Bad Bird (v5)

by Chris Knopf

  “Okay, okay. I get it.”

  “Good. So eat something. Can’t visit police HQ on an empty stomach. They’ll make you sign an affidavit proclaiming what you’ve eaten in the last twenty-four hours. If they suspect deception, they’ll get out the stomach pump.”

  This startled Ed.

  “They will?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “I’m kidding. For chrissakes,” I said.

  He looked embarrassed, but he managed a grin.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Order something, or I’m doing it for you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and got himself a glass of water. He spent the rest of the meal chewing on the ice.

  ———

  Joe Sullivan did such a good job reinforcing everything I’d said to Conklin, I almost slapped the big towheaded lump of a cop on the back.

  “Thanks so much for coming in to talk to us, Mr. Conklin,” he said, greeting us in the HQ lobby. “Can I get you a cup of coffee? What do you take in it?”

  Conklin had no defense against such gentle concern, and thus melted like a Popsicle on a hot sidewalk.

  “I’m fine, Officer. Thank you for asking.”

  Sullivan herded us into a room just off the lobby where suspects met with their lawyers, often me. I hated that room. It was a place where my clients were always filled with fear and I with insecurity over whether I’d be their ruin or their salvation. I hid this from Ed Conklin, of course, on whom I bestowed my best “We’re all going to be fine” smile.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” said Sullivan, like he meant it.

  Conklin nodded his appreciation.

  “Will anyone else be joining us?” I asked.

  Joe looked apologetic.

  “Just us, Counselor.” He looked at Conklin. “I’ll be taking notes, so talk slow. I know next to nothing about airplanes.”

  For the next several minutes Sullivan went through some standard questions, like date and place of birth, education, family members, etc. Then he asked about Conklin’s repair business and how Eugenie’s air taxi operation fit in.

  When he moved on to their home life, he looked up from his pad.

  “So, Mr. Conklin, things were going okay with you and your wife,” he said.

  “Far as I was concerned,” said Conklin.

  “Any change in her behavior lately? She ever act strange in any way?”

  Conklin squinted in the struggle to understand that question.

  “What’s that got to do with her plane going down? Her behavin’ one way or the other doesn’t explain why that engine sprung an oil leak.”

  “So that’s what you think it was,” said Sullivan. “An oil leak.”

  “Sure sounds like it. Oil spraying onto the exhaust manifold, smokin’ up a storm till it gets hot enough to ignite. A lot of oil, if the pressure gauge had dropped to zero. Big leak. That’s what I told them kids from the NTSB. They didn’t look all the way convinced, though I don’t know how they’re going to come up with a better idea. Not much of that plane left to investigate.”

  Sullivan wrote all that down.

  “So nothing the pilot could’ve done,” he said.

  Conklin looked at me.

  “Am I missin’ something here?” he asked me.

  I rested my hand on Conklin’s forearm.

  “Joe just wants to eliminate any possibility that Eugenie had a role in the accident. However far-fetched that might seem to you, it’s his job to ask the question.”

  Sullivan gave me a neutral look, but I knew he appreciated the assist.

  Conklin looked down at his hands like he’d done in the diner, nodding his head.

  “Eugenie knew almost as much about the guts of that plane as I did,” he said. “If she was going to wreck it on purpose there’re about a million other ways she coulda done it than the way it happened. There’s not much scarier than an engine fire. No point in going through all that if you’re only going to stick it in the ground. Either way, you’d have to be crazy suicidal, and Eugenie was nothin’ like that.”

  “I hear you, Mr. Conklin,” said Sullivan, one of those noncommittal statements everyone always took as an endorsement. “Sounds like Eugenie was well liked. Anybody not like her so much?”

  For the first time, I picked up from Conklin the scent of reticence. Subtle, but it was there.

  “Nobody I can think of,” said Conklin. “Nobody she ever talked about. Eugenie had a cheerful disposition, on the whole, but her temper wasn’t anything to take too lightly. She’s been livin’ in a man’s world a long time, surrounded by cocky flyboys. Was never a good idea to push her buttons.”

  “But some did,” said Sullivan.

  “I guess so, though it never amounted to much. Plus, push too hard and you end up pushing right into me.”

  I looked down at those massive mechanic’s hands, remembering the ropy arms hidden by his inelegant sport coat. Sullivan also took a closer look, as if suddenly engaged.

  “That ever happen?” he asked. “Ever have to step in and defend her?”

  Conklin looked down again and shook his head, very slowly.

  “Never came to that. Nobody that stupid.”

  Sullivan wrote on his pad.

  “You get a tat in the joint?”

  Conklin looked up at him, then over at me.

  “I have to answer that?” he asked.

  “What tat?” I asked Sullivan. “What’re you talking about?”

  “You haven’t told her yet?” Sullivan asked Conklin.

  “Told her what?” I asked.

  I hadn’t been in the criminal defense game as long as some others, but I’d learned to recognize a couple things. Like when I was the only one in the room who didn’t know what was going on.

  “What the hell, Ed,” I said.

  “How ’bout it, Mr. Conklin? You know the drill. Hide one thing, makes us think you’re hiding something else.”

  “What, what?” I nearly yelled.

  Conklin leaned forward in his chair and rested his elbows on the arms of the chair. Not so much to rest as to provide a launch pad.

  “Maybe a person doesn’t want to have to explain his past every time he runs into some bull with a hard-on for peace-minding ex-cons,” he said to Sullivan in a flat, nearly inaudible voice.

  Sullivan’s voice dropped even lower when he said, “This isn’t a duel, Mr. Conklin. If you want to turn it into one, fine. Name the time and place. Nothing official. Badge stays in the drawer. Neither of us wants that, but talk like that’ll get us there in a hurry.”

  All the air in the room had been sucked out of secret vents and replaced by tiny electric charges that danced on the edges of the furniture and crackled in the space between the two jaded, powerful men.

  Conklin thought about it, then leaned back in his chair and took off his sport jacket. He rolled his sleeves up to the elbows. They were clear.

  “Better to keep ’em guessing than to label yourself. Tats just give you a false sense of security,” he said. “Might make you a big man with the group you sign up with, but it’s a big fuck-you to everybody else. Excuse the French.”

  Sullivan probably noticed the dawn of recognition spread across my face.

  “Sanger medium-security prison,” he said, nodding toward Conklin. “Three years. Assault.”

  “Goddammit,” I muttered. “Thanks a lot, Ed. Jesus. Here I am giving you advice on police interrogations.”

  I was about to launch into my standard lecture on the profound advisability of informing your attorney of every fact and circumstance that could have even the remotest impact on your legal situation, when I thought about how I’d more or less forced myself on Conklin, providing little in the way of ground rules. I was usually the one being sold on taking a case, usually the cautious or reluctant party, careful to set the parameters, establish protocols. This was mostly my fault.

  Though, still.

  “Anything else you want to tell me?” I asked S
ullivan, then looked over at Conklin. “What happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean. The charge. What happened?”

  “Fistfight,” he said quietly. “Nothin’ more than that.”

  “Except the charge hung in the balance for a while—assault or manslaughter,” said Sullivan. “Lucky for you the guy lived.”

  “That was a long time ago,” said Conklin. “What’s it got to do with Eugenie?”

  “What should it have?” Sullivan asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, before Conklin could answer. “What other questions do you have for Mr. Conklin relating to the accident?”

  Sullivan studied his pad, tapping it with the tip of his pen.

  “Is that what it was? An accident?” he asked Conklin. “You’re sure about that?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not sure about anything anymore. Except Eugenie’s dead and it feels like somebody’s reached down my throat and pulled out all my guts. I’m as good as dead to the world myself. And there’s nothing you or anybody else could do to me that would be any worse than what’s already happened.”

  And then Conklin sat there still as a stone, staring across the table at Sullivan, but in a way that made you wonder if he was really seeing the big cop, or anything else in the room, or rather was lost in images captured by his mind’s eye, beloved or profane, it was impossible to tell.

  5

  After packing Ed Conklin into his truck, I gave him strict instructions to speak to no one without me there, and to never, ever, ever, withhold important information from me again—which he swore was impossible since I now knew everything about him, which I acted like I believed. Then I left the overlit, choking claustrophobia of Southampton HQ and went swimming.

  It was very early in the season to be jumping into the ocean, but I’d been braving the heart-stopping chill since I was a little girl. This was a ritual that bound me to many others who’d grown up on the East End of Long Island, for whom this was home turf, not merely a place to escape to from regions made lesser by their lack of mythical significance.

  I’d been lucky enough to be born with a sturdy composition, one that naturally resisted the charms of physical fitness and stood defiant against persistently unhealthy habits.

  It’s not that I didn’t believe in exercise; I just found little pleasure in the act itself. When I was in high school, there was nothing I hated more than organized sports. You knew who the best athletes were as soon as you walked into the locker room. They were the confident ones. They all knew one another and moved around like guys, and often skipped the shaving rituals most of us felt privileged to need.

  I made the mistake of signing up for the swim team because I’d been paddling around the local saltwater bays and backwaters, and of course the ocean, my whole life and thought that qualified me to race other girls in a clear, chlorinated bathtub. Up until then, I’d avoided softball and basketball, and, God help me, field hockey, but for some reason I thought this would be different.

  It was. The girls were like muscular seals, smooth and ferocious and indefatigable. Nothing could have prepared me for the stress of their workouts, their suicidal drive, the spit and mucous, the nauseating, monotonous lap after lap of liquid, effervescent hell.

  My bigger mistake was telling my father I was going out for the team. This meant I couldn’t quit, even after it became obvious that I’d consigned myself to a watery version of the Bataan Death March. He had a rule that once you started something, you had to persevere to the bitter end. No matter how bad it got. I think this rule was imposed on me because my father wasn’t crazy about his job and so devoutly wanted to retire that he could taste the moment on the tip of his tongue.

  But if he was going to tough it out, so was I.

  So I went to practice every day and tried to avoid dying of exhaustion or drowning from holding on to a foam board and kicking, making almost no forward progress while inhaling a spray of water off the far more energetic kick of the girl in front of me.

  My specialty was the fifty-yard freestyle. I discovered some aptitude for this event after realizing it involved the briefest time in the water, minimizing both the stress of competition and the resulting humiliation. All I had to do was leap off the diving block, swim as fast as I could to the other end, execute a contorted version of a flip turn, and swim back again.

  I’d almost figured out how to accomplish this maneuver when the first meet of the season was upon us. There were three swimmers from each team in each heat, and I was appropriately in the outside lane, against the wall, where the water sloshed into you from the Olympicscale wakes of the speedy girls in the middle. I was just glad it’d be over in less than a minute.

  As we stood on the starting blocks, I looked down the row of competitors and was struck suddenly by something I’d stupidly overlooked until then.

  They were all flat as a pancake. I was the only girl in the event who had a chest, even though it was only about half of what I have now.

  Well, shit, I said to myself. No wonder.

  I won that race. I beat all of them, much to everyone’s surprise, especially mine. I felt like I was a hydroplane, a water bug skimming across the surface of the water. What propelled me wasn’t the revelation of my physiological disadvantages so much as the giggle that swelled up in me as I bent down with my arms outstretched and my toes curled over the lip of the block.

  I didn’t have much chance to enjoy my success. A week later I overheard the girl in the top slot of my race call me a scuzzy slut, and I surprised myself again by backhanding her across the mouth. She was trying to pull all the hair out of my head when the coach intervened and, to my everlasting gratitude, kicked me off the team, providing the only form of escape my father would ever have found acceptable.

  So I didn’t swim to stay in shape. I swam to shock myself into a clearer state of mind. To soothe my jittery, jagged, oft-exhausted self in the salty ablution of the moody gray Atlantic.

  After I’d cleared the breakers and swam about a quarter mile straight out, I felt acclimated enough to take a break and get my bearings. It was while floating there, looking back at the neatly dispersed mountain-sized mansions that lined the beach, that a thought jumped to mind. A thought and a memory.

  It was good that the water was freezing cold. That probably numbed my emotions as much as my extremities because otherwise, I’d have hardly glanced at such a disturbing reminiscence. But there it was anyway, flushed out of the deeper crevices of my mind. The deepest, in fact.

  “Damn,” I said aloud. “That can’t be.”

  I started to swim again, parallel to the surf, heading west so I could keep my eye on the shore when I raised my mouth out of the water to take a breath. I swam hard, hoping to purge the visions that had suddenly taken root inside my imagination, but it didn’t work.

  I kept trying anyway, over about a mile of frigid ocean, until I found myself turning north and heading back to shore. I was tired, the whole experience having pumped my veins full of adrenaline and nervous unease. Numb as I was, I knew this wasn’t something that could be stuffed back into its hole unless I immediately proved to myself that it was all an unfortunate trick of the memory circuits.

  When I reached the surf, I caught a wave that carried me most of the way in, an unusual event on the Long Island coastline, where the waves tended to break late or peter out well before you got much of a ride. I took it as a sign that haste was called for in resolving the matter.

  I jogged back up the beach to where I’d left my towel, unneeded now that I was thoroughly air-dried. Two good-looking guys about my age were throwing a tennis ball for a lanky young Lab, his black coat slick with salt water and his muzzle sporting a sandy beard. They tried to engage me by tossing the ball in my direction. I dodged the ball and the pursuing dog, and headed straight for the cut in the dunes that led to my car, erecting behind me an impenetrable force field of anti-sociability.

  When I reached the car, I dug
my phone out of the glove box and called Roberta Comacho at the Southampton Chronicle. Roberta was a reporter I got to know several years before when I was researching the newspaper’s photo archives for one of my clients. Much of real estate law, which I did almost exclusively in those days, involves border disputes. The client’s home had started out in the early twentieth century as a little hotel, what we’d now call a bed and breakfast. The ancient survey of the property conflicted with the ancient survey of the house next door, and therein lay the fight. With Roberta’s help, I dug out an old photograph that clearly showed my client’s driveway back in 1922 traveling down the middle of the disputed territory, just as it did today. Before I could utter the words “adverse possession” the judge handed me the hoped-for decision.

  As we pulled boxes down off shelves and burrowed through stacks of moldy photos and brittle negatives, I felt myself becoming infected by Roberta’s pleasure in the pursuit. It wasn’t her actual responsibility at the Chronicle, but I discovered it to be her hidden joy. So much so that she often slunk down to the basement on trumped-up missions just to relax over a box of nineteenth-century daguerreotypes.

  “Good news,” I told her over the phone. “I’ve got a building to track down.”

  I’d learned from my last foray into the archives that Roberta was sixty years old. She didn’t look a day less than that. Though her complexion leaned toward olive, it hadn’t seen a lot of sun in those sixty years. Her hair was the color and texture of number two steel wool, and her fashion sense gave me hope that I might not be the worst-dressed woman on the East End. But you couldn’t fault her for lack of enthusiasm.

  “Most entirely excellent,” she said. “I’m working on a deadline, but I can cut it short and be done in less than half an hour. Who cares about all the background crap anyway.”

  “Not your average citizen,” I said. “But you can have the whole hour. I’ve met those boys in the newsroom. I’m not showing up in a bathing suit.”

  “Libertinos estúpidos.”