by Chris Knopf
“Can I get you some help?” I asked.
He gave a mirthless little laugh.
“Nothing nobody can do now. ’Cept maybe leave me alone,” he said, which I was in the process of doing when he added, “Or else arrest me, I guess.”
I turned around and walked back.
“Arrest you for what?”
He looked like he was listening to a private joke inside his head.
“Isn’t that what they do in these situations? Just arrest everybody that coulda had anything to do with it? Then let the lawyers and God sort it out?”
I didn’t think that was exactly how it worked, and I told him so.
“I doubt that, sir,” I said. “You have something to do with the crash?”
His face went blank–if it showed anything, maybe a little bewilderment.
“Shit, yeah. My wife was flying that thing.”
2
I earned my law degree against the wishes of my father. He never gave me a decent explanation for why doing this bothered him so much. He was an educated man himself. A civil engineer, though the title always made me laugh. My father was anything but civil. I guess he had to settle for what they offered. Nowadays you could probably get certified as an uncivil engineer. A Master of the Son-of-a-Bitch Arts.
I revere the law, no matter what my behavior might suggest. You have to revere something, I think, or else you become a toxic ball of cynicism and disappointment, which shows on your face, and I have enough trouble holding my looks together.
Along with a reverence for the law comes a general regard for due process, which means you go by the book as much as possible, with some faith that the book will treat you more fairly than some random schmuck who might be having a bad day. Like, for example, the jerk from the NTSB who interviewed me about the plane crash.
It was bad enough they took an hour to get there. I was so itchy from waiting I almost started to vibrate. So when the guy reached out his hand to shake, I probably squeezed tighter than I should have.
He squeezed back, and I relented a second before the small bones in my hand turned to powder.
“Give me your statement,” he said, pulling out a small notebook while simultaneously wiping his forehead, which looked pretty dry to me, with the back of his forearm.
“Please,” I said.
“Pardon me?” he asked, looking up from his book.
“You meant to say, ‘Please give me your statement.’ ”
If I had to describe him, I’d have to say he looked like a self-satisfied, imperious prig. About my age and handsome, in the traditional sense, which held no appeal for me at all. I like them odd. I wanted to tell him that–to quell his sense of superiority–but he didn’t give me the opening.
“Give me your statement,” he said again.
I shook my head.
“Not without the magic word. If you can’t say it, get me someone who can.”
He looked at me like I’d told him to go pee on his shoes.
“This is a crash scene investigation,” he said.
“Exactly. People are dead here. Be polite or I leave. And if you try to stop me, you’ll have a habeas corpus on your desk before you get back to the office.”
He stared at me for a few moments, taking it all in. I smiled, with my fists on my hips, a gesture so ridden with cliché I’d be embarrassed if it hadn’t had the appropriate effect.
“Please,” he said, flatly.
So I gave him my statement, one more thorough and precise than he deserved. I pulled out everything I could remember, including the metal camera case and my brief encounter with the husband of the woman flying the plane. I reported that I’d told the guy to stay put, then ran off to find Joe Sullivan, but when we got back, he was gone. All I could do was describe his appearance and recount our brief conversation.
I didn’t know how helpful it would be ultimately, but it was the best eyewitness testimony he’d get. I assumed it wasn’t the last time I’d have to talk to him, so I gave him a card and said I’d be available anytime for follow-ups. I waited until he gave me his card and said “Thank you,” then I left the schmuck and the smoky, surrealist’s accident scene and went back to my office in Water Mill so I could spend the rest of the day pretending to work.
My office was a converted apartment on the second floor above a row of storefronts and a Japanese restaurant that faced Montauk Highway, the main east-west thoroughfare stringing together the villages that make up the Hamptons. I’d shared the floor for two years with a group of surveyors who had yet to say hello to me, something you can already guess I took as an affront to common decency. Since a piece of my law practice was still related to real estate, I was in a position to recommend surveyors to well-paying clients. I could understand the surveyors ignoring me during the boom times, but now you’d think self-interest would have forced a modicum of cordiality.
I reciprocated by pretending they were all invisible. Of course, the only one actually suffering from this standoff was me, feeling tense every time I walked past their door, anticipating another failed opportunity to break the silence.
Self-inflicted pain over absolutely nothing. One of my specialties.
Once safe inside my office, however, my mood always caught an up-draft. What others might describe as a madhouse jumble of paper, aging computer equipment, and broken-down furniture, I saw only as paradise, well-lit and ventilated by windows on two sides, which also afforded a perfect view of a giant windmill out on the village green and the stately Beaux Arts architecture of what used to be a convent. Its purpose now was to provide an ideal landscape for long periods of gazing out the window when I should have been applying myself to one of the tedious assignments demanded as penance for choosing the law as a living.
I loved my house in Bridgehampton mostly out of habit, but there was something about my office that made me feel transcendently sheltered and secure, as if outside time and space, alone with only what was familiar and important to me.
To get the full effect of that environment, I made a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, and cleared a stack of last winter’s case folders so I could plop down on the sofa. I slumped down, enveloped in smoke and steam with my legs propped up on the ottoman. I was wearing men’s khakis, which I thought looked great with a pair of brown leather wing-tipped shoes. As I admired the look, I wiggled deeper into the sofa and stuffed my hands in my pockets, which is when I felt a wad of paper. I pulled it out and puzzled over how it had gotten there. Then I remembered how I’d crammed most of the dumped-out debris back into the camera case. Except what I’d crammed into my pocket.
When I sat up and untangled the crumpled paper, a clump of grass and a little piece of blue plastic fell out. It was a memory card for a digital camera. I remembered Sullivan asking me if there was film in the lady pilot’s camera. I had the answer in my hand. There might have been photos, but they wouldn’t be on film.
This confirmed that hiding in my office would do nothing to purge my mind of the sight of that woman’s face, immediately followed by the black-and-orange plume billowing up from the horse pasture. So I stubbed out the butt, climbed out of the sofa, and fired up my slick, new, silvery laptop.
I Googled “Pilots, small aircraft, female, East Hampton, NY.” Of the 52,000 hits that popped up, the only one that seemed useful was from an article in the Southampton Chronicle on how locals escape the tidal wave of summer people that washed in every Memorial Day.
“Eugenie Birkson has the quickest way to scram out of town: her own Cessna air taxi. The only female pilot based out of East Hampton Airport in Wainscott, Eugenie spends most of the summer transporting impatient wheeler-dealers to and from regional airports in Westchester and Fairfield counties, but likes to fly with her husband, Ed, to remote parts of Vermont and New Hampshire whenever she can.
“ ‘Nothin’ but cows and pine trees, and big old lakes you can swim in without gettin’ salt up your nose,’ says Eugenie. ‘My own version of the anti-Hamptons.’ ”<
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I focused on Eugenie Birkson and pulled up two more hits, one a report on a softball game in which she played second base, and the other a listing on a site called “Pilot’s Reference Network” that added little to the newspaper story. A look into Ed Birkson drew a blank.
I checked all the social media sites I belonged to but never participated in, and found nothing on either Birkson. I also ran the names through the ultra-double-secret, certainly illegal software given to me by a friend named Randall Dodge who used to be in naval cyber intelligence. The software’s talent was aggregating databases containing personal information–basic stuff like address, phone number, date and place of birth, education, employment, and medical history–with little regard for the niceties of privacy law. This for me was a genuine guilty pleasure, in that I enjoyed the hell out of it and it made me feel guilty as sin. But not enough to delete the software and go back to regular people searches.
I turned up a half dozen Birksons who’d lived at some point on the East End, but none named Eugenie or Ed. Eugenie did turn up, however, as a professional pilot with a Part 135 flight certification, trained in a program operating out of MacArthur Airport in Islip, a town an hour to the west of Southampton. From this report, I linked her to a pair of local Birksons–Matthew and Matthew Jr.–through an address in Springs, a section of East Hampton best known for Bonackers and Abstract Expressionism.
To confirm the hunch, I picked up the phone to call Joe Sullivan, then thought better of it. It was unlikely he’d want to share the name of any victim or victims before they were released to the public, which meant I’d have to finagle it, which would spark his suspicious nature, and I’d have him on my back before I hardly got started.
Which made me ask myself, Got started with what?
Instead of answering that, I shut down the computer and left the office. The sky above the fields of Bridgehampton was clear of smoke. Traffic on Montauk Highway was monotonously bumper-to-bumper, as it would be from May until some indistinct moment in late fall, before it got busy again over the holidays. The best shortcuts around the traffic were north of the highway but involved a more circuitous trip to the airport. So I took a southern route that zigzagged through planned neighborhoods of colossal houses and around the remnants of potato fields that were once the only use people had for oceanfront property.
Those people included my late husband’s family, who sold one of the area’s largest potato farms for what stood for huge money back in the 1990s. Following in the fine tradition of the nouveau and wholly unprepared riche, they blew the proceeds in fairly short order on things like the new Porsche my husband flew at about a hundred miles an hour into an old oak tree.
To get to East Hampton Airport, I had to get back on Montauk Highway for a brief stretch, then head north through a forest of rangy scrub oaks and pines stunted by the type of impoverished sandy soil common Up Island and also found in the northern reaches of East Hampton.
Though I was familiar with the sound of aircraft heading to and from the airport, I’d never actually been to the place myself. I was surprised to see it was a pretty well-developed place, with modern-looking signage, lots of buildings, and tarmacs thick with little prop planes and slim, fiercely expensive–looking private jets.
I parked my car and walked toward what looked like the main terminal, judging by a pair of black Crown Victoria limos pulled up to the curb.
According to the guy manning a car rental counter, airport management worked behind an unmarked door, which in turn was behind another counter. He told me the main man was Ralph Toomey. I breached the counter and knocked on the door, then opened it up. The office was filled to capacity with desks piloted by a diverse group of women, whose only common denominators were a pencil-thin waist and a diminutive stature. There was a white-haired white woman, a young blond woman, an African-American woman, and an Asian woman. I imagined the employment ad: “Wanted: Women to work in cramped office environment. Minimum clerical skills required, though must be no bigger than an elf. An equal opportunity employer.”
“Hello,” I said to the group at large. “Is Mr. Toomey in?”
None of them leaped for the ball, so I asked the tiny Asian lady directly.
“Would you know?” I asked her.
She held my gaze as she reached for the phone on her desk. Her face was perfectly round, as if drawn by a cartoonist.
“There’s someone here to see you,” she said into the phone. Then she looked up to ask who I was, a first step that hadn’t occurred to her on her own.
“Jacqueline Swaitkowski. I’m a lawyer and an officer of the court,” I said, my all-time favorite fiddle. It’s technically true, since I’m a practicing trial attorney, and completely meaningless, since anyone not being tried and hung by the legal system has privilege to the same title. Including tattooed bail bondsmen and the tricky bastards who deliver divorce papers to recalcitrant spouses.
The Asian lady took the bait and reported the gravity of the moment in hushed tones. Without being asked, I stepped away from the desk and took a seat, assuming all I had to do was wait for my audience. I was right.
“Ms. Swaitkowski,” said Ralph Toomey as he emerged from an inside office. He was a medium-sized guy with medium brown hair and medium Caucasian features, wearing a white shirt, gray pants, and a bland, striped tie, probably sporting the team colors of Middling University.
I stood and nodded, taking his dry, fleshy hand.
“Mr. Toomey. Sorry for interrupting you. I’m looking into Eugenie Birkson.”
“Oh, of course. The crash.”
And with those words, Mr. Toomey redeemed himself of all my preconceived assumptions. He was now both personable and brilliant.
“You’ve given a statement to the NTSB,” I said matter-of-factly as I dug a ballpoint pen and a small notebook out of my purse.
“Of course.”
“I’m not here for you to repeat all that; I just want to know what else you can tell me about Mrs. Birkson.”
I clicked the pen and stood with it poised above the notebook.
“Let’s go to the conference room, where we can sit,” said Toomey. “Who did you say you were representing again?” he added as he guided me toward one of the many closed and unidentified doors that lined the domain of the diminutive women.
“The NTSB is charged with determining the cause of the crash,” I said, handing him a version of my card on which I’d prominently included the seal of the State of New York and the words, in bold italics, Officer of the Court. “Local authorities are focusing on the pilot.”
Again, a truthful, albeit entirely misleading, statement I hoped would stand. It did.
“So, what can I tell you?” he asked, settling in at the conference table as he studied my card, holding it with both hands so it wouldn’t be blown away by a sudden breeze.
“Did you know Eugenie?”
He nodded.
“Sure. She’s been around the airport longer than me, running an air taxi between here and FBOs outside the city, mostly Westchester and Fairfield County.”
“FBOs?”
“Fixed-base operations. What we usually call general aviation airports, like us. The little ones. Not JFK.”
“So what’s your opinion? On the crash,” I said.
He thought about that with the kind of deliberate expression I often saw on expert witnesses at criminal trials. The kind I never quite believed were genuine.
“You probably know some colorful characters,” he said.
You don’t know the half of it, buster, I thought, but said instead, “This is the Hamptons.”
Toomey smiled a knowing smile.
“Eugenie broke the mold. Tough gal, you know, like Tugboat Annie in a slimmer package. Chewed tobacco, wore a set of keys on her belt, you know, like the biker chick she was. Used to drive one of those big hog things. Harley. But warm, when you talked to her. Would tear up at the drop of a hat. I liked her. Couldn’t help it. Sorry,” he said, tearing u
p a bit himself.
My opinion of Toomey took another upward leap.
“I’m sorry, too, Mr. Toomey. I know this is hard.”
He shook off the moment with a toss of his head and regained his professional poise.
“Eugenie was an expert pilot, with thousands of hours in the air. Something went wrong with the aircraft. Pilot error, zero probability.”
“She had a husband,” I said. “What do you know about him?”
He looked up from the table, which he’d been staring at.
“Ed? Good mechanic. Maintains half the planes on the field. Not much of a talker, but easygoing enough, for a Bubbie.”
“Ed’s a Bonacker?” I asked, referring to the ancient colony of reclusive fishermen who once held sway along the bayside coast of East Hampton, and who in all but name had essentially disappeared in the last few decades.
“Yeah, and I don’t mean perhaps,” he said, Bonacker style.
“Ed Birkson?”
“Ed Conklin. Eugenie was a modern girl. Kept her name. Proud of her white-trash heritage. Sorry, that was inappropriate. Is this being recorded? Will I have to repeat the same testimony? If so, I’d like to strike that last comment.”
He looked up at me with a reddening, worried face. I felt bad that it was all for naught, since there was not a single thing I could do to hurt him, unless suckering him out of this information constituted a hurt.
“I don’t think I heard that last part of your statement,” I said, generously.
He looked appreciative.
“Thank you.”
“So, Eugenie came from compromised circumstances,” I said.
“You probably don’t know Matt Birkson,” he said. “You would if you lived in Springs. Notorious hard case, from a long line of hard cases. Lives in a busted-down unpainted house, with derelict cars, boats, and major appliances all over the property. Spent time in prison for hijacking tractor trailers and knocking off an appliance store. And that was only what they caught him for. Ran his own gang. A real charmer.”
I remembered the name Matthew Birkson from my Google search, but I wrote it down again just in case.