Bad Bird (v5)

by Chris Knopf

  “Duly noted,” said Harry.

  “I’ll talk to Ross. Forward me the death threat and I’ll see if our lads in forensics can get there ahead of your geek. We got that funny thing called police powers. Sometimes comes in handy.”

  Harry lived in a gas station, where I spent what was left of the night. A former gas station, first converted into an artist’s studio, and later into the world headquarters of Goodlander GeoTransit. The artist had done a beautiful restoration job, so the living space was lovely. The bedroom had a wall of windows looking out on a brick patio, which you could drench in light with an array of brilliant flood lamps controlled by a switch next to the headboard.

  As we undressed in the dark, Harry lit up the patio. We crawled into bed, where I slept well into the morning, enclosed within his gigantic, tireless embrace.

  The next day Sam installed a peephole, an alarm, and a massive dead bolt on the door of my office. He also put hidden security cameras at the front entrance and in the hall leading up to my door. While he worked I cleared the sofa of legal papers and stashed half-smoked joints so the guys from the furniture store could take it away and replace it with a pull-out sofa bed. Since the office had once been an apartment, all the other living amenities were in place, including a kitchenette and a shower stall in the bathroom.

  We all agreed I wasn’t going back to my house anytime soon, but that didn’t call for total capitulation. I’d already decided on this solution before Harry, and then Sam, had a chance to mount aggressive campaigns to have me move in with one of them or the other. Part of the deal included the loan of Harry’s 40-caliber Glock automatic, a gun I hadn’t known he had.

  “I’ve lived in some pretty funky locations along the way,” he said. “Don’t feel the need out here, but just in case, I still have the Winchester twelve-gauge.”

  To his credit, I didn’t have to endure that condescending don’t-you-worry-your-pretty-little-head lecture I usually get from guys when a real gun enters the room, even though he didn’t know my father had trained me well enough to get a pistol license on my twenty-first birthday, renewed every five years after that. At the time, I had a few self-righteous notions about the evils of gun ownership, some of which I still believe, so I never got a pistol to go with the license. Recently, after being blown up, run off the road, assaulted by a kickboxer, and threatened by any number of criminal deviants, some my own clients, I’d learned that gun evil was mostly the province of evil people. So I’d started to go with Joe Sullivan to the range, where I could shoot his service Glock and privately held .357 Colt Python, just to feel that reassuring kick.

  To establish my cred with Harry, all I had to do was point the gun at the floor, tilt it sideways, flick the magazine release, and pull the mag out of the grip. Then, still holding the magazine, pull back the slide to eject the cartridge, which I caught with my left hand. I cleared the muzzle visually, slapped in the magazine, and used the slide to put the gun back into battery with a live round ready to go.

  The only thing left was to twirl it around by the trigger guard, slam it into a holster, and spit on the ground.

  “Alrighty then,” he said. “Let’s be sure we give Annie Oakley sufficient ammunition.”

  Sam was less accommodating when he came to my office to rig up his security array.

  “I’m willing to hang with you till they splatter the son of a bitch,” he said. “I’ve got nothing else to do.”

  “I’m not going to do this,” I said.

  “What?”

  “This. You offering your help and me trying to politely demur. I appreciate the security measures. Leave it at that. And I know you’ve got plenty to do. Just keep gas in the Grand Prix and your cell phone in your pocket.”

  He acted like he didn’t hear me.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I told you. I’m okay.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not okay,” he said. “You’re just pretending to be.”

  Anger and gratitude competed for control over my mood. I compromised by speaking softly when I told him to stop fucking psychoanalyzing me. That I could do that all on my own when I could spare the time and the cost of a hotel room in a warm climate. Right then, what I needed most was to be left alone with the space I needed to get back to work. Which I did when I finally got him out of my office.

  Then I surprised myself with how well I could concentrate, and how productive the day turned out to be. As did the evening, until I wore myself out enough to fall asleep on the pull-out bed, the Glock under my pillow, oft caressed throughout the night.

  Ross Semple set the alarm off the next morning, which did an excellent job of waking me up. He claimed he merely tapped on the door, but that was enough to trigger the alarm. Fortunately, I didn’t shoot him. Or Joe Sullivan, whom I saw standing next to Ross when I looked at the video monitor.

  I shut off the alarm, told them to wait a minute, stowed the ordnance, folded up the bed, and put on my robe. Then I threw back the dead bolt and opened the door.

  “Welcome to Fort O’Dwyer.”

  “Jesus, Jackie,” said Ross. “That scared the crap out of me.”

  “Coffee, anyone?” I asked. “It’ll take a sec. Have a seat while I pull myself together.”

  When I got back from the bathroom, dressed and, as promised, more or less pulled together, I found the two of them sitting uncomfortably on the hard sofa version of the pull-out bed. That’s because there was nowhere else to sit, since every other chair was groaning under a massive stack of paper. I handed out coffee, rolled over my desk chair, and settled in.

  “Okay, boys,” I asked, “what’s the occasion?”

  “I didn’t think it seemly to make you drive all the way to Hampton Bays to receive an apology,” said Ross. “For the record, Detective Sullivan took the opposite view.”

  “Thanks, boss,” said Sullivan.

  “An apology for what?” I asked, immediately suspicious.

  “The Birkson case,” said Ross. “I read your statement. I think you’re right. There’s more going on here than meets the eye. You tried to tell me and I didn’t listen. For that, I apologize.”

  Some situations are so transcendently weird, that even I, born and raised in the Hamptons, jaded and cynical, can be caught off-guard. This was one of those.

  I tried to read the situation off Joe Sullivan’s face, but he gave me nothing.

  “What did I do now?” I asked.

  “What do you mean what did you do? Nothing,” said Ross. “It’s all my fault. Enough of that. Let’s talk about the Birkson case.”

  So I pretended I could take him at his word and told him everything I knew. As I spun out the story, I tried to stay alert for road hazards—minor details for me, but prosecutable to the cops. But besides that, I more or less gave up the goods.

  “So you think she was running drugs,” said Ross when I was done.

  I shrugged.

  “Probably. Sam’s always telling me the obvious is almost always the explanation, but I’m not so sure on this one. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “What if we told you we’ve had a dramatic drop-off in drugs coming into the East End for years,” said Sullivan, still deadpan. “And what’s here is easily traceable. If she was flying in product, it wasn’t for local consumption.”

  Okay, I said to myself, there’s another first. The cops giving me material information that I hadn’t even asked for, much less launched a civil suit or invoked the Freedom of Information Act to get.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Sullivan reached into the inside pocket of his safari jacket and pulled out a thick, spiral-bound book. He tossed it into my lap.

  “Eugenie’s flight log for the past three years, not including the last few months, since she had that on the plane,” he said. “Shows flight times, routes, weather conditions, destinations, passengers, and a bunch of
other shit that makes no sense to anybody but a pilot. We don’t know what to believe, since there’s no third-party corroboration. Pilots can write anything they want; the whole thing could be a complete work of fiction. We’re hoping you could take a look, and if something pops into your head, you could break precedent and actually help us do our jobs.”

  I was faltering but still suspicious. If past experience was any guide, I had good reason.

  “So why the interest? The NTSB thinks it was an accident, or can’t prove it wasn’t. If that’s true, like Joe keeps telling me, there’s no crime here.”

  Ross put a hand on each knee and leaned back on the sofa. He looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath.

  “Back in the day, when I was living in Brooklyn, somebody broke into my house,” he said. “My wife and I were at work and the kids were in school. The guy wasn’t looking to rob us; he just wanted to look around to see what he could get on me that might help in his upcoming prosecution. Most criminals are pretty stupid, as you know. But occasionally you get the so-called criminal genius, which usually means some sociopathic shithead with above-average intelligence. This was one of those guys. For them, it isn’t just the life that gets them off, it’s the challenge. The chance to outsmart, outmaneuver, authority. It’s a type of game.

  “So the game here was to break into our house, go through our most intimate things, steal or record what he wanted, and then slip away without leaving a trace. The fantasy was that he’d find something that would be so revealing and scandalous, I’d immediately drop the case. Which was a big laugh since I doubt you’d ever find two people who are bigger squares than me and Arlene.”

  That he said “squares” went a long way toward proving the assertion.

  “My point here, and I do have a point,” Ross said, “was that the moment I walked into our apartment, I knew someone had been there. I couldn’t tell you exactly why at first. My conscious brain would have been easily fooled. But my unconscious, the part that keeps track of anomalies in my environment, immediately set off alarms.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Still waiting for the point.”

  “This whole thing is making me feel the same way,” said Ross. “I just don’t know why.”

  “Thanks for the logbook, Ross, but I can’t help you if I don’t have all the facts, which I clearly don’t.”

  They looked at each other, exchanging some sort of sub-rosa communication. I could almost hear them calculating how much to reveal and how much to hold back. It was tiring, but this is what defense attorneys have to deal with every day. I behaved like the trained professional I was and waited them out.

  Ross took a deep breath, exhaled theatrically, then said, “We got a call from Homeland Security.”

  The two of them sat there next to each other and waited for the vast import to set in. I think I disappointed them.

  “Yeah? So what.”

  Sullivan frowned.

  “They want to talk to us,” he said. “Ross and me. And you.”

  “About what?” I asked.

  “We don’t know,” said Ross.

  “You didn’t ask?”

  “We did. They told us they’d ask the questions, we’d answer them, then they’d leave and we’d forget we had the conversation.”

  “Screw that,” I said.

  “We’re talking Homeland Security,” said Sullivan. “They’re, like, not to be denied.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, my hackles flaring. “Try me. I aced constitutional law.”

  Ross looked at me the way my father used to when I sat at the dinner table with my fists clenched and my face set in suicidal defiance over some disgusting pile of overcooked vegetables. It’s me or the beans, you bastard. If you want me to eat that crap, you’ll have to shove it down my throat.

  “I told you she can be like this,” said Sullivan.

  Ross tried to get more comfortable on the new sofa, with little luck. On the other hand, I’d never seen Ross Semple look completely comfortable.

  “We’re on the same side here, Jackie,” he said. “All we had to do was bring you in like they asked us to. We didn’t have to tell you anything more than to show up.”

  I took a breath and closed my eyes.

  “Sorry. I’m just a little tense.”

  “You have a right to be,” said Ross. “If it helps, we’re reopening the Birkson investigation as it relates to the death threat and assault on you. Joe’s got the file. If there’s anything else you can share with us, now’s the time.”

  I had shared almost everything, except the connection to my brother. That one kept sticking in my throat. Until I figured out why, it would just have to stay lodged there.

  “I’ll do anything I can, shy of endangering clients,” I said.

  “In that case, know anyone at the FBI?” said Ross.

  That stopped me.

  “Sort of,” I said, tentatively. “I used to date an agent named Webster Ig. Nice guy, but too normal for my tastes. The breakup was amicable, but I’ve never tested how amicable. Why?”

  “I remember that dork,” said Sullivan. “Maybe he knows why the feds want to pay us a call.”

  That was a good one.

  “Are you kidding? Those guys won’t tell you the sky’s blue if they don’t have to.”

  Ross stood up, rubbing his butt and looking down at the sofa.

  “Good way to keep clients from lingering in your office.”

  “He’ll tell you something,” said Sullivan, also standing. “He had it for you bad.”

  I didn’t dignify that, but I did shake their hands before they left. Ross told me I’d need to come in the following morning and to act surprised. He’d confirm the time.

  “It gives you a day to get your head on straight,” said Sullivan. “And forget the constitutional law. Things are different now.”

  “Not to me,” I said, though I knew what he was trying to do: save me from myself, the definition of a hopeless task.

  13

  I spent the rest of the morning handing over my caseload to a woman named Alicia Brimbeck who worked in the Hempstead office of Burton Lewis’s pro bono criminal practice. Burton was the one, along with Sam Acquillo, responsible for relentlessly converting my working life from the safe (mostly) and lucrative practice of real estate law into criminal defense, a course rarely traversed by any sane attorney.

  After leaving law school, Burton opened a storefront pro bono legal office in New York City. He got into tax law a few years after that when his father died and left him his practice and the building on Wall Street that housed it. And the mansion in Southampton, etc., etc. Since then he’d tripled the family fortune and expanded the criminal practice, still free to qualified clients, throughout the five boroughs and into Nassau County, where Alicia ran the show. For the last several years, his agent in Eastern Suffolk County had been yours truly.

  I loved Burton in a way I’ve never loved anyone else. That he was gay might have had something to do with it. That he was on the Forbes list of the fifty richest people in America had nothing to do with it, since so far he’d cost me a lot of money. That was because he liked to put me on the cases his team tried out of Suffolk County Court, which had become such a common event that it now represented well over half my daily time commitment, and well under half my revenue.

  Real estate law isn’t the same thing as criminal defense. In both cases you’re called a lawyer, but that’s about where the resemblance ends. In the first case, you can make a nice living without ever facing anything more threatening than a zoning appeals board. Since by definition, Burton’s pro bono practice focused on the poor, the lunatic, and the most likely seriously guilty, it was like sliding into an alternative universe, a realm of fear, anger, and institutional cruelty. People who spent their days researching title claims and arguing over pyramid violations and nonconforming setbacks had no business there. And as Burton pulled me deeper into his practice, it was beginning to feel as if the reverse was also true.r />
  Probably more than anything, my attraction to Burton had to do with his essential goodness and stunning lack of pretense. Like all the crazy rich people I knew whose families had been crazy rich for generations, he could be oblivious to the commonplace concerns of normal people, like navigating a supermarket or scoring first-tier tickets to Bruce Springsteen, but you always sensed that his empathy toward fellow humans was completely genuine, immense, and heartfelt.

  And he was adorable, made more so by his unavailability, an opinion probably shared by thousands of women.

  I’d called to say I needed to take a sabbatical from my current responsibilities in order to concentrate on the crisis at hand. After I had described the crisis in as much detail as I could muster, he did the predictable thing.

  “Absolutely. What else can I do to help?”

  “Know anyone at Homeland Security?”

  He was quiet for a moment.

  “I do, though not a person I could easily impose upon.”

  “Just kidding, Burt. I wouldn’t want you to. Unless I end up in Guantánamo, in which case, impose away.”

  “You know their portfolio includes counternarcotics enforcement, in concert with the DEA, the DOD, the FBI, the State Department, and the CIA,” he said.

  “I didn’t exactly, but there’s a lot I don’t know about the federal government. Suffolk County’s byzantine enough.”

  “If your lady pilot was importing from across the border, they’d have a definite interest. The point with them isn’t the drugs, it’s what could come along with.”

  “Like?” I asked.

  “Who knows? Matters of interest to Homeland Security.”

  “Tell me not to start invoking Kafka,” I said.

  “Nothing’s perfect in an imperfect world.”

  “Okay. So we invoke Lao-tzu.”

  The upshot was that Alicia took my cases, temporarily I assured her, freeing me to neglect my real estate clients even more for a while so I could put all my attention on Eugenie Birkson, since it appeared that people attached to Eugenie Birkson had decided to direct so much of their attention toward me.