by Donn Taylor
“We’re looking for Cocky Joe,” I said. “Ralph Dornberg told us to look him up.”
“I’m him,” he said. “The name’s Joe Cochran, but they call me Cocky Joe.”
Mitra’s married name had been Cochran, but I bit back questions. Our first job was to get the man talking.
Mara took the initiative. “We’re interested in Jerry Vaughan’s crash—especially the maintenance of the airplane beforehand.”
“I told all that to those government people. What’s your interest?”
“I was Mitra Fortier’s friend.” Mara’s smile would have melted a diamond. “She was looking into this and didn’t live to finish the job.”
It occurred to me that Mara was getting to be as good a liar as I was.
Joe’s eyes narrowed. “Why d’ya think I’d be interested in Mitra Fortier?”
I clamped my teeth shut, but Mara answered without hesitation.
“If you’d known Mitra, you’d want to help. She was murdered while she was trying to find out if Jerry Vaughan was murdered. We’re picking up where she left off.”
He gave half a shrug. “What d’ya want to know?”
Mara spoke earnestly. “We need to know if anyone had access to his airplane long enough to sabotage it.”
Joe squinted one eye. “Well, I don’t know how long that would take. I don’t know much about airplanes.”
“Then tell us who came here in the nights before the crash.”
“As I told the accident board, all the owners came by in those last two nights. Ralph Dornberg; that car dealer, Emory Estes, and those guys Drisko and Samstag. And the afternoon before the crash, Drisko and Samstag came at different times and made a few takeoffs and landings.”
“But no aerobatics?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
Mara took over again. “When was the last time Dornberg and Estes flew the airplane?”
“I wouldn’t know that, either.” Joe looked bored. “I sleep in most mornings and don’t go on duty till five in the evening. I just happened to be wandering around that Friday afternoon.”
Mara smiled but bored in again. “But there’s a lot of activity out here in the afternoon? People would see if someone did something unusual?”
Joe repeated his half-shrug. “I suppose.”
“So if the airplane was sabotaged, it would have to be done at night.”
Joe bristled. “I’d have seen it and called the cops. That’s what I told those accident investigators, and that’s what I’m telling you.”
Mara’s eyes narrowed. “And you were here on the job every night.”
Joe said, “I was.” But his gaze drifted off toward the ground.
I jumped in again. “What about the time you weren’t here?”
“How’d you know about that?” Consternation gripped Joe’s face.
“You’d be surprised what I know,” I said. He would have been more surprised by what I didn’t know, but I had no intention of telling him. “Let’s hear your side of it.”
He squinted both eyes. “I could lose my job.”
“Not if you play ball with us,” I said. “Tell us about it and don’t skip any details.”
Joe’s shoulders slumped lower. “It was that Wednesday afternoon around five, and I got this phone call. The voice said it was Mr. Dornberg, but it didn’t sound like him. He said get a taxi and come see him. I said I couldn’t afford a taxi, but he said he’d pay for it, so I called one and started out.”
“What did he want?” Mara asked.
Joe pursed his lips. “When I talked to him later, he said he never called me.”
“So what happened?” Mara’s voice was soft.
“Just outside the airfield, a car full of guys ran us off the road. Then four big guys piled out of that car and beat us up good and left us laying on the sidewalk. They jumped in another car and got clean away. Turned out later their first car was stolen.”
Joe took a deep breath.
“We just laid there a while,” he said, “but somebody’d called an ambulance. In the emergency room they said our ribs was bruised but not busted. The taxi driver got one of his buddies to bring me back here, free. But it must have been midnight before I got back.”
Mara’s voice was sympathetic. “And you didn’t tell anyone about this? Not even the accident board?”
Joe’s eyes hardened. “Not a word. I have to keep my job.”
I jumped in again. “What about the police? They must have investigated the accident.”
Joe gave a sly grin. “They did, but I gave ’em another name. Same thing in the ER. So nobody ever asked me about it.”
There we had it—six hours when anyone could have sabotaged Jerry’s plane. The plot that provided those six hours smacked of more mob action. But Joe Cochran, if he were indeed Mitra’s ex-husband, would have had a perfect motive to dispose of her new boyfriend. I made a quick test.
“I’ve never understood much about these airplanes, either,” I said. “I always wondered how they could get enough air pressure beneath the wings to push them up off the ground.”
Mara threw me a what-on-earth-are-you-doing look.
But Joe grinned. “I’ve wondered about that, too. I guess when they get up speed and raise the nose, the air under the wings kind of pushes ’em up.”
“I used to know a guy that repaired propellers,” I said. “When some pilot made a gear-up landing and bent the propeller blades back double, he’d heat them up on a forge and have them back in shape in nothing flat.”
“Sounds like good work if you can get it,” Joe said.
Those answers told me what I needed to know, so I decided to drop the bomb.
“You’ve helped us a lot on that subject, Joe,” I said. “Now tell us about your marriage to Mitra Fortier.”
CHAPTER 33
Joe’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “What marriage? I never heard of that woman.”
I resurrected my Special Forces voice. “Don’t hand me that, Joe. You attended her memorial service in Overton City, and her personnel records say she was married to a man named Cochran. You’d better tell us the whole story.”
He looked down and muttered, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I kept pressing in. “If you don’t tell us, we’ll tell Ralph Dornberg you were AWOL from the job.”
His eyes burned with a deep fire, and I feared he might remain defiant. But sudden tears doused the fire, his shoulders slumped, and he said, “You have me over a barrel.”
His face took on a faraway look. “We met in college. She was pretty. And, boy, was she smart. I was kind of slow in the science classes, but she tutored me, and I passed the exams. And somewhere in all that we got interested in each other.”
He paused, apparently in thought. “After we got married, we graduated together and found good jobs. We were happy for maybe a year. Then she started spending time by herself, and she made it clear I wasn’t welcome in that part of her life. When I watched TV, she’d take one of those romance books and close herself up in the bedroom.”
“That couldn’t have been very pleasant for you,” Mara said.
“Pleasant?” Joe grimaced. “It was pure hell wondering what I’d done to deserve that. She spent more time by herself and less with me until I had a gullet full. So one night, I burst into that closed bedroom and found her writing in some kind of notebook. She slammed it shut. I asked what was in it, and she said that was none of my business. We started yelling back and forth at each other. But she wouldn’t tell me what she was doing, and I wouldn’t stop demanding that she tell. It came out a draw, and that night we slept with a lot of empty space between us in the bed—a wonder we didn’t fall out on opposite sides.”
“That’s terrible,” Mara said, her tone sympathetic.
He warmed to his story. “Well, our marriage had gotten cold anyway, and I thought maybe she’d been carrying on with someone else. I waited for things to calm down. Then I c
alled in sick at work and shadowed her around for a whole week. Nothing. Not one thing suspicious. So instead of following her, I went home and searched through her books. She had six notebooks, all hidden behind the romance books in her bookcase.”
Mara whispered, “What was in them, Joe?”
His face showed the saddest expression I’ve ever seen on a human being. “They were full of details of her romantic adventures—all with male friends we’d had, and all of them married. So at first I got real mad. But in one notebook, she’d written about being involved on specific dates and places with a guy named Murray Whitfield. But I’d run into Murray’s wife a few weeks before, and she told me Murray had spent a week in the hospital with knee surgery. I hadn’t mentioned that to Mitra. And she’d written the hottest parts of her romance with Murray while he was laid up in the hospital.”
Mara whispered again. “So she’d made it all up?”
Joe nodded. “That’s it on the button. So I had it out with her again, and she admitted everything. She said she’d had that … uh … ‘fantasy life,’ she called it, ever since she could remember. She said it was what kept her going in a world where ‘most everything was bad.’ So I said, ‘What about us?’ And she said something about ‘I like you, Joe, and you’ll always be a good friend.’”
He continued, tears in his eyes. “I said that wasn’t enough for me, and I filed for divorce. She couldn’t contest it because I had her notebooks and could use them as evidence if she wanted to get nasty. She didn’t, so the judge gave us the divorce for incompatibility.”
“Have you seen her since?” Mara asked.
Joe shook his head. “I never went back. But other things weren’t so clean. My calling in sick when I wasn’t cost me my job, and I started drinking. I couldn’t live with the idea that she had to imagine love affairs to make up for what I couldn’t give her. And I hit bottom. In and out of rehab, couldn’t hold a job, sometimes living on the street. I ended up here—a place to sleep and sixty dollars a week the pilots give me to look after their airplanes. And I let ’em down on that. I don’t know who set me up, but I know somebody or other got in here and ... and did something to Jerry Vaughan’s airplane.”
“You couldn’t help it,” Mara said, ignoring his failure to give essential evidence. “Do you still have Mitra’s journals?”
He looked away. “I burned them all long ago.”
“We couldn’t know all you’ve been through,” she said, “but we do understand part of it. The police have one of Mitra’s journals that says she had a long affair with Press here. It says I was her competition and that we had a shouting quarrel about it. Press and I have lost our jobs because of that journal.” She gave him a searching glance. “To undo some of that damage, would you tell the police what you’ve just told us?”
Joe recoiled as if she’d handed him a cobra. “The past is dead, and it’s going to stay that way.”
Her voice became a whisper. “You’d let innocent people suffer for things they didn’t do?”
Joe clamped his jaw shut. “I won’t put myself through that shame, and I won’t put her memory through it. I’ve fooled around with you too long. Now go away.”
He turned and slouched off toward the far end of the hangar.
Mara and I exchanged looks of despair, and I cursed myself again for losing my voice recorder. She must have been doing the same for letting her phone go dead. Without speaking, we went back to her car, getting a little more wet this time because the rain came harder.
“Tell me,” Mara said, “what was that business about propellers and air pushing up under wings?”
“I wanted to know if Joe knew as little about airplanes as he claimed,” I said. “Jealousy of Jerry Vaughan would have been a perfect motive for murder, but whoever did it had sophisticated knowledge of aircraft. Joe swallowed both my lies about airplanes, so he knows less about them than most high school kids.”
She looked at me narrowly, so I explained. “Most lift forms above the wings, not below. And no one could ever restore the balance on a propeller that’s been bent.” Silently, I awarded myself points for finding a subject she hadn’t mastered.
As we headed back to the main highway, the car skidded on the first turn. Mara handled it perfectly, steering into the skid and accelerating so that the front-wheel drive stabilized the car.
“The worst of all weather conditions,” she said, slowing to a creep. “There’s warm air up above where the rain is forming, but it’s falling into cold air and freezing when it hits. We’d never make it back to Overton City.”
“That’s not the worst of our troubles. Did you see that dark-colored car parked where we turned out from the airport?”
She threw me an alarmed glance. “I didn’t notice. I had my hands full of skid.” She returned her gaze to the road and concentrated on driving.
“It’s following us about a block back,” I said. “I’ve seen it several times today, always near but never too near. There were two guys in it, but I couldn’t make out any details.”
She frowned, gaze still fixed on the road. “I don’t understand. At the airport, they could have taken us out with no one to stop them.”
“I don’t know, either,” I said. “We’ve been warned to stop investigating. Maybe it’s surveillance to see if we heeded the warnings.”
On the main highway, we found two motels facing each other on opposite sides of the highway. Mara pulled into the parking lot of one and stopped to look it over.
“Exterior corridors,” she said. “Not good with those fellows following us.”
The other motel, across the highway, proved to have interior corridors.
“Let’s hope they have vacancies,” she said as she stopped under the motel’s overhead. “At least we won’t get rained on going in.”
The lobby was empty except for a well-dressed man with graying temples behind the registration desk and a wide-screen TV where a young floozie in boots and a leather bikini stomped around in something she thought was a dance. The desk man sniffed a couple of times but elected to remain silent about my aroma. At our request, he assigned us rooms on different floors. The separate-floor assignments were feeble precautions against the Blatant Beast—not that he ever let facts come between him and a good bite.
Mara let me go out and park her car. As I entered again, I spotted the dark car idling near the edge of the parking lot.
“I don’t mean to make trouble,” I said to the desk man, “but a couple of guys in a dark car are hanging around out there. I thought you ought to know.”
“Thanks,” he said. “We were robbed last month, and since then the police have been most helpful.”
Mara handed me her cell phone. “No one ever calls me on that phone,” she said, “and you’re expecting a call back from that guy in Dallas.”
When I protested that the battery was dead, she took the charging cord from her purse and handed it to me.
“I sometimes charge it in my office,” she explained, “but I never thought I’d need to charge it in the car.”
With that, we headed to our respective rooms, mine on the second floor and hers on the third. In my room, I left the lights off and watched from a window overlooking the parking lot. Five minutes later, a police car eased up beside the dark car and turned on its flashers. The policeman got out and spoke briefly with the dark car’s driver. Pretty soon the dark car drove out onto the highway and turned in the direction away from Overton City. The policeman waited a few minutes and drove away.
With that problem settled, I stripped down and hand-washed the liniment smell out of my undergarments and hung them on the shower rod. Then I applied a whopping fresh dose of Mara’s liniment to my aching body. It burned like battery acid and smelled like concentrate of eau de polecat, but it brought immediate relief. As my muscles relaxed, deep fatigue from the event-packed day seeped in. In a near daze, I remembered that all the information we’d gathered seemed to provide no help for either our suspensions or
Mara’s arrest.
So if Truth was really The Daughter of Time, it looked like Time had a runaway in the family.
When I recalled Joe Cochran’s sad story, my internal musicians featured a trombone playing “None but the Lonely Heart.” The soloist must have been a baseball player because he kept sliding into the third.
I was just sliding into sleep when Mara’s cell phone rang.
It was Leonard Morley. “Press,” he said, “you’ve got the proverbial tiger by the tail with Dustin Industries.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“You remember that you wanted me to take a look at it, and I gave you the short course about distances in Texas? Well, I have a friend in El Paso who owed me a favor, and he checked out the address where that company is supposed to be.”
“What did he find?” I asked.
“He found a lawyer’s office.”
“Does that mean Dustin Industries doesn’t exist?”
“It exists, all right,” he said. “It’s legally incorporated, but it exists only in a file cabinet in some lawyer’s office. I think you’ve found a dummy corporation that someone uses to scam government contracts.”
CHAPTER 34
That brought a possible motive for the murder of two people. Jerry was the CPA who said he was looking into Dustin Industries and paid for it with his life. Robert Sun Lee had told Mitra about Jerry and Dustin shortly before her death. But what could I do with the information?
“Press, are you still there?” Morley’s question jolted me out of reflection.
“Uh ... yes. Just wondering where to go from here. I don’t suppose you know who owns the corporation?”
“Not yet,” he said. “I’ve traced the ownership to the Cayman Islands. It’ll take me a while to find the real owners. Do you have any ideas?”
“Only suspicions. Mainly Gordon Samstag and Steven Drisko. But I suppose Ralph Dornberg and Emory Estes could be in on it.”
“I’ve heard of Samstag and Drisko,” he said, “but who are the other two?”
“Local businessmen in or around Overton City.”