Marcia Muller - McCone And Friends

“How did this happen?” she said.

I shook my head and stood up. Like he told the dump lady, Farrell’s art was junk-or in his junk-and now his lifeblood mingled with it.

I glanced at McCone, who had stood up too. Her expression was as unflinching as Mrs. Mallory’s, but I knew what was going on behind those steady dark eyes. She’s seen a lot of death, my woman, but she’s never grown indifferent to it, any more than I have. By all rights we should both be pretty callous: In her years as an investigator she’s had more than her share of nasty experiences, and my own past still gives me nightmares. But inside we’ve got that essential spark of humanity-which was why we drew closer together now as we stared around at the wreckage.

Broken lamp globes. A vacuum cleaner bag and part of a rusted wheelbarrow. Curved chromium chair arms. A 1973 Colorado license plate. Mason jars-shattered. Broken mirror-bad luck proven. Chipped head of a grinning garden gnome and some paperback romance novels with holes drilled through them. A toaster’s innards. Moth eaten stuffed dear head. Busted axe. The top of the windmill, one blade missing…

Behind us Mrs. Mallory asked again, “How did this happen?”

Hands-off attitude be damned! I said, “I know how. Let’s call 911.”

“It was an accident! An accident !” Mary Delmar, the dump lady, told the sheriff’s deputy. “I snuck over there late last night to get his gold, and the crazy bastard must’ve seen my flashlight because he came runnin’ out to the barn and attacked me. I was defending myself when those towers started fallin’ on us. I’m lucky I didn’t end up like Nick!”

The deputy, whose name was Evans, rolled his eyes at McCone and me.

“Why the hell couldn’t he just’ve stayed in bed?” Delmar added. “I’d already found the windmill blade. Why’d he have to come out there?”

Evans said, “Where is the windmill blade?”

Delmar collapsed on a bent lawn chair and put her hands over her eyes. “Why do things like this always happen to me ?”

McCone tapped the deputy’s arm, motioned at the refuse bin where we’d seen Delmar toss the thing that at first glance looked like part of a plane’s prop. He went to check, came back shaking his head. “Ms.Delmar, where is it?”

“Oh hell! All right! It’s in there.” She moved her shoulder at the shed behind us. “I had to paw through all that junk, scraping paint off everything till I found it. For all I know, it’ll never clean up right.”

Evans sighed. “I’ll have to read you your rights now.”

“My rights? Why? I already told you it was an accident. His fault anyway, runnin’ out there and attackin’ me.”

Evans gave up, motioned to his partner, who was standing by their car, to take over. Right off Delmar started yowling about calling a lawyer.

Evans took McCone and me aside, muttering, “Galway-Farrell-is dead, but she’s the injured party.”

McCone said, “Nowadays, it’s always the other guy’s fault.”

“One thing bothers me: this woman’s not very bright, and she doesn’t strike me as an art expert. What tipped her to who Farrell was?”

“He told her he used to be a famous sculptor under another name.”

“But did he tell her what name?”

McCone hesitated, frowning. “I don’t know. Maybe. But he certainly wouldn’t’ve told her about the gold.” She looked at me, raising her eyebrows.

I shrugged, then spotted the sign advertising recycled merchandise at low prices. “Well,” I said, “maybe she’s a reader.”

“Oh?” From both of them.

“Come on.” I headed for the shed where the books were. Maybe I’d come across an old western or two while I was hunting.

Plenty of romances, best sellers, self-help, and cookbooks, but no old westerns. On the back wall, though, there was a pictorial set: Popular Twentieth-Century Artist . The fourth volume was missing, and when I checked the introductory volume, I found that number 4 was on sculptors. A glance through number 1 showed that each article was accompanied by a photo the individual.

I found the index and flipped to “Farrell, Glenn.” There were several notations, but the most interesting was “theft and disappearance.” I showed it to McCone and Evans.

“So,” she said, “Mary Delmar is a reader-at least when she smells a potential profit.”

“Yeah, she is. She spotted this set, decided to see if she could find out who Galway actually was. Read about the stolen gold, and figure out what he a meant about his art being junk.” To my astonishment, McCone hugged me. “Ripinsky, what an absolutely fabulous birthday present!”

I leered down at her. “You like that one, wait till you see what else I’ve got for you.”

She narrowed here eyes at me, then flicked them toward Evans. She’s a very private woman, one of the many reasons I love her. And now I’d gone and said something that would make her all prickly.

“McCone and I are both pilots,” I said to Evans, who was looking quite interested. To her I said, “Think airport. Think the Citabria fueled and ready to go. Think terrific destination.”

“Oh?”

“Terrific-and surprising.” I nodded.

Now, if I could only come up with a terrific surprising flight plan by the time we got back to the Bay Area…

“That’s where it happened.” Hy put the Citabris into a gliding turn and we spiraled down to a few hundred feet above Tufa Lake. Its water looked teal blue today; the small islands and gnarled towers of the calcified vegetation stood out in gray and taupe relief. A wind from the east riffled the lake’s surface. Except for a blackened area on the south side of Plover Island, I saw no sign that a light plane had crashed and burned there.

I turned my head from the window and looked into the forward part of the cockpit; Hy Ripinsky, my best friend and longtime lover, still stared at the scene below, his craggy face set in grim lines. After a few seconds he shook his head and turned his attention back to the controls. Putting on full throttle and pulling back on the stick, the small plane rose and angled in for the airport on the lake’s northwest shore.

Through the dual headsets Hy said, “Dammit, McCone, I’m a good flight instructor, and Scott Oakley was a good student. There’s no reason he should’ve strayed from the pattern and crashed on his first solo flight.”

We were entering that same pattern, on the downwind leg for runway two-seven. I waited till Hy had announced our position to other traffic on the Unicom, then said, “No reason, except for the one you’ve already speculated on: that he deliberately strayed and put the plane into a dive in order to kill himself.”

“Looked that way to me. To the NTSB investigators, too.”

I was silent as he turned onto final approach, allowing him to concentrate on landing in the strong crosswind. He didn’t speak again till we were turning off the runway.

“Ninety percent of flying’s metal and emotional-you know that,” he said. “And ninety percent of the instructor’s job is figuring out where the student’s head is at, adapting your teaching methods to the individual. I like to think I’ve got good instincts along that line, and I noticed absolutely nothing about Scott Oakley that indicated he’d kill himself.”