“Like how much? I mean, like how much can you lose?”
“Well, geez, I don’t know. Millions. Jillions.”
“That’s what I keep telling these guys in East Hampton. They don’t get the dimensions of this thing.”
“Aren’t there State and Federal people mixed up in this?”
“There were—two months ago when it happened. I think the FBI interviewed his clients. Didn’t come up with anything they liked. The Staties gave a lot of forensic help and stuff, but they’re too busy setting speed traps and polishing their holsters.”
“Sounds like Smokey envy.”
The second beer killed whatever carpentry ambition the sun hadn’t already baked out of me. I took a bigger swig and leaned back in the chair, closed my eyes and tried to redraw Sylvia’s jaw in my imagination.
“At least it’s not your headache,” I said to him.
“Well, it’s not like it’s anybody’s headache, exactly. It’s like our job.”
“East Hampton’s.”
“Well, not really. Now that it’s all screwed up everybody’s got a piece of it.”
I opened my eyes again and saw him staring down the neck of his beer. Sullivan wasn’t always the easiest guy to read. Probably because he often concealed what he was actually thinking. When he actually knew what he was thinking in the first place.
“Things have been sort of slow for some reason,” said Sullivan. “Even with all the summer people pulling their usual crazy shit. Ross got us all together this morning and handed out copies of the file—had witness interviews, including yours, and the names of State and Federal people whore still officially assigned. Who’ll be happy to have somebody else to blame for turning up a big goose egg.”
“Should keep you out of trouble,” I said, lofting my beer.
The bottle felt cool in my right hand, and I thought I felt a
little breeze coming in off the bay. I slumped down deeper in my seat and put my head back against the wooden slats of the Adirondack. Trying to achieve a momentary state of perfect relaxation.
The windsurfer took a sharp turn to the left in the freshening breeze and headed straight toward the big gray-green buoy I’d been watching bob around out there for the last fifty years. I hoped he knew it was there. He wouldn’t be the first gentleman sportsman to plaster himself all over its battleship-grade plate steel hull.
“So, Sam, how busy’re you with that thing?” said Sullivan. “You got a deadline or anything?”
“What thing?”
He pointed at the addition.
“That thing. What you’re building.”
“I don’t know. Close it in before winter, maybe.”
“Yeah. You gotta do that.”
“Get the roof on.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Windows, siding.”
“Still have plenty of time to go talk to the guy’s wife,” he said to me, offhand.
“The guy’s wife?”
“The dead guy. The guy that got blown up.”
“I’m talking to his wife?”
“Well, somebody’s got to. They took her testimony, or whatever you call it. But they didn’t get shit out of her. She’s a doctor, but not the medical kind, some kind of PhD. Ed Lotane, the lead guy in East Hampton, told me she was loony, couldn’t go out of the house. Acraphobic or something like that. Afraid of the whole freaking world.”
“Agoraphobic.”
“That’s it. Plus, she’s kind of skinny and sickly, and has a
big house, so naturally the cops think she’s got some heavy juice. Even though she only lives in Riverhead, and was married to a local guy, for Christ’s sakes, which shouldn’t bother those yokels in East Hampton. But, for whatever reason, this broad’s statement is about half a paragraph, and made’a nothing.”
“What has this got to do with me?”
“Aw, geez.”
He tossed an imaginary object to the ground and stood up. His blue polyester uniform strained at the midriff, revealing a T-shirt at his belly button. Two shirts and a leather harness. Just the thing for July.
“What’s the big deal?” he asked. “You just go up there and talk to her. I’ll tell you what I need to know. It’s no big deal.”
“What’re you talking about? That’s probably not even legal. Even if I wanted to do it, which I don’t.”
“You don’t care if the people who busted up Jackie’s face just get away with it? You said you were curious.”
“Sullivan, you’re the cop here. This is your job. I’m a private citizen. What’s the problem with talking to his wife, anyway?”
I raised my voice so he could hear me as he walked away, heading toward the Little Peconic. “Aw, Christ,” I said to myself, before getting up to follow him.
Eddie and I caught up with him at the edge of my backyard. Beyond that was about thirty feet of polished beach pebbles, and after that, the blue-green Little Peconic Bay. A thrity-eight-foot Catalina was sliding by just outside the green buoy that marked the Oak Point channel. By reflex I checked the tide. It was low. If he’d passed inside the buoy his keel would have dug a nice furrow in the sea bottom.
“What,” I said.
“Forget about it.”
Eddie hopped down off the breakwater that defined the line between my yard and the beach. He liked to keep tabs on things at water’s edge, ever watchful for maritime threats, like beach balls and lobster buoys.
“What do you think Ross would say if he knew I was interviewing your witnesses?”
“She’s not a witness. She’s just his wife. You find out what you find out, I’ll just go back and ask the same questions, and that’s it. Never stopped you before.”
“That was different. I had an interest in that.”
“You don’t got an interest in this? You got your ass tattooed with glass, your ears blown out and your friend’s walkin’ around with half a face. Not to mention all the dead people.” Sullivan’s voice had started to move up a notch in volume, but he caught himself.
“Anyway” he said. “You’re a nosy bastard, everybody knows that. There’s no statute that says you can’t pay a call on somebody. It’s a free country.”
“Interfering with an ongoing investigation.”
“What interfering? You’re just talking to her.”
“I don’t get it, Joe. What’s the hang-up?”
Sullivan found a small rock in the grass and tossed it across the beach and into the bay.
“Two years is all I got,” he said.
“Two years?”
“Of college. Two years at the community college. Studied beer mostly.”
“We had that at MIT.”
“Exactly my point. You went to MIT. You been around, you did some things. You got the education. The problem with those boys in East Hampton is they don’t even know what questions to ask. Fuckin’ PhDs, financial analysts, all that shit, it’s like, you know, inhibiting.”
“Not for you.”
He put a meaty fist up on his hip just behind the black leather holster that held his .38.
“That’s right. I’ll talk to anybody. But I need an angle,” he said. “Something they haven’t thought of yet. Something to chase down. You might come up with it, you might not. Plus, I’ll owe you a favor. That’s got to have some appeal.”
I made him look me in the face.
“I can’t afford to go messing with anything more controversial than breathing Southampton air. The Chief frowns every time he sees me.”
“That’s just Ross. He’s suspicious of his own mother. Assuming he’s got one.”
“His mother wasn’t a murder suspect.”
“That case is closed,” said Sullivan. “Over and done.”
“I need to keep my head down.”
“Right,” he said, “and I need you to go talk to this lady and tell me what you find out.”
He turned away from the bay and slapped my shoulder as he walked by on the way back to his car.
“This is entirely fucked up,” I called to him.
“Just let me know how it goes.”
“I don’t even know who she is.”
He turned around and walked backward as he spoke.
“I left the name and address on your kitchen table. And phone number. And a list of questions. And a summary of the case I got from East Hampton. Burn it all when you can. Ross finds out I gave it to you he’ll can me in half a New York minute.”
After he left, I went up the ladder to set the two rafters that formed the addition’s south gable. First I measured the dimensions with my lucky twenty-five-inch tape. Then I recut the angles at both the ridge and the top plate to suit the
measurements instead of the math I’d been using before. The rafters fit perfectly. I checked it all with the framing square, then re-checked all the elevations with the transit. For added insurance, I scabbed a few Techo gussets at the joints and tacked the sixteen-foot two-by supports to the floor deck.
Then I went inside and got another beer, which I drank out at the edge of my lawn, waiting for the first signs of sunset to form over the top of the North Fork and looking for errant sailors and windsurfers to come crashing into my private coast, and yet again mess up the layout of a life that always worked better by eye than formal calculations.
I’
D MOVED OUT HERE
after an act of self-immolation cleared out the preceding thirty years of my life. My parents were dead, leaving me the cottage where I’d been raised. It stood at the tip of Oak Point, a scrubby peninsula that juts fearlessly into the Little Peconic Bay on the northwest border of the Town of Southampton, Long Island. My father was an old-school mechanic, so it wasn’t surprising that his cottage expressed the character and refinement of a
’55
Chevy. Sturdy, sure-footed and unadorned. My mother had tried to introduce a little gentility after he died, but the effort withered on the vine. Since I moved in, I hadn’t done much to improve the situation. With few friends or family, no job or any other meaningful pursuit beyond drinking vodka and watching the sun sizzle down behind the green mounds of the North Fork, home improvement seemed pointless.
I don’t know why I started building anyway. Probably some newfound professional enthusiasm. Every kid who grew up on the East End of Long Island worked in construction at least part of the time. The booms and busts would parallel the fortunes of Wall Street, though I could always get some kind of work, even in the slow times. The weather never stopped chewing up all the big wooden houses over in the estate section. And there were always a lot of rich people who were richer than everybody else, no matter what the economy was doing, and most of them had a house out here. I worked for them—or rather, I worked for the carpenters and contractors who lived off the trade.
I liked to work for a guy named Frank Entwhistle, who’d hired me thirty-five years before. His son, Frank Junior, now ran the crews. He needed a finish carpenter and cabinetmaker. Not an easy hire, now that most of the tradesmen, and for that matter waitresses, store clerks and bartenders, came from up island.
The only affordable housing locally was held like family heirlooms, and passed along to anyone bound to the dream of lost possibilities. I’d grown up with these people, and I recognized them around Town, going in and out of the hardware store or in the checkout line at the food market, but I didn’t know most of them anymore.
I worked for Frank more or less when I felt like it, and occasionally helped maintain his fleet of pickups and light-duty earthmovers.
Luckily he hadn’t asked me to set any ridge plates.
The cottage my father built had a big screened-in porch that faced the water, a living room of sorts with an oversized woodstove, a kitchen, a bathroom and two ten-by-ten bedrooms. I lived out on the porch most of the year so I could keep an eye on the Little Peconic Bay. After five years,
it was still there, so the vigilance must be paying off. I kept a round table, a few chairs and a cot out there so I could eat and sleep and entertain a select guest list. People like Jackie Swaitkowski and Joe Sullivan. Maybe an occasional Jehovah’s Witness or a neighborhood dog Eddied bring home to share water and biscuits. A little hospitality to prove to God I wasn’t completely disillusioned with His creations.
The cottage was never the center of Oak Point social life. At least not when my father was around. People shied away, and my mother tucked herself into a corner of the living room with her knitting when she wasn’t waging a losing war on the sand and salty damp air that clung to the walls and soaked through cereal boxes and bed linens. My father wasn’t much with people, especially the ones who lived in the house he built. He ran almost entirely on momentum and the acid gas of a nearly uncontrollable fury. I never knew why he was the way he was. I never thought about it until he was gone. I do know how he died. Beaten to death in the smelly men’s room at the back of a dusky, threadbare bar in the Bronx. It was down the street from his weekday apartment. They never learned who did it. They never really tried. There were no witnesses, even though a half-dozen barflies and the bartender were there at the time. The police figured it was a pair of junior-grade wise guys passing through the neighborhood under their customary cloak of invincibility. They assumed it was provoked. They knew my father.
While I was growing up he spent most of his time in the City working on cars and oil burners while my mother, sister and I were in Southampton at the cottage on Oak Point. In those days the peninsula was a working class neighborhood, on the whole, made up of guys from the Bronx like my father and local service people and unheated, do-it-yourself summer retreats. But it was wooded and filled with East End
light, and under the beneficence of the Little Peconic Bay, and, most of the time, free of my father’s corrosive wrath.
—
After making and breaking my share of good and bad habits over the years, I decided to stick with those already established, for better or worse. One of them was running along the sandy roads that thread their way along the bay coast and connect several North Sea neighborhoods. The day after Sullivan came to see me, Eddie and I were up early and moving west at a brisk pace. In the summer this was only possible in the morning. Later on the heat was too much. At least for a fifty-three-year-old guy with a full set of bad habits to counterbalance the benefits of regular exercise. Eddie might’ve stood it, but not happily.
An atomized mist had been sprayed around the scrub pines and oaks. A smooth cloud cover hung above the tree-tops. The sun had a few hours to burn it all off. Enough time for me to make it all the way to the Hawk Pond Marina where my friend Paul Hodges lived on his boat. My T-shirt was already getting soaked and I had to occasionally wipe off the sweat that slipped through my terry cloth headband. The chirping bugs from the wetlands were quiet now, having exhausted themselves during the night, but their diurnal relatives were up and about, buzzing around the forest and sticking themselves to my arms and legs. Eddie stopped a few times to pick a critter or two out of his fur. We shared some water from a bottle Velcroed to my waist and soldiered on.