A Flair for Trouble

"Ollie" was very willing to do anything for "Miss Melissa" and promised his full cooperation, and agreed to meet me early Monday morning in the manufacturing area break room.

We managed to stay dressed long enough to go back to Josie's Diner and have an excellent luncheon together and we discussed financial matters for nearly the entire meal and went back up to my room to supposedly review an especially odd financial statement from the spring quarter of 1991, when we got 'somewhat distracted' and ended up back in bed again for the rest of the afternoon and long, long evening.

I ended up being quite exhausted as I wasn't used to having six ejaculations in one calendar day (even when I was a much younger and friskier chap in my early 20's and in my own first unsuccessful marriage). Melissa had very firm ideas otherwise, and was determined that she'd soon get me back into proper fighting trim, and at the very least coax a final weak #7 out of me and to my amazement, around midnight she did and received "one last final taste of me" before we parted in the morning.

We did have a brief final interlude at some outrageous early hour of the morning when the phone rang with my wakeup call, but she wanted this last load while being fucked on all fours so she could feel me shoot deep inside of her, and feel the 'warm moistness of my cum inside of her during her long drive back to her current home near Portsmouth, along New Hampshire's tiny stretch of coastline.

We said our goodbye's for now right after breakfast downstairs, as it was time for me to go and meet Abercrombie. But she left me with two final sincere confessions as we embraced and kissed one last time before we got into our cars.

"I know exactly who killed my father, but it's too late for you or any other judge to punish him here. I know that my ex-husband was responsible. Daddy had wanted to ease into retirement just a little bit and stop handling most of the routine company stuff and let Don handle those things, but he soon regretted it. Don and I were about to divorce and daddy soon figured out that he and his friends were up to something irregular and were siphoning money from the company almost from the moment they had gotten here. He was flying to Boston when his plane crashed, to speak with our largest minority shareholder and to petition for an emergency shareholders meeting to fire all of the new company management. Don was going to be fired and his thieving friends all tossed to the curb and hopefully into prison. I've got two written statements from mechanics who swore they saw Don near his plane the morning of his last flight, despite his claims that he was on business in Concord that day. In any case, it's now too late."

"I couldn't divorce Don after that; it would cost me half of my father's shares of the company. I couldn't prove any fraud, and even if I could prove he was a lying cheating skunk of a man the share holders would still re-vote him back to continue to destroy everything my father worked so hard for. While married, I at least had a tiny little control over him and we separated to live in different cities until his death."

"I don't know who killed him. Really I don't. But Bill Tucker says he thinks he knows, but he 'can't prove it' and he told me once at the time that I 'didn't really want to know who did it anyway because it would just hurt me something awful and nothing good would come from its disclosure? anyway." This gave me a lot to think about on the short drive to the factory. "Ollie" seemed to be determined to give my overstuffed head even more to think about. He took me to a mostly unused office in a semi-abandoned part of the Fabrications building, and noted with a laugh that the only other person who used this room was "Rachel's frisky niece". Apparently, she had quite an active social life for her irregular working days and could usually manage to handle 'intimate relations' with three to five different men each visit, although not usually all at the same time.

he then offered me some considerably more useful advice. He knew where 'management' stashed their paperwork that was too sensitive to leave around the office, but was too important to burn or shred, and he gave me the name and room number of the storage facility. He also gave me Bill Tucker's most recent address and phone number. Bill had started up his own little aviation maintenance company at an old abandoned WW-2 era airstrip along the south Texas coast, right near a town called Lovett. The facility also acted as the only country airfield for at least sixty miles in any direction and it was possible to get a local 'treetop airlines' charter from Houston to Lovett fairly easily. He said he would give a call to old Bill first, to get Bill "good and primed to talk' before speaking to me.

I called the judge right afterward, gave him the address to send the local Sheriffs with a Warrant to seize the hidden corporate files and I got the ok to fly down to Texas for a day or two. I then promised, with Melissa now out of my bed, I would crack down on my duties and start getting the final financial reports into his office via Einstein Express (when your package absolutely and positively has to be there 'yesterday').

For the rest of the week, I was as good as my word and my final investigative reports for the years 1987-1995 were complete, leaving only 1996 to the first-quarter of 1998 left to be done, and as those were relatively lean years with relatively little if any real profit to be embezzled I didn't anticipate that these would take me long to do after my return.

Friday morning I was on the red-eye from Concord to Boston and then on another flight to Houston. Abercrombie wasn't kidding, the chartered single engine flight to Lovett I'm certain never missed scraping the tops of trees by very much. I found a Lovett cab (they only have three) who was willing to make the ten mile drive out of town to come get me, and the driver knew exactly where to find Bill Tucker on a Friday night, and took me right to Bill's favorite watering hole on the outskirts on Lovett and right on the beach. A glorious establishment called Phil's Cantina and Ice House.

Bill Tucker frankly wasn't delighted to see me, but seemed resigned to his fate and while he did not volunteer a single scrap of information, he freely and honestly answered every direct question I put to him. We ended up talking at the beach side bar until after 10 p.m., but we both kept getting quite distracted by the lovely and often very naked young ladies that alternated between drinking at the bar and 'going for a quick swim' with their boyfriends (or girlfriends).

Lovett, Bill explained to we, was an "odd sort of place" that seemed both at once utterly alien and as familiar as if it were your birth hometown.

He had received a settlement from the new Flair management to take early retirement at the ripe young age of sixty-nine or so, and he had moved down here to become the Chief of Maintenance for the local Lovett County Field. Technically and legally the airfield was in Aransas County right next to the border with Refugio County, but everyone preferred to think that Lovett was their home. Surprising considering that Lovett County is only about ten miles in total diameter. I suppose they had their reasons, but it seemed pretty strange to me.

He had expanded their business quite a bit and the company was now doing some contract repairs for other county airfields and even some of the closer municipal airports such as Corpus Christi and Victoria. He offered me a spare bedroom for the night and we made plans in the morning for him to show me around the old military field with its old vintage hangers and dilapidated facilities.

The land here, as I found out, was dirt cheap and the county taxes were next to nothing. The entire region was desperate to promote any kind of business growth, and I had to laugh hysterically when I heard that the number one source of revenue for Lovett County was actually its large nudist colony (one of the countries largest) that attracted nearby city folks in the summer and the snow birds in the winter for year around sun and fun on the beach. A local computer software company was starting to become fairly rich and famous, but the nude tourism industry still brought in more dollars than even the local ranching and farming did.

Unemployment in the area was high, very high among local young men and women fresh out of high school and they usually had to find jobs elsewhere in a larger more economically successful city. A kernel of an idea started to grow and the more I thought about it the more viable it sounded. I would certainly have a lot to think about on the long flight home Sunday.

Saturday afternoon, Bill and I had a very long talk in his dining room and he gave me consent to record the conversation as a semi-deposition for the bankruptcy court. Yes, he had strongly suspected that a considerable amount of fraud was taking place, especially and specifically regarding bogus purchasing invoices for materials that never existed. He could provide numerous examples of this, and also provided info on a new scam that I had not yet discovered involving payroll and benefits payments made to non-existent employees for many years. In fact, for much of the early 1990's Flair was claiming total payroll costs that were probably at least double their actual real costs. Again, Bill had documentation to support this. He seemed to be an extremely careful man who crossed every T and dotted every I, and doubled checked everything afterward to make certain. He would make an outstanding witness, if necessary, at the various fraud trials that were soon to come.

"Why did I take their thirty pieces of silver and leave?" He said with a laugh, "Old A.F. was dead and buried and his daughter outmaneuvered in a shareholders battle. The barbarians were already well past the gates and were checking out our good silver, drinking our best wine and pinching the asses of our daughters to see which would make the softest raping. Flair was done for; it was just a matter of time. A.F. would have wanted me to at least have salvaged what I could get so I could make a new start elsewhere. Did I regret leaving Melissa alone among the wolves? Not really, she was pretty much already on her own and she was away safe from her husband and his gang of four. She would survive and if anyone could later pick up the pieces, it would be her. She is very much just like her dad. If she called me on the phone tomorrow, I'd sell my house and everything I owned to bail her out of a jam."

I had to change my hour long cassette tapes four times before his wealth of inside company info began to peter out.

"Who had killed A.F.? Donald; period, end of discussion. He had absolutely no doubt in his mind whatsoever. Avery was going to "kick his ass out of the company and out of his daughter's bed if it was the last thing he did!" Bill assured me.

"The last words he spoke to me before he stepped into his plane to fly to Boston were "Billy, when I get back that smug sneaking bastard and his idiot sidekicks are going to be on their way to prison and we can get things a bit back to normal around here." Bill was sure that Avery had a thick brown leather briefcase with him full of documentation of various illegal doings for the other major shareholders to see.

"Who had killed Donald, Rachel's husband Phil, and young Charlie Seball who had been the head avionics instrumentation technician?" Bill thought he knew but really didn't want to specifically answer. "It wouldn't do anyone a bit of good today, even if the entire truth came out" he said, and added the cryptic comment "he or she didn't mean for it to happen anyway and they've already been punished enough already, and the truth would break Melissa's heart." I persisted, and at length dialed Melissa's cell phone number, and after reaching her I explained the dilemma. I then handed my phone to Bill and he took it into the kitchen for a long semi-private discussion with her that lasted at least ten minutes before he returned my phone to me.

"Melissa says for me to tell you everything I know and her feelings and consequences be damned. Her exact words. She also said for me to tell you 'she loves you' and to hurry back home, the Judge is getting antsy." He then sat down next to me and gave me his best military veteran hard ass stare in the face, and for a 75 year old man it was a damned good one."

"Son, I've known that gal all of her life, and as a baby she pissed in my lap more times than I could count. The only reason I didn't kill the rat bastard Don myself after he murdered her dad was because she begged me not to, on her knees in front of me. Avery would not have wanted his partner and best friend to spend his final years in jail just to avenge him. The thieves wanted money? Fine, it was 'just money', and money was replaceable, but the happiness of the last years of my life was not, she insisted. She was right, she nearly always was. The only mistake she ever made in her life was to marry that rat bastard Don, and I think that was just because her daddy kept pushing hard at her that he wanted grandchildren to spoil for his retirement. Don was a handsome MBA student, plenty smart and seemed like a good fit for the family business at the time."

"Now you on the other hand, I've only known for about one day and while I think I like you, if I even suspect that one day you will bring a single tear of unhappiness to her face, me and a cohort of ex-vet friends are going to come pay you a late night visit, and suddenly and quite violently correct your attitude all over your front lawn. Do we have any misunderstandings about this?"

I assured him that we did not, and after a round of beers were opened up, he opened his long closed memories about Don's death.

"The very first thing that you need to know about that tragic plane crash was that Rachel's husband Phil and poor Charlie were not supposed to have been on that plane flight. Don, who wasn't one-tenth the pilot that A.F. had been, was scheduled to take our new prototype of a ten-seat small commercial transport jet that we were getting the final kinks out of up for a short fifteen minute test, just to review some final instrument configurations before we started production. Really nothing more exotic than a few touch-and-goes around the airfield. Don at the very last minute got pissed over a switch that was giving a bogus fault reading, and he ordered Phil and Charlie up in the plane with him for that short test flight. As I said, Don wasn't that hot of a pilot and had the 'wrong stuff' in spades. He mishandled a minor fuel irregularity, and put the plane into a stall. Old A.F. wouldn't have blinked an eye and would have reset the engine to run solely off of the secondary fuel intake and wouldn't have lost ten feet of altitude in the process. Poor dumb Donald augers right into the side of a mountain and takes two good people with him."

"The other thing that you also need to know is that Rachel and A.F. were pretty close starting from the time Rachel and Melissa were still college together." If I had any misunderstanding about what he meant, it disappeared when Bill took his right index finger and inserted into an 'O' he had made with his left fist.

"Avery missed his late wife, who had died a few years earlier, and Rachel was apparently very willing to oblige his needs and didn't mind their age difference. They never got serious, but even after she had married Phil she still kept A.F. company on occasion. I think Phil knew all about it, but he was willing to share her. I hear that she has a hot-to-trot niece called Jennifer working with her now that keeps a lot of the young and not so young studs happy on the job. That's exactly the way young Rachel was when she came to work for us then, but Rachel was loyal to a fault to both Melissa and A.F."

He continued, "She took Avery's death hard, and even though she had channeled most of her love and affection to just her husband Phil, it still gnawed at her. Everyone knew that it was Don that had done it, but no one could prove a damned thing. As each annual Shareholder's Meeting came and went, Don's control of A.F.'s company seemed to get stronger, and Melissa was left further and further on the outside."

"Another thing you might want to know is that Melissa and Rachel were apparently very close in college, and remained occasional lovers afterward. Yes, I said lovers. They do that sort of thing down here in Lovett and no one blinks twice about it, and even now in my old age I admit it's fun to watch women lovers on the beach or in the clubs here. Heck, you can even see ladies kissing each other and comparing their tits openly in the grocery store here! But in old Puritan New England, that was some pretty bold stuff even for the 1980's and early 90's and they kept their affair to themselves and didn't advertise that they had more than a passing acquaintance with each others naked bodies when the lights were off. Apparently one day Melissa cried a bit too long and hard about Don's intolerable behavior towards her and his destruction of their once thriving family business to her close girlfriend Rachel... and Rachel decided that enough was enough and decided to do something about it."

"Rachel was a good technician, as she and Phil had taken apart and rebuilt many a jet engine together, it was nothing to her to 'tweak a fuel valve just a little bit' so that it wouldn't flow quite correctly and would soon jam in flight. Any pilot worth his salt could have fixed the problem in the air, but Don panicked and the man she loved died as well as the man she hated for killing one of her lovers and ruining the life of another."

"She had just 'wanted to teach him a little lesson in humility' she cried to me when I went to comfort her after the crash. She just wanted 'to scare him a little bit'. She knew he'd panic at the problem, but it shouldn't have caused the plane to crash. Two innocent people had died because of her mistake. She confessed everything to me and I knew that the truth would hurt Melissa badly, so we kept it our secret. This was the real main reason that I left the company soon afterward."

"I think Melissa knows the truth in her heart. Rachel became very distant from everyone after Phil's death, and no one thought twice about it. Phil was a good man and she was very obviously in mourning for him. But Rachel also pushed Melissa as far away from her as she could manage. She had accidentally murdered her lover's husband and her own husband, and wanted under no circumstances for Melissa to be ever blamed for this act."

"Does Rachel deserve to be punished? Maybe. For the accidental death of Phil and Charlie, nothing more. Frankly Don deserved what he got. It was justice in my opinion. Phil would probably forgive her too, and he did love her very much - enough to ignore her affairs with other men. I didn't know Charlie very well, he was a smart quiet sort of guy. I think he did have a girl he was sweet on that I think I saw crying at the funeral. Rachel's mistake cost them whatever future happiness they might have shared together. But I also think she has paid dearly for her crime already and would probably now be willing to stand up in public and pay just a little bit more. Go talk to your Judge about this, there is no benefit to anyone for her to spend the rest of her life in prison for a small mistake made in anger that she has punished herself for every single day since."

Bill really had little more to say. We hopped into his Jeep Cherokee and spent the rest of the evening back at the beachfront bar enjoying watching the young (and not so young) folks at play. He drove me to the field for my charter flight back Sunday morning and shook my hand firm while hardly utterly a word. He had said all he really needed to say, and I spent all of my connection waiting time in Houston and Boston running up my cell phone minutes talking with the Judge and catching up on any other last minute events.