Powersat

Astro Motel

The Sun was dipping below the scrub pines as April Simmonds parked her baby blue Sebring next to the empty handicapped space and headed for the motel’s bar entrance. No sense locking a convertible, she had learned. If anybody wants it badly enough they’ll slash the top open. Besides, nobody around here would bother her car. All the Astro people knew it was hers, and none of them were car thieves.

Pushing through the door brought her into the frigid air-conditioning of the bar. It’s cold enough in here to raise goosebumps, she complained silently. Then she remembered reading somewhere that they kept topless bars real cold so that the dancers’ nipples would be stiff.

It had been a long day at the office, with Dan in a sweat to get a booster set up on the launchpad so that they could mate the backup spaceplane to it. Most of the FAA people had left, though, and a crew of technicians had started gathering up the pieces of the first spaceplane’s wreckage to store in precisely marked cartons that eventually would be stacked in a warehouse.

The lounge was jammed with after-work people, most of them crowded around the bar three deep, men outnumbering women at least two to one. Country music was thumping from the speakers in the ceiling but the conversations and laughter and calls to the barmaids for drinks were so loud she could barely make out the song: “Lay Your Head on My Shoulder,” a classic. Dr. Tenny had always called it the transplant song.

Thinking of Joe reminded her why she was here. April wanted to talk to the barmaids, find out what they remembered about Pete Larsen, if anything. She herself had come to this bar with Pete once, on one of her dates with the man. Pete had shown more interest in the computer game console off in the corner than he had in her.

April hesitated just inside the doorway. The thought of worming through the crowd to the bar discouraged her, and she’d never get to talk to the barmaids anyway; they were too busy.

“Hey, April, what’re you drinking?”

It was one of the technicians. April recognized his face but couldn’t quite place his name.

“White wine?” she said, falling back into the slightly defensive mode of speech that she had inherited from her native Virginia.

The guy dove into the crowd and reappeared a minute later with a glass of wine in one hand and a tumbler of something stronger in the other.

“Haven’t seen you around here for a while,” he said, guiding her toward an unoccupied booth with a big grin on his face.

She accepted the wine and his hand on the small of her back. “It’s been terribly busy.”

“Yeah, the crash and then Tenny getting killed. Most of the people in my group are wondering how long we’ve got before Randolph lays us off.”

“He’s fighting awfully hard to avoid that,” April said, sliding into the booth, resigning herself to the fact that her attempt at detective work was going to result in nothing more than listening to this man’s troubles and finding an excuse to get away without hurting his feelings.

Across the crowded, noisy room, though, another Astro employee watched April chatting with the technician. He was a data manager in Astro’s personnel department, and he knew that Dan Randolph’s executive assistant had been reviewing personnel records for the past several days. She had scanned Pete Larsen’s file several times. He had a buddy in Houston who paid good money to be informed about what Randolph was up to. He decided to call his buddy, who worked at Tricontinental Oil, and let him know what April Simmonds was doing. The rumor was that Tricontinental was going to buy Astro out. A lot of money is going to change hands, he thought. I might as well get some of it for myself.

By the time Claude Passeau entered the bar, the after-work crowd had dissipated. April was long gone, driving alone to catch the last ferry of the evening. The technician who’d bought her a drink drove his own car into the ferry and even followed April partway to her apartment in Lamar, but lost his nerve halfway there and turned back to his own place, a house he shared with three other Astro employees.

A soft instrumental was purring from the music system, a blessed relief from the usual doleful nasalities that the bar’s clientele seemed to enjoy. Passeau grimaced at the thought of trying to pick a decent wine from the selection stocked at the bar. Instead be ordered a brandy, longing for a sip of Armagnac but settling for the Presidente that Dan had recommended.

Sitting alone in the same booth that April had occupied, he wrestled with his conscience.

Dan wants to launch his spaceplane, to prove that the crash was sabotage. I can’t be a party to that; it would ruin my career. So Dan cleverly offers me a free vacation on the Riviera.

The nerve of the man! Despite himself, Passeau smiled at the thought of it. Out-and-out bribery. We’d both go to jail.

And yet—Passeau admired Dan’s drive, his daring, his willingness to risk everything. And, at heart, Passeau agreed that the first spaceplane’s crash was no accident. Someone very cleverly sabotaged the plane. Someone with deep technical capabilities and enormous resources. Someone extremely dangerous. If only there were a shred of evidence to show!

A young woman entered the bar. The few men still perched on stools swiveled their heads to check her out. Pert, thought Passeau. That’s the kind of woman that defined the word. She was slim, cute, a sprinkling of freckles across her snub nose, strawberry blonde hair cut short. She wore a T-shirt with some sort of slogan across the chest and a pair of ragged cutoffs. Good legs, not much bosom.

She spotted Passeau and walked straight to his booth. Surprised and more than a little flattered, Passeau got to his feet as she approached.

“Mr. Passeau? I’m Kelly Eamons.”

Passeau’s welcoming smile faltered. “From the FBI office?” he asked, knowing it was a foolish question.

She sat across the table from him and lowered her voice slightly. “Special Agent Kelly Eamons,” she elaborated, with a nod. “I work with Special Agent Chavez.”

Trying to recover his aplomb, Passeau said, “You seem much too young to be an FBI agent.”

She smiled, showing perfectly straight white teeth. “Looks can be deceiving, Mr. Passeau.”

He recommended a Presidente for her. Instead she ordered a cherry Coke. Texas girl, Passeau realized.

Once the cola arrived, Eamons ignored it. “I need to get your straight-up opinion on what Dan Randolph’s told us.”

“About the crash.”

“And about the death of his chief engineer, Joseph Tenny.”

Passeau nodded.

“Well? What’s your take on it?”

He shook his head. How much of my career has depended on going along with the system, keeping quiet, staying out of the limelight? Twenty years of patient servitude, and what has it got me? A wife who has left me; two children who won’t even speak to me. A mortgage on a house I’m not allowed to enter. In five years I could take early retirement. Five years more.

Eamons leaned toward him, totally unaware of Passeau’s inner turmoil.

“I really need to know,” she said earnestly. “Even if you only—”

“I believe the spaceplane was sabotaged,” Passeau heard himself say, slightly surprised at his own words. “I have no evidence that clearly shows it, but that is my belief.”

Eamons sank back on the booth’s bench. She was no longer smiling. “I see,” she said. “Then that means there’s a chance that Tenny was murdered.”

“And that means that Astro Corporation had a spy, a saboteur, in its midst.”

“Had?”

“The man Larsen. The one who committed suicide.”

Eamons nodded, understanding. “Maybe that’s where I should start. With him.”

They talked until the barmaid came over and unceremoniously announced, “Last call. We close in fifteen minutes.”

Eamons got up and left, her original cherry Coke still untouched on the booth’s varnished table. Passeau gulped down the brandy that had been sitting before him since the FBI agent had arrived, then he rose, too, and headed for the door.

As he stepped out into the dank, humid, hot night, alive with the buzz of insects and distant groaning calls of lovesick frogs, Passeau finally made up his mind.

I will not go to the Riviera. That would be too obvious. I’ll take a vacation week and return to New Orleans. Perhaps my children will consent to let me see them. By the time I return to Matagorda, Dan’s test flight will be a fait accompli.

Back in the Astro Motel bar, the barmaid took the untouched Coke and delicate brandy glass back to the sink, thinking, A couple of big boozers they were. And he’s a lousy tipper, too.