McCone and Friends (36 page)

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…

“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.