by Lia Matera
A quarter mile ahead was Brad Rommel’s cabin, lights out, no smoke rising from the wood stove vent, no sign of his truck out front.
Between my car and the cabin, smothered in cold fog, was a airplane not much bigger than my rental car.
I stared at it for a few minutes, searching for a reason Brad would keep it here rather than at the airport. Maybe he didn’t recall it had been impounded as a condition of his bail. Maybe he was repairing the engine. Maybe the airport had run out of hangars.
Leaving my headlights on, I climbed out of the car. It was colder up here than down in town, or maybe the dripping redwoods created that illusion. The creak of timber and the crunch of gravel underfoot took on an ominous loudness. My headlights cast separate intersecting shadows.
Standing beside the plane, I tried to peer inside, but the lights offered only a dim undetailed picture. I tried the door—surprisingly smaller than my car door—and found it locked.
I went back to the rental, searching its side pockets and glove compartment for a flashlight. Finding none, I moved the car as close as I could to the plane, and I hit the high beams, creating a sudden wall of the fog.
When I returned to the plane, I could see the interior more clearly, well enough to make out some kind of metal or varnished box beneath a pair of headphones on the front seat. Chrome buttons, rows of them beneath the windshield, caught the light like mirrors. It seemed barely big enough inside for two, with control panels instead of leg room. Stacked behind the seats were standard tool kits and a tackle box with a red cross on it. Two bundles, probably parachutes, also crowded the baggage well. Propped behind the passenger seat was a long wood handle topped with a curved, serrated blade. It looked more like a gardening tool than something you’d find on an airplane.
I walked the plane’s circumference, not knowing what to look for and seeing nothing apparently amiss. No steam rose from the nose, no fans whirred to cool a just-flown engine. Back beside the pilot’s door, I crouched, trying to peer beneath. My headlights were aimed too high. I couldn’t make out anything.
Growing frightened of the rustle of branches and whistle of wind, I did a quick trot back to the car, flicking the lights to their lowest fog setting. My world shrank to knee- and ground-level, tinged an eerie yellow.
Crouching again, I could see beneath the plane. From its belly dangled leather straps with twists of metal wire attached. I stared at them, reaching under to touch them, my hand a sick yellow in the fog lights. I pulled a strap toward me. It had been badly chopped, with shallow slashes around the severed edge. The attached wire was frayed for inches above the cut end.
Feeling the slimy cold of the plane’s belly, I withdrew my hand. My fingers were black with oil or dirt.
I stood abruptly, keeping my hand well away from my clothes. I’d had enough. I was chilled through and more than a little freaked out.
I looked over my shoulder at the dark shape of the cabin. I considered angling the car to cast some light on it, to check the porch or peer into a window. But what was the point?
Brad’s truck would be here if he was.
And what would I say to him, anyway?
I climbed back into the rental, wiping my hand on the back of the passenger seat. I carefully turned the car around and headed home.
I’d come seeking reassurance, and I’d found greater worry. I’d found Brad’s plane, apparently rigged to drop objects from beneath, its jerry-rigged straps and wires severed. I’d come to hear Brad’s impassioned denial and instead found proof of his guilt.
But I didn’t understand why he’d done it. I wasn’t even sure why it had seemed essential to check.
It was almost too hard to think about.
I’d driven to the end of the long gravel road, nearly to the greenery-flanked incline, when I heard the explosion. It bucked my car, skittering it over the remainder of muddy grit onto the pocked pavement of the mountain road. I screeched to a stop, fishtailing with panic, and looked over my shoulder. A quarter of a mile back, Brad Rommel’s plane roared with leaping flames.
I ground my gears, my first instinct to get farther away. But I made myself wait and watch a little longer. I watched the plane burn red and hot, bathing the cabin and woods in flickering golden light. I watched it, remembering that I’d crouched there not ten minutes earlier.
My fears had centered on the gloom and the fog and the creaking of tree limbs. I’d been ten minutes from disaster, and I hadn’t felt it, hadn’t found room for it in my foreboding.
I slumped in the driver’s seat, watching in my rearview mirror as the fire consumed the plane.
It was like a Roman candle, localized and sputtering. The fire made no move to leap to wet trees or travel damp ground to the cabin. The plane was parked well away from either, in fact—purposely, I now suspected. Even if the fire were spotted from some other remote cabin, it would look like a big bonfire. It wasn’t spreading. It wasn’t likely anyone would phone for a fire truck—even if one were available tonight. No, the fire would burn itself out, leaving only scorched gravel and melted parts. And I supposed Brad Rommel would get rid of those somehow. With luck, no would know the plane had been here.
If I said nothing. If I told no one.
If I opted to keep my client free of other accusations so that I could win his murder trial.
Guilty or not.
15
My predominant emotion, driving back into town, was anger. Why the hell had I gone out there? Why did I always have to push things? When had it ever done me any good to barge in and demand—of all things!—reassurance? Now what was I supposed to do? Get my client rearrested after arguing a blue streak to get him granted bail? Confront him and urge him to turn himself in though he’d never get bail again?
I’d mounted my high horse challenging Connie Gold’s ethics. And now, if I did nothing, if I withheld evidence of a crime, what did that say about my ethics?
I saw a mental image of my uncle, crushed by the destruction of his hardest-won project. I thought about the cab driver paying more for his child’s insulin, about his daughter having nothing to do after school—a feeling I recalled too well.
I was three or four minutes up the highway from the court and law enforcement complex, a cement four-story whose top floor was the county jail.
Uncertain whether to go there, I pulled into the parking lot of a small bar on the northern edge of town. Usually at this time of night, traffic on the highway was light, mostly rigs driving the long road to Portland. Tonight there was plenty of southbound traffic but no other hint of disaster, not a scent or glimpse of the fire five miles up the road. Only the glow of the bar’s neon in the fog, the hiss of truck wheels on wet highway, the stench of beer and exhaust and nearby mud flats.
I climbed out of the car. Judging from the number of pickup trucks around me, the bar was full of evening cowboys, men with leathery faces and Oklahoma accents maintained here for generations in rural pockets with names like Elkhorn and Eel. Men to whom the destruction of a mall wouldn’t mean much, men who didn’t know they were fast becoming living history.
Luckily, I didn’t have to go inside. The pay phone was by the door. I dropped in some quarters.
It was after eleven. I found Sandy at home.
I interrupted his immediate enthusiastic recounting of what he and Osmil had done that night. All that, so huge in my consciousness six hours ago, seemed like nothing much, nothing important, nothing about me.
“The Southshore Mall, the big ugly one when you first drive into town—”
“You’ve got but one mall,” he pointed out. “What about it?”
“It’s on fire. They think someone dumped firebombs or napalm or something like that from a small plane. It ignited gas and chemicals—it’s burning like a son-of-a-bitch.” I could hear an old Johnny Cash song on the jukebox inside. “My uncle’s out there now.”
&
nbsp; “Anybody inside when it happened?”
“I don’t know. Maybe in the theaters. The stores close at six or seven.” Hillsdale hadn’t made it into ten-to-ten culture yet. “Sandy?”
When I didn’t speak for a moment, he said, “Are you okay, Laura?”
“I had this paranoia. You know Brad Rommel’s got a plane?”
“Yuh, I remember from the bail hearing.” The prosecution had argued he might fly off into the sunset to avoid prosecution.
“I drove up to his place to see if he was around. I guess reassure myself his plane was miles away at the airport.”
“You drove there this time of night? What happened? What did he say? Nothing happened to you?”
“No, no. I’m fine. I’m back in town.”
“So tell me.” Sandy’s voice had dropped in timbre, as it always did when he got protective of me. “You didn’t have a problem with him? You’re all right?”
“He wasn’t there, just the plane.”
“Jee-sus! The plane was there? I thought it got impounded.”
“It did. I guess he violated the court order and flew it home.” So much for airport security. “But here’s the weird part: I checked it out. It was rigged to hold something on the bottom.”
“What are you thinking? Bombs?” Concern made his voice tight.
“As I drove away, the plane blew up. It just burst into flames, Sandy, just blew up right there.”
I listened to him breathe.
“Sandy?”
“I want you to go someplace nobody knows you—a motel or something—and wait for me. I can be on the road in—”
“No, that’s silly. My uncle will be home in a while. The house has good locks. And really, this can’t have anything to do with me. Nobody knew I’d be going to Brad’s—nobody even knows I’m in town.”
“I could be there in five, six hours.”
“Take the morning flight in. You won’t be much later and—”
“Did you see the bomb before it blew?”
“I have no idea. I don’t know what plane parts look like, much less bombs.”
“Got a paper and pencil handy?”
“Why?”
“While it’s fresh in your memory, draw some pictures, draw in everything you remember.”
“What does it matter where the bomb was, Sandy? I mean, it was certainly there someplace. Planes don’t just blow up.”
“No, no, listen to me. If it was a bomb with a timer, then the plane was supposed to be gotten rid of as evidence, you follow me? He flies it home, rigs the timer so he’s long gone, and leaves it to blow up.”
“Yeah?” That was the only possibility I’d considered. I felt a stirring of hope. Maybe there was a less inculpating explanation.
“But on the other hand, it could have been set up with some kind of sensor. Triggered when people started handling it, but set to go off X minutes after the motion stopped.”
“They have bombs like that?”
“Sure, a motion detector and a timer ought to do it. But you see the point? If someone stole Rommel’s plane then left it on his doorstep, the person would want it found there.”
“Why blow it up afterward?”
“Something about the bomb set-up? Something pointing to the person who really did it? You see anything to tell you how the bombs were rigged?”
“There were leather straps and wires on the bottom. They’d been cut probably with a long-handled gardening tool that was inside the plane—”
“No way.”
“No, really, I saw it.”
“No damn way, Laura. I’m sorry, but there’s no way you could open an airplane door while you’re flying and cut some damn strap. For several reasons. And you’d be hard-pressed to gauge where to drop your load.”
“The mall’s a block square. He’d have some room to maneuver.”
“No, you’d need a better delivery system.” A pause. “Well, maybe that’s the point. Say the cops check out the plane and they see the straps and all. Their first thought’s going to be, nah, you couldn’t release a bundle this way. Then they back off to talk or whatever and blam, the plane blows up. How do they prove the straps didn’t have anything to do with it? That Rommel didn’t have the best luck ever, or perfectly figure his angle and speed? Is he mechanically inclined?”
“I don’t know.”
“Find out. Maybe his plane blew up to keep anyone from seeing how simple the mechanism was. Or how complex.”
As unlikely as it sounded—Rommel framed by some brilliant mad bomber—I found myself desperate to believe it.
“You haven’t been to the cops with this yet, have you?” Sandy was asking, not accusing.
“No.”
“You’re wondering whether to.”
“Yes.” Maybe I should. If Sandy was right, maybe this would tend to exculpate him.
“It complicates things, you being his lawyer. If the cops had found it, maybe it would occur to them it was a frame. But you finding it? They won’t be sure you’re telling the whole, exact truth. Especially if they think you waited a while to talk to them.”
“I’m only ten minutes off schedule, Sandy. I stopped at a pay phone on my way back to town. I’m a couple of miles from the county building.”
“Do you want to talk to the cops?”
“I’m supposed to.” I’d found evidence of a crime. I was an officer of the court, wasn’t I? A law enforcement official just like Connie Gold. One who prided herself on using the rules, not breaking them.
“Of course you’re supposed to.” It was clear from his tone he knew that didn’t settle the matter. “It’s not your life, it’s Rommel’s,” he pointed out. “You’re supposed to be square with the police, and if it does hang Rommel, well, Rommel’s Rommel and you’re you.”
“No lawyer is an island.”
Just then a big-bellied man in a shearling jacket stomped out of the bar, guffawing at the joke of an bleached blonde at least a decade his senior. He drowned out Sandy’s comment.
“I don’t know what I want to do,” I said unnecessarily. He’d surely gathered that.
“You don’t have any idea where Rommel is? We could find him, talk to him first. See if we can get him to go to the cops with you.”
“How would I explain the delay? Especially if we don’t find him for a while?”
“Best you can.”
“And Brad’s pissed at the cops big-time. I can’t see him going with me.”
“Why don’t you sit tight and wait for me? I could be there at sunrise.”
A cloud of cigarette smoke and the reek of old beer followed the ample couple. They didn’t climb into a truck. They staggered cheerfully along the sidewalk ignoring the highway traffic, probably heading to one of the dozen motels down the road. I could be there at sunrise: it might be what the cowboy promised the blonde.
“No, don’t be gallant—get some sleep. The morning flight will get you here early enough. I wouldn’t drive all night.”
“For me? Hell you wouldn’t.” He sounded sure.
“Take the first flight in.” There were only two flights a day, so he knew which I meant. “I’d rather see you a few hours later and not have you groggy.”
Another silence.
“I’m going to bed, Sandy. I wouldn’t be awake when you got here anyway. And you’ll freak my uncle out, coming to the door in the middle of the night. Come in the morning. I’ll pick you up at the gate.”
“You’re sure nobody knows you’re in town?”
“Uncle Henry and Jay Bartoli. That’s it.”
“And you’re okay at your uncle’s?”
“Definitely.”
“You’re going back there now? Or stopping off at the sheriff’s?”
“Home to bed.”
He made a
sharp, skeptical sound.
“What does that mean, Sandy?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Like hell.”
“You won’t get hassled for waiting a while, an hour or two, maybe even till the fire’s under control, and the cops stop being so busy. But I would give it a very serious think before you go to your uncle’s. In fact, I wouldn’t, unless you’re sure you’re not telling them.”
He was right. Going home would deprive me of any excuse for waiting. “I could play dumb. Say I went to visit my client, saw his plane but didn’t think anything of it.”
“Silly little you.”
“I can’t go to the police yet. The least question, and they’ll revoke his bail. I don’t want to screw Brad over.”
“You could be doing that by not going.”
“I need to think things through.”
A pause, into which I read a decision to be loyal rather than right. “Anything special I should bring?”
“The usual. Dress for hot weather.”
I heard him chuckle as I replaced the receiver.
Of course Sandy hadn’t offered a miracle answer. I hadn’t expected one, not really. But calling him had broken my connection with that irrational hope. I felt worse than ever.
I climbed back into my car, remembering a ride I’d taken with Brad once. We were seniors in high school and my romance with Gary Gleason was off-again. I wasn’t supposed to date at all—Aunt Diana had persuaded my father I was too wild to be trusted. So I cried out when a police car tried to pull us over, probably for speeding. Knowing my situation—that the cops would recognize the mayor’s niece and mention it to him—Brad floored it, outrunning the cruiser. They’d gotten his license number, of course, catching up with him later. He’d paid a fine, maybe even had his driving privileges suspended; I didn’t remember.
When I next saw him in Hillsdale High’s corridor, his eye was swollen shut. A passing jock had shouted, “Your old man finally sober up enough to hit straight?” Brad rushed away when he saw me coming. I don’t think he realized that my family, my aunt—though seemingly top drawer—was as ferocious an embarrassment to me as his father was to him.
