by Chris Knopf
Harry had picked one of those surviving local places that had successfully attracted the city crowd—combining hometown friendliness with off-world haute cuisine. The staff knew us there, another plus. Being a regular was usually worth about 20 percent off the final tab, if you knew how to tip.
“Jack and Merlot, two of my favorite people,” said the bartender, referring to us by our establishment identities: Jack Daniel’s for Harry, Merlot for me.
“Fill ’er up,” said Harry.
I took a gulp of Harry’s Jack before pretending to nurse my wine.
“Tough day,” said Harry, explaining to the bartender, a guy named Geordie who called himself a barman, being a Brit who stubbornly refused to convert to standard American English.
Geordie sweetly patted my cheek and topped off the bourbon.
“So you’re going to defend the husband,” said Harry.
“He’s the most likely in need of defending, whether it was an accident or not. He’s the guy who took care of the plane. And foul play almost always begins at home.”
“What’s Joe Sullivan going to think of that?” he asked, which I wished he hadn’t, since I was trying to suppress the obvious answer. But it was too late; the words were out there, where the bad-luck fairies could hear them. To prove the jinx, my cell phone immediately chirped at me.
It was Joe Sullivan.
“I can’t fucking believe this,” he said.
“You’re trying to interview Ed Conklin,” I said.
“I specifically told you not to get mixed up in this.”
“No you didn’t,” I said.
“I did. In so many words.”
“Put Conklin on the phone,” I said.
After some frustrated grunting, the phone went silent, then Ed Conklin came on the line.
“Did you say anything?” I asked.
“You told me not to.”
“Good. Don’t. You don’t have to say anything without me there. Not one single, solitary thing. If they want to use your bathroom, point. Put the blond cop back on the line.”
“You know when they lawyer up it only makes me more suspicious,” said Sullivan.
“Give him a break, Joe. He just lost his wife. And he’s totally unequipped to deal with you people.”
“ ‘You people’? What does that mean?”
“I’ll bring him in tomorrow afternoon. You and your boss and the whole squad room can have at him. Just give it a day.”
He knew that wasn’t only fair, it was constitutionally undeniable. So he got all magnanimous, sort of.
“Sure, Jackie. Thank you so very much. We appreciate your eagerness to cooperate.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and hung up on him. No point in selling past the close.
“So Sullivan’s loving you on this case,” said Harry.
“Tickled pink.”
For the rest of the night I resisted letting Harry or my own obsessive nature drag him any deeper into the Eugenie Birkson thing. I knew he was already starting to worry about me, which was a reflex in him that both charmed and irritated me. Since I hate cognitive dissonance, especially the monotonous, incurable, repetitive kind, I moved us aggressively off the subject. Which is not that hard with Harry if you’re willing to ask a lot of questions and keep track of complicated answers and convoluted narratives. Which I admit I always enjoyed coming from him.
I have another surefire way to distract Harry, which I had to wait until we got home to employ, but it did a fine job of distracting us both.
I told Harry I had to wake up in my own bed the next day so I could prepare for Ed Conklin’s interview with the Southampton Town Police, but that wasn’t the whole truth. The moment I snapped out of the romantic euphoria, all I wanted to do was embrace the gleaming device on my back porch that had finally supplanted the good old Hewlett-Packard desktop.
I thought I’d be all sentimental about the trusty HP, and I was, until the new machine displayed a level of blazing computational speed and stunning graphics I’d barely dreamed of.
As soon as I got home from Harry’s, I stripped to nothing but a terry-cloth robe, poured a glass of wine, and lit a joint, the three things I had to do when it was dark outside and I wanted to jump on the computer.
Harry had burned Eugenie’s five photos to a CD, which I slid into my computer. I downloaded them, then popped the CD back out and hid it inside a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was the closest I could get to a photographic reference among several hundred randomly arranged books on the overstuffed bookshelves in my living room.
I spent a long time looking at the buddies in the bar. I thought one of the faces would ring a bell, but nothing rang.
From there I went up about five tax brackets to the charity event under the tent. I had a bit more luck there, recognizing some of the people from local society magazines or from direct experience, on those rare occasions I’d been invited to an event I could both afford and endure without getting drunk or ending up in a worthless argument that would result in either social banishment or arrest.
So you don’t get the wrong idea, I deeply admire, even love, some of the people fawned over by those magazines. It’s not their fault that human beings are so enslaved by love of hierarchy, or by prurience, that some are made a public spectacle, whether they like it or not.
Two of them were in the photograph. Kirk and Emily Lavigne. Kirk had followed the standard arc of success that frequently lands people at the edge of the ocean in Southampton. The waypoints are junior overachiever on Wall Street; a rocket rise to management, followed by defection to a small, scrappy firm filled with guys just like him; eventual ownership; the rapid expansion of net worth; the sale of the firm at a head-scratchingly inflated price; and a smooth transition to the fund-raising circuit.
Kirk had a secret, and I was one of a handful of people who knew what it was. Late one windswept summer day on the balcony of his house overlooking the Atlantic, while Emily served iced tea and cucumber sandwiches, he gave away all his money. His best friend, a guy named Raj Ramaswami, would establish and run a foundation chartered to help poor kids get into college. Funding for the foundation would remain forever anonymous, and my job was to set up an irrevocable trust that would use a separate fund to pay the Lavignes’ bills. They weren’t insubstantial bills, but compared to the billions that went into the foundation, chump change.
I knew nothing about setting up irrevocable trusts, but I got the gig because Kirk said I was the only person he could trust to preserve complete confidentiality. Just thinking about that always makes me choke up and start to weep. Even though I immediately broke that confidence by getting Burton Lewis, my very rich tax lawyer friend and patron, who knows everything you could ever know about irrevocable trusts, to help me write it up. My conscience was fine with that, knowing that Burton was the only person on earth who could match the Lavignes for integrity and discretion.
Kirk and Emily, still assumed to be among the limitless rich, were invited to every charity event on the East End, which meant they could go out almost every night of the summer, always looking stylish and happy when the local paparazzi snapped their picture. Kirk admitted to me that he found these occasions a bit of a bore, but went along for Emily’s sake.
“She also thinks they’re a bit of a bore, but she likes to dress up,” he told me.
Kirk and I had become close cyber pen pals, for years maintaining a lively, ridiculously entertaining e-mail exchange, so it was easy to write him and ask if he could help me on a case. Few outcomes of a humble request would be more certain.
I moved on to the portrait of Eugenie’s plane. I went on Wikipedia and dug into a series of aviation sites, which contained a lot of information I didn’t remotely understand, but copied anyway for future reference. I did confirm that her plane was a classic FOB air taxi warhorse, and that the 207s and the 205s and 206s that made up the bulk of that Cessna class had an excellent safety record established over decades, with no reporte
d tendency to burst into flames midair.
The next picture I studied was the verdant New England lakefront. The only potential clue to the location was some flowers in relatively clear focus in the foreground and the species of pine lining the back of the shot. I jumped on the Southampton College site and found a botany professor with the likeable name of Dr. Johnston Johnson and sent him the shot with a challenge to pick the exact spot on the map. I offered no reward, knowing that for most college professors showing off intellectual prowess was the only reward that really mattered.
This left the old picture of Delbert’s Beachworld Deli. There was no identifying this one, I decided after searching the name and reviewing a few dozen images brought up by the prompt “Old Southampton NY buildings.”
I knew I had to turn over the memory card the next day. It wasn’t inconceivable that certain people at police HQ might suspect a delay in delivering material evidence. This might move them to impound my computer. So I printed out all the photos, after downloading them to my cell phone, then spent an hour copying my entire hard drive to external storage, including all my personal and professional correspondence and a picture of Harry’s naked butt that I sometimes used as a screen saver. I hid the device on a bookshelf behind 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I then deleted my browsing history, all my correspondence, Eugenie’s photos, and the semi-illegal search application from Randall Dodge. I knew client-attorney privilege would ultimately shield me from aggressive invasion of my professional files, but invoking it would have meant an ugly fight, and I had to live with these guys. It was easier to hand over a computer with nothing on it but a thirty-two-song iTunes library, Harry’s butt, and my mother’s favorite recipe for Swedish meatballs.
At that point the smart thing would have been to shut the damn thing off and go to bed, but the regulatory machinery that controls that kind of sound judgment has never performed up to specs. So I kept on browsing around innocuous sites—so much great stuff you can just know!–until I literally passed out, as I often do, with my head on the keyboard, struck dumb by all that seductive and mostly useless information.
4
I woke to the sound of a fresh e-mail.
I’ve awoken more than once in confusing circumstances, but few had quite the charm of my face resting on a computer keyboard, my right thumb pressed into my cheek and both legs numb from lack of circulation. The hour didn’t help. I’m not an enthusiastic morning person, unlike Kirk Lavigne, who at 6:00 A.M. had just returned my e-mail of the night before.
I’d made it thus far without succumbing to reading glasses, but no one can read a computer screen after being shocked out of a deep, dream-infested sleep. I dragged myself out of the chair and stumbled to the bathroom to splash water on my face, curse at myself, and brush my teeth. Then I went back and clicked on the e-mail.
“Nice to hear from you. Of course we’ll help with anything you want. Come see us. I’m authorized to extend Emily’s sincere salutation as well. Kirk.”
I’d arranged to meet Ed Conklin at a diner in Hampton Bays so I could prep him for our visit with the Southampton Town Police. He didn’t look any better than he had the other day. In fact, he looked a lot worse, though cleaner and better dressed in a plaid sport coat, crooked tie, and synthetic white shirt.
“Can’t sleep. Can’t eat. Suffering is all I seem capable of doing,” he said matter-of-factly when he sat down in the booth across from me. I immediately felt guilty about the bowl in front of me filled with half-eaten cereal topped with granola and raspberries and creamy yogurt. I pushed it away.
“How ’bout coffee?” I asked. “Not too nutritious, but good for the soul.”
“Whatever you say,” he said.
There was already a cup at his place, so I poured him some from the metal carafe they’d left on the table.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Conklin. I can’t imagine what you must be going through. Is there a funeral planned? I’d like to come.”
“That’s decent of you. All we get to do is a service, since there’s nothing to bury. We’re thinkin’ of doin’ it at the Community Church. Probably get a crowd. Eugenie’s a popular girl. Was.”
Unlike most guys his age, Conklin had all his hair, and it was still a dark brown. I immediately began to speculate. Dyed? Natural? Wig? Conklin thought I was looking over his head, not at it, so he turned around to see what was up.
“Thought I knew somebody,” I said quickly. “You sure I can’t interest you in a little something to eat? Toast?”
He shook his head, sadly, as if mourning the loss of his wife and his appetite in equal measure.
“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what you can expect at HQ. Joe Sullivan will likely do the interview, since he’s the detective assigned to the case. But it’s not unusual to have another detective join in so they can play what the entire world knows as good cop, bad cop. That could be Lionel Veckstrom, who’s technically a good cop in that he’s good at catching killers, but he’s a bad cop in the sense of being a person. So the bad cop role comes naturally to him. If it’s Ross Semple, the chief and a veteran homicide detective, you get something more like good cop, weird cop. Don’t let it fool you. No one who works for Ross wonders why he’s the chief. Including Veckstrom.”
“Why would they be payin’ that much attention to me?” he asked, genuinely confused.
I hated this part of the conversation.
“Mr. Conklin.”
“Ed.”
“Ed. Most deaths that aren’t obvious accidents, that are caused by another person, happen in the family. And most of these are caused by the person closest to the one who dies. In other words, the first suspect in any investigation of a wife’s death, suspicious or otherwise, is her husband.”
If his look of stunned disbelief was faked, he deserved an Academy Award.
“You gotta be kiddin’ me.”
I’ve had this conversation more than once, but it never gets any easier. In fact, it keeps getting worse.
“Ed, you’re not only her husband, you’re the mechanic who maintained her plane. In the crudest terms, without looking at any of the facts, you have both motive and means. You’re a twofer. The cops just love that.”
“I’d rather kill myself than do anything to hurt Eugenie,” he said, in a voice so low I barely heard what he said.
I leaned over the table to get closer to him.
“I know that, Ed. But the cops don’t. So give them the benefit of the doubt. Don’t let their suspicious nature and lousy social skills piss you off. Stay calm, answer every question honestly, and if they insult you, say, ‘That’s offensive. I’m not trying to be rude to you, why’re you being rude to me?’ ”
“Not sure I can remember all that,” he said.
I reached across the table and gripped his sport coat at the shoulder.
“Is there anything at all you can think of that might make the cops suspicious? Ever fight with Eugenie at a bar where there were witnesses? Do you have a relative who hates you and might tell the dolts at the DA’s that you made your wife’s life a living hell? Do you have a big life insurance policy on her? Is there anything at all that might look bad, if you think about it, to the cops or the prosecutor?”
Conklin looked like he was still grappling with the overall implications. I felt bad for him, but this had to be done. I wouldn’t be doing him any favors shielding him from the reality his wife’s death had thrust upon him.
“If I’m hearing you right, the police already think I had something to do with Eugenie’s crash,” he said, in a thick voice.
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way. They’re just working the odds. It’s nothing personal,” I added, and then immediately regretted it.
“Nothing personal about accusing me of killing my beloved baby doll? The only human being stupid enough to love a jamoke like me?”
He tossed a crumpled napkin across the table. It wasn’t much of a physical display, but I could feel the latent force behind it.
/> “I’m sorry, Ed. I’m doing a lousy job at this. Let me start over. The cops always suspect family members. That’s a fact. But these cops, at least the chief and Joe Sullivan, are smart, fair-minded people. They’re not going to make it any harder on you than they have to. And once you’re in the clear, you’re in the clear forever. It’s just I’d be a rotten lawyer if I didn’t prepare you for the reality of the situation.”
The rigid mask that his face had turned into softened. He looked down at his lap and shook his head.
“I know what you’re saying. Everybody’s just doing their job. I’m just a dumb aeronautical mechanic.”
“There’s an oxymoron.”
He smiled.
“I get the joke, just so you know.”
“Proves my point. What about the NTSB? They been in contact?”
Looking down again, he shook his head.
“If they call or come see you, give them my number. If they threaten you in any way, get the name of the threatener and write down what they said.”
He finally looked up.
“You’re trying to look after me,” he said.
I searched around the inside of the diner for some cosmic support. An angel in charge of earthly legal affairs to come down and help me straighten this guy out.
“Christ, Ed, what the hell do you think you pay lawyers to do?”
“Not sure I can afford to pay for that kind of protection.”
I waved that off.
“You can afford me to handle this. Don’t worry about that,” I said, seeing in my mind’s eye the face of my long-suffering accountant fall into bitter disappointment.
