Sixteen
I tried calling Mrs. Schmulowitz yet again to see how she was faring after her tummy tuck. A computerized voice said the memory on her answering machine was full and not accepting any more messages. My concern for her welfare was quickly escalating from worry to dread. Had there been surgical complications? Had she returned home and suffered an accident? What if she was lying on her kitchen floor with a fractured hip, unable to move? Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up! My mind raced with the ominous possibilities. In my haste to jump in my airplane and fly down from Rancho Bonita to San Diego, I hadn’t thought to ask for the name and telephone number of Mrs. Schmulowitz’s physician.
Dumb.
Neither hospital in Rancho Bonita could find any record of her having been admitted. I sat in my rented Escalade, in the parking lot outside the Montgomery Airport terminal, and fretted. Somebody needed to check on her as soon as possible. Problem was, I was more than 200 miles away. Fighting my way through the log-jammed freeways of Orange County and Los Angeles would take six hours at least.
Larry’s repair shop at the Rancho Bonita Municipal Airport was a ten-minute drive from Mrs. Schmulowitz’s house. I called him, but there was no answer.
The only other person I could think of was my ex-wife. She could be in Rancho Bonita, depending on traffic, in less than two hours. She picked up on the third ring.
“It’s me.”
“Are you OK?”
“I’m fine. Still down in San Diego. You got home all right?”
“Yes.”
Strained silence. She was clearly still irked at me.
“I need a favor, Savannah.”
The health of any friendship or romance can be gauged in the response to that one simple request. If the answer is an automatic, “Absolutely,” you can bet you’ve got a good thing going. If the answer is, “What is it?” it might be time to punch out.
“Sure.”
My heart danced, even if I don’t.
I explained that Mrs. Schmulowitz had undergone cosmetic surgery, that she wasn’t answering her phone, and that I was worried. Would Savannah mind driving up to Rancho Bonita to make sure she was OK — and checking on the welfare of my cat while she was at it?
“You can be there in an hour and a half, Savannah. I’ll pay you back.”
“Pay me back how?”
“We never did make it to SeaWorld.”
“C’mon, Logan, you can do better than that.”
“OK, I’ll throw in the Wild Animal Park, too.”
“What if you just started being more sensitive to the feelings of others?”
“I suppose I could do that.”
“Good.”
“So you’ll go?”
Savannah said she was just finishing her notes following a counseling session with a client, and could be on her way within the hour.
“I’ll let you know what I find when I get there,” she said. “I just hope she’s OK.”
I could’ve said, “That makes two of us.” What I said instead was, “You’re a good woman, Savannah.”
She seemed pleased.
As I hung up, a black, unmarked police car rolled into the lot and pulled up beside my rented Escalade so that the driver’s side windows were facing each other. Behind the wheel was Detective Alicia Rosario. She was alone.
“I was just over at Hub Walker’s house,” she said. “Wanted to ask him a few questions on the Bollinger homicide. He said if you were still in town, this is where I’d find you.”
“What was so important, you couldn’t just call me?”
She shut off the engine, got out of her cruiser, and got in on the passenger’s side of my Escalade.
“Hub Walker won the Congressional Medal of Honor.”
“It’s not Congressional Medal of Honor, Detective. It’s just ‘Medal of Honor.’ And you don’t ‘win’ it. You receive it.”
Rosario gave me a hard sideways look. She didn’t like being lectured.
“Something doesn’t smell right about your Medal of Honor recipient,” she said.
I said nothing.
“Hub Walker and Janet Bollinger were involved in a car accident the day after Dorian Munz was executed. Are you aware of that?”
“I heard something along those lines. Doesn’t make Walker a murderer.”
“Agreed,” Rosario said. “But when I was talking to him about what happened to Bollinger, he seemed a little, I don’t know…” Her words trailed off.
“Like he knew something you didn’t?”
She nodded as she gazed out at the runway, trying to piece the puzzle together. “Janet Bollinger starts dating Dorian Munz after her good friend, Ruth Walker, breaks up with him. Munz goes on trial for murdering Walker, Bollinger testifies against him, Munz is executed, then Bollinger gets stabbed to death—stabbed, not shot. Pulling a trigger, that’s easy. But stabbing somebody to death? Feeling that blade cutting through flesh? Man, you gotta want that person dead pretty bad.”
“So I’ve been told.”
I asked her about the status of Bunny Myers and Myers’ gangbanging cousin, Li’l Sinister, who’d tried to make me fly them to Mexico. Rosario said sheriff’s forensics investigators had found both of their fingerprints inside Janet Bollinger’s apartment. They’d also found two ceramic Hummel figurines in the trunk of Li’l Sinister’s car that they believed were stolen from Bollinger.
“Bunny told me he never went inside the apartment,” I said.
“He told me he did. Him and his cousin. They go in, see Janet Bollinger bleeding on the floor, and rabbit. Zuniga grabs a couple of Hummels on the way out the door.”
“Why steal Hummels?”
“His mother’s birthday was coming up.”
“Nice.”
“I don’t know if Walker was involved in Bollinger’s homicide, directly or not,” Rosario said, “but if we end up going after a Medal of Honor recipient, the sensitivity of that, in a military town like this?…”
“You never answered my question, Detective.”
Rosario looked over at me with her head cocked.
“What was so important, you drove all the way over here to talk to me in person?”
She hesitated, then turned and locked her eyes on mine. “I get the impression, Mr. Logan, there are things in this case you’re not telling me, either.”
I realized that if I filled her in on what Dutch Holland’s pilot buddy, Al Demaerschalk, had seen that night at the airport, and what FAA inspector Paul Horvath had found inside my engine — that someone had purposely tried to bring down the Ruptured Duck, perhaps to thwart a homicide investigation — Rosario would call in the cavalry. That meant the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board and, for all I knew, half the Marine Corps. And that, as far as my ambitions were concerned, was a nonstarter.
I learned serving with Alpha that there is not always strength in numbers. Too many hunters can trample the trail. Often, the most effective way to locate a target is to be small and stealthy, and to leave as few footprints as possible. That was my plan, so that I might find and personally punish whoever had done me and my airplane harm. Vengeance may not be very Buddhist-like, I realized, but then again, neither are chile verde burritos.
“I’ve told you everything I can,” I told Rosario.
“Can or will?”
She could smell the lie on me as easily as I did.
Paul Horvath was leaning into the Ruptured Duck’s mangled engine compartment, snapping close-up digital photographs of the carburetor, when I stopped by. I was anxious to have my plane trucked to Rancho Bonita as soon as possible so that Larry could begin piecing it back together, and I could get back to being a flight instructor whose business, putting it diplomatically, afforded abundant room for growth.