by Chris Knopf
“So what did you think of Iku?” I asked.
She looked like she was calibrating the politics of her answer.
“Work bitch. Not like a bitch bitch, but a fiend for the job. You know what I mean. The City’s crawling with them. Stress bunnies, Carl calls ’em. So wired up they can’t stop hopping around. Not my cup of tea, to be honest with you. Who doesn’t like money, but really, what’s the point?”
“Any talk about why she started staying at the house full time? Any kind of trouble?”
“Was it a personal crisis?” Amanda asked.
Sylvia nodded immediately.
“Exactly. She was going through some kind of personal crisis. You read about it all the time. Your symptoms are,” she ticked off on her fingers, “lots of crying, usually locked up in the bedroom, extra drinking and not only at night, playing your favorite depressing songs at a high volume and less care with regular hygiene, though that girl always looked great no matter how fucked up she might have felt, as annoying as that is.”
“What was the problem?” I asked. “Boyfriend or job?”
She looked at me as if I’d just drooled down the front of my silk shirt.
“It always has to be about guys?” she asked, insulted on behalf of the sisterhood. “Okay, it was probably about a guy, but I told you, I hardly knew the girl, so I wouldn’t know. Angel might, like I said.”
“Not Robert Dobson? He’s not the guy, is he?”
This was amusing to her.
“Bobby? You’re joking, right? I’d’ve pegged him for a fruitcake if I hadn’t heard him and Elaine thumpin’ and gruntin’ every morning, waking me up after an hour of sleep.”
I called a waiter over to order another Absolut on the rocks. I always found an empty glass distracting and wanted my full attention on Sylvia.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Elaine was, is, Bobby’s girlfriend. Not Iku.”
“Duh.”
“Bobby didn’t know Iku from Princeton?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
“So who introduced her to the rental?”
Sylvia looked around the outdoor seating area, then back at us.
“Ms. Hot Pants, who do you think?”
I must have looked confused.
“Elaine, Carl’s sister,” she said.
“I’m not getting this,” I admitted.
She shook her wrist, catching the wayward watch with her other hand.
“Sorry. Gotta run. Stephan is probably pissed about me leaving him with the floor.”
“Iku just showed up one day with Elaine?” I asked, trying to keep a grip on Sylvia’s attention.
She shook her head.
“One night. The two of them drunker’n shit. They got to the house right after Carl and I got off. Lots of falling down and giggling and all that shit that looks so lame and stupid to people who aren’t so lucky as to be drunk. Bobby was already in bed, but Zelda was there, pissed off as all hell. Freak job that she is. I’m sorry, that was mean. You can’t blame the girl. Nobody likes getting rousted by a pair of drunks. She really let Elaine have it. Called her a total tramp. I really got to go.”
She abruptly stood up from her seat, smoothing the fabric of her dress back down the tops of her thighs.
“Thanks for talking,” I said.
“Not a problem.”
“One thing, real quick. Did Iku have a computer?”
She looked incredulous.
“Are you kidding me? Lived on her laptop. That’s another thing I don’t understand. Why you don’t go blind after a while.”
Amanda and I watched again as she wound through the tables and back into the elegant old building.
“When I was a kid we had other ways of going blind,” I said.
“The march of progress.”
We spent the rest of the evening pretending to be nourished by the teaspoon-sized portions of unpronounceable but admittedly tasty food. The staggering cost was partly explained by the effort put into arranging things on the plate. Much of this involved a form of construction, using a wad of mashed potatoes, for example, to support a golf ball–sized scoop of tenderloin sprinkled with inedible green twigs. At the Pequot, you got a lot more food on a plate half the size. In fact, you routinely ate most of your meal as it spilled onto the vinyl placemats.
Yet I can honestly say that Roger’s did a better job on the salads. The foundation greens resembled nothing I’d seen before, but I liked the way they stood up to the tangy salad dressing and digestible flowers, and the colorless, chopped-up stems of who-knows-what. The salads at the Pequot, by comparison, were solid slabs of exhausted iceberg lettuce floating in a vinegar soup, though most of the Pequot’s customers were too captivated by the ambience to notice.
The dessert choices showed up on a big platter. I was glad because this meant I didn’t have to ask for a French-English dictionary to make a decision. All the choices were out there in plain view.
After Amanda picked something, I asked if they had ice cream.
“Yes, sir. Pine sorbet and chocolate raspberry truffle. Handmade.”
“Bring me some anyway. One scoop each, with a foot or two in between.”
“You’re a craftsman,” said Amanda. “Ever make ice cream by hand?”
“If it involves a table saw, I’ll give it a try.”
We ordered a few cognacs to help us over the final throes of the meal. Amanda asked for the check, but I’d already slipped a wad of bills to the waiter. She had a lot more money than I did, but I had an archaic, dug-in notion that self-respect meant paying your own way. I’d let her pick up the next tab at the Pequot.
On the way out we passed Angel Valero’s table. I can’t say he was happy to see me. He looked around the restaurant in protest over its failure to properly exclude.
I was pleased to see that the powder dabbed on his cheek had barely disguised a yellow and purple bruise. But I was more distracted by his dinner companion.
“Hey, Jerome. Where’s Marla?”
Gelb half stood, but Angel reached out, and without taking his eyes off me, touched his forearm. Gelb sat back in his chair.
I was about to ask Valero how the soprano lessons were coming, but a better part of me took possession.
“You’re like a bad penny, Acquillo,” said Gelb. “Always turning up and spoiling my mood.”
“I thought your mood was unassailable.”
“That’s because you’d rather talk than think, pal,” said Valero.
“And what should I be thinking about?” I asked.
“Who to put in your will,” said Gelb, which drew a sharp look from Valero.
I had Amanda gripped lightly by the elbow and could feel her tense up.
“I miss the happy Gelb,” I said. “Had a better sense of humor.”
“You just don’t know what’s funny.”
This put Amanda over the brink. She pulled my hand off her elbow and took me by the sleeve, dragging me through the restaurant and out to the parking lot.
“You keep frightening me,” she said,
“Me?”
“You talk about sharing, but all you do is withhold. And you think I don’t notice.”
We ran into Sylvia again before making it out the front door. She blessed us with her ersatz smile.
“How was everything?” she asked, deeply interested.
“Everything was the most,” said Amanda.
“Don’t you know,” said Sylvia, pleased, I think.
On the way back to Oak Point we cracked the windows just enough to let a little wind into the car. Amanda slid down in the seat, kicked off her shoes and allowed the hem of her dress to float on the breeze. I commented on the result, keen on changing the direction of the conversation.
“Fashion is becoming painful,” she said.
“You get out of practice hanging around construction sites.”
“I should try hostessing.”
“Sylvia envy?”
“Just her youth.”
“Wasted as usual,” I said.
I’m practiced at ignoring bitter reality and allowing myself to live in various states of denial. But outright self-delusion has never been my strong suit. Which was too bad, because I really wanted to convince myself that the evening had enriched all of my operating theories.
“You haven’t told me about those men,” said Amanda.
I did the best I could, filling in at least some of the details of my dealings with both of them. It was a heavily censured report, but more than she enjoyed hearing.
“The big guy was Angel Valero. Iku’s client. Former client, I guess, technically.”
“Sylvia mentioned him.”
“She did.”
“He looked like he wanted to mash you up into an Italian meatball.”
“Franco-Italian meatball,” I said. “The kind of thing only Roger Estay would know how to make.”
“Boulettes de boeuf à l’Acquíllo. An acquired taste.”
“One of his girlfriends liked me. I liked her, too. But not as much as you,” I added quickly.
“How many girlfriends did he have?” she asked.
“Two I could see. I wasn’t invited into the house.”
“And what about Gelb?”
“He was Iku’s boss at Eisler, Johnson.”
“So they have that in common,” she said.
“At least.”
The rest of the night wasn’t very notable. I know because I got to see most of it. It was one of those nights where I had to settle for lying down as still as possible with my eyes forced shut. Jackie Swaitkowski once said that insomnia was like trying to sleep with a rock band in the bedroom. Only all the noise was in your head.
I finally did the only thing I knew how to do in those situations. I got up and poured a drink and lit a cigarette, promising myself to deduct it from the next day’s budget, and settled in at the table on the screened-in porch. I stared at the Little Peconic Bay with questions roiling my brain. I’d invested a lot of time trying to wring answers from that edgy little body of water, with no success. But I continued to hold out hope until about 7:30 in the morning, when I gave up and called Joe Sullivan.
“If you had Iku Kinjo’s computer, what would you normally look for?” I asked.
“I’d look for the report from forensics. They do all the looking.”
“Can I talk to them?” I asked.
“You can talk to me. I can talk to them.”
“I don’t know what questions to ask.”
“Yeah, you do. You just don’t want to share.”
He was right. It was a bad habit.
“I’d want to know everything she ever wrote relating to Bobby Dobson and Angel Valero. I’d want to see private logs, journals, love letters, confidential memos and photographs. Financial spreadsheets. To-do lists. Shopping lists.”
“That’s all? How come you don’t want to read all her email? Inbox, sent, deleted and saved. What about a full record of her Internet habits? Websites visited. Click-throughs. Searches. Social networking sites. Chat rooms. Blogs read and responded to. Rants. How about iTunes and YouTube downloads? How come you don’t want the whole fucking hard drive?”
“Because I don’t know what any of those things are.”
It got quiet on the other end of the line.
“You might think about catching up with the contemporary world there, MIT,” he said finally.
“You’re right. Though I did get a cell phone. Did you know you can call people from your car or when you’re sitting on the can?”
“People like the victim run their whole lives on the computer, and forensics can get it all. The public thinks they can delete what they want, hide what they write or do online, but they can’t. It’s all available. No secrets. No privacy, and nobody seems to care but the people who make a career whining about it.”
“So where is it?” I asked.
“What?”
“The computer.”
“Stupid,” he said.
“What’s stupid?”
“I am. For not realizing that was an Ethernet connection in the girl’s room. Or asking anybody about it. I oughta know better.”
Sullivan was one of those intelligent people who grew up in a world that assumed otherwise, based entirely on your relatives, your neighborhood, your choice of profession. It used to annoy me, but I’d since developed a tactful way of overcoming his inferiority complex.
“Pretty stupid. But I’ve seen stupider,” I told him.
“Thanks, Sam. That makes it better.”
“So where do you think it is?” I said.
“Vedders Pond. I’ve already called in the divers.”
“That’s where I’d start. But if you find it, there’s a bigger question.”
“What?” he asked.
“Who put it there?”
FOURTEEN
I REMEMBER THOSE SCIENCE CLASS analogies of the sun as a basketball and the earth as a pea. It’s the same for the Hamptons and New York City. We have more room out here, but the City is a whole lot bigger.
To say people in the Hamptons have mixed feelings about the colossus next door would be to understate the matter by an appropriately vast degree. Even for people who work in town and live here when they can. No matter what you want to believe, the Hamptons are an adjunct of the Big City—an appendage. We’re in her orbit, her gravitational pull, and utterly in her thrall.
Which is one of the reasons I like driving into town. To see the big girl in all her arrogant glory. The only question was how I drove—or more precisely, in what.
“You’re thinking of taking the Audi, aren’t you,” said Amanda.
“Why would I think that?” I lied.
“I’ll drive the pickup.”
“Nah. I’ll drive the pickup. If you need to haul a few tons of stuff, you can use the Grand Prix,” I said.
So I ended up in Amanda’s little red truck, with Eddie next to me in the passenger seat, heading into New York City. It was a compromise, admittedly. It wasn’t easy for me to accept help from anyone, least of all my rich girlfriend. But driving the Grand Prix over the lunar landscapes of Manhattan was getting to be a hit-or-miss proposition, and I could do without the added stress.
I’d booked a hotel in Tribeca that allowed dogs. “Pet friendly” is how they put it, which sounded more like a predilection than a policy. The ad in the Times noted that the hotel bar featured the widest selection of vodkas in New York City. Providence like this demanded a reservation.
I had the rough edges of a plan. I’d drive in before rush hour, settle Eddie into the room, take my daughter out to dinner, then figure out the rest of the plan while testing the legitimacy of the bar’s claim.
I executed everything but the figuring out part.
The best I could do was wake up early enough to walk Eddie, bring him back to the room and haul myself up to the West Side in time to catch Bobby Dobson getting ready for work.
As I pushed the button on the panel outside his building, I was still waiting for a bolt of inspiration.
“Who’s there?” said a male voice over the scratchy intercom.
“It’s Jerome,” I said, my inflection pitched to Westchester by way of Brighton Beach. “We need to talk. Let me in.”
Seconds trudged by. Then the door buzzed.
I took the elevator to his floor, still wondering how I was going to beat the inevitable peephole in the door. But my luck and Dobson’s stupidity caused him to open his door when I was only a few paces away, allowing me to shoulder my way into the apartment before he knew what hit him.
What hit him actually was the door, hard enough to knock him off his feet, which I really didn’t mean to do. This left me standing over him as Elaine Brooks stepped into the hallway wearing only a terry cloth bathrobe, which in the excitement she’d neglected to tie closed.
I squatted next to Dobson.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I sai
d, “but I’m here to help you.”
“I’m calling the cops,” he said, leaning on his elbows.
“You can do that, but that’ll force me to tell them how you’ve been lying about Iku Kinjo.”
“Bobby?” said Elaine from down the hall, now more properly pulled together.
“It’s okay, baby,” he said, still looking up at me, “we’re just talking here.”
“It doesn’t look that way to me,” she said.
“All I want to do is talk,” I said to Bobby. “Honestly. We keep getting off on the wrong foot. My fault. I want to make it up to you. If you’d rather fight me, I’ll have to fight back. I’d hate that. And so would you.”
He slowly got to his feet, feeling around a red spot on his cheek. He waved me into an area that served as a combination living room and kitchenette, where he cracked ice cubes out of a tray to put on his face. All the while Elaine was whispering at him furiously, to which he responded with semi-articulate grunts.
Feeling stupid standing alone in the living room, I went over to the kitchen and introduced myself to Elaine. She was examining Bobby’s cheek, which had again caused her to lose control of her bathrobe. Her body was plenty nice to look at, but I was embarrassed for both of us. I looked away as I offered my hand.
“Sam Acquillo, miss,” I said. “I’m really sorry to bother you.”
She clutched her robe to her neck, which helped a little, and offered her free hand.
“You got a weird way of showing it.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. It’s Iku’s murder,” I added. “Makes me a little crazy.”
Elaine took the bait.
“Oh my God, is that horrible or what?” she said.
I saw Bobby let out an inaudible sigh.
Looking over at the gigantic coffeemaker on the kitchen counter, I said, “Can we sit down? Have some coffee?”
Their sitting area was mostly office space, with a tiny loveseat and two swivel chairs, a desk with a PC and bookcases with swayback shelves crammed with stacks of paper and miscellaneous clutter.
They plopped down in the loveseat and I took one of the swivel chairs. Now that I was familiar with Elaine’s more essential qualities, I studied her face. It was broad, large featured and pretty in the way old-fashioned writers called handsome. Her hair was dark brown, her chin square and her eyes, also brown, wide-set. There were dimples in her cheeks deep enough to grow crops and her smile was an orthodontist’s billboard.
