Balzac sighs, waves her off. He takes his time looking around the table, giving the lawyers a few seconds each to read the disgust on his face. “Just leave. All of you.” Balzac watches them slowly file out of the room. When the last is gone and the door is shut, he punches a number into his cell phone. “Did you watch?”
“I did,” says Jack Bunting. “I think that young fool just hung his cousin.”
“I agree. I think it’s time the government boys find the second phone.”
“I’m on it,” Bunting says. He hangs up, waits five minutes, and places a call from his office phone.
“Wexler,” the leader of the NTSB go-team answers.
“Nelson, this is Jack Bunting. I just received a strange call and thought I should tell you right away.”
“A call? From whom?”
“He refused to say. But he claimed the engineer, Coburn, had a second cell phone.” Bunting lets the words hang in the air.
“Sounds fishy,” Wexler says. “It’s not uncommon to get crackpot calls after a big accident. And the engineer’s lawyer just held a press conference.”
“And maybe the press conference spurred him to call. I thought that, too. But he didn’t sound off balance. And I’m certain he’s one of ours, that he works at Amtrak. He told me that two weeks ago he was in a crew room with Coburn and saw him using two cell phones: a company phone and a second one that looked like a cheap burner phone.”
Bunting can hear Wexler breathing on the other end of the line, trying to decide what to do.
“I guess we could go to Bear, search the locomotive again,” Wexler says. Amtrak’s repair facility in Bear, Delaware, is where Amtrak is storing the crashed railcars until the NTSB releases them. Known by the employees who work there as Bearcatraz, the property is surrounded by chain-link fencing, and the only entrance is through a manned guardhouse.
“Probably wouldn’t find the second phone, even if there was one,” Bunting muses. “Still . . .”
“Still, we have to follow every lead. Especially in a situation like this, where we have no insight as to what was going on with the engineer.”
“Agreed. So when are you looking to go to Bear?”
“No reason to delay. Let’s say day after tomorrow.”
“Thursday, sure. I’ll make the arrangements and meet you there.”
Right after I make a brief trip there by myself.
19
FRIDAY, JULY 18
At 6:30 p.m. Royce Badgett leaves his house and walks across the street to the corner bar for his nightly suds and sandwich. Dark and cool, the bar is a welcome relief from the steamy July evening. It’s a small place, only ten seats at the bar with a few tables in the back. Behind the bar, there’s a decent-size TV for watching the ball game. The place is older than Royce himself and tended by Neil Mason, the grandson of the man who founded it. A year ahead of Neil in high school, Royce has known him forever.
Two regulars sit on the far-right side of the bar. They look up at Royce as he enters and nod. He nods back, then takes a seat in the middle, to the left of a stranger. The guy looks to be in his early forties. He’s done time; Royce can tell from the prison tat peeking up from beneath his shirt collar. Probably saw some trouble inside, but not too much; through his T-shirt Royce can see the man has a powerful chest, and his arms look like granite. The man doesn’t pay the least bit of attention when Royce takes the stool next to him.
The man is halfway through a cheesesteak. He orders another beer.
“Another Yuengling?” Neil asks the man, who nods.
Royce and the man sit side by side for twenty minutes, neither acknowledging the other until Neil brings Badgett’s own dinner, a hot open-face turkey sandwich with fries.
“Need the ketchup?” the man asks, passing the bottle from his right to his left and setting it on the bar.
“Much appreciated,” says Royce.
They sit in silence for another five minutes. Then Royce, still looking up at the Phillies on the TV screen asks, “So what do you think?”
“Outfield sucks,” the man answers. “Hitting’s weak.”
“Herrera’s not bad. And they’re thirty-five and twenty-seven. Second place in their division.”
“We’ll see how long that lasts.”
Tommy has been tailing Badgett for three days now. The guy seems to follow a set routine. The lights go on in his house at 7:00 a.m. He’s out the door at 7:30, on his way to Newtown Square, where he works as a mechanic at a Cadillac dealership. He takes a half-hour lunch at noon, leaving the dealership and driving to Newtown Square Pizza or Wendy’s. He’s off work at 5:00, home by 5:30. He leaves his house around 6:30, walks across the street to the bar, where he eats dinner and drinks beer for a couple of hours. Then he goes back home, spends time in his basement or watching TV in the living room. The second night, he sat for two hours on his porch, smoking cigarettes and throwing back Buds, staring into space as he listened through the open window to the baseball game on the television. Badgett had no visitors, and the only person he said “Hi” to was the old lady who lives next door.
Today, Tommy made sure to be at the bar when Badgett entered and sat down. The plan was to strike up a conversation, see where it took him, hopefully find an opening to bring up Balzac. It’s going okay so far. They talk about baseball for a long while. Then Badgett asks Tommy where he’s from, what he does for a living, and Tommy feeds him a story about being out of work since GE closed its O’Hara solar-inverter plant near Pittsburgh. Tommy says he’s here visiting his brother, who lives in Havertown. He introduces himself as Joe LaBrava.
“What’s that, Italian?”
“Mutt,” Tommy says, and they both laugh.
Just then, the ball game breaks for a commercial, and a tickler for the eleven o’clock news comes on. It’s a story about the Amtrak train crash. The engineer’s lawyer has given a press conference that day. “Tune in at eleven to see what he said,” the anchorwoman says, an enticing gleam in her eye.
“That’s fucked up,” Tommy says. “That train crash. All those people who were killed.”
Badgett nods but doesn’t say anything.
After a moment, Tommy tells him, “A good buddy of mine was on that train. He got hurt pretty bad. I told him he should get a lawyer, but he says he’s not ready yet.” If Badgett is connected to Balzac, Tommy figures, this will give him the perfect opening to suggest Balzac as an attorney for Tommy’s friend.
Again, Badgett says nothing, just shakes his head.
“My brother told me there’s a lot of big-time lawyers working that accident,” Tommy says. “He sees them on the news.”
“Lawyers.” Badgett says the word like he’s spitting something out. “Never met one I didn’t not like.” Badgett smiles at his twist of the old Will Rogers saying.
“They make a lot of money, some of them.”
“Money they haven’t earned, which they spend on things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like.”
More Will Rogers.
Tommy drains his mug and asks the bartender for another. A political ad plays on the TV screen and Tommy says, “Country’s going to hell in a handbasket, you ask me.”
“That’s a fact,” Badgett says, and they go back and forth agreeing with each other on immigration, trade policy, jihadists, and corporate greed.
Every now and then, Tommy interjects something relevant about lawyers, personal injury, and that damned government-owned Amtrak, but Badgett doesn’t bite. After a lull in the conversation, Tommy asks Badgett where he grew up, where he went to school.
“You keep in touch with anyone from the old days?” Tommy asks. “I tried to, but it got real tough once I moved across the state.”
Badgett gets a sour look on his face. “Most of the guys I grew up with either went to jail, overdosed, or got too snooty for my tastes.”
“Not so many of my people got sent up,” Tommy says. “But way too many got uppity. Doctors and lawyers.”
> The sour look is back on Badgett’s face, but he doesn’t add anything.
“I think one of my old friends works for that Balzac. My brother told me that. I wonder what it’s like to work for that guy.”
“Balzac.” Badgett almost chokes on the name. “I went to school with that one. Had some good times, too. Not that he’d ever admit it. He’s one of them got too fuckin’ big for his britches.”
Tommy hears the venom in Badgett’s voice and decides he was right about the man; he’s obviously jealous of his rich former schoolmate who likely wouldn’t give Badgett the time of day. He wonders whether Badgett feels the same about Jack Bunting, but he can’t figure out how to work that name into the conversation without tipping his hand.
They talk for another hour, but Tommy can’t get Badgett to offer any real insight into Balzac. He senses that Badgett is holding back, but he isn’t sure whether it’s information that Badgett’s holding on to or just more venom. Tommy pays his tab and says good night. He leaves the bar and walks to his pickup, which is parked on the street outside.
As soon as the stranger walks out the door, Neil Mason walks up to Badgett. “Who the fuck was that?”
“No idea,” Royce says. “Any chance you got his license plate?”
Mason smiles. “Wrote it down when I went out for a smoke,” he says, sliding a torn sheet of paper across the bar.
Fifteen minutes later, Badgett is back home, sitting on his front porch. He pulls out his cell, makes a call.
“I was right,” Badgett says. “I was being followed.”
“By whom?”
Badgett laughs. “By Joe LaBrava.”
“What’s funny?”
“Name’s from an old Elmore Leonard novel. You know I read all his stuff, right?”
“Yeah, but it’s about all you read,” Benjamin Balzac chuckles.
“Can you get your guy at DMV to run a plate?”
Balzac asks for the number. “What do you think this guy wants with you?”
“It’s not me he wants at all. It’s you. He must’ve come at me a dozen ways about you.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“The truth,” Badgett answers matter-of-factly. “That you’re a son of a bitch.”
Badgett and Balzac share a good belly laugh. Then, when they quiet down, Balzac tells Badgett to call him if the guy shows up again, though that likely won’t happen before Balzac gets the info back on the plate and finds out who the prison-tatted asshole really is.
Balzac hangs up and leans back in his leather chair, smiling at the thought of Royce Badgett and his other best friend, Jack Bunting. They shared so many good times, pulled so much shit, Balzac can’t imagine how any group of guys could’ve had more fun growing up together.
Bunting was the toughest and meanest of the three. On the basketball team, he fouled so often and with such gusto that he rarely made it into the second period. In tenth grade, the coach finally kicked him off the team for unnecessary violence. The next year, after Jack had gained forty pounds, he went out for football. He was kicked off that team, too, halfway through the season, again for excessive violence—an amazing feat considering that Bunting was a lineman.
Royce Badgett was the crazy one. Nicknamed “Badger,” Royce would do anything—literally anything—that Balzac told him to do. Or anything he thought Balzac might want him to do. One time, Balzac mentioned to Royce that a family living on Balzac’s street had a mean-looking Doberman that stood on the porch and growled every time he walked past. The next week, the dog went missing. The family was bereft and had the whole neighborhood looking for the animal. They even offered a large cash reward. When Balzac mentioned it to Royce, Badgett smiled and said, “Let me know if they change the reward to dead or alive. They do that, and I might just see to it that Rover makes an appearance.”
Balzac’s own role in the trio was unspoken but clear: he was the leader. He was neither as strong as Jack nor as unrestrained as Royce. But he was the smartest. Balzac was the one who found ways to sneak them into ball games and concerts. The one who learned to fabricate photo IDs to get them into bars and frat parties. And it was Balzac who figured out what drugs you could use to slip into a woman’s drink to make her pass out and not remember anything after.
Balzac met Bunting and Badgett in ninth grade, when legal troubles made it prudent for his old man to move as far from Oakland, California, as he could. Balzac senior settled the family in Upper Darby, a small township bordering West Philadelphia. Balzac’s parents enrolled him in Upper Darby High School, where he banded with Jack and Royce. Back then, Balzac was more chubby than solid, and he was subjected to bullying. Until Bunting stepped in. One time—and it was a story Balzac, Bunting, and Badgett always chuckled at when they reminisced—an eleventh-grader named Jimbo Strunk pushed Balzac to the ground and held him there, slapping and taunting him. Balzac couldn’t get up to fight back and so had to lie there and take it until a teacher came along and broke it up. When Bunting and the Badger found out, they were furious. The three boys concocted a scheme to get even. Strunk worked weekends at the McDonald’s on Sixty-Ninth Street. One Saturday after quitting time, Balzac and Bunting were waiting for him. They snuck up on Jimbo as he was about to get into his car and threw him down so hard they knocked the wind out of him. Then, Bunting rolled him onto his stomach and held him down while Balzac twisted his right arm until he tore the shoulder tendons and Jimbo started screaming.
Later, Strunk insisted to the police that Balzac was one of the guys who attacked him, but Balzac and Bunting had worn masks so Jimbo couldn’t identify them with sufficient certainty to satisfy the police. And since both boys claimed they were at the movies and had the tickets to prove it—thanks to Royce—nothing could be done.
Balzac walks to the bar he keeps in his office and pours himself a glass of Bombay Sapphire. He takes a hefty gulp, then smiles. “Glory days.”
20
WEDNESDAY, JULY 23
Vaughn kisses Erin, who’s still sleeping, on the forehead and leaves her apartment. It’s been more than a week since their troubling conversation, when he shared with Erin the secret underlying his relationship with Eddy. Erin made plain her disappointment in him, and, for a couple of days, he worried that things between them would cool permanently. But Erin had softened, and they were back on track. Most nights, they met up with each other right after work and didn’t separate until the next morning, when Vaughn left Erin’s apartment or she left his.
Vaughn’s family seems to be breathing a little easier. Eddy and Kate, Uncle Frank and Aunt Claire, and Vaughn’s own parents, all called, congratulating him on the press conference and thanking him for standing up for Eddy. Even Cousin Jean had nice things to say. Their optimism is an illusion, of course, and would crash to the ground if they knew what he did: that a sociopathic mobster was chomping at the bit for revenge, that the most powerful P.I. attorneys in the city were pressing the district attorney to bring charges against Eddy, and that one of those attorneys actually has a high-ranking connection at Amtrak.
The only real bright spot for Vaughn is that all the stress is motivating him to get back in shape. He’s returned to his uncle’s gym half a dozen times for some bag work. And on one of those occasions, he sparred a few rounds for the first time in a long while. He even started jumping rope and running again.
Tommy told Vaughn about his bar conversation with the cagey Royce Badgett. Tommy’s conclusion that Badgett may harbor hard feelings for his former friend, Benjamin Balzac, seems sound. But Badgett likely isn’t going to be a source of usable information. Still, the investigation into Balzac and Day may prove unnecessary if, as Vaughn hopes, the district attorney doesn’t decide to lower the hammer on Eddy despite the two attorneys’ insistence that his cousin be criminally charged.
Two hours after he leaves Erin’s apartment, Vaughn walks into his office and sits behind his desk. He empties his leather satchel of a motion and supporting legal brief when the phone rings. It
’s Erin, who’s now at her own office.
“Hey,” Vaughn says, smiling over the phone.
“Something’s happening,” Erin says, her voice serious. “Day is in the big conference room with his whole Amtrak crash team, and they’re watching the television. It’s tuned to CNN, or MSNBC, I think. Day and Corey King are both smiling like Cheshire cats. I don’t like the feel of it.”
Vaughn bites his lip, thinks for a minute, then tells Erin he’ll call her back. He walks toward Mick’s office, but the door is closed, so he turns back to the main conference room, which has its own TV. He turns it on, waits for the shoe to drop. It doesn’t take long.
“We’re getting word,” says Mika Brzezinski, “that the NTSB is planning to hold a press conference this morning on the crash of Amtrak Train 174. It’s not confirmed, but sources have told MSNBC that the engineer may have had a second cell phone on board at the time of the crash, and may have been talking on it.”
“Jesus Christ.” Vaughn jumps from his seat and sprints to his office, where he opens his contacts file, then calls the number for Nelson Wexler. The call is sent directly to voice mail. His next thought is to call Eddy, but he decides to wait until he knows more. He returns to the conference room, where the television screen displays an empty podium.
After a few moments, NTSB board member Richard Olin walks to the lectern and begins to speak. He introduces himself and Nelson Wexler, who has moved up beside him. Then he gets to the business at hand.
“Last Tuesday, Mr. Wexler, leader of the Train 174 go-team, was notified that one of the Amtrak members of the team had received information that the train’s engineer was in possession of a second cell phone. Two days later, on July 17, members of the go-team conducted another inspection of the locomotive cab. The locomotive, as well as the other railcars, have been stored since the accident at a secure Amtrak facility in Bear, Delaware. The inspection of the locomotive was extremely difficult, given the extensive nature of the damage caused by the crash. Nonetheless, after several hours of searching, go-team members did find a second cell phone. The device was immediately taken to NTSB headquarters in Washington for detailed inspection and testing by the NTSB’s Vehicle Recorder Division. The cell phone was not registered in anyone’s name, but was a prepaid phone, sometimes referred to as a ‘burner phone.’”
An Engineered Injustice Page 14