“Call it a betrayal of confidence.”
“How?”
“I can't go into it. There're other people involved, and, like you said earlier, I don't know you. Or trust you.”
“In my business, I have to be discreet.”
“About your clients’ affairs, yes. But I'm nothing to you.”
She'd threatened to betray his confidence about the gambling club or some other illegal activity, no doubt. And she'd probably threatened to expose his associates, too. I needed to know exactly what had happened, and there was a way to work around this snag.
After a moment I said, “I assume you have an attorney on retainer.”
“Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”
“Get him on the phone. Tell him to hire me to investigate Lee D’Silva.”
“The hell I will! I took care of her personally; she's history.”
“Have him hire me to investigate her—for a dollar. Which I will loan to you.” I took one from my bag and laid it on the table between us.
A slow smile spread across Auerbach's face as he picked it up. Then he reached for the phone.
“I was thinking with my balls,” Auerbach told me. “For Christmas I gave her a membership in the casino—that key card. She'd noticed something was going on, was at me to tell her about it. So I thought, Why not humor the crazy kid? Maybe she'd stick around more. After that she was around plenty, but not because of me.”
“She's a gambler?”
“Hell, no.” He shook his head. “I never once saw her at the tables. She'd just watch. We get a lot of important people in here, and they interested her. At least that's what I thought at first.”
“And later?”
“Lee fancies herself a hot-shot private eye like you. I guess you know that. But, shit, the woman works for a bunch of alarm installers; uses a computer good, but so what? If you ask me, she couldn't detect her way out of a paper bag.”
He was underestimating D’Silva—but, then, so had I. “Go on.”
“Well, what she was really doing here—and with me—was gathering evidence on me and my associates. Them I'm not gonna say anything about, except that we got a pretty good cooperative arrangement in various lucrative areas, and I made the mistake of talking to Lee about it. So she decided she was gonna make a name for herself by exposing us and our important clients. Get her face in the papers, ensure she got the job with your agency. She'd sneak around in this stupid disguise that didn't fool anybody, and she'd photograph and tape stuff. Finally somebody noticed what she was doing and tipped me.”
“This disguise—I take it she looked somewhat like me in it.”
“Yeah. The bartender—he's new, never knew Lee—described you when he called back here. I was sure you were her.”
“Did you ever ask her why she wore it?”
“Sure. All she would say was that she liked to live different lives, and it was part of the fantasy.”
“The fantasy?”
Auerbach shrugged. “That's all she'd say.”
“Okay—somebody tipped you to the picture-taking and taping. Then what?”
“I had my condo swept for bugs, the club, too. They were there, and in most cases the circumstances were such that she was the only one who could've planted them.”
“So you … ?”
“Confronted her. Bitch actually bragged about what she'd done, said she had the evidence in a safe place and was going to go to the police and the D.A.’s office with it. I laughed at her.”
“Why?”
“Let's just say I got those angles covered, and the little fool was too naive to figure that out.”
Payoffs or holds over people at high levels? “What was her reaction?”
“She didn't believe me. It didn't fit her perfect plan. She kept coming at me, wouldn't back off.”
“And?”
“Maybe you don't want to hear this.”
“Look, we have a deal.”
“Christ! All right, what I did: We were here in the office. She got more and more out of control. Shouting, screaming, taunting me. So I took her by the throat and slammed her against the wall. Started choking her. Real quiet, I told her that if I ever saw her in any of my clubs again, or anywhere near my home or my associates, I'd kill her with my bare hands.”
The flesh on my arms rippled unpleasantly.
“I kept on choking her till she almost passed out. Then she peed in her pants and skulked out of here like a whipped dog. And I've never seen or heard from her again. Not a pretty story, is it?” He tried to put on a regretful face, but his eyes shone defiantly, almost proudly.
I watched him for a moment, keeping my emotions to myself.
I asked, “Exactly when was this?”
“You mean the date?” He reached for a calendar, flipped it backwards. “A Tuesday, February four.”
Tuesday, February 4. On Wednesday D’Silva had gone to work at Carver Security and tossed the key card that she'd never be able to use again into her desk. That night she'd gone home to find the turndown letter from me. And the combination of the two events had sent her—the perfectionist, overachiever, would-be private investigator and pilot— into her crazy emotional tailspin.
Tonight I'm dreaming—I must be dreaming—that I'm flying the Citabria over high-tension wires that have been severed by a storm. They spark and crackle and writhe like huge snakes in the violent wind, lashing at the plane. I make S-turns among them as I sometimes do between billowing coastal clouds.
Hy's not with me. My connection with him is cut as surely as those wires. There's an occasional spark, yes, but mainly I don't feel anything. Nothing but this lonesomeness and a panic that makes my breath come short. I want to ask him how to avoid the crackling wires, but he's out of reach.
I continue making S-turns as I try to spot a landmark on the ground below.
There it is—the safe and familiar. A triangulation of lights against the blackness. Something's important about those lights and what they represent—something I ought to remember.
One of the wires arcs above the plane's nose, almost tangles in the prop. I dive to escape it. When I'm clear, I put in full throttle and outrun the storm.
I
knew it was going to be a peculiar day when I spilled coffee on the cat.
I was leaning down to pat Ralph and the mug tipped and there he was, sodden and singed. “Oh, Jesus!” I exclaimed and reached for him, but he escaped my grasp and ran down the hall to where the pet door used to be before his sister returned one night with an enormous rat that later died behind the refrigerator. Ralph's head connected solidly with the closed-up space on the wall, and he staggered back, shaking it. I hurried to him, but he cringed and yowled to be let out. As he stalked away across the deck, he flashed me a look of betrayal. I retreated to the sitting room to make some calls, feeling guilty as hell.
According to the man who answered the phone at RKI's Buenos Aires office, Mr. Ripinsky and Mr. Rivera were still out in the field and unavailable. La Jolla told me Gage Renshaw and Dan Kessell were similarly occupied. In Dan's case, that was an outright lie, since he seldom left his office, preferring the company of a dozen or so stuffed portions of animals that he'd personally slaughtered to that of his fellow humans.
About the only thing that was cooperating this morning was the weather, which had turned colder and beautifully clear.
I was partway through the comics when the phone rang: Hy's friend from the FAA. He gave me the name of the examiner who had signed off on Lee D’Silva's private license, a Novato cop named Joe Bartlett. I reached Bartlett at home and told him I was thinking of hiring D’Silva and paying for her to get her commercial license so she could fly for the agency; what did he think of her skills?
“Skills're fine. She's great under pressure. We went up for the check ride in a Cessna 150, and … You fly?”
“I learned in a 150.”
“Well, then, you know how sometimes the doors can pop open in flight if you haven't closed them with the windows open?”
“Uh-huh.” It had scared the hell out of me the first time it happened.
“Well, that's what D’Silva's door did on takeoff, but it didn't faze her. She put on flaps, opened the window, tried to slam the door shut. Didn't work. So, cool as can be, she said to me the way a seasoned pilot would to a nervous passenger, ‘I'm having a little trouble with this door, so I'm going to go around and make a full-stop landing. I'll secure the door, and then we'll start over.’”
“Pretty impressive, on a check ride where you're nervous anyway.” What was it Stacey Nizibian, the SFPD expert on stalkers, had said? Something about them remaining cool under conditions that would have the rest of us climbing the walls. “Just out of curiosity, who was her flight instructor and where did she train?”
‘Woman named Sara Grimly—”
“I know her. She's at Petaluma Municipal.”
“Not anymore. She got married, moved to Los Alegres.”
Los Alegres, where I'd also trained with a woman flight instructor. D’Silva had replicated my flight-training experience.
After Bartlett and I ended our conversation, I got out a rumpled and torn sectional chart—my instructor had often joked that they were called sectionals because they came apart in sections—and located Paradise, where D’Silva had grown up, Los Alegres was only a short detour from a direct course there, so I called the fixed-base operator—flight school, sales, rentals, and repairs—and asked if Sara Grimly was teaching today. She was, had gone out on an early flight and would be back at ten. I left a message asking her to meet me at the Seven Niner Diner, the airport restaurant, and hurried to get dressed. On the way to Oakland I tried not to obsess about Hy, but failed to the point that I nearly rear-ended a pickup on the Bay Bridge.
As I preflighted the Citabria, I realized my dream last night had proved to me how totally our connection had broken down. I missed him more than ever, felt myself sinking further into depression and near panic. But once I was out of Class C airspace, the bad feelings lifted; in this place, the cockpit where we'd flown together for so many hours, it was impossible not to feel some optimism. There's something about physically cutting loose from the earth and all its problems that creates hope.
And at this point, hope was all I could count on.
Sara Grimly was in her mid-twenties, dark haired and petite. She seemed even smaller than when I'd first met her, probably because she was dwarfed by the 1600-pound Cessna that she and her student were pushing into its tie-down—him guiding with the tow bar, but Grimly doing most of the work.
I walked toward them as he secured the chains and she collected her booster seat—in spite of the growing number of women pilots, planes are still designed for tall men—and headset case and purse. She turned, saw me, and waved.
“Bob Cuda relayed your message on the unicom,” she called. “Nice to see you again.”
“You too.” I glanced toward the gas pumps, where a familiar gray-haired lineman in a hooded jacket was fueling an Aztec. “Cuda get his license yet?”
“No, but he's soloed.” Grimly turned to the student. “I'll sign your logbook tomorrow, okay?”
He nodded and she touched my arm. “Onward to the diner.”
The Seven Niner Diner held many memories for me, some of them bittersweet, and it seemed strange to be sitting down in a booth with Grimly rather than with my former flight instructor, Matty Wildress. Briefly I thought of how Matty would approve of my new take-charge attitude toward D’Silva—much as she would have disapproved of my earlier inability to deal with the situation.
We ordered—tea for Grimly, coffee for me. As she waved aside the offered menu, I spotted the substantial diamond engagement and wedding rings on her left hand.
“I heard you got married,” I said. “Lovely rings.”
She held her hand up so the light caught the stones. “Yeah. Do you remember when I told you the only way I was going to be able to buy my own plane was either to build up enough hours to get on with the airlines or to marry well?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I managed the latter. He's an architect, very much in demand. Now I can instruct for the pleasure of it, and that Mooney over there in the tie-downs is mine. And you know what? On top of all that, I'm crazy about him.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. So what's happening with you? Your message said you wanted to ask about one of my former students.”
“Yes—Lee D’Silva.”
“May I ask why?”
“She's applied for a job with me, but something about her strikes me as not right. I can't put my finger on it, and I thought you might be able to shed some light on it.”
Grimly considered, squeezing lemon into her tea. “Well, you know my policy of not talking about my students—and you also know I'll violate it for a good reason. Your feeling's correct. At first I couldn't analyze it either. She came into the FBO last July, insisted on a woman instructor. She learned fast, was very intense—driven, actually—but I couldn't get at her reasons for wanting to fly.”
“I'm not sure I understand.”
“I don't think she really likes to fly. She found the details—learning the regs, preflighting, flight planning—annoying. And she never relaxed in the cockpit. It's natural to be tense at first, we all go through it; but most students, at least when they start doing cross-countries, soon realize that flying's fun and start to experience the sheer pleasure of being up there above it all. D’Silva didn't.”
“Interesting, in light of the fact she was so cool on her check ride.”
“You must've talked with Joe Bartlett. Yes, she was cool, but in a situation that had happened before. And I had an earlier student who handled the door-opening problem on a check ride in the same way; I'd told Lee about him.”
“That explains it. What else about her?”
“She had mood swings; if I had to put a name to it, I'd say she was borderline manic-depressive. And she was fixated on mastering the difficult stuff before she mastered the ABC's. For instance, she wanted to train in a tail-dragger. I suggested she wait till she had the license, then I'd give her some instruction in the Citabria.” She motioned at the red-and-white plane parked near the FBO's entrance.