Cop Job

by Chris Knopf

  ALSO BY CHRIS KNOPF

  SAM ACQUILLO HAMPTONS MYSTERIES

  The Last Refuge

  Two Time

  Head Wounds

  Hard Stop

  Black Swan

  JACKIE SWAITKOWSKI HAMPTONS MYSTERIES

  Short Squeeze

  Bad Bird

  Ice Cap

  ARTHUR CATHCART

  Dead Anyway

  Cries of the Lost

  A Billion Ways To Die

  STAND-ALONE THRILLER

  Elysiana

  A SAM ACQUILLO HAMPTONS MYSTERY

  Copyright © 2015 by Chris Knopf

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

  The events and characters in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to any person, living or dead, is merely coincidental.

  For information, address:

  The Permanent Press

  4170 Noyac Road

  Sag Harbor, NY 11963

  www.thepermanentpress.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Knopf, Chris—

  Cop job / Chris Knopf.

  pages ; cm. — (A Sam Acquillo Hamptons mystery)

  ISBN 978-1-57962-393-7

  eISBN 978-1-57962-439-2

  1. Acquillo, Sam (Fictitious character)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3611.N66C67 2015

  813'.6—dc23 2015020499

  Printed in the United States of America

  CHAPTER ONE

  I got there just in time to see the crane hoist Alfie Aldergreen out of Hawk Pond. He was still strapped in his motorized wheelchair. Grey green salt water poured off his rigid body and cascaded over the chair’s tubular chrome framing. His head was twisted back and his eyes were closed, thank God, though his tongue, a swollen purple mass, protruded through his lips, which were partly chewed away.

  Dead bodies are never pretty.

  The scene was lit like a night game at Yankee Stadium. Cops in uniforms and political people from the town milled around. Few had official functions to perform, but all tried hard to look as if they did. I saw Joe Sullivan in the middle of it all, a Southampton Town detective upon whose broad shoulders the burden of sorting through this dreary affair had already settled.

  I was called there by Jackie Swaitkowski, a lawyer who worked for a philanthropic law firm specializing in hard-luck cases like Alfie’s. I saw her standing near the crane, wearing a summer suit with a hem an inch or two above the entirely professional, clutching herself around the middle in a rigid pose of shock and sorrow.

  When I tried to go to her, a patrol cop stopped me by shoving the end of a nightstick in my chest.

  “Step back,” he said. “This is a secured area.”

  I looked down at the stick.

  “I’m here with attorney Swaitkowski,” I said.

  I looked over his shoulder and the cop followed my gaze. As luck would have it, Joe Sullivan and Jackie were deep in conversation. The cop dropped the stick and I brushed by, making a little more body contact than was probably necessary.

  “Oh, Sam,” said Jackie, as I approached.

  I let her put her arms around me, and even gave her a slight squeeze. Sullivan just stood there and waited.

  “What the hell happened?” I asked him.

  “Your friend Hodges was fishing off the breakwater. When the tide went out, he saw the top of Alfie’s head. It was almost sunset before he realized what it was.”

  “Any ideas?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Jackie?”

  She looked down at the ground and shook her head.

  “He’s been very agitated lately. Paranoid. More than usual,” she said, looking up at me.

  We were all aware of Alfie’s mood swings. A regular presence along Main Street in Southampton Village, year-round, Alfie was known to have conversations with himself, or people no one else could see. He was usually happily engaged, often playing a very credible alto saxophone, though sometimes his face was lit with fear, and he’d stop passersby to warn them of impending catastrophe.

  I’d spent a fair amount of time with the guy, sitting next to his chair on a park bench drinking coffee I’d bought for the two of us. One time I had to talk down an angry shopkeeper who thought Alfie had stolen some of her merchandise, when in fact one of his invisible companions had made it a gift. That’s when I introduced him to Jackie, whose free legal services became a regular necessity.

  “Not like suicidal or anything?” I asked.

  Jackie looked around the area where we stood—a parking lot serving a boat launch adjacent to the harbor’s breakwater.

  “How far are we from the Village?” she asked. “Eight, ten miles? How would he even get here?”

  “There were no wheelchair tracks leading up to the breakwater,” said Sullivan, nodding toward a gravel-covered area cordoned off with yellow tape. “He’d have to fly to get there himself.”

  “Any other tracks?” I asked.

  “Trucks, trailers, footprints everywhere. Nothing you could take an impression of. Not in gravel. We’ll be back in the daylight for a closer look, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”

  Alfie had a one-room apartment behind a small, free-standing art gallery a block from the center of Southampton Village. The gallery space changed hands every season, but the owner, Jimmy Watruss, let Alfie rent the back area for a small percentage of his disability check. Like Alfie, Jimmy was a veteran attached to a mechanized unit during the Iraq War. The only thing Alfie told me about his service was when the wizard Gandalf joined up with his platoon. Apparently his fellow soldiers demurred when he set out across the desert to challenge the rising threat of Mordor.

  Back stateside, the army shrinks set him up with a drug regimen, and after a few months of observation, sent him into the civilian world. The first thing Alfie did was buy an old Fiat S1955 Ducati motorcycle, which he drove into a bridge abutment trying to avoid a volcano that had suddenly erupted on the New Jersey Turnpike.

  The VA put most of him back together, but there was no saving the bottom half of his spinal cord.

  Alfie wore his DCU—short for desert camouflage uniform—every day, though he’d never let people draw him into a conversation about the war. I don’t know how he ended up living in Southampton. I never asked, and even if I had, he probably wouldn’t have remembered. I did get to see his apartment once, when the batteries in his chair ran out and I volunteered to push him back home. The room was spare and immaculately clean, his uniforms and modest belongings neatly stored in portable, olive drab metal closets.

  PAUL HODGES, who lived aboard an old forty-eight-foot Gulf-stream motor sailor in the Hawk Pond Marina, emerged from a cluster of men watching the crane. I waved him over. In his late sixties, Hodges’s arms were still strung with ropey muscles, the legacy of long years in commercial fishing and construction and slinging questionable sustenance at his restaurant in Sag Harbor. Never an attractive man, age had been unkind to his grey puffs of curly hair and his face, which you might mistake for a less attractive version of Ernest Borgnine’s.

  “That poor son of a bitch sure didn’t catch his share of luck,” he said. Despite myself, my eyes were drawn to where Alfie sat in his DCUs, slumped over in his chair, his long brown hair stuck in sodden, forlorn strands across his face. He was guarded by two of Sullivan’s men so no one could touch the body before the medical examiner arrived. Not that anyone wanted to.

  “I feel bad about this,” said Hodges. “There he was the whole time I’m fishing. I thought his hair was seaweed. Sorry,” he added, looking over at Jackie.

  “You ever see him motoring around the
marina?” Sullivan asked.

  Hodges shook his head. “Never seen him anywhere but the Village. Never really knew the guy. Not like these two,” he added, using his thumb to point at Jackie and me.

  “Was he on his meds?” Sullivan asked Jackie.

  “I don’t know. I’m his lawyer, not his caseworker. But I know who is. Esther Ferguson.”

  Sullivan looked at his notebook and wrote down her name. “I know Esther,” he said. “Tough cookie.”

  Tough as in a cross between Joe Frazier and a rabid badger. She didn’t like me, which placed her within a fairly crowded field. Her beef was my occasional intervention on behalf of Alfie, which offended her social worker prerogatives. I was offended that she didn’t always do as good a job looking after her clients as she did upholding her exclusive right to their care.

  So we were even.

  “Alfie was murdered. That’s the gist of it,” I said.

  “I could make a case for it being an accident, or suicide,” said Sullivan. “But why?”

  Sullivan had been a plainclothesman for about five years. Before that he was a patrol cop assigned to North Sea, the wooded, watery territory just north of Southampton Village. I lived in North Sea in a cottage off the Little Peconic Bay—when I wasn’t staying on the Carpe Mañana, which was berthed next to Hodges’s in the Hawk Pond marina.

  A Smart Car pulled into the parking lot and I knew the medical examiner had arrived, based entirely on the weirdness of the vehicle.

  Carlo Vendetti was a cheerful scarecrow of a guy with long, slippery black hair stuck out of his baseball cap, disguising the fact that the rest of his head was as bald as a baby’s ass. You’d say he had a weak chin, if he actually had a chin. With a beak-like nose and black-rimmed glasses, Carlo was a right geek if there ever was one. That was okay with me. I got along fine with geeks.

  “Sam the Man,” he said, as he approached our little group. “Detective,” he said to Sullivan. “And the most stunning defense attorney in the Eastern United States,” he said to Jackie, taking her hand by the fingers and giving her knuckles a light kiss, much to her dismay.

  “Hi, Carlo,” she said, gently extracting her hand.

  I didn’t disagree with Carlo on Jackie’s looks, I just never thought of her in that way. Too much of a tomboy, too frenetic and churned up with Catholic guilt and attention deficit disorder for my taste. I liked her better in the steady hands of her boyfriend, a guy about the size of a sequoia with the equanimity and forbearance to match.

  “Come with me, doctor,” said Sullivan, placing a guiding hand on the ME’s back. “Let me introduce you to Alfie Aldergreen.”

  Hodges tagged along. I waited until they were all out of earshot, then asked Jackie, “What do you think?”

  She pushed a wad of kinky reddish blonde hair back off her face, a gesture signaling equal parts confusion and distress.

  “First I thought, ‘Who’d want to kill a harmless, crazy guy in a wheelchair?’ ” she said. “But, of course, people like him get killed all the time just for being harmless and crazy.”

  “Did he say anything unusual last time you talked to him?” I asked.

  “Like I told you, he was really worked up. He said a secret organization was out to get him. You know he was paranoid, but not that big on conspiracy theories. More focused on individuals. Conan the Barbarian comes to mind. Most would think crazy is crazy, but these folks have their themes. They usually don’t deviate.”

  I’d spent enough time with Alfie to know that was true. His main thing was imaginary people, either inside his head or hanging around nearby. If you spent enough time with him, you could almost believe they were actually there.

  “So no ideas,” I said.

  She shook her head, hard enough to cause the brushed-away hair to fall back into her face. She swept it back.

  “Nothing. Zilch. In a big city you might think sicko sadists preying on the disabled. But we don’t have that sort of thing around here, do we?” she asked, hopefulness in her voice.

  “We might,” I said. “Who knows.”

  “There’s a cheerful thought.”

  I pulled her over to where officialdom circled Alfie’s dead body. Carlo Vendetti had Alfie’s shirt open and was feeling around his inert chest, looking inside his mouth, and probing his lower abdomen. I noticed Alfie’s hands were wrinkled like an old lady’s and there were red ligature marks on his forearms, just above where they’d been duct taped to the chair.

  “I’ll know a lot more when I get him on the table,” Vendetti said to me, as if I had some official standing. “But since the water’s still pretty cold for July, the body’s in decent shape. There’re no apparent wounds or contusions, no external bleeding, though there’s salt water in his nose and mouth.”

  ”How do you know that?” asked Sullivan.

  “I can smell it,” said Carlo, holding up a gloved hand. Everyone fought to keep the cringing under control. “Plus his skin is blue, indicating oxygen starvation, and his limbs are secured with duct tape.”

  “So?” Jackie asked.

  “So he drowned. Correct that, he was drowned, intentionally. Not conclusive until we do the lab work, but you asked.”

  An ambulance came shortly after that, and Carlo directed Sullivan and his men on how to get Alfie out of his chair and onto a gurney. The chair went into the back of a police SUV as evidence and the paramedics got in the front seat of the ambulance, since there was no need for life support.

  I hung around until the area was clear of all but a single patrol car left to secure the crime scene, then dragged Jackie over to my boat where we could have a few drinks in the cockpit with Hodges and settle our nerves for the tough night’s sleep ahead.

  “Why do I get the most upset when bad things happen to people with the least intrinsic value to society?” Jackie asked, looking down into a plastic cup full of red wine.

  “I’d tell you if I knew what intrinsic meant,” said Hodges.

  I swirled around my own cup, giving the ice cubes a chance to chill the vodka to the proper temperature.

  “We’ve got to let Sullivan get to Esther before we do,” I said to Jackie, “but that’s where I’d start. I’d also go see Jimmy Watruss. He’ll talk to me. I’ve done a lot of carpentry work for him over the years.”

  “So he likes you?” Jackie asked.

  “Didn’t say that. Just said he’d talk to me.”

  “I’ll be fishing,” said Hodges. “In the Little Peconic.”

  IT WASN’T all that late when I got back to my cottage. My dog, Eddie, was sitting on the lawn waiting for me, recognizing as he always did the sound of my old Pontiac rumbling up the street. As soon as I turned into the driveway, he jogged over to the parking area so he could try to climb into my lap when I opened the door. He never made it all the way in, and I never made it out without a small struggle. It didn’t matter that we repeated this ritual several times a day. For him, at least, it was endlessly engaging.

  “Such a pain in the ass,” I said, gently shoving him back onto the grass, where he bounded off toward the cottage for the next stage in the process. I followed.

  Amanda Anselma met me out on the lawn, which wasn’t a surprise. She often drifted over to my cottage from next door and let herself in when I wasn’t around. Eddie didn’t mind, since she was a reliable source of Big Dog biscuits, a reward he officially didn’t qualify for, being more of a midsized dog.

  She also fed him aged Brie and fresh grapes, biscotti and prosciutto, albeit in small doses, so maybe that had something to do with it as well.

  “I hope everything’s okay,” she said, as I slipped my right arm around her and pulled her into me.

  “It’s not,” I said, kissing her full on the lips. “I hope you weren’t worried.”

  “I always worry. Everything could be fine, but why waste the emotion?”

  “Somebody murdered Alfie Aldergreen,” I said. “Dumped him in his chair off the breakwater on Hawk Pond. Hodges found him.
”

  She pulled away from me so she could put her hand over her heart.

  “That’s horrible. Who did it?”

  “No idea.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know how hard you tried to look after him.”

  “Sort of,” I said. “Others did a lot more than me. Like Jackie. She’s got that look on her face.”

  “The avenging angel?” she asked.

  “Something like that.”

  We all went out to the sun porch, which was in its summer mode—storm windows off the screens, ceiling fan engaged, cool drinks in slippery wet glasses on the side tables. The Little Peconic Bay sending in the musical lap of tiny bay waves, the southwesterly breeze rippling the lawn, Eddie panting and slurping water from his bowl in the corner of the room.

  “So what are you going to do?” Amanda asked.

  “Find the bastards.”

  “Of course you are.”

  She chose that moment to thrust a slender, naked leg out from the silk robe she’d chosen to wear for the trip across our adjoining lawns. I got the not overly subtle message.

  We hurried through the rest of our drinks and took it from there.

  NOT LONG after that, the phone rang. It was Jackie.

  “How often do you listen to your voice mail messages?” she asked.

  “I never listen to my voice mail messages,” I said, once I was awake enough to talk.

  “Me neither. Most of the time. But I saw the little light on the answering machine and thought, what the hell.”

  “And?”

  “It’s Alfie. Two days ago,” she said.

  I listened to some clunking sounds as Jackie put her cell phone within proximity of the answering machine.

  “Jackie, Jesus Christ, they’re going to kill me,” said the tinny, yet unmistakable voice of Alfie Aldergreen, clearly agitated. “I mean, after all these battles with the forces of eternal darkness, I get wasted by some cop job? What the hell is up with that?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I once worked as an executive for a multinational industrial corporation where I was in charge of about a thousand people, mostly technicians and engineers. Now I’m a cabinetmaker working for a builder in Southampton, New York. I like this job better, though it doesn’t pay as well.