.

  We burst into speech at the same time.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Thank you—”

  “Are you—”

  “I’m fine, you—”

  Slight laughed shakily, then reached for the notebook and looked at it and then at me.

  “It was stuck up under that left pedal,” I said.

  He nodded and gave it back to me. “I usually keep it in that pocket in front of your seat. It must have dropped out and slid down there. I don’t know what to say, Jenny. I’m sorry as hell.”

  “Well, we survived.”

  “Barely,” he said.

  I stuck the deadly notebook back in the seat pocket where it belonged and leaned back in the seat. For the rest of the trip I was silent and Slight didn’t talk, either, except to the air controllers. After landing on a jet runway at Kansas City International Airport, Slight taxied to a general aviation gate at the terminal.

  He switched off the engine, and the cockpit went dark and quiet. Slight reached over with his right hand and grasped my left one. I squeezed back, hard. He unsnapped his seat belt, and I undid mine. I pulled him toward me until I could get my arms around him, then he put his arms around me and we just held on to each other for a while.

  “Thanks for not killing me,” I murmured.

  “No, you saved us,” he said, then he lifted my hair off my neck and kissed the lobe of my right ear. “But I’ll take the credit, if you like.”

  I pushed away from him. “And I’ll take the blame for this. I’m sorry, Slight.” And I was, oh, I was. “But I’d better go.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  He carried my suit bag to the terminal for me.

  We stood at the door looking at each other.

  “I’ll miss you … ma’am.”

  “It’s been … exciting.”

  He laughed a little. “You won’t forget me, back in Port Frederick?”

  “Probably not,” I admitted, “but I’m going to try.”

  He smiled at that and opened the door for me.

  I stole a last glimpse of him through the glass as he trotted back to his airplane. That man and I were as intimately and permanently linked as two people could be who had faced sudden death together. Cape Cod Bay, I said to myself, Cape Cod Bay Cape Cod Bay Cape Cod Bay. I quickly turned so he wouldn’t catch me looking and walked over to a ticket counter where I canceled my morning return flights to Port Fr
ederick, then made new reservations on the red-eye that night to Chicago, Then I called Dwight Brady one last time to tell him that he didn’t need to send the plane, that I’d already arrived at KCI and would fly out tonight.

  I just didn’t say “out” where.

  “How are the police coming with their investigation?”

  “They’ve been after me to tell them why Benet would leave a fortune in land and cattle to total strangers,” Dwight said, and my heart, which had never completely gotten back under control anyway, started thudding unpleasantly again. “They can’t seem to believe that I don’t know why. Canales seems to have the idea that you and Quentin Harlan cooked up some scheme together.”

  “That’s just great,” I said bitterly.

  “They’re going to want to talk to you again,” he warned me before he hung up.

  Catch me if you can.

  I hoisted my bags, walked out of the terminal, and hailed a yellow cab.

  PART III

  Happy Trails to You

  24

  Did it always rain in Kansas City? Or only when I was there? I had no more than stepped out of the cab in front of the Kansas City Medical Center when the first drop fell. I remembered then the sudden gust of wind that had nearly tipped the Debonair into kingdom come, and I thought: So there was a storm coming, and I’d been too intent on surviving to notice. I spared a thought for Slight, flying home in rain and lightning, but that was the only other thought of him I allowed myself.

  Once again, I struggled through the hospital’s revolving doors with my belongings. Again, I passed the reception desk and traversed the long corridor to the swinging doors. Again, I thought how practically anyone could walk through here without being questioned, especially if that someone were wearing white or green, or using crutches. Or a wheelchair.

  Instead of making a right turn to room 1080, this time I stopped at the nurses’ station. I was lucky and located a nurse who had assisted the day Cat Benet died. She was at dinner in the cafeteria, I was told by another nurse, so that’s where I went looking for her.

  Kelly Eames, she was, an RN who looked about half my age. Kelly was eating by herself—egg salad on whole wheat, a small bag of barbecued potato chips, and a Diet Pepsi—at a table by a window. She had the clear, soft skin of a child and the body of a fifties movie star. Her name tag hung halfway down her left breast, like a sign on a mountain for advanced skiers. When I introduced myself, I described myself, vaguely, as someone who was “taking care of some of his business interests.”

  “Hi,” she greeted me in a friendly way. “Sit?”

  I did, in the chair opposite her.

  “I’m sure sorry about Mr. Benet,” she said.

  “Were you one of his regular nurses, Kelly?”

  “Um hum,” she said, her mouth full of egg salad. After she swallowed, she smiled a tender and apologetic smile at me. “I liked him a lot. I’m real sorry he got killed the way he did.”

  For a moment I was confused, wondering if she meant she would have preferred him to be stabbed, instead of smothered. Then my brain kicked in again.

  “Why’d you like him?”

  She looked surprised. “He was nice! And he was funny. Even when he was real sick, he’d laugh and crack jokes on us. Mr. Benet was one of those patients, you know, that you don’t mind going in to see, even when it’s going to be bad news when you get there.”

  “Bad news?”

  “Oh, you know, tubes and shots and pain and agony, and all that. There’s patients who cry about it and there’s the ones who get mad and there’s the depressed ones and there’s the ones who cop a feel and there’s the fake nice ones and the fake brave ones, and he was one of the real brave ones. If he was feeling too sick to laugh, he’d just lie there quiet and try to smile at you. But most of the time, he could manage a joke or a smile. He never said anything mean to any of us, except if somebody screwed up his pills or jabbed him too hard, then he’d be pretty sharp about it. Heck, I don’t blame him. And those friends of his really expected us to do right by him. Himself, he expected you to know what you were doing around him, I could see that. There was a couple of people around here didn’t like him for that. I mean, after he snapped at them for screwing up his IV or something. But all the rest of the time, to the rest of us, he was always very nice. I felt real bad when I heard he got killed. I’ve known a few patients, let me tell you, I wouldn’t mind killing myself. I shouldn’t say it, but it’s true, real nasty so-and-sos, but he wasn’t like that—”

  “What friends, Kelly?”

  “What? Oh, there were a couple of old cowboys used to come by once a week or so, one of them was big and never said much, and the other one was cute and talked a lot. But boy, I want to tell you, if Mr. Benet ever needed anything, they both could talk and plenty loud. They’d be hollering down the corridor “Where’s Mr. Bene’s pain shot?” or “We need a nurse in here” or whatever it was. A lot of people here didn’t like that, but I understood. His friends, they were only looking out for him. There wasn’t anybody else to do it, and we’re busy, too busy, really, so I think it was good that they were looking out for his best interests.”

  “Was he rational, Kelly?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Always?”

  “Mostly. He was real alert.”

  “So he probably could have read things—maybe even complicated things like contracts—and understood them? If he had signed a contract, or his will, say, he would have known what he was signing?”

  “Oh, sure, unless the pain was too bad, or he’d just had a shot or some awful treatment and he was too out of it. But when the pain would die down and he wasn’t drugged up, he could talk, you know, and read and function pretty well. He liked to watch General Hospital, isn’t that funny? A lot of our patients do. It probably made him feel better to stay busy, you know?”

  “Any other visitors?”

  “Just that lawyer.”

  “Were the cowboys here the morning he died, Kelly?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t see them.”

  “Did he have any other visitors that day?”

  “Besides you and that lawyer, you mean?”

  So she was observant.

  “Yes, besides us.”

  “I doubt it.” She shook her head to make it definite. “There never was anybody else come to see him. Just that lawyer and those cowboys. Lord, that cute one was an awful flirt, worse than Mr. Benet himself, and that’s saying something. I’ll say one thing for them, though, they never made any boob jokes around me, and that made them good guys in my book.”

  I felt ashamed of my own private joke about her ski slope of a chest. I also felt that it was just as well that she hadn’t been able to read Slight Harlan’s mind.

  “I heard he was a rich rancher,” Kelly said. “And that he’d been married seven or eight times. Do you know if that’s true?”

  “I don’t know what’s true,” I admitted.

  But she wasn’t really listening. Romance had her imagination in thrall. “All those wives and all that money,” Kelly said dreamily. “He must have been some kind of man in his day. You know, you’re not the first one to show up here asking about him. I’m beginning to think it’s like a pilgrimage or something, all these ex-wives wanting to come see the place where he died—”

  “Who did you say was here?”

  “One of his other ex-wives.” She leaned dangerously over her egg salad and whispered, “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you might want to avoid that waiting room on the first floor, ’cause she’s still in there. She showed up this morning, and she hasn’t left yet! You and her, I guess you’ve got something in common”—but Kelly looked doubtful as she said that—“but she looks the hot-tempered type to me, red hair and all, you know, and I don’t know if you’d want to mess with her.”

  What kind of type did I look? I wondered. Not hot-tempered, evidently. Cool and collected, as befitted my Swedish genes? Geof would get a good laugh
out of that, if I ever got a chance to tell him.

  “Which wife was she, do you know?”

  She shook her head. “Which one were you?”

  “I’m not an ex-wife.”

  “Oh,” she said significantly.

  “No! I wasn’t married to him.”

  “Wow,” she said, “so you don’t get any of the money, ’cause you don’t have any legal status, right? Were you common law, maybe?” She snapped her fingers. “You ought to get that lawyer, what’s his name out in Hollywood, Marvin Michelsburg or something, and get him to get you some of that palimony, I think they call it, you know?”

  “Good idea,” I said. “Thanks, Kelly. And thanks for taking such good care of ’ Cat.”

  I received that tender smile again. “Sure.”

  I walked away thinking that I had not clarified matters much: I’d been trying to establish whether the bequest was Cat Benet’s idea—free, clear, and rational—or somebody else’s, like Slight’s and/or Carl’s. In other words, if somebody was hiding something, which somebody was it who was doing the hiding? I had not really come any closer to finding out. Anybody could have slipped a will under his nose for him to sign while he was drugged; on the other hand, he could have signed it when he was completely lucid. Who was responsible for the strange document that bound the foundation to impossible terms? I still didn’t know.

  I did know that I was enjoying being around women again. Not only did they talk but sometimes they even told you something.

  25

  There were several people in the waiting room where Canales had interviewed Brady and me, but only one of them was a woman with red hair. Real red hair. That’s “real” as in natural and very. Tangled heaps and masses of it springing out as curls around her heart-shaped face and as ringlets from the ponytail fatly massed at the nape of her neck. This woman, too, had breasts like missile nose cones, but hers stuck out more than Nurse Kelly’s and were loosely contained in a white T-shirt with a hot-pink flamingo on the front of it. The bird, whose beak curved around the woman’s left breast, had been drawn in profile; its thin mouth curved up in a lewd and evil grin, its beady green eye staring aggressively over my shoulder, as if casing the joint for somebody more likely looking. The sleeves of this woman’s T-shirt were rolled up onto her shoulders, revealing shapely, muscular, tanned upper arms. A pink fur jacket (I suspected mink) was slung over her shoulders. She had tucked the T-shirt into blue jeans so tight it was a wonder some nurse hadn’t called a Code Blue on her for circulatory failure. Completing the ensemble were: sling-back heels held on to each of her plump and tiny feet by thin, pink vinyl straps; lots of pink plastic bracelets and rings; and huge, very dark pink plastic sunglasses with lenses shaped like hearts. The nose beneath the glasses was small and cute, the lips below the nose were sensuous and cute, although now they drooped with sadness, weariness, or sulkiness—it was hard to tell without seeing her eyes. The redhead looked so darned wild, so incredibly brassy, so unbelievably out of context, so adorable and funny, that I loved her on sight.