Bad Bird (v5)

by Chris Knopf

  “Did she have a brother? Matt Jr.?”

  Toomey nodded.

  “He split a long time ago. Another bad apple, if memory serves.” Then he snapped his fingers. “That’s right. Ed told me the two of them lived at an aunt’s while the old man was in stir. The boy ran off before graduating high school. I don’t think there was any love lost between the kids, to hear Ed tell it.”

  “So how long had Eugenie been working as a pilot?” I asked.

  “Long time. She started out as a mechanic. That’s how she met Ed, who was a widower at the time. Pilots can be pretty obsessed about flying, but Eugenie was extra obsessed. That and being a girl made her stand out.”

  I didn’t know if that last bit should ignite my feminist zeal or not, so I just let it slide.

  “So,” I said, “how do you figure out what happened when everything’s just a pile of burned-up rubble?”

  “She didn’t have a black box, like they do on commercial or military aircraft. This is an uncontrolled airport, meaning no flight tower, so radio communication isn’t normally recorded. She called a mayday on the CTAF, the regular open radio frequency, that she was short of the runway and had an engine fire. My girls in the office picked that up, as did the people around the field who monitor 122.7, which is the UNICOM frequency out here, but there wasn’t much we could do but roust the airport fire crews, who are all volunteers.”

  “You’re sure it was equipment failure? Are there maintenance records?”

  “Ed kept a maintenance log, of course. That’d be with the NTSB by now, but I doubt it’ll tell them much. Ed kept that plane in perfect condition. And even if he didn’t, logs are easy to fake. Not that Ed would do that. Not to his own wife.”

  “No copies?”

  “You’ll have to ask Ed. Though I’m sure the NTSB will share the info when they’re done analyzing.”

  Not with me, I thought. Not willingly, anyway.

  “But I’m curious,” he said. “Why this interest in Eugenie? It’s a tragic thing, but accidents happen.”

  I dodged the question, even though I had an answer. One I knew in my deepest parts from the moment I saw the careening aircraft.

  This was anything but an accident.

  ———

  Toomey gave me directions to the maintenance hangar where Ed Conklin worked. It was in an area well removed from where the other buildings lined the airfield. Toomey told me this was where the original airport had been built, but it was now considered a backwater, mostly serving local flying enthusiasts and humble air taxis like Eugenie’s.

  I thought it unlikely that Ed Conklin would be on the job the day his wife died, but I was wrong. As I felt my way through the darkness inside the yawning entrance of a battered steel building, I nearly ran into him, standing in the middle of the hangar floor wiping his hands with a greasy rose-colored cloth.

  “Mr. Conklin,” I said, taking a step back. “You’re here.”

  “Where’m I supposed to be?”

  “I don’t know. Home grieving?”

  “Not what Eugenie woulda wanted. I seen you somewheres.”

  “At the crash scene,” I said. “Has the NTSB been out here yet?” I looked over my shoulder as if expecting to see that young charmer and his team riding across the tarmac on war steeds.

  “Yep.”

  “They wanted your maintenance log.”

  “Yep. Some young prick asked a bunch of insulting questions, then left with all my paperwork. Won’t tell ’em anything. I’ve been fixin’ planes for thirty years. Only had a couple drop out of the sky, and it wasn’t maintenance that did it.”

  “Ralph Toomey said it had to be the plane. Couldn’t have been pilot error.”

  “He’s right about that. No goddamned way it was Eugenie’s flying,” he said, still wiping his hands. “Closest thing to a human bird you’ll ever meet. Drove her bike the same way. Like she was a part of the machine.”

  “Have the cops been here?”

  That seemed to confuse him.

  “Cops? What for?”

  “It’s routine,” I said, half truthfully.

  He shook his head, still confused, and resigned.

  “So any idea what could have happened?” I asked as I looked around for a place to sit down. Ed followed my eyes and pointed to a collection of large plastic bins holding what I assumed were aircraft parts.

  “Want to sit?” he asked.

  “I do.”

  He led me over to the bins, and I sat down. He followed me, choosing a bin uncomfortably close to my personal space. Close enough for me to smell the grease and sweat on him.

  Conklin was somewhere in his fifties. Could have been fifty-one or fifty-eight. His posture was straight up and down, his shoulders narrow but his arms thick as my legs. He had hands to match, which made me wonder for the hundredth time if men with large hands naturally found themselves in the manual trades or if their hands grew that way under the stress of the job.

  “I’m really sorry about Eugenie,” I said. “It must be a terrible shock.”

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “How did you know it was her plane that went down?”

  He looked at me with a flat expression.

  “I heard it on the radio. I was expecting her to call in when she got about eight miles from the airport, so everybody’d know she was about to land. I got the call, but she just wanted to know why the oil pressure gauge had pinned itself all the way down to zero. Can’t say as I had a respectable explanation.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked, for the second time.

  “Oil was blowing out of somewhere. Shouldn’t’ve happened. Something got fucked up,” he said, clearing the air of further speculation.

  I sat there looking at him. My initial surprise at seeing him at the hangar had lessened as I talked to him. This was a man in shock. He was in a daze, distant, yet there with me, on the verge. My friends, the few I have, will tell you I’m not the maternal type, but something akin to maternal instinct sprang up in my chest as I watched him continue to work on his hands with the old rose-colored rag. There was little the ragged scrap of cloth could do to clean his hands, but he kept wiping.

  “Is there anyone else?” I asked him. “Anyone at home?”

  He shook his head, looking straight at me, tears once again filling his eyes.

  “My boy works here, but he’s got his own place. Up Island. Drives all the way the hell here every day. He’s on a casino trip with his buddies. I need to call him, but I haven’t figured out how to put it. Eugenie’s just his stepmother, but he’s known her for years.”

  “Do you have a lawyer, Mr. Conklin?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not since I bought my house in ’83. You had to get one to do that.”

  I took a card out of my purse, the real one that just said Jacqueline Swaitkowski, Attorney with my office phone and official e-mail address.

  “I think this would be a good time to get another one,” I said. “I would like to have that honor. As the only witness to your wife’s crash, it would mean a lot to me.”

  Ed shrugged.

  “Okay, whatever. I sure as hell don’t know what to do with all this.”

  “You need to remember everything you said to the NTSB. If you have the energy, please write it down. All of us are forgetful, especially when we’re shook up, so there’s no shame in it. The local cops will be dropping by here or your house. The accident was in Southampton, and you’re in East Hampton, so right now they’re working out jurisdictional protocols. Otherwise they’d have been here already. Don’t talk to them about anything. Just call me. The number’s on the card.”

  I told him to stay put and ran back to my station wagon, where I maintained a small roving office. Not intentionally, but all that space back there cried out to be filled, and it seemed to make sense to throw in current case files along with some basic contracts, just in case. I opened the hatch and rooted around in a bankers box unt
il I found the right paperwork, then ran back to Ed’s hangar. He was sitting exactly where I told him to stay put. This was the sort of behavior I valued in a client.

  “All this means is you’ve signed me up as your lawyer. I just need it in writing in case somebody challenges me. If you want to get out of it at any time, let me know, and it’s a done deal. If you want proof of that, I can give you a few dozen people on the South Fork who can vouch for me.”

  People in the throes of grief tend to follow one of three paths: fury, denial, or resignation. Ed had clearly chosen the third, though I had the feeling the first might be running a close second.

  He signed the contract without hesitation. I’d slipped a sheet of carbon paper beneath the signature so I could give him a copy, an old-fashioned contrivance I found useful out in the field.

  I knew I was probably taking advantage of a man in a weakened state, who was obviously afflicted by emotional pain and suffering. But there was a higher purpose at stake, I argued to myself. I needed an excuse to stick my nose into something nobody would want it stuck into. This I knew from experience. In a criminal case, outsiders were less than zero. Defense attorneys, on the other hand, had a legal right to confront anyone and anything that would support the cause of the defended, even if no one wanted to live up to that constitutional imperative but the defense attorneys themselves.

  This case, of course, was sort of different. There was nobody to defend, no one charged with anything; at least not yet. There was only a dead lady pilot and a grief-stricken husband. But I felt I had a stake in the proceedings. I was the one who’d seen the plane crash. More important, I saw the look on Eugenie’s face as she passed overhead, filled with a combination of determined calm and anguish beyond understanding.

  I knew I’d never be able to let this one go. No way, nohow.

  3

  I might have mentioned that I like my men odd. You would know this if you ever met Harry Goodlander, even without me telling you. Harry stands on the plus side of six foot eight in his stocking feet and has a wingspan to match. He’s bald as a cue ball, but far cuter, in his own way. He used to wear a gold earring, which I never liked, and when I put his photo up to a bottle of Mr. Clean one day, that settled the issue. There was nothing he could do about the tattoo, the location of which few have had the privilege of observing, so on that I gave him a pass.

  Harry moves stuff around the world for a living. The technical term is logistics, though for Harry it was more like symphonics—the orchestration of a million little details resulting in a harmonious outcome for the owners of the stuff being moved.

  I would never have cared the tiniest bit about his chosen vocation if I hadn’t stumbled into caring about him. That’s because Harry has a way of making even the most trivial act of transportation seem like a dazzling adventure in shipping and handling. And after witnessing or hearing about dozens of these adventures, I came to realize they were just that, gaining an appreciation for people whose lives would have otherwise seemed hopelessly colorless and mundane.

  But that’s not the only reason I have a thing for Harry. It was also about him having a thing for me, the painfully difficult reality of me. That sealed the deal.

  “What are you doing tonight besides taking me out and lavishing generosity and attention upon me?” I asked when he picked up the phone.

  “For which I get in return?”

  “The opportunity to repeat the whole performance at a later date. And I’ll buy the first round of drinks. As long as it’s under twenty dollars.”

  “Deals that good don’t come along every day,” he said.

  I used to blame my inability to manage healthy romantic relationships on my parents. It’s hard to imagine two people less socially adept. This, I realized much later, was their point of commonality—neither could stand other people, least of all each other. My mother expressed her repugnance by standing aloof from all human contact, contained within herself, tightly wound, suffering silently. My father was more vocal, blaming all the people on earth for what he considered our family’s chronic undervalued state in the world.

  They’d been dead for quite a while, and now that I was well into my thirties, I’d begun to slow down on the recriminations and take responsibility for my own manifest pathologies. I’d begun to realize that whatever feelings drew me to oddball, albeit enriching, humans like Harry Goodlander would always come with the fear that the involvement would overwhelm and subsume my own tortured, though cozily familiar, sense of self.

  Which is one reason, despite Harry’s manifold charms, I’d stopped short of a genuine commitment.

  Be honest. Would you date a person like me?

  But Harry persisted, God knows why, and I happily let him.

  The other great things about Harry are his intelligence and problem-solving skills. A lot of women complain that men keep trying to fix whatever problem we’re bitching about, rather than simply listening, empathetically.

  Not me. I loved that “Okay, let’s figure this out!” quality about men like Harry.

  Maybe that says more about the number of problems I’m usually grappling with than my appreciation of gender differences.

  I’d planned on keeping the whole outlandish day to myself, to spare Harry from the commotion already brewing inside my head. I’d lately been on a mostly successful campaign of selflessness, giving him first shot at the conversational floor and withholding as much of my compulsive fretting as humanly possible.

  It’s a good thing I value people’s intentions over their actual performance. Especially my own.

  “You won’t believe what happened to me today,” I said, pushing by him when he opened his front door. “Although maybe you will. You have a good imagination.”

  “You were captured by aliens, but once they realized you weren’t representative of the human race, they let you go.”

  “Weirder than that. I saw a plane crash.”

  I gave him a full rundown while he made cocktails and plied me with his favorite snacks, tiny grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and macadamia nuts.

  “So you still have the camera’s memory card?” he asked, lasering in on the only act of the whole day you could construe as inappropriate. Okay, illegal. “I should turn it in, I know,” I said, getting out in front of the issue. “I’ll call Joe Sullivan tomorrow and tell him I just found it in my pocket inside a crumpled piece of paper.”

  “He won’t believe you.”

  “Of course not. Even if it’s true, mostly. Doesn’t matter. He can’t prove anything.”

  “So I guess you won’t be looking to see what’s on it. In the spirit of evidentiary integrity,” he said, using words he’d learned from me.

  “What are you, nuts?” I said, tossing the tiny chip on the table. “Get your camera and fire up the computer.”

  So over drinks we ran through the photos that were on the memory card. Actually, the run-through barely covered a single gin and tonic. There were only five photos. One was of a cabin on a lake surrounded by tall trees under a deep blue sky. I assumed somewhere in New England, based on the newspaper story. Another was a group shot of six people in a bar, all in customary T-shirts, denim, and baseball caps, arms laced with tattoos, scruffy sideburns and beer guts, even on the women. They looked like my typical clients, people I often bailed out and occasionally saved from jail. I didn’t have to know their names to know their pickup preferences and the songs playing in the background. They were the people who built the houses, fixed the cars, paved the roads, and ran the beer tabs on the South Fork. Invisible to the people who played here, but without whom the Hamptons really would be just a mirage.

  The third shot was a portrait of Eugenie’s plane, which a side trip into Wikipedia showed to be a Cessna 207, a single-engine air taxi that had been around since the mid-1960s. It had the look of a sturdy, versatile workhorse, which it was.

  The fourth was a familiar sight in the Hamptons—a huge party tent in the backyard of a big, shingle-style h
ouse. Not quite a mansion, but leaning in that direction. There were people in white shirts and black pants carrying trays of finger food, and bunches of already well-fed geezers in expensive summer wear drinking out of champagne glasses and trying to look engaged. In the foreground was a group portrait, a mix of older and younger well-dressed people.

  Number five was a black-and-white shot of a storefront with big glass windows and a sign that read DELBERT’S BEACHWORLD DELI. It was an old sign and an old store, and even the photograph looked old. I mentioned that to Harry.

  “It’s a scan of a regular film print,” said Harry. “You can see the edge exposed here,” he added, pointing at the computer screen.

  The place looked familiar. The photo was cropped too tightly to show the stores on either side, but something in my memory said there weren’t any, that it was a freestanding building.

  “I think I know this place,” I said to Harry. “It’s long gone, but I think I can find it.”

  “This is a pretty motley collection of photos,” said Harry. “What do they mean?”

  “Probably nothing. They just happened to be on a memory card that was loose in the camera case Eugenie tossed out of the plane.”

  “You’re sure about that?” said Harry.

  “No. I’m not sure of anything. Except that she saw me, because she looked at me. And she meant to throw me the case. And I’m totally positive I’m getting really hungry and could use another drink. In five minutes we could be in the Village, where both needs could be met.”

  The Town of Southampton is a huge place that takes up half the South Fork and includes lots of other Hamptons, like Bridgehampton and Hampton Bays, and places like Quogue and Water Mill, where I have my office. The Village of Southampton is a much smaller subset within the town, where you find streets lined with shops, restaurants, real-estate offices, and art galleries. If you drove through quickly, it would look like any pleasantly preserved small-town commercial district common to New England and Upstate New York. If you were on foot, moving slowly, you’d notice the prices in the real-estate agents’ windows, the outpost offices of top-tier brokerage houses, designer labels, and the size of the rocks in some of the jewelry-store windows. There was a time, not that long ago, when you could get an ice-cream cone next door to where you bought a five-thousand-dollar handbag, but rapacious rents and a fading local population had wiped out most of the homey, small-town elements. I missed them, but I stubbornly refused to mourn. The world is a constantly changing place, I tell myself. Get over it and move on. Which I was almost able to do.