Flat Spin (9 page)

I didn’t say anything. I could see where this was going. Czarnek reached into the breast pocket of his sport coat and got out a reporter’s notebook. He flipped through the narrow pages to find where he’d jotted down the date of Echevarria’s murder— October 24th. He asked me if I remembered what I was doing that night.

“It was a Monday,” Czarnek added.

“I would’ve been watching football.”

“By yourself?”

“With my landlady.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“She makes me dinner every Monday night during football season. We always watch the game together.”

“You two ever get it on?” Windhauser said. “Maybe at halftime?”

Another tactic from the Big Book of Standard Police Interrogation Techniques: Bad Cop periodically lets fly an outrageous accusation intended to infuriate the suspect who comes unglued and, in his unbridled anger, blurts the truth of his crime.

“My landlady is in her eighties,” I said. “She only goes for old guys, Detective Windhauser. Like you.”

Windhauser glared. His partner stifled a smile.

“You pretty sure she can vouch for your whereabouts that evening?” Czarnek asked.

“You’ll have to ask her that.”

“We intend to,” Windhauser said.

The detectives were staring at me in a new light, a light that told me even though I was the one who’d called them, I was now suspect
numero uno
in the homicide of Arlo Echevarria.

S
IX

I
nside the walled fortress that is America’s intelligence community, analysts are trained to scientifically consider all possible explanations when trying to determine who bombed the jetliner or blew up the office tower. Unfortunately, intelligence analysts are human. Like all humans, they quickly form opinions as to guilt or innocence, then instinctively pursue the evidence that will buttress their preconceived beliefs. Evidence that conflicts with those preconceptions is commonly disregarded. Which is why we sometimes end up invading the wrong country.

Professionals in other occupations are no different. A patient complains of a stomachache. His doctor concludes that the patient must have indigestion or an ulcer because the last five patients he treated with similar symptoms had indigestion or an ulcer. The patient is sent home with antibiotics or a bottle of Tums and dies that night from a burst appendix. Two LAPD homicide detectives conclude that an ex-husband murdered the man his wife left him for because the detectives have investigated dozens of murders over the years and it is
always
the ex-husband or former boyfriend who did it.

Still, I walked out of El Grande Taqueria that day a free man. No handcuffs. No threats of, “We’re going to have to take you down to the station for further questioning.” Czarnek thanked me for agreeing to meet with them. He asked me if I would be willing to take a polygraph test at some point in the near future. I said I wouldn’t mind at all. He said they’d be in touch and urged me to have a nice day, while Windhauser said nothing. I could tell by the way they watched me as I got in my truck, parked two spaces down from their unmarked Crown Vic, that it wouldn’t matter whether I passed a lie-detector test or not. They’d already made up their minds about who murdered Arlo Echevarria. Like intelligence analysts, now all they had to do was make the pieces fit their puzzle.

I waited for a break in the traffic, then burned an illegal U-turn across three lanes of traffic while my new friends from the LAPD watched. I tossed them a casual wave and motored south on Verde Street, feeling a sense of relief. I’d done what my ex-wife wanted me to do, done what my ex-father-in-law had paid me to do. I’d told the police what I knew about the real Arlo Echevarria. If they didn’t want to hear it, that was their problem. As far as I was concerned, I had fulfilled my end of the deal. I may still have been curious about who murdered Echevarria, but not so curious that I was willing to become more involved than I already was. Goddamn Savannah. I couldn’t decide which I regretted more, cashing her father’s check or not having been born rich.

She’s nothing to you anymore
, I told myself.

I almost believed it.

The light turned red at Federal Avenue, across the street from the old post office that was now a carpet showroom. A homeless guy was on the sidewalk out front, smoking a joint. Curled asleep beside him was a long, fat dog that looked like it had been assembled by committee. A hand-lettered cardboard sign was propped against the man’s legs. It said, “Ninjas kidnapped my family. Need money for Kung Fu lessons.” I tossed him a buck. Fair pay for a good laugh.

The light turned green. I hooked a right at the traffic circle and merged onto the freeway northbound, heading for the airport.

L
arry was sitting at a weathered picnic table in the shade behind his hangar, listening to Rush Limbaugh on a portable radio and eating his lunch—bologna and cheese sandwich, bag-o-chips and a Dr. Pepper. Larry had the same thing for lunch every day. Once, I heard him complain to his wife about the way she’d made his sandwich. “How many times I gotta tell ya,” he seethed low into the phone, “you put the fuckin’ cheese
between
the fuckin’ slices of bologna.” I believe it was the last sandwich she ever made him.

“I got your money,” I said out the window as I pulled in and climbed out of my truck. “All of it.”

“Call CNN,” Larry said. “They’re gonna definitely wanna break into regular programming for this.”

“You know, Larry, for a comedian, you make a pretty piss-poor airplane mechanic.”

I sat down opposite him at the picnic table and wrote out a check.

Larry picked crumbs out of his arm fur, watching me. “What’d you do, rob a bank or something?”

“Ex-father-in-law.”

“You robbed your ex-father-in-law?”

“More or less.”

I gave him the check. Larry folded it without looking at it and put it in his wallet.

“You been subleasing from me for, what, two years? That’s the first time I’ve heard you say word one about family.”

“He’s not family.”

“Used to be, though, right?” Larry said.

“How ’bout them Dodgers?” I said.

Larry grunted and finished his soda. My phone rang. The caller was male and foreign. His inflection was Spanish or Romanian, possibly Moldovan. Sort of like Dracula, only younger and hipper.

He said his name was Eugen Dragomir, and that he was a student at Cal State Rancho Bonita, whose campus was just up the road from the airport. The kid had seen my listing on Craigslist, he said, and was interested in learning to fly. Every other flight school between Camarillo and San Luis Obispo advertised online. Splashy, colorful web sites with animated graphics and streaming video testimonials from their many satisfied students. The fact that Dragomir could find no such web site for Above the Clouds Aviation, let alone any mention of it on Google, impressed him.

“Definitely old school,” Dragomir said. “I want to learn from the best. Someone who knows what they’re doing, who has been flying a long time.”

“Well, as the old saying goes, there are old pilots and bold pilots,” I said, trotting out the dustiest aphorism in the history of manned flight, “but there are no old, bold pilots.”

He wanted to get started right away and said he could be by within the hour. I said my airplane and I would be ready.

Twenty minutes later, Eugen Dragomir rolled into Larry’s hangar on a skateboard with a “Sex Wax” sticker on it. Gangly didn’t begin to describe him. He was built like a 3-iron with a backpack and dark, Eastern European dreadlocks. He was wearing black Chuck Taylor high-tops, laces dragging on the ground, surfer shorts that came down below his knobby knees and a T-shirt with a visage of Bob Marley on his chest. A shark’s tooth dangled from a leather strand looped around his pencil neck. He bobbed, swinging his spaghetti arms, as we strode out to the flight line. He was from Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, a fifth-year senior studying petrochemical engineering because that’s what his petrochemical engineer father wanted.

“But I’m thinking of switching majors.”

“To what?”

“Astronaut. I want to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

“You mean, ‘To boldly go where no
person
has gone before.’ Space is a very politically correct place these days, Eugen.”

He nodded like I was Confucius. He was all business, there to learn. I liked that.

I walked him through the preflight inspection, showing him how to check the
Duck
’s control surfaces for loose rivets, climbing up on the wings to make sure there was adequate gas in the tanks, checking the oil, looking inside the engine compartment for anything that didn’t look right, undoing the tie-down lines. He shadowed my every move, cocking his head as he listened, soaking it all in. When the walk-around was complete, I opened the left side door for him.

“Hop in.”

“You want
me
to fly?”

“That’s generally what pilots do.”

“This is
sick
!”

After we got in and locked the doors, I explained enginestart procedures and let him do the starting. I demonstrated how to dial in the ATIS frequency for current conditions on the field, including winds, dew point and altimeter setting.

I changed frequencies to Clearance Delivery and let the controllers know who we were and where we wanted to fly.

“Good afternoon, Clearance,” I said, “Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima.”

“Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, Rancho Bonita Clearance, good afternoon.”

“Four Charlie Lima is a 172 slant uniform, northwest departure with information Yankee, 4,500 feet. We’ll be doing some maneuvering outside the class delta. Request traffic advisories.”

“Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, on request.”

We waited.

“Dude, this is, like, the baddest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Eugen said. “I mean, once I took my girlfriend to bungee jumping and she was all, ‘I’m freaked,’ and I was all—”

“Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima”—I held up my finger for Eugen to be quiet while the controller came back on the radio with our clearance—“expect Runway One-Seven left. Fly runway heading after departure. Maintain VFR at or below 1,500 feet. Expect own navigation within three minutes. Departure frequency, 125.4. Squawk 4621.”

I jotted down a shorthand version of the instructions in a small notebook I keep in the plane for such purposes and read them back to the controller.

“Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, read back correct. Contact ground, 121.6. Have a good flight.”

I explained how next we contacted ground control to receive taxiing instructions.

“Tell them, ‘Ground, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, ready to taxi from Premier with Yankee.’”

Eugen keyed the radio and repeated what I’d said.

“Skyhawk, Four Charlie Lima, roger. Taxi to One-Seven left via Bravo, hold short 2-6.”

The kid was totally jazzed. I let him steer the plane. We nearly ran off the taxiway, but only once. Not bad for a beginner. At the run-up area next to the runway, with the airplane’s parking brake set, I showed him how we revved the engine to 1700 RPMs, to make sure everything worked properly. Then we taxied to the hold-short line of the assigned runway. I switched radio frequencies to the tower.

“Rancho Bonita tower, Skyhawk Four Charlie Lima, ready One-Seven left.”

“Four Charlie Lima, Rancho Bonita Tower, traffic on two-mile base. Runway One-Seven left, cleared for immediate takeoff.”

“OK,” I said, folding my hands placidly in my lap, “you’ve got the airplane.”

I’ve watched fighter jocks with 5,000 hours take off with less elegance. The kid took to flying like a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet. We flew for an hour. Steep turns. Turns around a point. Climbs. Dives. Standard stuff for a fifty dollar introductory lesson. Just enough to make it all look effortless. Eugen Dragomir was a natural. I almost let him land.

“You sure you’ve never done this before?” I said as we were walking back toward my office.

“Maybe, like, in a previous life or something.” He dug a damp, crumpled fifty dollar bill out of his board shorts. “If my father wrote a check for five thousand, would that be OK to start?”

“Sounds
mucho bueno
to me.”

Another five grand. My day was looking better and better. I found a fresh logbook in my desk. I filled in the particulars of Eugen Dragomir’s maiden flight, signed my name, and gave it to him. He held the book in his hand like it was a precious thing.

“Fortunately for you,” I said, “my schedule’s pretty flexible at present. Lemme know when the funds arrive. You’ll be soloing in no time, guaranteed.”

“Can’t wait.”

We bumped fists, then he retrieved his skateboard where he’d left it, against the wall of Larry’s hangar. As he coasted toward the security gate, he smiled and waved with his thumb and pinkie extended, one of those Hawaiian “hang loose” signs.

I returned the gesture, feeling rather foolish.

California State University, Rancho Bonita, with its 18,500 undergrads and architectural hodgepodge of a campus nestled on a picturesque bluff overlooking the Pacific, is known perennially as a top-ten party school. Few students who ventured off campus and wanted me to teach them how to fly ever came close to mastering that goal. Surfing, boozing, blazing, and getting laid invariably took precedence. Eugen Dragomir seemed different. A studious kid. A great potential pilot.