Impact (7 page)

“We
are. I didn't plan for three. What's the matter with Jack?”

“Out of town.”

“Jack's been out of town for years. And he's been out to lunch even longer.”

“According to Laura, he's about to make a ton of money on that resort thing he's talked about for so long.”

“Good. She can afford to take a cab.”

He waited for the phrase to dissolve in its hydrocholeric bath. “Why are you being like this?”

“Because I'm not looking forward to spending my evening watching you making
cow
eyes at Laura Donahue. You'd think she was
royalty
, for crying out loud.”

“She's attractive, Brenda, and I like attractive women. I know that's a federal offense these days, but I can't help it. I
like
them. Present company included.”

“The present company hasn't kept company with
you
for a long time, has she? This is the first night we've gone anywhere this month.”

“I've been busy. So have you.”

Brenda paused long enough to make him dread what was coming—he often dreaded what came after Brenda stopped to think.

“We used to
make
time, Keith,” she intoned. “Busy or no. Why do you suppose we don't do that anymore?”

“We're making time right now.”

“I wouldn't call—”

“I told her we'd be by a little before eight,” he interrupted before she could shove him further toward the admission of inconstancy she so clearly wanted him to make.

“No,”
she ordered angrily. “We can't. I'm sorry to spoil your plans, but I want to go by Carol's before the dance.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm worried. She's been depressed lately. I thought we could cheer her up.”

“I could pick up Laura, then go by for you at Carol's.”

“No, you have to come too.”

“Why?”

“Because Carol thinks you're funny. For reasons not readily apparent,” Brenda added with a demeaning fillip.

He sighed. “What's her problem?”

“I
think
she's found another man. Probably a married one—it wouldn't be the first time. Remember Paddy Runnels? God. If I told her once I told her a thousand times, ‘If Sadie doesn't want him, why on earth would you?' But Carol never listens to me about men, not since I caught her playing doctor with Billy Pinnock.”

Tollison cupped the phone and paged idly through the Wilson file. “Okay,” he yielded. “I'll call Laura and tell her we can't make it. But I think you're being silly.”

“And I think you're being blind. She's nothing but a gold digger, Keith. Why else would she stay married to Jack?”

“Jack puts up a big front, but unless that resort thing gets rolling, he's barely keeping his head above water. At least that's what I hear at the barbershop.”

“Maybe,” Brenda muttered. “And maybe he just doesn't like spending it in places the boys at the barbershop can see.” She paused, and her voice spread into a more appealing timbre. “I'll see you at seven-thirty. Okay? I don't want to be mean, Keith. But at my age I don't think I have to put up with a man playing footsies with another woman under my nose.”

Tollison listened to the sizzle of the phone line, then replaced the receiver. Although he never knew which of his shortcomings Brenda knew of and which she merely guessed at, he was fairly certain she didn't know of his affair, since she had voiced similar suspicions long before he and Laura had given her grounds. But certainty was only a matter of time. Tollison leaned back and closed his eyes and began to recall their crooked history.

They had begun dating in high school, the result of a dare that was prompted by Brenda's risqué lineage—her father owned a bar and her mother had just run off with the Hamm's distributor, leaving her husband, two kids, and the six-to-midnight shift. But Brenda had been more exotic than Tollison had suspected—she used swear words casually, knew as much about sports as he did, got A's in trig and Spanish both, and always said exactly what was on her mind, which was often something titillating. The bogus date had spawned a second, and eventually they had done the prom, the all-sports banquet, and the other hallmarks of his senior year. In the process they had fought a losing battle with their cravings until they were stalled by a pregnancy scare just before graduation. Terrified by the experience, Tollison had sworn himself to abstinence. When he left Brenda behind as he went off to college, he planned, Tollison told her in a dozen panting promises, to return after his freshman year and make her his bride.

That grand design had endured six months. After returning to school from Christmas break, he began to hear rumors of Brenda's dalliance with an assortment of Altoona's toughs. Eventually, his parents mailed him a clipping announcing her betrothal to one of her more slovenly swains, a gas jockey who raced stock cars on the weekends. Although he had hacked at it with beer and a willing woman, the rejection festered, and when Tollison returned to Altoona for the summer, Brenda was still uppermost in his mind. But when he ran into her at a party, his lingering affection was quickly doused. Having given up on herself for reasons he had never learned, Brenda seemed determined to make him duplicate her slide, belittling his ambitions so inclusively that his interest in her vanished.

By the time he entered law school, Brenda had married the mechanic and had a child, a strangely warped appendage who had come to be called Spitter. In response to an atavistic urge, the mechanic had volunteered for duty in Vietnam and been killed for the impulse. When Tollison returned to Altoona he found the reach of Brenda's social life was reduced to her peculiar child, her sister, Carol, and a coven of embittered teachers at Altoona High, where she taught four periods of freshman comp and two of junior lit.

For a second time they began to date, partly because there remained a trace of their high school hunger and partly because they were two of the few unmarried adults in Altoona and a string of helpful hostesses thought they remembered there had once been something serious between them. And, on Tollison's part, because Brenda was preferable to the string of spinster ladies his mother sent his way and to the periodic one-night stands he negotiated in San Francisco.

The reborn romance had ebbed and flowed for a decade, now passionate or at least resolute, now limp and mechanistic. The wounds they had inflicted upon each other over the years made each occasionally compelled to treat the other cruelly, as though to prove that between the two of them there could be no bygones. The relationship was thus a bumpy road that Tollison followed in large part because it relieved him of the burden of courting strangers. Still, he liked and even admired Brenda—her loyalties were fierce, her sense of injustice as acute as his, her intellectual aspirations far outdistanced his own, and her periodic expressions of soft sentiment were as moving as they were unexpected.

But those charms had not been enough; given the chance, he had quickly strayed. Smitten to his toes from the moment he laid eyes on Laura Donahue, Tollison had kept his hopes in check for years, until she came to see him about filing for divorce. Her reasons had been vague, though if the rumors about Jack were true, she could name half the women in Altoona as co-respondents. But after consultation over a period of several months, Laura had decided not to leave her husband after all, for reasons as unformed as those she gave for consulting Tollison in the first place. Then, only a week after telling him she had decided to stay with Jack, Laura had called to tell him she had decided to have an affair. Over the pounding of his hopeful heart, he asked her who she planned to play with. She answered simply: “You. If you'll have me.”

“I'll have you any way you come,” was what he thought he'd said.

They had met that very night, some eighteen months before, in a bar in Sebastopol where they correctly assumed no one would know anyone, and proceeded from there to a seedy motel in Santa Rosa that had, because of what it had permitted them, grown in his imagination to resemble the Taj Mahal. Over the succeeding months they sculpted their liaison. Covert schemes, unwitting allies, elaborate evasions—all were servants of their charade. Like adolescents, they believed they invented each emotion that stirred them, coined each phrase that passed their lips, originated each erotic expression of their love. Like Victorians, they reveled in their secret, then berated themselves for contravening the laws of God, or at least Altoona.

Since the beginnings of his affair with Laura, Tollison told himself that he wanted nothing less for Brenda than what he had found himself, which was a passion equal to the one they shared before he had gone away and left her to Altoona. But that was not quite right. Although his pursuit of Laura caused him to increasingly regard Brenda as an irritant, his failure to break with her completely stemmed from the sense that if Laura eventually cast him off, in a loathsome corner of his hardened heart he wanted Brenda to be ready to take him back.

As usual, Sandy peeked in before he could subdue the past or divine the future. The jail appointment was set, and Mrs. Rushton was on line one. Tollison put the women in his life aside and persuaded the mother to allow him to spring her son. Then, filling his cup with well-aged coffee, he got to work, relieved to be confronted with a task that would yield to brute persistence.

A half hour got him to the final clauses of the Wilson contract, a string of turgid phrases covering anticipatory breaches and willful defaults, forfeitures and restitution, all so his client could unload five acres of apple orchard on the local car-wash king—the circumlocutions and equivocations a pathetic bulwark against mankind's innate tendency to break its word. The originator of such boilerplate thought the labored language would keep disputes between the parties away from lawyers and out of court. Instead, the added ambiguity increased the possible grounds for quarrel. Lawyers feeding lawyers; sharks feeding on their own.

As he fumbled with the wording, Tollison realized his research into land contracts needed updating before he sent the instrument to Wilson for approval. He would have to check the texts, look into recent developments to make sure he didn't screw up … when? He flipped through the calendar. A cocaine trial, two OMVUIIs, a bar meeting. Status conferences, suppression hearings, appellate arguments. No time, except for the hours he regularly promised Brenda while he schemed to award them to Mrs. Donahue.

Tollison picked up the phone to tell Laura he wouldn't be able to provide a taxi. When there was no answer, he left a message on her machine. Minutes later, in the musty basement of his law office, he donned his best blue suit and tried to foresee the evening—if he dared ask Laura to dance, what she would say when he held her close, whether in the grip of mischief he would make a miscue so brash that he would, like so many of his hapless clients, incriminate himself with foolishness.

Aviation Investigations, Inc.

F. Raymond Livingood, Ph.D.,

Founder and Chief Investigator

Site Inspection Report, March 27, 1987—

SurfAir Flight 617 (Hastings H-11 Fan-jet):

Suspected Midair Collision

THIS REPORT CONSTITUTES THE WORK PRODUCT OF ALEC HAWTHORNE, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW, AND IS PROTECTED BY THE ATTORNEY-CLIENT AND WORK-PRODUCT PRIVILEGES.

On March 23, 1987, pursuant to the telephone request of Daniel Griffin, Esq., of the Law Offices of Alec Hawthorne, I proceeded to the site of the crash of SurfAir flight 617, near Woodside, California.

I arrived at the scene at approximately 8:15
P
.
M
., some two hours after the accident. I was able to obtain a ride with Ralph Hutchins, the IIC (Investigator in Charge) out of the National Transportation Safety Board's San Francisco office, a friend from my days with that agency. Needless to say, my presence in the Go Team vehicle should remain confidential.

The immediate environment was typical of a major air disaster. (Videotape to be provided.) The aircraft impacted on a heading of approximately 050 degrees magnetic, and left a gouge in the ground about 400 feet long. The main wreckage came to rest on a heading of 240 degrees magnetic.

The cockpit and approximately the forward one third of the main cabin were crushed. A portion of the rear fuselage and tail assembly had broken away from the main wreckage and appeared relatively Intact. The two fan-jet engines had separated from the wings and lay on either side of the fuselage, some 50 to 100 feet forward of the main cabin. The right wing had struck a eucalyptus tree and was folded back against the fuselage; the left wing separated from the fuselage upon impact with a rock outcropping. Landing gear were fully retracted. The aircraft struck the ground at a near level attitude, indicating the pilot was in sufficient control of the flight systems to attempt an emergency landing.

Although the aft portion of the fuselage remained intact, virtually all seats appeared to have torn free, causing the occupants to be hurtled into or through the bulkhead. Most passengers appeared to be still in their seat restraints, but some had been thrown free. It was impossible to estimate the number of casualties from observation of the remains; however, estimates by airline personnel at the scene were that a full complement of 120 passengers and eight crew members was aboard.

By the time I reached the site, remains were already being gathered into disaster pouches by the coroner's personnel. Body parts were being segregated by type—legs in one bag, arms in another, etc. All remains were charred from postimpact burning.

There were apparently several survivors—estimates run as high as twenty. Passengers with vital signs were taken to hospitals in Palo Alto and San Jose. The names and addresses of the survivors are beyond the scope of this report.

Initial observation revealed no evidence of metal splatter or hot spots indicative of pre-impact fire or explosion in either the engines or the cabin. The cabin floor did not appear to have collapsed, at least not in the rear portion of the fuselage, so interruption of hydraulic systems is not indicated. I saw no major component pieces outside the impact swath, so in-flight structural failure is not indicated. Temperatures on the ground were sufficiently substantial to preclude in-flight engine shutdown. It should be noted that because of the fire, I could not get near enough to the wreckage to make a definitive assessment of these points. Follow-up will be provided.