"He fell out of a tractor?"
"That's how he cut his head."
My chest started to tighten as if something were squeezing the breath out of me. Sometimes I threw my anger right out like a fishing net, catching what and whoever happened to be in range. But I couldn't be angry with this man. How could I? This time the anger seemed to settle in my chest and stay there like asthma. "Did Terry tell you this?"
"Yeah. But I also checked with enough guys I know it's true."
"So there were witnesses."
His back stiffened and he stared into his coffee cup. "I'm not giving any names. I'm only speaking for my brother here."
"I understand."
"So Little Pete's down on the ramp bleeding, but the tractor is still going. It misses the aircraft on Forty by about a foot and rams a bag cart instead. Also runs over a B727 tow bar. Terry sees all this and tells him to get somebody to drive him home. Little Pete says go to hell and starts staggering for the tractor. Terry tries to stop him and that's when Little Pete jumps him. You can check it out. The maintenance log will show a tow bar out of service that night."
I didn't need to check. He was telling the truth.
"And that's not even the worst of it."
"It's not?" I was almost afraid to hear the rest.
"Little Pete was running a crew that night, and one of his guys figured out while they were loading the airplane that he'd reversed the load."
I sat back in my chair. I couldn't even find the words to comment.
"Fortunately," John said, "they caught it before it ever left the gate. His crew sent him inside while they fixed it."
I felt numb just thinking about what could have happened. It's one thing to lose a bag or delay a flight and ruin someone's day. It's quite another to put them on an airplane that won't stay in the air because the load's not properly balanced and the load is not properly balanced because the crew chief was so drunk he couldn't tell the front of the aircraft from the rear. That would be hard to explain.
"Terry has to give a statement, John."
"He's waiting to see what you'll do to him if he won't."
"I'll fire him."
He nodded. "That's what I told him. If he says what happened, will he keep his job?"
"It's the only way he'll keep his job."
"And Little Pete gets canned?"
"If it's the last thing I do."
He angled toward the fireplace, turning his entire upper body, moving the way heavily muscled men have to move. His eyes were fixed on the dying flames, and he looked tired. More than tired, bone-weary. It was the same look I'd seen on Dan a few times. I waited. I knew he'd talk again when he was ready.
"When I first started at the airport," he said, still staring into the fire, "I was working down on the mail dock. My second or third day on the job, the union sent down a steward to tell me to slow down. He told me I was showing everybody up and if I wanted to keep working there, I should ease off. I told him to go pound sand."
"How'd they take it?"
"They gave me one more warning. Then one night in the parking lot, these two guys come up from behind and jump me. The one tried to grab me, I broke his arm. The other one ran away when he heard the bone snap."
The fire popped and I winced. "You broke his arm?"
"He had a baseball bat. They didn't bother me much after that."
I checked out the bulging biceps underneath his T-shirt and wondered what had possessed anyone to come at him in the first place. "Is this job that important to you?"
His chair creaked ominously as he leaned back. "I worked on my pop's fishing boat when I was growing up, me and my brother both. Out in the morning when it was still dark, home after dark. Miserable, cold, and wet, and you worked all day long. Pop didn't pay us much, but he taught us one thing-someone pays you to do a job and you agree to do it, then you do it. That's it." He turned back to the fire. "We get good money and benefits for throwing bags a few hours a day and sitting around in the ready room watching TV the rest of the shift. On top of that, you and your whole family get to fly around basically for free. It's not like we're skilled labor. This is a good job for someone like me. It's how I'm going to put my kids through college, and nobody's going to run me off."
"You have a family?"
"I got a wife and two kids, three and seven."
"It sounds as if they tried to run you off and failed."
"I can take care of myself. But it's different when it's your family, and I'll tell you something else, Little Pete scares the shit out of me. There's something wrong in the head with that kid. He's okay when he's around Big Pete, but when he's not, it's like he goes crazy or something. And when he's drunk, forget about it. When he's sober you never know what he's going to do, and when he's tight it's getting so it's tough even for his pop to deal with him."
"Do you believe he could kill someone?"
The lines in his forehead deepened. "If Petey'd been one of the guys who jumped me that night in the parking lot, he wouldn't have run off. I can't watch Terry all the time and no offense to you, but I'm sure as hell not going to count on the company to protect him. The company's just as likely to cut a deal and bring Petey back to work."
I wanted to say that that would never happen. I wanted to assure him that once Lenny had all the details, as I had now, there would be no way we'd bring Little Pete back to work and no way Terry would be fired. I couldn't tell him that because I didn't know it. Lenny was still a mystery to me. "Tell your brother to sit tight while I figure out what to do. I'll find a way to work all this out."
"How?"
"I have no idea. And tell him thanks."
"I will."
I sat quietly while he found a poker and tried without success to get the fire going again. When he'd settled back in, I asked him if he wanted more coffee.
"I'm working a shift starts at four in the morning. I gotta get some sleep tonight."
That may have been a clue that he wanted to go home, but I liked sitting with him. In spite of how I felt about everything else, I felt safe with him, and that was something I hadn't felt for a while. "John, you said something outside about Ellen's death not being a suicide. Do you believe she was murdered?"
"I don't know." He said it in a way that made it clear we weren't going to talk about it that night, or maybe ever, and I had to respect that. I tried something easier.
"How did you hook up with Ellen?"
"I was trying to get my brother a job at the airport."
"That doesn't seem so hard."
"The union didn't want another one like me around, so they poisoned him with the supervisors. They said if Terry got hired, they'd slow down the operation, set something on fire. I told her about it, and she interviewed him personally and made them put him on. After that, I told her if she ever needed help to call me."
"And she did."
"Yeah."
"What about?"
He did yet another visual sweep of the restaurant, but no one we knew was there, including our waiter. "There was something she needed… this package."
I sat bolt upright, nearly tipping the table into his lap. "What kind of a package?"
"I don't know, about this big"-letter-sized-"a plain brown envelope with tape and dust all over it."
"What was in it?"
"She didn't say I should look in it, and she didn't open it in front of me, so I don't know what it was."
In this one case, I wished he'd been a tad less principled. I couldn't ask the questions fast enough. "Why did she need you to get it?"
"It was in the ceiling tiles in the men's locker room. Dickie must have tossed it up there sometime when he was working here."
"Dickie Flynn?"