Cape Disappointment (49 page)

FROM TIME TO TIME
over the next months I experimented by telling parts of my story to relative strangers. When I went to Spokane on business I braced a cabdriver, telling her what I believed happened to the Jane Sheffield flight and all the rest of it. I tried my theories out on strangers in coffee shops. At a New Year's Eve party given by one of the law firms trying to recruit Kathy, I tested it on a couple of office temps. Once, when he and I were the only people on board, I laid out the story for a bus driver. Except for a homeless guy on the street who said, “Right on, brother,” the reactions were virtually the same: bewilderment, then a polite attempt to hide disbelief, and efforts to change the subject or separate from me as soon as possible. I'd become one of those dim-witted provocateurs who walk around telling people how both Kennedys were assassinated by J. Edgar Hoover and how Nixon was in on it.

The way my thinking had changed was scary. For a lot of reasons it was the scariest thing that had ever happened to me.

Early one morning, in the middle of an extraordinarily warm and sunny April, I walked into the office and found Ruth Ponzi waiting for me. It had been almost seven months since her husband's death and as long since I'd spoken to her. In the past year I'd seen a lot of relatives of the dead and, while she looked somewhat revitalized, she still had traces of the look I once thought I'd carry for the rest of my life. She'd
colored her hair darker and was doing something new with her makeup, toned it down, I believe. She looked better and worse at the same time; better physically, but there was a hurt deep in her eyes, a hurt I sensed might never dissipate. In addition, there was something about the cut of her jib that alerted me to the fact that she was filled with purpose now.

“You have a minute?” she asked.

“All the time in the world.” I escorted her into my cubicle and closed the door, noting the look Beulah gave me from the other room. Beulah clearly thought something momentous was about to happen, though as far as I knew, she'd never met Ponzi before. But then, Beulah was good that way. My own thoughts ran more toward Ponzi blaming me for her husband's death.

“I'd like to know where I can find the Sinclair Lewis twins,” she said.

“You're talking about Bert and Elmer? I don't know where to find them. I wish I did. I'd like to know they're okay.”

“They're in hiding?”

“I think so.”

“In lieu of that, maybe you can tell me what happened last fall.”

“You're talking about the election?”

“I'm talking about the dirty dealing surrounding the election. I'm talking about campaign workers who ended up dead or missing. About that plane crash and your wife's miraculous survival. About my husband's death. For a long time I didn't know what to do, but now I have a plan.”

“And that plan is?”

“Right now I'm just here to listen. I want to know everything you can tell me.”

“You're sure?”

“I've never been more sure of anything in my life.”

“The information I give you might be … unhealthy.”

“I've been in the hospital. I lost my husband. I'm not worried about my health.” She sat back in the chair, waiting. It took over an hour to lay out all of Bert's theories, a few of mine, and to explain without giving away too much that I believed the deaths of Hoagland and the disappearance of Kalpesh Gupta were intertwined. I kept my participation in the tale to a minimum. Even as I spoke, it occurred to me
that she'd been recruited by one police agency or another to get me to open up. I didn't really think so, but it was a possibility. Since last fall, my paranoia knew no bounds. In any case, I couldn't withhold the facts from this woman and I didn't.

She asked penetrating questions, and when I was finished answering, she said, “Are you game to get back to this?”

“You're going to write an exposé?”

“Yes, but I'm going to need help.”

“I need time to think about it.”

“I figured that would be your answer. I'll be working on it, and I won't stop until I get to the bottom of everything that happened. You call me whenever you're ready to help.”

During the next weeks I continued to earn a living as a private investigator, chipping away at the Sheffield incident in my spare time. I did not bother any of my clients with my theories. I networked with an ex-government employee in South Carolina who'd put up a website exposing various government conspiracies and who said he was interested in the Sheffield crash; I took enormous satisfaction in knowing that Kathy and I and the Slezak twins weren't the only believers on the planet.

Elmer returned from wherever he'd been and was immediately questioned by the FBI. They didn't learn much from him, nor did they arrest him. Our dog returned, too, looking even better fed than when he left and doing his best to pretend he'd never been away. I eventually was able to remember all the messages the woman in the gym gave me before she died, and I delivered them in a sorrowful meeting with her family. It was embarrassing, because they treated me like a hero and I felt like a murderer. I felt even worse about putting Tommy in harm's way and getting him killed. I located his girlfriend, wanting to help her out, but she had another boyfriend by the time I got there and he ran me off. Kalpesh Gupta's disappearance remained a mystery. Timothy Hoagland was still classified as having died somewhere in the Cascade Mountains off Interstate 90. No official cause was ever given for his death.

Soon after he came back to the Northwest, Elmer resumed his drinking career, engaging in a long bender before he went back to the clinic to straighten out. When I visited him in the clinic he told me
what the FBI had asked about me, and it was immediately clear they knew stuff they could only have found out by eavesdropping on my phone conversations.

In June, Snake received a postcard from Argentina without a message, just the stamp and Snake's address. “What's this mean?” I asked, when he showed it to me.

“It means he's all right.”

“You think they're monitoring your mail?”

“They're monitoring everything.”

“When are they going to stop?”

“I don't know. Six months. A year. When they get bored.”

Late that month Bert phoned me. “I'm coming home,” he said. “Be there in a couple of days.”

“Are you still … ?”

“There's nobody after me. Nobody after you, either.”

“How do you know?”

“A little birdie told me. Everything's been rolled up. They're on to other things.”

“You sure we're safe?”

“As safe as we'll ever be in this country.”

“What about Sheffield? Is anybody ever going to know the truth?”

“People don't want the truth.”

When I told Kathy about my conversation, she said, “I hope Bert didn't kill somebody to make this go away.”

“If he did, let's hope they were guilty.”

“We're all guilty.”

It had been twelve months fraught with disappointment. Disappointment that my wife had died and that my brain had unraveled so completely. I'd learned more about myself than I needed to know. Disappointment that Maddox was considerably less than even my worst evaluations had given him credit for. Most of all, disappointment that there were enough misguided Americans around to make something as ghastly as the Sheffield crash come off without a hitch, enough complacency among the throngs that nobody was thinking much about it.

Like every other voter, I was confronted with citizenship choices every day. I could carry on as usual, hoping dirty politics and the attendant illegal shenanigans wouldn't crop up again, hoping the great machine
I'd seen running amok didn't run over anybody else's toes the way it did with Sheffield and her co-workers and Ponzi's husband and Deborah and the four people who died in the Garfield gym. And my friend Tommy. Hoping everything would turn out okay in the end. I could use my talents to help swing things back to the way our founding fathers envisioned them, or I could wait for somebody else to do it. It was my choice, and I was painfully aware of my own reluctance to stick my neck out again. Still, late in the afternoon on a Friday when everybody else was rushing home to buy beer for the weekend I picked up the phone and dialed Ruth Ponzi.