The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  “He says he wouldn’t have been laid off if the union had been looking out for him.”

  “Layoffs go by seniority. There’s nothing the union could have done for him.”

  “He knows that. He’s just looking for someone to blame for how he feels right now. In his mind, if he had never been laid off, he never would have lost his benefits, which means we wouldn’t have had to pay all his medical bills, which means we would have the money to hire an investigator to go to Florida. And since he can’t have what he wants, he doesn’t want to do anything.”

  It may not have made sense, but it was a bitter, sulky kind of logic I understood. “Do you have any friends down there who could help you?”

  She had reached far under the table to retrieve a scrap of paper and was now staring at the three discrete piles I’d been constructing.

  “I’m organizing your notes,” I said. “Force of habit. The first pile is all related to his trip. The second one is a list of contacts you’ve made. The third one is for everything else.”

  She dropped the scrap on the miscellaneous pile, then sat back against one of the low kitchen cabinets. “I don’t know why I’m doing this. I say it’s for John or for the kids, but I’m not so sure. The whole thing was so… too fast. He was here. He was gone. I think I need to know what was in between. Is that strange?”

  “Not to me.” If I understood anything about what she was going through it was the obsession, the compulsive need to fill in every blank and answer every question in the hopes that understanding how and why it had happened might help in accepting that it had happened. I wasn’t sure it would, but I was sure I would be doing the same thing. In fact…

  The phone rang. She stood up, excused herself, and left me alone in the kitchen. I put the piles back on the table. And straightened them. I went over to the sink and looked out the back window at Turner the dog chasing squirrels. He was never going to catch them, but he had to chase them. Even though I knew it was a really bad idea, I tried to imagine a conversation where I told my new boss I needed time off before I ever arrived at a job it had taken me a year to find. It was inconceivable. I tried to work through the details of rescheduling a move that had been planned for a month. Impossible. I ran budget numbers through my head to figure how long I could really keep going without a paycheck. Not much longer. It was lunacy to even think about changing plans at this late date, and I could not afford to mess with this last best hope for salvaging my career.

  That’s what I had on the one hand.

  On the other hand, if I took a week and tried to find out what happened to John, I risked losing a job. It was not a stretch to say John had once risked his life for me.

  Mae was back. “I can’t get used to my children calling me on their cell phones.”

  “Problem?”

  “Erin doesn’t feel like going to her dance class and wants me to pick her up. I have to go soon.”

  “Mae, I’d like to help you with your investigation.”

  “Really?”

  “I’d like to take some time and go to Florida. I could take this logbook to the police and at least find out why—”

  “You would do that?” She sounded calm, even skeptical, but she couldn’t completely hide the tiny filament of hope that had lit up in her eyes.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but why… I mean I would never ask you to do something like that. How could you—”

  “I owe John.”

  “He never looked at it that way.”

  “I can’t look at it any other way.” Her eyes were now burning bright, not just with hope but with so much anticipation and gratitude it scared me, and I found myself backing off almost before I’d even fully committed. “I can’t stay very long and I wouldn’t want you to expect too much. I’m an airline manager, not an investigator and—”

  She came over and hugged me, which felt awkward because I didn’t know her very well and because I felt as if someone had opened the starting gate before I was ready. “There are some things I’ll need, Mae.”

  She sprang back into hyper mode, digging around the kitchen counter until she found a stubby pencil. She retrieved her pad from the table and flipped to a clean page.

  “What do you need?”

  “I need to know everything you know about John’s trip. You’ve got some of it here—where he stayed, if he rented a car, restaurant bills, charge card receipts—”

  “There won’t be any.” She had her head down, writing furiously. “John hated credit cards. He only carried one because I made him, and he never used it. He didn’t even like carrying a mortgage. It killed him when we had to take out a second.”

  “The card could have been stolen. It’s worth checking.”

  “I didn’t think of that.”

  “I need a list of anyone you’ve already talked to down there, including the cops. And I need you to call John’s cell phone provider. I want to know who he called while he was in Florida.” I hesitated on the next request, thinking about Mae’s family room and the kind of photos that were there. “I’ll need a picture of John to take with me.”

  After she left the room, I spotted one more stray piece of paper that had landed on the stove. At first I thought it didn’t belong in our piles. It was a soccer schedule. But on the back was the name and phone number that explained clearly why it did.

  When she came back, I held it up and showed it to her. “I need one more thing,” I said. “I need to know who Bobby Avidor is and why he wasn’t worth it.”

  Chapter Three

  “Bobby Avidor is a worthless piece of crap. He’s a prick. He’s scum. He’s a rat bastard, a two-faced, lying sack of shit—”

  “Take a breath, Dan.” His voice was the loudest in a small diner full of big voices.

  He stopped, blinked, grabbed a couple of home fries from my plate, and slid back in his side of the booth. But he didn’t relax. He never relaxed. In the year I had known him, I wasn’t sure Dan Fallacaro had ever taken a breath. He seemed to run on adrenaline instead of oxygen.

  “If you’d arrived on time,” I said, “you could have had your very own breakfast.”

  “I don’t have time to eat, Shanahan.” He shot forward in his seat and began drumming the tabletop with his fingers, thumping out the chaotic beat that was his own personal rhythm. “I had two airplanes crap out on me before the sun came up this morning, both of them overbooked. I had a ramper who got thrown in jail last night for drunk driving and resisting arrest. I had my best lead agent at the ticket counter not show up for work because her twelve-year-old kid stole her car. To top it off, air traffic control had a radar tower blow over, which means we’ve been having ATC problems for three days.”

  “Welcome,” I said, “to life as a general manager.” Dan was thirty-six, two years older than I was, but I felt so much like his big sister I always had to resist reaching over and tousling his hair. And I knew for all his constant complaining he relished every moment of his life at the airport, which not too long ago had been my life.

  “Life as a general manager sucks, Shanahan. Honest to God, I don’t know how you did it all those years.”

  “Most of those years, I did it somewhere besides Logan Airport.”

  “Maybe so, but I’ve got a whole new respect for you, boss.”

  I hadn’t been Dan’s or anyone else’s boss in over a year, and it felt good to hear him call me that. More than I wanted to think.

  The waitress appeared, a solid block of a woman with a face sculpted from stone. She slipped a cup of steaming black coffee onto the table in front of Dan. “What can I get you, Danny?”

  He smiled at her. “Just seeing your face is enough for me.”

  She beamed. Dan had lots of big sisters. “You gonna eat anything but her leftovers?”

  “Nope.” He reached over and took another deep-fried potato slug from my plate. I’d asked the waitress not to bring them with my egg white omelet, but here t
hey were, a half-eaten testament to my crumbling willpower. Being unemployed had disrupted my routine, to say the least, and routine had always been the key to my discipline. I took one last forkful, wishing I’d never taken the first, and pushed the plate toward Dan. He applied a blanket of catsup and set upon the greasy pile.

  “Bobby Avidor, Dan.”

  “Avidor used to work out at Logan throwing bags years ago. He was before your time. He’s a maintenance supervisor now down in Miami.”

  “Mae told me he saved Terry McTavish from drowning. She said—”

  “And it’s the best thing that ever happened to Avidor, that rat-fuck. He used to fill in on the McTavish fishing boat when they needed an extra hand. So one day, old man McTavish is home drunk off his ass, Johnny’s trying to get the boat home in the middle of this big storm, and Terry’s out on the deck doing whatever it is they do on fishing boats. All of a sudden, boom, this big fucking wave comes along and washes him over. Avidor happens to be standing right there. He looks down. He sees Terry dangling from this line. He does what any moron would do, which is reach down and haul him back in.” He’d gone through the fries like a buzz saw and shoved the plate aside, leaving one uneaten cantaloupe ball to roll around in the greasy dish. “And by the way, I’m not convinced he didn’t push him overboard to begin with just so he could save his butt.”

  “Don’t you think Terry would have said something if he’d been pushed?”

  “All I’m saying to you is Avidor’s an operator and he knows a good thing when he sees it. Mae’s right. He climbed aboard the Johnny McTavish gravy train that day, and he’s been riding it ever since.”

  “How?”

  “When Johnny started working for Majestic, he brought Terry in first, and right behind him comes Avidor. Avidor loaded bags for about two minutes before he got tired of freezing his ass off out on the ramp every winter. He decided he wanted to become an aircraft mechanic. Work inside the hangar where it was warm. So Johnny loaned him the money to go to school. From what I hear, he never paid him back.”

  “Mae said he didn’t.”

  “He’s a piece of shit.” Dan mumbled to himself as he dug around in the wad of suit jacket on the seat next to him. Somehow he found a toothpick. He started to stick it in his mouth, but something else occurred to him and he pointed it at me instead. “Avidor got caught stealing, too.”

  “Stealing what?”

  “The union caught him stealing tools from some of his fellow mechanics down at the hangar. They went to Johnny and told him to take care of it, so he gave Avidor a choice—leave the station, or get turned in to management and get fired. Avidor did the smart thing and transferred out to the West Coast.” He put the toothpick in his mouth. “Johnny should have cut him loose right then and there when he had the chance.”

  “Mae says John went to Florida to meet Bobby. She says she doesn’t know why.”

  “She probably doesn’t, but Terry does.”

  “He says he doesn’t.”

  “He may not know the specifics, but he knows what everyone else around here knows.”

  “Which is what?”

  He assumed his top secret, cone-of-silence pose, one I’d become familiar with during our time together. He leaned across the table and lowered his voice. “Ever since he got to Florida, Bobby Avidor has been sending wads of cash up here to his dear old mother. She still lives in one of those little towns up the north shore somewhere. It’s been one of life’s great mysteries for the boys on the ramp, at least the ones who used to know him. First of all, why does anybody give up mechanic’s pay to become a supervisor? Avidor was probably making more in overtime than his whole salary now. And second, making the salary he makes, how does he manage to buy his mother a nice SUV?”

  “And what have they concluded?”

  “Drugs. What else could it be?”

  There were lots of things it could have been, but there was no point in arguing with Dan. He lived by the drumbeat of ramp rumors and, at least so far, it had served him well.

  “He’s running drugs on Majestic?”

  “Not into Boston. No way. I’ve had the dogs in, the FBI, corporate security. No fucking way that shit’s coming into my station. I can’t speak for any other station. Listen, Shanahan”—he checked his watch. He’d been getting more and more twitchy by the second—“I’d love to sit here and shoot the shit with you, but I’ve got to talk to the asswipes in schedules. They’re trying to cram in another six flights a day, and I don’t have the gates. So if we’re done here—”

  “This drug thing and Avidor, is this a new rumor?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Why would John wake up one day and decide to get on an airplane and go confront a problem that’s been hanging out there for a while?”

  “How would I know that, Shanahan? Maybe he got fed up.”

  “Are you thinking Bobby killed John? Is that the rumor?”

  “Ahhh, Bobby Avidor is a pussy. Whoever got over on Johnny had to have been bigger, tougher, and stronger than he was.” He shrugged. “Or else it was five guys.”

  I wanted to probe further, but I was about to lose my audience. Dan’s patience was dwindling fast.

  “Dan, I need you to help me with something.”

  “I thought you already found a job.”

  “Not that kind of help.”

  I pulled the logbook from my backpack, but checked around the diner before slipping it onto the table. Maybe because of its condition, maybe because the man who had sent it was dead—for whatever reason, I couldn’t shake the feeling I had something I wasn’t supposed to have.

  Dan had no such compunction. He grabbed the book, freed it from its careful wrapping, and turned it over in his hands. “Jesus Christ. What happened to this?”

  “Be careful. You’ll get that black stuff—”

  Too late.

  “What is this black shit, anyway?” Since he had no napkin of his own, he reached for mine and wiped his hands, and then used it to open the book and flip the damaged pages. He looked up at me. “What the hell are you doing with a logbook, Shanahan?”

  I told him.

  “Johnny McTavish sent this to you?”

  “Before he left for Florida. This, too.” I showed him the ring. When I told him how much it was worth he thrust it back at me, stiff-armed. “Take it back. It’s making me nervous.”

  I wrapped it up and stuck it back into the pocket of my khakis, which may not have been the best place for it, but I wasn’t really set up to transport high-value cargo.

  “Dan, do you think you can find out what airline this belongs to?”

  “Probably. What for?”

  “Because I have two places to start, the ring and the book, and I’m taking care of the ring.”

  “Whoa. Slow down. What are you starting on?”

  “I’m going to Miami. I’m going to try to find out what happened.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be in Detroit on Monday. Hello? New job?”

  “Temporary change in plans.”

  He stared at me. “Not for nothing,” he said, “but you’re the one who was talking about how your severance was expiring and how bad you had to get back to work and what a great opportunity this was—”

  “They’ll be there when I get back.” I didn’t want to talk about it. “I made you copies of all the pages I could read. There are several captains’ signatures in there. Some entries have part numbers and mechanics’ license numbers. I figured we could trace one of them back to the airline.”

  “We?” He reached over and snatched the file almost before I could get it out of my backpack. “Shanahan, how come I feel like I still work for you?” He was trying to sound annoyed, but had the file open and was paging through the copies.

  “Be discreet. Whatever’s going on, I don’t want anything to get broadcast on the ramp before I get a chance to talk to Mae first.”

  He closed the file and looked down at the bag next to my booth. “What time
is your flight?”

  “I’m listed on the two o’clock. But if you give me a ride to the airport, I could probably make the ten-thirty.”

  He scanned the restaurant and caught the waitress’s eye. “Are you going to see Ryczbicki while you’re down there?”

  “It would be hard to avoid him. He is the station manager.”

  He reached for the check when it came and pulled out his wallet to pay, which was the least he could do, given that he’d kept me waiting for almost an hour, then eaten all of my home fries.

  “You tell him for me the next time he sends a damaged aircraft my way and blames it on Boston, I’m going to come down to his ramp with a fucking baseball bat and conduct my own investigation.”

  “Sure, Dan. That will be the first thing I bring up.” He glanced again at the check and threw down a twenty, which by my calculation represented more than a one hundred percent tip. Our stone-faced waitress would have another reason to smile today.

  Chapter Four

  The automatic sliding glass doors parted with a swish as I stepped from the warm, humid ​jetbridge into the terminal. The Miami International Airport was as I remembered it—an homage to marble, glass, and pink neon. Everything in it was canned, conditioned, and proudly artificial, especially the climate. Even the real potted plants looked plastic.

  I hadn’t spent much time in Miami, but what I always remembered was the slickness, the smooth and shiny surfaces that made me less surefooted, more aware that if I slipped and fell down here, I could get hurt.

  I checked around and located the agent who had met the flight. “I’m Alex Shanahan. You paged me on board?”

  She checked her clipboard. “Mr. Ryczbicki asked that you meet him in the lounge at the Miami Airport Hotel.”

  I almost asked her, but then it occurred to me she probably wouldn’t know how Bic had known I was coming. “Can you point me in the right direction?”