“Could you tell me if he had his license yet?”
“I doubt it. You’re-going to have to talk to Jim Edgar,” she said. “He’s out there talking to the people at the DOE copter, and if he’s not there, he’ll be working in the hangar.”
The copter was a big white Bell with Department of Energy identification markings. Round white bathtub-sized containers had been attached above the skids, and a woman in blue coveralls was doing something technical at one of them. The only others present were two men in the same sort of coveralls engaged in conversation. Probably pilot and copilot. Chee tried to guess what the big tubes would contain, with no luck. Obviously none of these people was Jim Edgar.
He found Edgar in the back of the hangar, muttering imprecations and doing something at a workbench to something that looked like a small electric engine. Chee stopped a polite distance away and stood waiting.
Edgar put down a small screwdriver, sucked at a freshly injured thumb and inspected Chee.
Chee explained himself.
“Teddy Bai,” Edgar said, inspecting his thumb as he said it. “Well, he’d soloed, but he wasn’t near ready to be licensed. He was sort of mediocre as a student. I already told the FBI fellas if he was going to be flying that old L-17, I didn’t want to be along on the trip.”
“That’s the one that was stolen? Why not?”
“He was learning in a new Cessna. Everything modern. Tricycle landing gear. Power-assisted stuff. Different instrumentation. Piper built that L-17 thing for the army in World War Two. Easy enough to fly, I guess, if you understand it, but you’d do a lot of things different than that little Cessna he was learning in.”
Edgar paused, seeking a way to explain this. “For example that was one of the first of that sort of plane to use wing flaps. But you can’t use ‘em on the L-17 if your airspeed is over eighty. And you have to set the tabs on the ground. Little things like that you have to know about.”
“And more than fifty years old,” Chee said. “Do you know anything about what shape it was in?”
Edgar laughed. “From what I heard on the television, the FBI thinks those casino robbers flew away in it. They better be lucky if they did. Unless Old Man Timms decided to spend some money on it since I saw it.”
Chee found himself getting more and more interested in this conversation.
“Was that recently? What was wrong with it?”
Edgar grinned at him. “How much time you got?”
“Any serious stuff?”
“Well, he brought it in for an FAA inspection last autumn. Wanted to get the FAA airworthy certification renewed. Way overdue anyway for an overage plane like that one, and he could have gotten in trouble for just flying it. First thing I noticed he’d let the mice get into it. He keeps it in a barn out at his ranch, which ain’t too uncommon out here. But if you do that, you’ve got to keep the rodents from chewing on things. Set the tail wheel in a bucket of kerosene, maybe. So the wiring and fabric needed inspection, and the engine was running sour. Then these things have twelve-gallon gasoline tanks built into each wing root, feeding into a header tank behind the engine fire wall. Had a little leak in one of the lines.”
Edgar shrugged. “Other things, too.”
“He got them fixed?”
“He got me to give him an estimate. Said it was way too damn high." Edgar chuckled. “Said he’d sell me the plane for half that. He was going to fly it up to Blanding and get the inspection done at CanyonAire up there. That’s the last I saw of him.”
“Would you have a phone number for Mr Timms?” Chee asked. “Or his address?”
“Sure.”
Edgar walked across the hangar to his desk and sorted through a Rolodex file. Chee stood watching, trying to understand his motive for what he was doing. What did this have to do with Bernie’s boyfriend’s problem? Had he spent so many hours fishing and fighting mosquitoes in Alaska that he yearned for some way to get himself into trouble? Was he hungering for some explanation of the wildly illogical way the casino bandits had managed their escape? Whatever his motive, Captain Largo would be very unhappy indeed if Largo learned that Chee had stuck his nose into FBI business and the FBI caught him at it.
Edgar interrupted these thoughts by handing him a copy of a Mountain Mutual Insurance claim form.
“He had me sign off on his insurance claim. He’d left the plane out in the weather and gotten some hail damage,” Edgar said. “That was several years ago, but as far as I heard, he hasn’t moved.”
Chee jotted the information he wanted into his notebook, thanked Edgar and headed back to his truck. Then a sudden thought caused him to grin. With the plane now stolen, Timms would be filing another insurance claim.
“Mr Edgar,” he shouted. “Do you remember what you’d have had to charge Timms for those repairs? When he said he’d sell it for half your estimate?”
“I think the estimate was close to four thousand dollars,” Edgar said. “But if I was stupid enough to want that thing, and made him an offer, he’d have said it was a valuable antique and asked for about thirty thousand.”
Chee laughed. That, he thought, would probably be about what Timms would claim from his insurance company.
“How about using your telephone?” Chee asked. “And the directory.”
He punched in the Mountain Mutual Insurance Farmington agent’s number, identified himself, asked the woman who ran the place if she still handled Eldon Timms's insurance.
“Unfortunately,” she said.
“His airplane, too?”
“Same answer,” she said. “Or I guess you’d say the former airplane, the one those robbers stole?”
“Does he have another one?”
“Lordy, I hope not,” she said.
“He file a claim on it?”
“Yes, indeedy, he did. Right away. I just heard about the robbers stealing a plane out there and flying off in it, and he’s on the phone asking about getting his money. And I said, “What’s the hurry. They have to land someplace and the cops recover it and you get it back.” And he said, “If that happens, we tear up the claim.”
“How much was the insurance?”
“Forty thousand,” she said. “He just jacked it up to that a couple of months ago.”
“Sounds like quite a bit for a fifty-year-old aircraft,” Chee said.
“I thought so,” she said. “But no skin off my nose. Timms was the one paying the premium. He said it was an antique, a real rare airplane, and he was going to sell it to that military-aircraft museum in Tucson. I have a feeling he was using that higher-insured value to sort of—you know—establish a sales price.”
Edgar had been standing nearby, listening.
“That do it for you?”
“Yeah,” Chee said, "and thanks. But by the way, what’s that Energy Department helicopter doing here? And what’s the DOE doing with those big white pods?”
“Actually, the pods aren’t DOE, they’re EPA,” Edgar said. “You are looking at a rare case of inter-agency cooperation. The Environmental Protection bunch borrows the copter and the pilots from the DOE’s Nevada Test site. They got radiation detectors in those pods, and they use them to find old uranium mines. Get the hot stuff covered up.”
After he left Four Corners Flight, Chee dropped in at the New Mexico State Police office below the airport and made two more calls—the first one to the Air War Museum at Tucson. Yes, the manager told him, Mr Timms had flown his L-17 down in June and offered it for sale. And, yes, they would have liked to add it to their collection, but they hadn’t made an offer. Why not? The usual reason, said the manager. He wanted way too much for it. He was asking fifty thousand.
The second call was to Cowboy Dashee, his old friend from boyhood. But it wasn’t just to reminisce. Deputy Sheriff Dashee worked for the Sheriff’s Department of Apache County, Arizona, which meant the ranch of Eldon Timms—at least the south end of it—might be in Deputy Dashee’s jurisdiction.