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something was wrong with the autopilot. It would have been tricky, leaping to safety just before the helicopter plowed into the cliff. But McKinstry was experienced in the ways of helicopters; he would have known how to time it. The one thing he hadn’t counted on was the pilot’s getting out too.
    If all that was true, it meant that Jack McKinstry had deliberately killed three of his friends to rid himself of one enemy.
    Strode was a steely man, but McKinstry’s callousness appalled him. Pierce had been unable to turn up any hard evidence that McKinstry had been paying off the pilot, but good-sized hunks of his income remained unaccounted for ever since the helicopter crash. Perhaps that was the real reason the former playboy had gone to work: to keep up the blackmail payments. The significant question was whether the seemingly good-natured Jack McKinstry was in fact cold-blooded enough to sacrifice the lives of three people he liked to get himself out of a financial hole. Strode didn’t spend much time puzzling over that; no one was ever exactly what he seemed.
    The clincher, as far as Strode was concerned, was the pilot. The man had been living in Redondo Beach ever since the so-called accident. But when Strode had sent Castleberry with his second offer for McKinstry’s House of Glass shares, McKinstry had let it slip that he knew Strode was making inquiries about the helicopter crash. That was about the same time the pilot had suddenly dropped out of sight. What a coincidence.
    But now Pierce had found him, and the man turned out to be just as corruptible today as he was four years earlier. The pilot was a lot shrewder than Ozzie Rogers; he hadn’t come cheap. He’d wanted to be set up in his own business running a helicopter charter service in Florida. Strode had agreed.
    Myron Castleberry and the pilot worked out a statement in which the latter attested that Jack McKinstry had deliberately rammed the helicopter into the face of the cliff. The pilot stated that McKinstry was at the controls and that he himself had tried to take back the controls when he saw they were in danger of hitting the cliff, but the other man had fought him off. When McKinstry jumped, the pilot had followed suit; he was sorry about those other people, but there was nothing he could have done to save them. No mention was made of any hush money the pilot had been collecting from Jack McKinstry ever since. Castleberry had to draw up three drafts before the pilot read one he liked, but in the end he even agreed to testify in court if it ever came to that. No one thought it would.
    Strode was feeling confident. The hold he had over Jack McKinstry was even stronger than the one he had over Joanna Gillespie. And since they were to meet at the well-populated McKinstry family beach house, it wasn’t likely that Jack would pull a gun on him.
    Strode rented a limo to take him to the McKinstry place. The various members of the McKinstry clan had their own homes scattered all through the Los Angeles area and Orange County, but the beach house at Malibu was the family gathering place—fully staffed year round, available without notice to anyone named McKinstry in need of a little R & R. Jack McKinstry had said that was where he’d be on Saturday afternoon. The uniformed driver who came with the limo headed north through Santa Monica and then west on the Pacific Coast Highway toward Malibu.
    When they got there, Strode was not surprised to find a wall around the place. The gate was electronically controlled; the limo driver pressed the speaker button and pronounced Strode’s name, which proved to be the only open-sesame needed. Inside the walls, Strode saw that the house was large enough to do service as a medium-sized hotel. The maid who answered the door said they were all out back and led the way. Strode had a quick glimpse of exquisite tile flooring and expensive-looking furnishings in such a variety of styles that