Merle Kostelnik

Merle Kostelnik is 44 and has spent fourteen years on the hydraulics of the company's 727s. Born in Spokane, the son of a railroad worker of Czech descent, he served in the army in Korea and came back to work with his hands. He repairs landing gear, flaps, the rear stairs, everything that moves with oil. He says he works well and earns badly, like everyone there, and that his raise was denied three times.

He lives in a two-room apartment, on the second floor of a brick building near the Seattle docks, with a tiny kitchen, a Formica table, a sofa with worn springs and a window onto an alley of wet brick. He keeps an empty fridge, a small television always tuned to the news and a basket of clean laundry on the chair. Alone, he dines on a can of beans and listens to the rain.

He is stocky and broad-shouldered, light brown-skinned, with thin brown hair with deep receding temples and brown eyes. His square chin always has two days of stubble. He wears a rumpled white shirt, no tie, under a cheap dark jacket, and has black grease under his nails. On the back of one hand, a bandage. Quiet, dry, resentful, he answers without looking in the eye, like someone calculating how much time is left before getting back to the hangar.

About the man who jumped, he opines with sarcasm: he figures it rained all night and the company has insurance. Two hundred thousand dollars is coffee change to them. The rest, he says, is none of his business. When he talks about work, he relaxes a little and describes hydraulics the way one describes a difficult woman. When the detective accuses him of burying the money, he tells him to lower his voice.

It could be the honest resentment of a worker who feels robbed by life, not by the sky. It could be the coldness of someone who chose each word before entering the room. The detective will have to decide which.