Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

LEMKO NEEDED to develop his own theory about grief, about how and why people reacted the way that they did. He had been well trained in the aphorisms of the legal profession. You never asked a question unless you were absolutely sure of the answer, and he was sure that guilt and anger and self-recriminations came quickly. He wanted the contact—say, the husband, contact number two—to offer him coffee, tell him stories of how he had met his dead wife, and flip through the photos from last summer’s trip to the Greek Isles. Death, however, was proving to have a variable effect.

The contingency plan limited the visit of an Adam and Eve Team to thirty minutes per stop, but he secretly wished he could stay longer, until the contact disassembled himself into a hysteric, convulsive mass. Just once he wanted to see flagellations and mortifications of the flesh, to see the tangible presence of grief right there in the room.

Contact number three, MacMurray, Richard L., had offered him orange juice and cashews, and Lemko at the very least could understand why. Probably raised Catholic, wakes of Irish whiskey, brisket sandwiches, and pitchers of beer at some dingy bar where the bartender wore black slacks and a white shirt and kept a shotgun or a Louisville Slugger or both in the beer cooler. If Nessen hadn’t been there, MacMurray probably would have offered him a shot and a beer; he looked like the shot-and-a-beer type, Lemko thought, because Lemko himself looked like the shot-and-a-beer type. Shot-and-a-beer guys wanted action. They didn’t want paperwork and explanations and promises.

This thought coincided almost immediately with the slam of the balcony door. Lemko found Richard MacMurray digging through the bottom of his closet and emerging with a small suitcase, the kind just big enough to fit in the overhead bin. Richard pointed at a leather dopp kit on the dresser, and Lemko simply zipped it and tossed it to him. He nestled it in among two T-shirts and two folded blue shirts and sets of underwear and socks for a couple of days. Lemko thought about his own bag, how being part of an Adam and Eve Team meant keeping a go bag packed in your office or the closet at home. He kept two, winter and summer, and was always raiding it for a spare shirt or a pair of socks, and now he’d be spending the night in DC with not much more than a toothbrush and a disposable razor, rethumbing his heavily annotated copy of On Death and Dying.

Richard zipped up his bag and yanked out the retractable handle and said only, “I’m going to need a ride to the airport.”

Lemko said, “Why?”

“My nephew. What will they do with him until I get there?”

Nessen had apparently dismissed the cop and had busied herself rinsing out the empty glasses of orange juice and putting the cashews away. She stepped out of the kitchen, drying a glass with a bright-yellow hand towel. “There’s a nephew? What nephew?”

“Christ. I thought you people were supposed to know these things. My sister has a son. Gabriel. He’s five—no, six. He’s six, I think. Your file doesn’t say anything about him?”

He took the yellow hand towel from her, refolded it, and hung it on the handle of the oven door, then pushed past her, preparing to leave.

“Unbelievable. Somebody better take some initiative and find out about the kid.” Richard pointed, making clear that Carol Nessen was the somebody he had in mind. Turning to Lemko, he said, “If you want to do something for me, you can get me to the airport and get me on a plane to Dallas, and if you can’t do that, then you can lock up because I’m going downstairs to catch a cab.”

Lemko would have to write this up in his incident report to the general counsel, the justification for expensing the ride to the airport, the comped ticket to Dallas. Mostly, he’d have to explain why they hadn’t known about the boy. Richard and Lemko sat in the back of the cab and did not speak. They rode in silence until Richard noticed the coat sitting across Lemko’s lap, and took it from him, started playing with the black velvet collar. The coat fell open, and Lemko saw the tag: This coat tailored especially for Lew MacMurray. They did not talk, not even when they crossed the river and the ominous clouds began to unleash a heavy blanket of snow.

IT TOOK Nessen over ninety minutes of working the phones from Richard MacMurray’s apartment desk to confirm that there indeed was a child, Gabriel Llewellyn Blumenthal, age six. The Dallas County Office of Family Protective Services was closed for the holiday, so phone calls went to the airline first, where a recheck of the ticket audit and a call to the airport Angel Team confirmed that the child had not been a passenger on Flight 503. The Angel Team at Salt Lake airport had called it in; the kid was in the care of a coworker of the deceased. Nessen scribbled notes, made more phone calls.

She managed to reach an FPS caseworker, who promised to locate a qualified court-appointed special advocate to retrieve the child and watch over him until the uncle arrived. Again Nessen referred to Richard by the phrase only known living relative, and the caseworker was relieved because, in the entire spectrum of emergency-custody cases, a sole surviving relative was perhaps the easiest to deal with. They understood what duties were now required of them.

The child wasn’t in the system: no notices of neglect, no complaints to FPS. He presented no special needs, no history. The mother, at least the parts of her narrative that could be discerned from her presence in various databases (Division of Motor Vehicles, Harris County Traffic Court, even Internal Revenue—a call that was technically illegal but that the caseworker made anyway), was squeaky clean: no delinquencies, no outstanding traffic tickets or library fines, a solid credit score of 754, registered to vote at her current address, which was a garden apartment in a reasonably safe neighborhood.

Nessen kept having to thank people for getting involved on New Year’s Day, for interrupting their afternoons of football, and each person she spoke with breathed the heavy sighs of the put-upon bureaucrat; each thought that the pay of a municipal employee was not nearly enough to justify holiday work, that they would never get those hours back. They moved into action only because they were parents themselves and a six-year-old was involved.

As Nessen told the caseworker, “We’re putting the uncle on a plane now,” she felt as though this was the most important duty of an Adam and Eve Team, to shepherd the relatives through their final obligations to the deceased.

The caseworker wanted to know, “What’s the uncle like? Are there going to be any problems there?”

Nessen took the cordless phone with her into the kitchen, tore the doodles she had made while on hold into a series of long strips, and tossed them into Richard’s garbage can. “I don’t think so. He’s a pretty solid guy.”

“Solid? In what way?” the caseworker asked between smacks of her gum.

Nessen coughed. “As in ‘employed.’ ‘Familiar.’ His name is Richard MacMurray. You’ll recognize him the minute you see him.” She heard the caseworker’s computer keyboard clicking in the background.

The caseworker laughed. “Oh, that guy. From television.”

AMONG THE tariffs and wages in the latest collective-bargaining agreement, the customer-service personnel of Panorama Airlines had negotiated a clause, little noticed by management, that expanded the definition of holiday and double time, all while reducing the number of customer-service advocates (the term used in the contract to describe the polyester-blazered attendants who printed boarding passes and threw luggage onto the conveyor) on duty on a holiday evening. Just one red-jacketed employee stood at the gate, and when Lemko and Richard MacMurray approached, Lemko discreetly moved to the head of the line, told Richard to take a seat, that he’d handle everything.