McCone and Friends (2 page)

“They’re babes, all right,” Sam Delaney said, “but I’ll let you judge for yourself.” He grunted as he stowed his bag of take-out cartons in the back of the plane—his lunch, he’d informed me earlier. Business had been so bad recently that he couldn’t even afford the relatively inexpensive airport dinners. Eating bad take-out food, I thought, probably accounted for the weight Sam had gained in the year or so that I’d know him. He’d always had a round face under his mop of brown curls, but now it resembled a chipmunk’s, and his body was growing round to match. Poor guy had probably hired on with Wide Horizons thinking to build up enough hours for a lucrative job with the airlines; now he wasn’t flying enough to go to a decent restaurant.

“Here they come,” he whispered to me. “Look at them—they make heads turn, especially when they’ve had a few pops of that Napa Valley vino.”

The women were attractive, and a number of heads did turn as they crossed from the charter service. But people take notice of any woman tripping across the tarmac in high heels, her brightly colored silk dress blowing in the breeze. We women pilots are pretty much confined to athletic shoes, shirts and pants in cotton and denim—and the darker the color, the less the gas and oil and grease stains will show.

The woman Sam introduced as Melissa Wells had shoulder-length red hair and looked as though she could have used a few more hours’ sleep; Angie Holbrook wore dark hair close-cropped and spoke in a clipped manner that betrayed her tension. Neither had more to say than basic greetings, and they settled into the back seats quickly, refusing headsets. During the thirty-minute flight, Melissa sipped at a large container of coffee she’d brought along and Angie tapped her manicured fingernails against her expensive leather briefcase. Sam insisted on keeping up the fiction that I was a new Wide Horizons pilot by chattering at me—even though over the noise of the engine the women couldn’t hear a word we said through our linked headsets.

“Gordon’s real strict about the paperwork. Plan’s got to be file and complete. Weight-and-balance calculation, too. It’s not difficult, thought; each of us has got his own routes. Mine’re the Napa and Sonoma Valleys. I’d like to get some of the longer trips, build up more hours that way, but I don’t have enough seniority with the company. At least I get to look at some pretty scenery.”

He certainly did. It was springtime, and the length of California’s prime wine-growing valley was in its splendor. Gentle hills, looking as if someone had shaped bolt after blot of green velvet to their contours; brilliant slashes of yellow where the wild mustard bloomed; orchards in pink and white flower. It made me want to snatch Sam’s takeout and go on a picnic.

We touched down at Calistoga shortly before ten. The limo was there for Melissa and Angie, as was the rental car Wide Horizons had arranged for me. I waited till the limo cleared the parking lot, then jumped into the rental and followed, noting the other car’s license number. It took the main road south for several miles, past wineries offering tours and tasting, then turned off onto a secondary road and drove into the hills to the west. I held back, allowing a sports car to get between us; the sports car put on its brakes abruptly as it whipped around a curve, and by the time I’d avoided a collision, the limo had turned through a pair of stone pillars flanking a steep driveway. The security gates closed, and the car snaked uphill and disappeared into the trees.

I pulled my rental into the shade of scrub oak on the far side of the road and got out. It was very quite there; I could hear only birds in a grove of acacia trees on the other side of the high stone wall. I walked its length, looking for something that would identify the owner of the heavily wooded property, but saw nothing and no way to gain access. Finally I went back to the car to wait it out.

Why did everything always seem to boil down to another stakeout?

And three hours later was when I found myself up to my neck in mud.

The limo had departed the estate in the hills and, after a few wine tasting stops, deposited Melissa and Angie at the Serenata Spa in Calistoga. Calistoga is famed for is hot springs, and initially I’d fancied myself eavesdropping on the pair while floating in a tub of mineral water. But Calistoga is also famed for its mud baths, and in order to get close enough, I’d had to opt for my own private wallow. As I sunk into the gritty stuff—stifling a cry of disgust—I could clearly hear Angie’s voice through the flimsy pink partition. In spite of the wine they’d sampled, she sounded as tense as before.

“Well, what do you think? Honestly?”

“They’re high on it.”

“But are they high enough?”

“They paid us, didn’t they?”

“Yes, but…”

“Angie, it was the best we could come up with. And I thought it was damn good.”

“It’s getting more difficult to come up with the stuff without making it too obvious what we’re doing. And this idea of yours about image—the charter flights cut into our profits.”

“So, I’ll pay for it out of my share from now on. I love to fly. Besides, it’s good for Carlos’ people to see us getting off a private plane. It established us a cut above the competition.”

Silence from Angie.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing—people getting high; difficulty coming up with the stuff; Carlos…In the eighties, nine out of ten fictional arch villains dealing in terrorism and drugs had been named Carlos. Was I to assume that one had materialized in the Napa Valley?

“Angie,” Melissa said impatiently, “what is with you this week?”

“I don’t know. I’m really spooked about getting caught. Maybe it was the way Sarge looked at me last night when I told him we wouldn’t be in HQ today.”

“He can’t possibly suspect. He thinks we’re out in the field, that’s all.”

“But all day, every fourth Wednesday? We’re going to have to shift the deliveries around among our clients. If Sarge finds out we’ve been stealing—“

“Stop, already!”

Now what I couldn’t believe was that they’d discuss such things in a public place. A sergeant, headquarters, being out in the field, deliveries, stealing…Was it possible that Angie and Melissa were a couple of undercover narcs who were selling the drugs they confiscated?

After a while one of them sighed. Melissa’s voice said, “It’s time.”

“Yeah. Back to the ghetto.”

“Listen, if you can’t take the heat…”

“Funny. Very funny.”

When we got back to Oakland I hung around Wide Horizons while Melissa paid for the flight in cash and gave Sam a two hundred dollar tip. Then I went to Gordon’s office and made a verbal report, asking him to keep the information confidential until I’d collected concrete evidence. I’d have that for him, I said, before the woman’s next scheduled flight.

As I drove across the Bay Bridge to my offices at Pier 24 ½, one of the renovated structures along San Francisco’s Embarcadero, I thought over what I’d heard at the mud baths. Something was wrong with the picture I’d formed. No specific detail, just the nagging sense that I’d overlooked an item of importance. I wanted to get my computer researcher, Mick Savage, started on the case as soon as possible.

The next morning, Mick began by accessing the Napa County property-tax assessor’s records; he found that the estate in the hills belonged to Carols Robles, a prominent vintner, whose wines even I—whose budget had only recently expanded to accommodate varieties with corks—had heard of. While Mick began tracking information on Robles in the periodicals indexes, I asked a contact on the SFPD to check with the National Crime Information Center for criminal histories on the vintner, Angie Holbrook, and Melissa Wells. They all came up clean.

Mick started downloading news stories and magazine articles on Robles and his winery, and soon they formed an imposing stack on my desk. I had other work to do, so I called in Rae Kelleher, my field investigator, and asked her to check with our contacts at Bay Area police departments for detectives answering to the women’s names or matching their descriptions. At six o’clock, I hauled the stack of information on Robles home to my brown-shingled cottage near the Glen Park district, curled up on the couch with my cats, and spent the evening reading.

If you believed Robles’ press, he was a pillar of the Napa Valley community. His wines were considered excellent and frequently took gold medals at the various national competitions. Robles Vineyards hosted an elegant monthly wine, food, and music event at their St. Helena Cellars, which was attended by prominent social and political figures, many of whom Carlos Robles counted among his close friends. I couldn’t detect the slightest breath of scandal about his personal life; he’d been married to the same woman for thirty-three years, had four children and six grandchildren, and by all accounts was devoted to his family.