The Killdeer Connection

by Tom Swyers

  “Need any help?” McNeal asked.

  “No, we’re good,” the man said.

  “David, everything okay here?”

  “Yeah, Pete.”

  “You know where to reach me if you need help.”

  “Thanks, we’re almost done here,” David said.

  With that, McNeal drove off. David got the full-size spare mounted and began to hand-tighten the lug nuts.

  “I could have done this by myself, you know,” the man said. “We’re quite capable.”

  David looked up at him. “Who is we? You got someone else in the car?” he asked.

  “Blacks.”

  “You keep dealing me the race card. I’m not interested. You’re dressed as a professional. Maybe you have clients; maybe you’re going to your office. Either way, dirt and grime on you is not good. It works for me, given how I’m dressed at the moment. Do you think I’m some kind of racist or something by the way I’m dressed? Is that what’s going on?”

  “Are you a racist?”

  David looked up at the man in disbelief. He was staring down at him, poker face and all. “Let me tell you a story. My great-great-grandfather fought for the Union during the Civil War. Volunteered in 1861 for a three-year tour of duty.” David looked away, picked up the lug wrench and tightened each nut. ”He survived Fredericksburg, the Battle of Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mill, Charles City Crossroads, the Second Battle of Bull Run, the Battle of South Mountain, Antietam, and Gettysburg.” David looked up. The man had his arms crossed and was staring down the street. “From what I can gather, the mortality rate for his regiment was over twenty percent.” David began to lower the car. “In May 1864, one week before his tour of duty was going to end, he was captured.” When the car was on the ground, David pulled the jack out. “He was placed in Andersonville prison, where he survived while thirteen thousand men died around him.” David reached for the lug wrench and began to tighten each lug nut with all of his strength, grunting as he finished each one. When he was done, he stood up and faced the man. “He was released near the end of the war and returned to central Pennsylvania, where his entire family had resided for more than a century. He was rail-thin and wearing only a gunnysack for clothing.” David picked up the jack, put it in the trunk, then slammed the lid.

  “What’s your point?” the man asked. “Do you resent blacks because your great-great-granddad suffered so much during the war?”

  David found the chrome center cap and pounded it on with his fist. “My great-great-grandfather didn’t have children until after the war.” David then picked up the lug wrench, faced the man, and smiled ear to ear. “The point is that he volunteered to serve, and if he hadn’t survived the fight for your ancestors, I wouldn’t be here to fix your flat.”

  The man stroked his chin, shook his head, and thought for a second. “I suppose you want me to thank you and your family.”

  David knew how to tell a person to go to hell in such a way that he’d have a pleasant trip. “You’re free to do that if you’d like.”

  The man climbed into the car, shut the door, and rolled down the window. “Have a good day, sir,” he said before driving off.

  David stood there in the middle of the road, watching the man drive toward his house before turning right for the highway. As he walked back to the house, he realized he still had the man’s lug wrench in his hand. Despite David’s fears, the man had not hurt him. By keeping the wrench, David was the only one who might have committed a crime that afternoon.

  SIX

  David hated the idea of returning to Harold Salar’s apartment, but he had no choice. Given his relationship with Chief McNeal that went back to childhood, McNeal’s suspicion of him seemed out of place, perhaps even comical. It began to make sense only with the appearance of the man with the flat tire. Clearly, he had been from another law-enforcement agency, and he was either working with McNeal or conducting a separate investigation that McNeal knew about. In David’s mind, the flat tire was either an unfortunate incident that occurred during surveillance or a ruse of some kind. Maybe it was an accident that transformed into a ruse on the fly.

  In any event, David believed that Harold’s apartment would again become the focus of the investigation. He needed to get there before the law returned with another search warrant. Without Harold’s laptop, he had to locate anything that might be crucial to his defense, might help identify the real killer, or might aid him in his case against Helmsley Oil. On top of it all, David had to inventory Harold’s assets, anyway, as part of the estate work. The first place to look for that information was always in the decedent’s personal papers.

  The next afternoon, David was again wiggling and jiggling his shiny gold key to open the door to Apartment 1B. He pushed the door open and let the miasma of death rush out. Prepared to deal with the fumes, he returned to his Mustang to get the fans he’d brought from home.

  A cool shower started to fall, offering a brief respite from the unusual heat wave. David wished he could move the shower inside Harold’s apartment for a few minutes. He stood to the side of the entrance holding two box fans, one in each hand, and found a pocket of fresh air. After inhaling deeply in rapid succession, he held his breath to enter ground zero.

  There was a bank of light switches to his right, and he managed to flip them on with a hand that held one fan. Streams of light shot across the ceiling from an unseen lamp—like a sunrise over the mountains of crap that occupied the room. David quickly moved down the aisle and reached the spot where he found Harold. There was a dent in the wallboard where Harold’s head had been, and there were streaks of blood below it. He took a hard right and ventured down an aisle he remembered. From the outside of the apartment, David guessed that this pathway would lead to the large living-room picture window, and he was right.

  David groped for the cord to open the drapes. A hazy glow drifted into the room through the dirty window as the pulley squealed with each yank of the cord. David could reach the double-hung window that stood in front of him; a second one on the other side of the picture window was blocked. He put a fan down and tried to open the sash lock with his thumb. It was stuck, the brass finish corroding over the mechanism. David put down the other fan and used both thumbs to force the lock open. He was quickly running out of breath.

  Once he got the lock open, David squatted and pressed upward to push the sash open and draw in fresh air. It was painted shut. He pushed up again. Nothing. Pounding on the sash edges to loosen it, he felt like a desperate man trapped inside a car sinking to the bottom of a lake. The painted seams cracked, and the window budged—then finally, it yielded, slowly groaning open while it drained all of David’s strength. He reached for the screen and jerked it up, then stuck his head out the window, breathing heavily as the raindrops ran down his face. Taking one final gulp of air, he ducked back inside.

  After locating an outlet, he mounted the fan in the window and turned it on full blast—forcing the foul air outside while drawing in fresh air from the open entrance door. Loose papers throughout the apartment rustled in the breeze. David felt dizzy. Retracing his steps back to the entrance, he raced outside to take in some fresh air and scrub his hands over his face in the rain.

  That was when he spied the navy-blue Crown Victoria slowly driving down the street, passing the parking-lot entrance, and heading down toward the mountains. It had chrome center caps, not hubcaps, just like the strange man’s car. David knew time was not on his side. He reached into his pocket and snapped on a pair of white-latex gloves, took another deep breath, and headed back into Apartment 1B.

  David picked up the other box fan by the window and then followed the aisle that intersected in front of Harold’s spot, going in the other direction. The path split, and he could see the exposed side of a refrigerator in one direction and the bedroom in the other. He walked into the bedroom, turned on the lights, wrestled the window open, popped open the screen, hung his head out the window for fresh air, then ducked back inside to fin
d an outlet and mount the fan in the window. After turning the fan on high, he waited until his breath gave out before inhaling to test the air. It was tolerable.

  That gave him time to search for his quarry. Aside from the trash, a single unmade bed occupied one half of the room; the other part held an old oak desk that had three drawers on either side of a center kneehole. He turned on the brass desk lamp. The top of the desk was busy but organized; it was the cleanest place in the apartment.

  David bent over and yanked open the bottom left-hand drawer to the desk, removing it completely. Reaching back in the empty cavity, he felt around on the carpet for something that would reveal the compartment underneath. His fingers found a seam in the carpeting. He took out his car keys and pried underneath it. A compartment opened up, and David was surprised to feel the laptop that sat inside. He almost hugged it when it emerged along with its power cord. If I got the laptop, what did Pete find? Harold had two computers? Why? He slid the drawer back into the desk, put the laptop into a bag, and walked quickly to his Mustang. The Crown Victoria was nowhere in sight. He opened the car door and hid the laptop under the front seat.

  Then he went back to the apartment and headed for the kitchen. There was an overflowing garbage can in the cabinet under the sink. David held his breath again while he pulled the can out and tied the top of the trash bag. Mouse droppings silhouetted the space where the garbage can had stood. In the refrigerator, he found spoiled take-out food in mottled Styrofoam containers and a quart of sour milk. The sink overflowed with dirty dishes, but he managed to crack the drain with his fingers. A cockroach scurried out of sight in the bottom of the sink. He poured the lumpy milk down the drain and turned the faucet on full blast to flush it with water. Blue mold marked the surface of a rancid block of cheddar cheese that sat on the Formica counter. He placed that science experiment in a plastic grocery bag and knotted it.

  The kitchen table was covered in grocery-store flyers from Price Chopper and Hannaford, utility bills from National Grid, a coupon from David’s Beauty Salon, and editions of every petroleum-trade magazine ever published. David spotted a box of trash bags there. Harold had not even opened the carton, so he used the first two to empty out the refrigerator and freezer. Then he hauled the bags to the bin in the parking lot. It may have helped the smell in the apartment—a little.

  Returning to the bedroom, David froze at the sight before him. He had not seen them before, mentally blinded by his mission to retrieve the laptop computer Harold’s letter had mentioned. But there they were—all of them—looking at him. Looking through him! Hundreds of curious, playful eyes stared at David. Some were hidden by the ubiquitous trash mountains. But the eyes were all over the room, all the way to the ceiling. In each case, black-dotted pupils surged against the backdrop of their reddish-amber irises.

  Surrounding David on every wall were photos and illustrations of various sizes of a single species of bird: the killdeer. They were flying, nesting, swimming, standing, hopping, or running on the ground, proudly showing off their downy-white breasts and underbellies. The adults were slender and lanky, with long, pointed tails and wide wings. The two bold, black bands around their collars were like ribbons of honor. Brownish-tan plumage covered their top halves like perfectly tailored suit jackets. When in flight, the tops of their outer wings were black with a white stripe running down the middle but totally white on the underside. Their legs and feet were flesh-colored, and their tail feathers and heads were a symmetrical assemblage of white, black, and brown contrasts. As they flew, a bright-orange rump patch revealed itself. They were beautiful!

  David tried to focus on the desk. It was the logical place to begin his search for assets. He saw a large, empty manila file folder on top, with Expert Opinion written on the tab. There was a baseball scorebook, opened to the page of the last game the team had played that summer. Written in pencil with large strokes, the numbers 1 and 2 were barely legible, followed by a line that fell clear off the bottom of the page. He started looking through the largest pile of papers on the desk. All of it had to do with the killdeer: more pictures, nesting habits, habitat, distraction techniques, population information, migration patterns, and similarity between the sexes. He read as much as he could, recalling that Harold had said in his letter to always follow the killdeer. But follow where, and why? According to one report on the desk, killdeers lived all over the United States, and they weren’t an endangered species, not even close. So, why the fascination with the killdeer? David didn’t have a clue.

  David pulled open the center drawer. It was packed with pens that didn’t work, chewed pencils on life support, and fossilized erasers. There were dozens of slim notebooks with clear-vinyl business-card holders that contained twelve cards per sheet, six on the front and six on the rear, neatly organized like a prized baseball-card collection. There were also stacks of business cards bound by rubber bands. He tried to open a stack, but the rubber band fell apart at the sides, and a piece on the top stuck to the card like a dried, shriveled worm.

  He opened a side drawer crammed with bank passbooks of all different colors. Visions of large bank holdings danced through David’s head. He eagerly started to open them. When he was all done, he counted 103 passbooks from a variety of banks in different states, all of them carrying amounts less than a few thousand dollars, all of them closed. Many had been closed decades ago. David wondered how many toasters and clock radios Harold must have acquired by opening the accounts.

  The bottom drawers were the largest. Inside one, David found credit-card statements and dead-check registers going back decades, but nothing recent. The other large drawer was filled with twenty years of financial statements from various brokerage accounts, but again, nothing recent. The remaining drawers bulged with petroleum-industry research papers Harold had written over the years.

  Shoving through the trash, David managed to reach a closet and open it. The space was packed with file cabinets, mounds of clothing and shoeboxes, piles of papers, and trash bags bursting with God knows what.

  It was getting close to dinnertime. David was exhausted and eager to boot up the hidden laptop in the privacy of his office. Harold’s desk, the most logical place to look for asset information, had yielded absolutely nothing. He knew much more about killdeers than he did about Dr. Harold Salar. One thing was apparent to David: Harold never threw out anything. His apartment was a complete archive containing everything from his life.

  He turned off the fans and shut the windows. On his way out, David saw that the mailman had delivered some mail through the slot in the door. He picked up the pile and shuffled through the magazines, the charitable solicitations, and the sales circulars and spotted a large white envelope from Castlerock Life Insurance. He opened it and pulled out a copy of a $1 million term life insurance policy written on the life of Harold Salar, effective two weeks prior to his death. The sole beneficiary named in the policy: David Thompson.

  SEVEN

  For a brief moment, David felt like he had won a lottery. By its very nature, the life-insurance-policy payout would not be part of the probate process, so the policy’s existence would not be public information. The insurance company would make the payment privately, and it would be tax free. But then David realized that his ultimate prize might be a trip to a maximum-security prison for life. Thankfully, the death penalty wasn’t an option in New York.

  Though he knew nothing about the policy’s existence, now it offered a motive for David to have killed Harold: to collect $1 million. The insurance company would request a police investigation, and as the only beneficiary, David would have a bull’s-eye painted on his back. Because of the investigation, the news of the policy’s existence would come out sooner or later. Winning $1 million had never tasted so bad. In the back of his mind, David wondered if the life-insurance policy had been set up by someone who wanted to see him take the fall for Harold’s death.

  He had to take time to think the situation over. He needed the money, but rushing to
cash in on the policy would implicate him in Harold’s slaying.

  I can’t file a claim now. I’ll just keep quiet until I figure this out.

  But then David realized his time had expired when he opened the envelope. He had knowledge of the existence of the policy at that moment, and that knowledge might come back to haunt him later under police interrogation. They would say his knowledge and his silence about the policy was indicative of his guilt. The longer the time gap, the guiltier he looked. David had no choice. He had to call Chief McNeal and tell him up front about the policy.

  With the policy in hand, he dialed McNeal from the parking lot.

  “Yeah, David?”

  “Hey, Pete, I have to give you a heads-up. I’m over at Salar’s apartment and just picked up the mail. You’ll never guess what I found.”

  “I give up.”

  “Harold Salar just took out a life-insurance policy in the amount of one million dollars. Guess the name of the beneficiary.”

  There was a pause. “David Thompson.”

  “Right. How did you know?”

  “Castlerock’s legal department called me.”

  “Really? When?”

  “After the memorial service.”

  “When were you going to tell me?”

  “You mean you didn’t know about the policy before now?”

  “Of course not. That’s why I’m calling you. When were you going to tell me, Pete?”

  “David, I don’t have to tell you anything. You’re a possible suspect now.”

  “I thought I was a person of interest.”

  “That’s before I learned of this new life-insurance policy. That’s quite an odd coincidence, don’t you think?”

  David’s stomach dropped to the pavement. “Harold Salar was a very odd man.”

  “Anything else, David?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Talk to you soon,” he said before hanging up.

  David’s worst fears had been realized. How am I going to explain all this to Annie? As he slid the phone back into his pocket, it rang. The caller ID flashed the law firm of Baxter & Chadwick. He had only one case pending with that firm, so David knew that Amber Remington, defense counsel for Helmsley Oil, was on the other end. David was tempted to let it drop to voice mail; he didn’t want any more bad news. But he decided that he would rather deal with Amber head-on now than play phone tag with her all week long and run the risk of taking the call with Annie around. He didn’t need to add to his problems by having Annie get involved.