Bad Bird (v5)

by Chris Knopf

  “As a witness?”

  “As a defense attorney. Ed Conklin’s.”

  “Why does he need defending?”

  “Why are you interviewing him?”

  His peculiar face relaxed into a wide grin.

  “There’s something you don’t know? How novel.”

  Goddammit, I thought. Cat and mouse with Ross Semple. My least favorite thing.

  “Okay, you know something I don’t,” I said. “The bidding’s open. What’ll it take to find out?”

  “What’s the meaning of these photos?”

  I described each of them in as much detail as I could remember, including the physical details of Delbert’s Beachworld Deli, though that’s as far as I went.

  “And these are the only photos discovered at the scene?” said Ross.

  “The only memory card I’m aware of. You have the camera.”

  “It would break my heart if you weren’t in full disclosure,” said Ross, and I knew he meant it.

  “Never happen. I’m an officer of the court.”

  “Hm,” he said, pulling his feet off the desk and dropping them down to the floor. He picked up the stack of photos and leafed through them.

  “They could mean nothing at all,” he said.

  “That’s what I think. Just happened to be in the camera case. Random occurrence.” I watched him study the photos for a few minutes. “Hey, Ross,” I said. “What do you care?”

  “Huh?” he said, looking up.

  “Why the interest in those photos? Wasn’t this just a plane crash? Why all the interest in Conklin? What don’t I know?”

  He liked that.

  “So now you’re giving me the third degree. I like that.”

  “Well, of course I am, Ross. Who wouldn’t? You’re omniscient. You know everything.”

  He put his elbows on his desk and rubbed his face with both hands, reaching up under his glasses, which almost made them fall off his head.

  “So how come I’m not rich?” he asked in a muffled voice.

  “Your wealth is in your friends. Like me.”

  “We’re friends?” he asked. “That’s a pretty thought.”

  “We are. And friends don’t let friends defend clients without all the information she needs to do her job.”

  His cigarette had burned down to the filter, but he still held it in his hand like a tiny pointer. He pointed it at me.

  “Here’s the problem, Jackie. I’ve got an ongoing investigation and you’ve got a client to defend. What would happen to our friendship if these things happen to conflict?”

  “Cut the crap, Ross. They already have,” I said, digging out another of his cigarettes and lighting it, then using the smoldering end to point back at him. “You don’t have to tell me anything at all. I’ll just wait for the charge, if one’s coming. Then we’ll play it from there.”

  “What happens when you deposit more than ten thousand dollars in cash?”

  “The bank reports it to the government,” I said.

  “Excellent. What happens when you deposit lesser amounts of cash with some frequency in more than one bank over a longish period of time, say three years?”

  “The banks report it to the government?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Ed Conklin?” I asked.

  “Close.”

  “Eugenie?”

  I’d handled these cases before. There were only two reasons people tried to sneak cash deposits past officialdom. Tax evasion or drug deals. Or both. Hiding cash in a bank was never an easy thing to do, but after 9/11, it was nearly impossible. Professional criminals knew this and had a dozen ways to run their cash through the laundry. So the people I defended over dirty money were uniformly amateurish, or at least naïve.

  “You’re thinking drugs,” I said. “Flown in from wherever for distribution in the Hamptons.”

  “Either flown in or out. We only uncovered her little enterprise a few months ago. Your lady pilot’s been a very bad bird. A local bank president gave me the tip-off that the FBI had come to call about the deposits. He knows I don’t like the feds poking around my town without me in on it.”

  “He does? A bank president knows this?” I asked, trying to imagine the conversation.

  “He’s my cousin,” said Ross. “His mother’s my father’s sister. Pompous little fink, but richer’n all of us put together, so there you go.”

  “Since Conklin’s an ex-con, you’re making the assumption that he got her into this. Used connections made in the joint.”

  “The commonsense assumption. You know as well as I do that the obvious is almost always the truth,” he said. “Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.”

  “That’s right. Anyone can see that the sun goes around the earth, which is flat as a pancake, by the way.”

  “Exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis.”

  “So what do you do now? And say it in English. I feel like I’m back in catechism.”

  “We do what they pay us to do around here. Investigate your client.”

  “Why tell me?” I asked. “Sort of takes away the element of surprise.”

  He laughed one of those weird little half laughs that always sound contrived. Not without humor, just not exactly genuine.

  “I wouldn’t normally, Jackie, but you messed me up with the memory card caper. Pulling a stunt like that again could finally get you that obstruction of justice rap we both know you richly deserve.”

  My heart raced at that, partly from outrage and partly from the truth of it. The effort to calm myself down was well spent, since it kept my mouth in check just long enough for me to get my better judgment back in control.

  “So, if I’m hearing you properly, now that I’m on notice that there’s an ongoing investigation of Mr. Conklin, there’s a higher standard of evidentiary integrity at issue.”

  “Don’t get all lawyerish on me, Jackie. I’m just looking after you.”

  “Just as long as you understand that Mr. Conklin’s my client. And therefore matters between us are protected under attorney-client privilege.”

  “Unless that privilege is used to perpetrate a crime or fraud. Supreme Court, Clark v. United States, 1933.”

  It didn’t seem fair that the chief of police in the town of my birth—the town in which I’d chosen to undertake a career in real estate law, now tragically morphing into defending the poor, the corrupt, the cynical, criminal, and sometimes sociopathic, to say nothing of occasional innocent—would have to be Ross Semple. The foreign languages and command of philosophy I could take. The command of constitutional law, not so much.

  I sighed and said, “Almost never invoked, though I’m sure you know that.”

  Ross jumped up out of his chair and stretched, his arms held high above his head and his face straining with the effort.

  “I’m glad we got that out of the way,” he forced out.

  “Me, too,” I said, jumping up myself, more than eager to vacate the premises.

  “Hey, Jackie,” he said to my retreating back. I turned.

  “Yeah?”

  “The guy’s dirty. I know it in my bones.”

  I tried to work out “You mean up your ass” in Latin, but I couldn’t do it fast enough, so instead I just muttered it in English as I turned again and left his office.

  8

  Scrambled eggs. That’s how I imagine my brains under certain circumstances. All lumpy and clumpy and incapable of coherent thought.

  I have no cure for the condition, but I do have a coping strategy. I start doing things. It doesn’t matter what it is, I just do. I fix things, buy things, puzzle over things, remember things, organize things, and toss things in the trash (albeit reluctantly).

  I also make up for things I haven’t done, but really should have, like returning an e-mail from a forgotten high school friend who tracked me down over the Internet. Throwing away run-filled panty hose and socks that permanently and mysteriously lost their partners decades ago. Transfer
ring hand cream from the store bottle to a lovely glass container given to me by who-knows-who. Cancelling the expensive cable TV package I bought the night the sales rep called me after I’d already had half a bottle of wine and was weeping over the late-night loss of Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. Or washing the hand towel hanging in the guest bathroom that smelled like a wet sheepdog (for naught, since I rarely had a guest).

  Somehow, all this doing begins the process of focusing my chaotically unfocused mind, cauterizing the jagged nerve endings and calming the tempest often raging inside my skull.

  Only then can rational thought commence, strategy be divined, or planning put in place.

  After meeting with Ross, I committed myself to an orgy of doing, until I exhausted both myself and the strategy itself. Though still at my wit’s end, I stopped the whirling dervish thing and poured a glass of wine like I should have done in the first place.

  That was when I finally knew what I had to do next.

  O’Dwyer isn’t that common a name, which helped. Sitting at my office computer and using Randall Dodge’s semi-illegal, database-aggregating, privacy-violating software, I had a dozen William O’Dwyers that fit my brother’s vital statistics in a matter of minutes. Five were in Ireland, where they belonged; one was in Canada, one in Argentina, the rest in the United States. Of these five, two lived in the New York metropolitan area, one born in a pizza parlor in Brooklyn, the other in Southampton Hospital.

  I hate to admit that something as statistically daunting as tracking down one person in 300 million can be this easy, but it is, if you know what you’re doing and you have the right tools. Welcome to the world as we now know it.

  I had no proof that this was my brother, but the circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. In addition to the place of birth, there was the fourteen-year stay at Sanger medium-security prison on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in seriously Upstate New York.

  I had a phone number and an address in Port Jefferson, a town on the north shore of Long Island and about an hour from Southampton. I also had a firm conviction that I was not going to do this alone.

  “Ever been to Port Jeff?” I asked Harry when he answered the phone.

  “No, but I bet I’m going.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  “Let me. You navigate.”

  “You don’t like the way I drive,” I said.

  “You don’t drive. You approximate. It’s exciting, in small doses. What’s in Port Jeff?” he asked.

  “Emotional havoc brought on by bizarre coincidence.”

  “When, and what’s the dress code?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon. I want to get there by six. Wear something empathetic. With a tie. But nonrestricting, just in case.”

  “In case of what?”

  “I’ll explain in the car,” I said. “When I do you’ll see why I have to go in person.”

  “No explanation necessary, Jackie. I’m simply honored to be your driver,” he said, which from anyone else would have sounded vaguely sarcastic, but Harry said things like that all the time, and after knowing him for a few years, I realized he meant just what he said.

  “You’re a wonderfully patient and understanding man, Harry Goodlander. As well as handsome in an atypical way and a reasonably good dancer for a guy the size of the Empire State Building.”

  “Though too easily swayed by flattery.”

  I don’t know what accident of divinity, fertility, or dumb happenstance caused my parents to produce me eleven years after my brother, but that’s what they did. My father was already in his forties, my mother not much younger. They’d already settled into their lives as a classic American family unit, my father engineering bland office buildings Up Island, my mother looking after the house, and the two of them raising young Mr. Wonderful.

  I didn’t fully appreciate the impact I must have had until I found some 8mm movies in a closet when I was clearing out the house after my mother died. I thought converting them to DVD was a good idea. Here’s a tip for the hypersensitive: don’t do this.

  It was a backyard barbecue. My father was talking to a guy who looked a lot like him. Each had a cocktail glass in one hand and a pocket stuffed with the other. The scene was relatively static until a little girl with fuzzy reddish blond hair leaped into view, hopped about in a crazy sort of dance, then zipped back out of the picture. This happened two or three more times, until the cameraperson, I assume my mother, sought more promising subject matter.

  I didn’t remember the specific event, but I thought it conveyed the central truth of my childhood—that I spewed out far more riotous energy than the family could ever absorb. You can see in those movies my father suffering through the imposition. He tried to look like the parent of a lively kid, but the best he could muster was a weary tolerance, laced with irritation.

  So imagine what it must have been like to lose a beloved son the way he lost Billy, and then to realize that all he had left was me.

  On the way to Port Jefferson, I gave Harry a full rundown of the facts of the case, treading lightly over the emotional terrain. Anyone could see this was tough stuff. He didn’t need the gory details.

  Port Jeff was a mixed bag of a town on the North Shore of Long Island. It had a lot of nice-looking buildings around the harbor. You could eat fried seafood or buy T-shirts and kitsch. Motorcycle clubs passed through so frequently they had their own parking section. On the water was a grand old hotel that had a good view of the dock that received giant ferries running back and forth between Port Jefferson and Bridgeport, Connecticut.

  None of which Harry got to see on this trip. My brother’s apartment was officially in Port Jeff, but about as far from the coastline as the town’s borders would allow.

  It was in an old three-story house with a wraparound porch. There were three buzzers next to the front door. The one I wanted buzzed on the third floor. A woman’s voice came out of the speaker.

  “Who’s there?”

  “My name’s Jacqueline Swaitkowski. I’m an attorney. I’m here to see William O’Dwyer.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I need to discuss that with Mr. O’Dwyer. If you don’t mind coming to the door, I can show you my identification.”

  The speaker went silent, and we waited. Now that I was about to actually confront the situation, I was strangely unmoved. Maybe that was it. The situation was too strange to feel real.

  “You didn’t tell her who you are,” said Harry. “The sister part.”

  “One thing at a time. I don’t even know for sure he’s my brother.”

  The door had a large single pane of glass, through which I saw a young woman come down the stairs. She had thin brown hair parted in the middle and a small face, with a small nose but eyes that were disproportionately large. She wore a cotton dress that could have come out of my mother’s closet, and black exercise sneakers that would never find their way into mine. She looked concerned but opened the door, not all the way.

  I handed her my card. She read it carefully, as if the entire explanation for my visit was printed there.

  “I’m investigating an accident,” I said to her. “Mr. O’Dwyer is not directly connected in any way. But he might have some information that would be valuable. It should only take a few minutes.” I looked over at some dusty wicker chairs loosely arranged around a coffee table. “We can talk out here.”

  She looked in the grip of manifold uncertainties, as if any response had its unique hazards.

  “I’ll go see,” she said, finally, taking my card and leaving us to wait on the porch.

  “I wonder if she knows,” I said to Harry.

  “Knows what?”

  “About the prison time. Not the first wife to be left in the dark.”

  “Or girlfriend,” said Harry. “No wedding ring.”

  “Was that brilliant detection, or do you always look?”

  “I’m brilliant enough not to answer that one.”

  Almost ten minutes went by, and I wa
s starting to think I should either push the buzzer again or pack it in and go home when the woman came back down the steps, this time with a guy walking behind her. She stepped out of his way when they reached the door, and he swung it open.

  My heart clenched.

  It was my father. A fleshier, paler version, but with the same curly orange hair and big, cartoon ears. He wore rimless glasses, behind which his eyes squinted at me, as if trying to read an explanation on my face.

  “Mr. O’Dwyer?” I asked, or more likely croaked.

  “What’s this about?” he asked, looking at Harry, like men always do. Don’t ask the woman standing right there, who’s actually the one you’re supposed to be asking.

  “As I told your wife,” I said, “I’m investigating an accident. A plane crash, to be more accurate. You might be able to shed some light on our investigation.”

  The suspicion in his face matched the woman’s uncertainty. For both of them, no choice seemed easy.

  “I don’t know anything about a plane crash,” he said.

  “Can we sit down?” I asked, pointing again at the ratty wicker chairs.

  Harry did just that, drawing the rest of us in his wake. Billy sat; the woman continued to stand. On guard.

  I described Eugenie’s crash with most of the detail intact, including the flying camera case and the photos in the memory card. I saw no point in withholding anything. Especially since I was withholding the biggest fact of all—that Billy’s estranged little sister was telling the story.

  I carefully watched his face as I talked, looking for involuntary reactions, but his only expression was of pained confusion. I was not too worried that he’d identify me. I was a little kid when he went away, never to return. It was possible that a person in his situation would try to keep remote tabs on his lost family, but I doubted he’d be one of them. I had nothing to base this on, but judging by his reactions on the porch, I thought I was right.

  Plus, I didn’t exactly look like me anymore. The aforementioned car bomb didn’t kill me, but it thoroughly smashed up my face. The plastic surgeons not only put everything back together again, they improved on the product. Most of their clients were Upper East Side dowagers trying to look like Marilyn Monroe, so some of that got mixed into my native Irish cheeks. If he hadn’t checked up on me recently, he might not realize who he was talking to. Though in this Alice in Wonderland moment, I realized that it wasn’t only my father who looked back at me through my brother’s eyes. My mother was there, too. And a little of me, including the bits of me that no longer existed.