Where Echoes Live Page 21

  “Hy says he thinks you should fly up here tonight. He’ll pick you up at the Reno airport.”

  Margot had told the service attendant at the Barbary Park garage that she was going home for a few days.

  “You say fly to Reno tonight?” I asked.

  “Yes, it’s quicker. Hy’ll let you borrow his Land Rover while you’re here.”

  Ted turned and went out the door.

  I hesitated, considering the proposed course of action. In light of my suspicions about him, I didn’t relish the idea of driving the lonely mountainous stretch between Reno and Vernon with Hy Ripinsky. But there was no reason to believe he was aware of those suspicions, and it was possible his guard might be low enough so that I would learn something from him on the ride.

  “Ted’s checking the schedules now,” I said to Anne-Marie. “What’s wrong there?”

  “Oh.” Quick expulsion of breath, the closest to a whine I’d ever heard from her. “I’d better save it till you get here.”

  I wondered if her reluctance to talk about it was due to Ripinsky being in the office. Did she have her suspicions, too?

  Ted reentered. “You’re booked on the eight-ten AirCal flight out of SFO.” He set a piece of paper with the flight number and arrival time in front of me.

  I read off the information to Anne-Marie and told her I’d see her at the lodge.

  “I take it I’m on cat duty until further notice?” Ted asked.

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Mind? Hah! It means I can play a couple of rented tapes on your VCR without interruptions from the phone or our esteemed colleagues.”

  I watched him leave the office, reflecting on how much I—all of us—depended on Ted. It never occurred to us that he might actually want to be free of his duties when five o’clock rolled around. We thought nothing of burdening him with messages to pass on, plane reservations to book, references to look up, or lost objects to locate, no matter what the time of day or night. I seldom gave any thought to his private life, save to notice that he’d engaged in no intimate relationships since his friend Harry’s death had brought the full reality of the AIDS threat home to him. Ted had never struck me as a lonely or overburdened man, but now I realized he was both, and it saddened me. I would have to think more of his needs in the future, just as I should of George’s—

  George! Quickly I dialed his number, apprehensive about how he’d react to my breaking our date on such short notice. The line was busy. “Dammit!” I slammed the receiver into its cradle, then immediately picked it up and called Bart Wallace at the SFPD.

  Before he could ask about the progress of my investigation, I said, “I want to take you up on your offer to help out with this Erickson thing.”

  “Okay.” Wallace sounded wary, but then, he had always been an extremely cautious man.

  Quickly I gave him a list of names, including Ripinsky’s, to run through the National Crime Information Center and the state Criminal Justice Information System. Wallace promised to get on it right away; I thanked him and said I’d check back tomorrow. As I hung up, Rae came through the door.

  “Hey, good work on Peggy Hopwood,” I told her, deciding to ignore the hanging-up incident for the moment. “You must have chased all over the place today.”

  She didn’t reply. Her blue eyes were riveted on my bruised face, her freckles standing out against the sudden pallor of her skin.

  She said, “Not again!”

  “What?” I glanced around the desk and began gathering papers and folders to take with me.

  “Just look at yourself!”

  “I’ve looked, thank you, and once was enough.”

  “You’re making a joke of this?” She came all the way into the room and stood in the center of my Oriental rug, hands on her hips, small chin thrust forward.

  I was in no mood to deal with another lecture, so I kept my tone light as I replied, “If I didn’t joke, I’d whimper, and what’s the point in that?” I stood and began packing my briefcase.

  Rae watched me for a few seconds, then asked, “What happened?”

  I started to bring her up to date on the investigation, but when I got to the part about Margot Erickson attacking me, she became agitated. She began to pace the geometric pattern of the rug, then flung her arms out and exclaimed, “You can’t keep doing things like that!”

  “Like what? Running a stakeout? Tailing someone? Making like I’ve got two left feet at the top of a stairway?”

  “See? You’re joking again. This is not funny, Sharon.”

  I shut the briefcase and rested my hands on it. “Rae, if you can’t see the humor—”

  “Humor!” She stopped pacing and faced me, arms crossed over her breasts and gripping the opposite elbow with either hand. There was outrage in her eyes, but also another emotion, only half submerged beneath it. With surprise I realized Ted was right: Rae was frightened—and I knew of what.

  I said, “This goes back to last summer, doesn’t it? You saw a different side of me then, and it scared you.”

  “Scared me?” She made a dismissive sound with her lips, but her quick glance away told me I’d cut to the core of the problem.

  “Yes, scared you. You’re afraid that if you stay in this business you’ll turn out like me.”

  She was silent, looking down at her folded arms.

  “That’s what all this lecturing and carping is really about,” I said. “You can’t deal with a very legitimate fear, so you’ve converted it to anger toward me.”

  I thought she’d deny it, but instead she looked up, relief stealing over her features. Quickly it was followed by fresh anxiety. “A legitimate fear?”

  “Perfectly. When you spend years in a job where your basic function is to poke sticks into an absolute cesspool of human behavior, you’re bound to become disillusioned and angry. How you handle those feelings depends on the kind of person you are.”

  “And you think you handle them well?”

  “I didn’t say that. I handle them the only way I can.”

  “Last summer you almost killed—”

  “But I didn’t.” Hy Ripinsky might be a liar and a fraud, but he’d helped me to face one truth: the only thing that mattered was that, no matter how much I wanted to, I hadn’t taken a life.

  Rae said, “But up till then you’d always seemed so calm, so in control.”

  “Those are only my outer layers.” I paused, thinking back to the things my mother had said the night before. “You know, I’ve always claimed that the undesirable changes in me—cynicism, anger, whatever—have come about as a result of the things I’ve seen and done in the course of my work. But now I’m not so sure that’s wholly true. Maybe as we get older our experiences don’t change us so much as make us more who and what we really are.”

  “So what does that mean—that deep down where it counts you’re nothing but an enraged old cynic?”

  “I hope not, but to tell you the truth, I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you think you should know who and what you are by now?”

  “Oh, Rae.” Suddenly I was struck by how very young she was. “None of us ever knows that. We just keep closing in on it all our lives, and each time we think we’ve got it figured out, everything changes.”

  “That’s not very reassuring, you know.”

  “Sorry, kid—it’s all I’ve got to offer.”

  Rae’s face remained downcast as she thought the concept over. It wasn’t until I hefted my briefcase and moved around the desk that she spoke again. “Urn, Shar … I’m sorry I hung up on you.”

  “That’s okay—I understand.”

  “Where are you going in such a hurry, anyway? You didn’t finish filling me in about the case.”

  But there was no time left now. Besides, I was still feeling a little put out by the hanging-up episode. Since Rae was fond of bragging about her abilities as a detective, I decided to give her something to work on.

  “I am off,” I told her, “to the fire
mountains.”

  Part Three

  The Fire Mountain

  Twenty-one

  It was cold in Reno. When the first blast of frigid air hit me, I felt thankful that I’d traded my suede for a wool pea jacket. As I descended the steps of the plane, I spotted Hy

  Ripinsky on the tarmac below, talking with one of the ground personnel. He had bundled up, too, in a leather bomber jacket with a sheepskin collar, and the hand he raised in greeting was gloved.

  When I stepped out of the line of passengers and went up to him, the man he’d been chatting with slapped him on the back and moved away. Hy grabbed my weekend bag and looked closely at my face. “You get into a bar brawl, McCone?”

  “I have only my own clumsiness to blame.”

  He looked disbelieving, but merely asked, “Have a good flight?”

  “It was fine.” Actually I’d spent most of it worrying: about George’s reaction to my breaking our theater date for that evening, and about this initial encounter with Hy. Mainly I was afraid that something in my voice or manner would betray my suspicion of Ripinsky’s involvement with Lionel Ong and his geologist, but there was also the possibility that Alvin Knight had alerted him. If so, I couldn’t predict what he might do.

  But Ripinsky seemed at ease and plainly glad to see me. He put a hand on my shoulder and began to steer me away from the terminal building. “Hey,” I said, “where are you going?”

  “Buddy of mine’ll give us a lift over to General Aviation.” He motioned at the maintenance vehicle that waited several yards away, amber lights flashing, exhaust billowing white in the cold air.

  “Why?”

  He stopped and frowned down at me. “Didn’t Anne-Marie tell you we’d be flying back to the lake?”

  “She said you’d pick me up, that’s all.”

  “Well, I am—in my plane.” Under his droopy mustache, his lips curved in amusement.

  When we’d first talked about him, Anne-Marie had mentioned something about Hy owning a plane, but it had slipped my mind. Now it seemed I was supposed to fly over the Sierra Nevada at night with a man whom I was leery of trusting. I frowned, wondering if I could get out of it by feigning a fear of small aircraft.

  Hy said, “You can’t be afraid. Anne-Marie told me you’d taken a few flying lessons a while back.”

  That had been several years before, when I’d been enamored of an instructor at the Alameda Naval Air Station, who had taught me for free. The lessons stopped when he received orders to Pensacola and I realized how expensive it would be to continue without his largess. Now I cursed Anne-Marie’s good memory. “I took enough to know how dangerous mountain flying is,” I told Hy. “Especially in the dark.”

  “No need to worry—I’m an old hand at it. “ He nudged me toward the waiting truck. “Been flying since I was old enough to reach the controls. My daddy was a crop duster, and he taught me well—at least until he got wrapped up in some high-tension wires south of Fresno.”

  “Thanks for sharing that encouraging information with me.”

  Hy shrugged. “Compared to crop dusting, mountain flying’s a piece of cake.”

  We reached the truck and squeezed into the cab with his friend, whom he introduced as Dan. As we sped across the field toward a hangar where small aircraft were tied down, they discussed Dan’s new girlfriend, a cashier at Bally’s. I tuned them out and tried to assess how much danger the situation held.

  By now Anne-Marie would have told Hy that I’d possibly found a way to stop Transpacific’s Golden Hills project. Given his own apparent involvement, that might pose a personal threat to him. But how much of a threat, and to what lengths would he go to stop me?

  Assume the worst, that he would go so far as to kill me. He couldn’t just throw me bodily from the plane and claim I’d never shown up in Reno. The airline had my name on the passenger manifest; people like Dan had seen us together here. In order to make my death look accidental, he’d have to crash his plane, injure himself, too. That tipped the risk factor in my favor.

  Of course, there was the possibility that once in the air he’d attempt to intimidate me. While I didn’t relish the prospect, it wouldn’t be the first time someone had used terror tactics on me, and I was sure I could make it through the ordeal unscathed. But somehow I doubted either of the scenarios would come to pass; nothing in Ripinsky’s manner indicated that the ebb and flow of the relationship had altered—at least from his point of view. As the truck pulled to a stop aside a lighted office on one side of the hangar, I made my decision: don’t blow your investigation; just sit back and try to enjoy the ride.

  We got out of the truck and thanked Dan for the lift. He gave us a quasi-military salute and drove away. Hy said, “Wait here,” and went into the office. In a minute he returned. “All set—let’s go.”

  All around the hangar small craft were tethered to the tarmac by chains. The cold wind blew strongly, and as Hy led me among them their wings bobbed and creaked. Ahead of us the lights of Reno glittered, spread across the flatlands and rising on the hills; behind us a jet’s engines roared as it landed. I heard the shriek of rubber as its tires bit down, felt the shudder of its frame. We rounded a six-passenger Cessna, and then Hy stretched out his arm.

  The sleek plane he indicated seemed like a toy next to the Cessna: white, with a high wing and a tail section that canted sharply toward the ground. A double blue stripe and identification number, 77289, ran along the side, and on the tail was a blue silhouette of an airborne gull—the symbol of the Friends of Tufa Lake.

  “So what do you think of my baby?” Hy asked.

  “What is it?”

  “Citabria Decathlon.” There was a thinly veiled note of pride in his voice.

  I’d heard experienced pilots speak enviously of the Citabria, a fabric-covered special-purpose monoplane manufactured in limited numbers. “Aerobatic plane, right?”

  “Uh-huh. The name’s ‘airbatic’ spelled backwards.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  He ducked under the wing, opened the door, and tossed my weekend bag into the rear compartment. “Well, don’t get too excited—we’re not going to do any loops and rolls tonight. Plane’s got a hundred and eighty horsepower—top of the line—but the altitude we need to fly at—twelve, thirteen thousand feet—is about the max it can safely handle.”

  I swallowed.

  Hy turned, stripping off his gloves and peering intently at my face. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, McCone,” he said, “there’ll still be plenty of power in reserve to handle the downdrafts. Just get in, will you?”

  I stepped forward and he helped me up. The seats were in tandem, the cabin not much wider than my desk chair at All Souls. I said, “It’s like a matchbox with wings.”

  “More streamlined, though.” He fiddled with the seat belt, strapped it around me. The joystick protruded from behind the pilot’s seat, directly between my bent knees. “Don’t touch that,” Hy told me.

  “I know.”

  He unhooked a headset from the wall and fitted it over my ears. “You want to talk with me, you’ve got to put your lips right up against the mouthpiece.”

  “Hy—”

  “Take it easy; I’ve made this trip more times than I can count.” He drew back through the door and grinned at me. “Listen, McCone, this plane is such a class act that Bellanca, the manufacturer, wouldn’t sell one to Lindbergh for his transatlantic flight. They were afraid it would detract from their prestige, since he was only an inexperienced mail pilot on the Saint Louis-Chicago run.”

  “What does Lindbergh have to do with—”

  “Like I said, the Decathlon is top of the Citabria line. Besides the increased power, there’s more of a camber on the bottom of the wings—allows it to fly inverted better.”

  “Inverted,” I said miserably.

  “I promise—not tonight.” He winked and turned away.

  I watched his long, lean figure as he bent to release the chain from the right-hand wing, made routine
checks of the gas and oil, and passed in front of the plane, running practiced hands over the propeller. Ripinsky might not be on to what I’d discovered about him in San Francisco, but he had tipped to a basic fact about me personally—I like to pretend I’m braver than I really am. If I hadn’t been hamstrung by the seat belt and earphone wires, I’d have climbed out of there and given him a good kick to get even for his obvious glee at needling me.

  When he’d gotten into the pilot’s seat and settled himself, he glanced at me while reaching for an instrument panel to my left. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” I said coolly, trying to look nonchalant as I stared up at the sky through the clear roof above him.

  He flipped a couple of switches.

  I jerked.

  He grinned wickedly and turned his attention to the controls.

  On the premise that sometimes it’s best to ignore what’s making you nervous, I concentrated harder on the black sky. Hy started the engine. It died. He tried again. It died again. A third try. Same result.

  I gripped the back of his seat, staring straight ahead now.

  “Relax, McCone,” his voice said through the headset. “At this altitude the air’s thin; it takes a bit to get her going.”

  I let go of the seat and clasped my hands between my knees, avoiding the joystick.

  The engine caught and roared to life; the propeller spun, whirled faster—a silver blur against the night.

  I looked up, trying to find something to concentrate on, something other than the mechanics of departure. George? Oh, God, George …

  I’d tried to reach him from home but hadn’t succeeded until minutes before I boarded my flight at SFO. Although he was disappointed at the sudden change of plans, he reacted with characteristic fair-mindedness.

  “It’s not as if you haven’t warned me about how unpredictable the demands of your job can be,” he had said.

  Quite unreasonably I felt a prickle of irritation at his calm understanding. “I’d be furious if you did this to me.”

  “That’s because you’re an Unconventional.” It was the little circle into which he—lately—felt I best fit. (Damn my mother for so dubbing George’s personality classifications! I’d never be able to think of them otherwise now.) Among my group’s more unfortunate traits were extreme emotional sensitivity, a disregard for social mores, and a tendency to depression.