Cape Disappointment (24 page)

THE DRIZZLE INTENSIFIED
as the last groups on the tarmac broke up. On my way to the car I lost track of Snake and then was waylaid by Ruth Ponzi, who asked if she could have a few minutes of my time. “I don't think so,” I replied rather uncharitably.

“But … that's not fair,” she sputtered. “We had a deal. I was going to answer your questions and you were going to answer mine.”

Reluctant to welsh on a bargain, at least not openly, I let her ask questions for five minutes, giving replies that were either shrugs, expletives, or “I don't recall.” In a sadistic way it was actually kind of fun teasing her, something I would regret later. She fished for personal tidbits about Kathy and me being on opposite sides during the campaign. She wanted all the details of my watching helplessly as the plane went down. Ponzi wanted a story with human dimensions, but I wasn't about to offer up my life or Kathy's for the gum-chewing masses. In the end, I answered her questions, but didn't give a single credible detail to scribble down. “If you decide you want to talk, give me a call. I would really like to write this.”

“I know you would.”

Not far from my Ford, in the parking lot by the fence, I found Snake chatting with Joey Hilditch, who was standing next to a Honda with side panels of different colors. They were talking about the stock market, Joey happily and rather shyly explaining how he'd bought a bundle
of penny stock in a company that purported to be researching the biggest AIDS medication breakthrough in history. He'd invested everything he could scrape together, had even borrowed from his girlfriend and his girlfriend's parents. “The odds of it hitting big are one in a thousand,” he said. “But when it hits, I'll be set for life.”

Snake said, “I've dumped every cent into a new Internet idea. It's going to be the hottest thing since sliced bread.”

Everybody had money in a secret stock.

“Joey,” I said. “Anything in your family history that might give these suicide theories room to breathe?”

“My dad's father killed himself. But that was a long time ago, before I was even born. And I guess, now that you bring it up, I had an uncle who killed himself, too.”

“Your father's brother?”

“Yeah.”

“How long ago?”

“My uncle shot himself when I was about two. You don't think my father killed all those people? He would never do that.” Joey looked desperate. I hadn't meant to alarm him, but the question had come up, and it would come up again.

“No, I don't,” I said, though I had no idea if he had. “How was your father's marriage?”

“Twenty-six years and going strong.”

Once we were in the car, I turned to Snake. “There's no way he committed suicide, except his father did and his brother did?”

“Give the kid a break. He loved his pop, and he doesn't want it to be a murder-slash-suicide. Even
you
don't want that. What we want is for it to be an accident.”

“Yeah? What does your brother want it to be?”

“With Bert, anything bad happens, it's a government setup. But don't
you
go down that path.”

“No way.”

“I'm warning you.”

Less than twenty minutes later we were on Mercer Island searching for an address off West Mercer Way, a twisty road famous in the cycling community. On a summer evening, you might see sixty or eighty cyclists
pass by in an hour. It was drizzling when we found Freddy Mitz's property, which sloped steeply down to the beach. Across the lake we could see the verdant hills of Seward Park and beyond that housing clusters in Seattle. As we hiked the steep driveway, Snake observed, “This would be the place to watch the hydro races from.”

The house was sprawling, two stories over the garages, but one story everywhere else, extensive landscaped shrubbery in front and a small wrought-iron gate through which we passed to descend a set of staggered concrete stairs to the front door. I'd called earlier, so Claire Mitz was expecting me. She opened the front door and was startled to see Snake. In this neighborhood he looked more like some mountebank selling phony magazine subscriptions than anything else.

“Mr. Black?” she said, turning to me with something akin to distress.

“That's right, but call me Thomas.”

“At Freddy's funeral somebody pointed you out. I was told you'd lost your wife on the plane.”

“And you made it to Kathy's service. I hope I wasn't rude. I think I was rude to everybody. I was in shock.”

“I was the same at Freddy's.”

“Maybe so, but you were very gracious. I was rude.”

We were members of an exclusive club, the membership select, the dues painful. For me, the endless chain of black-clad grieving widows, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children, friends, and associates had made life during the past week almost unbearable. At night, when I wasn't thinking about riding a plane into the ocean, I got lost amid a sea of grieving faces. The truth was, I'd attended so many funerals by the time Kathy's came along, I had all the favorite Bible passages memorized; I could recite the Robert Frost poem by heart. Partially because of that numbing effect, Kathy's services had barely scratched my consciousness. I'd passed the day in a fog.

“Come in,” Claire Mitz said.

“This is Elmer Slezak. Claire Mitz.” Snake took off his hat. His cowboy boots made a racket on the slate entranceway. She walked us through an airy atrium to a large living room overlooking the water and the hills of Seward Park across the lake. “Beautiful home,” I said.

“Thank you. The property was in Freddy's family for forty years before
we put a house on it. I just hope we can keep it in the family. The taxes are going to kill us.”

We sat on tall, firm sofas in the living room while Claire bustled into the kitchen and came back with a silver tray bearing coffee and cookies. No matter what she claimed, she still had that deer-in-the-headlights look over the loss of her husband, though she did her best to play the hostess role. Everything in her life had been turned upside down. All of her thinking about what she was going to do next week and next year would have to be recalculated. She was probably still wrestling with the problem of what to do with her husband's personal effects. I sure didn't know how to handle Kathy's.

Claire Mitz was in her early forties, young-looking with a shock of short-cropped hair a stylist had frosted. I noticed she wore make up and earrings, along with a smart little ensemble in pink: trousers, a white blouse, and tiny pink shoes. It made me wonder if, unlike me, she was able to attend to her personal hygiene in spite of her grief, or if she'd been wandering around her empty house in the same pair of food-stained sweatpants for the past ten days, as I had. She was thick through the middle and large-breasted in the way some women become when they take on weight. She had pretty blue eyes framed by bangs cut straight across. You could see she'd been a heartthrob in high school and college.

When we were all seated, she said, “It was nice of you to come.”

“You're getting along all right?”

“Fine.” I'm sure my face betrayed the fact that I knew she was doing poorly. Misery recognizes misery.

“I'm here to pick your brain, Claire. If you don't mind. Anything you can tell me about Freddy or Chuck Hilditch. Does anything you've been reading in the papers strike you as not making sense?”

“I haven't been reading the papers.”

“Thomas is investigating the crash,” Snake said. “He's a private investigator.”

“I'm trying to stay out of the way of the official investigation,” I said, in response to her look.

“He's given them a couple of pictures of the crash as it happened,” Snake added. “So it's not like he hasn't helped.”

“Pictures? You mean photographs?”

“I was at the lighthouse on the coast when the plane went down. I got two photos of the plane going into the water.” Claire looked as if she were strangling. It was more or less the reaction I'd expected, which was why I hadn't brought it up myself.

“Does … ?”

“They don't show much. It's so far away it almost looks like a toy plane.”

When Claire had composed herself, she said, “Do you have any reason to think the official investigations aren't going to uncover the truth?”

“I'm not sure. I only know I have to do this myself.” Outside the window a floatplane flew low over Lake Washington, then headed up into the drizzle. Every time I saw a small plane now I expected it to crash. “Is there anything about the accident itself that strikes you as odd?”

“It was all odd.”

“They stayed the night in Portland?”

“Chuck had a sister he wanted to visit. He hadn't seen her in a while, and she'd had a baby.”

“Which meant you weren't going to see your husband for at least three more days?”

“Right. He'd been gone over two weeks. In some ways, it almost feels like he's still on a trip.”

“They were close? Chuck and Freddy?”

“Very.”

“And Freddy thought Chuck was a good pilot?”

“Freddy thought Chuck was as good as anything the air force had ever produced, including himself. Chuck lived to fly. So did Freddy, for that matter. I guess they died doing something they loved.”

“You've heard the suicide rumors? That one of the pilots might have been trying to …”

“That's absurd.”

“What about the plane? Had your husband mentioned any problems with it?”

“He didn't usually talk to me about the plane, but if he'd been worried about it, I'm sure he would have told me, and he didn't say anything.”

It was beginning to look like a waste of time: my trip here, Boeing Field, all of it. And then, as so often happens during an investigation, something we'd said or done toggled a series of synapses in her brain and she said, “There was one odd thing, but I'm sure it isn't relevant.”

“Everything is relevant.”

“That last night on the phone Freddy mentioned he'd seen a man he thought he recognized from the airfield in Seattle on a street in Portland. Freddy told me he went over and said hello to the guy. That's the sort of person Freddy was. If he knew you, he'd go over and say hi. But the man claimed he'd never seen Freddy before and hadn't been to Seattle in years. Freddy could have sworn he'd seen him at the airport in Seattle the day they left.”

“At Boeing Field?”

“Yes. And then ten days later on the street in Portland.”

“Probably somebody who looked like somebody else,” said Snake, the twin.

“That's what I told him,” Claire said. “But Freddy was sure he recognized him, even though he didn't know who the man was.”

I said, “But he was certain enough to walk up to the guy and say hello?”

“Yes. Freddy would never call anybody a liar, but he thought this man was lying. Knowing he was going to be flying a senator in a day, Freddy thought maybe it was a Secret Service agent who was embarrassed about getting spotted. You think?”

The Secret Service didn't make a habit of following pilots on the street, not unless they were considered a threat. And if he had been Secret Service, what had he been doing at Boeing Field two weeks prior to the flight?

“Did he happen to tell you what this man looked like?”

“No. He only mentioned it to me because he thought it was kind of strange.”

We spoke for another ten minutes. They'd been married young, back when Freddy was still in the air force, and had raised two children, a boy and a girl. The girl was at Mount Holyoke. The boy had an engineering degree from the University of Washington and was working for a software firm five miles away in Bellevue. As we left, I
said, “The man Freddy recognized in Portland? You tell the other investigators?”

“I didn't think of it until today. Should I?”

“Maybe. Yeah.”

“What do you make of it?”

“I don't know.”

WE WERE STILL ON MERCER ISLAND
when I rolled my car window down to let one of Snake's farts clear out. “Let's find Bert,” I said.

“Now don't be dragging my brother into this. And close the window, would you? It's cold.”

“Where is he?”

“I thought he was back in Maryland looking for work until I read he got himself arrested at the Cape.”