by Chris Knopf
He sat in the deep embrace of the leather couch, turning the giant snifter between his hands.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, with an uncharacteristically flat inflection.
“Drugs, Benson. I’m talking drugs.”
His manner took an abrupt and lively turn for the better.
“Drugs? Could be. Did a little coke myself in the day. Okay, did a lot, but knew when to back away from the brink. I still have that little craving tickling at my nose. You too? Don’t deny it. It’s in your eyes.”
I did have that little tickle, but I wasn’t going to admit it to him, or to myself for that matter. Some things truly do need to be locked away in a very secure vault.
We sat quietly for a while, taking in the twilight and Cognac. I put my legs up on the glass coffee table, letting my pumps slip halfway off my feet. I rested the snifter on my belly. Benson did the same, mimicking me. I laughed.
“The eight hundred foot human you brought to the funeral,” said Benson. “Boyfriend?”
I nodded.
“Oh,” he said. “Not serious, I hope.”
“Not sure.”
“Good. Keep me informed on that,” he said. “I want to be first in line.”
“You’re everybody’s first in line.”
“It might surprise you to know that’s rarely the case. Been told often there’s too much of me to take in anything but small doses. You think that’s a defect?”
I looked at him, I hoped in a way that said, Are you kidding me? Who do you think you’re talking to? Then I dropped my head back on the couch, closed my eyes, and thought, Decision time. Exhaustion, in all its manifestations—physical, psychological, emotional—was catching up with me. I knew this because I’d stopped obsessing over every tiny detail of the Birkson case. I’d stopped being anxious, or excited, or furious. Or even curious. All that was left was this lead blanket that lay over me, and this hopeful eagerness for oblivion to take me away.
I opened my eyes and saw Benson looking at me.
“My house is only a block away,” he said. “Leftover veal medallions and Taittinger. Fireplace stocked with dry red oak. A better view of Sag Harbor Bay than this. If that isn’t good enough, we can drift the Hinckley off the dock and wander further out. It’s a little chilly, but the tartan blankets and Courvoisier should take care of that. Did I mention the beds I’m beta-testing for Tempur-Pedic? One for the boat, one for the house. Come with environmental music and dark chocolate. Amazing.”
He smiled. I smiled back. It would be so easy.
I closed my eyes again and felt my mind at work, sorting priorities. Then I opened them so I could see what I was doing. I pulled my legs off the coffee table and stood up. Benson looked at me in anticipation.
“If things were different,” I said, “they’d be different.”
I walked around the table, and with a slight stagger, leaned down and kissed that tender spot right below his ear. Then I managed my way out the door, down the stairs, and into the Volvo, which I drove with the utmost of care back to Water Mill, where the only form of refuge I thought I would ever trust awaited. The one fortified by me and me alone.
16
The next day I figured it was time to check back in with Ed Conklin, who was still technically my client even though the cops had lost interest in charging him with anything. I found him in his repair hangar, with his son, both of them neck-deep in the engine compartment of a Piper Cherokee. I didn’t want to startle them, so I called hello when I was still a distance away.
“Howdy, Ms. Swaitkowski,” said Ed, stepping down from a short ladder. Brian stayed with the job.
“You can call me Jackie,” I said, shaking his grease-covered hand. “I keep telling you that.”
“Understood. Just can’t make myself do it.”
He led me over to the overturned bins where we’d first sat to talk. The company conference facility. I chose my regular spot.
“Have you heard from the NTSB?” I asked.
“Not really. I get a call once in a while from one of them asking a technical question about the aircraft. It’s all piddling stuff, so I don’t bother you with it. Is that wrong?”
“You should write down what they asked and how you answered, and then let me know. Just in case.”
“Sorry. I will. They mostly want to know stuff that’s already in Eugenie’s flight logs. The ones from last year back. The last four months’ went down with the plane.”
“You didn’t keep copies.”
“No need.”
“Wait here.”
I went out to the Volvo and retrieved my laptop. I set it up on its own bin and pulled up Eugenie’s photo file.
“Did Eugenie take a lot of photos?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, real shutterbug. I bought her a fancy digital camera a few years ago to replace her old Canon. She used some Web site to get her prints. Put ’em in a regular album. Nothin’ arty. Just vacation stuff and get-togethers. You want to see it?”
“I would. In the meantime, I’ve got something to show you.”
I first pulled up the cabin on the lake.
“Is this where you folks stayed?”
He looked at the shot and shook his head.
“Nope. Looks nice, though.”
“Really,” I said. “Never stayed there.”
“Nope. We mostly went to a campground in Bennington, Vermont. Easy walking distance from an airfield cut right out of the woods. Great spot. Brought all the gear in the plane, got up there in two hops and a jump. Eugenie loved to camp.”
“What about this?” I asked, clicking on the bar shot.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked. “That was Eugenie’s birthday party a couple years ago at the Schooner. That’s her dad and aunt. Them two are from the bike club Eugenie used to belong to.” He pointed at the ones in the denim outfits. “Can almost remember their names. Ridin’ that Harley was her second most fun thing to do, till she had to focus on the flying. Don’t know the others. Not sure Eugenie did either. These’re all people Birkson invited. That’s my back over there.” He pointed at himself, facing away, wearing a flannel shirt. “I had a good enough time, but a lot of Matt’s buddies are ex-cons or still in the game. Not good for me, even bein’ well past parole. Rather keep a low profile.”
I moved on to the shot of Eugenie’s Cessna.
“Please tell me that’s her plane.”
“Yep. Took that no more’n a few months ago. That’s her baby. Not so easy to look at.”
“Sorry,” I said, and clicked on to the fund-raiser photo. “Know these people?”
He examined the photo carefully, then shook his head.
“I thought maybe they was movie stars I’d know, but I can’t say I do. I never look at those magazines stacked around the sidewalks. Not my scene.”
Brian approached, wiping his hands on the thighs of his mechanic’s jumpsuit. He looked over his father’s shoulder at the computer screen. I clicked back to the party at the Schooner.
“Know any of these people?” I asked. “Besides the Birksons, of course.”
He studied the photo, then pointed at the couple in denim.
“That’s Dutch and Sandy Andersen. Eugenie rode with them in the day. Dutch don’t like me. Can’t say I like him.”
“When was the day?” I asked.
“Long time ago. Before she started working with my dad. Could tear down and rebuild that hog of hers like nothin’ else. I saw her do it, right here in this hangar. Right before she sold it off. I was maybe twelve at the time. It was sittin’ around for years. I was hoping to get my hands on it. Worth a lot more now than when she sold it.”
“You don’t happen to have a picture of the bike, do you?” I asked Ed.
“Sure. It’s in the album. Had to get one to sell it. It was tough to give it up, but, to be honest, not as much as you’d think. By then, she was all airplane engines and airplanes.”
I had another thought.
“Eugenie’s photo album, does it have anything from her childhood? I’m thinking about her brother.”
“Not in the album—that’s just since our time together—but she’s got black and whites of the brother and the mom before she took off,” said Ed. “Showed them to me once. I’ll see what I can dig out.”
“What happened to him, anyway?” I asked.
“Who, the brother? Don’t know,” said Brian. “Long before my time. Nobody in the family wants to talk about it. I think just boltin’ the scene pissed everybody off. Just like the old lady. Fucked-up family.”
“ ‘Nuff of that,” said Ed.
“Sorry, Dad. You’re right. Didn’t mean the disrespect.”
I’d had some experience with people’s names disappearing from family discourse, so it wasn’t hard for me to understand.
“Do you mind if I send a courier over to pick up that album tonight?” I asked Ed. “How much time do you need to look for the old family shots?”
“Not much. Hour maybe. I can have it all ready by six o’clock.”
Ordinarily, I do my own schlepping, but after Ed’s late-night visit to my house, and his obvious tipsiness at the funeral, this seemed like the ideal time to have somebody make a run for me. As we sat there, I placed the call, then handed the phone to Ed so he could provide directions. As usual, the courier acted like I was his best and most valuable client, even though I gave him only a dozen or so gigs a year. I like to think it was because I saved his bacon from being fried in a big larceny case. Especially since he was actually innocent, a rarity among my defense clientele.
“I’ll be at your office by six-thirty on the dot, Miss Jackie. With utmost pleasure.”
“To both our pleasures. I will be awaiting.”
Before I left, I showed Ed and Brian the final picture, the one of Delbert’s Deli. Again, not much recognition.
“Looks familiar,” said Ed. “Can’t say more’n that.”
“It used to be a little food store in North Sea called the Peconic Pantry where the shopkeeper was robbed and assaulted.”
Ed looked a little closer.
“Oh, sure. Billy O’Dwyer. Met him at Sanger. He was coming in about the time I was coming out. He looked me up as soon as he arrived. A Hamptons boy, so I did what I could to look after him, get him set up. Didn’t belong there.”
I felt my face start to burn, and hoped it didn’t show.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Just a kid, but not like the other kids that filled the place. College boy. Smart and polite. I was inside when the thing went down, so I didn’t know the particulars, but what little I heard didn’t fit with O’Dwyer. Didn’t have the hot head, like I had, or the blood urge, or the killer’s pride most of the young idiots seemed to have.”
“So you didn’t stay in touch,” I said.
“Nah. I was out six months after he got there, and when I left he was in good hands. Meaning, protected by the ones who’d protected me for three years. Nobody survives outside a group, but it don’t have to be shanks in the gut or pervo shit all the time. Just a little team play. Don’t know what happened to him after that.”
I wasn’t sure how Brian felt hearing all this, but Ed seemed undeterred. I guessed by then, thirty years after the fact, this had been long talked out.
“So you think he might not have done it?” I asked, hoping like hell the little tremor I felt in my voice wasn’t audible.
“He said he did it,” said Ed, “so I guess he did. I just found it hard to believe.”
“Did he ever say if he had accomplices?”
Conklin said no.
“Never came up. Though I can’t say we talked about it much. Some of the guys loved to hash over what landed them in the joint. Usually to convince you how bad they were screwed by their lawyers, or the system, or whatever. Mostly, I kept that stuff to myself. No point. O’Dwyer was like that.”
The Conklins might have been up for more difficult and emotionally challenging analysis, but by then, I sure as hell wasn’t. The turn things had taken shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected—I knew both Billy and Conklin had been at Sanger, though I hadn’t checked for overlap. Whatever focus and deliberateness I’d had at the start of the conversation was completely blown.
Flummoxed though I was, I felt, or rather hoped, I’d learned some important information. I just needed some head space to sort it out, and that wasn’t going to happen right then. What I really needed was fresh air, away from the gleam of polished steel and the smell of lubricating oil.
So I packed away the laptop, and was up off the bins and on my way to the hangar door when Ed said, “It’s funny, though, now that I’m rememberin’ all this.”
I stopped.
“What’s funny?’
“If it weren’t for O’Dwyer, I probably wouldn’t’ve met Eugenie.”
“You wouldn’t?”
He looked a bit in the thrall of reminiscence, so I gave him time to assemble his thoughts.
“That first time, she came in here to thank me,” he said.
“For what?”
“For keeping Billy out of trouble on the inside. He was a friend of hers from high school, and he wrote her to say that me and my gang had probably saved his life, if not his virgin ass, though that’s not how she put it.”
Back in Water Mill I found a note stuck to my office door. It was from Makoto Sato, the guy who owns the Japanese restaurant on the first floor below my office. He asked me to come down and see him.
It was barely noon, and the restaurant only served dinner. But the back door was open, so I walked in. There were people working behind the bar and the sushi counter, but all the seats were empty. Except for one in a remote corner, far from the front windows.
“Well,” I said. “What do you know.”
“Hi, Jackie. Want some tea?”
I sat down and took in the awesome ingenuousness and precision that was Webster Ig. He still looked about twenty years old, though he was closer to my age, his soft brown hair just long enough to allow a part that looked drawn in with a razor and a straightedge. His blue eyes were far paler than mine, like a fresh spring day, clear of bad habits and burdened conscience. He was in his customary white shirt and plain, dark tie, his suit coat draped over a chair. In front of him was a folder with papers that he neatened up and put away.
“Needed something to do while I waited.”
“How’d you know I was going to show up?” I asked.
“I didn’t.”
“I hope you didn’t freak out Mr. Sato.”
“You may remember I was stationed at Yokota Air Base for five years,” he said, adding another line in Japanese as he bowed his head. “He thinks I’m merely an old friend paying a visit.”
“You are, but not merely. Nice to see you.”
“Ditto. How’s the law practice? Still getting in trouble, obviously.”
“What do you mean ‘still’? When was I ever in trouble?”
He grinned.
“Would it surprise you to learn that inter-agency cooperation within the law-enforcement community is often less than thoroughly collegial?” he asked.
“Disturbingly, no.”
“This isn’t all bad.”
“Really,” I said.
He took another sip of tea and waited while a young Asian man in a yellow Yankees hat set a cup in front of me, which I filled from Webster’s pot. It was green tea, slightly bitter but a lively change of pace.
“In the absence of reliable official communications, unofficial networks tend to form. These are based on mutual trust, or mutually assured destruction. It’s like a black market, and the trade is information.”
“Lovely. The American public would be so pleased to hear this.”
“ ‘Unofficial’ is the operative word here,” he said. “The communications might not be sanctioned, but they’re also unregulated.”
“Not unlike the conversation we’re having right now.”
&nb
sp; “In gangster movies they’d say, ‘We’re just talkin’ here.’ I also did some talkin’ with a friend at Homeland Security.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re dating Inspector Li.”
He smiled. “I thought our social lives were off-limits.”
“Sorry.”
“My friend, forever nameless, knows quite a bit about you.”
“I knew it. Goddammit, I’m being surveilled. What damn good is it to have a constitution if nobody pays any attention to it anymore? You can’t just do that to an attorney, especially in the absence of cause, without a shred of due process. It’s illegal, and–”
“Whoa, rein in the righteous ponies. You’re not under surveillance, or investigation, or anything like that. They know you from the Windsong bombing. When you and Sam got plastered all over East Hampton. You might remember that was only a month after that bloody mess in D.C. Forgive us, but two big explosions in a row might just pique the curiosity of domestic security.”
He was talking about the car bomb that mangled my face. He was also kind enough not to mention he was the first guy I went out with after the fact, while I was still pink from all the plastic surgeries.
“Oh,” I said.
“My friend also knew that your phone had been used to text a code to a disposable cell phone. Your phone and several others, so you were never considered a suspect in any way.”
“Cold comfort,” I said.
“Do you know a woman named Janie Wilson?” he asked.
“The Plant Lady. She has a radio show. And is a very nice person. How can you not be, playing around with plants all day?”
“All my plants die within forty-eight hours of receipt,” said Ig.
“Did they tell you about water?”
“Ms. Wilson had about a dozen calls with similar coded messages sent to almost the same number of disposable cells. Unlike you, she’s under intense investigation. So far, nothing, according to my friend, who’s close but not in the middle of it.”
While he talked, Ig methodically straightened the corners of the papers extending past the edges of the manila folder. In another few minutes, they’d be as one. While still looking more boy than man, he’d fleshed out a little. Some heft around the jawline, rougher hands, more prominent veins, and dryer skin.