Bad Bird (v5)

by Chris Knopf

  “Hey, Jackie. We’ve been talking about you,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  The girl nodded in agreement.

  “This is Shawna. She wants to be a lawyer.”

  I shook her hand with lawyerly authority. She lifted her shoulders up to her ears and smiled a nervous smile.

  “I’m pre-law. I’m so into it,” she said.

  “Good,” I said. “We need all the female lawyers we can get. Need to kick some male ass.”

  This probably wasn’t the mentorly encouragement she was hoping for, but it actually was what I most wanted to say. She looked down at the cocktail in my hand and registered a thought on her face that I had no trouble deciphering, and no interest in correcting. Instead, I wished her the best of luck and swept Harry away.

  “So, learn anything?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but not sure what. How about you?”

  “Eugenie was a popular girl. With everybody. But nobody thought her untroubled. By what, nobody knew.”

  “Or would admit?”

  “Or would admit.”

  We mingled for another half hour to no worthy end, then with strong consensus decided to make a break for it. We tracked down Ed Conklin to pay our final respects. He was in Brian’s corner in deep, sub-audible conversation with his son. I had to clear my throat to get their attention.

  They both looked at Harry before they looked at me. I took it as the usual man thing. Assess the threat before you engage in contact.

  “Thanks again for the invite,” I said to Ed. “I didn’t know Eugenie, but it meant a lot to me to see her off.”

  He took my outstretched hand in two of his. I would have enjoyed the added intimacy more if I hadn’t seen him weave a little, clearly half in the bag. He tried to put together a coherent good-bye, but it was too much of a challenge. So all he could do was say thanks and pump my hand.

  Brian just stood there and watched, one eye on Harry.

  We left them and got out of there without incident. Harry suggested we stop in some brightly lit, fun-filled joint on the way home, just to recalibrate our moods, which were slightly dinged by that last encounter with the fresh widower and his son. I was all in favor.

  Rightly so, because by the time we reached my house, most of the gloom had been washed away. So much so that I jumped out of the car, ran around to the driver’s side, and pulled Harry out of his seat, whispering suggestive things in his ear as I did.

  Once in the house, I changed into my ratty bathrobe, turned down the lights, lit up the stinky candles, poured wine, put on the Mary McPartlan, and pulled off Harry’s size-twenty boots. I was about to coast pleasantly from there when I heard the little electronic incoming e-mail ping from the computer out on the porch that I’d unfortunately left running before going to the funeral. The mood took a dip, but I felt resilient enough to bear a quick peek at what had just come in.

  Harry smiled at me and told me to go look, then please turn the damn thing off. I brought up the e-mail screen with a few taps on the keyboard. There was one new message, from someone named “yourfriend.” More important, the subject line was “RE: plane crash.”

  I clicked on the message, hoping for the best. What I got was simple and to the point:

  Back off or die, bitch.

  11

  I was waiting for Randall Dodge when he showed up for work the next day. I was sitting on his front stoop with my laptop and a big cup of coffee to keep me company. When he walked up, his lanky frame blocked the sun, which was a relief.

  “Trouble?” he asked, pointing at my laptop.

  “Not with the computer. With what’s on it.”

  “Let’s take a look-see.”

  I gave him the ten minutes he needed to fire up various machines, check their screens, and eat half a bagel, the other half eaten at his insistence by me. When he was ready, I put my laptop on a table where we could both see the screen and opened the e-mail from the night before. After he read it, I said, “One question. Where did this come from?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Ah, come on. You’re always saying that and then you do stuff. You mess around on the keyboard, mumble to yourself, then come up with the answer. Just do that. That thing you do.”

  He looked over at me.

  “You’re missing the part where I tell you to go away so I can concentrate.”

  I pushed myself back from the table.

  “Fine, no prob. I can do that.”

  “You don’t have to leave your laptop. Just forward me the e-mail.”

  “Roger that.”

  Back outside, I noticed it was already a warm day. Not quite summer-like, but warm enough to unzip my jacket and drive with the windows down. Randall’s shop is off the parking lot behind the storefronts that line Main Street in Southampton Village. From there it was a fifteen-minute drive up into North Sea, where Sam had his cottage with a wood shop in the basement where he built architectural details for Frank Entwhistle. He’d told me the week before that he had a mantel and a pair of built-ins to fabricate, so I was pretty sure I’d find him down in the shop, which you could access by pounding on the basement hatch and rousing the dog.

  It’s always a good idea to show up at Sam’s with something to drink, which in the morning means coffee from the corner place in the Village. I was thus prepared when the hatch door opened. I thrust a large cup in his irritated face before he could start gritching at me.

  “Black and still slightly warm, the way you like it,” I said.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  He took the cup but kept the frown. Eddie bounded up the basement steps and almost knocked me over in his eagerness to say hello. I rumpled his head and told him his roommate was a grouch and a pain in the ass undeserving of the kinship of pleasant and well-intentioned people like the two of us.

  Then we all walked out on the front lawn to a set of Adirondack chairs perched on the edge of a breakwater, beyond which was the Little Peconic Bay. Sam and I sat, and Eddie disappeared off the breakwater, presumably to scour the pebble beach for tasty saltwater detritus.

  The sun had risen high enough by now to light up the bay, turning it into a shimmering gray-blue piece of slate. A sailboat moved along the southern coast of the North Fork, its sails a brilliant white against the green hills.

  “So what’s the problem,” said Sam, after downing most of the coffee.

  “I only visit when there’s a problem?”

  “Mostly.”

  “I got a death threat.”

  I brought him up to speed on the Eugenie thing, laying out as much detail as I could remember—since I knew he’d want that—ending with the e-mail from yourfriend, now under the analytical gaze of Randall Dodge.

  “Even the NSA can have trouble tracking down an e-mail address if the sender knows what they’re doing,” he said.

  “You always say not to get defeatist.”

  “True. Let Randall tell us if we should be.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “It’s great news,” he said.

  “That somebody wants me dead?”

  “That it’s not all your imagination.”

  “Dandy.”

  Eddie startled me by coming up to the side of my chair and dropping a sandy flip-flop in my lap. He stood there for a moment, then trotted away again.

  “That yours?” Sam asked.

  I picked it up with two fingers, then dropped it again.

  “Don’t think so.”

  “You’ll offend him if you don’t take it home.”

  “See if you can teach him the word ‘Gucci.’ ”

  “You can stay here if you want,” he said.

  “I could also stay with Harry, but I’m not ready for that either.”

  “Okay.”

  “Any theories?” I asked.

  He rested his head on the back of the Adirondack and closed his eyes. The sunlight coming in over our shoulders did nice things with his curly gray hair, but not much for the lin
es in his face or his busted nose.

  “In the absence of other evidence, you have to assume the most obvious interpretation,” he said.

  “I know that. Thanks to Ross, I can even say it in Latin.”

  “You have a pilot whose husband and father are both ex-cons. She was probably running drugs and got into trouble with somebody—a supplier, a customer, a competitor. This somebody sabotaged her plane, killing her. You have no proof of this and neither does the NTSB, since they’re about to call it an accident. But that’s not the whole story.”

  “The camera case,” I said.

  “Thrown to you.”

  “With an empty camera. And a few photos on a memory card.”

  “The photos have no significance,” said Sam. “It’s pure luck that you know of their existence.”

  “Is it? She threw me the case. Which is pretty heavy and reasonably indestructible. The memory card was probably in the camera. It was ejected by the force of the hard landing. When I picked up the case, all this stuff fell out, and the card landed in my cuff.”

  “The photos are just random shots,” said Sam.

  I swatted his arm.

  “Exactly. Even a heartless brute like you has to have saved at least a few photographs from your past, if only for historical purposes. How would they look to someone who doesn’t know you?”

  “Random.”

  “Exactly. The fact that they appear random and were the only shots on the camera tells me they were intentionally saved, and that’s because they were valuable to her. I’ll bet you a million dollars there are prints of the same photos somewhere, maybe in Ed Conklin’s house.”

  He swatted me on the arm.

  “Still hypothetical, but credible.”

  “What’ve I been doing since I got ahold of those photographs?” I asked.

  “Stirring up trouble?”

  “You bet, but with whom? Unless Randall traces that e-mail back to the Southampton Town Police, most of the people who know I’m interested in Eugenie’s death are in those photos.”

  “Hm.”

  “Hm?”

  “You’re right,” he said. “The e-mail sender doesn’t have to be one of them, but it’s more likely that they are. Or someone connected to that group.”

  “Ipso facto, the photos are significant.”

  “Ad utrumque paratus.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Loosely? Brace yourself. It could go either way.”

  I called Randall on the way back to my office. He said he’d nailed the IP address—the location from which the e-mail was sent—in the time it took me to get to my car. It was an Internet café in Queens where everyone paid cash and the screens faced the wall so you could watch porn or play online poker in complete privacy. He said the next thing was to penetrate the e-mail account at the access provider, which would take a bit more effort.

  “Unless the FBI owes you a few favors,” he said.

  “Do what you can.”

  It was still relatively early when I got to my office, so I was able to put in serious time writing briefs and e-mails in support of my once lucrative, now waning real estate practice. How had that happened? For about five hours it was all about well-paying clients, but then I made the mistake of writing to Mr. Charming at the NTSB. I asked him if it was true they were planning to declare the crash an accident. I could have shared my grave suspicions, but since the most likely scenario involved drug running, it would surely blunt his interest. Also, there was so little of the plane left after the crash and fire I couldn’t imagine what they’d investigate.

  After I clicked the Send button, the magnetic pull of the Eugenie case forced my cursor into the Google search box, and before I knew it I was down the rabbit hole.

  My first search was for Skitch the photographer. That took a few seconds. Because I’d confused Skitch with her subject matter, I imagined some blond, whippet-thin, high-cheekboned society nymph. The reality was just the opposite—overweight, with heavily permed black hair and what looked like a big mole next to her crooked nose. Though she had a nice smile. Personality plays an important role with party shooters. If you’re not cute or famous, you’d better be fun.

  I clicked on her gallery button and was rewarded by hundreds of options—parties, events, and fund-raisers going back at least ten years. She had a generous policy on downloading her work: you could take anything you wanted as long as you gave her credit and didn’t try to resell the images. She posted only unpurchased photos and only after the event was well over, protecting paying media. It was on the honor system, but I could see what she was doing. Even if a quarter of the downloaders actually gave her photo credit, that was a lot of publicity.

  I wanted to invite her to dinner so I could gush over her business acumen, but I was already deep in search mode, tracking down the Children’s Relief Fund event of last year. Didn’t take too long. In another few seconds, there was the shot saved on Eugenie’s memory card. I rolled my cursor over it, and the familiar little icons asked me if I wanted to e-mail, save to disk, copy, or print. I saved it to my hard drive just for the hell of it, since I could.

  Then I jumped into e-mail and wrote Dr. Johnston Johnson at Southampton College, since I hadn’t heard from him about that photo of the cabin. I used various extravagant euphemisms that added up to an apology for giving him a task apparently beyond his intellectual powers. Inspired by my chat with Sam, I tossed in some Latin, what little I knew, just to seal the deal.

  I pulled up the other shots in the Eugenie collection and went through them all over again, for the millionth time. That was the problem, I thought. I’m looking at everything the same way every time, so I’m seeing the same things. Be different.

  Nevertheless, by then I was getting bleary-eyed and it was almost closing time at Jackie Swaitkowski Enterprises. So I shut down the computer and packed up to go home. Out in the hall I saw one of the surveyors slipping out the door. A surge of impetuosity overcame me, as it often does.

  “Looks like a beautiful evening,” I said.

  “Not to me,” he said, without looking at me, then stuck his hands in his pockets and rushed down the stairs to the parking lot below.

  Just go home, Jackie, I said to myself, and let it go.

  Home wasn’t much, I admit. But it did have a shower, which I used, and my ancient, and therefore extremely comfy, terry-cloth robe, marijuana that I bought at usurious prices because it came in tidy pre-rolled joints (you pay more, but think of the convenience), wine, leftovers, broadband, and a fireplace. It took about an hour to assemble all these vital ingredients, but it was worth it.

  I sunk into the ratty sofa in front of the smoky snapping fire, surrounded by sinful indulgences, in particular my laptop, perched on my lap, where it was designed to live.

  I started with the lakefront cabin shot, because it was first in the series. My prodding of Dr. Johnson aside, I didn’t think he’d be able to narrow the location any closer than, say, southern New Hampshire, which covered a lot of territory. It was a high-resolution image, so I used the little magnifying glass feature on the computer to zoom in on the cabin, which didn’t tell me much. It was a generic cabin, as if on a movie set, taken from about fifty feet away.

  I moved on to the bar scene, which I thought more promising. This was also in high resolution, which I made good use of, cropping out and copying square-ups of each person’s face, for future identification. Two were simple—Matt Birkson and his sister, Ida. The others might have been at the funeral; I kicked myself for not searching them out. They were much younger, but no less hardened and roughly composed. One guy had a goatee, tattoos on his forearms, and the beginnings of a Matt Birkson–gauge gut. The woman with her arm around his waist was heavy, with deep bags under her eyes and too much hair clumped above her forehead. The other two were in full denim regalia—shirts, pants, and jackets, all in varying shades of blue so you could barely tell where one article of clothing stopped and the other started.
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  I skipped over the Cessna and went to Delbert’s Deli. This was the first time I’d lingered over the image at its full size on my own computer. I popped in the disk Randall had given me with a complete set of the Southampton Chronicle’s photo coverage of the motorcycle rally. I picked a shot that most closely resembled Eugenie’s later image in angle and perspective, and put them side by side.

  Then I lit a joint and drank a little wine, just to sharpen my visual acuity. I looked at the two photos until I started getting bored and let my mind wander off into other corridors, where I could access things like gentle fantasies of me and Benson MacAvoy trapped in an elevator in midwinter and needing to cuddle to stay warm, which shifted to worry about who was going to plow my driveway next year, since I’d fired the dope who took out the only line of healthy shrubs on the property, thoughts that were suddenly intruded upon by the memory of the last time I balanced my checkbook, which a rough calculation put at over six weeks ago.

  At this point, I realized my eyes were closing as relentlessly as my anxieties were opening up. I drank a little more wine, sucked down a little more pot, then shook my head, resolved to take one more solid look at the two pictures.

  And that’s when I saw it.

  I shook my head again, then ran into the kitchen and splashed cold water on my face, dabbed it dry with paper towels, and ran back to the computer. It was still there.

  It was a trick of the eye. In Eugenie’s photo the storefront window had what I’d thought was an odd wrinkle in the glass, but was actually the reflection of a man looking at the store and a second with a camera up to his face, taking the picture. It depended on how you interpreted the shapes, like seeing a person smoking a pipe in a cloud formation, or a woman with a pile of clothes on her head in a Rorschach test. Only the more I looked at the photo, the less I saw alternate visions. It was definitely two people, one clearly snapping the shot.

  I reached for the phone that sat on a table at the end of the couch, then caught myself. What the hell was I doing? Who was I going to call and what was I going to tell them?