Hot Start (22 page)

Glancing down at the field, now 500 feet below me, I could see that the airport’s resident firefighters had swung into action. Two lime-green fire engines loaded with foam retardant were rolling onto the taxiway paralleling the runway on which I was preparing to land, their lights flashing. Alongside was a paramedic unit.

As they say, better safe than sorry.

I chopped power, dumped full flaps, and turned short final. The landing was otherwise uneventful.

“Thanks for the help, fellas, regardless,” I radioed as I rolled out and slowed down.

The ambulance and fire engines waited until I’d turned safely off the runway before shutting off their emergency lights and slinking back to their station on the north side of the field. Yet another false alarm. You could almost feel the crews’ disappointment.

My mechanic friend Larry was waiting outside, wiping his ever-dirty hands on a rag. I didn’t bother parking in my normal spot. I taxied over directly in front of his hangar, shut down the
Duck’s
engine, and hopped out.

“Good lord,” Larry said.

Vulture blood and entrails, mixed with bits of black feathers, streamed aft from what remained of the airplane’s windscreen. Blood coated the leading edge of the portside wing all the way across the top of the passenger compartment to the starboard wing root. The
Duck
was a mess and so, apparently, was I.

“You look like you just went twelve rounds with Big Bird. You OK, Logan?”

“Far as I can tell.”

Not a scratch. Amazing. My polo shirt was sticky with bird gore. I stripped it off and used a clean part to wipe my face as Larry leaned inside the plane and glanced around.

“Well,” he said, reaching into the backseat and gingerly holding up what was left of the vulture by one foot, “as my teenage daughter, the National Honor Society student, might say, ‘Gross me out.’ You’re lucky this homely sumbitch didn’t take your head off when he decided to commit suicide. I mean, look at the size of this thing.”

The carcass was headless. Blood dripped on the tarmac.

“You can wash up in the hangar,” Larry said. “Might as well burn those clothes. Vulture stink don’t come out.”

“It sounds like you’re speaking from personal experience.”

He grunted, mildly amused, and heaved what was left of the dead bird into a trash can.

“Hey, Logan?”

“Yeah, Larry?”

“I just want to say, I’m glad you’re still with us, but if you want me to change out your windscreen, you’re gonna have to clean up inside your plane first, cuz no way I’m working around chunks of dead bird.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

L
ARRY
HAD
one of those flimsy, freestanding plastic shower stalls in the back of his hangar. Soap was a pump bottle of heavy-duty, degreasing hand cleaner. What he didn’t have was towels. I air-dried as I walked naked to the storage closet that served as my business office, where I kept a set of clean clothes—or
thought
I did. I couldn’t find them. Larry fortunately had spares. I practically swam in a pair of his navy blue work pants. On the front of the T-shirt he loaned me were the words, “Please tell your boobs to stop staring at my eyes.” The shirt was not what I would call my style, but it would have to do until I got home and changed.

I e-mailed Evan Gantz to let him know what had happened and that I wouldn’t be meeting him in Riverside after all, apologizing for any inconvenience. If anyone could understand, I figured, it was another pilot. He called me a minute later.

“I’ve nailed a few birds myself,” Gantz said. “Hit a goose once. Lost an engine. Those things really make a mess. Guts everywhere.”

“Geese have nothing on turkey vultures,” I said.

He hesitated, then he said, “So you wanted to ask me about hookers and politicians.”

“You preferred to talk in person.”

“And I still do, but I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Logan. You’ve got my curiosity up. I’ve got a couple of minutes. We can talk now if you want.”

“I appreciate it.”

Gantz said he’d started flying for Roy Hollister about four years earlier, rotating with Pete McManus depending on their respective availability. Sometimes Hollister flew his Citation alone, as pilot-in-command. Sometimes, particularly on long, transoceanic flights, he’d hire Gantz or McManus to fly right seat.

“Roy Hollister was a good pilot,” Gantz said. “Always ahead of the plane. Knew what he was doing. Then, about a year ago, he changed.”

“How so?”

“More on edge, pissed off all the time. A lot more, I dunno, secretive, I guess you could say.”

A private jet touched down out on the main runway, rumbling the hangar with its reverse thrusters. I waited for the noise to subside.

“Explain that to me,” I said over the phone. “When you say he was more secretive . . . ?”

“He just . . . he’d get mad at you for no reason. I remember once I asked him how his weekend was. I knew he was going flying somewhere by himself. He just blew up at me. Told me to mind my own business.”

“What about call girls, flights back and forth to Europe?”

“That one’s news to me,” Gantz said. “I’m not saying Roy couldn’t have been doing something like that—I always got the impression he was into kinky stuff, and his plane definitely had the range—but I never flew any passengers like that when I was with him. I would’ve noticed, believe me.”

“What about Congressman Pierce Walton?”

“That was one thing Roy wasn’t secretive about,” Gantz said. “He bragged about his friendship with Walton. My buddy the congressman this, my buddy the congressman that. Seemed like we were always flying Walton around to charity dinners and golf tournaments. He’s a super nice guy, by the way, Walton. Very humble. Never had any issues with him.”

“People tell me Toni Hollister was a real sweetheart too,” I said.

“Toni? Toni was great. Super nice lady. Could never do enough for you. Used to bake us oatmeal cookies.”

“Did you ever hear anything to the effect that she was having an affair?”

Several seconds passed before he responded. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, you might want to talk to Pete McManus about that.”

“Why McManus?”

“I just . . .” There was a hesitancy in Gantz’s tone. “That’s all I’m really prepared to say. Anyway I really do have to go. Sister’s getting hitched. Big rehearsal lunch.”

We’d already muttered good-byes when Gantz said, “One thing before I go. I’d really hate to see Toni dragged through the mud. Sort of like her being murdered twice, you know?”

“I’ll try not to let that happen.”

“Good luck with your plane, Mr. Logan.”

“See you around the pattern, Evan.”

Pilot Pete McManus had given me his card days earlier while we were both standing in the lunch line at Tequila Mockingbird. I dug it out of my wallet. He lived in a lower-middle-class neighborhood east of the airport, on Lomita Place. In Rancho Bonita, lower-middle-class can translate to $750,000 or more for even a two-bedroom, one-bath fixer. I went home, showered again, changed out of Larry’s clothes, and drove over.

What I saw when I got there would take me a long time to forget.

EIGHTEEN

P
ete McManus lived in a post-war, ranch-style tract house with peeling gray siding, a front lawn more dirt than grass, and a couple of palm trees out front, slowly dying of thirst. A faded blue and white Air Line Pilots Association decal was stuck to the corner of the front window. I rang the doorbell. It didn’t seem to work. I opened the screen door and rapped loudly.

“Hello?”

No response.

A red Volkswagen Jetta that hadn’t seen a car wash in years, if ever, was parked on the curb in front. Somebody had scrawled, “Wash me,” on the back window. The shiny new BMW convertible McManus was driving when I’d seen him last was nowhere around.

On the side of the house was a chain-link fence. In back was a detached, two-car garage. The dented metal garage door was closed. Inside I could hear a woman sobbing mournfully and trying to sing.

The melody was hard to identify at first, let alone the lyrics. The woman was no crooner. But as I walked through the gate and drew closer, I realized that the tune was Adele’s “Someone Like You” and that there was raw anguish in her effort.

On the north wall of the garage was a weathered, partially open side door. I knocked and stepped inside, startling a very pregnant woman in her early thirties who had been standing at a workbench. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves and a bloodstained shop apron over a Mickey Mouse maternity top. Tears irrigated her cheeks. In her right hand was a meat cleaver.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

She stormed toward me, teeth bared, raising the blade over her head like she meant business. “Get the hell out of here!”

I snared her wrist easily, twisting the cleaver from her grip and kicking it under the bench.

“What do you think you’re doing? Let go of me!”

I held her as she fought to get away, her back to my chest, her arms pinned to her sides. “It’s OK. I’m a pilot, a friend of Pete’s. I’m not going to hurt you.”

Only then did I realize the garage was a butcher shop, but unlike any I’d ever seen. The remains of exotic game animals hung from the rafters on meat hooks—the hind quarter of a zebra with the hide still attached, something shaped like an elephant tusk, some sort of small deer. Piled on the workbench, next to an industrial-sized band saw, were hunks of raw meat that looked like they were being carved into steaks and roasts. Opposite the workbench was a wall-sized cooler with glass doors like the kind you’d find at any convenience store, only this cooler was crammed top to bottom with packaged meat wrapped in clear plastic and neatly labeled: “KUDU”; “LEOPARD”; “LION”; “ORYX,” “RHINO.” Something acrid rose in my throat and stayed there.

“What is this place?”

She struggled to escape my grip. “What do you want?”

The cement floor was sticky with blood. The soles of my shoes stuck to it. “I’m not going to hurt you,” I repeated. “I just want to ask you a few questions, that’s all. You think I could do that?”

Her resistance lessened.

“. . . OK.”

“Great. It’s OK. You can trust me.”

I let her go. She backed away a couple of feet, wiping away tears and staring at the floor, too scared to look at me directly.

“My name’s Logan. I’m a flight instructor. Are you Pete’s wife?”

She nodded.

“What’s your name?”

“Peyton.”

“Nice to meet you, Peyton. Again, I’m sorry if I scared you. Is Pete around?”

She peeled off her gloves. “He’s up north somewhere.”

Freckled and of medium height, Peyton McManus was less pretty than she was cute, with a tangled thatch of hair the color of straw and buff-colored eyes rimmed red from crying. She wasn’t wearing a wedding band.

“What is this about?”

“Roy and Toni Hollister,” I said.

Her chin trembled. “Toni Hollister was a two-timing whore.” She pulled off the apron and tossed her rubber gloves angrily on the bench.

“What makes you say that?”

“I’m due in three weeks,” she said. “I gotta eat something.”

I followed her toward the back door. The yard was sun-baked dirt, littered with rusting oil drums, broken chunks of cinder block, and an old motorcycle missing its front wheel. She went inside and didn’t protest when I did likewise.

The kitchen hadn’t been updated in what looked to be about fifty years. Harvest gold appliances. Butcher block countertops. Rolled linoleum floor. Formica dinette set with chrome trim. She washed her hands in the sink and dried them on a dishrag draped over the handle of the oven door.

“Why was Toni a whore, Peyton?”

“What do you care?”

“I’m just asking, that’s all.”

“You said you’re a flight instructor.” She opened the refrigerator. Packages of meat like those in the garage were stacked on the shelves. One of them was labeled, “ELEPHANT.” “Why would a flight instructor care who Toni was banging, unless you were banging her too.”

“I didn’t know Toni. Never met her.”

She opened a can of Sprite and slapped a piece of American cheese between two slices of Wonder Bread. Eating nothing would’ve been more nutritious.

“Answer my question,” Peyton said, easing herself into a chair. “Why do you care?”

I told her how I’d gotten caught up in the Hollister case, how I’d known her husband for a while, and how I respected him as a pilot.

Peyton slowly chewed her sandwich without seeming to taste it. “Toni and my soon-to-be
former
spouse were sleeping together on a regular basis,” she said contemptuously. “The affair was going on for over a year, right under my nose. I only found out about it a couple days ago. Ran across some e-mails I wasn’t supposed to. Or maybe I was. I don’t care anymore.”

“I’m sorry, Peyton.”

She stared at nothing, lost in her own venomous thoughts. “Toni was always so
nice
to everybody. All hugs and air kisses. Couldn’t do enough for you. It was all an act. Such a fake bitch. And the thing was, I
trusted
her, you know?”

I didn’t say anything.

Peyton shook her head, staring into space. “The woman was, like, fifteen years older than him. OK, so she had money but, I mean, what kind of guy goes after some shriveled-up old bitch like that? Like he was looking for his mommy or something. I mean, what’s wrong with me? Am
I
so disgusting?”

“I asked myself the same thing when my wife left me.”

Peyton looked up at me.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Logan.”

“You want a cheese sandwich, Logan?”

I’m rarely squeamish, but knowing what the cheese was parked beside in her refrigerator made me want to throw up in my mouth. I declined the offer.

She got up and rinsed her plate in the sink.

“What’s with the meat processing operation out back?” I asked her.

“I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“I didn’t come here to get you in trouble.”

Her back was turned to me, her hands braced on the counter. Several seconds passed.

“Screw it,” Peyton said. “It wasn’t my idea, anyway.”