Free Fool's Flight (Digger) by Warren Murphy Page A

She nodded toward the kitchen table. Women love to sit at kitchen tables.
    "I’m just wondering if you had any idea about the accident. How it happened."
    She shook her head. "It’s hard to figure. Steve could’ve flown that plane in his sleep. So scratch pilot error. What’s left? A bomb? A lunatic? Equipment failure? Instrument failure? I don’t know."
    "Captain Donnelly was good, wasn’t he?"
    "The best. We were at Pan-Am together and he was a top captain. That was…"
    "Before he started drinking," Digger said.
    She looked at him in surprise.
    "I told you. I talked to Batchelor. And I talked to Mrs. Donnelly before that."
    " She ought to know about his drinking."
    "I know she’d drive me to drink," Digger said amiably.
    "Anyone. Listen, Abraham. Hey, you don’t mind, I just can’t call you Elmo, I couldn’t call a cocker spaniel Elmo. How deep are you digging into this? Why don’t you just get the F.A.A. report when it’s done?"
    "Look, let’s level. I’m not a cop. I’m not some kind of newspaper snoop or government inspector. All I do is go around and try to figure out how things happened so that just maybe they don’t happen again. So I look at everything. People’s frame of mind. Equipment. Procedures. Lunatics. You name it, maybe it’s important to me. I don’t know until I have it all figured out."
    She sipped her drink and stared at him. The liquor was startng to erase the washed-out look from her eyes. Finally, she nodded and said, "Go ahead, ask away. I’ll tell you anything I know." She said it as if she had weighed all the alternatives and, reluctantly, this was the only possible decision.
    "All right. Why don’t you like Mrs. Donnelly?"
    She hesitated. "I…"
    "You said anything."
    "I guess I did. My big heart gets me into trouble again. Aren’t you hot in that jacket?"
    "No."
    The question made her conscious of her own robe and she pulled it tighter around her shoulders, covering up her deep cleavage. She sipped at her drink, then swallowed it quickly. "Steve and I were lovers when we both worked for Pan-Am. I’m sorry you never met him. There was never anybody quite like him. He was happy and fun-loving and good-natured and I don’t think there was anybody in the world who knew him who didn’t love him."
    "What happened?"
    "Trini happened. She came along and made a run at him and she got him all messed up. We all knew what was happening but you can’t talk a man out of anything like that. She got him messed up."
    "How’d she do that?"
    "She got knocked up. So Steve, being Steve, married her. Then he found out she was a bitch on wheels. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted. She slept around. She drank like a goddam camel after three months in the desert. That’s when Steve started drinking. I still used to fly with him, but the heart was out of him. He was so damned low all the time. Then I left and I kind of lost touch."
    "Why’d you leave?" Digger asked.
    "A man. I got married. All very professional. Marriage, fights, separation, and divorce. It would have all fit in one week in a soap opera. I moved back to Atlanta with my folks and I was out of the business for a long time. I used to hear about Steve from friends. Then he left Pan-Am. They told me that the booze was really bad. Finally, I moved down here and found a job with Interworld and who’s there but Steve."
    "How long ago was that?"
    "Two years or so."
    "What was he like then?"
    "It’s funny. He had stopped drinking, so I guess his health was better, but I didn’t really see him when he was heavy on the sauce so I don’t know. He was still unhappy, though, you could tell."
    "No chance of picking up where you left off?"
    "No. You’re going to laugh at this," she said. "But he got religion. There’s this minister in town…Reverend Dariell or something."
    "Wardell?"
    "Yeah. Anyway, Steve was going to this guy and he was different, really different. He was off the juice and he was straight arrow with his wife. He even