Bad Bird (v5)

by Chris Knopf

  I pulled a sweatshirt over my bathing suit and drove north to my house on Brick Kiln Road. It was set back a fair distance from the road on a flag lot my late husband bought with some of the potato field fortune. Unfortunately, the one area in which he and his family succumbed to parsimony was residential construction. It wasn’t family pride so much as sacred ethnic doctrine that male heads of households build their own houses. Pete had his fine qualities, some of which I ached to recall, but handiness wasn’t one of them. My father had a minuscule measure of Pete’s good nature, but he was a civil engineer whose universe was built out of straight lines, tight joinery, and adequate load-bearing dimensions, all things that did little to entrance my husband, his father, or the endless gaggle of goofy, jovial cousins and brothers who jumped in on the project.

  So you would have called the house an architectural disaster if you weren’t so distracted by the shoddy construction.

  But it was mine, mortgage-free, mostly weatherproof, and utterly indifferent to my failings as a housekeeper.

  Contrary to some of the wisecracks I endured from my closer friends, you didn’t have to follow paths to get from one room to the other. Between the various piles, a few of which rose to some prominence, there was plenty of open space. At least a few square yards or so. The biggest detraction in my mind was the wall-to-wall carpet and living room furniture, once an off-white that Pete fantasized to be the pinnacle of urban chic, now far more off than white. But like a lot of things I inherited on his death, I could no more change it out than perform my own appendectomy.

  It’s not exactly grief. I really didn’t love him as much as I should have, about which I’m strangely less guilty than my Irish Catholic nature would lead you to believe. It’s more a frail attempt at honoring his happy delusions, his blessedly obtuse view of the world.

  The one feature of the house I insisted on, much to the Swaitkowskis’ bemusement, was a wall of bookshelves in the living room. A huge wall of bookshelves, which held tons of books, CDs, record albums, and magazines, along with hidden photo files, external hard drives, illegal software, and drug paraphernalia. This is what I came home to every day. The rest was just a place to flop in and ignore.

  I took a shower to wash off the salt and sand and climbed into clothes I’d likely wear to clean out the basement, since that was exactly the type of environment I was heading for.

  I still had the memory card I’d sworn to hand over to the police, which I decided not to do after Sullivan outted Conklin’s history as an ex-con. It could have been nerves, rattled as mine were by the revelations. Or some possessive impulse out of my subconscious that told me I wasn’t yet done with it.

  As promised, I made it to the Chronicle an hour after I called. Roberta was waiting for me in the lobby, also dressed in her best archive spelunking outfit—blue jeans, a sweatshirt, and sneakers.

  “I went home and changed,” she said. “Of all days, today I decide to wear a skirt. I don’t even like skirts.”

  The rest of her looked about the same as when I’d last seen her. Maybe a little older, with a little more fat on an already overloaded frame. But just as cheerfully eager.

  “How long have you been working here?” I asked her as we trotted down the enclosed stairwell to the basement.

  She thought about it.

  “Has to be about twenty years. I settled for copy editor at first. Thought I needed something to help support Pedro. I told you that story, didn’t I?”

  She had. Pedro Comacho had been a tennis pro working out of a tony country club in Newton, Massachusetts. He seemed to lack ambition, but he was handsome and charming and apparently nuts about the plain-Jane reporter on the Boston Globe city beat. Roberta found herself swept off her feet, and more than willing to chuck it all, marry Pedro at the county courthouse, and follow him back to his hometown of Southampton. But being a practical girl, she lined up the best job she could at the local paper before they arrived.

  Unnecessary, as it turned out, at least for financial reasons. Pedro had neglected to mention that his father, Alejandro Comacho, owned his own international airline and enough stock in DuPont to be a frequent houseguest at various stately homes tucked away in the hills of western Delaware.

  “This way I know you didn’t marry me for my money,” Pedro told Roberta as he helped her haul her luggage up to the entrance of the family’s fifteen-thousand-square-foot cottage on Gin Lane.

  She kept the job anyway and eventually worked her way back to covering her local municipality—not quite Beacon Hill, but enough to keep her busy self engaged.

  When we got to the basement we stopped at the long, narrow workstation that served as a staging area for expeditionary teams assaulting the mountains of archival data. The work of cataloging and cross-referencing had begun long before computers, and management saw little advantage in digitizing the towering stacks, so you had to pore through the microfilmed records stored in cabinets above the workstation and enlarge them on a big hooded monitor that looked like something Gene Roddenberry would have put on Captain Kirk’s bridge.

  I pulled out Eugenie’s photographs and placed the one titled “Delbert’s Beachworld Deli” on top.

  “That’s the building in question,” I said. “I think it’s long gone, but it looks familiar to me. I have a theory, but I want it to be wrong.”

  Roberta, who was studying the photo, looked up at me.

  “That’s interesting,” she said.

  “Don’t get all reporterish on me,” I said. “I just want to find the building.”

  “ ‘Reporterish’?”

  “Curious.”

  “I think that’s my job,” she said.

  I ignored that and took the photo out of her hands. I put it on the table.

  “Do you recognize it?” I asked.

  She picked it up again and moved it around, catching different angles of light.

  “No,” she said. “But judging from the condition of the façade, the junky trees showing here above the roof, and the potholes in the parking area in front, I’m thinking Hampton Bays, North Sea, or Springs.”

  “Really,” I said, taking the photo out of her hands to get a closer look.

  “I’m not criticizing those places,” she said. “In fact, I love those places. For the very reason I think this building belongs to one of them. It’s funky. A little worn. A natural, regular place.”

  “Let’s see if it’s in there,” I said, going to the “D” drawer and looking up “Delbert’s Beachworld Deli.” Of course, it wasn’t. “How old do you think this photo is?” I asked.

  Roberta studied it again.

  “Pre-digital by a healthy margin. Say early eighties. Though taken with a decent camera—a thirty-five millimeter, not a disposable or some piece of crap your mom used to take snapshots.”

  I asked that question because the archives were organized by title and number code, but you could also search by basic categories, such as geographical location (e.g., Hampton Bays), people/politicians, landscapes, fund-raisers (by far the largest category), fatal car crashes, residences, commercial buildings, missing cats and dogs, etc. These in turn were organized by date, so we started with commercial buildings/retail, Hampton Bays, 1985 to 2000.

  I wish I could say it was fun to operate the archaic technology, but it wasn’t. In fact, it really sucked. Before we sat down in front of the thing, Roberta warned me not to mutter “O Google, wherefore art thou?” every few moments like I had the last time.

  The process was to write down all the ID numbers within that search category, then go to the stacks and pull boxes down off the shelves, trying to avoid bleeding to death from paper cuts inflicted by the razor-sharp edges of the aging manila envelopes as you extracted the photographs and, disappointed, slipped them back in, whilst sneezing and wiping your nose with your sleeve from all the dust and mold.

  It was a tribute to Roberta’s infectious enthusiasm that I endured all this in reasonably good humor. Most of the time.

/>   The first hour netted nothing but a little blood and proof positive that the photo archives included nothing that looked like our subject, based on our search criteria. We pondered a change.

  “I think 1985 was too late,” said Roberta. “I say we go earlier.”

  “What else? What about the location?”

  “The scientific method calls for changing only one criterion at a time,” said Roberta.

  “And what are we, scientists?” I asked.

  Roberta liked that, though she looked a little rueful.

  “Okay. How about North Sea?”

  We went back to the microfilm, and a half hour later had another list of names and numbers. The subsequent search through the boxes was even more physically punishing, given the earlier vintage of the photos, but the moment it became nearly unbearable, we found something.

  It was a roll of film shot in the summer of 1977, turned into strips of negatives that were slid into the slots of an 8½ × 11 plastic sheet. The title on the envelope was “Motorcycle Rally Means Hog Heaven in North Sea.” Even with the sign out of the picture, and the images of bikers and their machines lined up in front of the store, you could see it was Delbert’s Beachworld Deli, though an even older version. This was confirmed to the satisfaction of both of us after multiple perusals with Roberta’s trusty loupe.

  Seeing the store, even in the negative, brought me a lot closer to where I didn’t want to go.

  “What’s the matter?” Roberta asked. “You look like you’re ready to hurl.”

  “I am.”

  “When are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “What are the chances of me borrowing these negatives?” I asked.

  “Officially? None.”

  “Unofficially.”

  “Excellent. But only if you tell me what’s going on.”

  “How about half the story, the rest to be filled in as facts are confirmed?”

  “You seem to forget I’m a reporter. They pay me to report the news. It’s a fiduciary responsibility, counselor.”

  “I could argue the fiduciary part, but I understand,” I said. “Did you hear about the plane crash in Bridgehampton?”

  “Uh, yeah. We here at the newspaper and the rest of the world, both at about the same time.”

  “This has to do with that. And that’s only the start.”

  “That’s supposed to make me less curious?”

  “Let me take this sheet of negs and I promise that as soon as I have the whole story worked out, and I can let it out, I’ll give it all to you. Only you. And I’ll buy the drinks.”

  “No way.”

  “I don’t need the negatives to confirm my story,” I said, suddenly realizing that myself and feeling stupid for overlooking the obvious. “They’ll just help seal the deal.”

  I dropped the sheet on the table and stood up.

  “I’m not trying to be an asshole,” I said to her. “I appreciate all you’ve done for me. You’re great.” I turned to walk back up the stairs.

  “I hate that,” she called after me. I stopped. “Just say you want to keep things loose till you’ve ironed out a few wrinkles,” she said. “That’s good enough for me.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “No it’s not. But it preserves a person’s dignity.”

  I walked back and picked up the sheet of negatives.

  “You’re still great,” I said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” she said as I vaulted up the basement stairs and burst out a side door into the spring air.

  ———

  A few minutes later I was knocking on the glass door of my friend Randall Dodge’s computer repair shop, Good to the Last Byte, off the big parking lot in the middle of Southampton Village. The sign on the door said, “Absent without leave,” but I knew he was in there somewhere. He almost never left.

  A few moments later his rangy shape filled the space on the other side of the door.

  “I assumed it was you,” he said, opening the door with one hand and munching a slice of pizza with the other. “Who else takes ‘not here’ as an invitation to knock.”

  “I bet you can turn a photographic negative into a regular print in about five seconds,” I said, handing him the manila envelope.

  “Not as easily as a photo developer,” he said.

  “Don’t know any of them,” I said. “But I know you. I just need this one here,” I said, pointing to the one that showed the clearest view of the storefront. “How long will it take?”

  “About five seconds. With no interruptions.”

  I sat down on a nearby chair, folded my arms, and gave him a tight-lipped not-saying-another-word smile.

  It was more than five seconds, actually about five minutes, before he emerged from some hidden space deep in his electronics-crammed cave holding an eight-by-ten print. He handed it to me.

  It was an older, run-down version of Delbert’s. The print was clear enough to show paint chipping off the trim around the door and the two big display windows on either side. Some local kids were gawking at the motorcycles while the bikers stood around looking ferocious and drinking beer from bottles held at the neck. The scene didn’t quite fit the cheerful innocence of the headline labeling the sleeve of negs, but I wasn’t paying much attention to that. Instead, I was staring at the sign that ran across the front of the building above the windows and the door. Most of the name was sliced off, but it was definitely not “Delbert’s.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  Randall looked unhappy.

  “Sorry, Jackie. That’s the best I could do on short notice.”

  “Not your work, Randall. Something else. Can I use your computer?”

  Randall was enough Shinnecock Indian to qualify for a spot on the reservation in Southampton, but he was just as much African-American and Caucasian, by way of an Irish Catholic grandfather, which he never tired of reminding me. Every St. Patrick’s Day we’d tie one on at O’Malleys, starting the night with Irish brogues that either improved or disintegrated depending on which side of the conversation you were on.

  But true to the stereotype of the reticent Indian, he never smiled with his mouth, a deficiency that was amply compensated for by his gray-green eyes, which were always alight.

  “You may use anything I have in this world, Jackie. Because I know you would do the same for me.”

  “You’re a doll, Randall.”

  “Just leave the Volvo in the lot when you go. Big date tonight.”

  Those sparkly eyes could have lit Yankee Stadium.

  “Deal,” I said, tossing him my keys.

  He snatched them out of the air and led me down a canyon formed by towering shelving units stuffed with computer hardware and tangled cords to a cramped workstation equipped with the gleaming desktop version of my new laptop. I think I let out a little cry of delight, though I hope I didn’t.

  Since real estate is the principal industry in the Hamptons, few lawyers in the region do anything but. I was no exception when I started out. There are a few things I could do really well, and there are a small number of things I can do as well or better than anyone. One of those is title searches. Not unlike Roberta Comacho, there was a time when I lost myself digging around the mildewed records in the basement of Southampton Town Hall, following conveyances from buyer to seller sometimes all the way back to the mid-seventeenth century.

  Sometimes in the course of a title search I’d come across a name or a property that looked sort of interesting and then find myself following transactions that had nothing to do with my clients. I know it’s more than a little voyeuristic, and not even close to ethical, but it’s that damn curiosity of mine.

  Imagine a hound sniffing around the woods, with only a minor objective in mind, and a rabbit runs by. It was like that.

  So it didn’t take very long to narrow in on Delbert’s physical location, which I already knew was somewhere in North Sea, and from there, cross-reference the number on the lot with the pr
ior owner of the property.

  I took that information and went into the archives of the Southampton Chronicle, this time of the editorial pages, which the paper had taken the effort to digitize and put online, and did another cross-reference.

  And that’s how I nailed it down. Clinton Andrews, the owner of the Peconic Pantry, which had hosted the motorcycle rally in 1977, had sold the property to Delbert J. Johannson after coming out of a coma caused by the severe beating he received during the course of an armed robbery at the store.

  This event had been somewhat of a sensation back in 1978, a time when Southampton was less accustomed to the types of crime then common in the big city at the other end of Long Island. Especially since the perpetrator was a local kid who’d been caught when he tried to cash the only check the owner had left under the tray in the register. Both the arrest and subsequent trial held at the criminal court in Riverhead made for a minor media frenzy. I was only seven years old at the time, and didn’t remember specific news coverage. Probably because my parents did everything they could to keep the story away from me. An understandable impulse for any set of parents, but particularly for mine. The last thing they wanted was for me to read the name of the accused splashed all over the local papers.

  Billy O’Dwyer. My brother.

  6

  Like most people, the first time I heard the term “elephant in the living room” was from a shrink. I liked it then, and I still do. It perfectly explains what it’s like to have the most important thing that ever happened to a family remain completely and forever unrecognized.

  An elephant is a big thing, with a powerful gravitational pull. Like gravity, the ones grazing around a living room are invisible, but the pull is relentless, affecting everything and everyone, all the time.

  It was like a sudden death, only worse. The visit from the cops in the middle of the night (they were hoping to catch my brother at a vulnerable moment, but he wasn’t there). My parents speaking to them in urgent, hushed tones. My mother crying, my father cursing. The shock waves of fear and incredulity permeating the walls of my bedroom, where I’d been told in the harshest terms to stay put.