E is for EVIDENCE Page 9

  I boarded the plane with twelve minutes to spare and tucked my overnight case under the seat in front of me. The aircraft was small and all fifteen seats were occupied. A hanging curtain separated the passengers from the cockpit. Since I was only two seats back, I could see the whole instrument panel, which didn’t look any more complicated than the dashboard of a new Peugeot. When the flight attendant saw me rubbernecking, she pulled the curtain across the opening, as if the pilot and copilot were doing something up there we were better off not knowing about.

  The engines sounded like lawn mowers and reminded me vaguely of the Saturday mornings of my youth when I would wake late to hear my aunt out cutting the grass. Over the din, the intercom system was worthless. I couldn’t hear a word the pilot said, but I suspected he was reciting that alarming explanation of what to do in the “unlikely” event of a water landing. Most planes crash and burn on land. This was just something new to worry about. I didn’t think my seat cushion was going to double as a flotation device of any kind. It was barely adequate to keep my rear end protected from the steel-reinforced framework of the seat itself. While the pilot droned on, I looked at the plastic card with its colorful cartoon depicting the aircraft. Someone had placed two X’s on the diagram. One said, “You are here.” A second X out on the wing tip said, “Toilet is here.”

  The flight only took thirty-five minutes so the flight attendant, who wore what looked like a Girl Scout uniform, didn’t have time to serve us complimentary drinks. Instead, she whipped down the aisle, passing a little basket of Chiclets chewing gum in tiny boxes. I spent the flight time trying to get my ears to unpop, looking, I’m sure, like I was suffering from some kind of mechanical jaw disease.

  My United flight left right on time. I sat in the no-smoking section being serenaded by a duet of crying babies. Lunch consisted of a fist of chicken breast on a pile of rice, covered with what looked like rubber cement. Dessert was a square of cake with a frosting that smelled like Coppertone. I ate every bite and tucked the cellophane-wrapped crackers in my purse. Who knew when I’d get to eat again.

  Once we landed in Dallas, I grabbed up my belongings and eased my way toward the front of the plane as we waited for the jetway to thump against the door. The stewardess released us like a pack of noisy school kids and I dogtrotted toward the gate. By the time I actually hit the terminal, it was 10:55. The cocktail lounge I was looking for was in another satellite, typically about as far away as you could get, I started running, grateful, as usual, that I keep myself fit. I reached the bar at 11:02. Lyda Case had left. I’d missed her by five minutes and she wasn’t scheduled to work again until the weekend. I won’t repeat what I said.

  Chapter 11

  *

  I had Lyda paged. I had passed a Traveler’s Aid station, an L-shaped desk, where the airline-terminal equivalent of a candy-striper was posted. This woman was in her fifties, with an amazingly homely face: gaunt and chinless, with one eye askew. She was wearing a Salvation Army uniform, complete with brass buttons and epaulets. I wasn’t sure what the deal was. Maybe distraught mothers of lost toddlers and foreign-speaking persons in need of Kaopectate were meant to garner spiritual comfort along with the practical kind. She was just shutting down her station for the night, and at first she didn’t seem to appreciate my request for help.

  “Look,” I said, “I just flew in from California to speak with a woman who’s on her way out of the terminal. I’ve got to catch her before she hits the parking lot, and I have no idea which exit she’s using. Is there any way to have her paged?”

  The woman fixed me with the one eye while the other moved to the one-page directory she kept taped to her desk top. Without a word, she picked up the phone and dialed. “What’s the name?” she asked.

  “Lyda Case.”

  She repeated the name and within moments, I heard Lyda Case being paged to the Traveler’s Aid station, terminal 2. I was profuse in my thanks, though she didn’t seem to require much in the way of appreciation. She finished packing up and, with a brief word, departed.

  I had no idea if Lyda Case would show. She might have been out of the building by the time her name was called. Or she might have been too tired and cranky to come back for any reason. On an impulse, I rounded the desk and sat down in the chair. A man passed with a rolling suitcase that trailed after him reluctantly, like a dog on its way to the vet. I glanced at my watch. Twelve minutes had passed. I checked the top desk drawer, which was unlocked. Pencils, pads of paper, tins of aspirin, cellophane-wrapped tissue, a Spanish-language dictionary. I read the list of useful phrases inside the back cover. “Buenas tardes,” I murmured to myself. “Buenas noches.” Good nachos. I was starving to death.

  “Somebody paging me? I heard my name on the public-address system and it said to come here.” The accent was Texan. Lyda Case was standing with her weight on one hip. Petite. No makeup. All freckles and frizzy hair. She was dressed in dark slacks and a matching vest ��� one of those all-purpose bartender uniforms that you can probably order wholesale from the factory. Her name was machine-embroidered on her left breast. She had on a diamond-crusted watch, and in her right hand she held a lighted cigarette, which she dropped and crushed underfoot. “

  “What’s the matter, baby? Did I come to the wrong place?” Mid-thirties. Lively face. Straight little nose and a sharp, defiant chin. Her smile revealed crooked eyeteeth and gaps where her first molars should have been. Her parents had never gone into debt for her orthodontia work.

  I got up and held my hand out. “Hello, Mrs. Case. How are you?”

  She allowed her hand to rest in mine briefly. Her eyes were the haunting, surreal blue of contact lenses. Distrust flickered across the surface. “I don’t believe I know you.”

  “I called from California. You hung up on me twice.”

  The smile drained away. “I thought I made it clear I wasn’t interested. I hope you didn’t fly all this way on my account.”

  “Actually, I did. You’d just gone off duty when I got to the lounge. I’m hoping you’ll spare me a few minutes. Is there some place we can go to talk?”

  “This is called talkin’ where I come from,” she snapped.

  “I meant, privately.”

  “What about?”

  “I’m curious about your husband’s death.”

  She stared at me. “You some kind of reporter?”

  “Private detective.”

  “Oh, that’s right. You mentioned that on the phone. Who all are you working for?”

  “Myself at the moment. An insurance company before that. I was investigating a warehouse fire at Wood/Warren when Hugh’s name came up. I thought you might fill me in on the circumstances of his death.”

  I could see her wrestling with herself, tempted by the subject. It was probably one of those repetitious nighttime tales we tell ourselves when sleep eludes us. Somehow I imagined there were grievances she recited endlessly as the hours dragged by from 2:00 to 3:00. Something in the brain comes alive at that hour and it’s usually in a chatty mood.

  “What’s Hugh got to do with it?”

  “Maybe nothing. I don’t know. I thought it was odd his lab work disappeared.”

  “Why worry about it? No one else did.”

  “It’s about time then, don’t you think?”

  She gave me a long look, sizing me up. Her expression changed from sullenness to simple impatience. “There’s a bar down here. I got somebody waiting so I’ll have to call home first. Thirty minutes. That’s all you get. I worked my butt off today and I want to rest my dogs.” She moved off and I followed, trotting to keep up.

  We sat in captain’s chairs at a table near the window. The night sky was thick with low clouds. I was startled to realize it was raining outside. The plate glass was streaked with drops blown sideways by a buffeting wind. The tarmac was as glossy as black oilcloth, with runway lights reflected in the mirrored surface of the apron, pebbled with raindrops. Three DC-10s were lined up at consecutive gates. T
he area swarmed with tow tractors, catering vehicles, boom trucks, and men in yellow slickers. A baggage trailer sped by, pulling a string of carts piled high with suitcases. As I watched, a canvas duffel tumbled onto the wet pavement, but no one seemed to notice. Somebody was going to spend an irritating hour filling out “Missing Baggage” claim forms tonight.

  While Lyda went off to make her phone call, I ordered a spritzer for me and a Bloody Mary for her, at her request. She was gone a long time. The waitress brought the drinks, along with some Eagle Snack pretzels in a can. “Lyda wanted somethin’ to snack on, so I brought you these,” she said.

  “Can we run a tab?”

  “Sure thing. I’m Elsie. Give a holler if you need anything else.”

  Ground traffic was clearing and I saw the jetway retract from the side of the plane nearest us. On the runway beyond, an L-1011 lumbered by with a stripe of lighted windows along its length. The bar was beginning to empty, but the smoke still sat on the air like a visible smudge on a photograph. I heard high heels clopping toward the table, and Lyda was back. She’d peeled off her vest, and her white blouse was now unbuttoned to a point just between her breasts. Her chest was as freckled as a bird’s egg and it made her look almost tanned.

  “Sorry it took me so long,” she said. “I got this roommate in the middle of a nervous breakdown, or so’ she thinks.” She used her celery stalk to stir the pale cloud of vodka into the peppered tomato juice down below. Then she popped the top off the can of pretzels.

  “Here, turn your hand up and lemme give you some,” she said. I held my hand out and she filled my palm with tiny pretzels. They were shaped like Chinese pagodas encrusted with rock salt. Her hostility had vanished. I’d seen that before ��� people whose mistrust takes the form of aggressiveness at first, their resistance like a wall in which a sudden gate appears. She’d decided to talk to me and I suppose she saw no point in being rude. Besides, I was buying. With ten bucks in my pocket, I couldn’t afford more than thirty minutes’ worth of drinks anyway.

  She had taken out a compact and she checked her makeup, frowning at herself. “God. I am such a mess.” She plunked her bag up on the table and rooted through until she found a cosmetics pouch. She unzipped it and took out various items, and then proceeded to transform herself before my very eyes. She dotted her face with liquid foundation and smoothed it on, erasing freckles, lines, discolorations. She took out an eyeliner and inked in her upper and lower lids, then brushed her lashes with mascara. Her eyes seemed to leap into prominence. She dusted blusher high on each cheek, lined the contour of her mouth with dark red and then filled her lips in with a lighter shade. Less than two minutes passed, but by the time she glanced at me again, the rough edges were gone and she had all the glamour of a magazine ad. “What do you think?”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Oh, honey, I could make you over in a minute. You ought to do a little more with yourself. That hair of yours looks like a dog’s back end.”

  I laughed. “We better get down to business if thirty minutes is all I get.”

  She waved dismissively. “Don’t worry about that. I changed my mind. Betsy’s workin’ on an overdose and I don’t feel like going home yet.”

  “Your roommate took an overdose?”

  “She does that all the time, but she never can get it right. I think she got a little booklet from the Hemlock Society and takes half what she needs to do the job. Then I get home and have to deal with it. I truly hate paramedics trooping through my place after midnight. They’re all twenty-six years old and so clean-cut it makes you sick. Lot of times she’ll date one afterwards. She swears it’s the only way to meet nurturing men.”

  I watched while she drained half her Bloody Mary. “Tell me about Hugh,” I said.

  She took out a pack of chewing gum and offered me a piece. When I shook my head, she unwrapped a stick and doubled it into her mouth, biting down. Then she lit a cigarette. I tried to imagine the combination… mint and smoke. It was an unpleasant notion even vicariously. She wadded up the gum wrapper and dropped it in the ashtray.

  “I was just a kid when we met. Nineteen. Tending bar. I went out to California on the Greyhound bus the day I turned eighteen, and went to bartending school in Los Angeles. Cost me six hundred bucks. Might have been a rip-off. I did learn to mix drinks but I probably could have done that out of one of them little books. Anyway, I got this job at LAX and I’ve been working airport bars ever since. Don’t ask me why. I just got stuck somehow. Hugh came in one night and we got talkin’ and next thing I knew, we fell in love and got married. He was thirty-nine years old to my nineteen, and I was with him sixteen years. I knew that man. He didn’t kill himself. He wouldn’t do that to me.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “What makes you sure the sun’s coming up in the east ever’ day? It just does, that’s all, and you learn to count on that the way I learned to count on him.”

  “You think somebody killed him?”

  ” ‘Course I do. Lance Wood did it, as sure as I’m sittin’ here, but he’s not going to admit it in a million years and neither will his family. Have you talked to them?”

  “Some,” I said. “I heard about Hugh’s death for the first time yesterday.”

  “I always figured they paid off the cops to keep it hush. They got tons of money and they know ever’one in town. It was a cover-up.”

  “Lyda, these are honorable people you’re talking about. They’d never tolerate murder and they wouldn’t protect Lance if they thought he had anything to do with it.”

  “Boy, you’re dumber than I am, if you believe that. I’m tellin’ you it was murder. Why’d you fly all this way if you didn’t think so yourself?”

  “I don’t know what to think. That’s why I’m asking you.”

  “Well, it wasn’t suicide. He wasn’t depressed. He wasn’t the suicidal type. Why would he do such a thing? That’s just dumb. They knew him. They knew what kind of man lie was.”

  I watched her carefully. “I heard he was planning to leave the company and start a business of his own.”

  “He talked about that. He talked about a lot of things. He worked for Woody fifteen years. Hugh was loyal as they come, but everybody knew the old man meant to leave the company to Lance. Hugh couldn’t stand the idea. He said Lance was a boob and he didn’t want to be around to watch him mess up.”

  “Did the two of them have words?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I know he gave notice and Woody talked him out of it. He’d just bid on a big government contract and he needed Hugh. I guess Hugh said he’d stay until word came through whether Woody got the bid or not. Two days later, I got home from work, opened the garage door, and there he was. It looked like he fell asleep in the car, but his skin was cherry red. I never will forget that.”

  “There’s no way it could have been an accident?”

  She leaned forward earnestly. “I said it once and I’ll say it again. Hugh wouldn’t kill himself. He didn’t have a reason and he wasn’t depressed.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t holding something back?”

  “I guess I don’t, if you put it like that.”

  “The notion of murder doesn’t make any sense. Lance wasn’t even in charge at that point, and he wouldn’t kill an employee just because the guy wants to move on. That’s ludicrous.”

  Lyda shrugged, undismayed by my skepticism. “Maybe Lance worried Hugh would take the business with him when he went.”

  “Well, aside from the fact he wasn’t gone yet, it still seems extreme.”

  She bristled slightly. “You asked for my opinion. I’m tellin’ you what I think.”

  “I can see you believe it, but it’s going to take more than that to talk me into it. If Hugh was murdered, it could have been someone else, couldn’t it?”

  “Of course it could. I believe it was Lance, but I can’t swear to it. I don’t have any proof, anyhow. Sometimes I think it’s not worth foolin’ with. It�
��s over and done, so what difference does it make?”

  I shifted the subject. “Why’d you have him cremated so fast?”

  She stared at me. “Are you thinking I had a hand in it?”

  “I’m just asking the questions. What do I know?”

  “He asked to be cremated. It wasn’t even my idea. He’d been dead for two days. The coroner released the body and the funeral director suggested we go ahead with it, so I took his advice. You can talk to him yourself if you don’t believe me,” she said. “Hugh was drugged. I’d bet money that’s how they pulled it off. His lab work was stolen so nobody’d see the test results.”

  “Maybe he was drunk,” I suggested. “He might have pulled into the garage and fallen asleep.”

  She shook her head. “He didn’t drink. He’d given that up.”

  “Did he have a problem with alcohol?”

  “Once upon a time, he did,” she said. “We met in a bar. Two in the afternoon, in the middle of the week. He wasn’t even travelin’. He just liked to come watch the planes, he said. I should have suspected right then, but you know what it’s like when you fall in love. You see what you want to see. It took me years to figure out how far gone he was. Finally I said I’d leave him if he didn’t straighten up. He went into this program… not AA, but something similar. He got sobered up and that’s how he stayed.”

  “Is there a chance he’d gone back to drinking? It wouldn’t be unheard of.”

  “Not with him on Antabuse. He’da been sick as a pup.”

  “You’re sure he took the stuff?”

  “I gave it to him myself. It was like a little game we played. Every morning with his orange juice. He held his hand out and I gave him his pill and watched him swallow it right down. He wanted me to see he didn’t cheat. He swore, the day he quit drinking, he’d never go back to it.”

  “How many people knew about the Antabuse?”