Hard Landing

by Lynne Heitman

  "Is that grapefruit yours?"

  "You're holding an innocent man out of service," he announced, completely ignoring my question. "Petey was just an innocent bystander in this thing last night."

  "I'm learning that no one is innocent here, and Victor's the union president, so why are you talking to me about this?"

  "I don't trust Victor to handle the important stuff"- his eyes cut to my face-"and neither do you."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "It's true, ain't it?"

  It was, of course, and though I didn't want to believe I'd been that transparent, I appreciated the respect he showed by telling me that I had been. It meant I could be equally blunt in return. "If Little Pete was a bystander, why would he have twelve stitches in his head? And I don't think Terry McTavish broke his own hand."

  "Man jumps you from behind out of the clear blue and throws you down on the ramp, you're entitled to protect yourself."

  "I haven't met Terry, but I'd like to meet the man who could sneak up on your son and throw him to the ground."

  He suppressed a smile. "Must have been the element of surprise."

  "Must have been. Look, I think I already know what happened last night." He drew back and looked at me all stiff-necked and squinty-eyed. "So instead of you trying to convince me it didn't, just tell me what you want."

  He threw part of the peel in the trash, then leaned back and propped his feet up on the desk, his heels resting on the old, stained blotter. "All right. I know you're in a position here. You got appearances to think about, and you got to take some kind of action." As the peel fell away and the fresh citrus smell filled the office, I noticed that he had a hard time stripping the fruit because his fingernails were so short-painfully short-and ragged. They were not much more than nubs, and I knew that he was a nail biter because I had been, too. Big Pete Dwyer struck me as a lot of things, but a nail biter wasn't one. I wondered what it was that made him nervous.

  He noticed me staring at his nails and dug his fingers into the fruit, pulling the sections apart. "To my way of thinking," he continued, "Terry threw the first punch. You want to can his ass, we won't fight you. I can guarantee he won't even file a grievance."

  "And what happens to Little Pete?"

  "He didn't do nothing, so he should come back to work." The grapefruit peel went into the garbage, and a slice of the fruit disappeared into his mouth.

  "It's funny how that worked out." I shifted to find a comfortable spot on the cracked leather seat. There wasn't one, so I stood. "You and John McTavish get into a pissing contest the other night. The next thing I know, his brother Terry is in trouble under questionable circumstances. Is Terry aware that his union representative is offering up his job? More to the point, is John?"

  "You don't need to worry about what goes on inside the union. You just need to worry about yourself." For a moment he actually made eye contact and held it. "I'm trying to help you out here."

  It might have been my imagination, but he seemed oddly sincere even though he was trying hard not to be. There was no question he was trying to help himself and his son, but it was also possible that he truly believed he was helping me, too. "I appreciate the gesture," I said, "but it sounds as if your son is the one who needs help. I understand he has a problem with alcohol."

  Pete didn't even stop chewing. "Yeah? Who says so?"

  "He's worked under the influence in the past, I think he's doing it now, and I suspect he's the one who instigated the trouble last night, not Terry McTavish."

  "My son ain't got no problem like that. If he did, nobody down here would tell you."

  His face had betrayed nothing as he sucked another slice into his mouth and spat out a seed, but it wasn't without effort. I heard it in his voice. It was in the measured way he spoke and the precise way he formed his words. The strain was there. It sounded old, scabbed over, and I thought maybe I understood what made him chew his nails. Big Pete was no different than any other father with a screw-up for a son. I almost felt sorry for him.

  "How much longer do you think you can cover for him? You can't watch him all the time."

  "You don't have no case against my son." He finished off the last wedge and wiped his fingers on a piece of paper from the trash can. "You never will."

  "I don't want him working around airplanes," I said.

  "If he's working the ramp, he's working around airplanes."

  "Then I'm going to have to find a way to make sure he's not working the ramp. What if he causes an accident? Could you live with yourself?"

  "You shouldn't even say something like that."

  "It scares you, too, doesn't it?"

  He stood up slowly, more like uncoiled, and brushed a few wayward flakes of glazed sugar from his uniform shirt. He started toward me and didn't stop until I could smell the grapefruit on his breath. The muscles in my back tensed, and for the first time I felt uncomfortable with him. "My son is my responsibility," he said. "You leave him to me and you won't have no problems. But you push this thing, and you're going to regret the day you ever asked for this job."

  I started to breathe a little faster. "Are you threatening me?"

  He stepped around me, opened the door, and let the bag room noise come in. Then he leaned down and whispered in my ear. "Think about what happened to the girl who was here before you." I stared straight ahead, fixing my gaze on the letter opener he'd left on top of the desk. "You're all alone out here, just like she was, more alone than you think. I wouldn't want you to get depressed and kill yourself." I turned to look at his face, but he was already through the door and gone. I would never smell grapefruit again without that awful feeling of my heart dropping into the pit of my stomach.

  Molly was at her desk fanning herself and looking as if she might pass out.

  "Is someone working on fixing the heat?"

  "This happens every year," she said breathlessly.

  "So I hear. Why don't you go out and get some fans? Charge it to the company."

  "It's the middle of winter in Boston. Where am I going to find fans?"

  "How should I know, Molly? Just do something."

  I went into my office and slammed the door. I went back to my desk and straight to my briefcase, where I found the fax from Ellen's house, the one asking for a meeting at the same time, same place. I smoothed it flat on the desk and wrote directly on the page, "Saturday, 7:00 PM, Ciao Bella on Newbury Street." It was the only restaurant in town that I knew. I signed my name, went out to the machine, and punched in the number to Sir Speedy in Nahant. My finger froze over the Enter button, giving me one last chance to appreciate what I was doing. I had no idea who had sent this message, and it was just my own instinct saying that it was friend, not foe. But I needed more people on my side, and if this was someone Ellen had trusted, maybe I could trust him or her, too.

  I punched the button, the machine whirred to life, and the message was gone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Friday afternoon was the worst possible day to cancel a flight. We'd taken two mechanicals back-to-back and cancelled them both. I'd spent the past several hours at the ticket counter helping to rebook a couple hundred inconvenienced passengers. Rebooking is a technical term. It means presenting hostile travelers with a list of terrible alternatives and asking them to choose one. It usually takes a while.

  I was almost past Dan's office door before I realized he was in there sitting at his desk, tie loosened and sleeves rolled up. He'd changed his shirt since breakfast yesterday morning, but his eyes were still bleary. He was using one hand to prop up his head and the other to turn the pages of something that had his complete attention.

  "If I'd known you were here, I would have invited you up to the ticket counter to take part in our latest disaster."

  He responded without looking up. "I just got in. I've been up at Ellen's house all day."

  "Which means you've been up for two straight days."

  "Here, before I forget…" He dug into his pocket and
came out with Ellen's house key. "I also went to the post office and got her mail forwarded to the airport."

  "Good plan." I sat down and peeled off my shoes. "Did you find anything? Answering machine tapes, perhaps? Or a fish?"

  He gave his head a weary shake. "I've searched every square inch of that place. Whatever she was hiding, I don't think it's in the house, unless it's behind a secret panel or something. With that old place, who knows? But I did find out one thing." He lowered his voice to the point that it was almost just a rumble. "I talked to the old guy, the landlord, and he said the alarm went off again the other night. The police came, but no one was there. You know what that means." He didn't need a response from me. "Someone tried to go in who didn't have the new security code."

  "Didn't that make you nervous, being up there by yourself and knowing that?"

  He looked at me, and I knew there was no point in pursuing the subject.

  The item he'd been studying so intently was a wall calendar. "Are you planning your next vacation?"

  "This is Molly's calendar from last year. My buddy over at United got me the list of Ellen's destinations from their frequent flyer desk. Altogether she took fifteen trips, and thirteen of them she could have flown on us. The two we don't fly are to Pittsburgh and Charleston. She got miles for every trip, so you were right. She bought tickets like a real passenger."

  I turned the calendar so that I could see the dates. "Did you tell Molly? Because she didn't believe me."

  "Yeah. Neither one of us can."

  The calendar was from an insurance company, the kind they give out free every year. It had pictures of Massachusetts tourist attractions through the seasons. We were looking at November and Bunker Hill in the snow. Dan had penciled in the three-digit city codes for Ellen's destinations throughout the year. Most corresponded with an ELS, Molly's designation for Ellen, and an explanation of a dentist appointment or an off-site meeting or a personal day off. For some, she must have flown out that night and come back the next morning, because there was nothing on the calendar. No time lost.

  "Any pattern or interesting sequence?" I asked.

  "Nothing jumps out at me, but I'm working on it. My next step is to call the GMs in those stations."

  "If she was sneaking around, flying under cover of another airline, it's not likely she'd check in with colleagues while she was there."

  "I know, but I don't know what else to do."

  "Is there any connection to the Beechcraft angle?"

  "I thought of that," he said. "If there is, I can't figure what it is, other than the fact that we fly them out of here. Big deal."

  "You said she had questions about the Beeches. What kind?"

  "Like I said, a lot of questions about the cargo compartments, how much weight they can take, position of the fuel tanks, that kind of stuff. That's why I made the connection to drugs."

  "But we don't think it was drugs, right? So what was it?"

  He shrugged.

  "Why don't you try to find another copy of that Nor'easter procedures manual?" I said. "If we looked through it ourselves, maybe we can figure out what she was doing with it."

  We stared at each other. We were glum. Stumped and glum. Finally, I reached for the calendar and pulled it into my lap. "When was her first secret trip?"

  He checked his list. "A little over a year ago. Not too long after she got here."

  I leafed backward through the months, reading the various notations Molly had made and charting the station's recent history in reverse. Besides Ellen's travel days, there were employee birthdays and company anniversaries, retirement luncheons, and the annual Christmas party. September of last year had an entry in red with big arrows pointing to it. It was always an event when Bill Scanlon passed through your station.

  "You believe Ellen started her investigation a few weeks ago, right?"

  "A little longer, sometime before Christmas."

  "If her first trip was over a year ago, then it's hard to relate the travel to the investigation. In fact…" I flipped a few pages as the idea settled into my brain. I flipped a few more and I knew I was right. "What these look like to me are secret rendezvous, especially those overnighters."

  "What, like she was meeting someone?"

  "Someone she didn't want anyone to know she was meeting."

  "Why?"

  "What do you mean, why? Why does a woman usually have a secret rendezvous?"

  "You mean like she was having an affair? No way."

  I knew I was right. It felt right, but I had to figure out a way to convince Dan without telling him that my conjecture was based on my own personal experience traveling through the shadow land of whispered conversations, furtive plans, and hidden destinations. "Dan, we've already established this woman's ability to keep secrets. I think it's very possible that she was hooking up with someone in these cities."

  His pained expression, lips pursed and eyebrows drawn together, was one I was coming to recognize, because he displayed it every time we found out something about Ellen he didn't know or like. He began to roll down his sleeves and button his cuffs. Something under his desk rattled when he bumped it with his foot. He kicked it impatiently and then again before he looked under the desk.

  "Oh, shit." He checked his watch, then reached under and came up with an overnight bag. "I gotta get out of here."

  "Where are you going?" As far as I knew, Dan didn't travel anywhere except back and forth to Logan Airport.

  "Jersey. I'm going down to see my kid."

  "Michelle."

  "Yeah, I called her last night and told her I was coming. She'll be waiting for me." As he put on his jacket, he couldn't stop grinning. It was an unabashed, I'm-crazy-about-this-kid-and-don't-care-who-knows-it smile. "She's a pisser. I can't believe some of the stuff she comes up with."

  I smiled, too, picturing a miniature female Dan racing around at Mach speeds, spewing invectives. "Does she talk like you?"

  It took him a moment to get my drift, but when he did, he was horrified. "No fucking way. I don't swear around my kid." He put his hand over his heart. "On my mother's grave, she has never heard me cuss. Not once. Not my kid."

  "If you say so." He unzipped the bag and started loading in files and printouts. I snatched them all back, including the calendar. "I'll take care of this."

  "You sure?"

  "If you're going to be with your daughter, be with her. And by the way, why did I have to hear about her from Lenny?"

  "I don't know. It never came up." He closed the bag and looked at me. "You got any?"

  "Kids? No."

  "Ever been married?"

  "No."

  "See that? I didn't know that about you. It never came up."

  I squeezed back into my shoes and followed him to the reception area. "Hold on, I'll walk you to your gate." I grabbed my coat and briefcase, closed up my office, and we started walking. It was hard to talk as we pushed through the crowded concourse, so I waited until we'd arrived at his gate. The agents on his flight were boarding stragglers, so I had a chance to tell him about my tete-a-tete with Big Pete. I kept my voice low so no one could eavesdrop.

  "Am I doing the right thing not bringing back Little Pete?" I asked.

  The bag thudded to the floor as he leaned back against one of the windows. "I think you're doing the right thing-" He caught himself and started again. "I know you're doing the right thing. The question is, can we deal with the consequences? And I'm not just talking about here in Boston. Have you talked this over with your boss?"

  "Not exactly."

  "I'll tell you what's going to happen. Assuming we could even get Terry McTavish to talk and we can nail Little Pete in the first place, Lenny is going to find some way to make a deal with the union and bring him in through the back door. Lenny will be a hero and we'll look like idiots."

  "If we can prove that the guy was drunk on the job and physically attacked another employee, I can't see how Lenny could bring him back, if for no other reason than
self-preservation. Setting aside all the issues of moral responsibility and self-righteous breast beating, in terms of pure self-interest, knowing what we know-"

  "Suspect. What we suspect. Right now we can't prove anything."

  "You're right, but if we get to the point where we can prove it, we would have no choice but to pursue his termination. And if Lenny was aware of the same facts, he'd be on the hook, too."

  "You're going to threaten him?"

  "I'm simply going to make him aware of all the facts. Maybe in writing."

  "Sneaky, but be careful. Lenny has no problem looking out for his self-interest. It's your interest I'd be worried about. He'll find a way to get what he wants and blame all the bad stuff on you. He did it to Ellen over and over." He checked the activity at the boarding door. "By the way, is next week soon enough on Angelo? I thought I'd call him when I get in on Monday."

  "Monday's fine," I said. "I can't wait to meet the famous Angelo. In my mind, he's almost achieved mythic stature."

  "What are you doing this weekend, boss? Looking for apartments?"

  "No. And I won't be having as much fun as you will. I'm going to keep an eye on the operation, and if I have time, I might also go back to Marblehead."

  "You're going back up?" He hoisted the bag onto his shoulder. "I thought you gave your word to Lenny."

  "I only said I wouldn't go into the house. I'm going to check out Ellen's athletic club, talk to her trainer. If I'm reading her invoice correctly, she did a training session a few hours before she died, which seems odd to me. I've also got this mystery woman, Julia Milholland. If she ever calls me back, there might be something to do there."

  He was grinning. "I knew you'd come around."

  "I haven't come around. I'm simply getting a few questions answered to my own satisfaction."

  "Whatever you say." The gate agent motioned to Dan. I walked with him through the boarding lounge.