Heartshot

Chapter 23

I fumbled the telephone, dialing a couple of times before getting it right. Eventually the phone rang, and I tried to picture my son’s household in Corpus Christi being jarred awake. Buddy should be up, I thought. Four rings. How could he get to the 4 A. M. flight briefings at the Naval Air Station if he didn’t get out of bed? After eight rings, I had just about decided that maybe my youngest son had found some leave time after his return from Spain and the family was off somewhere camping.

“Hello?” The voice was thick with sleep.

I immediately flushed with acute embarrassment. “You’re going to be late for your briefing, Buddy,” I said, trying to sound jocular.

There was a silence while a sleeping brain tried to digest that. “Who the hell is this?” Lieutenant William C. Gastner, Jr., asked. He was awake and ready to punch somebody, and then before I could speak again, he said with some disbelief, “Is this Dad?”

“This is Dad.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Why, thank you.”

“Well, shit!”

I laughed. “I jerked you out of bed, obviously. You aren’t flying today?”

“No. I flew in about twenty-three hundred hours last night. But the hell with that. Dad, how the hell are you? I talked with Camille after I got in. She said you were doing much better. I was getting things arranged so I could zip over that way.”

“Ah, wait until you can come with everybody,” I said. “Hell, it’s no big deal. Over and done with. I just got in a little over my head, is all. Overtired.”

“Right,” Buddy said a little skeptically. “I can believe that. Camille said it’s been a hell of a summer in Posadas.” His voice dropped a tone or two. “She was sorry as hell she couldn’t get there right away.”

“Don’t start that,” I chided him with a laugh. “If a man wakes up in the hospital and sees his family standing around him wringing their hands, he knows right away the doctors told everybody he’s dying. It scares him so bad, he dies.”

My son laughed. “You timed it really well, if you wanted it to remain a secret. One daughter’s in South America, I was in Madrid, and Joel was over hobnobbing about transistors with the Japs. Camille is in Flint with a broken ankle.” He cleared his throat. “If your sheriff…what’s his name?”

“Holman.”

“Holman, that’s right. If he hadn’t been persistent and finally reached Camille, none of us would have found out until you got around to calling. You did good, Dad.”

“I try. But if Holman thinks I’m going to remember him in my will, he’s got another think coming. Anyway, I needed to ask you a question.”

“I had just about figured that out. Nobody calls at zero three-thirty hours just to chat, although I’m not kickin’. Which nurse is the one in question?”

“I wish. No, I’m home already. Not even in the slammer anymore.”

“That’s super news.”

“You bet. But look. Is Kendal still building one airplane model after another?”

There was a slight pause as Buddy tried to puzzle his way through my abrupt change of subject. “Yeah, he’s doin’ that. He’s a terminal airplane nut case. He even got me to join the base modelers’ club so he could be a member.”

“They fly those gas-powered jobs?”

“Right. Some of them are pretty sophisticated. Especially the radio-controlled ones.”

“There’s a Scout troop here in town that does that, too. They had a float in the July Fourth parade. I was just remembering how big they were. Nothing like those things you used to fly on the end of strings.”

Buddy laughed. “Nope. Whole different world. Last time I flew with Kendal, I put one straight down into the pavement. Shot about three hundred bucks. What, are you thinking of a hobby, or what?”

“No.” I reached over to the nightstand, turned on the light and pulled out the evidence bag. I held up the wood and plastic that had been found in Scott Salinger’s back pocket.

“I’ve got a curious piece of evidence. I wanted to run a couple things past you.”

“Shoot.”

“First of all, what’s the plastic stuff that people cover model airplanes with now? It feels like a very heavy, slick garbage bag.”

“Hell, there’s several brands. Just a sec.” I heard muffled voices, and Buddy said, “It’s Dad. He’s fine.” He came back on the line. “Edie just snuck up on me. She said to tell you to get back in bed where you belong.”

“Tell her I am in bed. And tell her not to go away. I want to talk to her when I’m through with you. So tell me about airplane coverings.”

“We use a brand called Unicoat. It comes in a roll about two feet wide and in several lengths. Six, twelve, and twenty-five feet. There’s three or four brands. Most of them are pretty much alike. I’m not into it as deep as some. Kendal would know more than me.”

“But it’s nothing like that paper stuff you used to use as a kid.”

“Silkspan? Hell, no. Some people still use the silk and dope, though.”

I turned the wood and plastic over in my hand. “What holds the plastic to the wood? The bond seems pretty tight.”

“You put it on with a hot iron, or a hair-dryer kind of thing. There’s some sort of high-tech stickum on the back side that adheres under heat.”

“How would I tell one brand from another if I had a sample?”

There was a moment’s silence. “Beats the shit out of me,” Buddy said. “The only thing I know is that to put on Unicoat, we have to turn the iron up to its highest setting. That’s not true with the others. I don’t know if it’s just because it’s thick, or what, but it always seems to take a humongous amount of heat. What the hell are you working on, anyway? Did somebody back there Unicoat somebody’s mouth shut, or what?”

“We don’t know yet, Buddy. I found a scrap of model-airplane wood and covering in a murder victim’s back pocket.”

“So your victim built models?”

“That’s something I’m going to check. I’ve been holding back for obvious reasons. The stuff in his pocket was just scrap. I can’t imagine why he would walk around out in the boonies with that. My theory right now is that he picked it up…and because it wasn’t crushed deep down in his pocket, my theory is that he picked it up just before he was murdered.”

“Who was the victim? Anybody I know?”

“No, I don’t think so. A high school kid.”

“No shit,” Buddy said in wonder, and he whistled softly. “The airplane stuff…what was it?”

“The crime lab said it looked like the leading edge of an airplane wing.”

“Shaped into a taper, you mean? The front edge is rounded?”

“Right.”

“How big is it?”

“The piece is about three inches long. I would guess about three-quarters of an inch thick at its widest point. Maybe a little more.”

Buddy made a sound of surprise. “Balsa wood?”

“No. Spruce.”

“A big sucker, then.”

“What’s big?”

“The model that the piece came from. Kendal’s got an airplane now that has a wingspan of about sixty inches, and it uses a piece of quarter-inch dowel for the wing’s leading edge.”

“This is three or four times bigger than that.”

“How long is the chunk you’ve got?”

I held it up close, as if Buddy could see it over the telephone lines. “About three inches. Maybe four.”

“On the back side…the trailing-edge-side…is there a slot of any kind?”

“No. The wood is smooth. There’s some glue residue. And a speck or two of white stuff. The crime lab said it was a kind of Styrofoam. No other marks of any kind. Why?”

“Well, it’s from a foam-cored wing, then. Usually, if the thing is all balsa, the wing ribs glue to the leading edge. There would be a mark, or even more likely, a slot in the wood itself where the rib fits in. But if it was foam core, that wouldn’t be the case.”

“Nope. So what’s the significance of foam?”

“It’s used in models that are either of simpler construction, or are intended for pretty high performance. Several of the new full-size airplanes-especially the aerobatic ones-have core wings. Composites, they call ’em.”

“So your guess is that this is from a pretty big model, then.”

“Yes. If it was balsa, not necessarily. But spruce or pine, yes. That spruce is put on there just as a leading edge, for a little stiffness and protection. Where’s the rest of it?”

“Beats me.”

“The piece is obviously broken out?”

“Yes. Both ends are fractured. There’s a split that runs almost the length of the piece.”

“The only thing that makes sense is that it got wrecked in a crash, or stepped on, or crushed by a car, or something. It took a hell of a thump. If it crashed, there should be other pieces. If it went straight in, they’d all be together. If it skipped around-and that’s just as common-you might have a bunch of pieces in one spot, then some more many yards away. Who knows. Weird case you got, Pop.”

“Yes, it is.”

He laughed. “I’ve seen some fruitcakes in this club down here who would probably kill if you did something wrong and caused them to screw their plane into the ground. Some of them get pretty serious.”

“I don’t think that’s the case here.”

“How was the kid murdered?”

“One shot through the heart. Kind of a clumsy attempt at making it look like suicide.”

“Well, you’ll nail ’em. Anyway, if you want to tell if the plastic is Unicoat, just get a modeler’s iron and turn it to the highest heat setting. If it takes all the iron’s got to make it stick, it’s Unicoat.” He hesitated. “But now that I think about it, five gets you ten it’s not. If you are ironing a covering onto foam, you don’t want to melt the foam. You’d need low heat. So it wouldn’t be Unicoat, then. Probably not. You’d want a low-heat cover of some kind. I don’t know what they are, ’cause we never use ’em. Something like Colorfab. I think that’s one. I don’t know the others. Kendal would. And the other thing I’ve noticed is that they all have favorite shades. What color is it?”

“Sky-blue.”

“That should be an easy match. And a dumb color for radio-controlled airplanes, too.”

“Why?”

“Get it up against the New Mexico sky, and you can’t see it.”

“That makes sense.”

“Everybody around here seems to be stuck in the yellow-red rut. High visibility if it gets a little far away.”

I didn’t say anything, because my brain was kicking into high gear. The silence went on so long that eventually Buddy said, “You still there?”

“Yes. Let me ask you a question. Suppose the victim came upon the crash site of a big model airplane. What could there be about it that would be so incriminating as to prompt the kid to pick up a piece of the wreckage? And then a murder follows?”

“Where was the murder?”

“Up at the Consolidated Mine boneyard. You remember where that is?”

“Sure, but what have you got that suggests a connection between airplane and murder?”

“Not a damn thing. Except the junk was in the kid’s pocket, and there was no reason for it to be there.”

“One thing I’m not is a detective, Pop. But like I said, you and all your staff will figure it out. Sounds like you got it on the run. Say, keep me posted, will you?”

“You bet. And sorry about the night call. How was Spain, by the way?”

“I never saw it,” my son said with a laugh. “Got there at night, left early. What little ground I saw was brown…just like Posadas County.”

“You home for a while now?”

“About a week, I think. Anyhow, if I think of anything else, or if Kendal does, I’ll make sure we get right back to you. You want to talk to Edie?”

I heard her say, “Of course he does,” in the background.

“Buddy, take care,” I said, and then my effervescent daughter-in-law was on the line.

“When did you get out of ICU?” she asked, and like a fool, I told her. The lecture I got seemed to last ten minutes. There was no point in arguing. I finally mollified her by lying like a rug, promising faithfully to take all the medications as prescribed, and to visit them in Texas as soon as I could. Part of all that was true, at least. I was planning to make some visits, all right…but not to Texas.