Bad Bird (v5)

by Chris Knopf

“If anything happens to him, I won’t be the only one with a very bad conscience.”

  Marshall still looked unhappy, but he let me urge Sullivan to help get Sid off the streets. Sullivan gave in after minimum resistance, which was more reflex than genuine opposition. I knew how hard it was from a legal standpoint to impose protective custody, especially when the protected is unwilling. And from experience, these were the people most in need of protection.

  “I can have Alicia Brimbeck represent him,” I told Sullivan. “That’ll go a long way with the judge.”

  It didn’t go that far with Marshall, but he seemed willing to give up the fight. Maybe because I suggested Sid could move in with him, if that made him feel better.

  “You could get the Universal Force to do the dishes.”

  By the time I was in my car and on the way back to the East End, Sullivan had called me to say it was all arranged. He said he’d cashed in a load of chips, implying that I was doing the same. I didn’t care. I just drove along the highway, letting a little wind through the driver’s side window and feeling my heart loosen that traitorous grip.

  19

  It surprises me that I don’t travel very often, given how much I love to fly. I can understand why people are afraid of flying, but the first time I took off from JFK and felt those gigantic jet engines pinning me to my seat, and, as we conquered gravity, saw a detailed miniature of Manhattan laid out beneath me, I almost swooned from the excitement.

  The subsequent month in France was fine, but every day I eagerly awaited liftoff from De Gaulle.

  So when I got the e-mail from Bedard, Vermont, my heart soared in more ways than one.

  Attorney Swaitkowski:

  I am honored that you chose me to assist you in the pursuit of the information you are seeking. I have done my utmost to be worthy of your trust and have diligently investigated with thoroughness and energy. Thus, it is with considerable pleasure and pride that I report success.

  I have found your cabin.

  Sincerely,

  Rajesh

  I wrote him back:

  Rajesh:

  You’re the man. I’m coming up tomorrow. Expect an uptick in sales at the Indian Trading Post.

  Thanks and best wishes,

  Jackie

  I called Ralph Toomey at the East Hampton Airport who put me in touch with Claude James, who not only ran his own air taxi business, but had been a good friend of Eugenie’s. I went through the reservation process, which amounted to calling Claude on his cell phone and getting directions to his hangar, which was two doors down from the Conklins’.

  That’s where the similarity ended. Where Ed’s hangar was a dark, oily cave, Claude’s was like an auto showroom, bright and clean, with a painted floor and all the tools and equipment stored in drawers behind red cabinet doors. His Piper Saratoga dominated the middle of the room, like a gleaming chrome, blue, and white–painted piece of performance art. Claude gleamed as well, or at least his teeth did when he smiled and stuck out his hand.

  I knew he had an accent from the phone call, but I realized which kind when he said, “Allo, mademoiselle. So we go to Canada?”

  “Not all the way. Almost,” I said to him in French.

  “Très bien.”

  Claude was short and broad all over—broad torso, big hands, and a wide, flat nose. A former pilot for Air Canada, he wore a flight jacket, not unlike the phony one I was wearing, and blue jeans over thick legs. He’d grown up in Montreal, but in his early thirties moved away, seduced by a few hundred layovers in New York. Subsequently downsized (maybe that’s why he looked like someone had squashed a taller, thinner version of himself), he bought the Piper and moved to the East End.

  I learned all this before we took off, his loquaciousness further contrasting with the laconic Ed Conklin. I made him switch to English partway through the story. Though I loved the way he spoke, the conversation was too involved for my Parisian French to follow his Canadian accent and vocabulary.

  He let me sit in the copilot’s seat while he used a lawn tractor to tow the Piper out of the hangar. The interior of the aircraft was just as clean and beautifully maintained as the exterior. The only distraction being the not-so-subtle smell of Gauloises, which always reminded me, in an oddly pleasant way, of horse shit. And even more pleasantly of dark wood and polished granite, café noir, and the steamy squeal of espresso machines.

  I sat quietly while Claude flicked switches and turned dials on the instrument panel, watched the propellers spin up to the appropriate RPMs, and radioed on 122.7 that we were about to take off. Two other pilots in the vicinity rogered that, and after a quick taxi over to the runway, we were airborne.

  This was maybe my third ride in a small prop, and again I kicked myself for not doing it more. I loved the way it swung up into the air, the dips and surges as we climbed, and the tight banking as he aimed the nose at Northern New England.

  “Yippee,” I said.

  “You enjoying this?”

  “Immensely.”

  “Good for me. Much better than the white-knucklers. I’m always afraid they don’t get to the little bag in time.”

  It was even more fun to make out familiar landmarks on the South Fork and Shelter Island than to see the Empire State Building. The villages looked smaller than they should have in relation to the open and wooded terrain, and the bays looked bigger. White powerboats moved below us, their wakes drawing a white V on the calm surface. The sailboats threw far less of a wake, but their sails were luminous and elegantly tipped toward the east. Moments later we were crossing the vineyards of the North Fork and zinging out over Long Island Sound, which glistened in pale blue, like Webster Ig’s eyes, reflecting the early morning sun.

  “If I’d known about this earlier I might have skipped law school,” I said. “I could have been the other notorious lady pilot of the Hamptons.”

  “Did you know Eugenie?” he asked.

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  I told him I was the last person she saw, skipping gingerly over the details, which seemed appropriate given our current disposition. I also told him we were heading up to Burlington as part of an investigation into her crash. I apologized for not telling him more, but like everyone in the world, he didn’t think I would, or necessarily should. I asked him to be accurate with his flight logs, but to keep our ultimate destination to himself.

  “Consider it done. Anything to help the cause. I miss that nutty woman.”

  “You liked her.”

  “Oh, yes. I like anyone that cheerful. And a very good pilot. She flew that Cessna like an extension of her own body.”

  “Do you know anyone who didn’t like her?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Not among the pilots or ground people. I didn’t know her other friends and acquaintances. Both Ed and her father had been in scrapes with the law, but I think a long time ago, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  The contours of the Connecticut shoreline began to look like more than hazy gray lumps as we approached. The first identifiable structures were power stations, one to the west in New Haven, and the nuclear plant well to the east, near New London. We went between, over a lighthouse at the head of the Connecticut River, which we followed all the way to Hartford, where Claude veered to the east to stay clear of air traffic around Bradley Field, then readjusted our course to head straight for Burlington.

  “Ever been to Three Creeks Field?” I asked him.

  “No. But I’ve been to smaller and bumpier in tighter spaces. It looks like a nice little facility.”

  I was torn between grilling him more about Eugenie and just staring at the terrain below, which I was encouraged to see nearly completely covered in trees. I knew there were buildings down there as well, but it’s astonishing how much of New England is forest. And not always so. It was nearly stripped bare for farming in the eighteenth century. I also loved to see the stone walls from that altitude, which in April were still fairly evident, betrayi
ng the fields, village streets, and foundations of an earlier time, back before the settlers knew America actually had some very rich soil to the west that you could farm without the pleasure of chopping down trees or digging up tons of stumps and boulders.

  “Did you know any of Eugenie’s customers?” I asked him.

  “No. Names of customers is one thing we pilots don’t eagerly share.”

  “How about Benson MacAvoy? He was a regular of hers.”

  “Not had the privilege.”

  A little short of two hours after leaving East Hampton, Claude pointed down at Three Creeks, which looked like someone had snipped off a piece of two-lane highway and dropped it into the middle of a big lawn. He circled a few times, then dusted off the bottom of the Saratoga with the tops of the encircling pine trees and set the plane down with hardly a tremor.

  “Bravo, capitaine,” I said.

  “Merci beaucoup.”

  After the props stopped, we climbed out over the wings and I tried without success to use my cell phone, which explained the phone booth. I called Rajesh.

  “Hello, sir. I’m here at the airfield,” I said.

  “And I am here at the Trading Post. I will be there in ten minutes.”

  While we waited, I educated Claude on the surrounding flora, in some cases using the Latin name, or what I thought I remembered it to be from Dr. Johnson’s itemized description.

  “Botany a hobby of yours?”

  I shook my head.

  “E-mailing.”

  Rajesh showed up in a tiny Toyota pickup truck, which made me wince. I owned one just like it that I’d inherited from Potato Pete, and like him, I managed to destroy it on Brick Kiln Road. The difference was mine wasn’t an accident, and not my fault, and I lived to tell about. That’s not why I winced. I imagined squeezing into the little passenger compartment with Claude and Rajesh and then suffering the charms of the little truck’s suspension system as we drove over pitted dirt roads.

  I was spared.

  Rajesh jumped out of the truck and shook our hands. He was a tall guy with deep-set eyes and thick gray hair. He wore a black and yellow checked wool coat over a fire-engine-red flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots. I started the process of overthanking him, but he seemed more concerned about my sneakers and Claude’s black shoes.

  “How’re you set for walking?” he asked. “It’s not very far, but there are rocks.”

  “We’re walking?” I asked, deeply relieved.

  It turned out Claude’s shoes were made to suit both boardroom and hiking trail, and my sneaks were more than up to the challenge. There were rocks, but the path we took was mostly dirt covered in leaves and the needles from the Picea mariana.

  It was still morning, and the air was New England crisp and clear, which I noted to Claude.

  “That’s Québécois air you’re referring to,” said Claude. “We flew the whole way into a light but steady northwesterly breeze.”

  “You’re awfully good to be doing this, Rajesh,” I called ahead. “Can I call you Rajesh? I don’t know if that’s your first name or last.”

  “Please do,” he said, looking back at me as we walked. “My last name you wouldn’t be able to pronounce.”

  During our brief e-mail exchange, I’d told him I needed to find the cabin as part of an investigation into a fatal plane crash. I acknowledged the seemingly remote connection, and asked his forgiveness for not explaining further. He took it all remarkably in stride.

  “And I like your shirt and jacket combo,” I said. “It looks great.”

  “How else could I be your colorful native guide?”

  I heard Claude chuckle, the way Frenchmen do, deep in his throat.

  “How did you find this place?” I asked Rajesh, after we’d walked for a while.

  “On the Internet.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “That is where I got the names of real estate agents in the area who sell or rent out cabins like this. Then I visit them and show them the picture. On the third try I hit pay dirt.”

  About ten minutes later, the trail lost its definition as we entered a crowded stand of hemlocks, which will notoriously kill off ground cover by creating a canopy light can barely penetrate. But through the dead lower branches it was easy to see the rear of the cabin where it stood next to a still pond.

  We cleared the remaining distance in a few minutes. The three of us stood in a line and looked around.

  “Was it a rental or a sale?” I asked.

  “Rental.”

  “You don’t happen to know the name of the renter?”

  He reached in his front jeans pocket as he walked and pulled out a piece of paper, which he handed back to me. It was a Xerox copy of a real estate listing. Included was a black-and-white photo of the cabin, taken from a different angle but undeniably the same building. Someone, presumably Rajesh, had scribbled some notes and phone numbers in the margins. And a name.

  Matthew Birkson Jr.

  I sat down on the ground and stared at the paper in my hand. Claude asked me if I was all right, and I said I was just a little tired and needed a moment to rest. The two of them joined me on the ground, waiting for the next thing the crazy lady lawyer had in mind.

  Whatever mind she had left.

  I whispered the name Matthew Birkson Jr. over and over, as if that would tease the explanation out of my scattered thoughts.

  “What the hell,” I said out loud.

  “Don’t know, mademoiselle,” said Claude. “You tell us.”

  I looked at them as if they were parties to every wild conjecture racing through my mind. They took it cheerfully, like Eugenie would probably do.

  Then I stood up and walked over to the cabin. I looked in the window, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the change in light. All I could see was a bed and a chest of drawers. I moved to another window. More of the same. By then, Claude and Rajesh were there looking with me. We agreed that only bedrooms and probably a common bath occupied that part of the cabin. We went around to the front and repeated the process. To one side of the front door was a dining room. To the other, a seating area in front of a fireplace. Through partially drawn curtains, I could see a coffee table on which paperwork was stacked and some comfy-looking overstuffed chairs. That was about it. I knocked on the front door. Nothing. Then I tried the doorknob. Locked.

  Moment of truth.

  “Say, boys, why don’t you take a little walk around the pond. Check out the wildflowers and compare notes on Montreal and Mumbai.”

  That confused them at first, understandably. So I did my best to explain.

  “As a lawyer, I can advise you that if someone was, for example, going to break into a private dwelling without the authority of a warrant or the sanction of the local police, since she’s been too busy to arrange all that, and you had no knowledge of this, you couldn’t be held as an accomplice.”

  Then I did one of those exaggerated winks and shooed them off the front porch. They readily complied.

  My friend Sam likes to think he isn’t bragging when he tells me how he cracks locks with a bobby pin, a penlight, and tweezers pulled out of a Swiss Army knife. I could no sooner do that than fly to the moon. Instead I got a rock out of the woods and used it to break a window. A few moments later I was inside, after forcing my hands into a pair of surgical gloves I’d brought along in the faint hope of this very occasion.

  The interior of the cabin was far more refined than the outside. Bordering on luxurious. The walls were Sheetrocked and painted, the trim a varnished hardwood, the floors dark-stained oak and the furnishings a type of Wild West chic favored by California billionaires and decorators in Telluride and Park City, Utah.

  I found the kitchen and rifled through all the cabinets and drawers. Everything looked new and rarely used, and expensive. I knew this because everything in my kitchen was exactly the opposite. The oven was clean as a whistle, but the microwave showed a fair amount of splatter. The refrigerator held only individually
wrapped slices of American cheese, half a quart of thoroughly decayed milk, pizza, and beer.

  Men, I thought, as convinced as a tracker crouched over a pile of deer stool.

  I checked the bedrooms and the first-floor bath, and found more of the same. Dirty shower, shaving cream, and the absence of face towels. Upstairs was nearly the same, though the shower had a bottle of expensive conditioner and a pink razor, another telltale. So, all boys downstairs, at least one girl on the second floor.

  Back downstairs, I checked out the living room. I went right to the stack of paper on the coffee table. It was mostly printouts of Power-Point presentations. Monotonous and jargon-filled pages of bullet points that made no sense to me whatsoever. But I persisted with one of them until it became clear that the presenters were describing a type of mini-surface-to-air missile that they claimed with barely restrained enthusiasm a child could carry in his school backpack and subsequently use to take down any low-flying aircraft in the dead of night.

  I stuck the papers under my arm and searched the rest of the room, finding only a few cocktail glasses, one unwashed wineglass (with a lipstick smudge), and a stack of DVDs. So girl or girls were allowed on the first floor for social events.

  There was a DVD player connected to a wide-screen TV, but no cable. Neither telephones nor computers, or even a place to plug them in. There was no basement, but I found a utility room that housed the HVAC and electrical panel. I’d put in my time as a real estate lawyer crawling around cobwebbed basements looking for proof of the mechanicals claimed in the listing, so I knew what a phone or cable hookup looked like. There weren’t any.

  I spent the rest of the time finding a screwdriver, some screws, and a piece of plywood I could attach to the outside of the windowpane I’d busted through. Then I went to find my international expeditionary force, which was sitting next to the pond, engaged in voluble commentary on the virtues of their respective homelands.

  Both adroitly avoided noticing the stack of white paper clutched under my arm.

  “Let’s lose this joint,” I said, which neither of them understood explicitly, but they got the inference.