Plane in the Lake Page 15

  “We’re looking into it, pal. More to come. Now, let’s get back to our agreement not to screw up our night by obsessing over this shit.”

  He gives me a rueful smile and apologizes.

  “No worries,” I say while waving to get our server’s attention. When I do, I order another bourbon for me, a Miller Lite for Billy, and ask for more peanuts. Dry-roasted, generously salted peanuts… one of my gastronomical weaknesses. I hope to eventually be reincarnated as a cow so I can laze away the days with an endless supply of salt licks. Until then, I make do with peanuts and potato chips.

  “So, what’s up with your father and all the crap around your place?” he asks. “Real sorry to hear about the cop who got shot, man.”

  I give him a drastically abridged version of the story, leaving out the lurid details of Papa killing his sister’s rapist and his recent flight to Italy.

  Billy isn’t quite buying the bare-bones tale I’ve spun, but he lets it go after I deflect a couple more questions. “How about you, Tony? You’ve been divorced awhile now, huh? Any women in your life?”

  There’s a topic that won’t take long to cover. I turn my glass of bourbon this way and that to catch the light. I definitely don’t want to start wallowing in that misery over a few drinks. Morose Tony is definitely not Fun Tony. “Well, there’s Brittany,” I reply lightly. “A handful by any measure.”

  Billy lifts an eyebrow in surprise. “Really? I’ve always gotten the impression that she’s a good kid. Troubles?”

  I shake my head. Aside from her mother’s threat to steal her away from me again, things are good on the Brittany front. “Not from her. More crap from her mother. She filed for custody again.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah. Michelle and her parents have invited us to a little get-together to discuss custody ‘without the unpleasantness of going to court.’”

  “That sounds hopeful.”

  “Hah!” I sneer. “I’m being given an opportunity to surrender gracefully.”

  “Why would you?”

  “Because that’s the way of the universe according to Prescott Rice the Fucking Third: You got. I want. You give or I take… and break you into a thousand little pieces in the process.”

  Billy frowns. “They sound like nice folks.”

  A bitter laugh escapes me. “Anyway.”

  “But things are good between you and Brittany, right?”

  I guess I’m about to find out. Things seem okay, but they often do just before the broken relationship roof falls in on me.

  “We’ve got a seventeen-year-old, man,” Billy says. “Feel free to talk things through. I may have a useful insight or two.”

  “Nah, you were right. Britts is a good kid. I was just thinking about the bullshit with her mother.”

  “I’m glad you got her back from Europe.”

  Let’s hope she doesn’t go right back. Shit, I’m in danger of starting to wallow in it all. I shrug, probably looking as miserable as I feel while doing so.

  “Okay,” Billy says with a tight smile. “No more Brittany talk.”

  “Thanks.” I pop a handful of peanuts into my mouth and signal our server for more.

  “How about Pat O’Toole?” he asks, opening yet another raw topic. “You two seem to get along.”

  “Yeah, we do, but she’s not interested in me that way.”

  “Which sounds like you’re interested in her ‘that’ way?”

  Am I? The distance she insists on imposing between us is starting to wear on me. Anyway, it’s not a topic to bore Billy with. I decide to steer the conversation to his late sister. Mel’s death had devastated me. I know it still haunts Billy, yet remembering her together seems to help both of us to shoulder the loss without sinking too deeply into melancholy. There are plenty of happy memories to sustain us, and we invariably get a few laughs out of remembering her wacky antics.

  “Have you heard from any of Mel’s friends lately?” I ask.

  He nods. “You know how people loved Mel. I still hear from a few of them now and then, and we get lots of Christmas cards. I ran into Pete Livingston at a ball game last summer, and we shot the shit over a couple of beers.”

  I smile. Pete was a wild one who ran with our crowd. “How’s Pete?”

  “Good. Still doing his firefighter shit, still telling cornball jokes, still stuck in adolescence. He was telling me about a time he and Mel and some other nuts drank a little too much and tried to paddle a dinghy by hand all the way across Lake Michigan in the middle of the night. I can’t believe they didn’t kill themselves!”

  “When I think about some of the dumb shit we did, I’m surprised we didn’t kill ourselves several times over. That night we got it into our heads that we wanted to see Michigan,” I say with a chuckle.

  Billy grins. “You were there?”

  I nod. “Pete’s folks were out of town, so he suggested using his dad’s ‘little boat,’ which turned out to be an inflatable Zodiac with an outboard motor—not exactly a dinghy. We didn’t have a trailer hitch to take the whole thing, so we took the motor off and strapped the boat to the top of someone’s car—I forget whose. Anyway, Dipshit Livingston forgot to load the paddles, which we didn’t realize until we put the damned thing in the water. Mel, in particular, was disappointed about not getting to go to Michigan.”

  “All her fault, huh?” Billy asks with a chuckle.

  “Not entirely, but she was a babe, and no guy wanted to let her down.”

  Billy laughs. “I still thought of girls as being gross back in those days—especially Big Sis.”

  Mel was anything but gross. While not drop dead gorgeous in any traditional sense of the word, she was vivacious and inherently appealing. Everyone wanted to get close to her all through school. The glue of the special bond between her and me had been the abuse we suffered at home—mine at the fists and feet of my older brother ‘Fearsome’ Frankie, and Mel’s at the hands of her father, who was a twisted bastard of a child sexual abuser with his eldest daughter. Mel had suspected the truth about my brother by watching him interact with me at school and around the neighborhood. Her suspicions were confirmed one day when she arrived at our house while Frankie was pounding the crap out of me on the other side of the screen door. That particular beating had left me with a six-stitch scar on my right cheekbone that resurfaced when I tanned for years afterward. Things crystallized for me after school one day when she begged me not to go to volleyball practice and leave her alone in the house with her father. The fear in her eyes and her evident relief when her mother arrived sent my mind back to a number of other times when she’d exhibited uncharacteristic skittishness. Looking back on them, I’d realized that her father featured in every instance. She tearfully admitted to the truth when I pressed her for a definitive answer. Neither of us whispered a word of it to anyone else; we were friends, confidants, and a two-person, mutual-support network. I sometimes wonder if either of us would have made it through our teens without the other to lean on and love. Although the sexual tension between us was electric and we walked right up to the precipice of a full-blown relationship more times than I could count, the idea of going there and having it go sour terrified us, so we always backed away. The prospect of losing our best friend and one-person, emotional-support network was too terrifying to contemplate.

  I pick up the story of the Lake Michigan escapade for Billy. “Anyway, we’ve got three sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boys spewing testosterone and the apple of our eyes is in distress, so, dumbasses that we were, someone came up with the bright idea of paddling across. The notion actually scared the shit out of us, but once it was out there, none of us were turning back. I mean, who wanted to risk looking like a chicken in front of the girls?”

  “I guess no one thought about how stupid they’d look as bloated corpses washing ashore?” Billy asks with a wink.

  “Hell no!” I chortle while flagging our server for another round. This time I order myself two bourbons.

 
“Pete said you didn’t make it to Michigan. What happened?”

  “We washed ashore on the Indiana sand dunes.”

  My mind turns inward to memories of Mel while we wait for the drinks. We spent years apart while Mel chased happiness around the globe in an unending string of bad relationships, each of which I think she hoped would erase the stain of her father. None ever could, of course, but I was always a safe home base when she came back to lick her wounds. If I hadn’t been married to Michelle, something more might have developed between us on one of those early homecomings.

  “Here you go, gentlemen,” the waitress says as she plunks our drinks down. She adds another bowl of peanuts and grins at me. “You might wanna go easy on those, sir. The manager’s gonna start charging you by the pound pretty soon.”

  Melancholy sets in somewhere in the middle of my fourth bourbon when Billy heads off to the bathroom and my thoughts turn to Pat. A series of bad relationships through my time in law school left me wondering if my older brother wasn’t right about how worthless and dog-faced I am. I’ve never forgotten his telling me that I was one of those guys the girls all snickered at and said “eew!” about when I passed by. Sure enough, I came to feel as if I wasn’t worth anyone’s emotional investment. I still feel that way at times… and this is why I shouldn’t drink too much.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Billy says as he slips back into his seat.

  “Just thinking about Pat. She talks a good game to explain why she isn’t ready to commit to any more than friendship.”

  “Such as?”

  “She’s happy with her life and career, she doesn’t need someone else to ‘complete her.’ She’s committed to work, family, Lawndale, and painting. She’s not sure she has time in her life for more. It all makes sense on one level, but I suspect it’s more likely a way for her to keep me at arm’s length without rejecting me outright. It stings, but I get it and accept it. I appreciate that she’s trying hard not to hurt me, but it’s still rejection.”

  “That’s a lot of self-trash talk, man,” Billy says softly when I finish and upend my glass.

  “Yeah, well, at some point I had to come to terms with the reality that I’m simply not good enough.”

  “Good enough for what?”

  “People. Friendship. Relationships. Just not cut out for it, I guess.”

  “Mel would slap you around something fierce if she heard this, Tony.”

  I smile the saddest of smiles and start in on my second glass of bourbon. “Yeah, she would. Nobody ever had a fiercer protector than I had in her.”

  “She had someone just as committed to protecting her.”

  I stare back into his eyes, wondering if he’s ever figured out what his father did to Mel. She’d always protected Billy from that knowledge and had sworn me to secrecy, as well. “Sometimes I wonder if the reason Mel and I never went all in on our relationship wasn’t something similar to the situation with Pat.”

  Billy shakes his head while giving me an incredulous look. “Nah, she loved you with her whole being, Tony. You two should have been together. Hell, you were meant for one another, whatever the hurdles. She knew that at the end.”

  Or maybe that was an act of pity on her part. By the time Mel and I finally found ourselves free of other entanglements after Michelle and I separated briefly for the first time when Brittany was only three and Mel had limped home from Australia after a particularly painful breakup, time was running out on us. We had three months together before cancer claimed her. I remember telling her how completely broken I felt during her last few days. I’ve often clung to her response. As she so often did, she found the right words in a song lyric. This one came from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem” about how there is a crack in everything, but instead of lamenting the crack, he suggests that this is how the light gets in. I’ve always found the idea to be a profoundly positive way to find the light within the darkness.

  Billy drinks off the last of his beer, then leans in closer and locks my gaze in his. “She did know you were the one, Tony. She told me that the biggest mistake of her life was not to roll the dice with you way back when, because she knew you would never, ever have let her down.”

  I nod and admit, “Yeah, I guess I do know that at some level.” But would she have turned away from me if she’d rolled those dice? Everyone else has.

  Billy rests his hand on my arm and leans even closer. “You’re real fucked up in the relationship department, my friend. Don’t let Pat or your ex-wife or anybody else tear you down. You’ve told me more than once that my sister was the best person you’ve ever known.”

  I nod.

  “You’ve told me that she knew more about people than anyone, right?”

  I nod again.

  “I’ve also heard you swear that Mel was the most honest person on the face of the earth… past, present, and future.”

  I smile at that. It was quite a pronouncement—one I believe to this day.

  “We both made promises to Mel at the end,” Billy says. “Mine was to make sure you never lose sight of her love for you. I guess she knew you had this morose streak in you, so I understand tonight exactly why she tagged me to keep an eye out.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  “Can I give you a bit of advice?”

  I twirl my hand in a “bring it on” motion.

  “Get back on the horse, buddy. You’ve got to know a woman or two. Take someone out on the town, live a little.”

  Maybe he’s right. Lord knows I can use a distraction from the ugliness that’s swirling all around me. Maybe it’s time to set aside my feelings for Pat and stop mooning over lost causes. Being her friend isn’t the worst thing in the world. Maybe it’s time to dip a toe in the water and see if maybe Mel was onto something. My thoughts track immediately to a former co-worker I ran into at the courthouse a few weeks ago. Note to self: call her.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jonathan Walton sighs inwardly as he and his partners ascend to their office in a Willis Tower elevator. Caitlyn Tyson is on the verge of one of her eruptions—narrowed eyes, lips drawn tightly, fidgeting from foot to foot while she impatiently flips her hair away from her face. Oliver Franklin simply looks worried. What’s new?

  They’re on their way back to the office after meeting with their lawyers at Caitlyn’s insistence. Someone from her family is filling her head full of shit supposedly gleaned from a source within the Justice Department. She wants to have legal advice in hand if it turns out to be true. The story is that the FBI is investigating Megan Walton’s training and qualifications or some fucking thing.

  “Just relax, guys,” he says impatiently when they’re safely in his office and out of earshot of anyone else. “It’s all under control.”

  “Yeah?” Caitlyn says in a challenging, grating tone.

  Walton nods, then walks over to a compact conference table that sits beside a floor-to-ceiling window with a magnificent lake view. He drops into his usual seat and waves his partners into theirs.

  “We’re good on this R & B inspection angle?” Franklin asks.

  “Oh yeah,” Walton replies with a chuckle. “Those two are fucked.”

  “You’re sure that can’t blow back on us?”

  The fucking guy can’t get enough reassurance, Walton thinks with disdain. Fucking pussy.

  “What’s this shit you’re spinning about doctored documents?” Caitlyn asks suspiciously. “R & B did do that inspection. We can’t just magically undo it.”

  “They can’t prove it,” Walton replies smugly before a laugh escapes him. “Such a little pissant company those guys run. They use a fucking typewriter! Can you believe it?”

  “And that matters why?” Caitlyn asks in a caustically bitchy tone that amuses Walton—except when it’s directed at him. Which has been happening a little too often lately. Fault lines are beginning to appear in their little band of brothers… and a sister.

  “Let me tell you how that matters,” he retorts. “Not only
do they use a typewriter, they use carbon copies, Caits.”

  She throws up her hands in exasperation. “So?”

  “Old shit like that is ripe to be fucked with. Our Avgas friends dug up some ancient fart in a Mafia retirement home or someplace who knows how to forge and dummy up that stuff.”

  “They did, huh?” Caitlyn asks with a Cheshire Cat grin. She relaxes back into her seat and crosses her legs. Mount Caitlyn is temporarily dormant.

  She knows what’s coming, Walton thinks as he shoots her an answering grin. “The guy made the R & B carbon copy look like the original date was September ninth and that R & B did an amateurish job of trying to backdate it to August twenty-third.”

  “What’s the point?” Franklin asks.

  “It makes it look like they sent the paperwork after the crash, right?”

  Franklin nods.

  “And then tried to backdate it.”

  A slow smile spreads across Franklin’s face. “As if they hadn’t done the work, then panicked after the accident and cooked up some paperwork to suggest that they did.”

  “Exactly,” Walton says with an answering smile. “And then realized they fucked up with the date and tried to fix that.”

  “August twenty-third was the actual date they sent the invoice, right?” Caitlyn asks.

  Walton nods.

  “What about our copy?” Franklin asks. “The NTSB took it.”

  “Yup,” Walton replies airily. “No worries, dude. The Luciano guys substituted a new copy dated September ninth.”

  Franklin’s eyes widen. “Right in the NTSB’s files?”

  Walton smirks and nods.

  “How?” Caitlyn asks in a tone somewhere between skepticism and admiration.

  “How the fuck would I know? That’s the Luciano family’s area of expertise.”

  Caitlyn whips out her cell phone and stares at the calendar. “But August twenty-third was a Sunday.”

  Walton bursts out laughing. “I know, right? That’s suspicious right there. Who the hell sends out invoices on a Sunday? Accounting departments are all at home, for Christ’s sake!”