Lynne Heitman - Hard Landing

"Crescent Consulting. I know you remember this. We paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars. I signed the invoices. Crescent Con -"

"Crescent Consulting. I get it." Bill's voice was a stark contrast-calm, rational, a little irritated underneath the clicking and popping of the static. He must have been in his car. "What about it?"

"It was a sham. Nothing more than a bank account that Lenny used for kickbacks. You knew about this, Bill. You had to have known."

"Let's not talk about this right now. I'm on a cell phone."

"We're talking about this now." She sounded panicked, almost hysterical. "Don't you dare hang up on me."

"All right, all right. Why would you say something like that?"

"Because of the special signature authority. All that garbage about how much you trusted me. You set me up. The only reason you had me request a higher limit was so that you wouldn't have to sign those invoices. Every single invoice from Crescent you forwarded to me. Every one. You knew, Bill" -she was fighting back tears- "and I can't believe you did this to me."

Finally, she couldn't hold on anymore, and her voice dissolved into sobs, mighty, rolling sobs. As soon as one stopped, another one started, and I knew that they had come from someplace deep because when I had cried with her this morning the first time I'd heard this tape, the pain had come out of my whole body, through every part of me. It sounded like-felt like- a thousand years' worth of holding in.

When she'd cried herself out, there was silence, and then Bill's voice, gentle and soothing. "I thought it was better if you didn't know."

"Do you think anyone is going to believe that I didn't know?"

"Ellen, you didn't do anything wrong. I'm the one who screwed up, and I'll protect you."

"Tell me what you did. Tell me what you've gotten me involved in."

"Back when we were working on the Nor'easter deal, Lenny came to me with this idea that we wouldn't have to wait for the vote… that he had some way of buying off the IBG - "

"He didn't just buy the contract vote, Bill. He used the money to cover up this crash, this - the real cause of an aircraft accident, for God's sake. We gave him that money, Majestic did, you and me, and my name is all over -" She stopped as if she still couldn't believe the words that were coming out of her mouth. "That Nor'easter Beechcraft that went down in 1995… I've got this surveillance tape, this… these documents that Dickie Flynn had put away in the ceiling. It wasn't the pilots. It wasn't their fault. It was Little Pete Dwyer, and Dickie Flynn, and Lenny -"

"Do you have this package?"

"It's right here in my hands, and I don't… I think I need to take it to someone. I can't - Oh, God, Bill, don't ask me -"

'Wo, you're right, we need to get it to the right people. Let me just think for a minute."

"Tell me… one thing," Ellen said, pleading. "Tell me that you didn't know about this crash, that it was only this IBG contract business that you knew about."

He didn't hesitate. "I knew absolutely nothing about it. I swear to you. And if Lenny did what you're saying he did, I'll have his ass."

"Thank God, Bill Thank God."

"We have to take this package forward. All I'm going to ask is that you hold off for a day or so until I can get out there. I want to sit down with you. I want… it's important to me that I get a chance to explain it to you. I want you to understand. And I want you to help me figure out what to do, Ellen. We can get through this together."

There was no response.

"Ellen, listen to me. Don't think about what you're going to say to me next. Just listen. Are you listening?"

I was listening, and my knees felt weak, knowing what was coming next.

" I am in love with you, Ellen. I am hopelessly, desperately, pathetically in love with you, and I don't want to live my life without you in it. I'm not going to let anything happen to you, Ellen. Don't you know that?"

I turned off the tape.

My hands started to shake and tears streamed down my face. I had listened to that bit of tape over and over. There was nothing on that tape that I hadn't already heard. But listening to it with him, watching his face as he listened to himself deceiving Ellen, using the same line on her that he had used on me, was almost more than I could bear. Any expression, any reaction at all from him might have given me at least a seed of doubt, if that's what I'd wanted. But when he looked up at me, his face was stone. When he looked at me, I felt him measuring my resolve, wondering what it would take to get me to back down, and calculating his risk if I wouldn't. That was the moment when I knew that it was true-that it could be true. All of it.

"It was you," I said, backing away, taking one step, then another until I was up against the opposite wall, as far away from him as I could be in the cramped office. "You were Lenny's partner on the inside, not Ellen. You were the one who stole the money, and you used her to shield yourself, you bastard." The words came pouring out, searing the back of my throat and making my eyes burn. "You knew about the crash from the beginning. You knew that she would eventually figure it out, and you knew that she would take that evidence forward. You were the one who had Ellen killed, not Lenny. It was you."

His only reaction was to look down and touch Ellen's note, brushing his fingertips across her words, thinking, perhaps, that he could make them disappear. A tiny smile formed on his lips. "Ellen always did have a flair for the dramatic."

I felt my body begin to collapse in on itself, felt the four walls disappear and the world drop away until it was just the two of us standing in a barren wasteland, barren as far as I could see. And I knew that I was looking at the life that I'd made for myself, and when I looked again, I was alone, desperately alone.

He walked over to the window and stood with his hands deep in his pockets, rocking up and down on the balls of his feet. "That must have been some storm last night. It had mostly blown itself out by the time we landed."

I watched him, stared at the side of his face as he squinted into the bright sun.

"Have you seen the video?" he asked, in a tone that can only be described as jaunty.

"Last night," I whispered, leaning against the wall for support. "I saw it last night."

"I've never seen it. I imagine that it is quite extraordinary. I suppose I'll see it now. Everyone will, won't they?"

When he turned toward me, the light was coming from behind him and I couldn't see his face, but his manner was as smooth as ever and I knew that he was grinning. I could hear it in his voice. His tone wasn't flippant exactly, just light, and very, very confident.

It pissed me off.

"Why do you suppose she left it here that night?"

"Maybe she got smart and decided she didn't trust you after all."

"I have some ideas about that video," he said, "Would you like to hear them?"

"No." I pushed myself away from the wall and slowly made my way back to my desk. When I got there, I leaned over it, using both arms to support myself.

"What did you tell the authorities?" he asked quietly.

"I told them what I knew at the time."

"Which was what?"

"That on the night of March 15, 1995, Little Pete Dwyer worked Flight 1704 under the influence of alcohol, and his negligence caused that plane to go down. I told them that the incident had been recorded on a surveillance tape from beginning to end and that, as a part of a cover-up, Dickie Flynn, Big Pete Dwyer, and Lenny Caseaux stole that tape and altered official company documents. I told them that it was my belief that Dickie and another man, Angelo DiBiasi, were paid ten thousand dollars each to keep quiet about what they knew. I told them that Lenny Caseaux would have done anything to keep the sale of Nor'easter on track so that he could cash out his stock and become a rich man."