Nice Place for a Murder (2 page)

Lulu had maybe seventy yards lead. Her wheelhouse was open toward the stern, and I could see Mr. Hit-And-Run, holding the wheel with both hands, looking over his shoulder at me against the glare of the sun.

The Elysium was running down the middle of Lulu’s wake. I punched the barrel of the Remington at the cracked glass of the windshield to enlarge the bullet hole, then leaned forward with my elbows on the console to fire through the opening, once, and then again. No hits that I could see. The marauder stood at Lulu’s wheel, urging the boat ahead, looking over his shoulder every few seconds.

The distance between the two boats grew. I fired off two more rounds while I still had a prayer of hitting the shooter, but my prayer went unanswered. Lulu outrunning me, putting two hundred yards between us, then three hundred. The fisherman heading toward Orient Point, tip of the North Fork. In fifteen minutes she could be around the Point, north through Plum Gut and out into the Sound. From there she could make anywhere on the north shore of Long Island, or head across to Connecticut.

The gunman was gone. I eased the throttle back and stopped dead in the water, watching Lulu’s wake roll away in the glassy calm.

It was quiet now, only the patient idle of Elysium’s good engine breaking the stillness. My heart continued to work overtime, stepped up by the chase. Adventures weren’t good for a man my age, with a rusty circulation system. Yet, in a willful way, I liked to remind myself I could still get the juices pumping when I had to.

Thinking, well I’m into it, whatever it is. Somebody owes me answers. I turned the boat and headed back toward the Julian dock. 

CHAPTER II

There was a boat in one of the four slips. Thirty feet of red and white Cigarette, fundamentally an outsize engine with a cockpit on top, designed for speed and not incidentally, noise. That’s what Cigarette owners crave, the thunder as much as the speed, maybe more. It resonates in the chest, then heads downward and makes the masculine hormones surge. Piloting a Cigarette flat out requires a sure hand and a contempt for danger. The boat was Ingo Julian’s toy, evidently.

I pulled the Elysium into an empty slip and began tying up.

From behind me a woman’s voice said, “The body is gone. They took him away.” I made the stern line fast and turned to look at her. Her blue eyes were set remarkably wide apart, and the nose was slightly flattened like a prizefighter’s, but the face, taken all in all, was constructed from a classic plan, more elegant than mannish. She had close-cropped red hair, muscular but shapely legs that disappeared under her silky peach beach jacket.

“Away where?” I said.

“Heaven, I suppose. To see if they’ll let him in.”

“Who exactly are we talking about here?”

“You don’t know?”

“Not to a certainty.”

“Kenny. Kenneth Newalis. Vice president, advertising and public relations, Julian Communications. Thirty-five years old, more or less. Brilliant, in his way, but insecure.”

“So you think Kenny might not make it past the Pearly Gates?” I said. “Why is that?”

“Who’s certain to get into heaven? Are you, Seidenberg?” She sat on Elysium’s gunwale, making the boat rock in the water.

“I’m lucky if they let me into a decent restaurant.”

“Why is it I think modesty doesn’t tally with your profile?” she said. “I hear you’re smart and tough. But I thought you’d be younger.”

“I am younger. I just look old.”

“Smart and tough, though?”

“Don’t have to be tough any more. I’ve weathered with such refinement, people are embarrassed to pick a fight with me.”

“And so you get what you want?”

“Don’t want much. I keep my life simple,” I told her. “That’s why I’m wondering how I got involved in this particular complication. Now I’m here, what am I supposed to do? And by the way, now that I’ve shared my inner life with you, who are you?” I tried to catch her looking at the bullet hole in my boat’s windshield, but she gave no indication of being aware of the damage.

“I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do. Safeguard the prestige and best interests of Julian Communications, probably. I’m Lisa Harper. Ingo sent me, asked me, to meet you.” She threw a glance upward, toward the Julian house that commanded the precipice thirty feet up. I took the gesture as quiet confirmation that the real authority resided above us.

“And what is it you do here?”

“Around here I mostly run along the shore, and then I drink orange juice. Back in New York I head up marketing for Julian Communications. For Ingo. He asked me and Kenny to spend the weekend here, brainstorm next year’s promotions.”

“Bad move for Kenny.”

“As it turned out,” Lisa Harper said. She pushed her nicely sculptured ass against the Elysium and made the boat bump against the slip. 

“So what happened?”

“He drowned.”

“Oh, yes? Where? In the bathtub?”

She held up a forefinger, staring at me, making me wait, amusing me with her studied arrogance. Finally, “Patience, Seidenberg. All will be revealed. He drowned swimming in the bay.”

“Swimming in October? Water’s pretty cold.”

“People do it. Ingo swims into November.”

“Really.”

“Cold doesn’t bother him. Nothing does. Phenomenal endurance. He’s a fitness freak, like me.”

“You into fitness?”

“My passion.”

“Thus the running and the orange juice.”

“Kenny swam out thirty yards and did laps in front of the house. We watched him from up there.” She pointed to the deck well above us, a cantilevered affair that seemed almost to float in space, barely touching the main structure of the house. “Suddenly he was in trouble. He stopped swimming and started flailing around in the water. Almost immediately he went under, disappeared.”

“Then what?”

“We ran down, Ingo and I, and went in after him. Hard to locate him. The water’s been so murky since the storm. It took us awhile, too long, but Ingo found him under water and we towed him back to shore. He gave him mouth-to-mouth and I ran up to call for help, the local ambulance corps. They got here right away, but it didn’t make any difference. They worked on him with a resuscitator for forty minutes, right there on that rock. But he was gone.”

“I’m surprised anybody could find the guy below the surface. You think he’d drift with the tide, maybe end up a mile away.”

“That’s what Ingo thought, too.” said Lisa Harper. “But it was slack tide, we found out. The water wasn’t moving.”

“How deep is it out there, where he was swimming?”

“Maybe twelve, fifteen feet. Why?”

“Just that I wonder why he was out so far if he was swimming laps. For exercise, right? He could have done that in four feet of water.”

“The bottom drops off sharply here,” she said.

I shrugged. “So what was it, a cramp did him in, you think?”

“I suppose, yes.”

“No reason to look for any other explanation, then?” I said. I folded my arms across my chest, resting them on my stomach, which I made no longer made any effort to suck in. Three years ago, when my weight had stabilized at 225 pounds, putting me beyond the far side of what was appropriate and healthy for a man of a certain age standing five-eleven, I had decided there was no more room in my life for vanity.

“What else could it be? He just suddenly went under.”

“Try heart attack. Try food poisoning. And there’s always that old favorite, foul play.”

“Oh, please. He was all alone out there when it happened. And anyway, who would want to do harm to Kenny? I mean, Kenny, after all.”

“I take that to mean you think he was an innocuous soul who couldn’t have had enemies.”

“Your words, not mine. He was a competent, effective executive. Ingo doesn’t hand out vice presidencies to morons.”

“A good guy, then? You liked him?”

She stood and walked to the end of the dock, looking across to the Greenport waterfront. A film of clouds, tinted orange by the lowering sun, had gathered on the horizon to the west. “I liked him well enough. But now you’re thinking why am I so stoic about it, why aren’t my eyes red from the sorrow of it all. After all, I helped pull his body out of the water. Looked into his cold, dead face.”

“Yes, you did,” I said.

“Never saw the sense of crying about anything. It’s unproductive. Whatever happens, deal with it and move on.” She almost smiled. “Write that down, if you want.”

“You’re tougher than I was when I was still tough.”

“I’m the Iron Woman, Seidenberg.”

“That what they call you?”

She turned to face me and undid the belt that held her beach jacket around her, then with a languorous realignment of her shoulders, let the jacket slip free and fall to the dock. The sharp angle of the fading autumn light traced the highlights of her form, shoulders broad and round, breasts full without being rude, narrow hips radiating a sense of power, sculptured thighs. Lisa Harper was an athlete, filled with muscular possibilities. She was dynamics at rest, ready to leap in an instant. The whole package was bound up by a bathing bra and thong bottom, both white against her tanned skin.

I caught myself gaping at her. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Not really,” she said. “Point is, my wavelength is the physical world. That’s the only reality. Sorrow and regret and frustration, they just waste you.”

“Is that what makes you the Iron Woman?”

“Every year I compete in the Iron Woman
Triathlon. Train four months to get into shape. The competition is fifty miles that brings me to the limits of what this body can achieve. The experience is as close as one can get to absolute rapture. First bicycle, then swimming, then running. That’s the reason they call me the Iron Woman.”

“Only reason?” I said.

“Let’s get back on track. I told you I liked Kenny. It was a hideous accident. We couldn’t save him. We did all anyone could possibly do.”

“I’m sure you did.”

Ingo Julian’s voice was a rasp that came from above. “Come up, Lisa. Bring him.”

I had met Ingo Julian only once before, two years after the crash of his private plane that disfigured the man, and taken the life of his brother Felix. The sight of him now came as no surprise, but still, his appearance was so disquieting I had to force myself not to look away. There wasn’t a trace of hair anywhere on Ingo Julian’s head. Even his eyebrows were gone, sacrificed to the surgery that had repaired him after the fire and trauma of the crash. His head was a pattern of scars, the most prominent running from the top of his head, down his forehead and cheek, to just below his right ear. Another began at his left temple, then forked into two lines as it made its way behind his neck. The restructured appearance of his skin was accentuated by the sun, which had left him bronzed in some places while leaving mottled patches of white, outlined by his scars, in others. It was as though a membrane of some sort, damaged and mended, had been stretched over his head and neck.

“Thank you for coming,” he said, his voice, as I remembered it, raw and labored. “Ben, isn’t it? Yes?”

“Flattered you remember,” I said.

“You’ve put on a few pounds. Living the good life on the North Fork.”

“My lady friend likes hefty men. She insists I eat well.” I was taken by the sheer size of the great-room in which we stood, the cathedral ceiling with its huge exposed beams, the expanse of polished oak floor.

“I’m not sure what you can do here. Might be a waste of your time,” Julian said. “Hector thought it would be a good idea. Lawyers are so circumspect. Well, they keep us from doing foolhardy things. If we let them, they also keep us from doing productive things, isn’t that so?”

Lisa Harper lingered in the room’s entrance archway, beach jacket draped over her shoulders. “You don’t need me anymore, do you, Ingo? I’m longing to take a run.”

“Run,” said Julian, motioning toward the beach.

“I can be found if you need me, Seidenberg,” she said. I felt her focus linger on me for an instant before she turned and disappeared.

“You left Empire, didn’t you?” said Julian. “You cashed out. The fact is, old Teague made it worth your while. Yes?”

“It was time to move on,” I said.

“Yet the fact is, here you are.”

“Old loyalties.”

Julian lowered himself into a black leather chair near the tiled fireplace, and pointed to a matching chair facing it. I sat. “Not all loyalty comes from the heart, does it?” Julian said.  “The best of it is bought and paid for. I suspect the Julian Communications retainer fee has something of an impact on your payout from Empire. Three more years. A strong basis for your loyalty. Yes?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “How is it you know everything about me and Teague and Empire?”

“We pay you a great deal, as fees for your sort of services go. I’m compulsive about looking into the people we do business with. You would know that, certainly.”