Darwin's Blade

10 “J is for Jorgé”

Dar pulled the lap belt tight and then tugged the shoulder straps snug as he settled into the L-33 Solo and moved the rudder pedals back and forth to make sure he was comfortable. Ken taxied the towplane forward a bit while his brother, Steve, stood watching the two-hundred-foot-long tow rope lose slack. Ken stopped for a moment. Steve looked over at Dar in the bubble cockpit of the L-33 and made a circular motion with his fist and thumb up, meaning “check controls.” Dar had checked them, and gave the thumbs-up signal for ready to go.

Steve caught his brother’s eye in the towplane and swung his right hand low across his body from left to right. Ken pulled the tow rope taut and glanced back from the single-seater Cessna. Steve looked over at Dar again, who nodded, his right hand comfortably loose on the stick, his left hand on his knee but ready to grab the tow-hook release knob at the first sign of trouble. The towplane began its roll-out and the sailplane jerked slightly and began to bump along behind it off the grass and then down the asphalt runway.

Dar went back through his A-B-C-C-C-D checklist again as he rolled toward takeoff speed: Altimeter, Belts, Controls, Canopy, Cable, Direction. Everything all right. He shifted slightly to get more comfortable. Besides his lap belt and shoulder straps, he was strapped into a model 305 Strong Para-Cushion Chair parachute—the integrated seat pad putting something between his butt and the metal seat, and the inflatable air bladders along the back of the chute giving him much better back support than the upright strip of metal offered by the plane’s seat. Most sailplane pilots of Dar’s acquaintance disdained parachutes, but two of those he’d known had died for the lack of them: one in a totally foolish midair collision above Mount Palomar a few miles to the north, and the other in a highly improbable accident doing loops in his high-performance glider when the left wing simply detached.

Dar liked both the physical comfort of the integrated chute seat under him and the mental comfort of having the chute aboard.

The sailplane left the ground before the towplane, of course, and Dar held it a firm six feet above the runway until Ken got the Cessna airborne in a few hundred feet, and then Dar expertly put the L-33 in the normal “high tow” position, staying just about level with Ken’s little Cessna and just above the towplane’s wake. Officially, Dar was using a standard mountain-country technique of keeping his glider aligned properly with the towplane—that is, keeping the towplane at a fixed position on his windshield just above the sailplane’s simple instrument console—but in truth he was using the skilled pilot’s trick of just placing himself where he wanted to be in relationship to the towplane and staying there. This skill required a certain amount of precognition and telepathy, but after being aero-towed by Ken several hundred times, both those elements were there.

It was a beautiful morning with unlimited visibility, a gentle three-knot wind out of the west, and lovely thermals building in the foothills and mountains around the valley airstrip. But when they had gained a thousand feet of altitude, Dar could see a storm front far to the west. It would be moving in over the coast soon and would spoil the day’s soaring within a few hours.

They climbed at a steady rate as the towplane turned north and then west, then continued climbing as the Cessna turned them back onto a northeasterly course, toward Mount Palomar and into the wind. At the prearranged altitude of two thousand feet, Dar let the tension on the towline grow taut so that Ken could feel the imminent release. Then Dar pulled the release knob twice, saw and felt the towrope go free, and banked into a right climbing turn as Ken dropped the Cessna into a steep left descent.

Then the L-33 was on its own, lifting into the thermals rising from the foothills and steep ridges north of the airfield, and Dar settled back to enjoy silence broken only by the lulling and informative rush of air over the metal wings and fuselage.

Dar had awakened early that Sunday morning, prepared coffee, set out bagels, cereal, and a note for Syd, and was prepared to leave for the Warner Springs gliderport when Syd herself showed up at the door, dressed again in jeans with a red cotton shirt this day and a light khaki vest with many pockets. Her holster and pistol were on her belt under the vest.

“I was out for a walk,” she said. “Are you skipping out on me?”

“Yep,” Dar said, and explained.

“I’d love to go along.”

Dar hesitated. “It’s boring just standing around the field waiting,” he said. “You’d have a better time hanging around here and reading the Sunday paper…I can drive down to the junction and get it. They have a paper dispenser near the row of mailboxes.”

“Won’t you let me fly with you?” she asked.

“No,” said Dar, hearing more harshness in the syllable than he had meant. “I mean, my sailplane is a one-seater.”

“I’d still like to go watch,” said Syd. “And remember, I’m not really your guest this weekend, I’m your bodyguard.”

So they rinsed a Thermos with hot water and filled it with coffee, put some bagels in a bag, drove back through the little town of Julian on Highway 78 and then turned north and west through canyons on Highway 79 before coming out into the broad valley at Warner Springs.

Syd was surprised at how small his sailplane was. “It’s not much more than a pod, a boom, wings, and a tail,” she said as he unlashed the tie-down cords.

“You don’t need much else for a sailplane,” he said.

“I thought they were called gliders,” said Syd.

“That too.”

She steadied one wing while he lifted the tail boom, and together they pushed the red-and-white sailplane out from the tie-down area onto the grassy berm of the airstrip. Ken, flying his Cessna towplane, was making frequent touchdowns, tying onto other gliders, and towing them skyward.

“It’s light,” said Syd, moving the wing easily up and down. “But it’s made of metal. I thought gliders were canvas over wood or something, like the old biplanes.”

“This is an L-33 Solo,” said Dar, “designed by Marian Meciar and manufactured at the LET factory in the Czech Republic. It’s almost all aluminum alloy except for the fabric on the rudder part of the tail. It weighs only four hundred and seventy-eight pounds empty.”

“Do the Czechs make good gliders…sailplanes?” asked Syd as Dar opened the cockpit and dropped the seat-cushion-parachute in place.

“With this one they sure did,” said Dar. “I had to sand down some original paint ridges that were creating a high drag knee in the polar at about fifty-nine kts, and this model does have a tendency to stall without any prestall warning buffet, but for someone with enough experience it’s a nice craft.”

“How long have you been flying sailplanes?”

“About eleven years,” said Dar. “I began along the Front Range of Colorado and then bought this plane used when I moved out here.”

Syd opened her mouth to speak, hesitated the briefest of seconds, and said, “How much does a plane like this cost…if you don’t mind my asking?”

Dar smiled at her. “It was a good value at $25,000. But that’s not what you were going to ask. What?”

Syd looked at him a second. “I know you don’t fly commercially. I thought that you hated flying.”

Dar had started his walk-around preflight inspection. “Uh-uh,” he said, not looking at the chief investigator. “I love flying. Let’s just say that I don’t like being a passenger in the air.”

Now Dar turned back into the wind and climbed over the foothills below Mount Palomar. To his east he had seen Beauty Peak standing alone—its summit at about his altitude of fifty-five hundred feet—and Toro Peak farther to the southeast, its lone cone several thousand feet higher. But it was the thermals from these lovely ridges and foothills that Dar was seeking.

The L-33, as with most sailplanes, had very little in the way of instrumentation and controls. Dar had the stick, tubular rudder pedals, a short handle for the spoiler and air brake controls, another handle to lower and lock the undercarriage, the large knob for tow rope release, and a small instrument panel with his altimeter, variometer, and airspeed indicator. The little sailplane had no radios or electronic navigation devices. Actually, the instrument that Dar used most commonly was the “yaw string”—a bit of colored string attached to the fuselage directly in front of the cockpit. That and familiarity with the sound of the wind over the wing and fuselage let him know his airspeed better than the instruments. Dar knew from experience that the ASI pitot on the fuselage nose that fed wind speed/velocity data to the airspeed indicator was fairly reliable, but that the two ASI static ports on the aft fuselage sides were not flush, so they registered airspeeds about 6 percent above what they actually were. As long as he knew this bias, he was safe enough. Mental arithmetic had never been a problem for Dar. Besides, the yaw string never lied to him.

Moving his head constantly to keep track of other gliders and powered aircraft—only a few were visible far to the east—Dar sought out the thermals rising from east-facing foothill slopes, bare patches of rock, and even from the tile roofs of the clusters of homes below. Two thousand feet above him and closer to Mount Palomar, a large hawk circled lazily in its own massive thermal. A few clouds were floating on the east side of the mountains now, and Dar could see a foehn wall of heavy clouds piled on the western slope of Palomar, with some spilling over the summit. Farther west he could see tall, black nimbo and stratocumulus building as the storm came in across the coast. This did not worry him. His plan was to continue his elementary 270-degree looping climbs through the foothill thermals until he had at least a safe eight thousand feet of air beneath him, and then tackle the lift and sink areas on the leeward side of the big peaks. This was known as “wave soaring” and took a bit more experience and skill to do right than simple thermal soaring.

Dar worked the ridges, finding the stronger thermals on the sun-soaked slabs, climbing, and then swooping back to the east in places to come on the downwind side of the slope to use the venturi effect to lift and soar through the notches between lower peaks, then circling back for more thermal lift. Finding these anabatic lift points and east-slope thermals meant working within a hundred or two hundred feet of the steep slopes—sometimes much closer. The tall Douglas fir and ponderosa pine on those slopes seemed very near each time Dar lazily banked the L-33 to the right and up, the variometer showing the climb in feet per minute. Dar glanced back over his left shoulder as he crossed one of these ridges and saw three deer running silently along the ridgetop. The only sound in his universe was the soft lull of the wind over the canopy and aluminum fuselage. The morning sun was getting very hot and he slid open the small panels on the left and right of the Plexiglas, feeling the warm winds that were lifting him as well as sensing the slight drop in performance as the airflow over the canopy was disturbed.

Now Dar was clearing the last of the steep ridges before the serious mountains, necessarily coming at them from the downwind side so approaching with plenty of speed and extra altitude, always ready to bank hard and turn and run if the curl-over downdrafts were too heavy to handle. But each time he cleared the ridge—sometimes only thirty or forty feet above the ridge of rock or pinnacles of pines—and then gained lift for the next one. Finally he was west of the line of ridges and some six thousand feet above a valley floor, approaching the slopes of Palomar, crabbing the L-33 sideways into the strengthening winds, and planning his wave-lift approach. The obliging presence of some “lennies”—flying-saucer-shaped lenticular clouds which rose above the rotor effect in the trough of the wave beyond the leeward foehn gap—showed him the crests of the lift-area waves by stacking lenticulars like so many dishes on a shelf.

Dar glanced over his shoulder before beginning a 270-turn to gain a bit more altitude and was shocked to see another high-performance sailplane approaching from above and to his right. Sailplanes did not like to fly in formation—midair collisions were the most serious things glider pilots could face—and for this one to be so close when there was so much good empty sky today was unusual. If not actually impolite.

The blue-and-white glider came closer and Dar immediately identified it as Steve’s Twin Astir—a nice, high-performance, two-seater glider in which the airport owner gave rides and instruction. Then Dar recognized Syd in the front seat.

For a second, his response was irritation, but then he relaxed, loosening his hand on the stick. It was a beautiful day. If Syd wanted to go soaring, why not?

But Steve’s Twin Astir was coming closer, rocking its wings as it came. The wing rocking was a signal during aero-tow to release now! but Dar had no idea what Steve was trying to say as the two sailplanes came abreast of each other, wingtips about thirty feet apart, both of them rising quickly on the next lift wave coming off Palomar.

Syd was gesturing. She held up her cell phone, pantomimed talking into it, and pointed back toward the Warner Springs valley.

Dar nodded. Steve peeled away first, gaining altitude over the foothills but making a beeline for the airfield. Dar followed a few hundred meters behind. Coming out of the hills over the wide valley, he followed the Twin Astir into the usual entry-leg point south of the Warner Springs airport, dropped farther back as the two aircraft entered the eastern downwind leg at about seven hundred feet above the ground, made the base-leg turn north at about four hundred feet of altitude, watched the Twin Astir touch down smoothly on the grass to the right of the asphalt strip, and set his aiming point for flare-out about 150 feet behind that.

The wind was gusting now, but Dar came in smoothly, keeping his airspeed steady during the final approach while watching the yaw string flutter and estimating his minimum stalling speed plus 50 percent plus half of the estimated wind velocity, now at about twelve knots.

Steve had used a rather steep angle of descent and now so did Dar, using his spoilers and flaps to keep himself on the proper glide path, finally smoothing out the glide perfectly parallel to the ground at an altitude of exactly one foot, feeling the slight crosswind at the last second and ruddering around to perfectly align the nose of the L-33, and then touching down so gently with the nosewheel that he could hardly feel the contact. Dar focused his attention on the rudder, keeping the Czech-built aircraft moving smoothly across the short-cropped grass and finally braking to a stop less than six feet from the left wing of Steve’s Twin Astir.

Dar popped the canopy and was out of his parachute harness and shoulder straps in a few seconds. Syd was already jogging toward him.

“Dickweed called,” she said before Dar could speak. “Jorgé Murphy Esposito is dead. If we hurry, we can get to the scene before everyone mucks it up.”

It was raining hard when they arrived at the construction site in south San Diego. They had decided to get their luggage, documents, and videotapes, so it had taken extra time to go back to the cabin, load up, lock up, and then get back to the city. By the time they arrived, Esposito’s body had been taken away, and there was yellow police tape around the accident site, but the place was still milling with uniformed police and others.

Captain Frank Hernandez, who had been at Wednesday’s meeting in Dickweed’s office, was the ranking plainclothes officer on the scene. Hernandez was short but solid—a light heavyweight without the altitude but with all the attitude, his face all angles and planes—and he wasted neither his words nor his time on fools. Dar had heard from Lawrence and others that Hernandez was an honest cop and an excellent detective.

“What are you two doing here?” asked the captain as Dar followed Syd through the pouring rain to the collapsed scissors lift which was wrapped about with yellow tape.

“The DA’s office called,” said Syd. “Esposito was a potential witness in our investigation.”

Hernandez grunted and smiled slightly at the word witness. “I could see why you would have an interest in Mr. Esposito, Chief Investigator,” he said. “He was definitely one of the area’s top cappers.”

Syd nodded and looked at the scissors lift. If the heavy platform had fallen from its highest point, it would have been about a thirty-five-foot drop. Now the platform itself was held up by jacks on each side. While the ground around the area was a sea of mud, it was dry under the scissors lift platform except for sprays of blood, brains, and a darker liquid. Flecks and spatters of brain matter were also visible on the cinder-block wall at the far side of the scissors lift.

“Are you here because it’s being considered a homicide?” Syd asked Hernandez.

The detective shrugged. “We have an eyewitness who says otherwise.” He nodded toward where a construction foreman holding a clipboard was talking to a uniformed officer. “There were only a few workers on the site today,” continued Hernandez. “Vargas—that’s the foreman there—he didn’t see Attorney Esposito show up, but noticed him talking to someone by the scissors lift.”

“Did he recognize the other man?” asked Syd.

Hernandez nodded again. “Paulie Satchel. Used to work this site but has been laid up due to a fall. Paulie’s suing the company…”

“Let me take a wild guess,” said Syd. “Esposito was his attorney.”

Hernandez’s dark eyes showed no amusement as he smiled.

“So is this Satchel a suspect?” asked Syd.

“No.” Hernandez sounded certain. “We’re looking for him to interview him, but only as a witness. The foreman…Vargas…saw Satchel leaving just as it started raining. Esposito stepped under the scissors lift to get out of the rain. The lift was up at the third-floor level there. Esposito was all by himself the last time Vargas saw him there. Then the lift suddenly gave way, it looks like Esposito jumped the wrong way—toward the wall—and his head was caught in the scissors.”

Syd looked at the spray of gray matter on the dry cinder-block wall and said, “Did Vargas actually see the accident?”

“No,” said Hernandez, “but he turned his head as soon as he heard the sound it made. He didn’t see anyone else around.”

“How does a scissors lift just collapse?” asked Dar. He was snapping images with his digital camera.

Hernandez looked the insurance investigator up and down a long moment, as if sizing him up, and said, “Vargas thinks that Esposito was fucking around with that oversized bolt and screw there on the closest column. That’s where they fill and drain the hydraulic reservoirs. When the screw came out, the hydraulics lost pressure almost at once and the lift came down just as fast.”

“Why would Esposito do that?” said Syd.

Hernandez mopped his wet, black hair off his forehead. “Esposito was a fuckup,” he said simply.

Dar came close to the lift, did not step under it, but crouched to look at the dry area underneath. “There are more footsteps here than Mr. Esposito’s.”

“Yeah,” said Hernandez. “The paramedics who extricated him. And the ME who declared him deceased. Only Esposito’s footprints were under there when the uniforms and I arrived.”

“How could you tell?” said Dar.

Hernandez sighed. “You see any of the construction guys wearing Florsheims with a reinforced heel?”

Syd crouched next to Dar and reached into the taped-off zone, dipping two fingers into some of the dark fluid on the ground and raising the fingers to her face. “So this longer, narrow spray is hydraulic fluid…”

“Yeah,” said Captain Hernandez. “And the rest is Esposito.”

“But you’re keeping the case open,” said Syd. “Considering foul play.”

“We’re going to talk to Paulie Satchel,” said Hernandez. “Do formal interviews with some of the other guys who were on site at the time. Somebody like Jorgé Esposito makes a lot of enemies and has a lot of rivals. But right now it looks like it’ll be logged as an accident.”

“What about Vargas?” said Dar.

Hernandez frowned. “The foreman? He’s been with the company for eighteen years. Doesn’t even have a parking ticket on his record.”

“Mr. Esposito was suing the company,” Syd said quietly.

The detective shook his head. “Vargas was on the phone in the main shack over there when the lift came down. He was talking to one of the architects. We can check the phone records and interview the architect. But Vargas is clean. I feel it.”

“Instinct?” asked Dar, curious, as always, about how cops deduced things. He almost believed in their sixth sense.

Hernandez squinted at Dar as if he’d read sarcasm in the remark. He said nothing.

Syd broke the silence. “Where did the ME send the body?”

“City morgue,” said Hernandez, still looking at Dar with cold, dark eyes. Finally he moved his gaze to Syd. “You thinking of going there?”

“I might.”

Hernandez shrugged. “Esposito wasn’t a pretty sight when we got here…I doubt if he’s any prettier in the morgue. But hey…it’s your Sunday.”

Dar had noticed in recent years that in the movies, morgues were always filled with naked, beautiful young female bodies and the medical examiners tended to be written and played as fat, insensitive pigs. But the ME of San Diego County, Dr. Abraham Epstein, was a small, meticulously dressed and tailored man in his early sixties, who spoke so softly and seriously that one was reminded of a funeral director, but with more sincerity. Nor did Dar and Syd have to walk past bodies to see Esposito’s corpse. The procedure now was to sit in a small, comfortable room while a video of the deceased was shown on a high-resolution thirty-two-inch TV monitor.

As soon as Esposito’s face appeared, Dar cringed. He could feel Syd recoiling next to him.

“In medical terminology,” Dr. Epstein said quietly, “this is called the Face of Frozen Horror. An antiquated term, but still quite appropriate.”

“Dear God,” said Syd. “I’ve seen many dead bodies, many resulting from violent death, but never…”

“An expression such as this,” finished the medical examiner. “Yes, very rare. Usually the phenomenon of death, even violent death, eliminates most or all expression from the face—at least until rigor mortis sets in. But this occurs in rare cases involving massive and almost instantaneous trauma to the brain—such as one might find on a battlefield—”

“Or in the closing struts of a scissors lift,” said Dar.

“Yes,” said Dr. Epstein. “And as you can see, the top of the skull was not only cut open and peeled back—‘capped’ is what convicts call it, as if in an autopsy—but the skull itself was squeezed quite violently. Much of the brain matter was expelled, and that which remained lost contact with the deceased’s central nervous system in less time than it takes for the nerve impulses to travel to the body.”

They sat in silence for a moment—silence broken only by the soft sound of Dar tapping in numbers on his pocket calculator—and Jorgé Murphy Esposito’s expression stared at them from the monitor. His eyes were rolled upward as if watching a guillotine descending, his mouth opened impossibly wide in a scream that would never end, the muscles of his face and neck distorted almost to the point of cartoon absurdity—all under the peeled-back skull, the remaining bit of bone and hair looking like a cheap toupee that had blown half off.

“Dr. Epstein,” said Dar, “my calculations suggest that if the platform were at its maximum height…which is what the construction foreman and the few other workers on the job today said in interviews…a loss of hydraulic fluid would mean that the platform would reach near-terminal velocity almost immediately. The platform would have struck Mr. Esposito in less than two seconds.”

Dr. Epstein nodded slowly. “This is consistent with the studies done on the so-called Face of Frozen Horror. The brain must be…disconnected…from the nervous system in one point eight seconds or less for the facial expression to remain fixed in such a manner.”

Dar looked at Syd. “And how far do you think Esposito’s body was from the column where the screw was opened to spill the hydraulic fluid?”

“The platform is twelve and a half feet wide,” said Syd. “Esposito was on the side opposite the column with the released screw, and his head was protruding from the scissors’ struts by several inches, as if he were trying to throw himself out through the closing X of metal.”

“Do you think he could have turned that bolt, removed that long screw, and jumped across that space in less than two seconds?” asked Dar.

“No,” said Syd. “And if, as his expression suggests, Esposito saw the platform falling, his instinct—anyone’s instinct—would have been to jump forward, out from under it. Not run deeper under and try to escape near the wall.”

Dar put his calculator away.

“There is something else,” said Dr. Epstein. He led them into a medical work and storage area between the waiting room and the actual morgue lockers. There were various bags on shelves, most labeled with the international symbol for toxic bio-waste. Epstein pulled a box from a drawer, pulled on disposable surgical gloves of the type used by paramedics since the AIDS epidemic began, and handed a pair to both Dar and Syd. He lifted down one of the clear bags. The tag on it said ESPOSITO, M. JORGÉ and had the current date and case number on it.

“This has all been photographed and videographed by the police, of course,” said Dr. Epstein, “but you should see the actual thing.” He opened the bag and laid Esposito’s clothes out on a stainless steel table with blood gutters.

The pinstripe suit had been a cheap one, Dar could see, and the blood and brain matter on it did not make it look any more attractive. The white shirt was almost completely red. Esposito had been wearing a bold, yellow tie, now stained mostly crimson.

The medical examiner lifted the sleeves of the suit jacket and then the sleeves of the shirt. “You see,” he said.

Syd nodded immediately. “Blood…human tissue…but no hydraulic fluid.”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Epstein, in his modulated, mournful tones. “Nor was there any hydraulic fluid on the body’s hands, face, or upper body. But here…”

He lifted the trouser legs. Dar put his gloved hand on them to turn them better into the overhead light. The right trouser leg was black and oily from hydraulic fluid. Epstein removed worn, black Florsheim shoes with a reinforced heel from the bottom of the bag. Both shoes had blood on them, but only one, the right one, had been soaked in hydraulic liquid. And even the sole of the shoe stank of the fluid.

“The spray trail we saw must have spurted out of the pipe about eight feet,” said Syd. “For some reason, Esposito was under the lift—probably near the middle of the area or closer to the wall—and couldn’t run for the opening. He turned and jumped for the gap between the cross struts just as the scissors closed. The hydraulic fluid caught just his pant legs and his right shoe as he jumped.”

“What could keep someone from running the shortest distance to safety with two tons of platform dropping toward him?” asked Dar.

“Or who?” added Syd.

Dr. Epstein put the clothing back in the evidence bag. He peeled off his now bloody gloves, dropped them in the toxic bio-waste bin, and scrubbed his hands at the sink. Syd and Dar followed suit.

In the waiting room again, the monitor now mercifully blank, they both thanked the medical examiner.

Dr. Epstein smiled, but his eyes remained sad. “I know about Attorney Esposito,” he said so quietly that Dar had to lean closer to hear him. “Ambulance chaser. Almost certainly an accident capper. But it was a terrible death. And…even though Detective Hernandez and others do not seem interested…it must be reported as a wrongful death.”

“A wrongful death,” agreed Syd.

“Murder,” said Dar.

The two went out into the heavy rain.