Hard Stop sahm-4

by Chris Knopf

  He flipped through some more pages.

  “Quote: ‘Elaine and I have been off and on for years. But we’ve always been friends. You wouldn’t understand.’ I love that shit. You wouldn’t understand, you dumb fucking Ivy League–deprived cop.”

  “Condescension’s on the Princeton curriculum.”

  He flicked the backs of his fingers under his chin. “Fungu to Princeton.”

  “Any other prints in Dobson’s room?”

  “Just him and A. We checked the sheets, too, by the way, and got all the usual goodies. Also not the victim’s.”

  I walked back onto the balcony and looked down at the living room, trying to see the players arrayed on the broken-in furniture. I tried to imagine who was sitting with whom. I shut my eyes and listened for their conversation, but I didn’t know enough to hear.

  “To the basement?” Sullivan asked.

  “Sure.”

  On the way down we stopped at the kitchen so he could show me where a set of carving knives was stored in a wooden block on the counter. A set of five.

  “Japanese,” he said. “Similar handle design as the murder weapon. Very sharp. The lab is tracking down the source.”

  We moved on from there, stopping a few times so he could explain the little yellow cones that marked where forensics had picked up a sample or spotted something they wanted to come back and recheck. He told me they needed a warrant each time they did that, but it was almost impossible to get everything on a single pass.

  “So Bobby’s cooperative,” I said.

  “Not bad. His old man’s been up my ass a bit, but the DA’s been up his. It’s nice to have that broad on my side for a change.”

  We went down to the basement, which was technically at ground level at the back end of the house. More colorful finger print powder and little yellow cones.

  Iku’s room looked even more forlorn without her body lying on the bed. The disarray of the search and investigation showed around the edges. There was still an impression on the bed from the weight of her body.

  “They searched the hell out of this room,” said Sullivan. “Nothing probative to write home about. One set of prints. Hers.”

  I couldn’t help wishing I’d poked around a little myself before calling in the cops. It was an unworthy thought—unfair to Iku and the cops, but I couldn’t help it. I was bugged by a strong sense of absence, that something was missing.

  “Gadgets,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Where’re the gadgets? Cell phones, laptops, iPods.”

  Sullivan rested his hand on my shoulder.

  “At the evidence lab, Sam. We don’t know what them things do, us hick cops, but we knows we gotta get ’em to the lab.”

  I turned and looked at him.

  “What was on the computer? Did you get her email?”

  He still wanted to be insulted.

  “Weren’t no computers. Jes’ an old cell phone. Don’t happen to have that report yet, but when I do you’ll be the first we tells.”

  “Really? Great. I appreciate it.”

  I quieted him back down with a grip on his meaty shoulder. He shook his head.

  I walked deeper into the room, with my hands in my pockets as he’d instructed me earlier. On impulse, I tried to look behind a dresser, the only large piece of furniture in the room.

  “Can I touch that?” I asked, pointing to the dresser.

  He handed me a set of surgical gloves. I squeezed them on and pulled the dresser toward me. Stuffed down between the dresser and the wall was a green cable. I pulled it free.

  “What’s this?” I said.

  Sullivan stood next to me and bent over to look.

  “That’s not a phone cord?” he asked.

  “It’s a Cat 5. A phone jack is smaller. Cat 5s are used for Internet connections.”

  “I’m sure it’s in the report,” he said. “We do know something about this shit.”

  I reminded him that only one of us had a computer with broadband access and an email account, and a PDA. And it wasn’t me. He looked a little less defensive, but concerned. I went back to looking around the room.

  “Two closets?” I asked.

  He pointed to one of the doors.

  “That one goes to the bedroom next door.”

  “Prints on the handle?”

  “Just on the other side. Unknowns A and B. Shall we look?”

  We went back out to the hall so we could go into the other room without touching anything.

  “Unknowns A and B are all over the place. Since B was also found in tucked-away places, we’re guessing that’s the one who owns the room. But that’s an inadmissibly wild-ass guess.”

  “You could ask Bobby.”

  “We did. He said he never came down here, so he didn’t know. The print evidence more or less proves that.”

  “Don’t forget the rubber gloves theory.”

  “I don’t forget anything. And I don’t believe anything I can’t see with my own eyes, and even then I’m suspicious.”

  “What about C?”

  “C is scattered about the house. The only one you find on the furnace and water heater, along with the usual unknowns found nowhere else.”

  “The owner and maintenance mechanics.”

  “You think?”

  He took me out to the patio under the deck where they found the blood trace, and showed me how it led back to the bedroom. Reluctant as I was to bring up the concept of jimmied locks, I asked if the patio door had been forced or messed with in any way.

  “Nope. No evidence of that anywhere. It’s some skill to pick a lock, let alone leave no trace of doing it. Takes a real mechanical whiz,” he said, looking at me pointedly.

  I put up my hands.

  “It’s beyond me.”

  We walked the blood path a few more times, me asking questions, him answering as well as he could and jotting down things to check out later. He turned on the recorder a few times to get my official statement on the disposition of the body, the condition of the house, all the stuff he already knew but had to ask to cover him for the warrant that got us back inside.

  I wanted to feel more enlightened after walking around the death-impregnated place, but all I felt was confused and disoriented. It made me wish again that I hadn’t found her. Maybe I would have been able to think more clearly if the image of young promise rendered silent and supine wasn’t filling my mind’s eye.

  We were back outside and about to get into our cars when I remembered another obvious question.

  “You said Dobson was in the City during the week. What does he do?”

  “Wall Street, of course,” said Sullivan.

  “Like what?”

  “Some administrative job.”

  “Where?”

  He sighed and fished out his case book again, with a look that said this was the last time.

  “Eisler, Johnson Consulting, Inc.,” he said. “He’s a help desk administrator, though not much help to me so far.”

  THIRTEEN

  IT HAD BEEN A WHILE NOW since I first awoke on the screened-in porch of my parents’ cottage, fresh out of rehab and expectations. I’m a little surprised I survived that first year, so indifferent was I to the basic essentials of life. It’s a testament, I guess, to the gene code my parents bestowed on me, their penchant for grim forbearance, their heedless endurance.

  Most people are too polite to ask me why I flamed out on the upward arc of my career, why I demolished my marriage and laid waste any future professional prospects. The fact is, I’m not sure why. Or, I’m not ready to understand why. I know it’s supposed to be a big deal to me, this thing that happened. I don’t deny that, but I’m not sure any good can come from dissecting my motivations, plumbing the depths of my soul, my essential being, to root out fundamental, underlying causes.

  All I can say is I used to wake in the morning feeling a rich blend of panic and hollow despair. Now I’m merely undecided.

  Another impro
vement is waking up next to Amanda. I remember Abby as The Lump. Amanda’s more like The Volcano. At rest, and then, suddenly, not.

  I left her in the big bed in the new room at the back of the house and went to make coffee. Eddie ignored me from the shearling-covered bean bag Amanda gave him to use in the kitchen, the one room in the house without overstuffed furniture.

  I’d pulled Eddie out of a pound where all he had to lie on was concrete. Before that, according to the rescue people, he’d been living in the scrub oak north of Westhampton, not exactly four-star accommodations. You wonder how a dog like that can develop such a taste for upholstery.

  When Amanda wandered into the kitchen a few minutes later he jumped up and acted like royalty had come to call, assuming Her Majesty liked having a set of paws stuck in her midriff and a wet nose in the kisser.

  The air was cool and the lawn was sodden with dew, but I wanted to get all I could out of the last warm months. I passed out sweatshirts and pants and filled Amanda’s arms with worn but stalwart blankets. I brought china mugs and coffee in a big white thermos.

  Once settled into the Adirondacks at the edge of the breakwater, we were in a good position to watch the sun slowly turn the Peconic from silver grey to dark blue as it cleared the air of mist and turned the sails across the bay into tiny white blades against the shadowy horizon.

  Eddie sat next to my chair and leaned against my leg. I used one hand to hold the mug, the other to scratch a spot near the end of his nose, an attention he found tirelessly agreeable.

  “You’re thinking about the Japanese girl,” said Amanda.

  “I’m thinking about computers.”

  “Why you don’t have one?” she asked.

  “Why Iku didn’t have one. Makes no sense. At the company her laptop was like an appendage. And that was at the dawn of email, before wireless broadband and whatever else you people are addicted to.”

  “You people? You mean the general population of non-Luddites?”

  “Donovan told me the last contact he had with her was an email. There was a Cat 5 connection in Iku’s room. We used Cat 5 to run cabling for distributed control systems. The only purpose it has in a house is broadband Internet.”

  “If you get that email you can check the IP address and confirm it came from the rental,” she said.

  “I can?”

  “Not you, darling. Somebody who knows what an IP address is. Me, for example.”

  There was a lot I didn’t know about household technology. But I knew Iku Kinjo couldn’t have survived without it.

  “We need to find her computer,” I said.

  “We do. After another cup of coffee.”

  Before going back down to my shop I checked in with Sullivan. He told me the investigators had noted the broadband connection at a built-in desk in the kitchen, but missed the one in Iku’s bedroom.

  “We did get her cell phone records. Incoming and outgoing by the boatload until May 30.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing,” he said. “She cancelled the service. I guess she’d said all she wanted to say for the year.”

  “She used someone else’s phone?” I asked.

  “Probably a disposable. Untraceable.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing,” I said.

  “It’s what Ross calls a directional indicator.”

  “Jesse would say that’s redundant.”

  “Who’s Jesse?”

  “One of Valero’s assistants,” I said. “A bikini specialist.”

  “Bikinis are redundant?”

  “Sometimes.”

  In our ongoing spirit of collaboration I told him my plans for the evening, which were highly dependent on Amanda scoring a reservation on short notice at Roger’s.

  “I could see me putting that one through expenses,” said Sullivan.

  “I’ll let you know what I learn.”

  “Find out if their fries come with ketchup.”

  I told Amanda the key to successful undercover operations was to blend into the environment. Since Roger’s was often patronized by beautiful women in revealing evening wear, it was clear what had to be done.

  Luckily, Amanda was always game for a challenge.

  “Great looking nightgown. But what are you wearing to dinner?” I asked when I picked her up.

  “You need to carry my lipstick. As you can see, no pockets.”

  “No nothing.”

  We took her Audi Avant. The Grand Prix had a lot more room to spread out, but for some reason you always left the passenger compartment covered in dog hair.

  Roger’s was in an eighteenth-century house set about twenty feet in from the edge of Montauk Highway and about two miles east of Bridgehampton. It had been a restaurant for over sixty years, and after destroying the lives of several owners had settled in nicely with Roger Estay, a chef from Baltimore who’d come to the Hamptons hoping to recover from a nervous breakdown by exposing himself to dire financial risk.

  Roger consistently dished out the best food and most breathtaking checks on the East End.

  Amanda hadn’t only nailed down a reservation, it was for the best table in the joint. The one on the outside patio under the spreading arms of an antique copper beech. We were led to it by a blonde woman in a tubular silk dress that she shouldn’t have been able to walk in. Three good-looking young men wearing white shirts, black pants and expressions you often see on devoted evangelists were waiting for us when we reached the table.

  “Pulled strings?” I asked her, quietly.

  “Threw money.”

  Before the blonde had a chance to pass us off to the choirboys I asked her if she was Sylvia Shandy.

  It took her aback.

  “I am,” she said, with an up-speak lilt suggesting she might not be Sylvia Shandy if that was the safer answer.

  I put out my hand, which she shook with the same reservations.

  “I’m Sam Acquillo. This is Amanda Anselma. I was a friend of Iku Kinjo.”

  She dropped my hand like it last held Iku’s corpse.

  “Jesus what an awful thing,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Sylvia was either a bottle blonde or a champion tanner. Even in the low light her coloring looked mismatched, though she herself looked pretty good. Small proportionate features, large wide-set brown eyes with lashes you could comb your hair with. Her fingers were long and slender, ringless, with fingernails painted a pearlized white.

  “Do you get a break?” I asked. “I’d like to talk a little about Iku.”

  She shook her wrist until a watch attached to a loose silver chain worked its way into view.

  “Maybe in an hour,” she said. “Though I don’t know what I can tell you. I hardly knew the girl.”

  “I know,” I said. “If you could just give me a few minutes.”

  She smiled an artificial smile.

  “Maybe a minute.” She stood back as the waiters passed out menus. “Most people start with the coquilles, but I’m big on the ceviche. Roger says it tastes like a Jamaican sunrise.”

  As we watched Sylvia vamp through the patio tables back into the restaurant, Amanda asked, “Do you put that dress on or have it applied?”

  “Let’s get one and find out.”

  With nothing else to do, we focused on ordering food and explaining to the waiters why a chunk of fruit has no more business in a glass of vodka than a Jamaican sunrise in Vladivostok. The menu looked like it was hand-lettered, which must have been hard work, because they gave up before adding in the prices. It was nominally in English, though I only recognized about half the words.

  “My mother told me never eat anything I can’t pronounce,” said Amanda.

  “Probably saved you from a diet of ceviche and coquilles St. Jacques.”

  The lighting out on the lawn, mostly from strings of little pin lights draped around tree limbs and stretched overhead, made everybody look better than they deserved, which meant Amanda looked ridiculously great. Her bountiful au
burn hair, parted in the middle, cascaded over her shoulders and the liquid satin of her dark blue dress.

  “What,” she said, catching me staring.

  “You look ridiculously great.”

  “Even if I’m not blonde and shrink-wrapped in polyester?”

  “Even if you were,” I said. “You can’t help it.”

  “I think we’re talking ‘eyes of the beholder.’”

  “The beholding comes later. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

  By mutual consent, we launched into a game called “blissful ignorance.” The object was to talk only about things we knew nothing about, which meant we couldn’t talk about our work, our past, our social, economic or political views or how many games the Yankees were out of first place. This is harder than you think, but virtually guarantees the avoidance of painful, emotionally challenging conversation. Since both parties are blissfully ignorant of the subject at hand, you spend a lot of time speculating on things, like how often Buddhist monks wash their robes or the chemical composition of Neptune’s atmosphere.

  Post-game fact-checking was entirely permissible, though I never did. “The basic geopolitical unit of local Texas government has got to be the county. The place is too damn big to organize around municipalities,” I offered up.

  “Is that why it’s legal to shoot people in broad daylight, provided it’s a fair fight?”

  Thus contentedly engaged, we were slightly disappointed when Sylvia catwalked back across the patio to our table.

  “Hey, guys,” she said. “I gotta few. Can I sit?”

  Amanda waved her into an empty seat.

  “Before you get all interested in what I have to say you should know a guy just came in who actually knew Iku, like intimately.”

  “Really,” I said. “Big guy?”

  “Yeah. Angel Valero. Ya know him?”

  “Intimately.”

  “Love your hair, by the way,” Sylvia said to Amanda. “I could manage the color, but it’s hard to get thick outta Clairol.”

  “Did Angel ever visit Iku?”

  “Hell no. She made us swear we wouldn’t tell anybody she was there. She just talked about him all the time. Called him the Evil Troll. Or just plain Fucking Angel Valero. Can’t support that opinion one way or the other. Not the friendliest guy in the world, but he’s a good tipper.”