Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Contact number two answered the door while on the telephone with the fraud prevention department of his credit card company. From what Nessen and Lemko overheard, they gathered that the contact had telephoned a mortuary to pay the final $1,000 on one of those prepaid funeral-arrangement plans and had suffered the embarrassment of having not one but two different cards declined.

Nessen thought briefly of burying her own mother, how the funeral director had stepped out of the room and sent in an underling to talk about payment plans and options— Darla here will talk to you about financing. Nessen, whose own credit cards never carried a balance, signed a contract without even looking at the amount or asking Darla to explain how much. The casket had cost as much as a good used car. And now this contact was explaining into the telephone how demeaning it was not to be able to pay the final $1,000 for his wife’s casket, or for the transport of her body back to the Washington area (she was one of three people on Flight 503 who had been continuing on to the next leg of the flight, from DFW to Reagan National). His wife’s cards had been canceled because she was deceased, but his own cards had inadvertently been marked Deceased as well, and it would take at least forty-eight hours to correct the error. Nessen wanted to interrupt, to be assertive just for once, to defy her training and rip the cordless phone from his hand and end the call.

She’d explain how Panorama Airlines would make everything okay, bereavement tickets and no charge for the transportation of the caskets and first-class upgrades and limousine service and tarmac permissions to stand at the baggage area and supervise the loading and unloading of the loved one’s body (a service that a surprising number of the next of kin accepted). But the very purpose of the visit—the notification of the contact—had already been subverted by the inability of a pair of computer systems to communicate with each other. They had no need to tell him what he’d already learned. Nessen was left to watch as the contact sank into his sofa, hung up the phone without comment.

The drive back into the northwest section of the city took only twenty minutes, thanks to the relative quiet of a late holiday afternoon. Nessen was happy to let Lemko drive; he’d grown up in the Maryland suburbs and knew his way around the Beltway and the parkways and bridges. He piloted while she read and reread the dossier on the next contact. Only known living relative.

They double-parked illegally in the middle of California Street, and Lemko stayed with the car while Nessen used the buzzer to try to enter Richard MacMurray’s building. She rang his apartment, but the automated entry system was connected to the telephone, and there seemed to be some problem with the phone line. The operator she called for assistance verified the line as in service, suggested that the phone was simply off the hook.

After ten minutes of waiting at the door, she gave up. Lemko drove them to the yellow loading zone directly in front of the Third District police station on V Street Northwest, just three blocks away. They moved with the assurance of people tasked with an important mission, and to everyone in the building—the detectives and patrolmen and even the mechanic who changed the oil in the Crown Vic police sedans—Nessen and Lemko looked and behaved like cops.

They introduced themselves to the desk sergeant, produced laminated identification in the manner of so many films and detective shows, and Nessen explained their purpose. The sergeant escorted the Adam and Eve Team out through the Police Officers Only exit. Nessen started heading back toward the car, but the sergeant restrained her, gently, at the wrist, saying, “No place to park. It’s faster on foot. In this neighborhood, everything’s faster on foot.”

When they again reached Richard’s building, at the summit of the small hill on California Street, Lemko had to hunch over, hands on knees, and catch his breath. He checked his pulse against the dial of his diver’s watch and thought about upping the intensity of his cardiovascular conditioning. He’d hardly realized their pace.

The sergeant radioed back to the station for someone to try Richard’s phone. Through his Motorola handheld unit, he could hear his colleague, a second-year policewoman, mumbling over and over, “Pick up the phone.”

Lemko thought to dial another apartment on the entry console, and the person who answered did not say a word, just pressed the entry buzzer. They bounded up the stairs. At the door to apartment 33, the sergeant had the disconcerting sensation of knocking on the door and then hearing the report of his knocks again, with the slight delay of transmission, through his radio. The policewoman’s voice told whoever had answered the phone, “You need to go to the door now.”

The voice on the walkie-talkie kept saying, “You should be talking to one of my officers,” whatever that meant. Lemko worried about not having his briefcase. It was his security blanket. He’d left it in the car. He carried in his briefcase intelligence estimates on the average life span of a plane, its hours of service, its entire history. He knew he could pull out the papers in a practiced bit of theater and use them to calm a particularly agitated family member. He knew from his experience as a litigator that so much of what he did, day to day, was performance; the papers were a prop, but a useful one, and almost always had the desired effect—anything in writing made it true. I can tell you the last person who put in a roll of toilet paper, he’d planned to say. If someone touched that plane with any tool, tightened this or loosened that, or even spat on the windshield and rubbed it off with the sleeve of his coveralls, I can tell you who it was and when, and certify that his saliva was drug- and alcohol-free.

But encountering vitriol was rare. He tried hard not to be taken as the typical asshole lawyer and served up such serious attitude only to plaintiff’s attorneys, the guys who represented the passengers in the lawsuits that Lemko tried to make disappear: the morbidly obese passenger who could not buckle his seatbelt even with the seatbelt extender and sued the airline for causing his acute embarrassment; the child whose peanut allergy meant that his flight to Toronto had ended with an injection of epinephrine in his neck at thirty thousand feet and an emergency landing in Cincinnati; the sales manager who suffered a mild concussion when another passenger’s trumpet case sprang from an improperly closed overhead bin.

Lemko’s briefcase contained the file folder with the page of information about Richard MacMurray and his relationship to Mary Beth Blumenthal of Garland, Texas. In the Comment field of the form, someone from the corporate office would have written the reason that Richard MacMurray of California Street Northwest merited in-person notification. After all, the Adam and Eve Teams were performing a service required by exactly none of the fifteen thousand pages of federal regulations that outlined what was and was not necessary in the aftermath of an incident. If Lemko had reviewed that form, remembered to bring that form with him, had that form with him now, he would see that Richard MacMurray was not only the next of kin but the only one left. Only known living relative. Somewhere in the byzantine world of the main corporate office, it had been decided: Some things could only be said face to face. Sometimes death merited looking a man in the eye.

But inside the airline offices, no one had to be told why they did it; Lemko knew it boiled down to a cost-control measure: put a human face on the corporation, and it became a lot harder for someone to sue.