The Underground Lady (16 page)

"Sit down, Pushkin. I got your warning. Threats irritate me."

The receptionist stood in the door. "Is everything alright, Mr. Pushkin?"

"Yes, yes, Miss Clark."

She turned and went back to her desk.

"I'm sorry, I don't remember your name," he said, sitting down behind his desk, some color returning to his face.

"Leicester, Jay Leicester. This is Hebrone Opshinsky.

He ignored Hebrone. "What is this about some threat?"

I watched his face. The hard wrinkles and brown, tanned skin made him look old and hard to read. "Avis Shaw died this morning, and you are not the father of Sunny Pfeiffer."

There seemed confusion in his eyes, as if he couldn't put things in sequence. Everything in his life had an order to it. All the numbers added up, the books balanced. "What has any of this got to do with me? I already told you I wasn't the father of Hadley Welch's daughter. I certainly made no threat against you, sir. Avis Shaw, I'm sorry to hear of his death, but what does he have to do with any of this?"

"You and Shaw had some differences in the past. He wrote a letter to Miss Pfeiffer saying her mother was murdered. Maybe he knew what happened and was trying to get back at you."

"Get back for what? I never heard such…"

Hebrone propped his feet up on Pushkin's desk, took out a small pin knife that I'd never seen before and proceeded to clean his fingernails. "You like animals, Mr. Pushkin?"

The man looked at Hebrone as if he was insane. "Animals? Yes, I have two dogs. What has that got to do with anything? Would you please get your feet off my desk?"

"Hear me well, Pushkin. If anything happens to me, any of my friends, or any of our pets, the first person to be looked at is you."

"I think you two better leave."

"One more thing, we know who left the note on my door. When we find them, and we will, they will talk. Good day, Mr. Pushkin."

***

As we drove toward the Meridian Airport, Hebrone said, "I don't know, Jay. The man is hard to read. If I had to make the call now, I'd say he's not involved, but he needs looking at some more. Don't cross him off the list entirely."

We parked near the control tower. Paul Bradford had the transcript ready for us. I thanked him for his help. He had spoken to his brother and passed on my regards. He said that Asa was being promoted to Chief Pilot of the Seattle base. If I ever wanted a job flying the line, let him know. He had a seat waiting for me.

Back at the truck, I handed the transcript to Hebrone, and we headed to Raymond Spruance, the retired Naval Aviator's home.

Hebrone read through the report. "There's nothing out of the ordinary here. The only question is why did she deem it necessary to return to her landing strip? There are really only three possibilities."

"They would be?"

"She forgot something, had a mechanical problem, or saw someone from the air that she wanted to talk with."

"Doesn't tell us what happened to her or the airplane."

"No, it does not."

We entered the gated subdivision and parked in front of Raymond Spruance's neat house. He was sitting on the front porch observing a birdfeeder in a far corner of the yard. A dozen male and female Cardinals sliced through the air like drops of blood. Blue Jays and House Sparrows fussed at ivory-beaked Juncos and Mourning Doves. A fat Calico cat sat at the corner of the house eyeing the spectacle and licking her lips.

Spruance stood when we walked up the sidewalk. His silver gray hair glinted in the afternoon winter sun. "Can I help you?"

"Mr. Spruance, I'm Jay Leicester. I talked with you a few days ago about Hadley Welch."

"Ah, Mr. Leicester, forgive me, I did not recognize you. Please come and have a seat, if it's not too cold for you."

"This is Hebrone Opshinsky. You probably flew high cover for him during the Vietnam War."

They shook hands.

"Vietnam, so many sacrifices, so freely given, so little accomplished. Yeah, I was there." He was handsome, vigorous, and in his seventies. There was no more to his face than form required. It was spare and wrinkled, with the impatient squint of an aged aviator, and a lipless pseudo-smile that emphasized the lustrous melancholy of his blue eyes.

"We want to talk some more about your relationship with Miss Welch. There have been some developments."

"Then you've found out what happened to her?"

"No, but threats have been made against those of us who are looking into her disappearance."

"Threats? I don't understand. Why would there be threats? I thought her plane crashed?"

"Her daughter received an anonymous letter saying that her mother was murdered. The man who sent it is dead. Someone, for whatever reason, wants us to stop looking into what happened. We thought maybe you could remember something else that might shed some light, or maybe confess that you killed her?"

He stroked his mustache, smiled at me, and then seemed to go far away. The winter sun cast light more radiant than that of summer across the porch, but its shadows seemed darker and deeper. Turning, he said, “I would still look at that civilian flight instructor, what was his name…?"

"Earl Sanders."

"Yes, Sanders. She was enamoured with the man. I remember telling you about him."

"We've ruled him out."

"Then I can offer nothing else, except…"

"Except what, Mr. Spruance?"

"Dead people always appear in complicity with their circumstances…"

We left Raymond Spruance to his bird watching and headed north to a familiar house on a lake with an empty boathouse.

"The man had nothing to do with any of this. I realize it was twenty-five years ago, however he's easy to read. Drop bombs from the air, shoot down an enemy aircraft, but get up close and personal for a kill – I don't see it."

"I agree, that's why I wanted you to meet him, see if we drew the same conclusion. I truly look forward to your impression of Mr. VonHorner."

"If we eliminate him, then what? You got any other suspects?"

I did not.

***

The same small, Mexican-looking woman from my last visit opened the door at Gerald VonHorner's home. She looked at Hebrone, their eyes locking as if in recognition. It was as if two sets of killer eyes were saying hello.

Then she turned to me. "He no home. You no come back."

"We need to talk to him. When do you expect his return?"

"You no come back."

"Do you know Hadley Welch?"

"She dead. You no come back." She started to shut the door.

Hebrone stuck his arm out and stopped it from slamming in our faces. "We want to talk to the man."

"You go now. No come back, be really bad." Her words came like a stale breath that somehow had been exhaled from a corpse.

Hebrone looked at her in a silence as fatal as a rattlesnake. The air around us was dead and smelled dead. We stood stupidly, everything about us was alien, and so we felt alien – almost apologetic, I think.

"Let it go, Hebrone. There will be another time."

He moved his arm, and the door slammed shut.

Heading north toward Union, I asked. "You two seemed to have some kind of connection?"

"She's an old soul, a true killer. We've met before, a long time ago, maybe in another life."

I was sorry I asked.

Chapter Thirteen

It was almost six p.m. when we arrived back at the cottage. Shack was sitting in a chair on the porch waiting for us. B.W. lay in the cypress glider eyeing him, his tail switching in jerks. I don't think the two liked each other.

"I left Rose's a few minutes ago. They are fine. We talked about the note from last night. Hope you don't mind that I told her. Be prepared, she's pissed that you didn't call her immediately after you found it, but that's Rose. At any rate, she bought a whole ribeye at the grocery store the day she cooked them and had the butcher cut two-inch thick steaks. There were several people in the store. The butcher argued they should be one and a half inches, and Rose said that if he didn't cut the steaks as ordered, she would come behind the counter and stuff them up his ass. It was a small to do. We think the one made the threats or one of his accomplices was in the store."

Laughing at the story, I said, “It would explain how he knew about the steaks, but not that we would be at table."

"Assuming it's a he." Hebrone tried to rub B.W.'s head, but the cat jumped down and came to me.

"What?"

"We don't know that our threat-maker is a male."

"It's after six, I've got to get a shower and meet Miss Galore. See what information she has that could help us. Hebrone, take my truck and B.W. Tell Rose and Sunny that we will talk in the morning. Shack, you keep checking on your friend Ralph Henderson. We need to have a conversation with him."

"What about the interviews today? How'd they go?"

"Hebrone can catch you up on his impressions.

***

It was after seven when I left the cottage. The sky changed through several colors and became soft, crumbled dark gray, then black. It was like driving under the roof of an enormous cave where hidden fires burned below. I could see stars overhead, and below them the sharp, ragged edges of trees looking as if they had been fenced with light and seeded with more stars.

The address was hard to find, and it was almost seven-thirty when I knocked on the door. It immediately opened, and Pussy Galore stood there wrapped in a heavy wool robe which made her look androgynous and monk like. But the steel-rimmed glasses were gone. The hair was down and flowed silk-like across her shoulders. She looked much younger.

"I thought you weren't coming."

"It took awhile to find the address."

"Come in, have a seat. I'll fix you a drink. Is bourbon okay?"

"If you're having one?"

"I am."

When she disappeared into a small kitchen, I turned on a tiny voice recorder that fit snuggly in my shirt pocket like a credit card. I had no idea if this could be a setup. She and her attorney boss could be in on this together. Hebrone had me on the verge of paranoia. It never hurts to be safe, though.

Looking around, I saw that this was a one bedroom furnished apartment. Kind of sad, I thought. Hang your clothes in the closet and use the bed after everything in town closes and there's no place else to go. Live in one sometime. See if the place ever shows any more outward trace of your personality than one of the railroad cars a few blocks to the west. I had spent too much of my life in rooms like this, rooms that pierced the soul with silent screams of loneliness and desire, rooms as warm as a ship's hole and as lovely as an open wound.

Hanging behind an old overstuffed chair was a hand-stitched, framed Biblical quote:

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; Who can know it?

Jeremiah 17:9

She returned with the drinks, having discarded the robe. A thick, plaid shirt, faded blue jeans, and worn tennis shoes were now her attire. One could take her for a logger's wife. A wife with a fine body that she took pains to conceal.

Noting that there was no television, I thought that lonely people sometimes become associated with local t.v. shows in order to belong to a family of people. "What do you do to make time pass around here?"

She sat down in the overstuffed chair. "Time passes by itself – you don't have to do anything."

Taking a sip of the drink, which surprisingly contained expensive whiskey – Jack Daniel's, I guessed – I said, “Tell me about your life in Union?"

She looked up at me, and her face was pale in the light of the room.  Her eyes were lost in their darkly shadowed hollows save only for their glint and I could see in her expression something not seen before, and the name of that thing was sorrow. "You ever been married, Mr. Leicester?"

This was the second woman to ask me that question this week. "No, and I think we can be on a first name basis."

Her eyes were transparent and bottomless, like deep water where men have drowned. "Tell me, Jay, why are men always embarrassed when women give them what they want?"

"I've never been embarrassed by what any woman ever gave me."

"Then I wish I'd met you a long time ago."

She had been hurt before, had hidden her soul deep within herself. If you keep it buried far enough away you can protect it, but it may go blind in the eternal darkness.

"Could I have another drink?"

"Sure."

She took the glass and I watched her walk to the small kitchen, her hair flowing across her back like corn silks blowing in a summer breeze. Returning, she handed me the whiskey with the self-aware look of one who understands reality is basically an ironic joke that no one else gets.