"Yes, I have a business appointment this morning, then I'm flying back to San Francisco. What is this about, please?"
"I'd like to ask you a few questions," Harrow said, "in connection with an investigation by the Napa County sheriff's office."
"Napa, as in wine?" Martindale asked.
"That's right. Can you tell me where you were last night, Mr. Martindale?"
"I was here, at the hotel."
"Did you have dinner in the dining room?"
"No, I came in about six-thirty from a lecture I had given; I asked the front desk not to put any calls through, then I had something from room service, watched television for most of the evening, then went to bed."
"What did you watch on television?"
"Some news on CNN and a movie, The Bedford Incident."
Harrow wrote down the name. "The one with Richard Widmark, about a submarine?"
"Widmark and Sidney Poitier," Martindale replied. "Excellent movie. I don't think anything less would have kept me awake. I was very tired."
"Did the room service waiter come and get the dishes after you ate?"
"I put them outside the door when I had finished."
"What time was the movie over?"
"Sometime after midnight; I'm not sure exactly what time."
"Did you speak to anyone before you went to bed?"
"I called the front desk when the movie was over to see if there had been any calls, but there hadn't been any."
Harrow nodded. "Were you in Napa County last night, Mr. Martindale?"
"No, I was here, as I've told you."
Harrow stood up. "Thanks very much for your cooperation, Mr. Martindale."
"Can you tell me what this is about?" Martindale asked.
"I'm afraid I don't have the details; you'd have to call the sheriff's office in Napa and ask them."
"Well, it's damned peculiar," Martindale said. He appeared mystified.
Harrow shook hands with the man and he and Martinez left the room. They took a few steps through a tunnel and emerged into a parking lot. "He could have left the hotel without being seen," Harrow said.
"That's right," Martinez echoed, "he could have parked his car right here."
"Kind of pushing it to get to Napa by what, ten-thirty, then back here in time to call the front desk at…" he looked at his notes, "twelve-fifty, the lady said."
"I guess it could be done," Martinez said. "Maybe a private jet?"
"Damned if I'm going to tell Sheriff Ferris that," Harrow said. "The department will have us checking every charter service in town."
"Maybe Martindale had the opportunity to get up there and back, but we'd have a hell of a time proving in court that he did, unless we canvassed all the charter services and found somebody who'd testify that they flew him up there."
Harrow nodded. He put his notebook back into his pocket and started for their car.
Ferris hung up the phone. "Mr. Martindale appears to have an alibi," he said. "He was in his room at the Bel-Air last evening, had dinner there, watched a movie on TV, then went to bed."
"He could have snuck out of the Bel-Air," Cara said. "All the rooms open to the outside; you don't have to go through the lobby to get out of the hotel."
"Maybe," Ferris said. "We'll check on it, of course, but the LAPD reckons Martindale was at the Bel-Air all evening. We'll do some checking locally, too."
Everybody shook hands, and the sheriff and his deputy left.
"Let's get you to bed," Cara said.
"Do you think it really was Peter?" Sandy asked.
"I'm damned certain it was," she said. "He's covered his tracks, as usual."
CHAPTER 54
Deputy Tony Wheeler sat down at his desk in the sheriff's office and spread out a map of greater Los Angeles on his desk, along with an L.A. yellow pages. First, he looked up the address of the Bel-Air Hotel in the phone book and found its position on the map. He marked that with a highlighter, then began looking for airports. There were lots of them in the L.A. area, but the two that were nearest the hotel were Burbank and Santa Monica, with Santa Monica being closer. He started there.
He opened the yellow pages to the air charters listings and made a list of the ones that seemed to be at Santa Monica Airport, the ones with the 310 area code. There were an even dozen, and he went at them alphabetically. All of them denied sending an airplane to Napa County the night before, but with one, he had a flutter of disbelief; it was a guy called Barnum.
"Barnum Air Service, speak to me."
"Is that Mr. Barnum?" Wheeler asked.
"You got him. What can I do you for?"
"Mr. Barnum, my name is Wheeler; I'm a deputy sheriff of Napa County."
There was silence at the other end of the line.
Wheeler thought the silence was odd. "Mr. Barnum, did you do a charter to Napa County California last night?"
"No sir," Barnum said, then was silent again.
"Have you ever had a customer named Martindale?"
"No sir."
Wheeler was accustomed to a little more chat from possible witnesses. "Have you ever flown into Napa County Airport?"
"No sir."
Wheeler sighed. "Thanks for your cooperation," he said, and hung up. He shook his head and finished his calls to Santa Monica Airport, then started working the Burbank list. When he was finished, only the call to Barnum struck him as not quite right. He looked up the main number for Santa Monica Airport and asked for the tower, then explained who he was.
"How can I help you, deputy?" the woman who'd answered asked.
"Do you keep any records of airplanes that take off and land at your airport?"
"We keep a log for a month, then we throw it away. Air traffic control would have a computer record, if there was a flight plan filed."
"Can you fly out of your airport without filing a flight plan?"
"Yes, you can depart VFR, that's under visual flight rules, and not file."
"Can you tell me if any airplanes departed VFR last night between, say, seven and ten?"
"Can you hang on for a minute?"
"Sure." Wheeler tapped his fingers impatiently on his desk while he waited.
Shortly, the woman came back. "Last night between eight and midnight we had only one VFR departure, and that was a twin Cessna, registration November one, two, three, tango, foxtrot."
Wheeler wrote down the number. "Can you tell me if it returned last night?"
"Just a minute." Another minute's wait. "Yes, it landed shortly after midnight."
"Is that particular airplane familiar to you and your coworkers?"
"There are a an awful lot of airplanes based on this field."
"How would I find out who that airplane is registered to?"
"You'd have to call the FAA registration office in Wichita; hang on, I'll give you the number."
Wheeler wrote down the number, thanked the woman and called the FAA. He was connected to registrations, gave them the number, and asked to whom it was registered.
After a short delay, the clerk came back onto the line. "We show that aircraft as not a Cessna twin, but a Beech Bonanza, which is a single, and it's registered to a corporation with an address in Santa Fe, New Mexico." She gave him the name and address.
Sheriff Ferris walked into the station and stopped at Wheeler's desk. "What are you up to?" he asked. "Shouldn't you be patrolling the north sector?"
"Norm, I got to thinking about Martindale, and how Mrs. Kinsolving said he could easily get out of the Bel-Air Hotel, so I called all the charter services at Santa Monica and Burbank airports to see if anybody had run a flight up here last night."
"And?"
"And everybody denied such a flight, but I got the impression that one guy wasn't being truthful with me. I figure it's possible that Martindale hired the guy, then paid him extra not to talk to anybody."
"That's hard to prove."
"Then I talked to the tower and found out that only one airplane took off from there last night without filing a flight plan, a twin-engine Cessna, and the registration number for that airplane turns out to be a Beech single, from New Mexico. The airplane took off early in the evening and returned after midnight."