Cape Disappointment (22 page)

It was astonishing how many bloggers thought our government was being corrupted and run by a cutthroat cabal of power brokers and fat-cat billionaires. This was the same contingent who contended our elections were frauds and the true vote hadn't been counted in a national election in over a decade. We all knew the two-party system pumped out eerily similar candidates in a mysterious and complex manner, but according to these conspiracy theorists, even with only
two candidates, the reigning powers found it necessary to engage in massive electronic election fraud. Other websites claimed a silent coup had already taken over the government. It was enough to make my head swim. Two weeks ago it would have taken a cattle prod to force me to read this kind of conjecture, but now I gobbled it down whole. Strange how losing your wife in a plane crash stretches the boundaries of what you are willing to entertain as reality.

I knew there were only a few indicators that my suspicions had any basis in reality, and those indicators might have been attributable to poor reporting and sloppy statements. But then, there had been Bert Slezak's exhortation that I bar Kathy from traveling with Jane Sheffield. He must have known
something.
Any of these items taken singly could be brushed off, but together they raised my antenna.

Snake said I would feel better after I found somebody to blame. He was right. Having it attributed to a burned-out wire or a seagull flying into a prop wasn't going to give me the satisfaction that finding a living culprit would. As I continued to read, the wackiness factor began to fade and I found myself open to theories that would have sounded perfectly preposterous two days ago. I began to believe the Paul Wellstone crash in 2002 had been sloppily and/or fraudulently investigated. What made it worse were the parallels between the Wellstone and Sheffield crashes.

Wellstone had been highly critical of the administration at a time when it was being accused of dirty tricks, at a time when every senatorial vote was crucial, at a time when key administration critics were being silenced by various means. Sheffield had been in much the same position, having been a radical and constant critic of the current administration. What could silence a critic more completely or permanently than a plane crash? During the current elections, national commentators had repeatedly opined that the course of the nation and of world affairs would hinge on one or two key elections around the country, and one of those elections was Maddox versus Sheffield. It had been disturbing to the conservatives who were backing Maddox to realize the polls placed him so far behind Sheffield. Party insiders were frustrated that his campaign hadn't gained traction despite the millions of dollars poured into TV ads. The vice president himself singled out the Maddox race as a grave disappointment.

The hue and cry over the election was one of the reasons Kathy and I had been at odds. The stakes were enormous: control of the U.S. Senate and thus the country for the next few years. Ideologically, I'd been on Sheffield's side, but personally I'd thrown in with Maddox. I'd taken it as a matter of faith that any aid I gave him would be futile, but now that Sheffield was out of the picture and national pundits were attacking our governor for promising Sheffield's position to her husband should she be elected, I wondered if there wasn't something too convenient for the current White House in these events. It was fine to have good luck, but sometimes a dealer rolled sevens so many times in a row you had to suspect the dice.

Because I had so consistently dismissed 9/11 conspiracy theories in the past, I was reluctant to align myself with their sponsors now, but most of the people who were suspicious about the Sheffield tragedy were also distraught with the 9/11 Commission report.

My thought was that in the morning I could begin corralling the facts and correct my false impressions, if any; I would discard the bat-shit theories and adhere to the known, but tonight, just for the hell of it, I read on. It was interesting stuff in a kind of sci-fi way. Strangely, energized by wildcat hypotheses here in the middle of the night, I had more vigor than I'd had all week. It was amazing how much adrenaline a good conspiracy can inject into your bloodstream. I don't remember falling asleep or even going to bed, but I must have, because it was after eight o'clock when I woke up under the covers.

I went into the spare bedroom, where I kept my weights when it was too cold to use them in the garage, and pumped iron for twenty minutes, just enough to get my blood circulating, then took a shower. I shaved, combed my hair, dressed in slacks, put on one of the two ties I owned and a dark blazer.

After preparing a breakfast of eggs, toast, and grapefruit juice, I called Snake, who, without a word, made his way to the bathroom to wash up and then a minute later began inhaling food as if he'd been stranded in the outback for a month. He'd spent the night in his hat and boots. “You got anything to do today?” I asked.

“Yeah. I'm going to follow you around and make sure you don't step in any cowpies. You in a hurry?”

“I'll wait for you to finish.”

“Better give me time to drop a deuce, too. Man, you hate that guy from last night, don't you?”

“Kalpesh? Just for the part where he got my wife killed.”

“He couldn't have known the plane was going down.”

“Your brother did.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You're not going to talk me out of it.”

“Okay. Want me to whack him?”

“Maybe later.”

Once again we took my SHO. The streets were slick with an overnight rain, and clouds to the south were scudding along in front of a strong southwesterly wind, puddles of blue sky over Lake Washington to the east of us. It was good to be out of the house and traversing the planet. Over the years Snake and I had been through a lot. I valued his friendship, his quiet nature, even his eccentricities. Most of all, right now I valued his presence.

We slogged through traffic on I-5 for forty minutes before the Albro exit took us to surface streets and then Boeing Field, which was visible at the south end of the city just off the interstate. Northwest Apple was based in a hangar on the east side of the field off Perimeter Road. On the tarmac I saw another Beechcraft King Air 100 with a Northwest Apple Flight logo on the side of the fuselage. The parking lot was filled with TV vans. Because it was beginning to sprinkle again, ten or twelve reporters were huddled under an awning outside the front door.

We elbowed our way into the Apple office, where we were told Hoagland was in a meeting and wouldn't be available to answer questions for at least an hour. Hardly larger than a dentist's waiting room, the Apple office was crowded and stuffy, the windows fogged over. Snake and I joined the gang under the awning outside. Near the corner of the building, one man talked too loudly on a cellphone, as if putting on a performance for the rest of us. That inspired two women to take out their phones and compete with him. Snake exhaled loudly through his nostrils and looked around for something or someone to occupy his time. He chose a tall, gawky woman with huge feet and teeth that looked too big for her face. Her pretty blue eyes were desperate with eyeliner.

She was almost as tall as I was, which put her at eight inches taller
than Snake, but neither that nor the wedding ring on her finger deterred him. He joked with her about the weather, the wait, the man on the cellphone. I recognized her name from
Seattle Times
articles: Ruth Ponzi.

“I've been reading your stuff,” I said.

“Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I really do.” She turned to Snake and said, “Do you by any chance have a brother or a cousin who lives in the state?”

“My brother, Bert. You're not dating him, are you?”

“No. I'm married.”

“That wouldn't stop Bert.”

“Yes. Well, it would stop
me,”
she said. “Can you tell me anything about his arrest at Cape Disappointment a couple of days after the airplane crash? I saw him get hauled away in handcuffs. When I tried to get a short interview, they told me he was being held incommunicado.”

Snake and I exchanged a glance. “We knew he'd been arrested, but we don't have any of the details,” Snake said. “Which agency arrested him?”

“I'm not sure.”

I made a mental note to call Beulah and ask if Bert had phoned.

Beulah was still working half days, collecting phone messages left by people who didn't realize Kathy was dead, and messages for me left by people who didn't realize I was out of commission. Periodically Beulah would stack up the messages on my answering machine, but I'd been ignoring them. At the funeral I hugged her and sat by myself. If I saw her afterward, I had no memory of it.

“You've been doing most of the reporting on the crash investigation for the
Times,
haven't you?” I asked Ponzi.

“I don't know that I've been doing
most,
but certainly a lot. I'm glad you like it.”

“I never said I liked it.”

“I'm sorry. Is there something wrong with my reporting?”

“Just the inaccuracies.”

Taking umbrage, she stretched to her full height, something she'd been avoiding in the way that tall girls tried to avoid but tall women didn't. “In what regard have I been inaccurate about the accident?”

“There's your first inaccuracy. Was it an accident?”

Her face turned pink, and she was doing something with her mouth, covering her teeth with her lips. Snake was giving me a dour look. If he'd had any chance of bedding this woman, I'd blown it for him. “I suppose you were there?” she said, finally.

“I watched the plane go down. Yes.”

“Even the Coast Guardsman manning the lighthouse didn't see the plane go down.”

“I did. So did half a dozen old gummers off a tour bus.”

We stared at each other for a moment, and then, in an effort perhaps to buttress his chances with this woman, Snake said, “Thomas's wife was on the plane.”

She regarded me for a long time. “I'm sorry,” Ponzi said, blushing again. Snake had been trying to make her feel better about my onslaught, but his declaration had the opposite effect. “I had no idea. In fact … I tried to talk to you. We did a piece on each of the victims … I called you. Maybe you didn't get my messages.”

“I got them.”

“I don't understand.”

“You don't understand why I wouldn't talk to the news two days after watching my wife's plane go into the ocean?”

“Thomas,” Snake said. “Be nice.”

“Everyone else talked to us,” she added.

“I guess I'm just a sissy, then.”

“My editor was all over me for not getting quotes from you, but I guess I wasn't taking your feelings into account. I sincerely apologize.” Tears filled her eyes as she stepped closer. But then, incredibly, she flipped her notebook open while at the same time crabbing her left hand around in her purse for a pen, never once taking her eyes off mine. “You mind if I ask a few questions now?”

“Not until you answer mine.”

“Sure.”

“For starters, why do you keep writing that there was only one pilot?”

“Well, that's how the NTSB people are saying it. There was a pilot and a copilot. So there really was only
one
pilot. Isn't that right?”

“You're framing the tragedy so that it can be explained away more easily. People think of a small plane going down with only one pilot on board and they can come up with a thousand scenarios for a crash.

One guy could make a mistake. Misread the instruments. Have a heart attack. But it doesn't get so easy if there are two.”

“Point taken. From now on I'll write ‘pilots,' plural.”

“Also, you keep hinting the weather might have been a component by saying it was less than ideal that day. Anything other than clear blue skies and no wind is less than ideal. You know the weather wasn't a factor, but by repeating that it was less than ideal, you create a climate in which it's easy for your readers to dismiss the crash as weather-related when you and I both know it wasn't. And as for the iced-wing theory you keep proposing, local pilots who were up that day have already discounted the possibility. Also, the plane had two separate deicing systems on board. You didn't bother to mention it.”

“I thought I'd put that in.”

“No.”

“You reported that the NTSB was looking for the voice cockpit recorders, but there were none. Why didn't they know that?”

“Listen. Some of these things are editorial decisions.”

“Then there was that crap about it being a close race. There was
nothing
close about the race.”

“Now that
was
an editorial decision.”

“Right up until the time the plane went down, Sheffield was way ahead and you know it.”

“If you disagree with something I've written,” said Ponzi, “you can email me. I
do
want to get this right, you know.”

“Is anybody looking into the possibility that the plane might have been brought down on purpose?”

“You mean a tinfoil-hat conspiracy?”

“The very fact that you call it that tells me you don't have an open mind.”

“On the contrary, I have an extremely open mind. But there are conspiracy nuts coming out of the woodwork, and that's one of their accusations, that the plane was brought down on purpose. A missile or something.”

“Is that why nobody in the mainstream press brought it up? Because they don't want to be seen as crackpots?”

“It's the sort of thinking we're trying to avoid. That it was shot down.”

“Why?”

“Well, because …”

“Because why?”

“I guess … I don't know, really.”

“Something bad happens,” I said, “an accident or a crime occurs without an explanation, you list the possibilities and then eliminate them one by one, and you make sure people know when a theory has been discarded and why. You list those who might benefit from the event and eliminate
them
one by one. When somebody makes a list and leaves off a possibility— even if it's being touted by a bunch of twits— I have to wonder why.”

Ponzi was about to respond when something occurred inside the office that sent reporters funneling through the front door.