“Yessir, I am. I done my training in Miami, and I worked in Fort Lauderdale for eight years before I come home to St. Marks.”

“How long had you done mechanical work on Chester Appleton’s airplane?”

“For eleven years.”

“The same airplane?”

“No, sir; Chester bought this one six years ago.”

“Was the airplane in good condition?”

Harvey Simpson straightened in his seat. “Yessir, it certainly was. I did an annual inspection on the airplane last month; I always kept it right up to snuff.”

“What about the port engine?”

“That was the newest of the two. I installed it eight months ago, and it only had five hundred and ten hours on it.”

“How long is an engine good for?”

“That one was rated for two thousand hours.”

“So Chester had only used a quarter of its expected life?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“At the time of the annual inspection, did you find anything wrong with the engine?”

Harvey Simpson opened a plastic briefcase and removed a book. “I got the engine logbook right here,” he said. “There’s a list of what I done to it.”

“My question was, did you find anything wrong with the engine?”

Simpson consulted the logbook. “I found two exhaust brackets broken. That’s a common fault; vibration weakens the metal. I replaced both brackets. The compression on all the cylinders was in the high normal range; that’s a pretty good indicator of the health of the engine. All the airworthiness directives and service bulletins were up to date on it.”

“We have heard testimony that the engine caught fire; can you think of anything that might have caused this to happen?”

“No, sir,” the man said emphatically. “I did a fifty-hour inspection on the engine three days before the crash—that includes an oil change—and there wasn’t nothing wrong with it.”

“What, in your opinion, could cause an engine fire in that airplane?”

“Leaking fuel would be about the only thing, sir, but I checked all the fuel connections during the fifty-hour inspection, and they was all tight.”

“Nothing else could have caused the engine fire?”

“Well, a bad exhaust leak, maybe, but there wasn’t no exhaust leaks, either.”

“So you have no explanation for the engine fire?”

“No, sir, I don’t, and believe you me, I’ve done some considerable thinking on the subject. If I had the engine back and could inspect it, I might be able to tell you what caused the fire, but…”

“Quite,” the coroner said. “Does any member of the jury have any questions for Mr. Simpson?”

A tall black man stood up. “I’ve got a question,” he said.

“Go ahead and ask it,” the coroner replied.

“Harvey, Alene Sanders, who got killed in that crash, was my wife’s sister-in-law. What I want to know is, who’s going to pay for killing her?”