“Sally!” I stopped the recording and picked up the phone. “What are you up to?”
“I wondered if you were free to take a little ride with me,” Sally said. “I didn’t know if that husband of yours was in town or not.”
“He’s in town, but not at home right now, so I’m footloose,” I said, relieved at having a reason to leave the house without calling it retreating in fear. “Where are you going to go?”
“I’m going to drive to that airport where Jack Burns was taking flying lessons, the one where he rented the plane before he took his
Put like that, how could I resist?
“Want me to drive in and meet you at the newspaper office?”
“That’s where I am now. That’d be great.”
“Okay. Give me a few minutes, I’ll be on my way.”
I called the hospital to ask Angel if she needed anything urgently, and she told me that Shelby was much better, but still didn’t remember anything about the attack. She sounded a lot better herself. She’d run home the night before to change clothes, and she told me she might come home to take a nap in the afternoon if he continued to improve.
Then I called Martin. If he was at the plant, he wasn’t answering his phone. I left a message at the Athletic Club with the intimidatingly streamlined girl who answered the phone, kept the sun-bed appointment schedule, and presided over the check-in book. She sounded quite pleased to have a reason to approach Martin.
I ran upstairs, looked myself over in the mirror, and decided that almost anything was good enough to run an errand with Sally. I brushed my hair quickly, securing it at the nape of my neck with a green band to match my T- shirt, and cleaned my Saturday glasses, huge ones with white-and-purple mottled frames.
Sally made a choking sound when she saw them. “God Almighty, Roe, where’d you get those? You look like a clown.” She was shoveling papers and fast-food bags out of the passenger’s seat of her car.
Talk about the honesty of friends.
“They’re my Saturday glasses,” I said with dignity, locking my car and walking over to Sally’s even older and more beat-up Toyota. The parking lot which served the newspaper staff was empty except for our cars and a Cadillac in the corner, which I recognized as the property of Macon Turner, owner and editor of the
“Indicating that on Saturdays you are in a whoopee mood? Carefree and fun-loving?” Sally’s voice was muffled as she bent back in. She’d opened a garbage bag and was swiftly sorting through the debris. Between the assorted paperwork, grocery bags, and cardboard cartons, I figured Sally had a whole tree in her front seat.
“Sorry about this,” she continued, as she emerged and carried the garbage bag over to the dumpster. “I have to do this under duress or not at all, and asking you to ride with me provided the duress.”
Sally was wearing slacks, which she seldom did on weekdays, but her bronze curls and careful makeup were unchanging. Sally hadn’t altered much in the years we’d been on-again, off-again friends. She’d had a wonderful but brief episode of gourmet cooking, tried marriage the same way, and now was back to Chick-Kwik, burgers, and the single life, without gaining a pound or wrinkling a crease. The only thing that made Sally look her age (which I estimated to be fifty-one) was her son, Perry.
I watched while Sally went down a mental checklist, giving a tiny nod as she reviewed each point on a list only she could see. Then she slid behind the wheel and said, “Coming?”
Soon we were flying down the interstate, for Sally believed the speed limit was just a guideline. This belief accounted for Sally’s knowing every highway patrolman in the area by his first name. But today, we weren’t stopped, and we arrived at the Starry Night Airport having exchanged only a modicum of gossip.
We had left the interstate just five minutes east of Lawrenceton and had taken a state highway north a couple of miles, passing the usual seven million pine trees. Sally turned onto a road that scarcely deserved the name. It had been paved at one time, but that had been long ago. This alleged road terminated at the romantically named Starry Night Airport.
It was evident that Starry Night was a marginal business. Rendered invisible from the highway by a strip of pines and a ridge, the little airport had been carved out of the woods a long time ago. There were two runways, and even to my ignorant eyes it was apparent they were suitable only for small planes. Very small planes. The parking lot was small and graveled, delineated by landscape timbers. A concrete sidewalk led to the office, a little building about half the size of the ground floor of my house. This green-painted cement-block building had windows running nearly all the way around. Though the windows were curtained, the curtains were all wide open.
If you didn’t turn off the sidewalk to enter the office, you continued past to the hangars. There were two. From the office, only the first few feet of the interior of each hangar would be visible. While both hangars were in use-I thought I could detect at least three tiny planes in the first, and two larger ones in the second-I couldn’t see any people at all. Nothing moved.
I surveyed the grounds again. “Now, wait a minute,” I said. Sally, who hadn’t moved at all, looked at me with a little smile. “You’re wondering how the murderer got Jack’s body to the plane?” she said.
I nodded. It would be brazen to carry the body to the plane past the open windows of the office, no matter how deserted the place seemed to be.
“Look,” she said, pointing out her window at a narrow gravel road, just wide enough for one vehicle, leading out of the parking lot and running up the ridge that rose behind the hangars.
“What about tracks?” I asked.
“No rain here for three weeks before Jack’s body was dropped,” she said. “The ground on either side of the gravel was rock-hard, so if there were tracks, they wouldn’t amount to much. Now that we’ve had rain, it would be a different story.”
Instead of hopping out and going to the office, as I expected, Sally turned to me and said, “Now, here’s the reason I brought you along.”
I felt a warning bell go off in the “better sense” area of my brain.
“Let’s hear it,” I said, the caution in my voice making Sally purse her lips in exasperation.
“Well, Dan Edgar, the kid who wrote the story on the attack on Shelby, was too lazy to get out of bed this morning to help me, and the other reporters are all gone or sick this weekend.”
“So naturally you thought of me.” I raised one eyebrow, but possibly this effective expression was invisible behind my big glasses.
“Yes,” said Sally without a trace of irony. “Actually, I did. You’re small, you’re quick, and if your husband’s out of pocket, you’re bored.”
“Well,” I said blankly, for want of something better.
“Anyway, this won’t take long. Do you want to be the sneaker or the diversion?”
“How much trouble ran I get into?”
“Oh, hardly any. I’ll take responsibility.”
I tried raising the eyebrow again.
“Oh, okay, maybe yelled-at trouble, not jail trouble.”
I opted for the sneaker. I figured I already had so much trouble, a little more wouldn’t make any difference.
“Okay,” Sally said. “Now, here’s what you have to do. When I was out here doing the story on Jack Burns, of course I asked the owner, an older guy named Stanford Foley, how it was possible for Jack and someone else to get in a plane without him even seeing it. He said it just couldn’t happen, that he was here the whole time. The police can’t make heads or tails of that, and I can’t either.”
“Your story said Jack had rented the plane himself.”
“Yes, I said that, but I was counting on Foley too much. It turns out, Jack had reserved that time and that plane, but I don’t think Foley saw him at all. I think Jack was brought here dead-he certainly wasn’t killed in the plane, the cops tell me-and loaded into that plane by his killer. Jack’s car was parked at the police station and nothing was wrong with it, so he didn’t come here on his own and he wasn’t killed in his own car.”
“So, what do you want me to do?”
“While I go in there and talk to Foley I want you to sneak in that hangar and get in a plane. Actually, the plane that you saw that day, the one that transported the body, may be back here. It’s one Mr. Foley keeps to rent out to whoever wants it. Jack had actually flown it several times.”