Authors: David Freed
A
banner the size of a toboggan hung from the wall above my desk. In red, white and blue letters, it said, “Above the Clouds Aviation—Flight Training, Whale Watching and Aerial Charters.” I’d paid a graphic artist sixty-nine bucks to design and print it out, splurging for three colors instead of two. The artist offered to throw in some smiling cartoon whales jumping out of the water and cute little psychedelic-colored biplanes zipping through rainbows and around cotton ball clouds, but I figured the FAA would take one look at all of that extraneous garbage, assume I was smoking crack—like the artist—and revoke my pilot’s license. I stuck with the basics.
A woman was standing below the banner, flipping through my “Babes and Bombers” wall calendar, smirking at all the photos of hot chicks posing with hot warbirds. The calendar had been a birthday gift from Larry, back when I could still afford to make the rent, before the economy took a dump and prospective student pilots disappeared like shadows from a passing cloud. She looked up as I entered.
“I know you,” she said with a cloying smile.
Some faint new lines around the eyes. A slight softening under the jaw. Not bad for six years gone by. She wore a sleeveless gray silk pantsuit and a black lace camisole that showed more cleavage than I really needed to see. Her feet were clad in patent leather high heels with Wicked Witch of the West toes. A Kate Spade satchel hung from her right shoulder. Her hair was a shade redder than when I last saw her, and shorter. She wore a gold wedding band. No other jewelry. No makeup. She needed none. My ex-wife, Savannah Carlisle, was still every inch the heartbreaker I unfortunately remembered all too well.
“The devil must be wearing thermal underwear,” I said.
Her smile faded. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Outside your attorney’s office. That morning we signed the papers.”
“I said I’d see you again when hell froze over. I was upset that day, Logan. I’m sure you could understand, under the circumstances.”
Her eyes were liquid mahogany, her gaze as penetrating as ever. I wondered if she could hear my heart slamming around under my polo shirt.
“You cut your hair,” I said.
“And you didn’t.”
She approached me slowly, shoulders back, accentuating her breasts, maintaining eye contact while biting her lower lip—classic signals of carnal interest. I was hoping she was going to wrap her toned arms around my waist and admit how much she’d missed me, what a terrible mistake she’d made by leaving. The biggest mistake of her life. But as she drew closer, I could see that her pupils were barely dilated.
She reached out and gave my beard a playful tug.
“Very Grizzly Adams,” Savannah said. “I think I like it.”
“Whew. What a relief. The first thing I said to myself when I grew it was, ‘Gee, I wonder what my insignificant other would think?’”
“Still the same sarcastic jerk. Some things never change, do they, Logan?”
I couldn’t decide if I wanted to make love to her or crush her exquisite throat with my hands. A man doesn’t lose so rare a woman as Savannah Carlisle without craving and loathing her the rest of his life.
“Still modeling?” I asked, doing my best to keep things civil.
“Nobody wants to see a forty-two-year-old woman walk the runway, not in a string bikini, anyway. Actually, I’m doing a fair amount of counseling these days.” She dug a business card out of her bag and handed it to me. In Ye Olde English script it said, “Savannah Echevarria. Life Coach.”
“That’s rich. You, of all people, telling people how to manage their lives.”
“You always did enjoy putting me down, didn’t you?”
I would’ve apologized but I was in no mood. I parked myself behind my desk and shuffled through a stack of outdated airworthiness directives like it was important work.
“So,” Savannah said, glancing around, “seems like you’re doing well.”
“Me? Top of the heap. Couldn’t be better.”
I was amazed my nose didn’t go Pinocchio on me. All she needed to do was take one look around my stuffy, windowless “flight academy” to see that things could’ve been way better: A card table littered with a dozen dog-eared Jeppeson flight manuals. A cheap plastic fan and a couple of green plastic lawn chairs from Kmart. A decrepit, Vietnam-era metal desk and an Army surplus filing cabinet, olive drab. A computer so old, I had to just about shovel coal into it to make it work. I resented the hell out of her showing up, invading my space, inviting herself back into my world without fair warning. But it was my own fault. I’d left the door unlocked. In the sun-kissed, seaside enclave of Rancho Bonita, with its red tile roofs and Italian climate and verdant hills overlooking the Pacific—“California’s Monaco” as the city’s moneyed minions like to call it—most everybody leaves their doors unlocked. At least they claim to. Admitting otherwise would be to concede that Rancho Bonita, like Los Angeles—its bloated, apocalyptic neighbor 120 miles down the coast—has a crime problem. Heaven forbid anything should undermine property values in paradise.
“So,” Savannah said, “what made you decide to grow out your beard?”
“Just trying to walk a different path, that’s all.”
“A different path. Sounds vaguely Buddhist.”
“I dabble.”
“Are you serious? Cordell Logan, a
Buddhist
?”
I shrugged.
“Don’t tell me you’ve gone vegetarian, too.”
Another shrug.
“A vegetarian. I don’t believe it,” Savannah said. “What happened to Mr. Meat and Potatoes?”
“You’d be amazed,” I said, “what they can do with mock duck these days.”
Let me be honest here. I struggle with the vegetarian thing. I mean, sometimes, a dude just
has
to have a
chile verde
burrito. But I wasn’t about to admit that to a woman who’d walked out on me. I was the new and improved Cordell Logan. A better man without her. The man she could no longer have. That’s what I wanted her to believe, anyway, even if it wasn’t close to being in the same hemisphere as true.
“Definitely not the man I married,” Savannah said.
“Not the one you dumped, either.”
“I didn’t dump you, Logan. You filed on me.”
“Yeah, after you banged my boss.”
Her eyes flashed fire. “Whatever I did, I did long after you forgot what the word
faithful
meant.”
“You make it sound like I was some kind of womanizer.”
“Did you or did you not sleep with that flight attendant?”
“If you’ll recall, Savannah, we were separated at the time.”
“Did you or did you not sleep with her? Yes or no, Logan?”
“I was drunk. I told you, she meant nothing to me.”
“Well, she sure as hell meant something to me.”
“Look, what I did was wrong. I admitted that then, I admit it now. But I didn’t leave you, Savannah. I wasn’t looking for a way out. You were.”
She sank into one of my Kmart lawn chairs without asking if I minded and ran a hand through her hair.
“I didn’t come here to open old wounds,” she said, sighing.
“Old wounds? I don’t see you for six years. Not a phone call. Not a Christmas card. Then you show up unannounced and expect us to have a friendly little chat? Catch up on old times?” I got up from my desk and stuffed some papers into the filing cabinet. “What the hell did you come for anyway, Savannah? Because, as I’m sure you can appreciate, being a life coach and all, I really do have a life to get back to here.”
“Arlo’s gone.”
“And you expect me to give a shit? The guy ran out on his first wife, Savannah. What makes you think he wouldn’t run out on you someday?”
“I meant, he’s dead.”
Her words hung in the air like the rumble of distant artillery fire.
“Dead . . . as in
died
?”
She stared at her shoes. “Last month. I wasn’t sure if you’d heard or not.”
Arlo Echevarria. My old boss. The man she’d dumped me for. Dead. I wanted to punch my fist in the air. I wanted to dance like Snoopy come suppertime. I wanted to shout that the Buddha was right, that Karma is real! I looked back at my ex-wife from my make-believe paperwork, hoping the expression on my face didn’t betray the sudden, unbridled joy I felt inside, and said instead, as evenly as I could, “What happened?”
“Somebody came to his door dressed like a pizza delivery driver and shot him.”
My head was spinning. “You said
his
door.”
“We moved to LA last year, after Arlo retired. My father helped us buy a place in the hills, above Sunset, but Arlo moved out after a couple months. He was just . . . He’d changed. We fought a lot. He was renting a little house up in Northridge. We were . . .” Savannah drew a breath and let it out slowly, “separated.”
She unfolded a newspaper clipping from the
Los Angeles Times
and laid it on my desk. I snatched it up and skimmed it. A paid obituary. It was full of lies and half-truths.
“Who wrote this?”
“I did.”
She waited for me to say something comforting. I slid the clipping back to her across the desk and picked at a splinter in my thumb.
“Christ, Logan, you act like it was nothing. Did you hear what I said? Arlo was
murdered.
”
“Sorry for your loss.”
She gave me a hard look and made a little huffing sound through her nose and mouth, like she couldn’t believe anyone could be so callous, let alone a man to whom she’d once given herself so freely.
“You know, I’d forgotten what a complete bastard you can be.” Her chin quivered. Then she began to sob.
The air inside my office started to feel heavy. I turned the table fan on low, watching it oscillate back and forth, the blades riffling the pages of my wall calendar, while she wept. I thought about all the pain she’d heaped upon me and how hard I’d tried to drink myself off the planet after we’d divorced. I had long ago accepted the reality that the wounds she’d inflicted having left me for Echevarria would fester forever. And yet, bitter as I still was, I actually found myself feeling sorry for her as she sat there in obvious pain. Which made me feel even more bitter.
I yanked open the top drawer of my desk. Inside was a thick stack of brown paper napkins from Taco Bell.
How the hell can any corporation possibly turn a profit when half the free world steals its napkins by the fistful?
I backhanded her one.
“You want some water or something?”
She shook her head no, dabbing her tears with the napkin.
“Then what
do
you want, Savannah? Why drive all the way up here from LA? Because I know it wasn’t just to tell me Arlo’s
gone
.”
“I’d like you to tell the police what Arlo did for a living.”
“He worked in marketing.”
“His
real
job.”
“That was his real job.”
We both knew I was lying.
“Logan, the police are
never
going to find who killed him if they don’t know who he really was,
what
he really did. I need your help. Please.”
Something shifted in my gut, a moist sickness.
Some nerve
,
asking for my help after cutting off my balls.
I swallowed down the taste of bile and leaned back in my chair, my hands clasped nonchalantly behind my head.
“What are the police telling you?”
“That they’re not getting anywhere.”
Detectives assigned to the case, she said, had concluded that Echevarria’s demise was the result of more than some random act of violence in a metropolis whose middle name is random violence. But given what meager evidence they had to go on, investigators had been unable to gain much traction, according to Savannah. No arrests had been made. No viable suspects had even been identified.
“People die in LA all the time,” I said with a shrug. “Sometimes, for no reason at all.”
“Arlo died for a reason,” Savannah said. “I think it had to do with what he did, his work—his
real
work. Somebody out for revenge. If you could just talk to the detectives . . .”
She searched my eyes, waiting. I gazed at her evenly and gave back nothing.
“I told them that Arlo worked for the government,” Savannah said. “They said they couldn’t find any records other than when he was with the Army.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t know anything about it.”
“You know that’s not true, Logan. You worked with him. You worked
for
him.”
“That I did. In marketing.”
Her jaw muscles tightened. She was getting nowhere, but she wasn’t about to give up. “I want to show you something,” she said, digging through her purse.
Outside, a regional jet began its takeoff roll down Runway Twenty-Six, its twin turbines rattling the walls of the hangar. I hiked the sleeves of my polo shirt a little and folded my arms across my chest, pushing my biceps up with the backs of my hands to give her a glimpse of what she’d given up for the likes of scrawny Arlo Echevarria, but she was too busy rummaging through her designer handbag to notice my
mas macho
gun show. She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes and tucked it behind her ear as she searched her purse. Why did she have to still be so goddamn gorgeous?
“I haven’t been over to his house yet,” Savannah said. “I can’t. It’s just too . . .” She cleared her throat, still going through her purse. “My father hired a company. They come in after somebody dies and pack up all their clothes, personal effects, clean up the mess. Can you imagine a job like that? Anyway, I was going through a box of Arlo’s things the other night, and I found this.”
She pulled out a wallet-size photograph from her purse and slid it toward me across the desk. I exhaled like I was doing her a big favor picking it up:
The photo was of Echevarria and me, taken in the Nubo-Sindian Desert. Our cheeks were streaked with camouflage face paint and eight days of Iranian dust. We were outfitted in battle dress devoid of rank or unit insignia. Sprawled at our boots was a bearded Arab, arms splayed above his head, his eyes half-hooded in death, the front of his white
dishdasha
man-dress splotched red from multiple gunshot wounds. In Echevarria’s right hand was a Kalashnikov assault rifle with a collapsible stock and extended banana clip. His left hand was clamped affectionately on my shoulder. He was beaming at the camera like a safari hunter posing with a trophy lion, while I stared grimly into the lens, thoroughly exhausted.