Bad Bird (v5)

by Chris Knopf

  “So it’s industrial espionage or something else?” I asked.

  “If the receivers of the information have nothing to do with their country’s defense apparatus, it’s industrial espionage. If they do, it’s a breach of our national security. Treason is an old-fashioned word, but that’s what it is.”

  “So nobody at the DHS, FBI, or NTSB thinks it was drugs?” I asked.

  “Nobody. The people on the receiving end of those messages are only interested in things that either fly through the air or blow things up, or both.”

  I fiddled with my tea, less than eager to siphon off the dregs that had settled like an aromatic wad of crud at the bottom of the cup.

  “I don’t suppose your friend knew much about the crash itself,” I said. “The NTSB is calling it an accident.”

  “That’s just a smoke screen. Those planes don’t spontaneously self-destruct. The family maintained it, so the conjecture is sabotage committed in the course of her travels. There are any number of ways you could rig a failure. The favorite is replacing an oil line with something made of a material that breaks down in the presence of hydrocarbons, either aviation fuel or lubricating oil. Strong enough initially to get you in the air and fly for a while, but ultimately failing under heat and pressure. Segments of polyester tube saturated with oil were found in the wreckage, so it’s the likely scenario.”

  I realized I was so thrust forward in my seat I was in danger of tipping over the table. I sat back and crossed my arms over my chest.

  “You don’t know how it feels to hear that, Web. It’s so good to know I’m not crazy.”

  “You are crazy, but you can also be right.”

  “Why the hell don’t the cops in Southampton have that same information? What can it hurt just to share a little? Aren’t we on the same team?”

  “We should be, but we’re definitely not. For most of my colleagues, preserving the prerogatives of their organizational frame of reference is much more important than serving the interests of the nation as a whole.”

  “That’s brilliant,” I said.

  Makoto came over and asked if we wanted more tea. He looked at me when he did this in a way I interpreted as protective. I told him yes, and thanked him for being so gracious to my old friend. He bowed and I bowed and that was that. As Makoto left I noticed two of his employees, who’d been standing a few feet away, moved away with him.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” said Ig.

  “About what?”

  “I told you when we broke up that I didn’t want to be friends. That was foolish. I want to be friends.”

  “Enlightenment. That’s what happens when you study literature.”

  “Self-preservation. You’re going to call me periodically and make your presence felt no matter what I do. I might as well write you into the script and enjoy the play.”

  I told him how happy that made me, on a variety of levels, and also that I had a boyfriend that I was mostly sure about–to get that out of the way before I gave him a kiss on the cheek. The moment triggered a few memories, courtesy of the smell and taste of him, which I did a great job of suppressing.

  There wasn’t much else he could tell me about the domestic spying case beyond the fact that they hadn’t fingered a perp for any of it, though they had a list of suspects. He encouraged me to come forward with anything I learned, and I assured him I would.

  Back out in the daylight, he put on his suit jacket and sunglasses, hugged me, and disappeared back into the mists and shifting sands of American criminal justice and domestic security.

  Bolted into my office once again, I set up the laptop and checked e-mail. There was a message from jjloveplants.com. I bit.

  “Thank you for your complimentary messages regarding my botanical skills, which must come highly overrated,” the message read. “I apologize for the delay in writing you back. I have been very busy grading student papers.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, “tough life.”

  “And the recent death of my mother caused me to return to California for several days,” the message went on.

  “Great. Nice one, Jackie.”

  “In regard to the photo you sent me, I’m afraid I can’t pinpoint the exact location it was taken in.”

  “That’s what I figured,” I said to the screen.

  “But it’s either East Farmingville or Bedard, Vermont.”

  “Really.”

  “I’d start with Bedard. The Picea mariana (black spruce, or swamp spruce) likes swampy conditions, which are more prevalent there.”

  He went on to justify his analysis by listing about a hundred other species of flower and plant, with their Latin names, noting whether they were indigenous or imported, sturdy or endangered, welcome or invasive–along with possible remedies, including the introduction of benign insects. I read as much as I could bear, out of respect for his efforts, wrote him back to declare that he’d answered every question I could ever imagine asking, extended my sympathies on the death of his mother, hit Send, then clicked on MapQuest.

  Bedard was a swampy, lake-infested town on the Canadian border about twenty-four miles northeast of Burlington. It had a few motels, lots of cabins to rent, a store a guy named Rajesh called The Indian Trading Post, which I appreciated, the usual car dealerships and repair shops, and a landing field called Three Creeks that claimed a smooth runway, a phone booth, and a wind sock. I e-mailed Rajesh and asked him if he could identify the cabin photographed in an attached jpeg, and if not, who in town might.

  Then I roamed around online until my eyes started to blur. So I took a break and got out the manila envelope with Sam’s boxes and arrows. Left to my own devices, I wouldn’t have done these schematics, but now that I had them, what the heck. I started filling in the new pieces of information, using some of his abbreviations and some of my own invention, which were about three times longer. Then I added a bunch more boxes, which looked more like loose rectangles, or trapezoids, and drew in some arrows that were too curvy to be real arrows, so just to improve my artistic execution, I drew some more, which I then had to erase. This caused me to erase some of Sam’s work as well, which I had a little trouble reconstituting. I did the best I could, until I was distracted by a squiggle I’d drawn that looked like the head of a French poodle, so I drew in the rest of the dog and had it say, “Look at all these chicken scratches. But where are the chickens? I love to chase those noisy chickens!” Then I tried to write that in French, but not sure of the translation, went online and spent an hour trying to divine the French equivalent of “chicken scratches.” The best I could achieve was coups de griffe de poulet, which really didn’t work as the right expression, so I spent another half hour on a site that compared French and English idioms, where the closest I could get to chicken scratches was pattes de mouche, which literally translated as “legs of the fly.” This snapped me out of it, causing me to abandon the manila envelope entirely, stuffing it back into my briefcase before making a fresh cup of coffee and lighting a cigarette over which to enjoy the invigorating aroma.

  That left me free to do what came more naturally, which was to sit and grind over whatever facts, feelings, and unsupported supposition happened to be churning away in my mind, without the aid of technical drawings. Unfortunately, what facts I had were highly unquestionable, and what feelings I had were totally compromised by underlying emotional storms that kept sloshing into the deliberations like boarding seas over the stern of a sinking ship.

  That left unsupported supposition, one of my comfort zones.

  I decided to build some support under my primary supposition by flopping on the sofa with the copy of Eugenie’s log left by Ross and Sullivan. Not unlike Sam’s boxes and arrows, it was filled with numbingly dry and lifeless information, data points that were supposed to tell you something if you were inclined to put in the necessary effort, which I couldn’t immediately bring myself to do. There was no record of Bedard or East Farmingville, or any other towns north of Bennington, Vermon
t. I did notice on her passenger lists, however, the frequent presence of Benson MacAvoy, which wasn’t a surprise, given what he’d told me.

  Most of the trips with MacAvoy were to Connecticut, to places like Stratford and Brainard Field in Hartford, places I’d never been to but might have driven past. There was nothing odd about any of it. MacAvoy was a political consultant who worked out of the Hamptons, and Eugenie was the operator of an air taxi. They knew each other well.

  Come on, Jackie, I said to myself. Connect the boxes.

  Benson knew Eugenie, who knew Billy, who knew Benson. Ergo, Billy knew Eugenie, confirmed by Ed Conklin. So why hadn’t he said so?

  Because he’s an ex-con who doesn’t say anything he doesn’t have to. Because his wife was there making sure he said as little as possible. I had no real leverage, and I hardly tried. I couldn’t do it. He wasn’t just another witness, another source. He was a specter out of the nightmare past.

  I forced myself to think through what to do next.

  I needed to know where Billy worked. His wife certainly wouldn’t tell me. Sullivan could get it from Billy’s parole records, but that would open a can of worms I couldn’t afford right then. Maybe I was thinking too hard, so I wasn’t thinking at all.

  I booted up the laptop and brought up my last search for Billy O’Dwyer, which Randall’s software had automatically saved. One of the features that made the software clearly extra-illegal was the ability to capture people’s social security number, the key that unlocks your entire life. It took a few clicks to narrow in on Billy’s number, and then I just requested the works.

  Buried in the middle of the vital statistics, credit histories, prison records and parole check-ins, visits to the walk-in clinic in Port Jeff, car loans, college applications (pre-prison, which I passed over as quickly as I could), and voter registration was the name of a single employer, Harrison & Flynn TeleSales, Coram, Long Island.

  It was only midday, so I encountered little traffic on the way up to Coram, a town just south of Port Jefferson. I drove with the radio off to aid concentration, which I found easier to achieve in the car than in most other places. I didn’t know what this said about my driving habits. I hadn’t run into anyone yet, though a few had run into me.

  This was also a good way to keep my rational self sequestered from my emotional self, which had done nothing but undermine any clarity I might have had regarding my brother, and thus deserved to be banished.

  Instead, I set my mind on the plan, which like many of my plans extended only to the moment I knocked on someone’s door or strode unheralded into their reception area, as I did that day at Harrison & Flynn TeleSales.

  “My name is Jacqueline Swaitkowski. I’m an attorney and officer of the court,” I told the receptionist, handing her my Officer of the Court card. “I need to speak with someone in management, and without delay.”

  This had the predictable effect. She took off her headset and immediately left her post to fetch someone. There was a small seating area with a coffee table covered in telemarketing trade journals. I stood and waited.

  A little guy of indeterminate age, with thin curly hair encircling a bald crown, a polyester shirt, and pants that buckled over his bulging midriff, rushed into the reception area, followed by the receptionist. He held my card. I stuck out my hand and used his grip to move him out of the receptionist’s earshot.

  “I’m here to speak with William O’Dwyer,” I said in soft, urgent tones. “He may be reluctant, but you must insist. He knows who I am. It would be in his and your company’s best interest to cooperate.”

  “This is pretty out of the norm,” he said.

  “Do you have a conference room I can use?”

  “We do. Should I be calling my lawyer?”

  “This is a matter solely concerning Mr. O’Dwyer. If you want it to become the concern of Harrison and Flynn as well, that’s your prerogative. Though let me warn you, it’ll be far easier to engage with me now than to later un-engage with this situation down the line, which you will undoubtedly want to do.”

  I knew little of the art of telemarketing, but I was betting it involved a quick reading of a situation, snap decisions, and the ability to move on to more lucrative prospects without looking back.

  “Follow me,” he said, and I did.

  The conference room was surprisingly well-appointed. It had a nice conference table and an original work of art over a sideboard where you could pour coffee from an elegant silver decanter. At the center of the table was a black phone that looked like a little flying saucer, with several smaller saucers connected by black wires placed on a leather blotter at each seat. There were no windows, but a big flat-screen monitor filled much of one wall, and a whiteboard was on the wall at the opposite end of the room. The carpet was deep pile, and fresh air flowed down from vents in the ceiling.

  The chair I sat in was appropriately comfortable, which mattered little as the minutes ticked off. It wasn’t hard to conjure the hundred bad things that could be happening on the other side of the closed door. But there was nothing to do but wait and feel my body go rigid with frustrated anticipation.

  Then suddenly Billy was there, his pale cheeks slightly rosy, his eyes darker in the sockets than I remembered them, until I realized he wasn’t wearing his glasses, but rather carried them in his hand. His red hair was slicked back with some type of product, and he wore a white shirt unbuttoned at the top and a tie loose around the collar.

  “I can’t talk to you without Ivan,” he said, standing at the open door. “My lawyer. I promised Kathy.”

  I tapped the blotter next to me.

  “Sit down, Billy. I’m your sister.”

  He stayed standing, but the rose on his cheeks turned a brilliant red. I wondered how often my own cheeks betrayed me in the same way.

  “I actually wondered about that the last time,” he said. “The hair and the name.”

  “I married a Swaitkowski. He’s dead. Come on, sit down.”

  He pulled out the chair and sat down, and then put on his glasses.

  “I can see it now,” he said. “Why the lawyer act?”

  “Not an act. I’m an attorney. I couldn’t face you as just your sister. I meant to, but when I saw you, I choked. I apologize.”

  “I don’t blame you. I might’ve done the same.”

  “I know a lot more now than I did before. I need to ask some tough questions. If you want Ivan present, that’s your call. But he’s liable to prevent you from saying things I need you to say. You just have to trust that it stops with me. Even though you have zero basis for that trust.”

  “I don’t know. You’re my sister. That should mean something. And I’ve got nothing to hide. I did my time and I’ve been the most law-abiding citizen in the country since then. Not even a parking ticket. And don’t ever get stuck behind me on the road, because I always drive below the speed limit.”

  As I sat there with him, most of the thoughts I’d always imagined sharing with him evaporated. The cocky, unreachable boy wonder of my childhood memory was now a slightly overweight middle-aged guy with a soft handshake and the undeniable air of resignation.

  “You knew Eugenie Birkson, didn’t you? You wrote to her from prison.”

  He smiled and shook his head.

  “I knew her brother, Matt. I tried to reach him, but she’s the one who wrote me back, telling me she didn’t know where to forward my letters. She apologized for opening his mail, but I was glad to have someone on the other end respond. She’s the only one who did.”

  I remembered pulling letters from Sanger Prison out of the mailbox the first few years he was gone, but then they stopped. I felt my throat begin to tighten again, but I swallowed the lump and pressed on.

  “Did you stay in touch?” I asked.

  “I haven’t heard from her since she hooked up with Ed Conklin, which wasn’t her fault. I just didn’t feel like writing anymore. Nothing to tell. But I was glad for how that all worked out. Conklin will never
know how much he did for me.”

  As he spoke he fiddled with his glasses, which he’d taken off again and put on the conference room table. My father used to do the same thing, something I’d forgotten until that moment. I wondered how many other phantoms of my past knowing Billy better would reveal.

  “I talked to Benson MacAvoy, another associate from the day, apparently,” I said.

  “Brazen Bennie, we called him, which he was.”

  “He said you were best buds.”

  “We were. When Bennie was around, girls were automatic.”

  “That was never a problem for you, either, as I recall.”

  “You were too little to know anything. He called you carrottop and you liked it. Though he pissed off Mom. Too much of a wiseass.”

  “I also talked to Clinton Andrews,” I said, or rather blurted. Billy shut his eyes and let his head fall slightly to the side. I moved closer to him. “I’m terribly sorry to bring this up, but you should know the guy’s a human marvel. He’s fitter, healthier, more robust and frankly, randier than guys half his age.”

  He opened his eyes again and nodded.

  “I know. Kathy told me. We met at group therapy, so I’d already told her everything I could think of. Before we got married she had me investigated, just to check my story. Isn’t that beautiful? Trust but verify.”

  “Did she really know everything?” I asked.

  He looked up from the table and nodded.

  “It wouldn’t work otherwise,” he said. “Even a single secret could kill it off. Would kill me off.”

  “Even a secret that might exonerate you?” I asked.

  He squinted at me as he had on the porch up in Port Jeff, searching with his eyes and his mind.

  “Nothing can do that,” he said.

  “Clinton said there were two other guys there that night. He doesn’t remember anything beyond that, but he’s sure of it.”