The Flight Attendant(25)

8




Cassie met the union official for breakfast at a diner on the corner of Twenty-Sixth and Third. Derek Mayes had chubby salt-and-pepper caterpillars above his eyes, the brows shading tortoiseshell eyeglasses and a face just starting to grow jowly. He was mostly bald and his seersucker blazer had blotches of black city dust, but the blue matched his eyes. His wedding band was thick like his fingers. She pegged him for his late sixties.

“I went through your records,” he was saying. He was eating scrambled eggs and home fries and bacon. She was nursing a bowl of oatmeal, both because she wasn’t especially hungry and because her anxiety had made her queasy. “You were on the Hugo Fournier flight. Infamous.”

“I guess.”

“Man, some of you were in deep water on that one. Stowing a dead guy in the bathroom? That widow was pissed. And, oh my God, what a PR nightmare for the airline. For the union. Remember The Tonight Show? Conan? The New York Post? I remember the comics trotted out all the terms: Trolley dolly. Air mattress. Sky muffin. It’s like it was 1967 and you were all ‘stewardesses’ again—like there were no male flight attendants.”

“The female terms are all about sex. The male ones are degrading in a different way. A lot end with ‘boy.’?”

He nodded. “Juice boy. Cart boy.”

“Anyway, I really wasn’t involved in the decision about what to do with the body.”

“I know. We would have met then if you had been. But we had that purser’s back and everything turned out okay. And it was never a criminal thing.”

“Like this.”

“Yeah. Like this. At least I think like this. It’s just so typical of the FBI. So typical. They don’t call the union, they don’t tell you to get a lawyer. It’s infuriating. If they were going to meet the plane, they should have told us so we could make sure there was someone in the room with you.”

“Are you going to meet with every employee who was on the plane?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, almost chuckling at the certainty as he spoke. “Look, every person the guy met the last couple of days is of interest now. Someone in Dubai or someone in America is going to want to talk to every single bellhop and waitress and concierge and, yes, flight attendant he might have said boo to. Every single one. Of course, it’s really only you and Megan and Jada I’m worried about. You’re the three.”

“Because…”

“Because you were the ones handling first class and you were the ones who were in direct contact with Sokolov.”

“And you said they both called you?”

“Damn right, they did. You should have called me, too,” he said, and she felt chastised.

“You live in the city?” she asked. After she spoke, she wondered if she should have apologized to him for not reaching out to the union on Saturday. But she had been so relieved when the FBI’s Frank Hammond hadn’t even asked about her whereabouts in Dubai that it hadn’t crossed her mind to contact them. She had been in something like shock at the way she thought she might have dodged a bullet.

Mayes nodded as he chewed. Then: “I live about ten blocks south of here. My wife and I always figured we’d move out to Long Island when we had children, but we never did, so we just stayed. And we like the neighborhood. Lot of NYU kids. Makes us feel younger than we are.”

“I like that area, too. Especially in September when the freshmen arrive. They are just so young.”

He smiled. “And they get younger every year.”

“So, what did Megan say? Or Jada?” It felt like she was feeling her way in the dark. So far she and Derek had discussed her path to the airline, but the most revealing thing she had shared was that she had made it through the University of Kentucky on financial aid and a work-study job at the college switchboard. She’d manned the console, an antique as the twenty-first century loomed, from midnight to eight a.m. two nights a week. Almost no one ever called. Mostly she alerted campus security when students locked themselves out of their rooms or when women wanted a safe ride back to their dorms. Mostly she wrote papers and worried about her kid sister and the foster home where Rosemary was parked until she finished high school. Cassie didn’t drink then. She guessed this was irony, given the way that so many of her peers seemed to live on keg beer and boxed wine.

He wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, and then used it on his fingers. “They said they barely spoke to him. Hi and bye. Jada thinks she may have brought him the basket of breads midway through the lunch service and asked if he wanted another roll. She may have offered him a newspaper and asked if he wanted English or French. But they both said—when I asked—that you spoke to him a lot.”

“Why did you ask?”

“Because I needed to know who was taking care of the guy and talking to him, if they weren’t. And they both said it was you. Jada said he chatted you up pretty seriously.”

For a second she said nothing. She was grateful that Jada had told Mayes that Alex had been chatting her up, the implication being that he had paid more attention to her than she had paid to him. The truth was somewhere closer to the middle. Still, she wondered: Was this the moment when she should confess? Tell this union official that she needed a lawyer and the union’s help? Tell him that there was a woman in this world named Miranda who may have had something to do with Alex’s hedge fund, and had seen her in Alex’s hotel suite at the Royal Phoenician that night? But she let the moment pass, as she had every other opportunity she’d had to start over. Derek Mayes wanted to help her, but she rather doubted there was any variant on attorney-client privilege between the two of them that could withstand a court of law. Whatever she told him could come back to haunt her. “I told the FBI everything I knew when we landed,” she said firmly. “I know it wasn’t very much. But he was just one more passenger on just one more flight.”