by Chris Knopf
“The Dobsons.”
“Purpose of the visit?”
“Carpentry.”
He looked up at me from his clipboard.
“Didn’t know they was doin’ work,” he said.
“Thinkin’ about it. The boss sent me over here to appraise the situation.”
“They gotta get approval from the association. This place got regs up the ass. Can’t do shit unless them I’s and T’s are crossed.”
“That’s why I’m here, brother,” I said. “I’m the boss’s man on T’s and I’s.”
“I’m a T and A man myself.”
“I leave that for the weekends.”
He went back to the clipboard, on which he wrote something, who knows what. Then he waved me in. I thought about my hike up the hill to Donovan’s Greenwich neighborhood. Probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble with a frontal attack. Live and learn.
The houses in the complex were each on about two acres, in a variety of architectural motifs, from standard shingle-style postmodern to stuccoed pseudo-Tudor to amped-up bungalow. There was a curious absence of privet hedges, a standard throughout the Village’s estate section. Maybe the developer wrote a hedge ban into the I’s and T’s.
I found the address Sullivan had given me and parked across the street. The Dobsons had chosen a two-story New England colonial with three dormers protruding from the roof and a colonnaded portico over the front door. The driveway swept past the house in a gentle U-shape that provided two ways in and out. The doors to the three-car garage were closed. A tall white flagpole stood in the middle of the lawn, flagless. The telltales of a professional maintenance crew showed in the edging and tightly trimmed shrubs that lined the drive and hugged the periphery of the house.
Parked up tight to the house was the black Volvo.
I had a cup of Viennese cinnamon coffee from the corner place in the Village and three cigarettes slipped out of the pack on the way out the door that morning. I lit the first one after drinking half the large coffee. Pacing myself. I turned on the public jazz station and pretended to leaf through a file folder opened across the steering wheel. Since a contractor’s pickup was the only thing sighted more often in the Hamptons than a third-rate celebrity, I almost felt invisible.
I hadn’t evolved the plan any further than this. I hoped something would develop on its own, which it did, soon after I finished the coffee and my second cigarette.
I hadn’t seen Dobson leave the house, but I heard the Volvo start up and saw it curve around the driveway. At the street it turned toward the entrance to the complex. I started the pickup and followed as closely as I dared.
I noticed him blow past the hut, so I did the same. He turned north on Old Town Road, which led up to Montauk Highway. It was about nine in the morning, and the low-angled light was mopping up what was left of the mist hanging above the dew-soaked lawns and undeveloped acreage. We’d had a lot of rain in the late summer, so everything was still a dark saturated green, the opulent fecundity of the East End on proud display.
Every other car on Montauk Highway was a black four-door import, but I was able to keep a bead on the Volvo, which was traveling along at an easy pace. We headed east, past a thicket of car dealerships and roadside vegetable stands on the way toward Watermill, notable for the gigantic windmill on the village green and Jackie Swaitkowski’s engorged office space.
But we didn’t get that far. The Volvo took a sudden right turn into a parking lot serving a small cluster of buildings, one of which housed a Mediterranean café with an authentic aroma of over-roasted beans and an eclectic array of comfy seating options.
I waited in line behind Robert Dobson, my hat pulled down as a meager disguise. He was shorter than me and a lot lighter. His shoulders sloped down from his neck and rolled forward, making a hollow out of his chest. He wore a pink dress shirt, open and untucked, over a white T-shirt, and crumpled off-white chino pants.
He ordered a concoction with an Italian name I couldn’t pronounce. So I avoided the embarrassment by pointing at something on the menu. Dobson had to wait longer for them to whip up his order, so I killed time picking out the only wad of pastry in the glass display that wouldn’t automatically induce a heart attack.
Dobson snatched a real estate glossy out of a wire rack and, fortuitously, moved to a far corner where he dropped into the kind of nubby overstuffed sofa you used to pick up off the sidewalks of Greenwich Village. I waited until he looked settled in, then sat down next to him.
“Hey, Bobby,” I said quietly.
He looked over the top of the magazine, struggling to make sense of the moment. Which didn’t take too long.
“You,” he said, his face now filled with defiant alarm.
“If you run, I’ll catch you for sure this time. And you won’t like what happens next.”
“You can’t do that,” he said, looking over my shoulder as if seriously considering a run anyway. I put my hand on his forearm like Sullivan did to calm down the rowdy fishermen at the Pequot. It seemed to have the same oddly terrifying, and consequently quieting, effect.
“There’s no reason to get emotional here,” I said, in barely audible tones. “I’m just trying to get some information.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Sam Acquillo. I’m looking for Iku Kinjo. They say she’s your girlfriend.”
Without taking his eyes off me Dobson reached for his foamy light brown coffee and took a sip. Terror and confusion weren’t going to stand in the way of a hot jolt of caffeine. Not at those prices.
“Why are you looking for her?” he asked.
“Why aren’t you?”
“Who says I’m not?”
“You don’t seem concerned,” I said.
“I’m concerned. I’m very concerned.”
“I don’t think you are.”
“What’re you, a psychologist?” he asked.
“An engineer. It’s a type of psychology.”
“Look, I don’t know who you are.”
“Sam Acquillo. I told you that already.”
“But I don’t have to talk to you about anything if I don’t want to.”
I nodded. “That’s right. Though I wonder why you wouldn’t, if you’re concerned about Iku. We should be on the same team.”
“Concern for Iku and wanting to find her are two very different things,” he spat at me, proud to advance the proposition.
“Really?”
“Oh, come on. You think I don’t know what you’re trying to do? Even if I knew where she was, and I don’t, I wouldn’t tell you people.”
“You wouldn’t?”
Courage of conviction didn’t sit that comfortably with Robert Dobson, but as we talked, he warmed to the role.
“Yeah,” he said. “So let go of me and let me get back to my coffee or something’s going to happen that somebody’s not going to be too happy about.”
I realized I was still holding his arm. I let go and said, “What something?”
He obviously hadn’t thought that through.
“If you don’t mind,” he said, starting to rise.
I grabbed his shirt sleeve and shoved him back in his seat.
“What do you mean, ‘you people.’ What people?”
“If you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I’m not stupid. You can tell Angel and his overpaid, glorified goons to go jump in a lake. Or the East River, which is closer,” he said, making another attempt at escape, which this time I let him do. Almost.
I followed him out to the parking lot and met him at his Volvo, where he was fumbling with his keys and half-consumed liquid confection.
“I just need to know she’s all right,” I said to his back. “I don’t have to see her or know where she is. Take a picture or a videotape with a current newspaper. That kind of thing.”
He spun around.
“Like a kidnap victim?” he aske
d.
I moved in closer, forcing him to back up into his car’s side panel.
“Come on, Bobby, loosen up. Nothing bad can happen from this. Only good. I don’t give a shit about why she bugged out, or where she is or where she’s going from here. I just need to know she’s okay. Then I’m gone from her life forever. And yours.”
His face loosened up for a second, then suspicion crept back in again. “That’s all you want? Why?” he asked, the first sensible question of the day.
I told him the truth.
“Somebody’s paying me to find out. All I need is proof she’s alive and unharmed and I’m done.”
“If I did, hypothetically, know how to get her that message, what’s hypothetically in it for me?”
He went to take a sip of his coffee thing. I took the cup out of his hand before it reached his lips, tossed the coffee and shoved the crumpled cup into my pocket. He looked at me like I’d just pissed on his leg.
“You’re not so good at listening,” I told him. “Do this and I’m gone. Don’t and I’m so far up your ass we’ll be sharing sunglasses.”
I wanted to feel sorry for him, but I was having a hard time doing it. Maybe it was that whiny, overfunded, soft-palmed, self-reverential air of blasé entitlement. Or maybe not. Maybe I was just in a bad mood.
“I don’t know where she is, I swear I don’t,” he said, an anxious quaver in his voice. “We sort of split up a while ago. Her idea. But I’m sure she’s okay. I’d know if she wasn’t.”
I moved in even closer. Close enough to see the pores on his cheeks and smell the fear on his breath. I gathered up the front of his pink oxford cloth shirt and half lifted him off the ground.
“What are you going to do to me?” he asked, like he thought he already knew.
I immediately felt like a piece of shit. I let go of his shirt, took a few steps back and inhaled a deep breath, shaking the dopey fury out of my head. I searched my memory for mantras designed to quell anger, but I was still too worked up to think of any.
“It’s not that important,” I said to him.
I pulled a pen out of my jacket pocket and searched around my jeans, eventually coming up with a gas receipt. I walked over and used the Volvo’s hood to write my name and phone number on the back. I handed it to him.
“I apologize,” I said to him. “I still want to find her, but if you don’t want to help me, okay. I don’t know for sure, but I think it would be better for Iku if she opened a channel of communication. Give her my number. She’ll remember me. She can trust me, though she might not believe that.”
Dobson flinched when I stuffed the receipt into his shirt pocket. I left him and went back to Amanda’s pickup. But before a half dozen paces I stopped and turned around. Dobson was still leaning against his Volvo, studying the piece of paper I’d given him.
“Who the hell is Angel?” I asked him.
Dobson looked up from the receipt.
“If you don’t know, who the hell are you?” he said, and then rolled to his right, catching the handle of the Volvo’s door and letting himself in, starting the car and racing off in a cloud of dust, overwhelmed by the moments in life that remind people like him of their own ineffectuality, their brittle love of self.
SEVEN
I SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY at Sonny’s beating on leather bags until my legs, wrists and lungs were equally sore. Then I poached myself in the hot tub, which almost put me to sleep. In that somnambulant stupor I was defenseless against visions of Iku Kinjo caught in a fervent embrace with George Donovan, lounging around afterward wrapped in desultory pillow talk.
I felt better after nullifying the hot tub with a long, cold shower. Better than I felt after leaving Robert Dobson.
It was late evening by then. I’d left Eddie’s secret entrance open so he could come and go as he pleased. By now, Amanda was likely home diversifying his diet with hors d’oeuvres selected to accompany her first glass of pinot.
So when Robin and Laura from House Hunters of the Hamptons called me on the cell phone I felt free to join them at a place in Southampton suitable to their social aspirations.
I was met at the door by a guy in a white coat and black bow tie. He was a lot taller than me, but about the same weight. He spoke with an accent, though too quickly for me to make it out. All I heard was something like “the ladies has been waiting you to be here.” I followed him through the noisy roomful of entrenched City people, the ones who got to stay on after the season because they owned the houses they lived in during the summer. Most of them probably knew each other. None of them knew me. Except for Robin and Laura, who made a ridiculous show of standing and waving me over to their table.
“A rare man to get such greeting,” said the maitre d’, pulling out my chair with one hand and fiddling with my place setting with the other.
“Medium,” I said to him. “Medium rare.”
“Don’t let him fool you,” said Robin. “Red meat all the way.”
“Just bring the vodka,” said Laura. “There’s plenty of time for ordering.”
Laura’s wavy head of dark brown hair had been recently cropped and inexplicably combed and glued into jagged stalagmites. I’d known her to be the staid and restrained member of the pair, so it caught me by surprise. Robin was still her loud, brassy blonde self, with a lot more lipstick than self control. Judging by Laura’s stiff posture, despite the hair and a green drink in a platter-sized martini glass, their respective social styles remained stubbornly unresolved.
“So, things are good?” I asked.
“Been worse,” said Laura.
“Fab-ulous,” said Robin. “We just closed today on the Garrison place. Ox Pasture, don’t you know. La-di-da.”
“Co-brokers. Discounted commission,” said Laura, looking out across the big low-ceilinged room. Scanning for the next prospect. “Some la-di-da.”
“She’s such a killjoy. It’s in the genes.”
“Scandinavian.”
“Bergman on quaaludes.”
“I’m an ant,” Laura said to me, pointedly. “Robin’s a grasshopper. What can I say.”
“So, you called,” I said, snatching my vodka off the waiter’s tray as he lowered it to the table.
“Somebody asks me for something I put out,” said Robin.
“There’s a straight line deserving attention,” said Laura.
“Can you believe what I have to suffer?” Robin asked me.
“I like your hair,” I said to Laura, stopping them both in their tracks. “The ants are going to heave you out of the anthill.”
“Is he a goof or what?” asked Robin, fumbling for a cigarette, then realizing they were banned. She folded her arms and sank back in her seat.
“Robin’s the one who called you here, but I’m the one who got the goods,” said Laura.
“This is not a competition,” said Robin.
The waiter, who’d discreetly disappeared for a while, reappeared with pad and pen in hand. Both woman looked defensive, caught unprepared.
The waiter covered the moment by reciting specials and making doodles on his order pad. I focused on the vodka. The women kvetched and bickered over the menu until the suspense became nearly unbearable. I saved the waiter’s sanity by ordering a selection of appetizers for the table. That and another round of drinks.
“So you got the goods,” I said as the two of them sipped on single malts served neat in tiny brandy snifters. “I’m all ears.”
Robin jumped in.
“We found the Japanese girl’s rental. Or rather, Laura did.”
“Is she still there?” I asked.
“Don’t know about that. She wasn’t on the lease. We found her through Mr. Dobson, who was. The agent lent me a copy of the file. Out of professional courtesy.”
“And for a free dinner at the Silver Spoon,” said Robin.
“How do you know Iku was there? Or is there?” I asked.
Robin looked at Laura, eager to tell the story but afraid to
grab the floor. Laura made a show of looking nonchalantly around the restaurant.
“Oh, just clever detective work, you could say,” she said.
“Clever detective work. She read the file.”
“The police file. If that isn’t detective work I don’t know what is.”
“Police file?” I said.
“They had a note in the file that the Town cops paid a call on the place one night. Noise complaint,” said Robin, unable to resist stealing Laura’s thunder. “I think ‘noise complaint’ and ‘group rental’ are the same words in the dictionary.”
“Synonyms,” said Laura.
“Sin’s another story,” said Robin. “Plenty of that, too.”
“The cops usually alert the owners through the rental agent whenever they’re called to a property. This is a big issue around here, you probably know. Lots of people want more control on the groups, which is fine with me. Who needs them?”
“People who want to come to the Hamptons and can’t afford a kazillion dollar rental,” asked Robin.
“So this complaint,” I said, wedging my way back into the conversation, “what was it about?”
Laura shrugged.
“No biggie. Some neighbor said they were blasting their stereo out the window. Cops get there, a woman named Iku Kinjo apologizes and immediately turns off the music. Cops leave. No further complaints. Not exactly an earth-shattering event in the history of law enforcement.”
“Didn’t make the cover of The New York Times,” said Robin.
“Maybe page three.”
“Do you have the names of the cops who made the call?” I asked.
They looked at each other, then nodded.
“Sure. It’s right in the report. Don’t remember their names, but it’s in there,” said Laura, pulling a big pink envelope out from somewhere under the table and plopping it down on top. “Address, telephone number, owners’ names, square footage, number of bedrooms, instructions on cleaning the swimming pool, it’s all there.”
“Us agents are thorough,” said Robin.
“We’re anal,” said Laura. “You’d be, too, if you had to deal with these owners. You’d think we were renting out their children.”
