McCone and Friends (37 page)

I said, “I assume you want me to look into the reason Oakley killed himself.”

“If it’s something you feel you can take on.”

“Of course I can.”

“I’ll pay you well.”

“For God’s sake, you don’t have to do that!”

“Look, McCone, you don’t ask your dentist friend to drill for free. I’m not going to ask you to investigate for free, either.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Ripinsky. Nothing in life’s free. We’ll come up with some suitable way for you to compensate me for my labors.”

My obvious starting place was Scott Oakley’s mother. I called to ask if I could stop by, and set off for her home in Vernon, the small town that hugged the lake’s north shore.

It was autumn, the same time of year as when I’d first journeyed there and met Hy. The aspens glowed golden in the hollows of the surrounding hills and above them the sky was a deep blue streaked with high cirrus clouds. In the years that I’d been coming to Tufa Lake, its water level had slowly risen and was gradually beginning to reclaim the dusty alkali plain that surrounded it—the result of a successful campaign by environmental organizations to stop diversions of its feeder streams to southern California. Avocets, gulls, and other shorebirds had returned to nest on its small island and feed on the now plentiful brine shrimp.

Strange that Scott Oakley had chosen a place of such burgeoning vitality to end his own life.

Jan Oakley was young to have lost a husband, much less outlived her son—perhaps in her early forties. She had the appearance of a once-active woman whose energy had been sapped by sadness and loss, and small wonder: It had been only two weeks since Scott’s crash. As we sat in the living room of her neat white prefab house, she handed me a high-school graduation picture of him; he had been blond, blue-eyed, and freckle-faced, with and endearingly serious expression.

“What do you want to ask me about Scott, Ms. McCone?”

“I’m interested in what kind of a person he was. What his state of mind was before the accident.”

“You said on the phone that you’re a private investigator and a friend of Hy Ripinsky. Is he trying to prove that Scott committed suicide? Because he didn’t, you now. I don’t care what Hy or the National Transportation Safety Board people think.”

“He doesn’t want to prove anything. But Hy needs answers—much as I’m sure you do.”

“Answers so he can get himself off the hook as far as responsibility for Scott’s death is concerned?”

I remained silent. She was hurting, and entitled to her anger.

After a moment Jan Oakley sighted. “All right, that was unfair. Scott admired Hy; he wouldn’t want me to blame him. Ask your questions, Ms. McCone.”

I asked much the same things as I had of Hy and received much the same answers, as well as Scott’s Reno address and the name of his fiancée. “I never even met her,” Mrs. Oakley said regretfully, “and I couldn’t reach her to tell her about the accident. She knows by now, of course, but she never even bothered to call.”

I’d about written the interview off at that point, but I decided to probe some more on the issue of Scott’s state of mind immediately before he left for what was to be his last flying lesson. After my first question, Mrs. Oakley failed to meet my eyes, clearly disturbed.

“I’m sorry to make you relive that day,” I said, “but how Scott was feeling is important.”

“Yes, I know.” For a moment it seemed that she might cry, then she sighed again, more heavily, “He wasn’t…He was upset when he arrived late the night before.”

“Over what?”

“He wouldn’t say.”

Sometimes instinct warns you when someone isn’t telling the whole truth; this was one of those times. “What about the next morning? Did he say then?’

She looked at me, startled. “How did…? All right, yes. He told me. Now I realized I should have stopped him, but he wanted so badly to solo. I thought, one time—what will it matter? All he wanted was to take that little Cessna around the pattern alone one time before he had to give it all up.”

“Give up flying? Why?”

“Scott had a physical checkup in Reno the day before. He was diagnosed as having narcolepsy.”

“Narcolepsy,” Hy said. “That’s the condition when you fall asleep without any warning?”

“Yes. One of my friends suffers from it. She’ll get very sleepy, drop off in the middle of a conversation. One time we were flying down to Southern California together; the plane was landing, and she just stopped talking, closed her eyes, and slept till we were on the ground.”

“Jesus, can’t they treat it?”

“Yes, with ephedrine or amphetamine, but it’s not always successful.”

“And neither the drugs nor the condition would be acceptable to an FAA medical examiner.”

“No. Besides, there’s and even more potentially dangerous side to it: A high percentage of the people who have narcolepsy also suffer from a condition called cataplexy in which their body muscles become briefly paralyzed in stressful or emotional situations.”

“Such as one would experience on a first solo flight.” Hy grimaced and signaled for another round of drinks. We were sitting at the bar at Zelda’s, the lakeside tavern at the top of the peninsula on which Vernon was located. The owner, Bob Zelda, gave him a thumbs-up gesture and quickly slid a beer toward him, a white wine toward me.

“You know, McCone, it doesn’t compute. How’d Scott pass his student pilot’s medical?”