“You could fill your pilot’s log with obits when you’re in the aviation business,” he said when Chance described the pilot being extracted from the plane.
“What happened to the other two?” Kev asked.
Stunned by Kev’s matter-of-fact question, Chance wasn’t sure how to answer. It wouldn’t be the first time Kevin had been known to hallucinate. He might not even have gone to bed the night before. “What are you talking about?” Chance asked gingerly.
Kev pulled his head out of the engine compartment and stood up. He was looking eye to eye at Chance. “There was two other guys went up in that plane. I was on my way to the can when I saw the three of them walking across the tarmac toward the tie-down area.”
The can was in the lobby, which meant Kev must have seen them through the picture window in the pilot’s lounge, which was also where the door to the tarmac was. He must have missed them by seconds. “Did you recognize these guys? Were they from around here?”
Kev shook his head and went back to working on the engine. “Didn’t see ’em up close. Besides, I wasn’t that interested.”
“Well, what did they look like?” Chance asked, trying to hide his impatience.
Kev looked up from the engine for a moment, thinking. “One guy looked like your typical knock-around, about your age and size,” Kev said and returned to the engine, then spoke between turns of a socket wrench. “Another one was taller, ramrod straight. Could have been ex-military. The third guy looked older. I think he wore glasses. I only saw them for a split second.”
“You talked to the sheriff about this yet?” Chance asked, not surprised by the tirade that followed about what had the cops ever done for Kev but give him a hard time.
Finally, Chance left Kev to his overhaul and walked back to his car, a mixture of concern and indignation engulfing him. He drove back uptown, wondering what kind of guys would walk away from a crash-landing into a house, leaving a dead man. He also wondered if they knew they had been seen.
Granted, Silver Bow Aviation was not the world’s busiest place. Few people in Butte could afford their own planes, let alone hire a pilot. Out-of-towners and their passengers came and went without much notice unless they needed to refuel, or the weather was bad and they had to lay over.
Without a traffic tower, a pilot could fly in and out of Bert and Ernie’s without checking with anybody. All you had to do was avoid the commercial traffic, which was easy enough, considering it consisted of two flights a day from Salt Lake. And a fair number of private planes flew visual flight rules, so even the radio traffic was light.
That was partly why some celebrities, like David Letterman and Hank Williams, Jr., flew into Butte. If you wanted to get noticed, you flew into Bozeman. Whoever these guys were, they apparently had something to hide.
* * *
The last time Mesa had spent any serious time at the Mining City Messenger office, she had just finished her freshman year in college back east. That had been more than ten years ago, the month after her grandmother had decided to buy a newspaper.
The paper’s offices occupied the old Cleveland Building, which had once housed Butte’s grandest car dealership, with a fancy showroom for the Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles. The building, repainted in brick red, still maintained its dignity in the middle of Mercury Street, redefining the once famous center of Butte’s red-light district. From the outside, Mesa saw no hint that the Messenger might be in any trouble.
Nana had bought the weekly paper for a song from Solomon Ramey—Sol to his myriad drinking buddies. After Grandpa Ducharme died, volunteer work aside, Nana needed more to occupy her. She might not be a newswoman like Clare Booth Luce, but like Sol had said, you didn’t need to be able to write to own a newspaper. You just needed cash flow. Together Mesa and her grandmother had spent the summer getting the Messenger offices into shape.
The Messenger quickly picked up where Sol Ramey had begun to slow down. The paper was free, supported by a loyal base of local advertisers. Each issue usually ran at twenty-four pages with lots of homespun interest. Its peak circulation was ten thousand strong, with two hundred distribution points all over the county. But lately, according to Chance, advertising had taken a dive. Local speculation about the paper’s future, given their grandmother’s illness, no doubt contributed to the decline.
Mesa took a deep breath and entered the small reception area. The smell of stale coffee hung in the air. A faded, tan vinyl sofa with cracks at the seams took up most of the room. The only welcoming feature was a Big Sky water cooler in the corner.
She reached for a copy of the Messenger on the coffee table. The headline read, “Two More Mine Frames to Be Lit by Christmas.” The story was tightly written with vivid details about the preservation of the iron gallows that dotted the mountainside—revered symbols of Butte’s mining heritage. She was relieved the paper had at least one decent reporter.
Mesa had begun to inspect the rest of the front page when scurrying footsteps from the connecting hallway distracted her. A buxom, no-nonsense woman appeared, herding a thin young man with bowlegs and dusty boots out the front door.
“You listen up, cowboy. Here’s two words for you—paycheck,” the woman called after him. Mesa remembered the woman from the airport the day before, taking photographs. But they hadn’t recognized each other then.
Her miniature, feathered, dream-catcher earrings jostled when she spoke. “You tell your boss that if those inserts aren’t ready by Wednesday noon, you won’t see one thin dime. Now get the hell out of here and get busy.”
The door closed and the woman tossed her jet-black hair over her shoulder with a palpable sigh of frustration and turned to withdraw the way she came. It was then, from the corner of her eye, she spotted Mesa. She paused for an instant, straightened her burgundy blouse collar, and then said, “Sorry about that.” She cleared her throat and smiled. “Can I help you? I’m Irita Yellow Robe,” she said, obviously impatient to get the conversation going. Her voice was a rich alto, tempered by more than a few years of smoking.
Mesa smiled back and returned the newspaper to the cluttered coffee table. The last time Mesa had seen Irita was the summer after college graduation. Mesa had no intentions of coming back to Butte then either, but that hadn’t stopped her grandmother from trying to lure her. Irita had been a scrawny, anxious-to-please new employee. An extra thirty pounds now rounded out her upper body and face. The transformation, both in physique but especially in attitude, was startling.
“Beautiful name,” Mesa said and offered a hand in greeting. She decided to string Irita along for just a minute.
“It’s Crow,” Irita said. When Mesa didn’t respond immediately, Irita continued, “You know, like Indian. Feathers? Teepee?”
“Of course,” Mesa said. She thought back to the ceremonial welcome at the airport, surprised in a way. When Irita had taken the job at the Messenger, she described herself as a city Indian who had left the reservation years before. Maybe her attitude about that had changed too.
“Do I know you?” said Irita, her expression a mixture of curiosity and worry, as if a creeping awareness was bringing an unwanted realization to light.
“Irita, it’s me, Mesa.”
“Holy crap,” Irita said with an air of self-derision. “Of course. God, it’s been forever,” she said and reached out to hug Mesa. “I’ve seen your grown-up photograph in Mrs. Ducharme’s office but, well, it doesn’t do you justice. Come on in. God, I’m sorry about that little sideshow just now. We’ve been having some distribution problems, and I’ve got a ton of ads in this week’s issue, and if they’re delayed getting on the street even an hour, our advertisers will be ringing the phone off the hook.”
Irita reached for Mesa’s elbow and pulled her down the hall into the depths of the Mining City Messenger offices. Mesa let herself be carried along in the whirlwind. They stopped in front of a large office with half-glass walls.
“I thought we could put you in here for the time being,
” Irita said sheepishly.
Mesa looked at the rich, mahogany desk and chair, family photos on a credenza next to the wall. “This is grandmother’s office,” she said with an air of finality that suggested she did not intend to use it.
Irita sighed and then said, “It’s not like we don’t expect her back but . . .” She gestured toward the pool of several desks in what Mesa remembered was the newsroom and said, “But that’s it, unless you want a desk in our personal version of the Pit.”
Mesa took a step inside the office and looked around. Irita followed. “Look, you’re gonna need an office and one with a door you can shut. Trust me.” This last caveat Irita delivered with a tone that came right out of The Godfather: Part II.
Mesa smiled. “Okay, for now.” She felt uneasy about moving into Nan’s office on the first day, as though this were a signal that big change was afoot. But maybe Irita was right. Privacy might not be such a bad thing.
“Chance won’t be in right away,” Mesa said. “Nan said you could give me the lay of the land.”
“Chance is never around when you need him,” Irita said with a smile, “like most of the male species. He’s probably off rescuing some old building from the brink of destruction.”
On the one hand, Mesa wasn’t surprised to hear this. But on the other, she wondered who was running the paper if he wasn’t around.
* * *
Chance parked behind the KXLF-TV Bronco. He could see Ashley Carroll, the latest TV news blonde, lugging a video camera and struggling across the vacant lot in her high heels toward Sheriff Solheim.
Messenger staff did not routinely attend the sheriff’s daily press conferences, leaving coverage of the local crime beat to the Montana Standard and the local TV stations. But if Chance wanted to know more about this plane crash, he knew the sheriff would provide whatever the police wanted the public to know.
It might not be cutting-edge journalism for the police department and local reporters to cooperate, but Chance was prepared to let Mesa worry about that. He just didn’t want to miss what the sheriff had to say.
For some reason, which the department’s receptionist didn’t know, the sheriff had abandoned his office and the usual behind-the-desk conference to move to the crash site. Chance couldn’t blame any elected official for taking advantage of a little free TV time.
He joined the other media reps around Sheriff Solheim. At his full Nordic height, an imposing six foot three, Roland Solheim reached easily across Ashley to shake hands when Chance appeared.
“Thought I might see you today,” the sheriff said with a wry grin. His steely gaze and lanky build made it easy to imagine him facing down a trigger-happy gunslinger. In truth, Sheriff Solheim rarely stared down anybody but the Council of Commissioners and an occasional TV camera. A western sheriff in the twenty-first century, even in Butte, was more politician than lawman. He was open and affable and told everyone, except those who worked for him, to call him “Rollie.”
“You know Noah Gilderson?” Solheim said and nodded to the square-shouldered, fair-haired reporter with wire-rimmed glasses and a gentle smile. Chance liked Noah, a transplant from South Dakota who covered the courthouse and crime beat for the Standard. Like most of its reporters, he was young and energetic and woefully underpaid. But the two papers, at least as far as the hard news went, rarely competed, so theirs was a symbiotic relationship—back scratching all around.
Chance thought Rollie was a first-class lawman. Silver Bow County’s ninety square miles made it one of the smallest counties in the state, but the sheriff had his hands full trying to stretch a limited police force to cover all the terrain. By all accounts, he did a better job than most of his predecessors.
Sheriff Solheim rubbed his stubbly silver-gray crew cut with a bear-sized hand and waited politely for Ashley to balance the camera on her shoulder. When the red light came on, he began reading from several sheets of paper he had rolled up in his hand.
“The occupant of the Cessna 180 that crash-landed at 303 Washington Street on Sunday, September 6, was dead at the scene. An autopsy is pending. The victim is identified as Lowell Austin, age 54, most recently of the Idaho Correctional Institution in Orofino.
“Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board will arrive today to assess the wreckage to determine the cause of the accident. Special agents of the FBI are investigating the whereabouts of the last known pilot of the plane, which is believed to have been stolen from Moab, Utah. We are looking for any witnesses to the crash who might have information. They can contact the police department directly, etc., etc.”
“Thanks, Sheriff,” Ashley said, swinging her camera within an inch of Noah’s head, and then moving away to get a shot of the crashed plane.
“THE Lowell Austin?” Noah said after he ducked.
Chance looked at Noah, whose expression was a mixture of surprise and delight. “Wait, did I miss something?” Chance said. “Who’s Lowell Austin?”
“Don’t you read the newspaper?” Noah said with a smile. “We ran a wire story about Austin’s release last week. He did twenty-plus years for killing two Idaho game wardens in 1984. He left an Idaho prison a free man last Wednesday.” Noah turned to the sheriff. “What kind of injuries did he have?”
Solheim hesitated, leaning on the wooden fence at the back edge of the lot and said, “None really. No gunshot, not a lot of blood at the scene at all. I’ve worked a few auto accidents like that. It’s usually a heart attack. Again, don’t quote me. This is my first plane wreck.”
“What do you think he was doing in Butte?” Chance said, surprised by the victim’s identity, but glad that the dead man was no one local.
The sheriff looked up from his prepared statement with the smug expression of a police officer who couldn’t help appreciate the irony of the situation. Half Irish and half Swedish, he had a subdued, gallows sense of humor about work and life. “Beats the hell out of me, but he should have stayed in Idaho, that’s for damn sure. But don’t quote me on that either,” he said with a chuckle and shook his finger at Noah.
Solheim entwined his fingers and stretched his arms in front of him as if the conversation had begun to wake him up. “Put your pens away.”
Chance and Noah silently obeyed, knowing that Solheim just might give them something off the record to tickle their imaginations.
“As far as I can see it, Mr. Austin went on a plane ride that ended tragically. Doesn’t look like he was flying the plane, so obviously we still have a few dots to connect. His next-of-kin is an elderly mother in Virginia who didn’t know anything about what he was doing here. But he wouldn’t be the first ex-con who decided to light in Butte, and he sure as hell won’t be the last.”
Chance knew this was one of Solheim’s pet peeves. Butte already had its share of ex-cons thanks to the Pre-release Center, a locally contracted correctional service that housed compliant convicts on parole. The center helped the cons find jobs in Butte and kept track of their AA meetings, counseling sessions and literacy tutors, until pre-releasers were ready to rejoin society. All too often, according to Solheim, they ended up staying in Butte once emancipated.
“What about the owner of the plane, Consolidated Controls?” Chance asked. He suspected Rollie, or more likely an FBI agent, had been able to get through to someone who would say something other than “No comment,” which was all Chance had heard that morning.
“Hell, they know less than the mother. At least she knew who Austin was. The comptroller of . . .”—here Rollie hesitated and looked at his statement again—“Consolidated Controls says they own the plane and that the president of the company flew it to Moab, Utah for some Outward Bound type deal. We found his gear in the plane. The guy’s not due to come out of the Canyonlands until Friday noon unless the FBI wants to spend a small fortune searching for him in the back of beyond.”
Canyonlands was 300,000 acres of wilderness of countless canyons where people went to get away from civilization. The plane’s
owner might as well be on the moon.
Chance had to give Lowell Austin credit though. He had made the rounds all right. Released on Tuesday, he had gotten himself from the penitentiary in Orofino, Idaho to Moab, Utah and then to Butte, Montana in five days, and in a stolen plane. He had covered a lot of miles. Too bad he hadn’t lived to talk about the trip.
Chapter 4
“I’d be glad to bring you up to speed if you’re ready,” Irita said to Mesa. “Want to start with what’s lined up for this week’s issue?”
“How about the staff? Who’s in today?” Mesa said. She knew what it felt like to have a new boss. She thought she might ease the anxiety, at least temporarily, of any edgy employees curious about her. “Can I meet whoever is here?”
“Dealer’s choice,” Irita said. “Follow me.”
The two women snaked through a half-dozen desks, mostly unoccupied, while Irita talked. “You probably remember the newsroom. These empty desks are just temporary. We’ve had some desertions since your grandma’s heart problems. You probably heard about Rolf quitting, the old weasel,” Irita scoffed.
A retired Forest Service hydrologist and supposedly confirmed bachelor, Rolf Andervald had written a popular column called “Outta Doors.” Rumor had it that he had been soft on Nana all along, but when she took sick, he decided to face facts, and quit to move back to North Dakota.
“Then our so-called ace reporter, Fiona Curnow, defected. To her credit, she came and talked to me about it beforehand. The Standard lured her away. You know how it goes.”
Mesa understood. Reporters still interested in print journalism cut their teeth at weeklies and when their writing skills become sufficient to attract attention, they headed for any daily that was still hiring, for even a small raise in pay. The same thing happened at her old paper, the River City Current, whose staff of experienced reporters migrated to the Cincinnati Enquirer when an opening occurred.
A waiflike young woman, who looked no more than fourteen years old, sidled up to Irita and handed her several phone messages and then whispered, “And Anna said to say she decided to take the day off after all.”