TWENTY-SIX

I CLIMBED INTO the right-hand seat. He had taped the photographs of his family to the instrument panel, and now he was crying silently to himself. Like the copilot in the war movie, I looked away from him in deference to the sanction against masculine tears my generation inherited from his, as I put on the earphones. I watched the ocean, on which the late afternoon sun shimmered in blinding contrast to black-and-white war movies.

A high-pitched whine made my ears itch. I followed the sound to its source, a thumb-round bullet hole in the side window inches from Beemon’s temple.

“I think she wanted me to kill her, Arthur.”

“You—? Did you?”

He nodded.

I’m uncertain what happened then. Did I fall asleep? Absurd. Yet day became night, and I missed the change. Her own father had killed her. When he said so with that short nod, I was squinting into the sun, but when my awareness returned, sea, sky, and horizon were gone, no stars or moon, blackness. The only light in our world glowed red for night vision behind the old-fashioned dials, and the red bled eerily through the photos taped over it. He was saying something, speaking to me as if it were unremarkable that day should vanish into night during a nod of the head.

Billie’s “I’m dead” note was duct-taped above the compass and under the row of photographs. He pointed to the note, tapped it with his fingernail, and he said, “She knew what you’d do. She knew her man. The photographs, they’re all about my life, but this note is all about you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked as if I didn’t know.

“My daughter set it up. The whole goddam thing. Somehow she learned I was alive, then she set it up so I might kill her. But she had to have somebody to tell me who I’d killed or else her revenge wouldn’t work. You with me, Arthur? You look a tad bilious. Think how I feel. But you were the man for the job.”

“I don’t believe that,” I lied, and D.B. laughed at me.

This had been a family affair from the beginning, and I was nothing more than the gentleman caller.

“Acappella Productions,” he was saying. “I looked it up. It means alone, without accompaniment, but you and I, we know she had a hell of a lot of accompaniment. Only we didn’t know that’s what we were.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“When? You mean the night she died?”

“Don’t say it that way. She didn’t just die, like from a stroke.”

“I found her tied up in the tub. I went to her apartment, because that’s where all my employees flocked when I threw a scare into them, and I found her tied and gagged with her own panties. Jones did that, left her like that while he went looking for the photos. She looked at me standing over her and began to choke, so I removed the gag. She wasn’t choking. She was laughing.”

I pictured the scene played out against the night as if it were the wide screen, Billie contorted, probably in pain, but laughing at her father.

“She said, ‘You’re dead, Pop.’ Pop. She actually called me that. Course I missed the joke at that point. Right then I was thinking here’s this grifter all tied up, helpless, but she’s acting all out of character for a grifter caught in the act. Put yourself in my place, Arthur, what would you have done?”

“Hell, under the circumstances, I’d have drowned her. Only way to teach a grifter.”

“I didn’t intend to drown her, Arthur. I wanted to find out some things. How did she know about the doctors, the whole Florida business? What were these photographs she said would hang me? I had my life to protect, Arthur, so I ran some water in the tub. Put her face in it. She drowned. I look back on it, I’m convinced that’s the way she wanted it.”

“Now you’re batting a thousand,” I spit, enraged at the scene I saw before me, Billie drowned, her hair undulating on the surface, her bound hands clenched into fists.

“What’d you say?”

“Two for two. You got both your kids!”

His head didn’t turn; he flew his airplane. After a while, he said, “Here, you take over.” He was climbing out of the cockpit.

“Are you nuts!”

“Just while I take a pee.”

“It’s on autopilot, isn’t it?”

“Autopilot’s in the shop.” He turned and walked aft.

No, he wouldn’t do that. It was on autopilot. Right? No! We were accelerating. I gripped the half wheel. No, we were diving! That meant the nose must come up—

Behind me, I heard Sybel shout and Beemon pointed at me, made the okay sign, and walked aft.

I heaved back on the wheel. Things slowed down. That felt better, now I could think. Why were the engines screaming as if in distress? The stall! I had read the books, I knew the danger. When dick-up pilots raise the nose too high, the angle of attack grows so extreme that the wings lose all lift properties and they stall. Then the aircraft drops out of the air. Get the nose down! The books say that surviving pilots fly with a light touch. They don’t bend the wheel into a pretzel out of crippling terror. I eased the wheel forward and felt us edge over the top of the arc. Why were we diving? How long does it take for a pee! I yanked the wheel into my stomach. Almost immediately my seat began to shudder. Now I’d done it, totally fucked the laminar flow. So I shoved the wheel forward again, but nothing happened except that the shudder grew more violent. We were finished. We would fall into a spin from which I could never recover. A seat cushion or a thermos bottle might float ashore somewhere, and a strolling yuppie might toe the jetsam curiously before moving on.

“Give it a little throttle,” a calm voice advised. Beemon! He was back, headphones on, and he was flying.

I was gasping for breath. My arms ached. “What did you do that for? Are you crazy!”

“Well, pard, the fact is I don’t like your attitude. You come aboard my favorite airplane and tell me some pretty foul news only to go all righteous on me. Hell, you can’t even fly my favorite airplane. That was a ham-handed piece of work, all that up and down. You don’t have any instincts. You about killed us in the time it takes a real pilot to spray one. You can’t pretend to know a goddam thing about my life unless you got about five thousand hours in your book. Besides which you’re nothing more than an outsider at the family fracas. So if you don’t change that righteous attitude, I ain’t inviting you along again.”

I understood, sort of. I nodded. “There’s another thing you don’t seem to know,” I said, the outsider.

“I’ve had enough revelations for one flight.”

“Eleanor lives at Bright Bay.”

“Eleanor. As in my ex-wife Eleanor?”

“As in Billie’s mother.” It was my job to tell. I didn’t leave it unfinished, Billie.

“Why there? Must be thousands of nursing homes in New York.”

He seemed smaller now, compressed into his seat. The Ace of Aces seemed to me a vulnerable little boy. I didn’t want to pity him; I wanted my loathing untainted. Tears flooded the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. I wondered if Billie would have felt gratified at that.

“Keene and Osley. Billie learned about the Moxie business. That’s the only connection I can think of. Who is the burned man at Bright Bay?”

“Harry. He’s been there since the crash in Moxie. The doctors have done all they can for him.”

“So you switched identities? Why?”

“I needed a new one, since I was supposed to have been killed in that crash. His was handy. We discussed it. I loved him, too. Look,” he said quietly. “There it is.”

It was land, reef tops on which stray mangrove roots had taken hold. One islet was about the size and shape of a bus roof, and five others, smaller, barely out of water, were strung along behind.

“Hen and Chickens Reef. Pretty slick piece of flying if you didn’t notice due to all the emotional distractions. Dead on the landfall after six hours over water at night.”

“Brilliant,” I said.

“Brilliant? That’s quite a compliment coming from a flyboy like you. Now we bend east forty degrees.” He began the turn. “Did you talk to Eleanor?”

“Yes.”

“Was she—? How did she seem to you, Arthur?”

“She seemed—” I stopped. My impulse was to lie, to make her life sound better than it was. Why did I want to protect his feelings? What about my feelings? “Her mind is gone. She thinks Harry Pine is you. At least, I think that’s what she thinks.”