Hard Stop sahm-4

by Chris Knopf

“Good advice. I’ve had a history of that sort of thing. Can we talk about the important stuff now?” I asked.

  “More important than keeping your ass out of jail?”

  “Actually, yeah. Somebody’s daughter is dead. This is now your thing, too. We have a situation.”

  “I hate that word. Situation.”

  I sat on the ground and lit a cigarette, one of the three I’d brought along for the day. It seemed an appropriate use of rations. My nervous system had been geared up for lurking around Bobby’s rental, but not for finding a dead body. Least of all Iku Kinjo.

  God forgive me, my reflex thought was of my own daughter, about Iku’s age, and in my mind far more vulnerable than the hard-driving management consultant. I willed those thoughts back into their special chamber and forced a more immediate issue to the fore.

  George Donovan.

  I knew I had to tell him, and the sooner the better. Preferably right at that instant before the world was flooded with cops, voyeurs and reporters. I really didn’t want to do it. Not on a cell phone. Even if I could reach him on the first shot, which was unlikely.

  Do I leave a message?

  I gave myself time to finish the cigarette, then I dialed his number.

  “Hello there,” he said, to my surprise and regret. “Kind of an awkward time. Can I call you right back?”

  “No. We need to talk now. With nobody around.”

  “I see. Hold on a second.”

  I could hear the sound of his hand muffling the phone and some indistinct conversation. A minute later he was back.

  “You’re sounding serious,” he said.

  “I’ve got news,” I said. “The worst news.”

  “Oh, God.”

  I didn’t know how he’d want to hear it, so I just told it straight.

  “She’s been murdered. I found her myself a few minutes ago. In Southampton, just a mile or two from my house. The cops are on the way.”

  He made a sound that might have been the word “why.” So I tried to answer.

  “I don’t know why, or by who. She was stabbed. Pretty recently. I found her in the house rented by Robert Dobson.”

  “The boyfriend,” said Donovan.

  “Maybe her boyfriend. I’m not so sure. Listen, George,” I said before he could answer, “I’m sorry. I really am. It’s a terrible thing.”

  Now it was more obvious that he was crying. I just sat there and listened to those unnatural, animal sounds.

  “I better go,” he finally forced out. “I’ve got a half dozen people waiting outside my door. Call me tonight when you know more. We have to talk.”

  Then he hung up.

  I heard the first sirens coming in quickly from the south. I lit the second cigarette and leaned up against a tree. As I sat there the cloud cover gave way. The sun lit up the oak trees above my head and splattered puddles of light on the ground, casting a hard glare on the hoods of the flashing police cruisers as they swarmed into the little pond-side neighborhood, its reclusive anonymity a forgotten thing.

  NINE

  WHEN SULLIVAN ARRIVED at Robert Dobson’s group rental he sat on the ground next to me and said it was time to catch Ross up. I knew that. Sullivan was too far out on a limb. I also needed to preserve some elbow room, especially now. The situation was way too complicated to get into a war with the cops.

  So I put the call in to Jackie Swaitkowski, who was thrilled as always to hear we were on deck for a visit with the Southampton Town Police.

  I’ve always had a deeper respect for law enforcement than our historical relationship would suggest. I know they have a hard job. I couldn’t do it. I don’t have the patience or the presence of mind. Or the focus.

  What I’ve done to reconcile my beliefs with my behavior is make friends with cops and lawyers, thereby benefiting from both their wisdom and their largesse. While doing almost nothing to reciprocate.

  An imbalance I most earnestly pledged to rectify, someday, as I sat with Jackie Swaitkowski in a windowless white room at a banged-up conference table.

  Jackie was wearing a men’s button-down collar shirt with a bolo tie under a khaki suit, and a pair of cowboy boots. Lonesome lawyer of the high plains.

  I was going to ask her if she had Trigger tied up outside, but decided it was better to stay friends, at least until we got through with Ross Semple and Lionel Veckstrom, the Chief of Police and the Chief of Detectives, respectively, who were sitting on the other side of the table.

  Both had tried on more than one occasion to carve me up and serve me fricasseed to the wolves. Still, Ross I liked. Veckstrom, not at all.

  “You’re in here so much we’re thinking of naming a new wing in your honor,” said Ross, lighting us both a cigarette and passing mine across the table.

  “I didn’t know you were expanding,” I said.

  “We’re not. But if we were, you’d be on the plaque.”

  “It’d say ‘Asshole Numero Uno of Southampton,’” said Veckstrom.

  “Bilingual,” said Jackie. “Must be handy with our new population specs.”

  “You mean population Spics?” said Veckstrom.

  Ross blanched.

  “I’m impressed that he thinks that would bother us, because it does. Very perceptive,” I said to Ross. “Pero él todavía es un pedazo de mierda debajo los pies.”

  “Speak French and I’ll be impressed,” said Veckstrom.

  “Va se faire foutre,” said Jackie.

  Veckstrom had been a brilliant detective in Lower Manhattan. He dressed like a dandy, disdained his fellow cops and cracked cases everyone else thought uncrackable. He stayed on the job while going to law school at night, passed the bar, then inexplicably moved out to the Hamptons and went to work for Ross. It was harder to build a legend out here, but he’d tried hard enough by making me his special project. So far unsuccessfully, but then again, he was what he was. Another virtuoso shit who truly hated me.

  “I don’t know about the three of you, but I’ve got other things to do today,” said Ross, scrounging around a soft pack of Winstons. “So what say we just get this done without all the parry and thrust.”

  “No offense, boss,” said Veckstrom, “but don’t you have to thrust before you can parry?”

  Ross’s look took the temperature of the room down about forty degrees. Veckstrom threw up his hands and sat back in his chair.

  “So, Sam,” said Ross, lighting another Winston off the one he already had in his mouth. He shook one out for me. I took it and gave it to Jackie. Ross gave me another one and we all lit up.

  “Could you people hang on there for a second while I go get an Aqua-Lung?” said Veckstrom.

  “So, Sam,” Ross repeated, “what’s going on?”

  “I’ve been talking to some of my old friends from Con Globe about getting back in the game. Carpentry’s honest work, but, you know, I used to drive a nice car and have a little leeway between hand and mouth.”

  “Or foot in mouth,” said Veckstrom.

  “Ross?” said Jackie.

  “Shut up,” Ross said without looking at Veckstrom, who shrugged and sat back in his chair.

  “Back in the day,” I went on, “there was this very smart young woman who worked with me on a project for my company. We hit it off, professionally. I liked what she did and how she thought, and decided if I was going to try to get back in, I’d do what she did. Consult. Be a pro from Dover.”

  “Iku Kinjo,” said Jackie, for the record.

  “So I went to see her in the City, but they told me she’d basically gone AWOL. Never showed up for work one day, no word since. But they did tell me if I happened to run into her, have her call, yadda-yadda. This piqued my curiosity, of course. And you know how that goes,” I said to Ross.

  “Unfortunately.”

  “On a hunch I thought she might be hiding out in the Hamptons, so I started looking around for her. Nothing else to do, why not? Then I got a few leads, tracked down a friend of hers, went to call on him, and he
re we are.”

  I sat back, leaving the hand with the cigarette on the table to flick ashes into the ashtray.

  “What a crock,” said Veckstrom to Jackie.

  Jackie looked at Ross.

  “Do we always have to endure this charade of hostility?” she asked him.

  “No charade,” said Veckstrom, convincingly.

  “Any time you want, we can settle this outside,” said Jackie.

  “I’m not afraid of the old rummy.”

  “I’m not talking about him,” she said.

  Ross liked that. He smiled and lit new cigarettes for everybody but Veckstrom, who looked half-asphyxiated already.

  “Mr. Acquillo and Ms. Swaitkowski are here voluntarily, detective. We’re just havin’ a good old chat.”

  Ross liked to affect what he thought was the manner of a pre–Brown v. Board of Education Mississippi sheriff, which was unconvincing from an overeducated, lifetime Long Islander. None of Ross’s attempts at theatricality did anything but make him appear exactly as odd and ill-at-ease with social discourse as he truly was.

  “I know the drill, boys,” I told them. “I’ll be available whenever you want to talk. If I think of anything else, I’ll call. If I learn anything that might help the case, I’ll call. Otherwise, I keep my nose out of it.”

  “Huh,” said Ross.

  Veckstrom looked skeptical, as did Jackie, which I hoped the other two didn’t notice.

  “Okay?” I asked, stubbing out the cigarette and getting out of my chair.

  “Just one thing,” said Ross, gravely.

  I sat back down again. Jackie studied his face, holding her breath.

  “What?”

  “Tickets to the Police Ball. You have yours yet?” he asked Jackie.

  “Christ, Ross. You know I do.”

  “What about him?”

  “Put two more on my tab,” said Jackie. “That’s the limit before a charge of official misconduct kicks in.”

  We left Ross and Veckstrom in the interrogation room and cruised through the noisy squad room and back out into the intimidation-free air. I took a deep breath.

  “Is Veckstrom a dickless prick or what?” Jackie asked.

  “I think that question carries an interior contradiction.”

  “Does this mean Sullivan’s already off the case?”

  Joe and Veckstrom were Southampton’s only plainclothes-men, Sullivan being the junior partner. There was little love lost within the Detectives Unit.

  “Nah. Ross always brings in Veckstrom for our little chats. It’s his good cop–dickless cop technique.”

  “You need to be careful,” she told me. “Ross doesn’t like it when you lie to him.”

  “I’m not lying. I’m just not sharing all the facts. I will when I can.”

  “You’re not stopping, are you? How come? You did what Donovan asked you to do.”

  She was right. That was the deal I insisted on with Donovan—that all I had to do was find Iku, dead or alive. But that was when she was just a memory of an ambitious young kid, compelling in her intelligence but hardly likeable. And then when Donovan talked about her, the memory turned into an abstraction, almost a fiction, as I tried to put the two of them together in my mind. The photo from Eisler’s annual report reinforced the illusion that she wasn’t quite real, that she was just an artifice conjured by the mind of an aging plutocrat and Randall Dodge’s computer wizardry.

  It wasn’t until I saw her dead, now truly and irrevocably lost, that she became real. Lying there in her own blood, still a kid in my eyes, still ambitious and impatient, desperate to get to the next big thing.

  I found a dead overachiever, an orphan, a tragic victim, but I still didn’t find her.

  “It used to be about money,” I told Jackie. “Now it’s not.”

  “What’s wrong with money?”

  “Money’s good,” I agreed. “Sometimes.”

  “If I heard your tape right, you’ve got some coming from George Donovan.”

  “I told him about Iku. He wanted me to call later, but I can’t right now. We need time to figure out what happened.”

  “We?”

  I tightened her bolotie, then left her outside the station and went back to Oak Point and the Adirondacks on the breakwater at the edge of the lawn. Eddie was glad to be out running around the place again, working out the kinks. I wished Amanda was there to sit with me, but she was busy with her construction projects and had enough on her mind without all this.

  So I lay my head against the wooden slats and closed my eyes, feeling the faltering sun of early fall and the shifting winds off the bay. And then, for some strange and miraculous reason, I fell asleep. Something I almost never do in the middle of the day.

  I dreamt of skyscrapers and industrial plants, men in suits and women in heels, hard faces and eyes filled with aspiration and dismay. A lost world.

  Eddie woke me with a single bark. I knew what time it was by the bark’s tone and timbre. Dinner time. I opened my eyes and was rewarded with a nice sunset below a lavender sky. And the company of Joe Sullivan, sitting next to me drinking one of Burton’s special beers.

  “I was happy to let you sleep,” said Sullivan. “Just have my beer and go home.”

  I went into the house to throw water on my face and change my clothes, shaking off the weight of sleep and the lingering dream state. I must have been more tired than I realized. I threw Eddie’s food in a bowl and got Sullivan another beer. I filled my tumbler with ice water. For novelty’s sake.

  When I got back Sullivan asked me how it went with Ross and Veckstrom. I told him everything I could remember. He wrote it down in his case book.

  I apologized to him. “If I’d known this was going to happen I wouldn’t have involved you at all. You’d be clean,” I said.

  He waved it off.

  “You didn’t know. Like you said, we got a new situation here.”

  He asked me to tell him whatever I knew that I hadn’t told Ross and Veckstrom. I did. I owed him that. I only left out theory and conjecture. No point in confusing the facts with all that stuff.

  “When do you get the forensics?” I asked him.

  “In a day or two. Prints a little before that.”

  “Maybe that’ll settle everything.”

  “I’m not going to keep you out of this, am I?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Okay,” he said. “Just try to tell me what you’re doing. And I’ll tell you. Like, for example, after I leave here I’m bringing in Robert Dobson. Easy pickings, since I know where he lives. Now, you tell me what you’re doing.”

  “Having dinner and resting up for insomnia.”

  “Let me write that down.”

  “See if Dobson’ll give up the other roommates. No reason why he shouldn’t. If not, you got the mail. That should do it. And ask him about Angel. Don’t know the last name. I’m guessing the connection is back in the City. That’s where I’m going tomorrow. See? Full disclosure. My new way.”

  He looked unconvinced, but found it in himself to politely finish off a few more of Burton’s beers.

  Between him and Honest Boy Ackerman, I might have to get Burton over here to replenish my supply.

  Eisler, Johnson’s building had the good sense to install a coffee shop right in the lobby. Not exactly a shop, more like a big pushcart and a few bistro tables. The coffee was great, and you could make yourself sick on Danish pastries and stuffed croissants, which I did, mostly to appear like a normal customer rather than the stalker I actually was.

  My disguise was one of the suits I’d rescued from my house in Stamford before the demolition. It still fit fine, though the cut was probably dated. Which would only reinforce the look of a middle-aged office rat hiding out with a crossword puzzle and double latte.

  I’d picked eleven in the morning to begin the stakeout, and allocated a maximum of two hours. Lingering longer than that might draw the attention of people staring at a bank of security mo
nitors somewhere. I hoped it was enough time. As usual, I didn’t have much of a Plan B.

  I assumed the crossword puzzle was great cover until I realized I’d have it solved in about a half hour.

  “Why is it the last few are always the toughest to get?” I asked the lady sitting to my right, hoping to burnish my act.

  “Why do you think they’re the last?” she asked, leaving an unsaid but implied “you schmuck” hanging in the air.

  “Yeah. I guess you’re right,” I said, cheered by her observation.

  I spent the next hour staring off into space trying to squeeze the name of a river in Russia, six letters long beginning with “Dn,” out of my memory. I wrote it down when I saw Jerome Gelb stride by. I tossed the paper in front of my crabby neighbor so she could share my triumph.

  Gelb moved very fluidly, a nice City gait capable of gracefully covering a lot of ground in a short time. I was pressed to keep up without looking like I was trying to. I checked my watch once a block to convey hurry—the guilty employee finding himself gone a little too long from the office.

  Gelb suddenly stopped and stepped off the curb, looking down the avenue, I assumed to catch a cab. I strode past him and raised my hand. I got lucky when a cab shot out from the cross street and pulled over. I jumped in and we buzzed by Gelb, who glowered at what he rightly thought was a dirty cab snatch. I turned my head away and rubbed my face.

  The cabbie looked at me over his shoulder.

  “And?” he asked.

  “Pull over here on the right, will ya? Behind that van,” I said.

  “Big ride. A whole block,” he said, but did as I asked, cutting across four lanes with a heedless jerk of the steer-ing wheel that anywhere else would have caused a massive pile-up.

  “Just wait here,” I said.

  I had a good view of Gelb, his hand still extended from the end of his long, thin arm. No cabbie could miss it. The next one didn’t.

  “Okay,” I said as they flew by, heading downtown, “follow that cab.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  Gelb’s cab was timing the lights well, so we quickly ate up several blocks. As we began to hit the intersections on the yellow, I asked the cabbie to move alongside so we wouldn’t get caught at a red.