McCone and Friends Page 19

  I wouldn’t’ve let that barn stand two minutes on my ranch in Mono County. Of course one good windstorm, and it probably wouldn’t be standing here much longer. The door was open, hanging crooked on weak hinges, and a rust-spotted pickup was nosed inside.

  “Galway’s?” McCone asked Mrs. Mallory.

  The landlady nodded and called out to him. There was no answer. Quiet there. Only the rustle of eucalyptus windbreak and flies buzzing under the eaves. And a feeling of wrongness. I felt the hair on my neck bristle, looked at McCone and saw she was getting the same warning sign. Together we moved through the door and stopped by the truck.

  The clotted shadow was broken by shafts of light from holes in the high roof. They filtered down on a couple of eight-foot towers shaped like oil derricks made of metal, wood, glass, and plastic. Their components were all different pieces of junk: beercans, chair legs, bottles, parts of a baby stroller; an automobile bumper, fence rails, barbed wire, a window pane, a refrigerator drawer.

  “My God,” McCone said, she didn’t mean it reverently.

  My eyes had adjusted to the gloom now, and I saw other towers that were toppled and broken, lying on their sides and canted across one another as if an earthquake had hit the oil field. The one at the top of the heap was crowned by the blades from a small windmill.

  “Stay here,” McCone said to Mrs. Mallory. Then she started moving through the wreckage.

  I followed, because I’d spotted what she had—a pair of bluejeaned legs sticking out from under the bottommost tower. Bluejeaned legs and feet in shabby cowboy boots. McCone squatted down and shoved at the debris while I lifted. Together we cleared enough room so we could see the man’s face.

  Glenn Farrell, aka Nick Galway.

  His neck was bent at an unnatural angle, the back of his head caved in and bloody. McCone felt for a pulse, shook her head, pulled her hand away quickly.

  “He’s cold,” she said.

  I heard a noise behind us, swiveled, and looked up at Mrs. Mallory. Her eyes moved from the body to us, shocked but unflinching. Yeah, a tough old bird like Ma.

  “How did this happen?” she said.

  I shook my head and stood up. Like he told the dump lady, Farrell’s art was junk—or in his junk—and now his lifeblood mingled with it.

  I glanced at McCone, who had stood up too. Her expression was as unflinching as Mrs. Mallory’s, but I knew what was going on behind those steady dark eyes. She’s seen a lot of death, my woman, but she’s never grown indifferent to it, any more than I have. By all rights we should both be pretty callous: In her years as an investigator she’s had more than her share of nasty experiences, and my own past still gives me nightmares. But inside we’ve got that essential spark of humanity—which was why we drew closer together now as we stared around at the wreckage.

  Broken lamp globes. A vacuum cleaner bag and part of a rusted wheelbarrow. Curved chromium chair arms. A 1973 Colorado license plate. Mason jars—shattered. Broken mirror—bad luck proven. Chipped head of a grinning garden gnome and some paperback romance novels with holes drilled through them. A toaster’s innards. Moth eaten stuffed dear head. Busted axe. The top of the windmill, one blade missing…

  Behind us Mrs. Mallory asked again, “How did this happen?”

  Hands-off attitude be damned! I said, “I know how. Let’s call 911.”

  “It was an accident! An accident!” Mary Delmar, the dump lady, told the sheriff’s deputy. “I snuck over there late last night to get his gold, and the crazy bastard must’ve seen my flashlight because he came runnin’ out to the barn and attacked me. I was defending myself when those towers started fallin’ on us. I’m lucky I didn’t end up like Nick!”

  The deputy, whose name was Evans, rolled his eyes at McCone and me.

  “Why the hell couldn’t he just’ve stayed in bed?” Delmar added. “I’d already found the windmill blade. Why’d he have to come out there?”

  Evans said, “Where is the windmill blade?”

  Delmar collapsed on a bent lawn chair and put her hands over her eyes. “Why do things like this always happen to me?”

  McCone tapped the deputy’s arm, motioned at the refuse bin where we’d seen Delmar toss the thing that at first glance looked like part of a plane’s prop. He went to check, came back shaking his head. “Ms.Delmar, where is it?”

  “Oh hell! All right! It’s in there.” She moved her shoulder at the shed behind us. “I had to paw through all that junk, scraping paint off everything till I found it. For all I know, it’ll never clean up right.”

  Evans sighed. “I’ll have to read you your rights now.”

  “My rights? Why? I already told you it was an accident. His fault anyway, runnin’ out there and attackin’ me.”

  Evans gave up, motioned to his partner, who was standing by their car, to take over. Right off Delmar started yowling about calling a lawyer.

  Evans took McCone and me aside, muttering, “Galway—Farrell—is dead, but she’s the injured party.”

  McCone said, “Nowadays, it’s always the other guy’s fault.”

  “One thing bothers me: this woman’s not very bright, and she doesn’t strike me as an art expert. What tipped her to who Farrell was?”

  “He told her he used to be a famous sculptor under another name.”

  “But did he tell her what name?”

  McCone hesitated, frowning. “I don’t know. Maybe. But he certainly wouldn’t’ve told her about the gold.” She looked at me, raising her eyebrows.

  I shrugged, then spotted the sign advertising recycled merchandise at low prices. “Well,” I said, “maybe she’s a reader.”

  “Oh?” From both of them.

  “Come on.” I headed for the shed where the books were. Maybe I’d come across an old western or two while I was hunting.

  Plenty of romances, best sellers, self-help, and cookbooks, but no old westerns. On the back wall, though, there was a pictorial set: Popular Twentieth-Century Artist. The fourth volume was missing, and when I checked the introductory volume, I found that number 4 was on sculptors. A glance through number 1 showed that each article was accompanied by a photo the individual.

  I found the index and flipped to “Farrell, Glenn.” There were several notations, but the most interesting was “theft and disappearance.” I showed it to McCone and Evans.

  “So,” she said, “Mary Delmar is a reader—at least when she smells a potential profit.”

  “Yeah, she is. She spotted this set, decided to see if she could find out who Galway actually was. Read about the stolen gold, and figure out what he a meant about his art being junk.” To my astonishment, McCone hugged me. “Ripinsky, what an absolutely fabulous birthday present!”

  I leered down at her. “You like that one, wait till you see what else I’ve got for you.”

  She narrowed here eyes at me, then flicked them toward Evans. She’s a very private woman, one of the many reasons I love her. And now I’d gone and said something that would make her all prickly.

  “McCone and I are both pilots,” I said to Evans, who was looking quite interested. To her I said, “Think airport. Think the Citabria fueled and ready to go. Think terrific destination.”

  “Oh?”

  “Terrific—and surprising.” I nodded.

  Now, if I could only come up with a terrific surprising flight plan by the time we got back to the Bay Area…

  SOLO

  (Sharon McCone)

  “That’s where it happened.” Hy put the Citabris into a gliding turn and we spiraled down to a few hundred feet above Tufa Lake. Its water looked teal blue today; the small islands and gnarled towers of the calcified vegetation stood out in gray and taupe relief. A wind from the east riffled the lake’s surface. Except for a blackened area on the south side of Plover Island, I saw no sign that a light plane had crashed and burned there.

  I turned my head from the window and looked into the forward part of the cockpit; Hy Ripinsky, my best friend and longtime lover,
still stared at the scene below, his craggy face set in grim lines. After a few seconds he shook his head and turned his attention back to the controls. Putting on full throttle and pulling back on the stick, the small plane rose and angled in for the airport on the lake’s northwest shore.

  Through the dual headsets Hy said, “Dammit, McCone, I’m a good flight instructor, and Scott Oakley was a good student. There’s no reason he should’ve strayed from the pattern and crashed on his first solo flight.”

  We were entering that same pattern, on the downwind leg for runway two-seven. I waited till Hy had announced our position to other traffic on the Unicom, then said, “No reason, except for the one you’ve already speculated on: that he deliberately strayed and put the plane into a dive in order to kill himself.”

  “Looked that way to me. To the NTSB investigators, too.”

  I was silent as he turned onto final approach, allowing him to concentrate on landing in the strong crosswind. He didn’t speak again till we were turning off the runway.

  “Ninety percent of flying’s metal and emotional—you know that,” he said. “And ninety percent of the instructor’s job is figuring out where the student’s head is at, adapting your teaching methods to the individual. I like to think I’ve got good instincts along that line, and I noticed absolutely nothing about Scott Oakley that indicated he’d kill himself.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “He was a nice kid, in his early twenties. From this area originally, but went up to Reno to attend the University of Nevada. Things didn’t go well for him academically, so he dropped out, went to work as a dealer at one of the casinos. Met a woman, fell in love, got engaged.”

  He maneuvered the plane between its tie-down chains, shut it down, and got out, then helped me climb from the cramped backseat. Together we secured the chains and began walking toward the small terminal building where his Land Rover and my MG were parked.

  “If Oakley lived in Reno, why was he taking flying lessons down here?” I asked. Tufa Lake was a good seventy miles south, in the rugged mountains of California.

  “About six, eight months ago his father got sick—inoperable cancer. Scott came home to help his mother care for him. While he was here he figured he’d use the money he was saving on rent to take up flying. There isn’t much future in dealing at a casino. And he wanted to get into aviation, build up enough hours to be hired by an airline.”

  “And other than being a nice kid, he was…?”

  “Quiet, serious, very dedicated and purposeful. Set a fast learning pace for himself, even though he couldn’t fly as much as he’d’ve liked, owing to his responsibilities at home. A month ago his father died; he offered to stay on with his mother for a while, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Said she knew the separation from his girlfriend had been difficult and she didn’t want to prolong it. But he came back down for a lesson each week, and on that last day he’d done three excellent takeoffs and landings. I had full confidence that I could get out of the plane.”

  “And you noticed nothing emotionally different about him beforehand?”

  “Nothing whatsoever. He was quiet and serious, just like always.”

  We reached the place where our vehicles were parked, and I perched on the rear of the MG. Hy faced me, leaning against his Rover, arms folded across his chest. His eyes were deeply troubled, and lines of discouragement bracketed his mouth.

  I knew what he was feeling: He took on few students, as he didn’t need the money and his work for the international security firm in which he held a partnership often took him away from his ranch here in the high desert country for weeks at a time. But when did take someone on, it was because he recognized great potential in the individual—both as a pilot and as a person who would come to love flying as much as he himself did. Scott Oakley’s crash—in his full sight as he stood on the tarmac at the airport awaiting his return—had been devastating to him. And it had also aroused a great deal of self-doubt.

  I said, “I assume you want me to look into the reason Oakley killed himself.”

  “If it’s something you feel you can take on.”

  “Of course I can.”

  “I’ll pay you well.”

  “For God’s sake, you don’t have to do that!”

  “Look, McCone, you don’t ask your dentist friend to drill for free. I’m not going to ask you to investigate for free, either.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Ripinsky. Nothing in life’s free. We’ll come up with some suitable way for you to compensate me for my labors.”

  My obvious starting place was Scott Oakley’s mother. I called to ask if I could stop by, and set off for her home in Vernon, the small town that hugged the lake’s north shore.

  It was autumn, the same time of year as when I’d first journeyed there and met Hy. The aspens glowed golden in the hollows of the surrounding hills and above them the sky was a deep blue streaked with high cirrus clouds. In the years that I’d been coming to Tufa Lake, its water level had slowly risen and was gradually beginning to reclaim the dusty alkali plain that surrounded it—the result of a successful campaign by environmental organizations to stop diversions of its feeder streams to southern California. Avocets, gulls, and other shorebirds had returned to nest on its small island and feed on the now plentiful brine shrimp.

  Strange that Scott Oakley had chosen a place of such burgeoning vitality to end his own life.

  Jan Oakley was young to have lost a husband, much less outlived her son—perhaps in her early forties. She had the appearance of a once-active woman whose energy had been sapped by sadness and loss, and small wonder: It had been only two weeks since Scott’s crash. As we sat in the living room of her neat white prefab house, she handed me a high-school graduation picture of him; he had been blond, blue-eyed, and freckle-faced, with and endearingly serious expression.

  “What do you want to ask me about Scott, Ms. McCone?”

  “I’m interested in what kind of a person he was. What his state of mind was before the accident.”

  “You said on the phone that you’re a private investigator and a friend of Hy Ripinsky. Is he trying to prove that Scott committed suicide? Because he didn’t, you now. I don’t care what Hy or the National Transportation Safety Board people think.”

  “He doesn’t want to prove anything. But Hy needs answers—much as I’m sure you do.”

  “Answers so he can get himself off the hook as far as responsibility for Scott’s death is concerned?”

  I remained silent. She was hurting, and entitled to her anger.

  After a moment Jan Oakley sighted. “All right, that was unfair. Scott admired Hy; he wouldn’t want me to blame him. Ask your questions, Ms. McCone.”

  I asked much the same things as I had of Hy and received much the same answers, as well as Scott’s Reno address and the name of his fiancée. “I never even met her,” Mrs. Oakley said regretfully, “and I couldn’t reach her to tell her about the accident. She knows by now, of course, but she never even bothered to call.”

  I’d about written the interview off at that point, but I decided to probe some more on the issue of Scott’s state of mind immediately before he left for what was to be his last flying lesson. After my first question, Mrs. Oakley failed to meet my eyes, clearly disturbed.

  “I’m sorry to make you relive that day,” I said, “but how Scott was feeling is important.”

  “Yes, I know.” For a moment it seemed that she might cry, then she sighed again, more heavily, “He wasn’t…He was upset when he arrived late the night before.”

  “Over what?”

  “He wouldn’t say.”

  Sometimes instinct warns you when someone isn’t telling the whole truth; this was one of those times. “What about the next morning? Did he say then?’

  She looked at me, startled. “How did…? All right, yes. He told me. Now I realized I should have stopped him, but he wanted so badly to solo. I thought, one time—what will it matter? All he wanted was to take that
little Cessna around the pattern alone one time before he had to give it all up.”

  “Give up flying? Why?”

  “Scott had a physical checkup in Reno the day before. He was diagnosed as having narcolepsy.”

  “Narcolepsy,” Hy said. “That’s the condition when you fall asleep without any warning?”

  “Yes. One of my friends suffers from it. She’ll get very sleepy, drop off in the middle of a conversation. One time we were flying down to Southern California together; the plane was landing, and she just stopped talking, closed her eyes, and slept till we were on the ground.”

  “Jesus, can’t they treat it?”

  “Yes, with ephedrine or amphetamine, but it’s not always successful.”

  “And neither the drugs nor the condition would be acceptable to an FAA medical examiner.”

  “No. Besides, there’s and even more potentially dangerous side to it: A high percentage of the people who have narcolepsy also suffer from a condition called cataplexy in which their body muscles become briefly paralyzed in stressful or emotional situations.”

  “Such as one would experience on a first solo flight.” Hy grimaced and signaled for another round of drinks. We were sitting at the bar at Zelda’s, the lakeside tavern at the top of the peninsula on which Vernon was located. The owner, Bob Zelda, gave him a thumbs-up gesture and quickly slid a beer toward him, a white wine toward me.

  “You know, McCone, it doesn’t compute. How’d Scott pass his student pilot’s medical?”

  “The condition was only diagnosed the day before you soloed him. And remember, those medicals aren’t a complete workup. They check your history and the obvious—blood pressure, sight, hearing. They’re not looking for something that may be developing.”

  “Still doesn’t compute. Scott was a good, responsible kid. Went strictly by the letter as far as the regulations were concerned. I can’t believe he’d risk soloing when he knew he could nod off at any time.”