Fool's Flight (Digger) (8 page)

Territoriality, Digger knew, was one of the keys to interviewing. When you wanted people to be at ease, you interviewed them at their homes, in their offices, wherever they felt comfortable. When you wanted them to be a little on edge, you tried to talk to them in uncomfortable places where their discomfort level worked for you. Digger had found what he considered the best middle ground: he interviewed people in bars, whenever he could, because most people were ill at ease in unfamiliar surroundings and Digger was as comfortable as a clam in silt. But parking lots were okay, too.

"What can I do for you?" Batchelor said. He noisily glanced at his watch.

Digger pressed. "If you’ve got an appointment or something, we can arrange something later. Down-town."

"No, no, that’s all right. What is it you want?"

"Just tell me how it was you weren’t on that death flight?"

"Death flight? Christ, you sound like the
National Enquirer
. I already told your people."

"Yes, and there’s a report drifting somewhere through channels and it’ll be on my desk in a month or a year, but in the meantime, it’d help if you told me yourself."

"Okay. I went into the cockpit where Steve was. I got sick. Upchucking goddam pukey throwuppy sick. I went back to the crew lounge. I couldn’t even walk. Foxy had to help me."

"Foxy?" Digger made a show of writing down the name.

"Our stew. Melanie Fox. It’s a nickname, for Christ’s sakes. We call her Foxy."

"Oh, I see." Digger made an equally large display of crossing out Foxy from his note pad. Notes were nonsense. He could feel his tape recorder vibrating gently against his back. The open-mouthed frog tie clip that housed the unit’s microphone was picking up more of Randy Batchelor than notes ever could.

"Anyway, we were in the lounge and I was heaving like I had morning sickness and before we got back to the plane, Steve is taking off. It’s too late to do anything about it, so we’re left there holding our hands on our asses."

"Very strange."

Batchelor shrugged. "I guess. I know a lot of times pilots take off without passengers. They leave some of them behind. I almost did that once. I had a charter out of Pittsburgh and I was so goddam busy getting the plane ready that when the tower told me I was cleared to move into takeoff position, I forgot that I was still waiting for these corporate bigshots. So it happens. Stews are left behind a lot, especially if they’re a couple of minutes late. But not cockpit crew. That’s weird."

"It certainly is. In all my years of experience with planes, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything like that," Digger said. "What do you think happened?"

"I don’t know. The flight was a local. Steve could handle a hundred like that by himself. You wouldn’t want a better pilot."

"I understand he had a drinking problem?"

Batchelor shook his head. "No, that’s not right. He had one once but that was a long time ago. He didn’t believe in drinking anymore."

"Sounds born again," Digger said casually.

"Something like that. He was in a church and he had straightened out. No more booze. I thought he was nuts because he was a good drinking buddy in the old days but who knows what gets into people. He was so good lately he was a pain in the ass." He glanced at his watch again.

"I’ll only be a few more minutes," Digger said. "Whose idea was it that you leave the plane when you got sick?"

Batchelor thought for a moment. Then a look of understanding came over his face. "It was Steve’s," he said. He thought some more. "Sure. It was Steve’s. I was feeling like cooked shit and he said, better go back to the crew lounge. Get some Pepto-Bismol or something. The walking would do me good. Yeah. That’s right. And he told Foxy to go with me to make sure I was all right."

He stopped, looking off into space as if he had just understood something that had been puzzling him for a long while. Digger looked at him carefully, wondering what he had just discovered.

"The passengers were aboard by then?" Digger asked.

"Huh? Oh, yeah. I guess they all were."

"Did you fly with Captain Donnelly a lot?"

"I was here first when Interworld first opened. Then Steve came. We were generally a team. He had stopped drinking but we still used to bounce around a little. Then he got religion and we didn’t bounce much…I don’t know, I always thought religion was supposed to make you happy, but he wasn’t exactly Maurice Chevalier."

"Few of us are," Digger said. "It’s so hard towhistle while you’re dancing. Were you close friends?"

"Like how?"

"You know. Golf together. Weekends at the old cabin in the woods. Make-believe business trips out of town. Wives and husbands together for a four-hand game of gossip. You know what I mean."

"No, never like that. Steve was too inside himself lately. And I never liked his wife."

There was something in the way Randy answered that last question, Digger thought. Wasn’t there? It seemed as though Randy was no longer worried about Digger, but something entirely different.

"When you saw the plane taking off, what did you do?"

"I said ‘shit.’"

"Nothing else?"

"What else? Throw rocks at it?"

Batchelor glanced at his watch again. "Listen, I really…"

"It’s all right," Digger said. "I’m done for now. If anything else comes up, I’ll be in touch. Thanks for your time."

Batchelor nodded and turned to the car door.

"One last thing," Digger said. "Any ideas on what caused the accident?"

"Got me. Mind if I go? Some women aren’t meant to be kept waiting." He smiled conspiratorially at Digger who winked and nodded.

Digger walked back to his own car. For all his hurry to depart, Digger noticed that Batchelor was taking his time. He had started his engine but he was just sitting behind the wheel, apparently deep in thought. Then he backed the car out of the space and sped away.

Digger watched the FLYBOY license plate turn onto the street. A thirty-five-thousand-dollar car. The fifty-mission crush in a yachting cap, for Christ’s sakes.

Batchelor was a little too flashy, for Digger’s taste.

Chapter Twelve

Every old city was laid out the same way, Digger thought. There was a poor and busy central core, surrounded by a not-so-poor, not-so-busy ring. Then from the ring came four spokes. One led to the rich section and the opposite spoke led to the poor neighborhoods. The other two spokes led to middling sections. Melanie Fox lived in one of the middling sections.

The stewardess had tired brown eyes, the color of a cooked steak that had been left in the refrigerator too long. They were in a pretty face but the face was tired, too. There were lines at the corners of her eyes and from the corners of her nose to her mouth, and they were mileage marks, not laughter lines. Her body was bounteous, ripe and full, but only one clock-tick away from being a good middle-aged body instead of a wonderful young body.

It was late afternoon and her dark brown hair was messed. She was wearing a long dressing gown when she let Digger into the apartment and he surmised that she had not been out of bed for long.

"Mister Lincoln," she said, looking Digger over as he stepped through the doorway.

"I’m sorry if I woke you when I called. Please call me Elmo."

"Elmo?"

"Elmo."

"Come on. Nobody’s named Elmo except some guy who eats nails and lifts weights in a circus."

"It’s a long story," Digger said. He found himself talking to her back. She was walking across the soft pile carpeting to the sofa with the indifferent ease of a woman who was not terribly frightened by the idea of having a strange man in her home.

"I’ll call you Abraham," she said as Digger closed the door. "I’m just having coffee. Want some?"

"I’d rather have a drink but if you’re into coffee…"

"Have coffee, then a drink," she said. "I don’t know if my stomach’s up to watching somebody drink this early."

Digger sat in a chair facing the sofa, across the glass-topped coffee table. There were two cups on the table and she poured coffee from an electric pot, connected by a long white extension cord to a wall socket across the room.

She took a long sip of her coffee. "So," she said. It was a question.

"I’m doing a routine check into the accident. International Association for Plane Travel Safety. Eye-APTS. We’re an international consortium of private and governmental boards and agencies charged with the responsibility of…"

"Spare me the brutal details," she said. "I’m too tired to remember it and too bored to be impressed. What do you want to talk about?"

"I was talking to Mr. Batchelor about the accident."

"I don’t know what I can tell you that he didn’t. Christ, coffee’s good. I don’t think I’d want to live in a world without coffee."

"Or women."

"Or men."

"Or vodka."

"You win," she said, laughing. "I’ll get you that drink."

"I thought I was going to have to beat it out of you."

"Not me. I’m a piece of cake," she said. She walked into the kitchen, her voice carrying to him from the other room.

"So what do you want to ask me?"

"Do you want me to roar my questions at the top of my voice?" Digger asked.

"No. You can come out here."

In the kitchen, Digger saw she had poured two large glasses of vodka, no mix. She nodded toward the kitchen table. Women love to sit at kitchen tables.

"I’m just wondering if you had any idea about the accident. How it happened."

She shook her head. "It’s hard to figure. Steve could’ve flown that plane in his sleep. So scratch pilot error. What’s left? A bomb? A lunatic? Equipment failure? Instrument failure? I don’t know."

"Captain Donnelly was good, wasn’t he?"

"The best. We were at Pan-Am together and he was a top captain. That was…"

"Before he started drinking," Digger said.

She looked at him in surprise.

"I told you. I talked to Batchelor. And I talked to Mrs. Donnelly before that."

"
She
ought to know about his drinking."

"I know she’d drive me to drink," Digger said amiably.

"Anyone. Listen, Abraham. Hey, you don’t mind, I just can’t call you Elmo, I couldn’t call a cocker spaniel Elmo. How deep are you digging into this? Why don’t you just get the F.A.A. report when it’s done?"

"Look, let’s level. I’m not a cop. I’m not some kind of newspaper snoop or government inspector. All I do is go around and try to figure out how things happened so that just maybe they don’t happen again. So I look at everything. People’s frame of mind. Equipment. Procedures. Lunatics. You name it, maybe it’s important to me. I don’t know until I have it all figured out."

She sipped her drink and stared at him. The liquor was startng to erase the washed-out look from her eyes. Finally, she nodded and said, "Go ahead, ask away. I’ll tell you anything I know." She said it as if she had weighed all the alternatives and, reluctantly, this was the only possible decision.

"All right. Why don’t you like Mrs. Donnelly?"

She hesitated. "I…"

"You said anything."

"I guess I did. My big heart gets me into trouble again. Aren’t you hot in that jacket?"

"No."

The question made her conscious of her own robe and she pulled it tighter around her shoulders, covering up her deep cleavage. She sipped at her drink, then swallowed it quickly. "Steve and I were lovers when we both worked for Pan-Am. I’m sorry you never met him. There was never anybody quite like him. He was happy and fun-loving and good-natured and I don’t think there was anybody in the world who knew him who didn’t love him."

"What happened?"

"Trini happened. She came along and made a run at him and she got him all messed up. We all knew what was happening but you can’t talk a man out of anything like that. She got him messed up."

"How’d she do that?"

"She got knocked up. So Steve, being Steve, married her. Then he found out she was a bitch on wheels. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted. She slept around. She drank like a goddam camel after three months in the desert. That’s when Steve started drinking. I still used to fly with him, but the heart was out of him. He was so damned low all the time. Then I left and I kind of lost touch."

"Why’d you leave?" Digger asked.

"A man. I got married. All very professional. Marriage, fights, separation, and divorce. It would have all fit in one week in a soap opera. I moved back to Atlanta with my folks and I was out of the business for a long time. I used to hear about Steve from friends. Then he left Pan-Am. They told me that the booze was really bad. Finally, I moved down here and found a job with Interworld and who’s there but Steve."

"How long ago was that?"

"Two years or so."

"What was he like then?"

"It’s funny. He had stopped drinking, so I guess his health was better, but I didn’t really see him when he was heavy on the sauce so I don’t know. He was still unhappy, though, you could tell."

"No chance of picking up where you left off?"

"No. You’re going to laugh at this," she said. "But he got religion. There’s this minister in town…Reverend Dariell or something."

"Wardell?"

"Yeah. Anyway, Steve was going to this guy and he was different, really different. He was off the juice and he was straight arrow with his wife. He even gave up smoking not too long ago. It wasn’t like the old days but at least he seemed happy."

"You think it was this Reverend Wardell?"

"Steve said it was. He always talked about him, tried to get us to go with him to church. That was a laugh. I mean, Randy and I, we’re not your average church types, but I don’t know, if Wardell could bottle whatever it is he’s got, I’d buy some and take it every day."

"Vodka’s the closest thing I know in a bottle. Mind if I help myself?"

"No. Do mine, too. The change in Steve was really good to see."

"But it didn’t last," Digger said.

"How’d you know that?"

"I don’t know. Your tone of voice or something. What happened?"

"A few months ago, suddenly he became like edgy. You know how sometimes a guy’s been dry for a while without any problems, and then all of a sudden staying away from the booze really gets to be too much for him."