Ecco is a pleasant older establishment, frequented by people who work for the city or the courts, including jurors, and also including, unfortunately, defense attorneys, such as my ex-wife. I hadn’t run into her or her insignificant other here yet, but I would someday.
The waiter came with menus, but we ordered without looking at them. Salad and grilled tuna for Kate, and fried calamari and penne alla vodka for me.
I’m on the Dr. Atkinson diet. Harvey Atkinson is a fat dentist in Brooklyn whose philosophy is, “Eat what tastes good, and clean your plate.”
Kate said, “You’re putting on a little weight.”
“It’s the horizontal stripes on my tie.” What did I say about marriage?
“You need to eat right and get more exercise.” She changed the subject and asked me, “How did your meeting go?”
“Good.”
“Did it have to do with yesterday?”
“Maybe.” I asked her, “Do you know who interviewed Leslie Rosenthal, the manager of the Bayview Hotel?”
“I asked Mr. Rosenthal the same question five years ago. He was first interviewed by an NYPD task force detective, a man whose name he didn’t get. The detective, realizing he may have found the source of the blanket on the beach, then called in the FBI. Three guys showed up who identified themselves as FBI. One guy did all the talking, but Rosenthal didn’t catch his name.”
“No cards?”
“That’s what he said. According to Mr. Rosenthal, these three and some others questioned the staff and looked through the hotel’s written and computer records, making a copy of all the recent guest registrations and checkouts. I assume they tried to determine if two of these guests were the ones who’d taken the blanket to the beach that night, and who may have videotaped themselves, and inadvertently videotaped TWA Flight 800.”
I replied, “And what we don’t know is whether or not these three guys were successful in locating this couple. My instincts say they were. So, even if we found this couple, they’ve already been sanitized or vaporized.”
Kate did not reply.
I continued, “And so has this videotape, if it ever existed.”
“Well… if that’s the case, then we should at least find that out. Look, John, I never thought we were going to solve the mystery of TWA 800. I just want to… find this couple, and talk to them…”
“Why?”
“I don’t know until I talk to them.”
“That sounds like one of my lines.”
She smiled. “You’ve had a great influence on my thinking.”
“Same here,” I said.
“I hadn’t noticed.”
The appetizers came, and I asked her, “Do you think Mr. Rosenthal is still at the Bayview Hotel?”
“I know he is. I check every year. I did a background on him, and I know where he lives and all that.” She looked at me and said, “I’m not
“What files?”
She tapped her head. “Up here.”
“Tell me what else is up there.”
“I did that yesterday. Now it’s better that you ask when you need something.” She added, “You need to arrive at questions before you arrive at answers.”
“Okay, I understand you want me to work this case the way a detective would work it who just caught the squeal-meaning, who just got notified of the crime. But this is an old case, and I never worked on the Cold Case Squad. I used to get my cases before the blood even congealed on the corpse.”
“Please, I’m eating.” She pushed a forkful of salad at me. “Eat this.”
I opened wide, and she shoved this stuff in my mouth.
She said, “Ask me another question.”
“Okay. Have you ever discussed this with Ted Nash?”
“Not once.”
“Not even over dinner or drinks?”
“I wouldn’t have discussed this even if I was in bed with him.”
I didn’t respond to that, but said, “I’m going to call him.”
“He’s dead, John.”
“I know. I just like to keep hearing it.”
She scolded me, “John, that’s not funny. You may not have liked him, but he was a good and dedicated agent. Very smart and very effective.”
“Good. I’ll call him.”
The main course came, and I ordered another beer, and dug into my pasta. Kate said, “Have some of my vegetables.”
“So, Jeffrey Dahmer asks his mother over for lunch, and she’s eating and says, ‘Jeffrey, I don’t like your friends.’ And he says, ‘Well, then, just eat the vegetables.’”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Usually gets a laugh.” I got serious and said, “So I assume you also did not speak to Liam Griffith about this.”
“I spoke to no one. Except the guys on the twenty-eighth floor, who told me it was none of my business.”
“Right. So you made it my business.”
“If you want it to be. It all comes down to finding this couple. If they were found, and if it turned out that it was a dead end-that they didn’t see or tape anything-then that’s the end of it. The rest of the case-the eyewitnesses and the forensic evidence-have been gone over a million times. But this couple… whoever it was on the beach that night who left a lens cap to a video camera on that blanket…” She looked at me and asked, “Do
I replied, “It depends, obviously, on which way that video camera was pointing, and if it was even turned on. And then you have the problem of film quality and so forth. But let’s say everything came together by chance and that the last seconds of that TWA flight were recorded. Let’s even say the film still exists. So what?”
“What do you mean, ‘So what?’ Two hundred eyewitnesses would be looking at that film and-”
“And so would the FBI and CIA and their film experts. Someone needs to interpret the film.”
“It wouldn’t need interpretation. It would speak for itself.”
“Would it?” I said to her, “An amateur video, shot at dusk into a night sky, probably from a fixed tripod- assuming the couple were engaged in other activities-may not show all you think it would show. Look, Kate, you’ve been searching for the Holy Grail for five years, and it may actually exist, but you may never find it, and if you do, it may not hold any magical powers.”
She didn’t reply.
I continued, “You’ve heard of the Zapruder film.”
She nodded.
“Guy named Zapruder was filming John Kennedy’s motorcade as it passed by the Texas Book Depository. He was using an eight-millimeter handheld Bell amp; Howell movie camera. The film lasted twenty-six seconds. You ever see it?”
She nodded.
“Me, too. I saw the digitalized version, and I saw it in slow motion. So how many shots were fired? And what direction did they come from? Depends on who you ask.”
She stayed quiet for a while, then said, “Still, we can’t interpret the tape unless we find it. First things first.”
