Imperfect Strangers

CHAPTER 54

Deputy Tony Wheeler sat down at his desk in the sheriff's office and spread out a map of greater Los Angeles on his desk, along with an L.A. yellow pages. First, he looked up the address of the Bel-Air Hotel in the phone book and found its position on the map. He marked that with a highlighter, then began looking for airports. There were lots of them in the L.A. area, but the two that were nearest the hotel were Burbank and Santa Monica, with Santa Monica being closer. He started there.

He opened the yellow pages to the air charters listings and made a list of the ones that seemed to be at Santa Monica Airport, the ones with the 310 area code. There were an even dozen, and he went at them alphabetically. All of them denied sending an airplane to Napa County the night before, but with one, he had a flutter of disbelief; it was a guy called Barnum.

"Barnum Air Service, speak to me."

"Is that Mr. Barnum?" Wheeler asked.

"You got him. What can I do you for?"

"Mr. Barnum, my name is Wheeler; I'm a deputy sheriff of Napa County."

There was silence at the other end of the line.

Wheeler thought the silence was odd. "Mr. Barnum, did you do a charter to Napa County California last night?"

"No sir," Barnum said, then was silent again.

"Have you ever had a customer named Martindale?"

"No sir."

Wheeler was accustomed to a little more chat from possible witnesses. "Have you ever flown into Napa County Airport?"

"No sir."

Wheeler sighed. "Thanks for your cooperation," he said, and hung up. He shook his head and finished his calls to Santa Monica Airport, then started working the Burbank list. When he was finished, only the call to Barnum struck him as not quite right. He looked up the main number for Santa Monica Airport and asked for the tower, then explained who he was.

"How can I help you, deputy?" the woman who'd answered asked.

"Do you keep any records of airplanes that take off and land at your airport?"

"We keep a log for a month, then we throw it away. Air traffic control would have a computer record, if there was a flight plan filed."

"Can you fly out of your airport without filing a flight plan?"

"Yes, you can depart VFR, that's under visual flight rules, and not file."

"Can you tell me if any airplanes departed VFR last night between, say, seven and ten?"

"Can you hang on for a minute?"

"Sure." Wheeler tapped his fingers impatiently on his desk while he waited.

Shortly, the woman came back. "Last night between eight and midnight we had only one VFR departure, and that was a twin Cessna, registration November one, two, three, tango, foxtrot."

Wheeler wrote down the number. "Can you tell me if it returned last night?"

"Just a minute." Another minute's wait. "Yes, it landed shortly after midnight."

"Is that particular airplane familiar to you and your coworkers?"

"There are a an awful lot of airplanes based on this field."

"How would I find out who that airplane is registered to?"

"You'd have to call the FAA registration office in Wichita; hang on, I'll give you the number."

Wheeler wrote down the number, thanked the woman and called the FAA. He was connected to registrations, gave them the number, and asked to whom it was registered.

After a short delay, the clerk came back onto the line. "We show that aircraft as not a Cessna twin, but a Beech Bonanza, which is a single, and it's registered to a corporation with an address in Santa Fe, New Mexico." She gave him the name and address.

Sheriff Ferris walked into the station and stopped at Wheeler's desk. "What are you up to?" he asked. "Shouldn't you be patrolling the north sector?"

"Norm, I got to thinking about Martindale, and how Mrs. Kinsolving said he could easily get out of the Bel-Air Hotel, so I called all the charter services at Santa Monica and Burbank airports to see if anybody had run a flight up here last night."

"And?"

"And everybody denied such a flight, but I got the impression that one guy wasn't being truthful with me. I figure it's possible that Martindale hired the guy, then paid him extra not to talk to anybody."

"That's hard to prove."

"Then I talked to the tower and found out that only one airplane took off from there last night without filing a flight plan, a twin-engine Cessna, and the registration number for that airplane turns out to be a Beech single, from New Mexico. The airplane took off early in the evening and returned after midnight."

"So what's your conclusion?"

"Well, my hypothesis is that Martindale hired this guy Barnum to fly him up here and back, and the guy gave the tower a false tail number when he took off and landed. And from the time he took off until about forty minutes after he landed, nobody saw Martindale at the Bel-Air Hotel."

"I suppose he could have landed at Napa County, but then he'd have to have a car to get to the Kinsolving property; it would be a good eight miles."

"I've got an idea about that, too," Wheeler said. "The Milburn Winery has a private strip, and that property borders the Kinsolving place. I bet the strip is less than half a mile from Kinsolving's house. I called the Milburn office, but nobody lives on the place, and the night watchman doesn't remember a plane landing. He could have been on the other side of the property."

"But Barnum denies flying up here last night?"

"That's right, but he sounded funny to me."

"Okay," the sheriff said, "let's see what you got: You got a suspect says he was in his hotel room, but he had opportunity to get out unseen and charter an airplane. You got an airplane that takes off from Santa Monica, but gives the wrong tail number to the tower; then it returns later, and the roundtrip flying time makes sense. And you got a suspected pilot who denies everything. It's all circumstantial, and you haven't got a single witness to support your theory, right?"

"Right, but I'd like an opportunity to crack the pilot."

"What do you want to do?"

"I want to fly down there in the county airplane and talk to the guy face to face."

The sheriff looked at his watch. "All right, if the county manager will approve it, and nobody else is using the airplane, and the pilot's available to go. Don't stay overnight, come right back; I'm not signing any expense reports."

"That's just what I'll do," Wheeler replied. He picked up the phone and called the county manager's office.