Empty Places, page 19
"I know him," I said, realizing why the guttural voice sounded familiar. The thought of Robin making love to that fat, ugly toad sickened me. I swallowed hard and rubbed a hand over my face to relax the muscles twisted with disgust.
"I met him last night," I told Matt. "He's chief of security for Carlos Tinnerman."
CHAPTER 21
ALIGHT RAIN BEGAN falling in the valley as I parked the rented sedan in the airport lot. Gray clouds hung over the lowland, with just enough elevation to show the soft rain reaching the desert floor was only a taste of what was building up in the mountains. Black clouds crept down from the Santa Rosas like angry, dark smoke ready to smother the valley. The radio reported a flash-flood warning. Work crews began blocking roads crossing the Whitewater even as the first mountain runoff trickled into the dry riverbed.
It didn't take long after listening to Robin's recording to understand what the adhesive tape on the bedpost was for. A microphone taped into place had recorded Morgan's coerced confession, if you could call it that. The four pieces of tape were actually two pieces torn in half when the mike and its cord were ripped away from the bedpost.
We now understood why Robin was killed, why I was beaten. We understood how Robin made the tape. We were pretty certain she made a copy of the tape for safekeeping—Casey had seen her doing so in the TV studio—and we were just as certain whoever killed her also knew there was a copy. What we couldn't figure out is what made her make the damned thing in the first place.
This much more we felt certain of: Whatever Jinx Morgan was up to, he wasn't the brains behind it. Matt knew him too well to think Morgan was anything more than just muscle. My bet was on Carlos Tinnerman. His fingers were in too much of this to be clean. Matt finally conceded the Cuban might not be as red, white, and blue as he appeared to be. But the old bear had his own thoughts, too, and he wasn't sharing them with me. We decided I should talk to Tinnerman in the morning, while Matt checked out his own suspicions.
✽ ✽ ✽
The Cuban was more than gracious when I told him I wanted to take him up on his offer of an interview. Before leaving for the airport, Matt made me show him the .25 automatic in my bush jacket pocket, counter weighted by my tape recorder in the opposite cargo pocket.
"Where's the derringer?" he asked.
I grandly unzipped my pants and let them fall, revealing the small .22 revolver taped to my lower stomach just below the elastic of my undershorts.
Now I stood next to the car smoking a cigarette, letting the gentle rain drops dampen my hair and darken my jacket. The rain was warm and pure. I removed my dark glasses and tilted my head back, letting drops hit my face and run down my neck. My head was filled with images of Tex's withered body lying in the dingy living room, of Robin's body lying in the dirt, of her voice on the tape. I felt the need for a deep cleansing.
I walked through the terminal as instructed to a guarded exit door next to the Desert Air ticket counter. An armed guard, wearing a Morgan Security uniform, checked my name against a list on his clipboard, then let me out onto the tarmac and directed me to a secluded hanger at the north end of the runway.
The tarmac was hot and drier than the parking lot. The residue of the previous day's heat, trapped in the asphalt and cement, now rose to mix with the heat from jet engines and heavy-duty tires screaming along at more than 150 miles an hour. The light rain vaporized before being able to touch the ground.
A workman in orange overalls, a white hard hat, and goggles drove by on an electric cart. He slowed and eyed me, then stopped and offered me a ride down the strip. We passed a small, square white building that served as the airport flight operations center, followed by some small hangers, then several prop planes tied down to the tarmac. The workman dropped me off just short of the Desert Air hanger, gave me a good-bye salute, and motored off toward one of the other hangers.
Desert Air International's hanger was the Sears Tower of Quonset huts, at least half again as large as the next largest hanger on the airfield. Its white paint was still fresh and showed only the slightest settling of dark ash from the exhaust of jet engines.
Parked in a row outside the hanger were three sleek, needle-nosed turboprop airplanes, each painted identically with white fuselages and orange empennages. The cowlings of the four bladed turboprops were the same color as the tails. Black propellers tipped with yellow warning marks were held in place by silver rotor cups. Across each slender fuselage nose was boldly printed: DESERT AIR INT'L. The only visible differences between the aircraft were the FAA tail numbers printed beneath the rudder.
A fourth turboprop stood off by itself, the object of special attention. Half a dozen men milled around the ship, minutely examining its wheel assemblies, its flaps, its engines. The aircraft was painted the same as the others, with one difference. The words Desert Air Int'l were missing from its nose.
"Ah, Mr. Brandt, you're just in time.”
Carlos Tinnerman walked toward me from the Desert Air hanger. He was dressed in an olive-drab flight suit and shiny jump boots. A white silk scarf was wrapped around his neck, its ends tucked into the top of the flight suit. He wore teardrop aviator sunglasses with amber lenses and clasped a clipboard in his left hand.
"So good to see you again," Tinnerman said, shaking my hand. "You're just in time.”
"In time?"
He stepped back, waving grandly at the isolated plane. "Our newest addition to the fleet," he said. "We're just taking possession this morning."
"Expanding the airline?"
"Sadly no." Tinnerman's voice dropped. "Unfortunately, we lost one of our aircraft a few months back. It crashed near San Diego, with the loss of all on board. "
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "So, this is the replacement?"
"Yes, exactly," Tinnerman said. His voice became more cheerful again. "I was just about to take her up for a test flight. And I thought you might come along. We could do our interview in the plane. "
My stomach felt as if it had dropped onto my toes.
"Test flight?"
"Come, come," Tinnerman said. "It's not like some experimental test for NASA or anything dangerous at all. I simply like to be the first to fly our ships before we take final possession."
Tinnerman led me to an electric cart parked next to the hanger, and we drove down the tarmac to the small, white flight operations center. Inside, the walls were filled with photographs of aircraft, commercial jets to Piper Cubs. One wall was filled entirely with an aerial view of the valley. Pilots in airline uniforms mixed with those in slacks and windbreakers. No one was dressed in military flight garb like Tinnerman, and no one seemed to notice the incongruity.
"Good morning, Mr. Tinnerman," a short, thin fellow called out from behind the service counter. "Taking one up today, are we?"
Tinnerman smiled widely and shook the short man's hand. "Yes, George, I am," he said. "We finally got our replacement this morning from British Aerospace.”
"Yeah, I saw her come in," George said. "A real beaut, that."
"Es verdad, si, mi amigo," Tinnerman said.
"Not the best weather to take her up, though, Mr. Tinnerman," George said. "Got a bad front moving in."
George hefted a binder filled with weather reports and handed it to Tinnerman. The Cuban flipped through pages of terminal and area forecasts, pilot reports, radar reports, and winds aloft reports. Then Tinnerman walked to a teleprinter and studied a satellite weather image tacked above it. Tinnerman came back to the binder and flipped through the pages again.
"No AIRMETS or SIGMETS, George?"
"No, sir. But we've got phone reports that it’s rainin' and thunderin' pretty bad up in those Santa Rosas, so you can expect some heavy turbulence if you're planning on going that way. I wouldn't advise it, sir."
"No, you're absolutely right, George. I should stay to the northeast." Tinnerman closed the weather binder and gave George a broad, perfect smile. "I won't be up long, George. I'm simply taking her around the block for a spin, as you say. I'll be wheels down before the worst of the storm hits us."
"Good idea, sir," George said. "Well, happy landings."
We left the flight ops building and motored back to the Desert Air hanger. We passed private pilots milling around their aircraft, checking their tie downs. Others stood looking southward, toward the menacing, dark clouds above the Santa Rosas, shaking their heads.
"I hear they are already sandbagging in parts of the valley," Tinnerman yelled above the whine of the electric motor. "I think we are in a for a royal plastering."
I tipped my head with exaggerated nods, as if the overly large gesture was needed to be seen over the sound of the motor. “Do you think we should be flying?” I asked loudly. “I mean with a storm coming and all? Can this plane—well, is it safe?”
Tinnerman nodded, and his grin flashed large white teeth at my nervousness.
"An amazing piece of machinery," he said. "The British Aerospace Jetstream Super 31. Best regional airliner money can buy, in my humble opinion. Those two Garrett turboprops crank out more than one thousand horsepower each. She has a maximum cruise speed of more than three hundred miles per hour and a range of more than 800 miles, fully loaded with 19 passengers and a flight crew of two. Plus baggage. A beautiful piece of machinery."
"A real beauty," I agreed. "Kind of small though isn't it?"
"Small? Hah! She's bigger than the Douglas Invaders we flew in the Bay of Pigs. Bigger, faster, tougher. And—" Tinnerman pointed to himself. "—I came out of that just fine."
I bet, I said to myself.
"That's one of the things I'd like to discuss with you."
"Fine. Fine," Tinnerman said. "But first, into the aeroplane."
The Cuban could tell from the way I hesitated I wasn't eager for this aerial interview. He would have had to be blind to miss it.
"You don't like to fly, Mr. Brandt?"
"I was in a helicopter crash once," I confessed. "We weren't high off the ground and the chopper auto-rotated down. No one was hurt, but it left me with a profound respect for Newton's Law of Gravity."
Tinnerman laughed heartily and slapped me on the back.
"Come, Mr. Brandt," he said, gently pushing me toward the fuselage door. "Let's see if we can't break that law.”
We climbed the stairs into the narrow hull of the plane. The hatch closed behind us with a solid thud. Bent like hunchbacks, we scuttled forward to the cockpit.
"Take the right-hand seat, please," Tinnerman said, as if assigning seating arrangements at a dinner party.
The Cuban took the left seat and slipped on a set of headphones, leaving the ear next to me uncovered. His hands began to dance across the instrument panel, flipping switches, setting dials. Finally, his fingers pressed a button. The port engine whined, then caught. Its four blades spun out of sight as they picked up speed. Next the starboard engine whined and coughed, and soon its blades, too, vanished in a whirlwind of speed. Tinnerman let the engines slowly build up RPM, then signaled to his ground crew to clear away.
Tinnerman said something softly into the lip mike protruding from his headset, listened, then responded. The Jetstream shuddered slightly, rotated to the left, and began taxiing out toward the runway. After a few minutes, we were lined on the strip awaiting final clearance. It came, and Tinnerman turned to me, grinning, then raised his right fist in a thumb up gesture. I smiled uncomfortably in return.
The Jetstream jumped forward and hurtled down the runway. In what seemed only a few feet, the plane leaped into the air and clawed at the sky like a leopard climbing a tree. The angle of ascent had me almost flat on my back. I glanced at Tinnerman and he smiled back maniacally, his eyes wide, his head nodding.
We climbed to three or four thousand feet in the amount of time it would take an elevator to rise to the second floor, then eased over and banked to the right, toward the east.
"How are we doing, Mr. Brandt?" Tinnerman asked.
"Fine," I said. "That was quite an impressive climb. "
Tinnerman nodded.
"The factory specs say she can climb more than 2,000 feet per minute. I think we did better than that." He tipped his head toward the rear of the aircraft. "Of course, we have no cargo."
Rain whipped at the windscreen and Tinnerman flipped on the wipers. We rose gently into gray clouds. The first wisps looked like angels' hair, then the clouds grew denser until the gray thickness seemed to become our entire universe. I scanned the instrument panel and found nothing that even vaguely resembled a radar screen.
"How do you know you're not flying into a mountain or another aircraft in this soup?" I asked.
"We don't," Tinnerman said, still smiling. He laughed and slapped my leg. "Don't you worry, Mr. Brandt. We are still under the control of the flight tower." He tapped the earphone over his left ear. "They will guide us around any mountain or aircraft until we are in the clear."
We climbed until we broke away from the cloud cover into a part of the world you can see only from an aircraft or, perhaps, the tallest of mountains. Below was the gray carpet of clouds, broken only occasionally by the jutting of a mountain. Above us, more clouds, white, billowy and scattered. Bright sunlight illuminated the spectacle with a clarity never seen on the ground. If heaven was a place of beauty and light, this was it.
Tinnerman leveled the plane out, rocked its wings, let it yaw with left and right rudder, then let its nose dip and rise, dip and rise. I instinctively reached to brace myself when the dipping began. When he finished, Tinnerman notice my braced position and apologized. "I was just testing the controls. "
I nodded but said nothing. I was still trying to get my heart out of my mouth.
"Very well, Mr. Brandt," Tinnerman continued. "We are now, you might say, in the clear. Shall we start the interview?"
I pulled the miniature tape recorder out of my pocket along with a reporter's notebook. Tinnerman nodded his approval when I held the recorder up, seeking his permission to use it. The tape machine was just flash. With the sound of the twin turbos vibrating through the cockpit, I didn't really expect it to be much use. But then, I wasn't planning on transcribing our conversation anyway.
I flipped through the pages of the oblong notebook until I came to a list of subjects I wanted to touch on. I started the interview, as I usually do, with the easy ones. I wanted Tinnerman lulled into being comfortable answering questions before I asked the ones I really wanted answered.
"Well, since we're up here in one of your aircraft," I said, "tell me a little about your company, Desert Air."
"Ah, yes. We are a small regional airline. Five–no, now six turboprop planes with this new one." Tinnerman tapped the instrument console. "And we fly daily to Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas. We also have weekly flights to Sacramento and San Francisco, and charter flights to Mexico."
"There's enough business for all that?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," said Tinnerman, his head bouncing. "Deregulation, Mr. Brandt. It left small cities like Palm Springs with few air connections. A great business opportunity for me."
"I lived in The Springs for four, five years," I told Tinnerman, "and in that time, I must have seen three regional airlines start up and three regional airlines crash, if you will excuse the pun."
Tinnerman was already nodding, anticipating my question.
"I survive, Mr. Brandt, because Desert Air is only one of three regional airlines I own. I also have one in Florida that services that state as well as the Caribbean, and another in Louisiana that services the Gulf States." Tinnerman looked at me sideways, grinning his bright grin. "I am also a more astute businessman."
I scribbled nonsense in the notebook.
"Well, they must be very successful," I said. "You are obviously very wealthy."
"I am an entrepreneur, Mr. Brandt. I have many other business interests besides my airlines."
"Oh, such as?"
"A little of this, a little of that. I own, for instance, majority interest in the largest security firm in the desert."
"Morgan Security?"
"Yes. Yes, that's it." Tinnerman seemed curious about my knowledge.
"I saw the uniforms on the guards at your estate, and again at your ticket counter."
"Ah, of course." The answer seemed to satisfy his curiosity. "Anyway, that's one of my businesses. I have several more investments in other parts of the country. I own a company that services airlines at two or three major airports in the Gulf States. We clean their planes, refuel them, and cater their food. Much of what I invest in is related to flying. That is what I love most. That is why I concentrate on my little airlines." His hand playfully slapped the wheel. "Plus, I get to do this whenever I wish!"
"With so many business interests spread out through the country," I asked, "why are you living in a Podunk like Palm Springs?"
"Because, Mr. Brandt, I like this, as you say, Podunk."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I just meant that The Springs is somewhat secluded. . .cut off from the rest of the country. I would think a businessman would prefer to be in a city where he could wield more influence than in a small enclave where he’s just one of many wealthy people, like The Springs.”
"Many wealthy individuals, yes, Mr. Brandt. But only one Carlos Tinnerman!" The Cuban laughed joyfully at his own humor. His laughter was contagious and I joined him without meaning to.
"But seriously, Mr. Tinnerman," I said, "you do enjoy a rather great deal of power here despite the wealthy competition."
"I have many friends," Tinnerman said. "Some of them are powerful."
"I spoke to a police detective yesterday who said from the power you have at city hall one might think, as he said, that you paid his salary."
I wanted to see Tinnerman's reaction when I intimated I had spoken to the police about him. There was none.
"Did he?" the Cuban said. "Well, from the taxes I pay, he may be right!"
"You do enjoy a great deal of power, don't you? I mean, I was told that you could make or break a politician's career. "
