Black Swan (A Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery)

by Chris Knopf

  I didn't have her wealth, but shared her point of view. I had to work to pay the bills, but I would have done so anyway, having come to the realization that work was what kept you connected to the world in ways that were impossible for the leisure-prone, and disenfranchised, alike.

  "We go with the flow," said Amanda, the question both answered and ambiguous. Myron seemed to enjoy that.

  "We should let you people get back to work," he said. "It looks arduous."

  They disembarked using the same procedure, in reverse. Grace seemed more receptive to the idea, now that she had some warning. Some pleasantries concluded with Myron inviting us to visit them the following evening for cocktails. Make it a storm party.

  "We'll stay by the windows so you can keep an eye on the Mariana," he said.

  Now that we'd established a history of being invited to Christian Fey's hotel by people other than Christian Fey, I told him to expect us.

  "As long as we can bring the dog."

  "Better yet."

  We watched the two morphological opposites walk back down the center dock and disappear into the hotel. We sat in the quiet of the night, or what I thought was quiet.

  "You're making those sounds," she said.

  "What sounds?"

  "The ones you make when something's bothering you but you don't want to talk about it."

  "I'll stop."

  "Just tell me what you're thinking."

  "Nothing," I said. "It's none of my business."

  "Those are two different thoughts," she said.

  I don't want to talk about it."

  I got her off the topic by plying her with more wine and Italian breadsticks, and tales of adventure on the high seas, or low seas, if that's how you'd describe the beloved and capricious Little Peconic Bay, into which thrust Oak Point, where our houses stood side by side at the water's edge. It's where I'd learned to sail-on little boats worth less than the box of Eddie's dog food stowed under the galley sink. Leaky clinker-built dories and skiffs usually salvaged out of the marshland and powered by sails also scrounged, this time from the dumpster behind the sail loft in Sag Harbor, modified to fit their reduced circumstances. Luckily, the principles behind these makeshift craft and boats like Myron Sanderfreud's million-dollar Hinckley were essentially the same. They all had sails, keel, rudder and the rigging needed to control it all, to the extent nature allowed anything to be controlled.

  Sailing is both an engineer's nightmare and dream. The dream part is the endless potential for tiny mechanical variations to dictate the success of the enterprise. That's the nightmare as well. Though less so for me, an engineer as besotted with the beauty of random circumstance as with the elegance of flawless precision.

  And an engineer whose attention was often seized by happenstance falling somewhere uneasily in between.

  (

  The next morning's dilemma was determining when the plane was going to land and how to get there and back again with the boat parts. My reluctance to bother the Feys with additional logistics meant we'd have to take the more difficult yet less socially awkward approach of getting up early and walking with Eddie to the airport, a solid five miles away, with hopes of discovering a better course along the way.

  The airport was deep within the confines of the Country Club, the private reserve that made up three quarters of the island. The single road that accessed the club had a gate and a stern guy in a uniform during the season, roughly Memorial Day to Labor Day. During other times, the territory was patrolled by private security teams who were legendary among the transient sailors who anchored out in West Harbor, though none of us had ever seen one.

  The day was grey and windy, the high-contrast clarity of the prior day's colors replaced by a soft fuzz, the air now thick with moisture and portent.

  None of which dampened Eddie's mood, or enthusiasm for snuffling under leaf piles and marking every available object.

  I took us on a route that passed by Gwyneth Jones' emporium of the peculiar. We were rewarded by the sight of her in a burgundy velour sweatsuit doing stretching exercises on her front lawn. The bulldog and Eddie sniffed at each other through the fence slats.

  "Hale to thee," she said, when she saw us looking over the morning glory-enveloped white picket fence.

  "You're probably not open yet," said Amanda.

  "The computer never sleeps," she said.

  "How 'bout a land line," I said. "Can we use that?"

  "You could, but why?" she answered.

  "Is the cell tower back up?"

  "As of ten minutes ago when I called my sister in Seattle. I love waking her up."

  Through a typical act of over-preparedness I'd dropped my cell into the pocket of my jeans before we left the boat. I pulled it out and speed-dialed Burton.

  "This must be you," he said, answering. "Or someone who's stolen your phone."

  "We're an hour from the airport, by foot," I said. "What's the prognosis?"

  "Your parts are already there in the possession of a Mister Lee Two Trees, the man in charge of airport administration, which essentially means mowing the airstrip and keeping the wind sock from fouling."

  "That's great, Burt. How much cargo are we looking at?"

  "You said to send the whole array, so you'll need some sort of vehicle."

  "How 'bout a '69 Deux Chevaux?" I said, glancing over at Gwyneth. She shook her head.

  "Two real horses would be more suitable," said Burton.

  He gave me the airport guy's cell phone number and sincere words of encouragement. And envy. Burton loved to stick his head into a messy knuckle-busting repair. What he lacked in formal training, he made up for in gusto for whatever project was at hand, mechanical or otherwise.

  I signed off and called Two Trees, but only reached his voice mail. I clicked the phone shut and asked Gwyneth if she knew where I could rent a truck.

  "I don't know," she said, sadly. "Let's brainstorm. Who drives trucks?"

  "Contractors," said Amanda, a contractor who owned a sprightly little red pickup.

  "Don't know any."

  "Subcontractors," I said.

  "What're they?"

  "I know a plumber. Vince Foley. Family's been on the island since Adrien Block ran into it. A little touched in the head, but he's got a truck. Couple of them, actually."

  "We'll pay his hourly rate, but he's gotta come right away," I said. "It's already getting breezy."

  We all looked at the sky, which was filling up with dark grey balls of wool. The trees, still full of red, green and orange leaves, rustled in short, syncopated bursts of unseasonably warm wind. A sou'wester, a summer storm that had stumbled blindly into the late fall.

  Gwyneth disappeared into her shop, and barely a few minutes later, a black Dodge pickup skidded to a stop at the front gate. A bearded man stuck his head out the window and asked us what the hell the big hurry was all about.

  "The man's got a load of spare parts waiting for him at the airport," Gwyneth yelled back at him.

  I was glad she didn't say, "And a storm's a-comin'!", true as that was.

  "We'll pay your hourly rate," I said. "Pretend you're driving out to fix a leaky pipe without doing the actual work."

  I probably should've left that last part out; Vince was already confused enough by the situation.

  I never believed in having dogs ride in the back of pickup trucks. Eddie would love nothing better, but his ability to assess personal risk was limited at best. Before Vince could raise an objection, I had Amanda jump into the middle of the bench seat and I followed, pulling Eddie onto my lap.

  "You're good to do this," I said, pre-empting possible complaint.

  It was an intense five-minute ride to the airport. Having rarely sat on a person's lap, Eddie experimented with a variety of positions, only settling down when I opened the window so he could stick out his head, a practice he'd perfected driving around Southampton in my '67 Pontiac.

  The airfield had changed little in the years since I'd bee
n there. The pay phone was gone, but the little shed which constituted the airport's ground facilities, still stood. Parked next to it was a banged-up Toyota Corolla with the trunk open. Vince swung his truck around so the driver side windows of the two vehicles lined up. He rolled his down.

  "Dude," said the driver of the Toyota, a grey-haired man of indeterminate racial composition whom I assumed was Mr. Two Trees.

  "You got some packages for these people?"

  "I do indeed. Shipped here all the way from Maine. That pilot was none too eager to hang around. Never shut down the motor."

  "Storm's a-comin'," said Vince.

  "That'd be right."

  "So, fellas," I said, as Eddie dug a forepaw into my thigh, "let's make the transfer."

  The makers of the steering gear had their name printed on four boxes in a variety of sizes that we pulled from the car's trunk and dropped into the truck bed.

  Probably out of some sadistic impulse, Vince took his time driving us back to the Swan. He also felt obliged to predict the hotel's certain failure in the not-too-distant future. Amanda asked him why.

  "They're not from the island. Know nothing about it," he said.

  "Neither would their guests, presumably," she said. "Who better to make outsiders feel welcome than other outsiders?"

  This thought was of a conceptual nature that eluded Vince's ready powers of cognition. So he dropped the matter and slowed the truck to a near crawl the rest of the way to the Swan.

  After piling out of the truck, to our great relief, I commandeered Anika's wheelbarrow from inside the hedge and used it to haul the gear out to the boat, where I spent the rest of the day deciphering the manufacturer's installation instructions. In the face of their best efforts to confuse and misdirect, and while in a semi-upside down contortion inside the engine compartment, I made the repair.

  The only hitch was the need to run the cable through an enclosed channel right above the rudder. This feature had apparently been added by the hull builder as a tribute to the steering gear maker's love for unnecessary complication. I tried a variety of means for about an hour, and was about to call Vince Foley back and ask if he had the needed piece of equipment, appropriately called a snake, when Amanda handed one down to me.

  "How did you know?"

  "I assumed the words, 'A fucking snake. Where am I gonna get a fucking snake?' had nothing to do with herpetology."

  "Where did you get it?"

  "I called Vince Foley. You owe me a hundred bucks."

  "Expensive snake."

  "It's a seller's market."

  Buried as I was in the belly of the boat, I hadn't noticed the wind picking up until I felt a sudden tremor and heard a whistle coming from the mast, the sound transferred from somewhere above down into the bilge. By then I was done with the installation, a good thing. For the last hour I'd been choosing between loss of circulation in my left leg and loss in my right. Meanwhile, the experience had reversed the healing process in my broken hand, trading a dull ache for knife-like jabs of pain.

  Thus in a complicated mood, I emerged from the deep lazarette that led to the engine compartment with an immediate need written all over my face.

  "Vodka?" asked Amanda.

  The air had warmed up considerably and the sky was now mostly a uniform grey. According to NOAA, the system moving in from the southwest was scheduled to plow into a cold front drifting down from Canada, with the battle line forming across Connecticut and Rhode Island. In other words, right on top of us.

  The wind had continued to pick up, though still nothing extraordinary. It felt good, actually, rustling around the cockpit and swirling Amanda's hair.

  "So we're seaworthy again," she said, pulling her hair through the hole in the back of her baseball cap, which was clipped to the collar of her flannel shirt.

  "We won't know for sure until the sea trial, but I'm reasonably confident," I said, spinning the big chromed wheel from where I sat in the cockpit and feeling it move smoothly from one extreme to the other. "Better yet, I could see the failure point, which I've corrected. For want of a pair of stainless steel screws we could've gone ass-over fin keel."

  "If we hadn't had so adept a helmsman."

  "Exactly."

  "So now what?" she asked.

  "We wait out the blow, then get the hell out of here."

  There's one thing you'd think I would have learned by then: never project current circumstances indefinitely into the future.

  I heard a hoarse scream coming from the hotel. Moments later, I saw Anika running down the dock. Even through the gloom of the early evening, barely relieved by the dock lights, her face was an inflamed mask.

  "Oh God, oh God, oh God," she repeated, gripping the gunwale to steady herself as she looked into the cockpit. Amanda and I stood up in alarm.

  "Please come with me," she said to me. "It's terrible."

  "What?"

  "Myron. Oh my God, what're we going to do?"

  I told Amanda to secure Eddie and stay in the cockpit, then jumped to the dock and followed Anika as she ran ahead, her open denim shirt flapping behind her. Lights started coming on along the eaves of the hotel. Shouts and calmer words joined the screams, now more a low, wet groan. I followed the sounds around the left side of the hotel. Flashlights crisscrossed through the darkness and lit up a rough cedar booth built against the wall that I assumed was an outdoor shower. Anika grabbed my sleeve and pulled me toward the scene.

  Bernard 't Hooft suddenly loomed in front of me and blocked my way.

  "We don't need the help," he said.

  I shoved past him, not an easy task, and looked in the shower stall. The floodlight from above down-lit the massive corpulence of Myron Sanderfreud, his neck cocked at an impossible angle, a white nylon line tucked below his jaw and leading up and over the wall of the stall.

  (

  Christian Fey held a flashlight up to Myron's face with one hand and tentatively sought a way to undo the line with the other. I reached over his shoulder and took his hand, pulling it back.

  "Don't," I said. "Wait for the police."

  He spun around angrily.

  "We can't leave him like this," he yelled.

  "Yes we can," I said. "Don't touch anything."

  He resisted me when I tried to pull him out of the stall. When Grace started to shove her way in, he relented and gently forced her back out to the brick path. She was soaking wet. He gripped a wad of her shirt and moved her tiny frame away from the stall. In the process I snuck away his flashlight.

  "Nobody touch anything," I shouted behind me. "And stay off the soft ground."

  "By whose orders?" asked 't Hooft from the darkness.

  "You explain to the cops why you contaminated the crime scene," I said in the general direction of his voice.

  "Crime scene?" wailed Grace.

  "We don't know that," said Derrick Hammon, who was hidden by the glare of the flashlight in his hand.

  "That's why you should all back away and wait for the police to get here. Somebody called, I hope."

  "I did," said Axel, sticking his flashlight directly in my face. "She said not to touch anything."

  Somehow Anika had worked her way into the booth and stood next to me, clutching my biceps with both hands.

  "Who found him?" I asked.

  "Grace," said Anika. "I turned on the water for him. We'd shut it off to avoid freezing, but he was so into the idea. He was gone an hour before Grace came looking. That scream is like in my head forever."

  I ran the flashlight around the stall. The concrete floor pan was littered with soap fragments and tiny bottles of shampoo brought out from the hotel. Myron was barely in a standing position, his knees bent akimbo and his feet rolled up on their sides. Without a tape measure it was hard to be sure, but the distance from where the line was attached to his neck and the top of the wall seemed enough to hang him, and then settle him part way back into the stall. I tried not to look at the naked folds of his body drooping down from h
is chest and over his midriff, the thick wet mats of hair on his chest and forearms and blackened blotches on his cheeks where the blood had been squeezed, then left behind when his heart stopped.

  "He has such a little thing for such a big man," said Anika, almost matter-of-factly, which made the comment that much more jarring.

  "What the hell is going on?" came a vaguely familiar voice from out of the dark. I leaned out of the stall and shot my flashlight in that direction, lighting up Anderson Track.

  "Stay where you are," I said to him. He stopped and tried to squint through the brilliant light. "We have a situation here," I said, "If you want to help, stay out of the way."

  "What sort of situation? Who the fuck are you anyway?" he said.

  I saw Christian Fey move in between me and Track, but didn't hear what he said. But Track moved back, his hands aloft in a sign of capitulation, which was all I cared about at that point.

  A few moments later, another flashlight came erratically down the path from the front of the hotel. I caught the glint of steel from the lights shot in the newcomer's direction.

  "Please stand clear of the area," said a woman's voice.

  I held my ground as the others fell away, including Anika, who let go of my arm with a light sweep of her fingers.

  "You, too, sir," said the statie, her hand supported comfortably on the top of her holster.

  "I could describe the scene if you want," I said.

  "You police?" she said.

  "No. Mechanical engineer. And former defendant in a murder case. You learn some things."

  She held her flashlight in my face for a moment, then moved it toward the ground. I did the same. She was a small, slender-waisted woman with longish dark hair that fell in pin curls to her shoulders. Dwarfed next to Amanda's five eight, she looked either misplaced or completely comfortable in her statie uniform-it was hard to see in that erratic light. Her face was serious, a good cop face, and her posture assured.