Hard Landing (3 page)

I sat and listened one more time to the sound of his footsteps fading down the long corridor. The door to the concourse opened and closed, and I knew he was gone. Eventually, I pulled myself up and went out to meet my new assistant.

"Don't take it personally," she said when she saw me. "He's that way with everyone."

Molly had a flop of dark curls on her head, big brown eyes, and full red lips that occupied half her face. Her olive complexion suggested Hispanic blood, or maybe Portuguese, this being Massachusetts. She was probably in her late fifties, but her dainty stature made her seem younger. She was thin, almost bird-like, but judging from the hard lines around her eyes and the way she'd spoken to Dan, she was more of a crow than a sparrow. At least she had a voice like one.

She squinted at me. "You're the new GM."

"And you're Molly."

"Danny's been a little upset these past few days."

"Judging from my first"-I checked my watch- "fifteen hours in this operation, he's got good reason."

She leaned back in her chair, crossed her legs, and took a long, deep sideways drag on a skinny cigarette, all the time looking me up and down like girls do in junior high when they're trying to decide who to be seen with in the school cafeteria. She might not have been inside a junior high school for over thirty years, but she still had the attitude.

"So they sent us another woman," she said, eyebrows raised.

"Apparently."

With a swish of nylon on nylon she rose from the chair and sidled around to my side of her desk. It's possible I'd passed muster, but more likely she couldn't resist a golden opportunity to dish.

"He found her, you know."

"Who?"

"Ellen."

"Dan found Ellen's body?"

"When she didn't come in that morning, he's the one who drove up to her house. She was in the attic." Molly reached around to the ashtray on the desk behind her and did a quick flick. "When he found her, she'd been hanging there all night."

I reached up instinctively and put a hand on my own throat, which was tightening at the thought of what a body looks like after hanging by the neck for that long. With my thumb, I could feel my own blood pumping through a thick vein. "It must have been horrible for him. Were they friends?"

She nodded as she exhaled. "He won't talk about it, but, yeah, he hasn't been the same since. Like I said, we don't take it personally." She reached behind the desk again and opened a drawer, this time coming back with a big, heavy ring chock full of keys. "I'll let you into your office."

She went to the door, and I stood back and watched her struggle with the lock.

"How's everyone else around here taking it?" I asked. "What's the mood?"

"Mixed. People who liked her are upset. People who didn't are glad she's gone. It's that simple. More people liked her than didn't, but the ones that didn't hated her so much, it made up for all the rest."

"Mostly guys down on the ramp, I hear. Not the agents."

She nodded. "You showing up the way you did last night and doing what you did, that's given them all something else to talk about. Everyone's waiting to see what you're like, what you're going to do about Little Pete." The lock was not releasing and she was getting frustrated. "Who's Little Pete and why is he 'Little'?"

"Pete Dwyer Jr. He's the missing crew chief, the one who caused all that trouble last night. Most of it, anyway. Everyone calls him Little Pete because his pop works here, too. Big Pete runs the union."

"I thought Victor Venora was president of the local."

"Titles don't mean much here. And they have nothing to do with who's got the real power."

"And who would that-"

With a final, forceful twist, the door popped open.
"Cripes!"
Molly jerked her hand away as if it had been caught in a mousetrap. "I broke a nail. Damn that lock." She took the mound of keys, marched back to her desk, presumably for emergency repairs, and called back over her shoulder, "Go in. I'll be with you in a minute."

The door swung open easily at my touch. The office was slightly larger than Dan's. Instead of one floor-to-ceiling window on the ramp-side wall, it had two that came together at the corner. Unlike Dan's office, the blinds were closed, filtering out all but a few slats of daylight that fell across the floor like bright ribbons. The air smelled closed-in, faintly musty. In the middle of the space, dominating in every way, was a massive, ornate wooden desk. Its vast work surface was covered with a thick slice of glass. Underneath was a large, carved logo for…
Nor'easter
Airlines?

"Some desk, huh?" Molly leaned against the door-jamb with a new cigarette.

"It looks out of place," I said, walking over to open the blinds.

"It belonged to the president of our airline."

"Our airline" was how former Nor'easter employees always referred to their old company, which had teetered at the precipice of bankruptcy until Bill Scanlon, the chairman and CEO of Majestic,
our
airline, had sailed in and saved the day. As a result, Scanlon was revered by most Nor'easterners. It was the rest of us Majestic plebeians they resented.

I didn't tell her that no one at Majestic headquarters would have been caught dead with a desk like that. It didn't match the corporate ambiance, which was simple, spare, and, above all, featureless. When I pulled the blinds, the sun splashed in on a linoleum floor that was wax-yellow and dirty. The corner where I was standing was covered with a strange white residue, almost like chalk dust. It reminded me of rat poison. The morning light brought grandeur to the old desk, showing polish and detail I hadn't noticed. I also hadn't noticed the single palm print now clearly visible in the dust that coated the glass top.

"Has anyone been in here since Ellen died?"

"Danny and I were both in here looking through her Rolodex for someone to contact. Turns out an aunt in California was her closest living kin. If you need anything, it's probably in there"-she pointed with her cigarette at the desk-"supplies and all. Ellen was pretty organized that way." She turned to go and caught herself. "Oh, I should warn you, don't keep anything important in there. It doesn't lock anymore."

"Is it broken?"

"You could say that." She moved into the office and perched on the arm of one of the side chairs.

I walked around to the working side of the desk. The handsome wood facings of the drawers were scarred and scratched around the small locks, and the top edges were splintered and broken where someone had pried them open. I put my finger into a sad, gaping hole where one of the locks was missing altogether. "What happened here?"

"The union."

"The union broke into this desk? Why?"

"Just to prove they could."

That was a comforting thought. I stood up and looked at her. "What did Ellen do that had them so upset?"

"Well, let's see. She was a woman, she was from Majestic, and she wanted them to work for their wages instead of sitting around on their butts all day. That's three strikes."

I slipped the hangman's drawing out of my briefcase. I felt a tingling in my neck when I looked at it. I handed her the page. "Have you ever seen this before?"

"Not that version. Where did you get it?"

"Someone left it for me last night as some kind of a message."

She shook her head. "That didn't take long. I guess they figure they'll start early with you, keep you on the defensive from the start."

"It means they knew I was coming in on that flight."

"No doubt."

"And they saw where I'd put my bags, which wouldn't have been easy in all that chaos. Someone was watching me."

She shot a stream of smoke straight up, and handed the drawing back. "They're always watching."

I followed the smoke as it drifted up to the ceiling. This was apparently old hat to Molly, but I found it hard not to feel just a little shaken up by a drawing of a woman hanged by the neck with my name on it.

Molly stood to go.

"Did someone steal her pictures, too?" I asked.

She looked where I was looking, at the bare walls. "This office is exactly the way she left it," she said. "She never hung any pictures."

"How long was she here?"

"Almost thirteen months."

The walls were painted an uncertain beige, and had scars left over from previous administrations, where nails and picture hangers had been torn out. I walked over and touched a big gouge in the Sheetrock where the chalky center was pushing through.

"She didn't leave much behind, did she?"

Molly was putting the call on hold just as I walked through the door.

"How was your first debrief?"

"Long."

"You've got a call on line one,'' she said, "and it must be important because he never waits on hold and he never calls this early."

I checked my watch. It was ten o'clock in the morning. "Who is it?"

"Your boss."

"Uh-oh." The quick flash of nerves was like a caffeine rush. "Where's he calling from?"

"He's in his office in D.C."

She said something else, but I didn't hear what because I was already at my desk, bent over the notes I'd made from debrief, cramming for whatever question Lenny might think to ask about last night's operation. Someone I admired and deeply respected once told me that the best opportunities to make a good impression come from disaster-from how well you handle it. Last night certainly qualified as a disaster, and I was about to test that theory on my new boss.

After a quick moment to gather my thoughts, I made myself sit down, then picked up the receiver. "Good morning, Lenny. How are you?" Jeez, I sounded like such a stiff.

"Very well, Alex. And how you doin' this morning?" His deliberate Louisiana drawl sounded as if it were floating up from the bottom of a trash can, and I knew he had me on the speaker phone. I hated speaker phones. You could be talking to a crowd the size of Yankee Stadium and never know it.

"I'm well, Lenny, thank you."

"Can we talk about a few things this morning?"

"Of course." I heard the whisper of pages turning and imagined him leafing through his tour reports, zeroing in on Boston's, and reading with widening eyes about the debacle from last night. But I was ready, poised to jump on whatever he chose to ask.

"So…"

I waited, muscles tensed.

"…when did you get in?"

"Last night."

"Good trip out?"

"Uh, yes. The trip was fine."

"Glad to hear it."

The pages continued to turn. I inched a little farther out on the edge of my seat, straining to hear, waiting for the real questions to start. And waiting. And… and… I couldn't wait. "Lenny, we had a few problems in the operation last night. I don't know if you saw the tour report, but-"

"Was it anything you couldn't handle?"

"No, we handled it. It was-"

"Good. Listen, I need to ask you to do something for me."

Not exactly the grilling I'd anticipated. The paper rustled again and this time the sound was more distinct, a slow, lazy arc that I recognized. Lenny wasn't leafing through tour reports. He was reading a newspaper. I eased back in my chair and relaxed. No pop quiz today. Disappointing, in a way. "What can I do to help?"

After a short pause I heard a click, and I knew he'd taken me off the speaker phone. "You've got a ramper up there, an Angelo DiBiasi. Have you heard this story?" Without the squawk box his voice had an instantly intimate quality. The rest of the world was shut out. Only I could hear what he was saying.

"No, I haven't heard the story."

A group of ticket agents, talking and laughing, burst into the reception area and greeted Molly. I rolled my chair backward across the floor until I could reach the door and launch it shut.

Lenny was still talking. "He's one of the night crawlers, works midnights. I knew him when I was there. You knew I used to work in Boston, right? Before I came to D.C.?"

"I did." He'd mentioned it no less than six times during my interview.

"Anyway, old Angie's gotten himself into a little trouble."

"What did he do?"

"Damned if I can tell. He may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time regarding a cargo shipment"-which meant he was stealing-"but I feel bad about terminating a guy with over forty years in, I don't care what he did."

Forty years? I was used to stations out West, where twenty years was a lot of seniority. "What's his status?"

"Fallacaro fired him, he filed for arbitration, and now he's waiting for his hearing. But Angie's not a bad guy. You have far worse up there, and the thing is, his wife is sick. He's sixty-three years old. It could take up to a year to get his case heard, and I'd prefer not to put the two of them through it."

The group outside was getting louder, and I had to pay close attention. I could hear what he was saying, but what I needed to know was what he wasn't saying, and I had the sense that there was a lot. "If Angelo's on to arbitration, that means Ellen denied his grievance."

"Yes. Yes, she did and I can understand why. Ellen needed to establish herself as the authority there. But you don't have that situation. You've got much more field experience than she did, and now that you're sitting in the general manager's chair, it's perfectly legitimate for you to overturn the firing. As you know, I can't get involved until after arbitration."

When I didn't respond, I felt Lenny trying to read my silence. He wanted me to simply agree to do what he'd asked, but it was hard when I didn't know the players. Overturning a firing was a big deal. It would send a strong message about me to all of the people who worked in the station. I wanted to make sure it was a message I wanted to send.

"You still there, Alex?"

"Sorry, Lenny. I'm still here."

"Have you had a chance to hook up with Victor Venora?"

"He's on my list, but I haven't gotten to him yet."

"Here's an idea for you," he offered, his tone brightening considerably. He was taking a new tack. "You set a meeting with Victor, a president-of-the-local-GM-get-acquainted sit-down, and the first thing you do before he even opens his big mouth is tell him you're bringing Angie back. Start right in with a gesture of goodwill to the union. You'll knock his socks off."

I swiveled in my chair so that I could see out the window, looking for breathing room. Lenny was closing me in. I tried to decide if I was being crafty and shrewd or obstinate and stubborn. Sometimes they felt the same to me. What I knew was that he wanted me to commit to a deal without even knowing what this guy Angelo did and he wanted me to do it without making him ask explicitly, in which case it would forever be my idea. It didn't sound that risky and I had no reason to distrust Lenny, but I'd also been burned by bosses in the past for agreeing to far less.

I had to go with crafty and shrewd.

"Lenny, stealing is automatic grounds for termination, and-"

"I never said he was stealing."

No, he hadn't. But he'd just given me the way out. "You're absolutely right. You didn't say that, and it's clear that I need to gather some facts so that I'm more prepared to discuss this with you. I hope you don't mind if I take a day or so to do a little research. I'd like to talk to Dan, since he's the one who fired him."

We either had a pregnant pause or he was still reading the newspaper and checking out the sale at Barney's. I waited through his long exhale, and I could feel the test of wills making the phone line stiffen. I started to worry. This was my new boss, after all.

"I apologize, Alex."

"Excuse me?"

"I really do. Now that I think about it, I see that I'm putting you in a tough spot. I know you have to get your feet on the ground, and I know what a tough bunch you've got up there. I'm just trying to give you some ideas because I want you to do well, that's all. Take your time, gather some facts, and see if you don't agree with me on this Angelo situation. But whatever you decide, it's your call."

I was feeling less crafty by the second. How hard would it be to do what I was asked for once in my life? "I'll look into it right away," I said, and I meant it.

He hung up, leaving me squarely on the side of obstinate and stubborn.

The crowd of agents was gone when I opened the door. I signaled to Molly, who was just finishing a phone call, then went back to my desk and waited. When she came in, she was reattaching an enormous clip earring to her phone ear.

"What's up?" she asked.

"What did Angelo DiBiasi do?"

"He stole a thirty-six-inch color TV set. Tried to, anyway."

My heart began to sink. "There's no chance of a mix-up or misunderstanding? No question about what happened?"
No possible grounds for overturning his termination?

"The only question is how Angie could be so stupid. Danny caught him loading it into his car. He fired him on the spot because it was theft and theft-"

"-is automatic grounds for dismissal. I know. What's wrong with his wife?"

"Breast cancer. She had it once, and now she's got it again." Molly turned glum. "Poor Theresa," she sighed. "Seems like she's been sick forever."

My heart went right ahead and sank.