Move to Strike

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “What were you doing in the desert?”

  “Remember the land Lindy Markov gave me? I go out there.”

  “Alone?”

  “Sometimes Bob comes.” She turned back to business. “Thanks for dropping everything. I owe you, Paul. I know you didn’t really want to come up.”

  “I’m here now. And I’m interested. I already called the NTSB office in Carson City to set up a visit to the crash site.”

  “That’s fast work. Did you learn anything?”

  “Well, it’ll be a year before they come up with anything other than a ‘preliminary finding,’ but yeah, they’re still tending toward blaming the crash on pilot error. There’s no evidence of equipment failure so far. According to what they’ve been told, the plane was in tip-top shape. They’ve spoken with the mechanic who worked on it before takeoff. Apparently, he’s pretty reassuring. One thing though, he let slip that old Skip Bailey, the pilot, has an error on his record.”

  “That’s interesting. Maybe it was pilot error then, and there’s no connection to the doctor’s murder.”

  “It needs looking into. I talked to Connie Bailey on the phone last night. She swears her husband was the most careful man on earth. I plan to fly from Reno to LA tonight after the crash-site visit and talk with her some more. What do you think?”

  “Go for it. Here’s your check.” She took it out of the drawer and handed it to him. Without looking at it, he stuck it into his pocket. “And here’s a file with all the paperwork we have on the William Sykes murder to date. Police reports, preliminary autopsy report, crime scene photos, and so on.”

  “I’ll read it on the flight from Reno down south. I’ll put together a report and make sure you have it in a couple of days, all right?”

  “The hearing is next Wednesday, on May twenty-fifth. Do you want to meet Nikki?”

  “No need, at this point.”

  “I don’t think she did it.”

  “You never do.”

  “I’ve changed a lot in the past few months,” she said.

  “So have I.”

  She didn’t like the way he was not looking at her, not trying to figure her out, or listening for the subtle tune that had always run between them.

  Her brows knitted.

  Sandy appeared in the doorway. “Your three o’clocks are here,” she said. “Two of ’em.” She closed the door behind her.

  He got up to leave and Nina was aware of an old feeling streaming over her. She didn’t want Paul to leave. She wanted something from him, more . . .

  “Wait,” she said. “I have something else for you to do in LA. I want to check out Beth Sykes’s alibi.” She kept him there a good five minutes longer. When he finally left, she felt vaguely dissatisfied. She didn’t like the cooler atmosphere between them, when she should be welcoming it.

  Paul drove the rental jeep up a four-wheel-drive road as far into the Carson Range as he could toward the spot where the Beechcraft had gone down. His directions proved unnecessary. The closest spot along the road was cluttered with trucks and utility vehicles. Today they would be hauling the wreckage away.

  He pulled to the side, got out with his water bottle, crammed on a baseball hat the senator had given him that said “Washington Redskins” on it, and began hiking through a good mile of rugged terrain, well marked by the various agencies that had passed through in the past few days. He was glad he had changed into shorts because the sunlight burned steadily at his back.

  Breaking through a thick stand of ponderosa pine, he came to the spot where two people had died.

  The place looked appropriately forbidding. A long channel of charred grasses marked the area where the plane had tumbled along the ground. It had come to rest against the side of a hill. From where he stood, he could imagine the event in miniature, the plane rising and falling like the plastic toys he had crashed as a boy. Following the path of devastation, he got as close to the plane as he could before an official type tried to stop him. However, stating that he was the representative of the pilot’s widow won him some respect. After a short verbal spar, which he won handily, he was allowed to get in closer.

  He pulled out his old silver Nikon and began to shoot, first wide-angle shots that took in the setting, then close-ups of anything that looked even vaguely interesting, especially the engine sections. Moving in as he shot, he found himself peering into the cockpit. Blackened shreds of fabric clung to the pilot’s seat. Behind it, in one of several passenger seats, a burned blue jacket with an emblem reading “Pomona College” lay in a heap. A mangled laptop, curled from the heat and almost unrecognizable, lay next to a phone on the floor between the seats.

  Wiping a bead of sweat from the top of his lip, the portly, official type returned and stood nearby. He put his hands in his pockets. “I have a son in college,” he said. “How must his parents feel?”

  “His father died the same night.”

  “Couldn’t take the news? I’ve heard of that happening now and then.”

  “No.” Paul didn’t want to get into it. “There’s no known connection.”

  “Eerie,” said the man.

  On the way to the Reno airport, Paul called his office. “Trumbo and van Wagoner,” said Dean’s hearty voice. “Dean’s busy right now, but he’ll call back real soon.” He punched the cancel button and dialed Susan Misumi.

  “You’re back?” she asked.

  “No. Just thinking of you. Sorry it took so long to get back to you, but I’m finished with Washington now and I’m busy playing catch-up.”

  “Are you in town?”

  “I’m”—he looked around for a sign, saw nothing but gray asphalt blending into the gray sky, and took a guess—“ten miles outside of Reno, on my way to the airport.”

  “Flying back to Carmel tonight?”

  “No. Down to LA on business, unfortunately. How’d the latest film festival go?” Susan organized film series for a local group in her spare time, when she wasn’t conducting autopsies as medical examiner for the county of Monterey.

  “Great. We took in more money than last year. I was thinking next year maybe we’ll do a series of provocative female movies, really contrasty, cutting-edge stuff.”

  “What movies?” he asked, so that he did not have to come up with some polite bullshit. He hated chick flicks.

  “Oh, say, Cries and Whispers, one night. That’s heavy Bergman, all dark and red. Then, something trashy and lightweight but fun like There’s Something about Mary, or Rich and Famous.”

  “Isn’t that last one the movie where Jackie Bisset does it in the airplane lavatory with some guy she meets on the plane?”

  “See? There’s something for everyone, even you. Or are you having these sorts of thoughts because you’re about to get on an airplane?”

  “I’m having these thoughts because I’m talking to you.” It was true. He felt anxious to jump on some un-demanding, curvy, female hips. More ignominiously, he felt anxious to line somebody up to stand between him and Nina.

  “Ready to be bad?” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

  They made a date for the next weekend. It would have to do.

  Swinging into Reno on the multi-laned freeway coming up from Carson City, he imagined what it might be like to live here in this town that grew like a staunch little tree in America’s outback. He thought about Nina out in those treeless hills beyond on her weekends in the desert. Whackos found convenient hiding places in such desolation. Why didn’t that scare her?

  Underneath the polish of her suit and careful grooming, she had looked so sad.

  But no point in dwelling on that. Nothing he could do. Wounds took a long time to heal and sometimes the scars didn’t go away. They just got uglier.

  On the plane, he sat next to a slick young man in a slick young suit who surreptitiously fingered an unlit cigar throughout the forty-five-minute flight. A quick glance at the other passengers assured him that if Jacqueline Bisset was anywhere nearby she was heavily disguised.
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  At LAX, he stood in line for a long time to claim his rental car. Avoiding the freeways, he worked out his route on the map, finding his way to Pacific Coast Highway. It didn’t matter—the traffic found him, and he felt the old familiar road rage coming over him as though he’d never been away. He gritted his teeth and sat with the other drivers, feeling the heartburn firing up.

  It took an hour and a half. He had rented a motel room on the beach in Hermosa, which was the town right next to Redondo, Connie Bailey’s town. Why not squeeze a little pleasure out of his business?

  The modest room had a view of the ocean, but at this hour, who could tell? Even with the lamp lit, the corners stayed black. He put his duffel down and for a moment poised on the brink of one of those dead times, dangerously near the tingling void that he fell into so often lately. But tonight the sea was out there to fill in the empty places. He could hear it roaring like something alive, filling the room with rhythmic pounding, calling out to him, drowning out whatever it was inside that was burning him alive.

  CHAPTER 6

  SHE LIVED IN a house overlooking miles of high tension wires and sixties’ ranch houses. A rusty security screen door creaked when she opened it. “You’re Paul van Wagoner,” Connie Bailey said. “Please come in.”

  The dead pilot’s wife led the way past a tiny foyer into the living room. He sat down.

  Everything in the room matched precisely. Teal blue walls were trimmed in a deep, almost black, purple. The couch was purple with teal and beige in a wheat pattern. On the wall, abstract drawings of tree trunks in black bore inklings of the room’s primary colors in the background.

  “Nice,” he said, looking around. He found the compulsive coordinating soothing. She probably did, too. African American, very proper, she had black hair pulled back in a band and a broad forehead that ended in warm-looking, golden brown eyes. She was keeping herself on a tight leash, tucking her navy cotton dress neatly underneath her when she sat down.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I called a lawyer I know here in Los Angeles. Winston Reynolds. We went to high school together. He knows both you and Mrs. Reilly. He said I can trust you.”

  “Oh, yeah. Winston.”

  “He told me about you. He’s quite the character, really exaggerates something terrible. Told me something about kayaks up on that big lake up there. Probably another one of his stories.”

  She didn’t believe it. But it had happened, the kayaks on the lake, the explosion . . .

  “How is Winston?”

  “Still playing cat and mouse with the IRS. One of these days they’re gonna get tired of chasing him and pop that man in jail.”

  “He’s a lawyer. They don’t do jail.”

  Liking the sound of that, she relaxed a little, smiling. “That’s right. And he’s a good one, too.”

  Paul pulled out a notebook. “What do you want to tell me about your husband, Mrs. Bailey?”

  She got up and walked to the mantel, taking down a framed photograph. She studied the picture for a while, then handed it to Paul.

  A round-faced, balding man smiled out from the photo. He looked a little older than Connie, probably in his late forties or more, and had darker skin, with the clean jawline of a military man.

  “He was fifty-three when he died in that crash,” she said. “A kind man. A loving husband. A caring father to his kids.”

  “You have children?”

  “Two. Grown up. Working. Married. I’m so grateful he lived to see them happily married. We married when I was twenty-one and stayed married for twenty-three years. That’s a long time.”

  “Yes.”

  “A long time to love somebody and get used to them. The way they comb their hair just so in the morning, or in Skip’s case, search for it! The way they make coffee for you, too strong, but it’s the love that goes into it, you know?”

  “You miss him.”

  “I don’t know how I’ll get along now.”

  “I understand you were in Carson City?”

  “I just got back. I flew up to identify his body. Came back last night.” She was working to subdue her feelings, but the curtain of sorrow came down now over her face like heavy blue velvet. “It was very difficult. I didn’t recognize him. They identified him from his teeth, all those expensive inlays he had done.”

  “Are you alone?”

  “My sister’s staying with me until after the memorial service this weekend. She’s down at the Vons picking up some food. She was here when those two men came yesterday afternoon . . .”

  “What men?”

  “From the National Transportation Safety Board. They asked me a lot of questions.”

  “What did they want to know?”

  “Was Skip depressed? Did he tend to be forgetful? Any health problems lately that might have affected his ability to fly? When they asked to search his office, my sister flew off the handle. Booted them out.”

  “Any idea what they were looking for?”

  “Maybe they thought he went down on purpose,” she said, “like they thought the Egyptair pilot did in the seven fifty-seven crash. I don’t know. Maybe they want to frame him. Maybe they’re lackeys of the engine manufacturer. Who can say? I tell you one thing, everybody’s looking for a scapegoat, including the newspapers and at the moment, Skip’s their man. Did you see the article this morning in the LA paper? They refer to the cause of the crash as pilot error without a report, without a finding, without even an investigation.”

  “There have been a number of small-plane crashes lately. There’s a lot of interest.”

  “It amounts to the same thing. They’re destroying a wonderful man’s memory without any evidence that he did one thing wrong.” She got up to make coffee in the kitchen. Paul leafed through the magazines, aviation this and pilot that, wondering why Mrs. Bailey had called a hotshot lawyer like Winston Reynolds. He smelled a wrongful death lawsuit brewing over Christopher Sykes’s death right along with the coffee in the kitchen, and realized that Mrs. Bailey was going to have a lot of reasons for not wanting the crash to be a result of pilot error.

  Here we go again, he thought, the legal system twisting up honest grief like an old dishrag.

  “Skip never quit thinking about planes and flying,” Mrs. Bailey said, coming in with a tray. “He was like a kid about that stuff, very into the technical side of things. Built model airplanes until we needed a second house to stow them in.”

  She poured them both cups and sat back.

  “I donated most of them yesterday to a day care center. They’re going to hang them from the ceiling. I couldn’t have them around anymore.”

  “Tell me about his charter business.”

  “He flew for years for a commercial shuttle service between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. You’re going to hear about this, so let me be the first to tell you the exact truth. He fell asleep while the plane was on autopilot. One time, for a very short period of time. Nothing happened to the plane, but he was reported. Got fired.”

  “I guess that looks pretty bad on a pilot’s record.”

  “It took him years to get over the guilt. ’Course, the reason he fell asleep was he spent the whole night before that flight staying up consoling me because my father had died.” She waved her hand, picked up the creamer, and poured into a cup. “Doesn’t matter. You just can’t do that. Even though no one was in a minute of danger. Even though most pilots probably fall asleep one time or another on a long flight when everything’s going smoothly.”

  “So he started his own business.”

  “That’s right. Got a business loan and bought his plane. He never had an accident. He maintained that plane like he was going to take his own child on it.” She sipped. “I miss his lousy coffee. Isn’t that something?”

  “Did your husband keep records?”

  “Of course. The NTSB people brought a scanner and made copies of a lot of papers, but I’m keeping the originals for now.”

  “Can I see them?”

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sp; She showed Paul into a neat but cluttered study tucked behind the stairway. A few delicately assembled models dangled from the ceiling.

  “I kept a couple for the grandkids,” she said, setting one swinging. “To remember him by.”

  Paul had a hard time imagining Connie as a grand-mother. She would be about forty-five, only about five years older than he was. In his mind, grandparents would forever remain the older generation, the generation in which he did not belong.

  The records the NTSB had already been through lay on the desk, fastidiously kept, neat, revealing the pilot’s obsessive concern with details. His handwriting was crabbed and tight and hard to read. “He checked and fueled the plane a couple of hours before taking off for Tahoe,” Paul said, studying college-ruled notebook paper in a three-ring binder. The page had been marked with the year, the date, and the time of maintenance. “And here’s his flight plan and the passenger manifest. He came up the Nevada side of the mountains.”

  Connie nodded, her hand on one of her husband’s models.

  “Passenger,” said Paul. “Here it is: Mr. Sykes. The kid was young to be called mister.”

  She started to look at the notebook, but teared up and wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. “Skip was formal in that way.”

  “Was your husband accustomed to piloting planes chartered by college boys?”

  “You’d be surprised at the people who hired him. Housewives who want to run up for the weekend to Tahoe or Vegas to gamble . . . rich kids who need a ride back to Mom’s ski condo after a few days spent visiting Dad in the Hollywood Hills.”

  “Yes, but wouldn’t a parent reserve the plane?”

  “This is LA, remember? People grow up fast in this town.” She took a deep breath and exhaled. “I guess I’ll be hearing from that poor boy’s family now. I guess they’ll be wanting something from me since Skip’s not here. Revenge. Well, it wasn’t Skip’s fault. It plain wasn’t.” At last she released the model, turning eyes full of tears toward Paul. “I’ll wait for you outside, okay? This room smells like him.”

  “Can I borrow this notebook?”