by Chris Knopf
I stood at the front door and dug my keys out of the muddled mess at the bottom of my purse. Inside, I slung the bag over my shoulder and did a quick sweep of all the rooms. It was more or less the way I remembered leaving it, with the exception of the lamp in the living room that’d been knocked over in the tussle and never restored to the side table. That creepy little note aside, it was pleasant to take in the sights and smells, made slightly less familiar by the brief passage of time.
Since I rarely kept much in the way of perishable food around, the kitchen was merely dank. I tossed a single bunch of rotten carrots in a plastic bag, scrubbed out the sink, and poured a cup of baking soda down the drain. I unplugged the coffeemaker, something I thought I’d already done, and headed back up the stairs to collect my clothes.
It took longer than I expected to select the right items to cover with plastic from the dry cleaner and haul down to the Volvo. I was on my final trip back to the second floor when my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, which had a Nassau County area code. I answered anyway.
“So this is what you do for a living,” said a woman’s voice. “Ruin people’s lives.”
I climbed to the top of the stairs and went into the light of the front bedroom before answering.
“Who’s this?”
“He’s a good man. The best man I’ve ever known.”
“Kathy?” I asked, finally placing the voice.
“He did one bad thing, and he’s spent his entire life trying to rise above it.”
“What did he tell you?” I asked.
“And you, his own sister, just want to drag him back down.”
“He might be an even better man than you think,” I said. “If you stop and actually think for a minute.”
“You’re the evil one in the family. Jealous Miss Priss.”
Various parts of me fought to respond to that one, but luckily, the part that kept my head cool enough to practice criminal law, most of the time, prevailed.
“You need to tell me what Billy told you,” I said.
“Do you have any idea what Benson MacAvoy has done for us? Do you think anyone else would’ve gotten Billy back on his feet, got him a place to stay, a job? Surely not his family.”
Her emphasis on the word “family” was wet with contempt.
“You’re obviously in no mood to be reasonable,” I said. “But I can’t have a conversation when I don’t know what we’re talking about.”
“You know. Accusing Benson of attacking that man. You should also know that Billy confessed to everything. Not just in court, but to me. He opened his heart so he could heal. That was the night I fell in love with him. How dare you?”
“Where is Billy now?” I asked.
“None of your business. And if you don’t stay away and stop harassing us, I’m calling the police. Even ex-convicts have rights, whether you believe it or not.”
“Kathy, Billy’s innocent. He didn’t even know what Benson was planning to do.”
“Go ahead, try twisting everything around,” she said. “I’ve been warned.”
I heard the sound of myself stopping on a breath and felt my face catch on fire.
“What do you mean, Kathy? Warned by who?”
“Who do you think? I’m not letting you slander Billy’s best friend without him knowing about it.”
“You didn’t.”
“Accusing people of crimes just because they won’t go to bed with you? How low can you go?” she said, and she was about to say something else when I pushed the end button. I stood in the bedroom and waited for the screeching inside my head to quiet down enough for me to think.
That’s when I heard the unmistakable sound of a car rolling down the gravel driveway and stopping below the window, the car door opening and then slamming shut.
23
I had my cell phone flipped open and my thumb poised over the buttons that would speed dial me into Southampton Town Police. I walked over to the window and looked down. All I saw was my Volvo, and no evidence of another car save for a cloud of gravel dust. I strained to look down the driveway from the awkward angle afforded by the bedroom window, to no avail. So I ran into the bedroom that faced that direction, pulled up the curtains, and looked down at Ed Conklin’s pickup truck.
Relief, irritation, and a twinge of guilt swept over me in equal measure.
It was a devilish conundrum. Eugenie wanted the pipe’s secrets revealed or she wouldn’t have tossed the case out of the plane. Yet in so doing, she would be exposing her own involvement in the Peconic Pantry episode. Provided the authorities also learned her real identity. Compounding it all was my relationship with her husband, the guy who’d just arrived in his pickup, whose interests I was obliged to protect, even though they were often diametrically opposed to each other.
I’d tried like hell to keep Eugenie’s big secret, but I wondered how long before the world knew what so few had held in confidence all these years. Ed undoubtedly knew he’d married a girl who’d once been a boy. Eugenie’s social security number was still officially assigned to Matthew Birkson Jr. It was unlikely she could hide that over all these years. Filing taxes, taking out loans, keeping up her pilot’s license, renting a cabin in the woods of Vermont—there were just too many ways she’d be exposed without his cooperation.
Still, that didn’t make me feel any better about the impending conversation.
“Goddammit,” I said aloud. I put the phone back in my purse, which was still around my neck and over one shoulder, and walked back downstairs and out the front door. I looked over at the truck, down the drive, and across the lawn, but there was no one there.
“Yo, Ed,” I called as I walked toward the pickup, which I then realized wasn’t his, but one I’d seen parked at the hangar with the same decal promoting Conklin Maintenance and Repair on the side of the door. I moved closer and looked through the passenger-side window. Aside from the random flashlight, or socket wrench, all the junk on the seat and on top of the dashboard spoke of a young man—magazines devoted to heavy metal, half-naked women, and motorcycles, a pack of cigarettes, an iPod, an empty can of Red Bull, and a homemade flyer advertising a beach party featuring bitches, bonfires, and beer. Being the generally nosy person I am, I also looked in the voluminous area behind the seats, where pickup owners have been known to cram an impressive amount of crap.
Again, it was mostly tools and parts, baseball hats, more magazines, and in this case, a bashed-in Fred Flintstone mask peeking out from under a pair of greasy coveralls.
I heard the sound of him coming up behind me soon enough to spin around and jump away from the truck. Brian Conklin stood in the driveway with his hands in his pockets, a pale, slope-shouldered version of his father. He looked over my shoulder at the truck, then back at me, his skin glowing pinky white under the fading springtime sun.
Casper the Friendly Ghost.
I stepped toward the Volvo, but he moved almost lazily in front of me.
“You were looking in my truck,” he said.
“Is this your truck?” I asked. “I thought it was your dad’s. Looks just like it.”
“You were looking. What did you see?”
“Nothing,” I said, and started walking with greater authority toward my car. Brian stepped in front of me. I backed up.
“What did you see?” he said again.
“Nothing. What’s the big deal?” I said. “You’re not actually blocking my path, are you? That would be a very bad idea.”
“I think it’s bad to spy on people. That’s what you’re all about, isn’t it? Creeping around spying on people. Is that what gets you off?”
“What are you doing at my house?” I asked. “Isn’t that spying?”
“Watchin’s not the same as spyin’,” he said. “I knew you’d be back here some day. I just had to stop in once in a while.”
What luck, I thought. I turned around and walked down the drive, away from the truck, where I had more room to maneuver. As he start
ed to follow me, I turned back again and told him to stay where he was. He sauntered forward a few steps, then stopped.
“People know where I am,” I said. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret.”
He walked over to the bed of the pickup and reached in, pulling out a hammer with a long, thin handle and a tiny ball-shaped head.
“Should do the trick,” he said, then ran directly at me.
I screamed, ducked my head down, and tried to dodge out of the way. I nearly made it, but he caught the upper sleeve of my jacket. I twisted away, but he held on.
“Not this time,” he said, and whipped the little hammer into my shoulder.
I yelped again from the shock and pain, though the blow might have given the extra kick I needed to pull away. Rather than grab me again, he backed off, but in such a way that the path to my car was still effectively blocked.
“It was you,” I said. “You killed her. Your own stepmother.”
He tapped the hammer into his palm.
“Don’t use the word ‘mother’ when talking about that fucking freak.”
“You sabotaged the plane. You’d know how to do that. How to get it by your father.”
“Not that hard if you know what you’re doing,” he said.
“The NTSB knows exactly how you did it,” I said. “The question is why.”
As I talked I eased my leather bag off my shoulder and unzipped it.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“I’ve got their report in here. I thought you should see how your name’s all over it. You’re days away from getting busted. You think hurting me is going to help your case?”
He tapped the hammer again, this time against his thigh.
“How’re they going to know what I done with you?” he asked.
“I’ll tell them.”
“Not if I bash in your brains and feed your naked body to the sharks.”
He took a step forward, and I asked him again if he didn’t want to at least see what kind of evidence they had.
“I can read all I want when I’m done with you,” he said as I reached inside my purse.
He lurched forward, and was only a few feet away when I cleared the Glock from my bag and leveled it at his chest.
“Maybe not,” I said.
He stepped back a pace.
“Why’d you do it?” I asked.
He pointed at me with the hammer.
“Not impressed,” he said.
“Why’d you kill Eugenie?” I asked again.
He smirked at me.
“I seen the name Matthew Birkson Jr. around the house my whole life, on mail and shit. She always said it was her brother’s stuff that she had to forward on. Then I was in their basement looking for some shit from high school and found a whole stack of papers in a box. The dates don’t hardly line up. I ask her about it, and she tells me the whole deal. I thought I was gonna die before I stopped puking my fucking guts out. My old man marries a fucking fag.”
As he talked, his voice rose until he was nearly shouting, his Casper face turning more red then white.
“She kissed me good night when I was just an innocent kid and didn’t know anything!” he yelled. “What kind of sick shit is that?”
“You’re the one who’s sick, Brian. Put the hammer down,” I added, using the barrel of the Glock to gesture toward the ground.
“Fuck no. You’re not gonna shoot me. No fuckin’ woman has the balls to do that.”
He threw the hammer at me. I flinched to the right and used my left hand to swat it away, keeping the other hand in control of the Glock, so when he rushed me I was still able to pull off a round, missing his heart but putting a tidy crease in his right side, which had an effect.
I stepped to the side to avoid his grasping hands as he collapsed to the ground, mewling in stunned disbelief.
“This fuckin’ woman absolutely does,” I told him, holding the gun to his head with one hand while I searched my purse for the cell phone with the other.
24
Burton Lewis sat on my pull-out sofa looking completely at ease. On his lap was a legal pad hooked to a clipboard made of exotic hardwood. He took notes as I recited the testimony I planned to give the next day in the attempted murder trial of Benson MacAvoy, occasionally flipping back through the pad to check for inconsistencies.
“So it wasn’t until your brother revealed that Eugenie, as the former Mathew Birkson, had retrieved the assault weapon that you were convinced of MacAvoy’s complicity in the crime,” he said.
“That is correct. I purposely refrained from sharing my theories with the police until I knew I could support such a serious charge with incontrovertible evidence. Burton, you have a jillion lawyers who could be taking me through this. Don’t you have better things to do?”
“I want to be sure you don’t expose yourself to withholding. Nailing MacAvoy is priority one, I agree, but you can’t be tarnished in the process.”
“That isn’t what I meant,” I said.
“Fingerprinting and DNA tests have confirmed that the steel pipe was indeed the weapon used in the assault on Mr. Andrews, but traces belonging to both Mr. MacAvoy and Ms. Birkson were present on the pipe. Why should we believe Mr. MacAvoy was the only perpetrator?”
“Because Eugenie’s prints were only on the bloody end, from when she picked the pipe out of the Dumpster. She kept it to have something over MacAvoy. Otherwise, she could have easily disposed of it in a thousand ways. She was a brilliant mechanic, for Pete’s sake. With access to welding torches and lathes. To say nothing of small aircraft and the deep blue sea.”
“Benson wasn’t much of a criminal, for all his sadistic tendencies,” said Burton.
“You think?” I said. “Trying to escape on his yacht after Billy’s dopey wife told him I was onto him? Beating up on a convenience store owner is one thing. Selling composite technology critical to the American defense industry is another. Did he not know the Coast Guard works for Homeland Security? Tell me again why you’re the one prepping me for trial?”
“You knew of the details of Mathew Birkson Jr.’s role in the robbery, and his subsequent transformation into Eugenie,” said Burton, ignoring me. “Yet you failed to provide this information to the police when you and Detective Sullivan discovered the pipe. Why?”
“I felt constrained by client confidentiality since I was representing Eugenie’s husband, Ed. I needed his permission to openly discuss his wife’s complicated history, which I’ve subsequently received, hence my testimony today.”
“Which entails?”
“Mathew Birkson Jr. was born with a condition known as intersex anatomy. Meaning his sexual equipment was ambiguous—somewhere between male and female. With any luck, people thus affected are spared surgical intervention until they reach an age where they’re able to make a choice for themselves to remain as they are or be assigned to one gender or the other through surgery. Immediately following the robbery and assault, Matthew left for another city, where he lived for four years, during which time he elected to have the surgery that made him unambiguously female. He returned to East Hampton, where he’d grown up, as Eugenie Birkson, using a female variation of his middle name.
“Benson MacAvoy, who’d been Mathew Birkson Jr.’s childhood friend, was aware of this transition. At some point in their adult relationship, MacAvoy contracted with Eugenie to provide air taxi service for his frequent flights to various parts of New England. We’ve subsequently come to know these flights were part of an illegal enterprise that sold industrial secrets to foreign nationals. There is no evidence that Eugenie Birkson had any knowledge of illegal dealings, to which her murder was entirely unrelated. Consequently, there is no reason to suspect this was anything more than a simple chauffeuring arrangement between two old friends, as Mr. MacAvoy asserts.”
Burton looked up from his pad to signal that he was suspending role-play for a moment.
“I understand Benson’s phone calls to his customers won’t b
e part of the evidence,” he said.
“The NSA isn’t about to discuss their methods in an open trial. It doesn’t matter. The prosecutor doesn’t need it to convict, and Benson’s lawyers are just as happy to not go there. What we do know, unofficially, is that Benson favored the same crude but highly effective technique Brian Conklin used to evade electronic discovery—stealing other people’s gear, whether computers and e-mail boxes or cell phones. But once again, Benson outsmarted himself. From what my source in the FBI tells me, NSA monitoring looks for exactly that kind of pattern: frequent calls to suspect parties made from stolen phones. Which is where Benson’s thrill-seeking, master of the universe tendencies also caught up with him. Sneaking calls on the cell phones of his fellow partygoers is a classic ego trip for a narcissist like MacAvoy. And a bright red alert for the NSA. By the time people like Inspectors Fells and Li start circling, it’s just a matter of time. My greatest fear was that they’d snatch him up and disappear him into the gulag before I could nail him for Eugenie’s murder.”
“Which is the only thing he wasn’t guilty of,” said Burton.
“Lucky for him for a lot of reasons. Matt Birkson Sr. and Ed Conklin are still plenty well connected at Sanger, where MacAvoy is most assuredly going to spend the bulk of his remaining life. Which wouldn’t amount to much if he’d killed her.”
“No it wouldn’t,” said Burton.
“I know you know this, but it’s a tough goddamn world out there,” I said.
“A world in which you’ve shown remarkable courage,” said Burton.
“Remarkable stupidity. My instincts kept telling me there was something off about both MacAvoy and Brian Conklin. But did I listen? At least with Benson I can claim temporarily insane infatuation.”
Burton took a flash drive tied to the end of a thin tether out of the inside pocket of his blue blazer and twirled it around his finger.
“I refuse to agree with you,” he said. “I’ve always thought the world of you as a person, but now I see you for the crack defense lawyer you truly are. So you’re hired. And that’s that.”