by Chris Knopf
By this time Dan and Ned’s DEC adventure van arrived pulling a trailer with a tiny backhoe. We watched them pull up next to the Grand Prix and roll out of the vehicle in down vests and white hard hats.
“Hey, folks,” said Dan. “Who’re we missing?”
“Burton Lewis. The lawyer.” I checked my watch. “Just give it a few minutes. He’ll be here.”
Ned took the opportunity to hand out Styrofoam cups, which he filled from a huge thermos, much to my joy. As we drank the coffee, he briefed us on how we were going to approach the operation and the probable sequence of events. He’d just started to hand out neoprene boots and flashlights when Burton thundered up in his yellow and fake-wood paneled Ford Country Squire.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said, stepping out of the Ford, looking like he’d answered the same casting call as Amanda, wearing khakis over a pair of L.L. Bean Maine Hunting Shoes, red flannel shirt and a herringbone marksman’s jacket. He reached into an inside pocket of the jacket and pulled out a silver case.
“It’s my new digital camera,” he said. “Can’t hurt, right?”
“Tally-ho.”
Dan reviewed everything again for Burton while we put on the boots and hard hats and played around with the industrial-strength flashlights. Then Burton, Amanda and I followed the van on foot as it plowed its way over the undergrowth that had filled in the path running along the cyclone fence, heading down the east side to where it took a sharp turn and paralleled the strip of territory next to the lagoon where the storage cellars were located.
Driving like a dauntless field guy, Ned got the van within twenty feet of our destination. Then, with ill-disguised enthusiasm, stuffed himself into the caged cockpit of the backhoe and drove it off the trailer the moment Dan had him unhitched.
The noise and fumes coming from the little beast were unsettling after the subdued tone of our preparations. Amanda held my arm as we watched Ned use a handheld GPS to zero in on his point of penetration.
In about five minutes we were looking into a slanted black hole in the side of a bank of tangled foliage.
“Fascinating,” said Burton. “It’s like bloody archeology.”
“How bloody depends on what we find,” I said, edging up to the hole with my flashlight.
Dan cleared his throat and gently moved me out of the way. Then he stuck his own flashlight in the hole, immediately followed by his head.
After an intolerable wait, we heard him speak.
“Cool.”
He sat on the ground with his feet in the hole, then popped out of sight,
“Come on in,” he called from the darkness. “Just watch your step.”
I let go of Amanda’s hand and followed. The hole was in a stone wall that curved up to a concrete ceiling. You only had to step down about two feet to reach the floor, which was also concrete. As the beam of my flashlight flicked around with Dan’s, I saw a room lined with stone and filled with exactly nothing.
“So far, so good,” I yelled out the hole. “Come see.”
The space had a heavy, choking smell, like fetid vegetation. The air was damp, but the floor was dry to the touch, as was the laid-up stone wall.
“Look over here,” said Dan.
He’d been in front of me, blocking the view of an arched doorway at the far end of the room.
“Let’s wait a second so Ned can take some samples,” he said, using his flashlight to guide Ned’s less graceful entrance through the hole. We watched him kneel and swab the floor, open and wave around little canisters, open others and set them on the floor, shoot his flashlight at the face of a handheld device and do all those other things chem engineering people delight in doing.
As he worked, we listened to Burton reminisce about trips into the Pyramids and catacombs, the sewers of Paris, the caves in the cliffs of Monte Carlo and a coal mine in West Virginia. The closest I’d come to that experience was crawling inside a giant pressure vessel to grab a sample of a contaminated catalyst. I didn’t like this environment a whole lot better, so I was glad when Ned said we could move on.
Dan made us wait until he checked out the next cellar, which proved to be an exact duplicate of the one before. We had to endure another round of test sampling and travelogues before we moved on. This time, however, things were a little different.
“Barrels,” Dan called out from the darkness.
Amanda grabbed my hand again.
“Ned first,” said Dan, although Ned was already on the way. “Damn,” said Burton, quietly.
“Let’s just see,” I said.
So the three of us stood in the semi-dark for about ten minutes, listening to the rumble of their conversation on the other side of the wall.
“It doesn’t mean you can’t have remediation,” I heard Burton saying. “It’s done all the time.”
“He’s right,” I said to Amanda. “I worked a lot of these sites at the company. Every time we closed a plant something like this happened.”
“Any in the Hamptons?” she asked.
“We need Sam,” Dan called.
I asked Burton to take Amanda’s hand, then went through the passage. It took me a few seconds to locate them in the bigger room and I was confused by the frenzied criss-cross of flashlights. I followed the sound of their voices.
“Check it out, Sam,” said Dan. “What’s your opinion?”
They cast their flashlights on a wall of containers, stacked three high. The bright, colorless light of the flashlights made it hard to focus at first, but as I got closer detail began to emerge. And then I was close enough to reach out and stroke the side of one of the containers.
“Wood,” I said. “They’re old wooden barrels.”
“Right,” said Dan. “Not good. Porous.”
I squatted down and felt the dry floor. Then I stood again and took a few paces back.
I don’t know if I started laughing before or after the thought struck me.
I went to the end of the wall where the barrel that began the first row was almost clear of the one above. I muscled it out away from the wall.
“Hey, careful,” said Ned, flashing his light at the floor under where the barrel had been standing. While he was doing that I slipped the little geologist’s hammer out of his utility belt and swung it down hard on the top of the barrel. Both Ned and Dan literally jumped back in horror.
“Hey!”
I hit it again and then a third time, finally loosening a slat on the top so I could get my hands around and pull it upward.
“Jesus, man, we need special equipment if we’re gonna do that kind of stuff,” said Dan.
“You’re right,” I said. “I’ve got it back at the house. I just didn’t think to bring along ten-ounce glasses and a couple trays of ice cubes.”
I dipped my hand in the barrel and held the liquid up to my nose, then touched it with my tongue.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Sampling a little Scotch. Could be bourbon. It’s been sitting here a long time. Anyone bring peanuts?”
TWENTY-FOUR
I LEFT AMANDA AND BURTON with Ned to guard the inventory while he took test samples and went with Dan to check the rest of the cellars. Unfortunately, no more booze appeared. The last cellar had a door to the outside, a table and chairs and what were probably canvas cots, now just piles of musty disintegration.
We tried to push open the door but only managed a thin slice of daylight. We could see the tangle of flora through the crack. It would be easy enough to find from the outside.
“Let’s go rejoin the party,” I said to Dan.
Ned, wearing official DEC goggles and gloves, was filling and corking the last of his glass cylinders. Amanda was standing with her arms around Burton and her head on his shoulder. She looked up hopefully when I shot her in the face with my flashlight.
“All clear,” I said. “Nothing down there but a rumrunner’s dormitory.”
I got the next hug. It was nice, especially with the buttery soft l
eather jacket in between.
“We’ll go through the whole place and take samples at regular intervals,” said Dan. “You’d want us to do that.”
“Yes we would,” I told him.
“I’ll get a generator and some can lights and see if we have enough sample kits. Ned, you can start prescreening the hooch so we can help Sam’s internist work up an antidote.”
After showing Amanda and Burton around the rest of the place, we went back outside to the bright daylight and renewed circumstances. Burton gave us a history lesson on liquor trafficking on the East End during Prohibition that was more thorough and no less enthusiastic than Dorothy Hodges’s. I stuck in a joke where I could, but Amanda was too stunned with relief to absorb wisecracks.
I drove her back to her house where she said she wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep for a few weeks. She asked me to come by later in the evening to watch over her, if I wanted to.
“Leave the vodka at home,” she said. “I’ve got some Glenfiddich stashed somewhere. More appropriate to the occasion. Why are you looking at me?” she added.
“I like looking at you.”
“Not usually like that.”
“Sorry. It’s not you. I’m just thinking.”
“Okay. I’m too wasted to think. Offer’s still open,” she said, and then disappeared into her house. I kept looking at the space she’d just left behind until I was distracted by Eddie with his paws on the car door, looking in the window. I let him ride the hundred feet back down our common driveway. They say dogs have no sense of time, so I told him we were driving to Maine and back. It made him happy.
The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door. It was Rosaline Arnold, only this time I was dressed for it.
“I think I know what was wrong with Robbie Milhouser,” she said when I answered.
“You’ve been thinking?” I asked.
“I’ve been researching. I went back to storage and pulled everything they had on him all the way back to grade school.”
“Wow.”
“Then I cross-referenced everything with data pulled off the Internet. Just to get a little corroboration.”
“And?”
“Come on, Sam, I’m not doing this over the phone. Plus I have visual aids.”
“You’re in luck. My afternoon schedule just opened up. How do you feel about dogs?”
——
I fed myself out of Tupperware containers while changing into sneakers and a silk baseball jacket. Eddie hung around the whole time, knowing as he always did that he was coming along.
The nice weather seemed determined to persist. Now late afternoon, the sun’s angle was deepening the color of the trees, and the sky was working on a design for the upcoming sunset. It was cool. Too cool with the window down for a lightweight jacket, but I was committed.
For no good reason, I took a slightly different route over to Rosaline’s. I wanted to see how the day was treating the potato fields just north of County Road 39 and wasn’t disappointed. The sun’s clear light through the cloudless sky turned the bare, freshly tilled earth a supple gold. The trees and bushes planted around the new houses forming along the fringes between fields had begun to fill out and a few years of wear had settled them into the landscape. With spring’s emergence the traffic on County Road 39 had also begun to bloom, so I waited awhile to cross and head south to Rosaline’s condo complex.
“No newspaper?” she asked when she answered the door, genuinely disappointed.
“I took the high road. No newsstands.”
“You did, however, bring a dog. As promised.”
Her hair was piled on top of her head, held precariously with bobby pins and stuck with a yellow pencil. She wore a men’s dress shirt and melon-colored shorts. I guessed her father’s, since they were several sizes too big. Eddie expressed his social grace by jumping all over her.
“Is it too early for cocktails?” she asked in a gross display of the rhetorical.
“Out on the patio. I want to see the latest perennials.”
Eddie started sniffing the corners of her apartment while I went straight to my favorite wicker chair. She followed soon with glasses, bottles and several fat old manila folders. I helped her unload.
“Sit, sit. I’ll pour.”
“I didn’t expect you to keep digging,” I said.
“I’m compulsive, what can I say. It’s the Internet’s fault. It’s an amazing research tool, but can only take you so far. Eventually you have to get your hands on some good old-fashioned paper and ink. Cheers.”
She pulled up her legs so her heels were hooked on the edge of her seat, using her thighs to support the files as she leafed through. Eddie gave a sharp little bark from the other side of the French doors and I went to let him out. I walked him around the garden area for a few minutes so he could sample the local scents and piss on a few flowers, then bought him back with me to lie on the patio.
“Anyway,” said Rosaline, picking up where the conversation left off, “I already had my name all over requests for Robbie’s high school file, so why not go for broke. I still haven’t figured out what to say if I’m questioned. Maybe you can come up with something.”
“How about the truth?”
“Illegally sharing a student’s confidential information?”
“I’ll keep thinking.”
“The good news is what I uncovered is in the public domain.”
“Like what?”
She handed me a photocopy of a page from a church ledger. St. John’s Episcopal Church, Southampton. It listed marriages performed from January through April, 1966.
“Find Milhouser.”
I followed the columns till I came to “Emilia Silverio and Jefferson Milhouser.”
“Nice Italian girl,” I said. “Must have felt funny in that bastion of Waspdom.”
“You see the date?” she asked.
“Yeah. 1966.”
“Here,” she said, handing me another piece of paper.
It was a printout from the birth registry at Mt. Vernon Hospital, Mt. Vernon, New York. I traced down the columns until I found “Robert, to Emilia and Marco Silverio.”
“And the date?”
“1961. Son of a bitch.”
“Son of Italians. Very unlucky ones. Let’s move to the obits.”
The first was a scanned clipping from Newsday. An obit with a little American flag, indicating a veteran. Marco had owned a shipping and storage business out of Long Island City until a sizeable hunk of something to be shipped or stored fell on his head. He left a wife and a one-year-old son.
Rosaline waited until I finished reading so I could look up at her face and see another piece of paper held in her hand.
“I’m enjoying this, Sam,” she said. “Rummaging around in archives, on and off the Internet, especially those involving vital statistics, gives me an intense voyeuristic delight. In fact, at certain times it actually makes me a little wet. Does that sound perverse?”
“Not at all. What else you got?”
She handed me another scanned clipping, this one from The Southampton Chronicle.
Emilia had been spared the violent death of her first husband, but she was just as dead, this time from multiple myeloma, a less immediate but far more painful way to go. She left a husband, Jefferson Milhouser, and an eight-year-old son, Robert.
“Jeff’s not his father,” I said.
“Nope. It’s amazing how you see a family resemblance that’s not actually there. Think about it. They don’t look anything like each other.”
She put Robbie’s high school yearbook picture down on the table next to a headshot of Jeff from his days as a Town Trustee. Broad, burly Mediterranean next to lean, lanky Anglo.
“What kind of a teenager do you think you’d be if Jeff Milhouser was your only parent, your principal mentor?” she asked. “You don’t need a degree in psychology to figure that one out. I have one, by the way, and I did figure it out,” she added.
I picked up
a picture in each hand and looked at the faces.
“Can I use your phone?” I asked her.
She looked disappointed.
“You’re brilliant, Rosaline,” I said when I realized why. “But you know that. You did an amazing thing. And you didn’t even have to.”
Her face lightened up again.
She stood up and ran her fingers down my cheek. Then went inside to get the portable phone. Eddie jumped up, too, but I told him to relax. I finished off my drink and poured a fresh one over the dwindling ice and stared some more at the Milhousers.
I couldn’t remember Sullivan’s direct line, so after Rosaline brought me the phone I went through the cumbersome process with the switchboard. I paced around the garden to help speed things up. He eventually came on the line.
“Got me just in time, Sam. Ready to head home.”
“How’d you do with those phone records?”
“Not sure. They might be in the fax bin. When do you need them?”
It was one of the things I missed about a hyperproductive, anxiety-fueled corporate environment. Everyone knew you wanted everything immediately all the time. Even when you didn’t. I took a breath.
“Sooner better than later, Joe. I’m sort of snuggin’ up to an indictment here.”
“Yeah, Veckstrom said it could be any minute. Who told you?”
I felt a sharp tug in my chest.
“Nobody told me, Joe, I hadn’t heard. But you can see why I’d be feeling a little urgency.”
“Let me go check.”
A hundred years later he came back on the line. “Yep, I think it’s all here. Expedited, by the way. Don’t think I just was sitting on my hands.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Nah, I’m here with Will Ervin. He’ll drop ’em off at your house. Courtesy of the Town of Southampton, Department of Public Safety. To schlep and protect.”
I thanked him in a way I hoped he’d know was genuine.
“Do you have your computer turned on?” I asked Rosaline.
“No, but it doesn’t take long. What do you want to know?”
“If you can pry around in my personal life, I’m assuming you can do that with anybody,” I said.
