by David Freed
The smile drained from her face. “You must have me confused with someone else.”
“C’mon, I know it’s you. It is you, isn’t it?”
She exhaled. “I haven’t been that Crissy Walker in over twenty years.”
“I knew it.” Larry squealed like a kid come Christmas morning, which would’ve sounded cute had he actually been a kid. Not so cute coming from a guy who looks like the “before” picture in a Lap-Band infomercial. He wiped his greasy paw on his T-shirt, then offered it to her. “I’m a huge fan,” he said. “I used to look at your photo spread all the time. Sometimes three, four times a day.”
“Way too much information, Larry,” I said.
Crissy shook his hand tepidly.
Truth be told, I’d spent a little time myself admiring Crissy Walker’s pictures back in the day. We all did, my fellow Air Force Academy cadets and I. Who could blame us? There she was, stretched out on the wing of a B-17, wearing nothing more than a World War II bomber pilot’s cap and a smoldering, come-fly-with-me smile. The years had done little to diminish her emerald-eyed sensuality. But unlike my lascivious friend Larry, I was less awed by the former centerfold than I was by her husband. For the first time I could ever remember, I was truly starstruck.
“You’re Hub Walker,” I said.
He shrugged and smiled, embarrassed at being recognized.
“Reckon I am.”
I resisted the urge to squeal myself. Not because Walker was a big deal in film or on TV—why the world slathers adoration on mostly short, insecure people who stand in front of cameras pretending to be taller, self-assured people is beyond me. No, the reason I went weak in the knees was because in aviation circles, Hub Walker was nothing short of a living legend.
He was a natural pilot—talented enough to have flown with the Air Force’s Thunderbirds demonstration team. In Vietnam, he’d been a forward air controller, a Southern country boy piloting unarmed O-2 Skymasters at low level over the jungle canopy to purposely draw enemy fire, then directing fighter-bombers in to attack. Twice he’d been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for bravery. In 1972, he’d intentionally crash-landed in a rice paddy to protect a Navy pilot who’d been shot down. Though badly wounded himself, Walker held off an entire NVA platoon for nearly an hour with nothing more than a German Luger pistol his father, a World War I doughboy, had given him. For his pluck, Hub Walker received the Medal of Honor.
Ceremonial jobs with defense contractors soon followed. He got paid big bucks to attend cocktail soirées and play golf with Congressional power brokers. He also grew addicted to prescription painkillers. Guilt-ridden at having survived combat when so many of his squadron mates hadn’t, he married his psychotherapist, who would die during labor less than a year later giving birth to their only child, a girl Walker named Ruth. A few years later, during a Memorial Day barbecue at the Playboy Mansion honoring America’s fighting men and women, he met Crissy.
As I remembered it, she’d grown up Appalachian poor, the tomboy daughter of a veteran Air Force mechanic who’d instilled in her an appreciation of how airplanes worked, and a love of the outdoors. But with the visage of an angel and a body like vice itself, Crissy’s ambitions extended far beyond the humble hollers of her roots. She’d attended beauty college for awhile, dropped out to work as a flight attendant, and ended up posing au naturel on the pages of America’s most popular monthly men’s publication.
Walker would later thank Crissy for helping him beat his drug addiction and rescuing him from thoughts of suicide. She, in turn, would credit Walker for giving her life true purpose. Being the loving, supportive wife of a national icon was more than she ever could have hoped for growing up. They eloped to Las Vegas a month after meeting.
Their fairy-tale romance was profiled in magazines from People to Flying. I remembered reading one especially breathless article in Cosmopolitan between missions in our ready room outside Dammam during Desert Storm. The piece was headlined, “The Hero and the Hottie: A High-Altitude Love Story.” It made the rounds among my fellow sex-starved fighter jocks as quickly as Crissy Walker’s centerfold when I was at the Academy, where those of us on the football team voted her “Most Likely to Make You Feel Funny in Your Jockstrap.”
Larry dug a felt-tip pen out of his own pants, lifted his T-shirt, and asked her to autograph his massive gut.
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” she said.
“I’d never kid about what could be the greatest moment of my life.”
“Your wife might not think it’s so great,” I said.
“Mind your own business, Logan. Besides, Doreen’ll never know. She hasn’t seen me in the buff with the lights on for years. She has a heart condition. The shock would probably kill her.”
“I don’t sign body parts,” Crissy said.
“What if I knocked a hundred bucks off that replacement vacuum pump?”
“No.”
“OK. One-fifty. I gotta at least cover my costs.”
“No. And no means no. Not at any price. You got that?” She stormed past us, into the restroom of Larry’s hangar, and slammed the door shut.
Walker shrugged apologetically. “My wife gets a tad embarrassed over some of the decisions she made in her younger days. I’m happy to pay full price for the pump.”
“Suit yourself.”
A dejected Larry stuffed the pen in his pocket and went back to work on Hub Walker’s Mooney.
That night, over dinner on his dime, Walker insisted on telling me about how his daughter had been murdered, then offered me work that made me wish in hindsight I’d been born rich.
Two
Crissy Walker was in a fish mood. I recommended a cozy seafood place called Hooked at the far end of the municipal wharf where I always ordered the grilled wild sea bass with salsa fresco and a whisper of cilantro. Walker and his wife both went with steamed crab legs. From our table, the street lights onshore were gauzy starbursts, refracted in the mist that had settled thick and damp over the Rancho Bonita waterfront.
“Ask anybody,” Walker said, downing his third Jack Daniel’s and signaling the waiter for another. “My daughter was a knockout. Smart as a whip, too. Second in her class at Annapolis.”
He pulled out his wallet and pulled out a picture of an athletic-looking brunette with strikingly blue eyes. She was wearing Navy whites and flanked by eight other cadets identically dressed, all grinning into the camera and holding hand-lettered signs that said, “Beat Army!” They all looked like they had their whole lives ahead of them, but none more so than Walker’s daughter, Ruth. He was right. She was a knockout.
“That’s what happens when you raise your kid in a Navy town,” Walker said with a bittersweet smile. “She never did want to go the Air Force route like her old man.”
“You did good work, Hub.”
I handed him back his photo. He looked away, out onto the dark ocean, his eyes moist, hoping I wouldn’t notice them.
Crissy leaned her head on his shoulder and stroked his arm affectionately. “I was only her stepmom, which I knew Ruth resented sometimes, but I don’t know how I could’ve loved her any more.”
Nearly a decade had passed, Walker said, since two SEAL team snipers out for a leisurely, ten-mile midnight run found his daughter’s body sprawled in the sandy bluffs behind Coronado beach, about a half-mile from the Center for Naval Special Warfare, where West Coast SEALs do much of their training.
“She died,” Walker nodded, gazing out the windows and into the murk, “on a night just like this.”
I asked if her killer was ever caught.
“They stuck a needle in him out in Indiana about a month ago. Ten years of appeals before he finally ran out the clock. The feds offered to pay our airfare so we could come out and watch, but I was worried I might put the sumbitch out of his misery myself. They put us up in a hotel in San Diego instead and put it on closed circuit TV.”
“I couldn’t watch it,” Crissy said.
“I did,” Wa
lker said, staring glumly down at his drink. “Enjoyed every minute of it.”
Part of me wanted to offer a congratulatory toast. A rabid dog had gotten what he deserved. I’d helped exterminate a few of them myself working for the government, before I burned out, and before Savannah left me. After we divorced, I did some serious soul-searching and went looking for a new line of work. That’s when I found civilian flight instruction and the Buddha, who tends to frown on anything that smacks remotely of the kill-’em-all, let-God-sort-’em-out mind-set with which I’d been leading my life. I wasn’t sure where I stood anymore on the debate over state-sanctioned execution, only that I was glad I wasn’t the one to decide when to flip the tap.
Our tattooed, ear-studded, twenty-something server, who’d introduced himself at the outset of the evening as Gary, arrived with a fresh tumbler of whiskey for Walker. He ignored my empty water glass and tried not to stare at Crissy’s breasts.
“Another wine for the lady?”
“Please.”
The waiter’s lips curled in a leering smile as a thought came to him. “Excuse me for asking, but didn’t I see you in Playboy, like, twenty years ago?”
She raised her gaze to meet his, her eyes suddenly hard like jade.
“You have no idea,” Crissy said, “how often I get that.”
Gary got the hint and swallowed hard. “Be right back with that wine.”
“I could use some more water,” I said, but the waiter apparently didn’t hear me, or pretended not to, as he headed for the kitchen. I thought of going after him, putting him in a wrist lock or an arm bar and making him refill my glass. But that would’ve been bad karma. I’d probably come back in the next life as Gary’s busboy or, worse, his tattoo artist. I excused myself and fetched a water pitcher sitting on a shelf near the cashier’s stand. When I came back to the table, Walker was weeping whiskey tears.
“Losing a child, that’s something you don’t ever get over,” he said. “You wake up with it every morning. When your head hits that pillow every night, it’s the last thought on your mind.”
Crissy rubbed his shoulder and told him everything was OK.
“It’s not OK, Crissy. It’ll never be OK.” He swiped tears with the back of his hand and looked at me straight. “I want to tell you how she died.”
Not to sound insensitive, but I didn’t want to hear it. We mere mortals prefer our heroes unscathed by the kind of tragedies that randomly befall the rest of us, none being greater than having to bury a child. I didn’t know why he felt compelled to confide the painful details of so substantial a loss with someone he’d known all of one day, but changing the subject was a nonstarter. Hub Walker owned a Medal of Honor. Who was I to tell him no?
“Ruthie was a systems engineer, computers,” he said. “Served on a guided missile frigate after graduation. She didn’t much like sea duty, though. Never got past the throwing-up part.”
After she left the Navy, Walker said, he’d helped her land a job by introducing her to Greg Castle, the president of Castle Robotics, Ltd., a small but upcoming defense contractor headquartered east of San Diego in the hardscrabble suburb of El Cajon. Castle Robotics developed aerial drones for the Pentagon. Walker had done some promotional work for Castle’s company, and Castle was only too happy to hire Ruth as a computer design specialist. It was in that capacity that she met and began dating a cocky young engineer who worked for one of Castle Robotics’ main competitors, another San Diego-based contractor, Applied Combat Systems. Ruth’s new beau came from old money in Marin County. He’d gone to Stanford and boxed middleweight on the university’s intramural team. His name, Walker said, was Dorian Munz.
“They broke up, but not before Ruth got pregnant,” Walker said, blowing his nose with a cocktail napkin. “Munz didn’t want her having the baby. Told her he wasn’t about to be making child support payments the rest of his life. That’s when she told him it wasn’t his baby anyhow.”
Ruth would give birth to a girl she named Ryder. Munz grew convinced that the infant’s father was Ruth’s married boss, Greg Castle, who already had four children of his own. Castle dismissed Munz’s claim as “laughable.”
“Ruthie never would tell me who the real father was,” Walker said, “only that it was her own damn business and nobody else’s. She was a hardhead. Just like her old man.”
“That was Ruthie,” Crissy said, smiling wistfully, “always doing things her own way.”
According to Walker, Munz became suspicious that Ruth was spreading rumors about him: that he’d become fond of cocaine; that he’d developed a taste for high-end hookers. True or otherwise, they were the kind of rumors that can cost a man his top-level security clearance and his career in the defense industry. Dorian Munz would soon lose both. He started threatening Ruth over the telephone, Walker said, then began stalking her. Ruth took out a restraining order. Munz ignored it. He shadowed her to and from work, when she went to the grocery store, on dates.
“Phone records show that Munz called Ruthie the night she got killed,” Walker said. “We don’t know all of what was said, but the FBI thinks he lured her out by offering some kind of truce. She agreed to meet him on Coronado. That’s where they found her. She’d been stabbed.”
Because Ruth Walker’s body was discovered on Navy property, the case was quickly deemed federal. The U.S. Attorneys’ office announced in short order it would seek the death penalty. Munz’s lawyer argued that the government’s decision was influenced unfairly by the fact that the victim’s father was a Medal of Honor recipient. But Hub Walker insisted that his military accomplishments had nothing to do with it.
“The evidence against that miserable piece of filth,” he said, “was thicker than maggots on a dead possum.”
Southern colloquialisms. People are never merely upset. They’re angrier than a pack mule with a mouthful of bees. They’re never simply at a loss for words. They’re as tongue-tied as a coon hound chompin’ peanut butter crackers.
“At least he’s no longer taking up space,” I said, hoisting my glass. “To closure.”
“There’s no such a thing,” Walker said sadly.
He stared into the night, grieving over the loss of an only child, and all I wanted to do was get the hell out of there. I’m the first to admit, comforting others is not one of my strong suits. We’re born alone, we die alone, and in between, with rare exceptions, people invariably disappoint and deceive us. In the end, even in combat, the only human being you can count on is you. But the Buddha is all about understanding, and I’m all about trying to be a more compassionate, understanding human being, no matter how impossible the task might seem at times. And so, reluctantly, I swallowed down the urge to un-ass myself from my chair, and reached over and gripped Walker’s thin arm supportively.
“What’s done is done, Hub.”
“I only wish.” He looked over at me, fisting tears from his eyes. “After you left the airfield today, your mechanic buddy, Larry, told me you used to work some kind of intelligence assignment. Said he didn’t know much about it. Said the Los Angeles police couldn’t figure out who killed your ex-wife’s husband and you did. That true?”
Where to begin? Yes, it was true that after my fighter pilot days were cut short by a gimpy knee from days playing football for the Academy, I was transferred to Air Force intelligence and eventually to a Tier One Ultra unit within the Defense Department code-named “Alpha,” where operators were referred to as “go-to guys.” We functioned essentially as human guided missiles, hunting down terrorists abroad. That was before the White House got wind of our operations and shut us down for fear of political backlash. And, yes, it was true that I’d reluctantly agreed to assist in the murder investigation of the lowlife my ex-wife, Savannah, had left me for—Arlo Echevarria, my former Alpha commander—but only because her father had offered me $25,000 to do so. I’d subsequently spent most of that money covering an engine overhaul on my airplane, and paying Larry some of the back rent I owed him, which more or
less put me back in the financial doghouse. Hub Walker, however, didn’t need to hear all that. So I responded to his question with what I concluded was a brilliantly deflecting one of my own:
“What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?”
“I want you to help prove that Greg Castle had nothing to do with my daughter’s murder.”
I looked at him, not understanding. “Unless I’m mistaken, Hub, you just said the evidence against this guy, Dorian Munz, was ‘thicker than maggots on a dead possum.’ I assume the jury must’ve agreed, or else they wouldn’t have put him on the bus to hell. Or am I missing something here?”
Apparently I was.
As Walker described it, when Munz was asked if he had anything to say before being executed, he said plenty. He had proclaimed his innocence, as he’d done many times before. Only this time, he asserted that Ruth Walker had been murdered after discovering that her boss, Greg Castle, had been bilking the Defense Department out of millions of dollars in fraudulent overcharges. According to Munz, Castle killed Ruth—or paid somebody to kill her—before she could go to the feds with proof. While Munz’s allegations failed to produce the reprieve that he’d hoped for, they did generate widespread news reports in San Diego.
“The press,” Walker said, “lapped it up.”
The result was a public relations nightmare for Castle Robotics and for Castle personally. The company’s chances of securing Defense Department contracts were in jeopardy, as was Castle’s marriage.
“I’ve known Greg Castle for years,” Walker said. “He’s a good family man. Honorable as the day is long. I know he had nothin’ to do with Ruthie’s murder. But that’s not the impression everybody in San Diego has, what with everything Munz said before he died. You spend a week or so snooping around, get me something I can throw the news media, something to show that Munz was talking out the side of his filthy, lying mouth before they executed him, and I’ll pay you $10,000, plus expenses.”
“I’m a flight instructor, Hub, not Kojak.”
