Chapter 12

She tried not to be too contrite with Viscotti. Her attitude was, “Yes, I lost the plane, but I found the bad guy and got a member’s aircraft back.”

“The CitationJet was insured, wasn’t it?” she demanded.

“The plane was insured, but not necessarily covered in an instance where a pilot made an illegal landing. Not to mention that the landing was nowhere near a declared flight path,” Viscotti answered.

“Whose side are you on anyway, Henry? I have to say, I think I’ve done a darn good job, so far.” Helen smiled brightly. “I’ll try to get the Cessna back,” she went on. “Can I take your turboprop?”

“Spare me,” said Viscotti. “Anyway, you’re fired.”

That stung. She was rarely fired from jobs—plus, she had given her all on this one.

Handing him back the keys to the CitationJet, which she had found she still had in her purse, was hardly worth the bother.

“I’ll give you a check for your hours to date,” he told her.

“I’ll have to make up the bill,” Helen grumbled. “I’ll send it to you.” Probably some tears welled up in her eyes. “I don’t know what you expected,” she added. “I found the skyjacker. I had him in handcuffs. I just didn’t bring him back to this country, that’s all.”

“For all I know, you sold him the Cessna,” Viscotti muttered.

Helen recoiled. How dare he! “You’re insane,” she informed him furiously. “How can you even suggest such a thing?” She didn’t have any more words to throw at him, she was so overwrought by his accusation. She turned and strode to the elevator, punching the call button with a vengeance. She didn’t even look back to see if he was still there until the elevator came and she got in. He was standing, watching her. She jabbed at “L.” The fire in her eyes had dried the water in them.

She took a cab down the road to National. She figured she was still on the payroll for expenses at least, so Viscotti might as well pay her air fare to Boston. She caught the next shuttle.

She wasn’t from Boston actually, but from Newton, not all that far from the airport. The season was barely spring here and she was the only one on the bus without a warm wrap. She must have some jackets at home, like her old high school band jacket. She had played alto clarinet—none too successfully, in part, because she had gotten a bum instrument.

To keep herself warm, Helen trotted energetically from the bus stop to her father’s church. She might as well spend a few days here with her family. Right now, she was hurting, and family felt like where she belonged.

The church was locked; her dad wasn’t in.

When she was a kid, they had rarely closed the church at all, but times had changed. Bad people roamed the streets of even this lovely, peaceful New England town.

Her dad’s church had been built more than a hundred years before, not too long after the end of the Civil War. No one built anything this beautiful nowadays. She hurried on home. The weather was too damn cold to wander around.

She banged the door on her way into the house so whoever was there would know that someone had entered. Helen’s mother peeked out of her study. She was probably planning next week’s classes or grading papers. She smiled to see her youngest child and came over and hugged Helen. “You look wonderful, but where’s your coat?”

“I left it on the airplane.” She didn’t bother to explain that she had left the airplane, too, on a runway in the Mexican Sierras having been nearly murdered by Latin revolutionaries.

“Oh, Helen,” her mother sighed. “I hope it wasn’t an expensive one.”

“Not too, but the airplane was pretty pricey,” Helen couldn’t resist responding.

“You didn’t lose the airplane, also?” her mother joked. “Although those are a little bit harder to lose than coats, I imagine.”

Helen changed the subject. “What’s for supper? I missed having lunch.”

“Can you stay to dinner then? Why, how nice.” Her mother seemed genuinely surprised, reminding Helen that she usually only came home for an hour or two between flights. Of course, Helen and Eric had come up a couple of months prior for some days so that her family could meet Eric. Most of her relatives, her brothers especially, hadn’t approved of him. Helen wasn’t certain why. “We can spend a little while this evening planning your wedding,” her mother added quickly. “We have hardly any time left.”

“I don’t want a sit-down supper,” Helen repeated for the fortieth time. “I want a buffet. And we only want about seventy people tops.”

“Your father’s parishioners will think we’re ashamed of you if we don’t invite all of the most loyal ones.”

“This is my wedding. I’ll get married in New York if this thing gets out of hand.” She couldn’t do that, of course—unless she wanted to resign from her family here and now. But saying so was Helen’s way of telling her mother to back off.

Dinner was macaroni and cheese, which grossed Helen out, but the meatless meal made her think of Dennis—although refined pasta and fatty cheese would not have been his cup of bancha either.

After eating, she called Eric at home and then at Katherine’s, which was where she found him. She was a little afraid of speaking to him, actually; she had messed up so badly in so many ways that she expected him to yell at her or to break the engagement.

“I wish you would have come back to New York,” he groused. “I’ve been hanging around here waiting to see you.” She felt strangely relieved. He wasn’t done with her yet, then.

“I stole a job from you,” she told him. “But the case really had my name all over it.”

“I know,” he said. “I spoke to John Garcia. He’s an okay kind of guy, don’t you think?”

“He’s sort of a chauvinist,” she answered. “Great looking though, if you like that type. Not me, I like ‘em ugly.”

“That leaves me out,” Eric said. She laughed. Eric wasn’t handsome, exactly, but his looks were arresting. He was intense and alive, and she feared that she loved him more than was tolerable to her.

“I’ll be back in a couple of days. My mother and I are planning the wedding.”

He groaned. “Nothing too formal or elaborate, please.”

“The entree will be meatloaf. Everyone in Newton will be there.” She tried to imagine a meatloaf wedding on the town square, the women in calico skirts and the men in waistcoats. This whole wedding business was a colossal pain in the butt.

She slept long and deep, waking up finally at about nine in the morning, wondering what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

She came downstairs in an old nightgown without washing her face. Henry Viscotti was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee with her father. “Henry,” she acknowledged. She didn’t have the energy to yell at him. She poured herself only half a cup of the caffeinated brew; Dennis had urged her to stop.

“Still mad?” asked Viscotti.

“Everyone knows I’m honest,” she answered. She glanced at her father. “No one ever accused me of a dishonest act before.” Her father looked unperturbed.

“I didn’t mean it,” said Viscotti. “I’ve come to apologize.”

“You could have picked up the phone.”

“I did. Eric said that you were up here.”

“You should have asked Eric to take over the case.” She made a face at Viscotti. “He was the one you wanted in the first place.”

“I’m starting to get used to you.” Viscotti tried to smile. “Did you watch the news last night? This whole mess has been blasted wide open. There was another skyjacking when you were in Mexico. I got so many calls during the night that my message tape ran out. I’m giving a press conference later today when I get back to Washington.” He offered a bleak upturn of his mouth. “We’re on the job, aren’t we?”

“We? You mean me?” There was another skyjacking when you were in Mexico. How could there have been another skyjacking then, if Peno was the skyjacker? Wasn’t Peno the skyjacker? What had made her think that Peno was the skyjacker!

“I brought you my turboprop. You can have it. I’ll take the shuttle back.”

“No way, Jose,” she refused.

“You won’t continue with the investigation?”

“Hell yes, but I don’t want your damn little turboprop. Turbulence prop! Call Cessna and get me another CitationJet. Or maybe Lear will want to reward me for bringing the Rotz jet back. Get me something I can travel in, man. If I’m flying, it’s got to be high and it’s got to be fast.” She smirked with enormous self-satisfaction. She already had her itinerary planned. Next stop, White Sands, New Mexico.

Her dad tapped her on her hand, which rested on the tabletop. Oh, oh, they shouldn’t have spoken in front of him; he didn’t want her jetting around the country. “Could you watch your language, please, young lady? Swearing like that makes a beautiful young woman less than attractive.”

She went to church on Sunday morning before heading out to Logan where her new plane had been delivered—a loaner from Cessna. After all, the case was hot. Cessna was slobberingly eager for the publicity, or so Helen imagined.

Her father’s sermon during the service took her by surprise, although it shouldn’t have. He always liked to deliver moral soliloquies to those whom he felt needed it most, not infrequently her. This one was about marriage. The sanctity of it, to begin with, and how one partner should always be there for the other. Well, her mom had always been there for him, that was certain. Helen supposed that her dad believed that he had been there for her mother as well. What an active imagination!

She flew into the Alamogordo municipal airport, which was so close to where she used to land at Holloman that she could feel the Air Force jets screaming by as she landed. She was filled with nostalgia, a desire to be there then.

Helen rented a car and drove down U.S. 70. The highway was open, which meant that they weren’t firing anything right now at the White Sands Missile Range. Rockerton, the car rental agent had told her, was past both White Sands and Fort Bliss—on toward Las Cruces. She knew this area of the country pretty well and could figure why the military had chosen it as a major home for the testing of aircraft and weaponry. The scenery was stark, powerful, magnificent—little civilization to it. The San Andres mountains ran through here, as did the Tularosa Valley. Beside the townspeople and the ranchers and the just-above-the-poverty-line military families, a lot of the population out here was Indian. Nice landscape to buzz over or try to blow up, filled with citizens whose protest was constrained.

She found Rockerton easily enough and once she found it, realized she had passed by the buildings dozens of times in her treks from the base to a little sense of normalcy in Las Cruces.

She parked in a patch of shade, but knew by the time she emerged, the car would be baked inside and out. The steering wheel would be too hot to touch, and she’d have to pull her skirt down carefully so that the back of her legs wouldn’t touch the burning vinyl when she got in.

She had called and gotten a contact name. Joe Weston, executive vice president, now held the position that Avilla had occupied previously. A talk with him would be a start; she’d stay in New Mexico as long as she needed to track something down.

At times you’re lucky and at times you’re not. Weston was in and was willing to talk to her. He could have been out having lunch with a colonel from Fort Bliss—taking the colonel to lunch in Las Cruces or Alamogordo, she should say. That was how these things worked. Pay off everyone as often as possible—that was the way business was done between industry and the government, certainly in incestuous little cultures like this one. Helen began to remember some of why she had wanted out of here. Her escape hadn’t just been motivated by boredom with being a test pilot.

The first thing that struck her was that Weston wasn’t wearing a suit. He had a casual jacket, which, pulled back, revealed a string tie with a silver and turquoise clasp holding it down. Weston shook her hand firmly, maybe even a little too hard. Yes, he fit in out here all right, into this world of the good ole boy. If he called her “little lady,” she just didn’t know what she was going to do.

But Weston turned out to be nothing like that, after all. He was a sophisticated type from Los Angeles, who liked going with the trend. He and Helen talked about New York. He had attended New York University for a year and had lived at Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street, within walking distance of her own apartment there.

“I’m after information about Robert Avilla,” Helen explained as soon as they got down to business. “I met him at Beaumont in Roanoke a few days ago. I’m doing a financial backgrounder on Beaumont for a party whose name I’m not at liberty to mention. Suffice it to say, the interests I represent are potentially a large source of income for Beaumont—that is, if they feel confidence in the organization and the person they would be dealing with—Avilla.” She smiled. “I’m the investigator they turn to for this sort of checking around, so here I am—checking. The watchword today is, ‘Know your business partner.’ When you put millions into a venture, what’s a few thousand for a background investigation?”

“I see.” Weston was impressed. This was all very New Economy. “I didn’t know Avilla. I came in after he had already left. I understand Beaumont has one or two big government contracts, but I haven’t really heard any of the details. I didn’t even know the company was seeking out private industry business.”

She nodded sagely. “I didn’t say private industry,” she corrected. “I didn’t say U.S. government, either. We do have allies, don’t we, whose military interests are aligned with ours.” Until they aren’t, she thought, but that’s always left for the next administration to deal with.

“What did Avilla handle at Rockerton?” she probed. “I know you can’t be specific. Believe me, I understand. But was it Department of Energy-related?” Heavy uranium, anyone? Plutonium, maybe? “Was there a relationship with Los Alamos?”

“That’s some of what we do here,” Weston agreed after considering the question for a moment or two. “After all…” Yes, the White Sands are hot sands. You don’t want to go walking across the desert floor barefoot.

She smiled again. “Anyone at Rockerton now who might have known Avilla when he was here? After all, his tenure wasn’t so long ago, was it?”

“He took his secretary with him, I believe. I’m sure some people here did know him, but we can’t have you interrupting the workflow, can we?” He gave her an apologetic look. “One thing I do know, however, is that he has family around here. A sister, they say.” He appeared embarrassed. “There was a scene once, I heard. The sister wasn’t an educated woman, not in Avilla’s league anyway. She came to the office on one occasion and stirred up some trouble.”

He stopped and seemed to realize that he had been speaking out of turn. “I shouldn’t have said all that, should I have? Beaumont is a subsidiary of Rockerton, after all. But personal things of that sort have nothing to do with business. Everyone I’ve spoken to has the highest regard for Robert Avilla’s abilities.”

“Yes,” she concurred. “That’s what I’m hearing from all my contacts so far.” Helen stood up. “I appreciate your giving me so much of your time. I’m sure I won’t find anything that would hinder the contract.”

Weston stood at the same moment Helen did. “If you’ll be here this evening, Miss Robbins, maybe you’d care to have dinner with me?”

An older man in a grey janitor’s uniform stood on a ladder in the corridor, replacing a fluorescent bulb in one of the fixtures. Helen stopped and watched, took the old bulb from him and handed him up the new one. The old man descended the ladder as she held it for him. She smiled. “They’re always burning out,” she said. “I hate it when they start to flicker.”

“The other kind lasted much longer,” he agreed. He was Mexican, or an Indian maybe. She wasn’t sure what other kind of bulb he was talking about.

“Did you know Robert Avilla, when he was here?”

“Sure, I knew him.”

“Does his sister still live around here, maybe?”

“I see her sometimes in the Seven-Eleven.”

Helen grinned. “Is her name Avilla, or is it Peno?”

The old man thought. He shook his head. He didn’t know. “She lives in the trailer park right outside of Organ,” he told Helen.

“Thanks,” she replied hastily, moving toward the door. “Thanks a lot.”

Yes, a town named Organ was located on Route 70, a few miles outside of Las Cruces, and yes, a trailer park stood right on the edge of that settlement. “I’m looking for Robert Avilla’s sister. Her name is Avilla, I guess, or maybe it’s Peno,” Helen told the woman who ran the place.

“Her name is Maria Sedone,” corrected the proprietress in a rather flat voice. Avilla must have been something of a celebrity around here at one time for this woman to know who Helen was referring to. “Number 17. Two rows that way, and then four spaces down.” The manager pointed then turned her back on Helen, entered her own trailer, and shut the door.

The land was stark out here, that was for sure, not much in the way of greenery. Dust served for grass. Helen heard a crying baby close by. A couple of kids chased one another down the row she was walking on.

Was this four spaces down? Helen knocked on the mobile home. The door opened, but the screen remained in place. The woman on the other side of the barrier was dumpy and late middle aged—washed out. She looked as if her feet hurt her, or something else was giving her pain.

“Hi. I’m Helen Robbins. Are you Mrs. Sedone? I’m trying to locate your brother Robert. My company wants to make him a job offer.”

Maria Sedone opened the screen, inviting Helen in. “Do you want some coffee?” she asked.

“Yes,” Helen sighed. “I’d love a cup. I was trying to cut back, but it’s difficult.”

“Why cut back?” Sedone put some water on to heat, got out a jar of instant coffee and measured some grains into each of two unmatched cups. Coffee like that was sort of like quitting, Helen told herself.

“You’re trying to find my brother? He already has a job. He doesn’t live here anymore, anyway. He’s moved East somewhere. I’m not exactly sure where.”‘

“You and your brother aren’t very close then?”

“Close? No. He’s afraid I might ask him for money. Or maybe he’s afraid I might show up wherever he is. I’m not good enough for him, I guess.” She said something in Spanish, a snide remark, no doubt.

“You’re alone then, are you?” Helen accepted the coffee with a smile. She looked around. The trailer wasn’t entirely untidy, but neither was it neat and clean. The space was too crowded with small porcelain animals, baskets of prescription bottles, and tossed clothing, ever to achieve that distinction.

“I’m alone. After two marriages and two sons, that’s how it ends. I’m all by myself. But I get by. I take in sewing.” She nodded at a sewing machine and at some garments nearby. “And I have my husband’s little pension, too.” She offered Helen the milk carton.

“Two sons,” repeated Helen. “Someone said that your brother had a nephew named Ernesto. Is he one of your children?”

Sedone looked pained. “Yes,” she answered tersely.

“What happened to your sons, then?” Helen asked in a slightly disinterested manner.

“Ricardo is a refrigerator repairman in Santa Fe. He’s married and has two little girls.”

Helen sipped her coffee. Tepid. “Nice for you to have grandchildren. You must get to see them often. Santa Fe really isn’t far.”

“They’re not far, but the family is busy with this and that. I was up there at Christmas.”

“And Ernesto? Does he have a family as well?”

“Ernesto, I don’t hear from.” Sedone looked into Helen’s eyes. “My brother brought him up more than I did. He stole the boy from me. If you find Roberto, then you’ll find my other son.” She stared off into space. “Don’t tell them you saw me,” she added. “I don’t care to hear from either one of them again.” She leaned over and turned on the television set. The Price Is Right was on. “That sofa’s seven hundred and ninety-five dollars,” Sedone began to guess.

Helen tried to think what other information she could ask for. “Was your brother political?” she inquired at last. “Was he interested in politics?”

“As much as anyone out here is, I guess,” said Sedone. “He contributed money, I know, went to some dinners.”

“And Ernest? Ernesto?”

“Politics? I really don’t think so.”

“But he knows how to fly? He’s a pilot, isn’t he?”

Sedone turned her head from the screen in surprise. “Ernesto? A pilot? When would he have taken that up?”