Walter Conklin looked like a retired captain of industry, maybe a retired admiral. His full head of white hair was carefully combed back. He wore a white polo shirt under a soft blue lamb’s wool sweater, tan slacks, and moccasins. His ruddy face spoke of long afternoons spent sailing off his private beach. His handshake was unnecessarily firm.
“No problem finding me?”
His accent, however, was pure unadulterated Southie.
“Easy. Right up 1A. Beautiful setting.”
“Thank you.”
A slender woman in a tennis dress materialized from the hallway behind him. Her blond-gray hair was pulled back with a lime-green headband. She looked easily fifteen years younger than Conklin. “Lunch at one at the club?” She, too, had a working-class Boston accent, though Rick couldn’t quite place it. She kissed her husband on the cheek, gave Rick a wary glance before sliding out the front door.
The décor was Grand Hyatt tasteful. “My wife made coffee,” Conklin said. “How do you take it?”
“I’m fine.”
“Then I’ll help myself.” He led the way to a spacious kitchen-granite island, cherrywood cabinets, built-in ovens-and poured himself a mug of coffee from a Krups machine on the island. He went over to a banquette against the window next to a round wooden kitchen table and sat, gesturing to Rick to join him. Then he took a sip and looked at Rick over the rim. “So what’s your take on the wind farm gonna be?”
“Actually, I’d be more interested to hear your take.” He took out one of his old reporter’s notebooks and a pen and started jotting.
“You have any idea how big that thing is?” Conklin said. “It’s taller than the Statue of Liberty. It’s taller than the Zakim Bridge. I mean, each blade is like the width of a football field, you know that?”
“You’ve got a gorgeous view of the Atlantic here. How do you feel about what a windmill would do to your view?”
“The view? That ain’t the half of it. These things make a hell of a racket. I read a website about it. They disturb sleep and cause irritability. It’s like a jet engine hovering over you.”
“‘A jet engine’… that’s good.”
“Plus, when it’s freezing they throw off shards of ice. And they kill birds.”
Rick nodded, pretending to take notes, as he planned how he was going to segue to the tunnel accident.
“Yeah, it’s an unholy monstrosity.” Conklin paused and gave a twist of a smile. “But I have a feeling you didn’t really come here to talk about windmills, did you, Rick?”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not exactly a Back Bay reader, but they never commissioned an article about the Tinker’s Island windmill. Not their kind of thing. Now, if someone wanted to put one of these wind turbines in Boston Common, maybe they’d do something.” Conklin’s eyes glittered. He took a sip of coffee.
Rick felt a surge of adrenaline, a pulse of anxiety. “I’ve changed my mind about coffee.”
“Help yourself,” Conklin said casually. “The mugs are right there. Cream in the fridge.”
Rick took an earthenware mug from a spindle by the coffee machine and poured himself a cup of coffee, and by the time he took a sip he’d thought of a response. “They usually have no idea what I’m working on until I turn it in.” He sat down at one of the uncomfortable ladder-back chairs around the table.
“Uh-huh. They also say you’re no longer on staff there.”
All the years in retirement fell away, and Conklin was a cop again, talking to a perp in an interrogation room. He stared at Rick with a zookeeper look.
“Busted,” Rick said. “You know what, you’re right. I’m actually interested in asking you about something else, and I apologize for coming here under false pretenses. I’m actually working on something a little more interesting. A story about an accident eighteen years ago in the Ted Williams Tunnel where a family was killed.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. You were a patrol officer. You signed the incident report.”
“You know how much shit I had to deal with in my twenty years on the force? How many years ago was that?”
“Eighteen years ago.”
“Come on.”
“Well, I have a fairly good working theory of what happened. You were driving by or else got the call on the radio and you discovered a grisly accident scene. You saw a car that was badly smashed up. Then you saw what had happened. You saw that a light fixture had dropped from the ceiling and crashed into the car’s windshield. And that’s when you made a really smart decision.”
Conklin was no longer meeting Rick’s eyes. He seemed deflated, maybe hostile, but hard to read.
“Because you’re a smart guy,” Rick went on, “you realized you’d just found something really valuable. Something that might be worth a hell of a lot of money to the company that had just got finished building the tunnel. You probably even had friends who’d been hired by Donegall Construction. So you knew who to call. And that was a call that made you a rich man.”
Gears were turning in the ex-cop’s mind. Maybe he was trying to decide whether to break almost two decades of silence.
“You knew that Donegall Construction really wouldn’t want it known what caused this accident. Because that would expose them to some really bad publicity and, who knows, maybe a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit? You figured out that that light fixture would be worth a hell of a lot of money to them.” Rick paused, smiled. “But only if you put it away somewhere. Made sure it wasn’t found by any other cops or state troopers or accident investigators. So you put it away somewhere. Like the trunk of your car.”
Conklin was still looking off into the distance. Rick tried to measure whether his conjecture was hitting home, whether he’d got it substantially right. But the man remained unreadable.
“My guess is, you made a really good deal with them. Maybe even millions of dollars. Because it was worth it to Donegall Construction. Given how much they’d be on the hook for if anyone found out about the fallen light fixture, that was pocket change to them.”
“It was blocking traffic,” Conklin said finally. “I wasn’t gonna leave it there.”
“Of course not.” Rick had seen moments like this before, where the interview takes a sudden turn. The hostile corporate CEO abruptly decides what the hell, why not fess up? But it was important now to lock Conklin in to a confirmation.
Rick leaned in and said deliberately, “Look, the story’s going to come out, one way or another. Your best hope is to make sure it’s a version of events that’s…” Favorable to you, he thought, but he said, “accurate as you recall it. This interview can be entirely off the record, if you prefer. Nobody needs to know that we spoke. You see, I just want to know the truth. That’s all.”
Rick looked into Conklin’s eyes, and this time the old cop returned his gaze. Conklin pursed his lips and looked as if he’d just swallowed something unpleasant. There was a long beat of silence.
“Get the hell out of my house,” he said.
47
Conklin’s already ruddy face had turned dark, and his eyes twinkled with moisture. There was something in his expression very close to hatred.
Rick was about to speak, to attempt to talk the man down with some combination of wheedling and threat, when Conklin jabbed a fat finger in the air close to Rick’s nose and said, with teeth bared, “Get the fuck out of here this instant before I make you.”
There was no more reasoning with him. Anyway, Rick had gotten what he’d come for. He stood up, the ladder-back chair crashing to the kitchen floor behind him. He picked up the chair and slid it neatly against the table. Then he left the kitchen and headed down the hallway to the front door, his footsteps loud in the silence.