Fool's Flight (Digger) (15 page)

"What do you make of it?" he asked.

Busily chewing, she mumbled, "You first."

"I think he’s another Jesus freak, writing this sappy, maudlin letter and then he’s going to come back from Puerto Rico and tell her how he learned to walk on water and will she take him back. A lot of bullshit."

"I don’t know," she said. "There’s a lot of finality about that letter. ‘Too late for me.’ ‘Too late to cry about spilled milk.’ I’m not so sure."

Digger looked at the address on the envelope. Miss Martha Buchler in Butler, Pennsylvania. "Hold on a minute," he said.

He left the table, taking the envelope with him. Koko took the occasion to pick at his uneaten salad.

When he came back in ten minutes, his salad bowl was empty.

"Where’s my salad?"

"It was wilting. Where’d you go?"

"I called Martha in Butler. This guy was her husband. He left her when she was pregnant twenty years ago. The drunker he got, the more maudlin he got. He used to write a lot but he never came back to see her. She said he was a lush and a reprobate and she never wanted to hear of him again in her life."

"She hadn’t seen him in twenty years?"

"Not since he left her with the brat. I told her he was dead and she said good. She also said he was always writing stupid letters. She threw them away without reading them."

"Anything else?"

"She invited me for dinner the next time I’m in Butler. I might go. There isn’t much else to do in Butler."

"You got a lot accomplished in one telephone call," Koko said.

"I’m good at it. Even though I hate the phone," he said.

"You’re always on it," she said.

"Only ’cause I have to be. Some people like talking on the phone but I hate it. I always hope nobody ever calls me. A lot of people aren’t like that, though. They like calls. I was driving once on this highway in Connecticut and I bought this cup of coffee in a cardboard container from a machine. Well, on the side of the container they had the name of the company that made it and the phone number. Now, why would they put their phone number on the container, I wondered. I figured they wanted somebody to call. So I call the number and when I got the switchboard operator, I told her I just called to say that they made a really fine cardboard container and they were to be congratulated. Well, she made me hang on and I had to tell the same thing to every-body and everybody and finally I wound up talking to the president of the company and I told him that I really enjoyed his cardboard coffee container. And he wanted to send me a case of cardboard coffee containers and I wouldn’t take them and finally he asked me, why’d I call. I was getting mad so I said because you put your freaking number on the container and if you didn’t want people to call, why did you do that? Well, a year later, I stopped on that same road for coffee again and this time they took the phone number off the container. Instead, they put on the address of the company."

"So?"

"So I figured they wanted somebody to write them, so I wrote them a letter and told them they made a really good container, and they sent me a free box of cardboard coffee containers. I give up."

"You’re nuts, Digger."

"I think if people give out their phone number, they want to be called. That’s why I always call numbers that you find on bathroom walls. For really good head call oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh."

"Who do you get when you call?"

"Usually some arithmetic teacher with a student who thinks it’s funny to write her name on walls. Once I got a hooker, though."

"What about her?"

"She gave really good head."

"How’d her number get on the wall?" Koko asked.

"She used to give a couple of bucks to this guy who worked in a maintenance service and he wrote her name on walls all over. It pays to advertise, I guess."

He looked at her and said, "Let’s go home."

"Yes."

"And make love."

"No," she said.

Chapter Nineteen

DIGGER’S LOG:

Tape recording number four, midnight Friday, Julian Burroughs in the matter of Interworld Airways crash.

If you were an airplane, why would you go down? Don’t tell me if you found a pretty lady airplane. That’s ridiculous.

No, you’d go down because of a bomb, quite likely. Or mechanical failure. Or pilot error. But Steven Donnelly, sobersided, industrious, God-loving Steven Donnelly doesn’t make pilot errors, except to take off without his co-pilot and stewardess. The equipment could fail. That’s for sure. Interworld’s equipment could fail while it was being gassed up. But unless and until there’s wreckage, no one will ever be able to tell.

The problem with those two scenarios is that they don’t give any justification for fraud and swindle and I deal in fraud and swindle. It goes this way in my head as a most-likely case. Brother Damien talks the passengers into insuring themselves in his name. Then Brother Damien plants something aboard to bring the plane down.

There’s a problem with that. Suppose Randy Batchelor wanted Donnelly out of the way because Donnelly was going to blow a whistle on him. That wouldn’t have anything to do with Damien Wardell, though, and I am just not ready to write this all off as coincidence, with all that money going to Wardell, no matter how much I dislike Batchelor.

A bomb. Who brings it on? A passenger? Maybe inside the passenger’s luggage. Maybe Donnelly brought it aboard. Or Batchelor. Maybe Batchelor brought on his bomb-laden bag, hung it up, then faked sick to get off the plane. Nobody checks crew when they carry their crap on a plane.

I don’t know, goddamit, I don’t know. I hate not knowing.

In the master file is another tape, re interviews today with Dr. Richard Josephson, Damien Wardell, Candace Wardell, and a Mrs. Birnbaumer.

Josephson keeps Donnelly’s records in a file cabinet alongside his desk. But he won’t talk. He told me that and he told the other insurance man. Mustache, dark hair, nice looking, that sounds like Randy Batchelor to me, but what the hell is he doing involved in this? What is he after? What is he afraid I’ll find? And why weren’t Donnelly’s medical records in the Interworld files the first time Jane looked? And then back where they belonged the next day.

And then there is the Wardell ménage. There is Candace, Mother Wardell, who sings like a zombie on stage but is jazz-in-jeans around the digs. And then there’s the matching bookend, Erma, the secretary. What did Mrs. Wardell call her? Ninde? What the hell kind of name is that? And weren’t they cute? Two big pretty blondes with their matching jeans and blouses and their little handkerchiefs.

Ninde had me fill out a form before my consultation with Wardell. She’s got no sense of humor. She didn’t recognize the name Prester John. But no charge for the consultation.

I also met Jack Thomasen, Wardell’s accountant. He seemed very happy at having six million pumped into their accounts. Who wouldn’t be? And that pat on Mrs. Wardell’s shoulder was a little warmer than I would have expected in a rectory. Is he the man who makes Candy sing so passionately? Any electricity between Candace and her husband is negative.

I think I’ve got a handle on Wardell. He may be sincere, he may be the greatest thing in Evangelism since the hand-held microphone, but I think he’s a power junkie. He operates his place like a petty martinet, barking out orders to the wife as if she were a slow-witted janitor. I can see him ordering people to restructure their lives and put themselves into his hands. Even though he knew I was a fake, he couldn’t resist talking about the need of people to put themselves "totally in his hands." But he seemed honestly surprised by the six million in insurance. I was watching those narrow little eyes carefully and he didn’t know about it. Or he’s a better actor than I thought he was. Anyway, there’s no sign that they’ve been spending a lot of money recently.

Kwash is checking out the Puerto Rican retreat and we’ll see what that’s about. And he’s also checking on the handwriting on those insurance applications.

No one knows anything about the insurance and that’s a surprise to me because I looked at the insurance form Koko picked up at the airport, and what you do, is you fill it out and then stick it into the machine with your quarters and it snips off the original part of the application, but the rest of the form comes back and it’s a self-sealing envelope and you’re supposed to put a stamp on it and dump it in the mail. Knowing how ethical and honest all insurance companies are, you have to do that, otherwise the beneficiary could never know he was the beneficiary and America’s insurance companies might decide not to pay off if no one knew they had to.

So Wardell should have gotten forty pieces of mail, duplicates of the insurance policies. And they say they didn’t get any. So where the hell are they? Who were they mailed to? Were all the passengers so dopey they just stuck the beneficiary’s copy of the policy in their pockets when they went on the plane? Some of them had to have read the instructions.

I told Candace that Mrs. Donnelly was thinking of suing. And then Candace was talking on the telephone and I don’t know who she was talking to, but later Trini Donnelly wouldn’t hear any talk of suing. That’s a fast, unexplained change of heart and I think I know who Candace called on the phone.

And then there’s Henry Plesser, another of the passengers, whose letter I got from landlady, Mrs. Birnbaumer. Some people will do anything to avoid getting swallowed up in the Bermuda Triangle. What Henry had done was leave his wife and think later he had made a mistake. That tells you Henry was a loser. Probably the only right thing he ever did in his life was leave his wife.

A Jesus-saves letter from somebody gone to take the cure. Koko thinks maybe not, but I just can’t see anything substantial in that letter at all.

What did Koko say? My sweet, tired, sleeping-in-armor Koko? She said these guys were nobodies on their way from nowhere to noplace. So am I. I don’t know what to do next with this goddam case. I’ll think of something. I have to think of something. Any minute now, those two gorilla kids, What’s-his-name and the girl, are going to be lashed into Cora’s car and start down here. I’ve got to get done and done fast, otherwise I’ll have to see them all again.

Frank Stevens, our president, I love you and honor you. Kwash, I tolerate you. But before meeting with those kids, I will leave here case unclosed. And that’s it. Roma Locuta Est.

I’m going to have to put Koko in for a bonus. She’s saved the company three hundred thou so far. Who knows? She might get to like this work. Anybody can lie on the beach and get tan but it takes brains to be an insurance investigator.

Expenses today and yesterday. Breakfast in our room, Koko and me, fourteen dollars. Cheese Danish would have been cheaper. Beach. Miscellaneous costs. Ten dollars. That’s yesterday. Today. Gasoline for car, twenty-four dollars. Telephone calls, two dollars. Dinner with Koko on the Mrs. Birnbaumer interview, seventy-one dollars. Total, two days, one hundred twenty-one dollars. Make it one-thirty because I’m sure there’s some stuff I’ve forgotten. Koko’s taking care of her own expenses. Room and car by credit card.

Chapter Twenty

"I didn’t ask for a wake-up call."

"Burroughs, this is Walter Brackler."

"I stand by my previous statement," Digger said. He reached for the lamp, then remembered Koko sleeping next to him. He fumbled around in the dark until he found his cigarettes and lit one.

"We’ve gotten some word on that Puerto Rican property."

"Shoot."

"It’s owned by Damien Wardell. It has been for twenty-five years," Brackler said.

"It can’t have been," Digger said. He rolled on his side and talked softly into the phone so as not to wake up Koko who was stirring in her sleep.

"Why not?"

"Wardell’s still a young man. Twenty-five years ago, he would have been just a kid."

"A very rich kid, though. In case you don’t know it, and the fact that you don’t doesn’t surprise me, Wardell is the heir of the Wardell Paint Manufacturing Company, which may just be the world’s largest. He’s owned that property for twenty-five years."

"Okay," Digger said. "If Rockefeller could own Venezuela when he was a kid, I guess Wardell could own a piece of P.R. Anything on those applications?"

"I looked at them myself," Brackler said. "They don’t look like they were all written in the same handwriting. But maybe two or three different handwritings, that was all."

"But not forty different handwritings?" Digger said.

"No. No way."

"Good," Digger said.

"What are you up to down there?"

"Plugging away," Digger said.

"I wish you’d keep in touch and let us know what’s going on. It wouldn’t hurt if I had some input in your work."

"The reason I don’t let you have any input," Digger said, "is that you don’t have anything to put in."

"Get to work," Brackler said sourly and hung up.

Digger hung up the phone and slid quietly out of bed.

Where would they be now? With luck, Cora would oversleep and the menagerie might not yet be on its way to Florida. Maybe she’d have car trouble. But there was no sense in hoping for the best. One had to plan for the worst.

After dressing, he wrote Koko a note outlining instructions and left it on the table next to her head before leaving.

On impulse, he stopped for breakfast, wondering why he was hungry before he remembered that Koko had eaten almost his entire dinner the night before. He had eggs and sausage and grits and fresh-baked rolls and coffee. Digger had this deep gut feeling that everybody south of the Mason- Dixon line was a semi-simian shitkicker with a single-digit IQ. But he had to admit, they knew how to eat breakfast.

He bought two containers of coffee to take with him.

It had rained during the early morning hours and when Digger turned onto Galaxy Avenue, he saw the two boys, Spazz and Tard, sitting on the curb in front of their home, throwing stones at passing cars. He zipped in quickly to the curb, through a puddle, splashing them both with water.

"Hey," the bigger one yelled.

"Shit," the smaller one said.