Once in the Travelall, rather than reaching for the ignition, Twink punched the lighter instead. Then, with a lit cigarette held between her fingers, she tapped a button on her phone.
“Wait,” I objected. “Are you calling him from your phone?”
Twink nodded.
“I thought you said you’d give me his number.”
“You want him to answer or not?” At that point she put the phone on speaker, and I heard a muffled hello.
“Top of the morning to you, bro,” Twink said cheerfully. “Sorry to wake you, but I’ve got someone here who needs to talk to you. His name’s Beaumont, and he’s a private investigator from Seattle. He wants to talk to you about Jack Loveday’s suicide.”
With that dubious introduction, she handed the phone over to me, instantly putting me in the hot seat.
“I don’t like talking to private eyes,” Chad said. “So thanks but no thanks.”
“I’m working with Lieutenant Marvin Price,” I said quickly. “He’s a homicide detective for Homer PD. We’re looking into the possibility that Jack Loveday didn’t commit suicide.”
Chad’s change in attitude was like flipping a light switch. “Hot damn!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t you say so? I thought that case was closed for good and there was no way they were going to reopen it. What happened?”
“Some new evidence might have surfaced,” I answered, still trying to be cagey, gathering information without giving too much away.
“What do you need?”
“My understanding is that during the initial investigation you told Lieutenant Caldwell that you didn’t believe Jack’s death was a suicide. How come?”
“Shelley had given them some sob story about his being depressed about not being able to fly again, and that’s bullshit.”
Chad Winkleman, like his sister, didn’t believe in mincing his words.
“Why’s that?”
“Who says amputees can’t fly planes?” Chad returned. “Shelley had filled his head with all kinds of crap about never being able to fly again. With the sorts of prosthetics they make these days, amputees can do damned near anything they want, including running in marathons, and that’s exactly what I told him, but I don’t doubt the man was depressed. If I’da been stuck with a bitch like Shelley, I’d be depressed, too. I think he was finally seeing the writing on the wall, that she had only married him for his money. He was fixing to do something about that when he crashed the plane.”
“You know this how?”
“He told me.”
“When?”
“A couple of weeks before the crash,” Chad replied. “It felt like great news. to me, I’ll tell you—like he was finally catching on to what she was really like. Next thing I knew, he was in the hospital with both legs hacked off below the knee. I was over in town on business one day and went to see him in the hospital in Anchorage. Shelley was there, acting like she was Jack’s self-appointed guardian angel. It made me want to puke.”
“Was there ever any indication that someone might have tampered with his aircraft?”
“None,” Chad answered. “The Air Transportation Safety guys ruled it an accident, a combination of bad weather and pilot error.”
“Was anyone else privy to that conversation between you and Jack where he told you his marriage was going south?”
“Nope,” Chad answered, “it was just the two of us. He had some upcoming maintenance work he wanted done, and he’d stopped by my office to talk about that. Before it was over, he ended up crying in his beer about what was going on at home.”
“Beer?” I asked.
“Not beer,” Chad admitted. “Jack was always partial to tequila, and so am I.”
Evidently tequila is something of a big deal in Homer.
“My understanding is that at some point after the crash he asked you to do some modifications to one of his planes.”
“I told him that was so much balderdash—that with the right prosthetics he’d be able to fly just fine, but there were a few adjustments that would have made it easier for him to get in and out."
“When did he ask you about that?”
“Not sure,” Chad said. “We talked about that on the phone. I’m pretty sure he was out of the hospital by then. Maybe he was home, maybe he was still in rehab. I can’t say. But like I told the cops back then, a guy who’s asking you to fix his aircraft isn’t someone who’s ready to do himself in because he can’t fly anymore. Unfortunately, once the M.E. in Anchorage determined Jack’s death as a suicide, that was the end of it. Next thing I knew, Shelley was on my doorstep asking for help unloading his planes.”