by Chris Knopf
She did get to the cottage almost on time, which was a first. I had matching travel mugs of coffee ready for the two of us, and a box of Big Dog biscuits for Eddie.
“You’re bringing the dog?”
“I can’t leave him alone that long.”
“I thought you had it rigged so he goes in and out by himself and gets his own food and drives himself to the vet.”
“Not for his sake. For mine.”
Eddie never gave me an argument about a ride in the car. In fact, there was hardly anything that gave him more joy. Long rides, short rides, they were all occasions for unrestrained delight.
The car itself was a bit of a question mark. My father only got a few years out of it before he was killed. He kept it in pristine condition, which helps explain why I could bring it back to life after a million years sitting in a shed. I think my mother forgot it was there.
Even an alleged performance tank like the Grand Prix wasn’t all that complicated back in 1967. And I had little else to do after Jason dropped me off at the cottage. I replaced the battery, points, plugs, and wiring harness, pulled and cleaned up the carburetor, changed the oil and used a bicycle pump to inflate the tires. It started on the third try. There were a few thousand more things to fix and replace after that, but at least I had transportation.
I loaded up the trunk with tools and whatever spare parts I had in reserve and left the rest to providence. And positive thinking.
“This baby loves the open highway,” I said to Jackie, patting the steering wheel. “Gets the oil flowing, lubes the joints, burns up carbon deposits …”
“That must be what I’m smelling. Couldn’t be oil.”
I had both windows down so Eddie could run back and forth and stick his nose out. Jackie looked back at him, looked at me and shook her head while trying to get control of her hair.
“If we’re doing this the whole way you can let me out here.”
“You want a hat? I’ve got one in the trunk.”
We took Route 27 all the way to the Southern State, and from there up the Cross Island to the big bridges, and onto the Cross Bronx, which was running at its usual five miles an hour, filled to bursting with irritated, impatient drivers. Acting like this had never happened before. The Grand Prix kept its cool, according to the temperature gauge. As did its driver, who unlike his passenger was philosophical about the lack of air-conditioning.
“It’s a mind-set,” I told her. “You realize you have no air-conditioning, you start getting hot. Just imagine you’re out on the tundra, or having lunch with your mother-in-law.”
Eddie kept his head out the window while we were stuck in traffic, barking at any vehicle suspected of carrying another dog. As always, I wondered, to what end? But at least it kept him occupied.
Once we made it to the George Washington Bridge, things opened up and we sailed up the Palisades with the wind at our back. An hour and a piss stop later, we were approaching Hungerford, New York, a small rural town whose largest contributor to the tax base was a massive medium-security prison. You could see it from the highway, following the contour of the hills over which it sprawled. The original complex dated back to the late nineteenth century. It was made of red brick and unnecessarily adorned with architectural detail, especially given the aesthetic sensibilities of the residents.
Flowing out from the old buildings were plainer modern additions, built of red-stained concrete block to match the design vernacular. All of which was contained within two rings of twenty-foot-high cyclone fence topped with curls of jagged-bladed bands of razor-sharp steel.
To get inside you had to go through two checkpoints. The first had a friendly young man in a little hut who looked at our IDs and crossed our names off his list, made a joke about checking Eddie’s dog tags, then directed us to the parking lot where I left Eddie in the car. From there we passed through another cyclone-fenced entrance. The gate slid open, then closed behind us, leaving us in an enclosure. The next guy was a lot less friendly and asked what seemed like random, meaningless questions, but I knew why. He was seeing how we responded, looking for nerves or indecision.
We played it straight down the middle. On Jackie’s advice I’d brought along a sports jacket and tie, and she almost looked like a lawyer in her gray suit and sensible closed-toe pumps.
He buzzed us through the second gate and then a solid door that led to a narrow hallway, at the end of which was a large desk occupied by two prison guards, a man and a woman. They also checked our IDs and asked a few questions. Then they came around and ran metal detectors over us and patted around our nooks and crannies. The female guard asked Jackie if she preferred that done in private. Jackie said this was the closest I’d ever get to copping a feel, so go ahead.
After that they brought us into a windowless room with a table and a half dozen chairs. I was expecting to be in a little divided glass-walled booth where we’d have to talk to Roy over a telephone. This was much better.
The guards told us there was a routine cell check in progress that would keep Roy occupied for about half an hour, but he’d be in shortly after that. So we sat and waited. To kill some time I got around to asking Jackie how she pulled this meeting off.
“Pleaded, whined, lied, cashed in favors. All the things I usually do.”
“Roy doesn’t know we’re coming?”
“No, but we can’t make him see us if he doesn’t want to.”
“Any chance of that?” I asked.
She thought about it.
“I don’t think so.”
Soon after that he showed. A far thinner, balder, paler version of the Roy Battiston I’d last seen in a courtroom in Southampton. He used to be one of those overweight guys who seemed to sweat at room temperature, but now his skin looked chalky dry. The blue prison jumpsuit was big on him and folds of skin hung off his jowls and throat. In his early forties, his remaining hair was a gray-flecked, indistinct brown. He held a knit beanie in both hands, which he worried and twisted into a ball, then flattened out again. He looked slightly curious, but contained. Not wary, but guarded. What I remembered—that open, expectant, just-here-to-help-any-way-I-can bank manager look—had been replaced by a furtive energy, hidden behind an ashen haze that clung to his face.
No one tried to shake hands before he sat down across from us.
“This is a surprise,” he said.
“We appreciate you seeing us,” said Jackie.
“You’re my lawyer. I have to see you. I guess this guy sometimes comes with the deal,” he said, gesturing at me.
“How’re you doing?” asked Jackie. “How’re you holding up?”
He thought over his answer.
“In the beginning it’s a nightmare you can’t wake up from,” he said, looking at me, the guy who put him there, “but it gets better. I’ve always been a good learner. I’ve learned how to play the game.”
He pointed at my chest.
“If I know you there’s a pack of cigarettes in there,” he said. “They’re worth a lot more in here than out there.”
I took out an almost full pack and tossed it to him. He put it in his pants pocket with no further comment.
“So, you here to get me sprung?” he asked.
“The parole hearing’s only six months away,” said Jackie. “I’m very optimistic.”
“I’d rather hear you’re dead certain.”
“There’s nothing I know of that could get in your way,” she said in a flat voice.
“I’m a model inmate. From day one. All the white-collar guys are. The guards treat you better. But don’t buy that stuff about country club prisons. If this is a country club, the club rules were written in hell.”
“Then I’m sure we’ll do fine.”
“So, what’s up? If you’re looking for a loan, I’m probably not in the best position to help,” he said with an empty smile.
“I think we have a mutual acquaintance,” I said to him.
“We probably have a number of those,
” he said.
“Patrick Getty. Where’d you meet him? Doing laundry, having lunch? Selling cigarettes?”
The brown eyes behind his prison-issue glasses showed little reaction.
“We don’t get many oil millionaires in here.”
“Different branch of the family. This one’s into larceny and assault.”
He shrugged.
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” he said.
“Jackie, how closely do they monitor associations people make inside prison?”
“Every move, every wink, every nod,” she said.
Roy looked down at the table where he was kneading the beanie like a hunk of dough.
“I know a lot of people in here,” he said. “I can’t remember all their names.”
Roy had grown up when you could be poor and still have a Southampton address. He’d lived with his extended alcoholic family in what used to be called a beach colony, a romantic term for a cluster of shacks built on pilings, barely heated and rotting at the edges, a mile or two from the beach. Roy was the only one of the clan to make it out of there alive. A college education and a career in banking providing the wherewithal to put a thousand miles between him and the drag of his past, until he tried to add a few light years.
“Do you remember Robbie Milhouser?”
He looked up again, the left side of his mouth forming half a grin.
“Sure. Big man on campus. Let you know it every chance he got. Every class has one. Stupid intimidator. You were one of those in your day, right Sam?” he asked.
“No. I kept to myself. Like you. Had bigger plans.”
“Too bad they didn’t work out. For either of us.”
We let that hang in the air for a moment. Then Jackie spoke.
“Did you know he was dead?” she asked.
He looked at her with faint surprise.
“Really? No kidding. I didn’t know that. I guess if you make enough enemies one’ll finally get you.”
“I didn’t say he was killed. Just that he was dead.”
His little half grin formed into a smile.
“If he wasn’t killed you wouldn’t be here asking me about it,” he said. “Is that other fella dead, too? The oil guy?”
“Patrick Getty,” I said. “He worked as a carpenter for Robbie’s building business.”
“You think he killed Milhouser?”
“Do you?” I asked.
He raised his hands, briefly releasing the tortured beanie.
“I don’t know about any of that stuff. How would I know that?” he asked Jackie.
“It’s just an interesting coincidence. That you knew a guy in here who’d end up out in Southampton working for another guy you knew,” I said.
“So it’s a national secret that carpenters can find work in the Hamptons?”
“You knew his father, too, didn’t you?” Jackie asked.
“Long-time Southampton people all know each other,” he said. “You’d know that if you hadn’t grown up with the potato farmers in Bridgehampton.”
“I grew up in Bridgehampton with the professors of civil engineering,” she said dryly.
“She meant back in the old East End Savings days,” I said. “Didn’t Jeff Milhouser have a little deal with a wrinkle or two?”
He sat back in his chair, but still left one hand in contact with the beanie.
“Oh yeah, that was sweet,” he said. “My boss was the one who signed off on that loan. Fantastic. They had to can him to keep the banking commission from lowering the boom. Guess who got his job?” he asked, pointing at his chest.
Rosaline Arnold said I’d been up to my neck in corporate politics back at my old company. I don’t know why she thought that. I understand that politics is a word applied to mass behavior, whether the mass is two people or ten thousand. It’s what people do when operating within an organization, rigid or chaotic. The really good corporate politicians know how to manage up, focusing their energies on deceiving or pleasing their superiors as a means of advancement, often but not always at the cost of the people alongside or in lower layers. I knew from the beginning I didn’t have that kind of temperament.
My mind was drawn to the technical core, the processes and machines, the tangibles that formed the basis of the company’s reason for being. So the only people I cared about were those in my immediate vicinity. Men and women who were my peers and later I had to manage. I held many of them in high regard, though few were anything like me. But we had plenty of common ground on which to operate, and a culture that suited me, one dedicated entirely to the work. Some liked to socialize with each other, but mostly they all went home at the end of the day to their spouses and children and the presumption of a simple life.
I knew those privates lives were actually brimming with anxieties and troubles, dysfunctions and heartbreak, as well as occasional contentment and prosperity. But that was out of view, and when I led the group, that’s where I wanted it to stay. If someone came to me for help, I gave it eagerly, but you’d never catch me asking how things were going at home with the wife and kids.
That same myopia extended to office politics. I didn’t want to know about it, and my colleagues were glad to keep me in the dark. I was often surprised by the outbreak of hostilities between individuals or groups, learning that the conflict had been festering for months or years.
So I had little training in divining the motives of the human heart when I ran the company’s R&D. That’s why I was an easy mark for a guy like Roy Battiston, with the warm and convincing manner of a congenial salesman, cloaking rapacious venality and aching ambition.
But like Roy, I could be a pretty fast learner.
“Lucky for you,” I said. “Must have been a good job.”
“Luck is the intersection of opportunity and preparation,” said Roy, something the old can-do Roy would have said, only now it sounded more like Jack Nicholson than Dale Carnegie.
“Jeff Milhouser’s taken over Robbie’s building business. So now Getty’s working for him,” said Jackie.
“I used to tell people it was impossible to lose money in Hamptons real estate. Maybe Jeff will prove me wrong,” said Roy.
“Don’t think much of him, huh?” I asked.
“Don’t think of him at all. Don’t care.”
“He just lost his son,” said Jackie.
“Don’t care about that either. I lost my life, only I had to keep breathing. If you think the world’s worse off without Robbie Milhouser you’re a bigger hophead than I thought.”
“Careful,” I said.
“Hophead, boozehound. You two are made for each other. Oh, that’s right, you aren’t exactly a couple. Sam’s fucking my wife. Nice little bonus for you. I got to have her when she didn’t have a pot to piss in. Helped support her mother and her brain-dead kid. Now they’re both dead, and I’m in this shit hole and she’s richer than stink. But that’s okay, the boozehound who put me here is banging her. And now he wants to swoop in and get a little information. Maybe wants me to help with a little problem he’s got. But gee whiz,” he said, and then stood straight up, leaned out across the table and screamed in my face, “what would be my motivation?”
The door to the room snapped open. A short, stocky Latin-looking guard pointed the end of a nightstick at Roy.
“Sit down, man,” the guard said.
Roy sat.
The guard looked at us.
“You want I should stay?”
“No, we’re fine,” said Jackie, in a steady, clear voice.
“You sure?”
“We’re okay,” I said.
He left us to look at Roy slumped in his chair, back to bunching and reforming his hat.
“So you’re sure that parole hearing’s going to be a walk in the park?” I asked Jackie.
“That’s what it’s looking like,” she said.
Roy looked at her then back at me as we talked.
“I wonder what could mess it up,” I said.
“Roy
would have to somehow fall out of favor with the prison authorities.”
“By doing something in here?” I asked.
“Or causing something out there,” said Jackie.
“Or maybe something from the past might re-emerge,” I said. “Maybe just enough to put a crimp in the proceedings.”
If Roy was turning pale you couldn’t tell under the prison pallor. In fact, you couldn’t tell what he was thinking or feeling at all. He just looked at me in silence, crumpling his hat. Then his face lit up with a grotesque simulation of a smile.
“Wouldn’t that just be a kick in the ass, huh Sam? Golly, what a mess that would be.”
I looked over at Jackie. She was the one turning pale.
“But none of that’s going to happen, Roy,” she said, calmly. “So there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not worried,” he said quietly. “I have every confidence in you. Everything will go according to plan.”
“Well, then, that’s that,” he added, his half grin planted back on his face. “Sorry I can’t help with this Milhouser thing. I didn’t know he was a friend of yours,” he said to me. “When they catch the guy who did it, he won’t be coming here. Rap like that is strictly maximum security. You don’t even want to think about that kind of time. I have lots of new friends who’ve been there. And they have friends, too. They’ll be sure to give Robbie’s killer a fine reception.”
Then he stood up abruptly.
“You’ll have to alert the guard I’m ready,” he said. “If I touch that door I’m liable to get a stick up my ass.”
Jackie did as he asked, and he left after a goodbye handshake. His hand was dry as a bone, his grip surprisingly strong. Roy had apparently been seeing a lot of the gym, probably for the first time in his life.
Jackie was silent as we worked our way back through the security gauntlet on the way to the car. She waited while I let Eddie pee and sniff-search the parking lot. She was staring out the window when we got back.
It wasn’t until we were on the highway that either of us felt like talking.
