The parents were the first to leave. After hugs and goodbyes all around, the four of them climbed into their car just after eleven o’clock to start their long, rambling drive home up the Pacific Coast Highway. They planned to drive to Monterey and stay overnight there and then resume their drive the next morning.
Shortly after the mothers and fathers pulled away, it was time to make a trip to the airport. Celia, Greg, and Eric the violinist got into Jake’s car while Obie, Pauline, and Tabby got into Laura’s. They caravanned to Oceano Airport where the chartered Sikorsky S-76 helicopter was waiting to take them back to LA. While Obie and Pauline fussed with the luggage and Laura carried Tabby, and while Greg walked over to the pilot to discuss the preflight check (after all, he had a flight lesson in his logbook), Celia found her way over to Jake.
“So?” she asked him, her voice low. “Did he seem strange to you? Did you see what I was talking about?”
“Not really,” Jake said. “Other than asking to go along with me to Phoenix, he seemed pretty much like Greg to me.”
“And that in itself didn’t strike you as strange?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “It kind of did. What do you think it’s all about?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “But I expect you to keep me informed.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Jake told her.
“Now remember,” Jake told Greg as he taxied to Runway 30 at Whiteman airport just past noon on Sunday, “you are not to touch a single knob, dial, switch, or control, no matter what happens.”
“What if you pass out in flight?” Greg asked, his hands gripping the sides of the copilot seat.
“You still don’t touch anything,” Jake told him. “You try to wake me up if that happens, but I’m not going to pass out. There’s a reason we have to have physical exams every two years.”
“But what if...”
“Not a single knob, dial, switch, or control,” Jake cut in. “No matter what. And keep your feet off the rudder pedals too. They’re not footrests.”
“All right,” Greg said, perhaps a bit dejected.
It was a beautiful southern California fall day, so Jake was flying VFR. He took off to the northwest and then followed the standard eastern departure route, setting his climb for nine hundred feet per minute and his altitude for 15,500 feet so he could make it over the San Bernardino Mountains with a good clearance margin. The plane bounced and bumped a little as it ascended over the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles. At 8000 feet, the bleed air from the engines was fed into the cabin to keep them comfortably pressurized. Greg watched the passing scenery with apparently genuine interest, though every jolt of turbulence they encountered made him jump a little and grip his seat tighter.
Greg said little until they passed over the heavily forested San Bernardinos and were flying in the smoother air high above the desolation of the Mojave Desert. That was when Jake finally got an idea of what this trip was all about.
“This plane ... uh ... it doesn’t have a cockpit recorder in it, does it?” Greg asked.
Jake looked over at him, remembering that Laura had once asked him that same question. He gave the same answer. “No. This is not a commercial aircraft so a CVR is not required. And, since it’s not required, I’ve never had one installed.”
Greg nodded thoughtfully.
“Is there a reason you asked?” Jake prodded.
“Uh ... well ... kind of,” he said.
Jake let a full minute pass before asking, “Are you going to tell me what it is?”
Greg sighed. “Yes, I guess I am,” he said. He shook his head. “I must be crazy telling you this considering how close you are to her.”
“Close I am to who?”
“To Celia,” he said. “Who else?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said carefully. “I’m not sure what we’re talking about here.”
“Jake,” Greg said, “I consider you my best friend.”
“Uh ... okay,” Jake said. “I’m flattered, of course. And I think you’re a pretty cool guy as well.”
“Thank you,” he said. “But what I’m getting at is that I have something I need to talk about and you’re the only one I think would understand what I’m going through. I trust I can count on your discretion?”
“If you have to ask, you can’t count on it,” Jake said simply.
Greg nodded. “A fair point. I don’t think I have to ask.”
“I do,” Jake said. “What the hell are we talking about?”
Greg looked down at his feet (which were well clear of the rudder pedals, as instructed). “Mindy Snow,” he said softly, so softly that his voice barely made it into Jake’s headphones.
Jake had been looking at his instruments. Now he turned his head and looked at the actor again. “Mindy Snow,” he said slowly. “Please tell me that you’re not trying to tell me what I think you’re trying to tell me.”
Greg kept his head hung low, but he nodded slowly. “I had sex with her,” he said, “while we were out on that promotional tour we took last month.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Greg!” Jake said. “What the hell did you do that for? Didn’t I warn you about that shit?”
“You did,” he said softly. “And I didn’t heed your warning. She got to me.”
“She got to you?”
“She got me drunk in Chicago,” he said. “Kept feeding me drinks; on the flight there, at the hotel when we arrived, in the limo on the way to the premier, and at the premier itself. And she was matching me drink for drink!”
“Yeah, Mindy can put them away all right,” Jake said. “Almost as good as Helen. So ... you got drunk and fucked her?”
“No ... it wasn’t like that,” he said. “I’m not that easy.”
“Forgive me,” Jake said. “What did she do then?”
“She talked me into having one last shot at the end of the night,” he said. “That was after she spent the whole premier sitting next to me and rubbing my arm with her breasts and feeling my leg and ... and ... she even touched my ... you know...”
“Your dick?”
“Right,” he said. “My dick. She touched it right there in the theatre. By the time we got to my room ... I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Uh huh,” Jake said. “What did she do then?”
“She ... she ... put me in her mouth.”
“She gave you a blowjob?” he asked.
“That’s right,” he said. “She got down on her knees in front of me, opened up my pants, and started sucking me.”
“And you just let her?”
Another sigh. “I let her,” he said. “She knew about ... well ... a weakness of mine.”
“What kind of weakness?”
“Celia does not ever let me ... you know... finish when she’s doing that. Mindy knew that and she told me...”
“Whoa, hold up a minute,” Jake interrupted. He was surprised to hear that Celia didn’t let him ‘finish’ during that act, but that was not the current issue. “How did Mindy know that?”
“From Cheryl, the makeup girl I had that ... uh ... encounter with in Alaska. She ended up being Mindy’s makeup girl on a subsequent project and ... well ... the two of them developed a relationship.”
“Ahhh,” Jake said, things becoming a little clearer now. “Mindy did mention the makeup girl to me at the LA premier.”
Greg looked over at him sharply. “She did? And you didn’t tell me about it?”
“I didn’t really have a chance,” Jake said. “We both left town the next day. And it didn’t seem that relevant anyway.”
“Christ, what a mess I’ve made,” Greg said, shaking his head again.
“So ... you told the makeup girl that Celia wouldn’t let you come in her mouth and the makeup girl told Mindy and Mindy used that to get you to let her give you a blowjob?”
“More or less,” Greg said. “I was not in a rational state of mind at the time. You have to understand that. I was extremely intoxicated and very ... aroused. When she said that she would let me ... do that ... well ... I let it happen.”