by Chris Knopf
“With a name like yours?”
“My great-grandparents owned a place out here two doors down from Gerald and Sara Murphy. My mother married a pretty drunk named Mike Fitzgerald. You can guess the rest.”
She told the tale like she’d told it a thousand times, which she probably had.
“Lucky for you Tallulah Bankhead preferred Atlantic Beach.”
Something like a smirk formed across her narrow lips.
“Funny,” she said. “No, honestly. Very funny. What did you say you did?”
“I didn’t. But I used to be an engineer. Iku advised the company I worked for. How’d you know her?”
“Robert, the dear heart. He brought her home like he’d found a wet puppy by the side of the road. Not exactly wet. Wrecked would be more like it.”
I clinked my own mug a little. Getting into the groove of Zelda’s kitchen.
“Where was home?”
She pointed at me with the handle of her spoon.
“You don’t think it was suicide either, do you? And you’re not an engineer, are you?”
“I am. And I’m not a cop. And no, I don’t think it was suicide.”
“You think somebody killed her,” said Zelda.
“I do.”
“And you are, again?”
“Sam Acquillo.”
“Should I be expecting a call from the police?”
“Probably.”
“I thought so,” she said, half to herself. “From the moment I saw you walking toward the door. You were intense.”
She put her foot up on the rung of a kitchen chair, and in so doing allowed the kimono to part across her leg. It was a very long, very slender leg that I could follow almost as far as it went. The way she covered up when she noticed me looking made looking feel that much worse.
“I hope you find him quick,” she said, pretending what had happened hadn’t happened. “We can’t have people out there killing our brilliant and beautiful.”
“So where was home? Vedders Pond?”
“You engineers are very persistent,” she said. “Dogged even.”
“If you like dogged, I got some in the car.”
“Yes. That was our place, on the pond. Robert, Elaine and I. Robert has rented it every summer since college to get away from his parents and we chipped in. Others would come and go, and help spread the burden. Like Elaine’s brother this summer, with his unfortunate girlfriend.”
“Sybil Shandy?”
She nodded.
“The hostess at Roger’s,” she said “You probably know her.”
“If I could afford to eat at Roger’s. And Iku?”
“She joined the party this summer.”
“As Bobby’s girlfriend?”
She looked startled. Then she smiled an actual smile.
“Is that what I should tell the cops?” she asked.
“Is it the truth?”
“Does it matter?” she asked.
“Yeah, it matters. Your friend’s dead. Not coming back. It matters how that happened.”
She pushed herself off the kitchen counter and leaned over the table, supporting herself with her palms flat on the cherrywood surface.
“I loved Iku. She was a superstar. A shooting star. Robert, Elaine and I had all lived together since our junior year in Florence. We wore each other like comfy old clothes. Too comfy. Iku lit up the world. Our little world. Having her around was the best thing that could have happened to us. Don’t lecture me on what it means to lose her.”
She seemed to be trying to stare me down.
I leaned across the table myself, meeting her halfway. “Fair enough,” I said. “So who killed her?”
She finally took off her black sunglasses, revealing a set of brilliant cobalt blue eyes.
“She loved all of us,” she said. “Why not try the ones she hated? The people she worked with. Clients and colleagues. She loathed them all.”
“Not all of them. Me she merely disliked.”
Zelda had something to say about that, but was interrupted by the shrill twitter of my cell phone. It took a few moments to remember how to answer the thing.
“Hey, Acquillo, good news,” said Jerome Gelb. “I’m leaving my wife. And I owe it all to you. I thought you should know right away.”
“Mazel tov. Though I told you I’d keep Marla to myself.”
“Sure, so you can keep a gun at my head. Not anymore, compadre.”
“So how’d you get my name?”
“I got a call from Mason Thigpen.”
“How is the little craphead?” I asked.
“Talkative. He told me who you are and what you are.”
“An altruist?”
“A violent sociopath. He called to warn me about you. He said his security team was investigating your activities. They sound like some pretty tough customers.”
“The toughest.”
“But you know what?” he said. “I don’t care. I’m in way too good a mood. Before you know it, I’m going to be a free man. Of course, it’ll cost a fortune.”
“Yeah, but what cost freedom?”
“By the way, I also called Angel Valero to warn him, too. I gave him your name. He was very appreciative.”
“Who’s talkative now?”
“Ah, it’s a great day. I’m going to take some time off to smell the roses. You should think about doing that yourself.”
“All I smell is Hibiscus Paradise,” I said.
“Hey, Acquillo, one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Fuck you,” he shouted, then hung up.
I flicked the phone shut and stuffed it in my pocket.
“Sorry about that,” I said to Zelda.
“It’s hard to imagine the other side of that conversation.”
“It is for me, too, and I was listening to it.”
Zelda looked eager to rid herself and her Hobbit hole of my presence, and I couldn’t blame her. I made it easy by stumbling through the dark toward the front door without being asked. Though there was one question in serious need of answering.
“So did Iku actually have a boyfriend?”
She seemed to enjoy the question. Though now that I could see her eyes it seemed I knew even less about what she was thinking. So her smile might have been genuine, or I might have just thought it was in the dim light of the foyer.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think?”
On the way back to North Sea I was jarred again by the ring of my cell phone.
“You want to talk to me?” said a voice so deep I thought it was synthesized.
“Depends on who you are.”
“Angel Valero. You want to talk to me?”
“Yes. I want to talk to you.”
He gave me an address on Dune Drive in Southampton.
“Five o’clock. I’ll be down at the pool,” he said, then hung up.
“Doesn’t anybody say goodbye anymore?” I asked Eddie, but he couldn’t hear me with his head out the window, trolling the breeze for bugs and the streets for miniature French poodles to roust from their coddled complacency.
ELEVEN
I KILLED THE REST OF THE DAY walking around the docks of Sag Harbor looking at sailboats. With the likelihood of my buying one on par with a flight to the rings of Saturn, I’d never narrowed my preferences. Big boats, little boats, racers, cruisers, ketches, sloops, schooners and yawls, it was all the same to me. Equally desirable and equally out of reach.
But a thought struck me one day when I was working in my shop. What if I just built one myself? How hard would that be?
Impossible. Though maybe I could restore some miserable old derelict dredged off the bottom of the sea, or salvaged off the rocks after a hurricane. In that case, I’d need to get a little focus, clarify my priorities. This meant careful research of the type I was doing in Sag Harbor, walking around and looking at boats, with Eddie on a leash to avoid municipal sanctions and spare the resident waterfowl.
The proce
ss was easier than I thought it would be. The only boats I really liked were akin to Hodges’s Gulf Star—forty-something-foot, beat-up old live-aboards.
I didn’t want to race, I didn’t want to sail around the world. I wanted to sit with Eddie in the cockpit in a quiet harbor. I wanted to grill off the transom and listen to Miles Davis. And drink my vodka ration and smoke my Camel ration, then sail to another quiet harbor and drink whatever vodka was left over from all the dumb rationing. If I wanted, I could bring Amanda along and she could drink wine. There were any number of other things we could do on a boat if we put our minds to it.
This is a want, I said to myself. I want something. It had been so long since I’d felt that sensation it was hard at first to identify. But there it was. An unrequited yearning for an entirely unnecessary object of desire.
While still in the thrall, I drove Eddie back to Oak Point, where I let him out so he could wait in the backyard for Amanda to get home. Then I headed back toward the ocean.
On the way I called Sullivan, but his phone kicked me into his voice mail again. So I left another message, sticking to the facts, leaving out all speculation, conjecture and phantom sailboats.
Dune Drive was as good as its name, a curvy, two-lane road running parallel to the dunes and the shoreline. Scattered atop the dunes were oceanfront houses built mostly in the late twentieth century, a catalog of architectural triumph and catastrophe. The pampered landscaping had flourished in recent years, making it harder to see the houses, but Angel’s place was easy to spot. You’d probably find it in a magazine or academic text described in terms to inflame the imagination of design students and critics, but to me it was just a three-dimensional rectangle on stilts.
There was a square white gate with an intercom stuck to the gatepost. I pushed the button.
“Mr. Acquillo?” asked an accented voice a few registers above Valero’s.
“Yup.”
As the gates swung in I half expected the guy to say, “Enter ye, if thou darest.”
The cobblestone drive curved around plantings of dune grass and wild roses and formed a large parking area in front of the gleaming white staircase leading to the first floor of the house. Across the parking area, partly filled with the customary Jaguars, Porsches and Mercedes Benzes, was a white picket fence. Farther back were two smaller versions of the main house. Guest house and pool house by my astute reckoning.
When I got out of the car a woman in a minute, buff-colored bikini and a pair of Roman-style sandals with wide ribbons laced up her calves passed through a gate and strolled over to my car.
“You’re on time,” she said. “That’s rare these days.”
“Precision is an engineer’s curse.”
“A poetic engineer. Follow me,” she said, pivoting and heading back to the gate. It wasn’t the hardest thing anyone’s asked me to do.
Inside the gate she picked up a Siamese cat that was trying to twine itself around her ankles.
“Meet Opium,” she said, holding the cat out so I could scratch its ears.
“She’s such a greeter.”
Holding the cat under one arm, she continued the trip down a curvaceous path paved with grey bricks and lined with cultivated tufts of grass and purple and yellow flowers.
“No trouble finding the place?” she asked.
“I just looked for a big gift box.”
“A gift from Angel to himself,” she said.
When we got to our destination I could see why he’d said “down at the pool.” It was settled into a hollow inside the dunes, open to the ocean on one end and encircled by more grey pavers and yellow and purple flowers. There were enough white chaise lounges and deck chairs to seat a pool party, but only two were filled—another girl and a giant, barrel-chested, pot-bellied guy, both wearing only bikini bottoms and baseball caps.
I rounded the pool following my guide. Angel watched us approach through a pair of dark green aviator’s glasses. I stood next to his chaise and waited.
“You’re Acquillo?” he finally asked, not offering his hand.
“Sam Acquillo. You can call me Sam.”
“You can call me annoyed.”
He put his hands on the armrests of the chaise and lugged himself to his feet. He was about the height of Zelda Fitzgerald and outweighed her by several orders of magnitude. He stood slightly too close to me for comfort, but I held my ground. His breath smelled of the red wine he and the girl were drinking out of little plastic bowls. When he plucked his off the armrest he saw me notice.
“It’s the pool. Can’t have glass anywhere near. You like Shiraz?”
I looked up at the sky.
“It’s too light out for wine. How ’bout a gin and tonic?”
He pointed at the woman who led me in and jerked his head at a pink bamboo dry bar wheeled up to the side of the pool.
“Jesse, get the man his daylight drink.”
He took the pressure off my personal space and pulled over a couple of chairs and a round side table. I took the one that kept the girls in view. What the heck.
“This Gelb. You know him?” he asked, settling his bulk into the painted rattan chair.
“Only to coerce.”
“He says you want to make a run at me.”
He sliced the air with a slab of hand, as if to underscore the preposterousness of the idea.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “I just want to talk to you about Iku Kinjo. You were an important client. You might be able to shed some light.”
As with Zelda Fitzgerald, his sunglasses did a lot to contain his thoughts. But there was something said in the long pause in the conversation.
“She’s dead. What other light do you need?”
“The illuminating kind,” I said.
“That’s redundant,” said Jesse, now in a chaise of her own, reading a weathered copy of The Agony and the Ecstasy.
Angel ignored her.
“What’s your part in this?” he asked.
“Finder of the body.”
He made a grunt deep enough to be felt through the grey pavers.
“There’s no legal standing in that.”
“Since when did legalities trouble you?” I asked, taking a second sip from my drink. The first tasted like pure, lime-flavored gin. Jesse wasn’t much of a bartender.
Angel pointed at me. “How’s that mouth of yours served you so far? In life?”
“Intermittently.”
“I’ll bet.”
“So, any thoughts on what happened to Iku? If what I hear is correct, you had a close working relationship. They’re suggesting now it might be suicide. Any sign she was preoccupied? Or depressed?”
“No. But I am. By this conversation.”
“You’re a sensitive guy, Angel. I’ll try to soften the edges for you.”
Jesse was sitting behind him, so he couldn’t see the intimation of a grin pass over her face. I kept my gaze fixed on him so I wouldn’t give her away.
“Like you said, I had a working relationship with the woman. I didn’t know anything about her personal life. It’s all business with those Eisler people. It’s a mentality. Just get it done. Straight down the middle. Hired brains. No life, no heart.”
“So, nothing suspicious right before she died?” I asked.
He slid down in his chair and downed his bowl of Shiraz. He wiped his mouth with the back of his forearm.
“Even if there was, I wouldn’t know. I was in Europe at the end of the summer. No reason to talk to her. For that matter, no reason to talk to you. So why am I?”
“Because you’re a people person?”
I think Jesse liked this one, too. But it went right by the topless girl. In fact, she never looked up the entire time I was there. Can’t please everybody.
Angel took off his baseball cap and wiped his forehead. The move dumped out a large ball of wavy black hair. It took him a few moments to get it all stuffed back under the hat again.
“Gelb told me you we
re locked up in a loony bin for a while,” he said. “I’m understanding now how that could be the case. Because you got to be fucking crazy to talk to me like that.”
“I don’t suppose you’d want to tell me about the last deal you two were working on.”
As if realizing there were other people within earshot, Angel twisted around in his chair and looked over at Jesse.
“Can you believe this shit?” he asked her.
She held up her book.
“Not paying attention, darling,” she said.
“Whether somebody killed Iku Kinjo or she did it herself, there’s a reason it happened,” I said. “Given your close association, I’d think you’d be curious about that. I’m curious that you’re not.”
He leaned as forward in his chair as the medicine ball of a stomach would let him.
“Why all the curiosity?” he asked.
“I was looking for her. Until I find out why she’s dead, I haven’t really found her.”
He sat back in his chair again and put his hands on the armrests, preparing to haul himself to his feet.
“I got something to show you.”
He got up and waved for me to follow. We walked over to another gate in the white fence, one leading out to a patio area with round wrought-iron tables and chairs, umbrellas and a view of the ocean through a cut in the dunes. He opened the gate and ushered me through. I walked out on the patio and looked at the ocean, which was relatively calm and blue in the fading light of the sun coming in over our shoulders from the west. It threw our shadows out from our feet, which should have told me Angel was a little too close behind.
It was an embrace to take your breath away. Literally. I looked down at his arms crossed over my chest, one hand holding the other wrist, and the contours of his arm muscles swelling with the effort. The pressure increased steadily and rapidly, until I felt my ribs about to collapse. I gathered what breath I could and held it while straining against the relentless compression.
“You fuck with me,” he whispered in my ear, “and it’ll be the last fucking crazy thing you do.”
I think he said a few more threatening things, but I don’t remember. I was preoccupied by the blood being squeezed up into my head and the popping sensation behind my eyes. It wasn’t the ideal state of mind for working out a defensive strategy, but I had the advantage of panic and desperation.
