Carella waited.
“I’m sorry,” Ridley said.
Carella suspected he was crying, but he could hear no tears over the crackling line. He waited.
“Captain,” he said at last, “I wonder if I could ask you some questions. I know this is a bad time …”
He let the sentence trail.
Ridley said nothing.
“Captain?” Carella said.
“Yes. Yes, sure,” Ridley said. “Go ahead. Sure. I’m sorry. Go ahead.”
“We read some letters you sent to your sister …”
“Yes, we corresponded a lot.”
“In one of them, you made reference to one ofher letters …”
“Yes.”
“… where she told you she’d be flying a job early in December …”
“Yes.”
“… which apparently she felt would change her circumstances considerably, was how she put it in the letter to you, which you were quoting.”
“Yes.”
“What was that job, Captain Ridley? Would you know?”
The captain was silent.
“Sir? Apparently she wrote to say she’d be moving East sometime after this job …”
“Yes.”
“… be there long before Christmas, in fact, was apparently what she wrote to you, if your letter was quoting her exactly.”
Again, the captain was silent.
“You see, sir, she was killed just before Christmas, and we were wondering if this job she flew had anything to do with her murder.”
“How was she killed?” Ridley asked.
“Someone stuck an ice pick in her,” Carella said.
And waited.
“She was flying dope,” Ridley said.
“To Mexico, is that right?”
“Yes. Four runs.”
“On December seventh, she flew to Mexico for the last time, is that right?”
“Yes. How do you know that?”
“There was an entry in her calendar.”
“She called me right afterward.”
“Called you there in Germany?”
“Yes.”
“To say what, Captain?”
“That she’d flown the four runs, and they turned out to be a piece of cake.”
“How do you know they were drug runs?”
“She told me.”
“On an open phone?”
“No, in one of her letters. After I warned her not to do anything that might get her in trouble. She assured me these would be short flights, simple pickups and deliveries. Just like chickens or sandals, she said. Just like that.”
“Where was she flying? From where to where?”
“Texas to Mexico to Arizona.”
“What kind of pickups and deliveries?”
“Money for drugs.”
“How much money?”
“They didn’t tell her. It was in locked suitcases.”
