Fool's Flight (Digger) Read online

  "That’s interesting because the room was rented by a woman with black hair and sunglasses. Just like you saw. But her name was phony and the car description was a phony," Digger said. "Tell me about the tapes."

  "I’m sorry, Digger, but I don’t want to talk about it. You know I think differently from you."

  "I know. You like to stick raw material in your head and forget about it and let it percolate around until answers jump out in a flash of insight," he said.

  "Right. And you like to worry things to death like a puppy with a bone, never letting go, never letting it out of sight, never letting it loose until you bite it in half."

  "My way’s better," Digger said.

  "For you it is. That’s because you have an antic mind and if you don’t keep after something, you’re liable to forget it. Hell, sometimes you can’t even remember your own name."

  "I remember important things," Digger said. "Like right now, Gorilla Monsoon and What’s-his-name and the girl may be in Georgia. Minute by minute, the distance is closing between us and them. Do you think you might stick that information in the back of your brain and tell it to hurry?"

  "You can’t hurry genius," Koko said.

  "Okay, genius. But a couple of other factors for you to think about. Melanie Fox, our dark-haired stewardess with the substantial chest, is out of town. Her landlady said she left yesterday afternoon but she might have left later than that or she might still be in town for all we know. She has a black car. A Buick. That help?"

  "I don’t know cars," Koko said.

  "Added piece of information number two. I don’t think Trini Donnelly knew her husband had cancer."

  "Okay. About those tapes of yours," she said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Do you have to hit on every woman you talk to? You’re really awful, you know. And the things you said about me, did you mean them?"

  "I meant the good ones; the other ones I said in a fit of horny pique. And as far as hitting, the fastest way to a woman’s mind is through her pubis. Get them tingling, they’ll tell you anything."

  "You don’t really believe that, do you?" she asked.

  "Of course I do," Digger said. He took off his jacket. "Time to get out of this hot tape recorder and into a cold vodka. Who the hell could live in Florida year round?"

  "Dig, we live in Las Vegas."

  "Yeah, but we don’t pretend it’s not miserable there. People around here make believe they like this weather."

  He stripped off his clothes and peeled off the tape that held the recorder wires to his side, and went to take a shower. He stood for a long time under the cold water, then dried himself, put on fresh underwear and came out to the main room of the motel.

  Koko was in bed, under a sheet.

  Digger went back into the bathroom, and poured the last drops of vodka from the bottle in the toilet tank. He sat in the living room chair. The wheezing air conditioner squirted a trickle of cool air into the room.

  He sipped the cool vodka and saw Koko looking at him.

  "Come on over here and feel me up a little," she said.

  "I knew if I waited long enough, you’d weaken."

  "I’m just taking pity on you, you sex-starved, miserable creep. Before you turn gay in desperation."

  "Okay. Well, all right," Digger said. He carried his glass over to the bed.

  "I’ve got it," Koko said.

  Digger talked softly into her ear. "Twenty seconds more and I’ll have it, too."

  "Stop screwing around. This is important."

  "It can’t wait twenty seconds?" Digger asked.

  "That’s why you’ll never amount to anything. Your mind is ruled by your groin, just like you complain about women for," she said.

  "That’s right," Digger agreed.

  "All right," Koko said with a sigh. "Make love as long as you want. It’ll wait. Meanwhile, Madame LeFarge and the two demons are drawing closer, closer, closer. I can feel their hot breath even now crossing the Alabama line."

  "We’ll make a deal," Digger said.

  "What?"

  "Give me twenty seconds more."

  "Okay. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen, seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. You done yet, Ace?"

  "I am now," Digger said.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Digger looked around carefully before he entered the parking lot behind Damien Wardell’s parsonage.

  He had a long coat hanger hidden inside the sleeve of his jacket. The small lot was dark and quiet. Behind him, from inside the tent, he could hear the sounds of people milling around as the crowds arrived for the evening service. There were five cars parked in the lot where he had parked two days before. Two were white, one was yellow, another was maroon, and the last was black.

  Crouching between two cars, he looked around again. There was no sign of anybody. He felt his stomach churning; he was never bothered by a little creative fraud but simple burglary was uncomfortable, particularly if he should happen to get caught and be put in the clutches of Lieutenant Mannion of Lauderdale’s finest.

  The two dark-colored cars were parked next to each other. Crouching, Digger used a pocketknife to force an opening between the vent window and the main passenger window. Then he slipped the coat hanger through the rubber molding between the windows and twisted it around. It took him five minutes to get the hanger hooked over the door button and to lift it with a quick yank.

  He turned to the black car behind him, and swore softly. The car was a newer model and did not have traditional door lock buttons; the locks instead being built into the handles under the passenger’s armrests.

  "Dammit," he hissed. He chewed his lip and turned back to the maroon car. Maybe he’d get lucky. The parking lot was still deserted and he checked the windows of Wardell’s parsonage to make sure no one was peering out, watching him. He saw no one, so he opened the car door quickly, slid into the passenger seat, and pulled the door quietly closed behind him.

  He took a small penlight flash from his pocket and flicked it on holding it close to the vinyl fabric of the seats, so it would give as little spillover light as possible.

  He found what he was looking for on the driver’s headrest. He picked it up carefully and placed it in a plain white envelope which he stuck inside his jacket pocket. He breathed a deep sigh of relief as he turned off the flashlight, then waited a few minutes to accustom his eyes again to the dark. When he saw no one in the parking lot, he snuck out of the car, locking the door behind him and shutting it quietly.

  He stayed in the shadows, away from the glare of the high overhead lights, and moved quickly back toward the tent, mingling with the arriving crowd, then walked through the parking lot, across the street and to his car which was parked in a restaurant lot around the corner.

  "The car was maroon," Digger said. "You said it was black."

  "I figured it out after you left," Koko said. "It’s that funny green light they use for street lamps."

  "Mercury vapor," Digger said.

  "Right. It makes red things look black. That’s why I thought it was a black car. Did you find anything?"

  "One black hair coming up," Digger said. He extracted the small envelope from his pocket and gave it to her. She opened it and hunched herself over the small table under the direct light of the lamp. She removed the strand of hair Digger had found on the seat and placed it atop the white envelope. She looked at it carefully, then picked it up between thumb and forefinger. She ran the nails of her thumb and middle finger on the other hand down the length of the hair. It crinkled up into a tight little curl.

  "It’s not hair, Digger. It’s plastic. From a wig."

  "Dammit, you Japanese broads are smart."

  "Sexy, too."

  "Smart anyway."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The heat had broken. Teaspoon-sized drops of rain fell on the city and changed it in minutes from tropical garden to quagmire marsh
.

  Cars crawled down the streets, trying to skirt the foot-deep pits of water, piling up in the gutters faster than the storm sewers could carry it off. The dirt parking lot outside the Wardell mission tent, The Church of the Unvarnished Truth, was a wading pool of mud and Digger felt his car sink down as he slowed up and turned in from the street. He pressed down heavily on the gas pedal and muscled the car to the far end of the lot, nearest the main entrance to the tent.

  When he stepped from the auto, he felt himself sink into the ooze, up over his shoes, his socks soaking up the water from the mud.

  The flap door of the tent was closed, fastened with a rope through grommets on the inside. Digger reached through the narrow slit and with his pen-knife sawed away a section of rope. Then he pulled on the flap and the split rope slid loosely through the grommets and he stepped inside. He pulled the flap closed behind him, then used his penlight flash to find his way down the aisle to the raised platform that served as a stage. The lighting control panel was in a sealed box on the right-hand rear corner of the stage. The box was not locked and Digger opened it and found a switch neatly labeled "Main Lights." He pulled up the switch and the overhead lights flared on in the tent.

  He carefully closed the box and walked across the stage, then climbed up across the rows of bleacher seats until he found a spot halfway up the bank of bleachers, where he sat to wait.

  He hoped that this would wrap it up. He wanted to leave Fort Lauderdale. It wasn’t just that the beast with three heads was even now in a car lurching toward him. He just wanted to be home, even if home were a condominium in Las Vegas. The older he got, the less he liked traveling. He wanted to be home, with his records, his Freddy Gardner albums, his old Caruso records, his Jazz at the Philharmonic, his Jeri Southern records. His music. His liquor cabinet filled with bottle after bottle of Finlandia vodka. His house. Where he could find his sneakers. And his favorite books. And his personal treasures. The Dali drawing. The jaws of a shark he had once caught at Montauk. His stuffed piranha. His sliced geode paperweight, which was perfectly functional, except he never kept papers and never had anything to put under it. Which was okay in his house.

  With his woman?

  Not really, Koko would always be her own woman. They might coexist in the same space; they might even someday realize they loved each other like normal people; but she would never belong to him, just as he would never belong to her.

  Maybe, someday, she would find someone she wanted to belong to and with a heartbreaking smile, she would kiss Digger on the cheek and tell him, So long, kiddo. Write if you get work. And she’d be gone. And he would be as alone as ever. Crazy and getting crazier.

  He put the thoughts out of his mind as he heard footsteps coming down the wooden ramp toward the stage.

  It was Candace Wardell. She stepped onto the stage and walked quickly toward the control box. She was ready to toss the switch when it occurred to her to look around. She glanced upward and saw Digger.

  He waved gaily at her.

  "Who are…oh, it’s you. Did you turn these on?"

  "Yup."

  "Why?"

  "I don’t like sitting in the dark. I even sleep with a night light."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "Waiting to talk to you."

  "Make an appointment," she said.

  "Did Batchelor make an appointment?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Oh, a couple of things. Insurance fraud. Mass murder. Killing a blackmailer."

  "You’re delusional," she said. "I’m going back to the house."

  "Go ahead. Turn off the light, if you want," Digger said. "I can talk to the police just as easy as I can talk to you."

  Her hand moved toward the light switch, but it hesitated, then withdrew. "All right, if you want to talk, talk. But come down here so we don’t have to shout."

  Digger walked down over the seats toward the stage. He stopped and sat again in the first row. Candace stared at him. She was a handsome woman, but again he noticed something hard about her. It was the way she was standing on stage; he recognized it as the way her husband often stood as he delivered a punchline in his sermon.

  "It must be tough," Digger said, "to marry millions and then find out that it’s being frittered away to the church and you’ve got no control over it." He felt the comfortable whirring of the tape recorder against his right kidney as Mrs. Wardell walked across the stage toward him. She sat on the edge of the stage in front of him, her legs dangling toward the earthen floor. She wore tight blue jeans and a flowered blouse. Digger thought that the woman was pretty and ample, but not really what he would call bosomy.

  "A little girl from a little tank town gets a ticket into the big time and then her husband decides to go follow the Lord, sprinkling his money as he goes."

  "It’d make a wonderful movie," she said. "Maybe we can get Tuesday Weld to play it."

  "She goes along with the act for a while and plays Holy Mother Sister Superior, singing her songs by the numbers and all the time that jazz singer voice wants to get out and she’s trying to find a way out. But there isn’t any money that can be touched. It’s all in that trust. And she can’t even get a nickel if she sues for divorce."

  "Interesting. First time I’ve ever been psychoanalyzed without a couch," she said.

  "So you look for a way and then you got it. All those losers…remember, that’s what you called them…all those losers who came to dump their troubles on your husband. Who’d miss them if they vanished? Particularly the ones who didn’t have friends or family. But how to get something out of it? And then the Lord delivered Steve Donnelly into your hands. I feel sorry for him. He finally had his life straightened out and then he finds out he’s going to die. He’s going to leave a wife and kids and mortgage and a lot of debts. Insurance? Forget it. With his condition, he couldn’t get insurance anywhere. He probably came to talk to your husband about it and you intercepted him and I guess you showed him the way to do it."

  Mrs. Wardell was looking at Digger as if he were a particularly hypnotic snake, swaying back and forth in front of her.

  "Sure," Digger said. "He could have an accident, and he could have the accident with this plane full of suicidal losers. Drunks, derelicts, the whole pack who wanted to do something for somebody they wronged but who couldn’t produce a dime alive and wouldn’t be worth a nickel in insurance if they were dead by suicide. But nobody had to know it was suicide. It could be an accident. A fool’s flight of people wanting to die."

  Mrs. Wardell was swinging her legs back and forth, clicking her heels rhythmically against the wooden stage.

  "Donnelly decided to go along with it. There wasn’t much wrong with helping people to die who were going to kill themselves anyway. Of course, that didn’t include Batchelor and Melanie Fox. So he had to get them off the plane. My guess is that he larded up his coffee with Ipecac or one of those things that makes babies vomit and then left the coffee where Batchelor would be sure to drink it. I’m pretty sure his neighborhood drugstore will remember him buying some."

  "You’ve been a busy man," she said.

  "I had to be. I’m expecting unwelcome guests and I have to get out of Lauderdale. Anyway, it worked like a charm. Donnelly takes off, gets his plane off the radar screen, then probably took it so high that the passengers were knocked out for lack of oxygen, then aimed the plane down at the ocean and smashed it to splinters. Meanwhile, all those nice people aboard had filled out insurance applications naming your husband as beneficiary in the event of their death. Well, actually they didn’t fill them out. You did. And your helper. That sleazy accountant of yours, what’s his name…."

  "Jack Thomasen."

  "Yeah, that’s him. The one that gobbles you with his eyes. I figure him. I figure that when the police go through your house they’ll find a list of all the people that the passengers wanted you to take care of paying off. People they owed, families they’d abandoned, anybody who could stop them from leav
ing life without a clear conscience. And of course you had no idea of ever paying anybody anything."

  "Of course," she said in the tone of voice one would use to humor a madman.

  "But then things started to go wrong," Digger said. "First there was Mrs. Donnelly threatening to sue. I told you about that and before I was even out of the parking lot, you called her to back her off. I guess something like this. ‘Your husband told us here at the church if anything ever happened on this flight, we were to be sure to take care of you and the children. And of course we will.’ That’s only a guess, but when I tell her that my company will pay the entire face amount of the insurance to her, no matter what, I’m sure she’ll tell us exactly what you told her.

  "See," Digger said, "the whole thing with Donnelly’s insurance was a mistake. I don’t know if you or your boyfriend did it…the handwriting analysis will tell…but you never should have made out a policy for Donnelly. He would know that he couldn’t take accident insurance as the pilot, but you were so hungry to get every last buck, that you didn’t bother to read the policy. You know, you shouldn’t ever lie to an insurance company. We’re smarter than owls, more remorseless than athlete’s foot."

  "I’ll keep that in mind next time."

  "And then there was getting all those drunks to the airport. You brought them all here first and got them pretty much blotto to begin with. Then you bussed them down there and got them aboard the plane. The stewardess said most of them were juiced. I got to thinking about that. If they were drunk, how’d they fill out the insurance applications at that little machine? They couldn’t. They were all filled out beforehand. I found one of the policies in the room of one of the guys who died. All neatly filled out by this rumdum who hadn’t drawn a sober breath in years. But he forgot to send it in and you just couldn’t leave it laying around, or so you thought, so you broke into his place and tried to steal it. But you didn’t get it. I did. And the same handwriting, just like all the others.