Santa Fe Rules (2 page)
Flaps looked suitably guilty, but she knew very well she’d be fed again by the housekeeper, who melted at the sight of her.
“Be good,” he called out to her as he left by the kitchen door, “and don’t eat the mailman.” If an intruder ever actu
ally got into the house, Wolf knew her plan would be to kiss him to death.
He opened the garage door, tossed the blazer onto the passenger seat of the Porsche Cabriolet, then eased into the car. It was like climbing into a deep freeze. He started the engine, and as he let it warm up, he thought of going back into the house and seeing what the dog wanted in the guest wing; it was unusual for her to display an interest in that part of the house when there were no guests on board.
Oh, the hell with it
, he thought. He backed out and started down the driveway, taking it slowly, since there was still snow there from the last bit of weather they’d had. The four-wheel drive of the car kept it nicely in the ruts of the driveway, and the main road out of Wilderness Gate had been plowed days before. He passed through the gate of the subdivision and headed down into the town.
There was little traffic at this hour of the morning, and Santa Fe looked beautiful with the low sunlight on the adobe houses and shops. Everything was adobe in Santa Fe—or, at least, stucco painted to look like adobe—and it reminded him a little of an English village in which all the houses were built of the same stone. The common building material gave the little city a certain visual harmony.
Wolf always felt grateful that he had chosen Santa Fe as a second home instead of Aspen or one of the other movie-colony favorites. It was harder to get to from L.A., but that kept out the riffraff, and anyway, he had his own airplane to get him there and back faster than the airlines could. Never mind that Julia didn’t like the single-engine airplane and usually insisted on taking the airlines, when she couldn’t hop a ride on somebody’s jet; he liked flying alone. Today he would think about
L.A. Days
, the latest Wolf Willett production, written and directed, as usual, by
Jack Tinney. The film wasn’t right yet, and, since shooting had ended and the sets had been struck, it was going to have to be fixed in the editing, as it nearly always was with Jack’s films.
As he drove, he used the car’s telephone to get a weather forecast from F.A.A. Flight Services and to file an instrument flight plan from Santa Fe to Santa Monica Airport. He always flew on instrument flight plans, even in clear weather; it was like being led by the hand, especially when arriving in L.A. airspace, which was always smoggy and crowded. Santa Fe airport was virtually deserted at this hour of the morning. He drove along the ramp to his T-hangar, opened it, parked the Porsche behind the airplane, and pulled the airplane out of the hangar with a tow bar, then locked up. Normally, during business hours, he would simply call ahead and Capitol Aviation, the F.B.O. (fixed base operator—a name left over from flying’s barnstorming days), would bring up the airplane for him, but today he was too early for them. Anyway, he liked the idea of the Porsche being locked in the hangar instead of being left in the airport parking lot for days on end.
The airplane was a Beechcraft Bonanza B-36TC—a six-passenger, single-engine retractable with a 300-horsepower turbocharged engine. He’d owned it for three years and had nearly six hundred hours as pilot in command. It would do two hundred knots at twenty-five thousand feet, and Wolf wore the aircraft like a glove. He gave it a quick but thorough preflight inspection, checked the fuel for water or dirt, then climbed aboard and started the engine, working his way through a printed checklist. Noting the wind direction, he taxied to runway 33, then did a run-up, checking the operation of the magnetos. He checked the
sky for other aircraft that might be landing and, finding none, announced his intentions over the Common Traffic Advisory Frequency. He lined up on the runway, did a final check of everything, then took off, turning west when he reached five hundred feet.
Once airborne, he called Albuquerque Center on the radio and received his clearance. He was cleared as filed—direct Grand Canyon, direct Santa Monica, though he knew that when he approached L.A. airspace, they’d vector him all over the place in order to sequence traffic for Santa Monica and keep it clear of LAX—Los Angeles International—the big, busy airport just next to Santa Monica. He tuned Grand Canyon Airport into the Loran navigator, set the required course, and relaxed. Then he remembered that he’d forgotten to pick up a
New York Times
from a machine on the way, and he had nothing to read aboard.
When the airplane reached its assigned altitude of twelve thousand feet and was automatically leveled off by its autopilot, he leaned the fuel mixture, ran through the cruise checklist, then relaxed, forgetting his resolution to concentrate on
L.A. Days
. Instead he switched on the CD player and punched in a Harry Connick, Jr., album. He enjoyed the singer/piano player; the young man played the music he’d always liked best—the prerock, musical theater numbers that Wolf felt were the best American music ever written—none of the electronic noise that passed for music these days. He hummed along with “It Had to Be You” and let his mind drift. He was still curiously unable—or unwilling—to recall the past evening.
The song reminded him of his childhood; it was one of the first things his mother had taught him to play on the piano. He had been born in the small Georgia town of
Delano, to a music-mad piano teacher and a soldier from nearby Fort Benning. She had named him after her favorite composer: his birth certificate read Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Willett, a name which would subject him to years of the torture of schoolmates and the amusement of others. This began to abate when he captained the high school tennis team, and because he hit the ball so hard for a smallish fellow, he earned the nickname Wham, which was almost his initials. His mother called him Wolfie (Wolfgang when she was angry with him), but when he entered the university, he was able to shorten it to Wolf, and that had stuck through law school and military service.
He’d received a Naval R.O.T.C. commission and been sent to flight school, where he’d earned his wings. Then he’d stupidly allowed himself to be hit hard in the left eye with a tennis ball during a base championship match, and the resulting injury had washed him out of flying before he’d ever had a chance to land an aircraft on a carrier. A contact lens in that eye corrected his vision, but that wasn’t good enough for Navy flying.
He’d been transferred to administrative duties, and his first job, for which he had been totally unqualified, was to make a film about carrier operations for his unit. This allowed him to stay with his flight school class as they trained in the Pacific, and it had introduced him to the only man aboard the ship who knew how to operate a movie camera, one Jackson Tinney, a skinny, Tennessee-born good ol’ boy who was, unaccountably, a wizard with a 16mm Arriflex.
Together, the young ensign and the even younger able seaman had put together a cinema verité account of life aboard an aircraft carrier that was still shown to Navy
pilots; it had been put into general release and had won an Academy Award nomination for best short subject.
When the documentary had been completed, Jack had been transferred to a shoreside film unit and Wolf to other administrative duties aboard ship. It would be years before they saw each other again.
After being discharged from the Navy, Wolf, who had learned to love California while briefly stationed in San Diego, traveled to L.A. and began looking for a job in a law firm while studying for the state’s bar examination. No L.A. law firm displayed much interest in a University of Georgia Law School graduate who had not risen to the top of his class, but Wolf had been invited by an old Navy buddy to play tennis at a Jewish country club, and there he had met and begun playing twice a week with a top agent and senior vice president of the William Morris Agency. Shortly, he had a job as a legal assistant at the agency and, when he had passed the bar exam, was promoted to staff lawyer.
Some years later, after Wolf had risen to head the William Morris legal department, Able Seaman Jack Tinney had appeared in his office with four cans of film under his arm. Using Navy equipment and studio space, he had shot a film of his own, and when Wolf had run it in the William Morris screening room he had thought it rough, but the funniest thing he’d seen in years.
Wolf had rented a cutting room, and together the two men had gotten it into shape. Wolf played jazz piano, and he and some musician friends, with whom he jammed once a week at a Santa Monica bar, had recorded a sound track, and after months of work they had found themselves with a completed feature film.
Wolf had then taken the biggest risk of his life. He went
to his patron, the senior vice president, and resigned from his job; then he hired the man as his and Jack’s agent and dragged him down to the screening room to see
Rough Water
, as they had named the film. Their new agent had loved it. Within a week, they had nailed down a distribution deal at Centurion, one of the big studios, and within a year, Wolf and Jack had each earned better than half a million dollars. The film was still making money on late-night television and video rentals.
Twenty-five years and eighteen films later, Wolf Willett and Jack Tinney were still in business together. Jack wrote and directed the movies, and Wolf, their agent having died fifteen years before, produced, negotiated contracts, and oversaw every aspect of production. They had an in-house production deal with Centurion, and Jack had long been established as the Woody Allen of the West Coast. His films never lost money and usually did quite well, though they had never been blockbusters—not so far, anyway. They were shot on tight budgets, with big-name stars who were happy to play parts for small money just to get into a Tinney film.
All this had earned Wolf a house in Bel Air, another in Santa Fe, a nice little airplane, and the assorted cars, boats, pools, and tennis courts that went with a seven-figure income. He earned, in fact, even more than he spent, and he had even managed to put away something for his old age, which wasn’t as far away as it used to be.
Wolf was brought abruptly back to the present by a red light on the instrument panel before him. Red lights were not good. This one said
LOW BUS VOLTAGE
. He started looking at gauges. Alternator failure. He switched on the backup generator. Nothing happened. Backup generator failure. He started turning off electrical gear and consulted
his chart. He’d never make it to L.A. on battery power, and he didn’t want to fly in L.A. airspace without radios. Grand Canyon Airport looked good for repairs.
Wolf switched off the autopilot and began hand-flying the airplane.
T
he eastern end of the Grand Canyon was in sight when the instrument panel went dark.
“Shit!” Wolf yelled. He tried switching things on and off, but nothing worked; the battery was too low to operate anything. He had a hand-held radio somewhere in the airplane; he didn’t use it often. He began rummaging through the pile of charts, manuals, and other debris behind the passenger seat, while trying to hold the airplane straight and level with his free hand. He unearthed the small radio, found the adapter wires that allowed him to plug his headset into it, turned it on, and tuned to the Grand Canyon control tower frequency.
“Grand Canyon, November one, two, three, tango foxtrot.”
“Aircraft calling Grand Canyon, please say again. Your transmission is weak.”
Shit again; his hand-held’s batteries were nearly dead, too.
“Grand Canyon,” he said, enunciating carefully, “November one, two, three, tango foxtrot. I am a Bonanza B-36, estimate fifteen miles east of the airport. I have electrical failure and am using a hand-held radio.”
“Roger, November one, two, three, tango foxtrot; runway two-six is active; wind is two-seven-zero at eight. You’re number two behind a Grand Canyon Airways twin now on final.”
“Tango foxtrot.” He rested the small radio on top of the instrument panel. What now? Get the landing gear down. He hoped to hell there was enough battery power left for that. He pulled out the gear lever and pushed it down. The red
IN TRANSIT
light came on and drag on the airplane was noticeably increased. Was it down? Two miles out he called in again. “Grand Canyon, I will fly down the runway at one hundred feet. Please tell me if my gear is locked down.”
“Roger, tango foxtrot.”
Wolf tried the flaps; they didn’t work, either. He reduced power slowly and got the airplane down to 120 knots for his low pass down the runway.
“Tango foxtrot, Grand Canyon. Your landing gear appears to be partly down, but not locked. What are your intentions?”
“Goddamn it!” Wolf screamed, but not on the radio. “Grand Canyon, I’ll try to crank it down.” He had never done this before, although he had been trained to do it. The hand crank was behind the passenger seat where all his junk was. He began throwing stuff indiscriminately into the backseat. Finally the small crank was exposed. He began cranking. How many turns? Seemed he had been told fifty. On the twentieth turn, the gear-down lights
came on: all three wheels down and locked. Wolf heaved a sigh of relief; he was sweating heavily from the tension and the effort of cranking the gear down. “Grand Canyon, gear down and locked,” he said into the radio.
“One, two, three, tango foxtrot, cleared to land, runway two-six.”
With no flaps to slow him, Wolf had to make a fast approach, but there was plenty of runway length, and he got the airplane down smoothly. He cleared the runway and taxied to the maintenance hangar.
“Well,” said the shop foreman, wiping his brow, “you got a dead alternator there, all right. Dead standby, too. I haven’t got either in my stock.”
“How soon can you get replacements?”
“Day after tomorrow,” the man replied.
