Fangs Out

by David Freed

  “What?”

  “THEY TAMPERED WITH HIS ENGINE!”

  Other diners paused mid-bite to glance over.

  Demaerschalk looked at Holland, then at me, then back at Holland, with a sudden desperation in his eyes. “I gotta use the john,” the old man said, again too loudly, and got to his feet unsteadily.

  Holland watched his friend totter away. Then he glanced over his shoulder, making sure nobody could overhear us. “I think I might’ve seen something,” he said in a confiding tone. “I mean as far as your airplane goes.”

  “What did you see, Dutch?”

  Holland leaned closer and lowered his voice even more.

  “Somebody tinkering with your ship.”

  We waited for his friend, Al, to come back from the men’s room, but he never showed.

  Eleven

  America’s smaller airports are crawling with old pilots like Dutch Holland. Grounded after failing to pass their FAA-mandated medical exam, unable to shed their love of aviation, they continue hanging around the flight line, often living in the hangars where their airplanes sit rusting because their aging owners are no longer legally permitted to fly them.

  Holland’s hangar was located at the east end of Montgomery Airport. The remnants of my airplane were sitting in a hangar on the west end, nearly a mile away.

  “Got your TV, your icebox, your hot plate; cot’s over there, and there’s a port-a-john down the way. All the modern conveniences of home,” Holland said proudly, giving me the cook’s tour, the central feature of which was an immaculately maintained four-seat, single-engine Piper Cherokee older than I was. “Airport administration doesn’t care for us living out here—they’re worried about liability—but as long as you don’t make waves, they more or less leave you alone.”

  He was a widower, Holland said. The concept of living at the airport was so incomprehensible to his country club wife, he never once attempted to float the balloon while she was alive. After she died, he sold their home overlooking a golf course in suburban Poway and moved.

  “I wouldn’t trade it for all the tea in China,” Holland said.

  I considered for a millisecond hooking him up with my landlady, then quickly came to my senses. Mrs. Schmulowitz had chewed through nearly as many husbands as Henry VIII had wives.

  “Dutch, you said you saw somebody tinkering with my airplane.”

  “Slow down, sonny,” he said, raising the main door of his hangar with the push of a button. “I was in a rush, too, when I was your age. When you get to be ninety-one, and you can see the end of the road, you’re not as much in a big hurry to get where you’re going.”

  He offered me a cold bottle of water from his dorm fridge, which I readily accepted, then labored to unfold a couple of flimsy, aluminum-frame beach chairs. I knew enough not to offer my help; it would have only offended him. He set the chairs facing out toward the flight line, then slowly lowered himself into one of them with an arthritic groan. The worn mesh webbing sagged under his weight.

  “Unless you’re waiting for an engraved invitation from the King of Siam, might as well take a load off.”

  I sat down beside him.

  The old pilot watched with rapt fascination as a two-seat Robinson helicopter swooped in across the field about a quarter-mile away and hovered over the tarmac.

  “Always wanted to get a chopper rating,” Holland said. “Never got around to it.”

  “There’s a little known law of physics. Helicopters don’t really fly, Dutch. They just beat the air into submission.”

  He looked over at me like it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard, then looked back out at the flight line. “Your Cessna was parked over there, at Champion Jet Center.”

  I followed Holland’s gnarled index finger to a small fleet of sleek Gulfstreams and Citations about fifty yards away, each easily worth the price of a Beverly Hills mansion.

  “I noticed your ship right off,” he said. “Most everybody who flies in here from out of town in small planes like yours, they tie down over on the transient ramp outside the terminal. Cheaper to park over there. You must’ve been born with a silver spoon.”

  A silver spoon. Right. That’s me.

  As Holland told it, he was sitting exactly where we were, enjoying the cool night air and a bedtime toddy, when a small pickup truck drove onto the tarmac and stopped near my airplane. Wearing a baseball cap and mechanic’s coveralls, the driver got out with a flashlight and opened the Ruptured Duck’s cowling like he knew what he was doing. He rummaged around inside the engine compartment for about five minutes, then buttoned up the cowling, got back in his truck, and drove off. The truck was light in color, possibly white. It was too dark, Dutch said, to make out much detail beyond that.

  “My eyes,” he said apologetically, “aren’t what they used to be.”

  I told him I appreciated the tip, and asked that he pass it on to Paul Horvath, the FAA investigator I’d met with that morning. Holland pursed his lips and said he’d have to think about it.

  “There’s nothing to think about, Dutch. With all due respect, somebody tried to kill me yesterday. You have an obligation to tell the authorities what you saw.”

  “I do that, I draw attention to myself. I draw attention to myself, airport management kicks me out.”

  “But you went on TV. How is that not drawing attention to yourself?”

  “I-I don’t know,” Holland stammered, growing agitated. “I was just standing there and next thing you know, some pretty girl’s pointing a microphone in my face, asking me what I saw. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. I made a mistake. A stupid mistake.”

  He got up slowly out of his chair, painfully, bracing his hands on his knees, and said it was time for his nap. My cue to leave. I jotted down Horvath’s number on a business card and handed it to him. The old man tucked the card in his shirt pocket without looking at it and started folding up the beach chairs. I asked him what happened to his friend, Al Demaerschalk.

  “He never came back from the bathroom,” I said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Dutch Holland suddenly seemed in a big rush to put distance between us. I had to jump clear of the hangar door as it came down, him on the inside, me looking in.

  The story of my life.

  LEGEND HAS it that L. Frank Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz while staying at the Hotel del Coronado, across the bay from downtown San Diego. He supposedly modeled his “Emerald City” on the hotel’s Queen Anne-style architecture. It was at the “Del,” as the locals reverently call it, that an American divorcee named Wallis Simpson purportedly met a British prince named Edward, who would later give up the throne for her—just as Hitler’s dark shadow began to spread across Europe. American presidents have vacationed at the Del for more than a hundred years. The biggest names in Hollywood have had trysts there. All of which is to say that the place is dripping with history. But former Padres pitcher Eric “the Junkman” LaDucrie, whose luxury high-rise condo overlooked the Del, didn’t want to talk about any of that as I stood with him on his balcony, admiring the view from seven floors up.

  “The truth,” the Junkman said, literally thumping a leather-bound Bible. “It’s all in here. ‘Eye for an eye,’ ‘tooth for a tooth,’ ‘hand for a hand,’ ‘foot for a foot.’ This is what the Lord decreed. You want proof? Read Exodus, and Matthew, and Leviticus—‘Whoever takes a human life shall surely be put to death.’ Look at Romans: ‘For the wages of sin is death.’ ”

  The bucktoothed, forty-something LaDucrie was just warming up. He went on and on with his preaching, barely stopping to breathe, half moons of perspiration staining the pits of his pink golf shirt. Everyone from Jesus to Gandhi to Mother Teresa believed in the death penalty, he insisted, even if none of them ever said so openly.

  I could take only so much.

  “Mr. LaDucrie, I didn’t drive over here to attend religious services. I came to talk about Dorian Munz and the murder of Ruth Walker.”

&nb
sp; “Ruth Walker. Right. Sorry. I can get carried away a little sometimes. The whole death penalty debate isn’t just some political cause for me. It’s my life. And I know I’m 110 percent right.”

  “Yeah, I picked up on that.”

  I asked him how long he’d lived there as I followed him back inside.

  “Ten, eleven years. Bought the place right before the Padres wanted to send me back down to the minors. I’d been to the minors. So I hung up my spikes instead.”

  His living room, like the rest of his swinging bachelor pad, was a shrine to unchecked egotism and his Big League career. Framed game jerseys lined the walls along with magazine covers and the pages of newspaper sports sections featuring photos of the Junkman in action. Autographed hardballs in clear acrylic cubes shared shelf space with displays of Junkman rookie cards and Junkman bobblehead dolls. Over the fireplace was a vintage, larger than life LeRoy Neiman painting of LaDucrie on the mound in his Padres uniform, uncorking a knuckleball.

  He asked me if I wanted a beer or a soda. I declined both as he disappeared into his kitchen. “Dorian Munz killed Ruth Walker in cold blood,” LaDucrie said. “He deserved to die. Anybody who says different is misinformed.”

  He returned with a Diet Coke, and plopped down on an overstuffed leather chair shaped like a giant catcher’s mitt. I parked myself on a sofa, the back of which was constructed entirely of Louisville Sluggers. Furniture design by Major League Baseball and the Marquis de Sade.

  “Ruth Walker’s father is looking for additional information, facts that didn’t make the newspaper, that would help convince the public Munz was lying about Greg Castle.”

  LaDucrie gulped his soda. “I’d like to help,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his left hand, “but all I know is what I saw on the news.”

  “I’m told you were interviewed on TV just before Munz was executed. You said you were ‘completely confident’ he was guilty. ‘Completely confident’ suggests to me you know a lot more than what you saw on the news.”

  “Let me put it this way: Fox News, they got me on speed dial, OK? Every time there’s some death penalty case around the country and people are squawking about how the dude who’s about to get it doesn’t deserve it, I’m the guy who goes on camera and says he does, OK? Somebody’s gotta stand up against all these bleeding heart pussies, unless you want ’em taking over the world.”

  “What you’re telling me is, you have nothing to back up your ‘complete confidence’ claim that Dorian Munz was guilty.”

  LaDucrie looked off to his left and thought about it for a long moment. “Not really, no.” He chugged the rest of his Diet Coke, strained forward in his catcher’s mitt chair—his gut hanging over the expand-o-matic waistband of his tan golf shorts—and set the can down on a coffee table shaped like home plate. “What I know is that from everything I heard and read, the evidence against the douche bag was dead on. Ruth Walker should’ve never died the way she did, OK? She was a real nice little gal.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Maybe I met her once or twice.”

  “You knew Ruth Walker?”

  Again, the Junkman gazed off to his left for no more than a second, like he was thinking about it, then looked back at me. “I said maybe I knew her. You meet a lot of babes in the show. They’re all over the place, ya know what I’m saying? They all start blending in after awhile. You forget faces.” I caught a trace of sadness in his eyes as he looked down. “Soon as you retire, they scatter like cockroaches.”

  I asked him if he’d ever met Janet Bollinger. Again, he looked left, then back to me.

  “The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  LaDucrie’s eye movement, his involuntary micro-expressions in response to my questions, had at least been consistent. Either he was telling the truth when he said he may have known Ruth Walker but not Janet Bollinger, or he was lying through his buck teeth about both. I hadn’t known him long enough to accurately gauge which was which.

  I asked him how he’d become so passionate about upholding capital punishment. He told me how his sister was murdered at thirteen, lured into a baseball dugout by his Little League coach, who swore he’d only meant to kiss her. Convicted of involuntary manslaughter, Coach Rapist was sentenced to four years in Folsom. He ended up doing half of that.

  “The son of a bitch got hit by a car a week after he got out of the joint,” LaDucrie said with a smile as he walked me to his door. “Sometimes, the good Lord has ways of setting things right. Deuteronomy 32–35. ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.’ ”

  The Buddha believed that vengeance is pointless. Vengeance can only be met by more vengeance, force with force, bombs with bombs. But, then, the Buddha never knew the pure pleasure of dropping a 500-pound JDAM down the pie hole of an avowed Al Qaeda killer, or putting a 9-millimeter hollow point behind a terrorist’s ear at Helen Keller-can’t-miss range.

  I walked through the parking lot of LaDucrie’s condo to my Escalade. The sea breeze carried with it the cannonade of waves crashing onto the beach and the gleeful laughter of children chasing each other among the dunes. Nearly ten years earlier, less than a mile from where I stood, the body of Hub Walker’s daughter had been found amid those very dunes.

  I turned and gazed up at the Junkman’s balcony. He’d been living there, I realized, about the same time Ruth Walker was murdered.

  CRISSY WALKER was standing at her kitchen counter, making a smoothie. Her black short shorts showed off her toned tanned legs. The University of Georgia Bulldogs T-shirt she had on highlighted the fact that she was braless. Hub wouldn’t be back until after dinner, she said, dumping banana slices into a food processor. He’d gone to play golf at Torrey Pines with Greg Castle, hoping to convince Castle for his own good to go public with the paternity test he’d taken years earlier. She asked me if I wanted a smoothie. Given that I am not the smoothie type, I politely declined and went to make amends with Savannah.

  “She’s not here,” Crissy said before I got to the back door. “I took her to the train station about an hour ago. She said she wanted to go back to LA.”

  I couldn’t say I was surprised. Angry women don’t usually lock themselves in guesthouse bathrooms without also formulating escape plans. I recognized that my ex-wife had every right to be mad at me: I’d crashed my airplane and lacked the grace to let her know afterward that I wasn’t dead. Had the shoe been on the other foot, I probably would’ve been just as angry. I wondered whether we would ever get back together, or whether it was even worth endeavoring to try. Staring down at the glossy, terra-cotta tiles of the Walkers’ kitchen floor, I felt at that moment like a sailboat bereft of wind.

  “Sure you don’t want a smoothie?” Crissy said, cutting strawberries. “You look like you could definitely use a pick-me-up.”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  “I bet you are.”

  When I looked up, she was smiling at me. I may be a few transistors short of a circuit board when it comes to picking up on the nuances of female communications, but I knew exactly the message Crissy Walker was broadcasting.

  “Ryder’s at a playdate until after dinner,” she said, glancing at the digital clock on the microwave. “That gives us two hours.”

  “I have nothing but respect for your husband, Crissy.”

  “My husband is not here right now.” She glided around the kitchen’s center island biting her lip, her breasts swaying seductively behind her T-shirt, and stood in front of me, closer than was prudent. “No one ever has to know.”

  Her fragrance reminded me of scented massage oil. This is what the Playboy Mansion must smell like. She smoothed my collar, then reached up and stroked the side of my face.

  “I never properly thanked you for saving our lives, Cordell.”

  I gently grabbed her hand and stopped her. “I’m flattered, but . . .”

  Her lips spread slowly into a puzzle
d half-smile that conveyed something between surprise and self-doubt. “No man has ever said no to me before.”

  “I’m not trying to offend you, Crissy. I’m just down here to do a job, that’s all.”

  She covered her mouth, embarrassed. “I must need my head examined. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  I knew exactly what I was thinking as I watched her hurry out of the kitchen. That a million other red-blooded American guys would’ve killed for the same opportunity I’d just passed up. The Buddha might’ve argued that I had followed a moral path, and that I was a better man for it. But turning down the chance to spend two hours alone with a former Playmate of the Year, no strings attached? Maybe I was the one who needed my head examined.

  AS FAR as I was concerned, my work in San Diego was done. All Hub Walker had to do was convince Greg Castle to make public the results of his paternity test, and I could collect on the five large Walker still owed me. I could use the dough to cover the cost of trucking the Ruptured Duck back up to Rancho Bonita. Whatever was left would go directly to Larry to pay down some of the back rent I owed him, along with seed money to begin rebuilding my plane ahead of whatever damages the insurance company was willing to cover.

  I was toweling off from a shower in the Walker’s guesthouse when my insurance broker, Vincent Moretti, returned my call. I’ve never met the guy face-to-face, but I’ve always envisioned him as Vito Corleone because that’s exactly who he sounds like over the phone. He’d reviewed my policy, he said, run some numbers, and scheduled a claims adjuster to tally up the damage. Assuming the Ruptured Duck was totaled, he said, which is what it sounded like to him, I was looking at about $20,000.

  “That’s laughable, Vinnie, and you know it. My plane’s easily worth twice that much. I just got the engine overhauled.”

  “You’re a serious pilot, Cordell, to be treated with respect,” Vinnie said, like his mouth was crammed with Sicilian olives, “but your aircraft is old. It’s tired. Trust me on this, my friend, when I say that I would be doing you a service, cashing you out at twenty large.”