Cop Job

by Chris Knopf

  The corporation is gone, sectioned off to eager bidders after it succumbed to an ugly financial scandal. I’m still here. So there you go.

  I’m fifty-nine years old. It’s not a bad age, though I wish I were more like thirty-nine. That’s a better age, though I’d rather be thirty-nine without all the drama and trouble that went along with that time of my life.

  I have no idea how old Eddie is, since I rescued him from the pound, though he seems like the same dog that first jumped into my car, tail sweeping the air in a gentle wave, mouth an eager grin.

  We live together in an easy alliance. I feed him, give him shelter and complete freedom, and he lets me. I also hit golf balls off the breakwater above the pebble beach for him to retrieve, which he never tires of doing. Probably why both of us are more limber and lively than our ages should allow.

  Remarkably enough, it’s been about twelve years since I lost my job, and subsequently my wife, the big house, and all that money. I’ve recouped a bit since then, but not a day goes by that I don’t miss things about my old life, while thanking God that it’s gone forever. This is the kind of cognitive dissonance I specialize in, which will likely be the case to the end of days.

  Amanda inherited the house next door, along with a lot of other houses, which she spends her days fixing up and selling. I help her out occasionally, though we know it’s better for us to keep our homes and jobs separate. We still manage to visit each other a lot, facilitated by the convenient proximity.

  Amanda turned forty-six the week before Alfie was killed. We celebrated by ignoring the birthday and getting drunk out in the Adirondack chairs we keep at the edge of our common breakwater. It takes a lot to get us drunk these days, but we gave it our all, and the fact that we woke up that morning still on the lawn was proof of success.

  We did it all over again the night Alfie died. Whether we were in the mood for more denial or a new routine was settling in, it was hard to tell.

  I was first up, and used the time to look at Amanda’s beautiful Italian face, framed perfectly by an indomitable head of thick, auburn hair, seeing her brilliant green eyes flash open, uncomprehending at first, but then light up with gentle good humor.

  “We passed out again,” she said.

  “We did.”

  “Who got the blankets?”

  “I don’t remember,” I said.

  “Does it matter?”

  “No.”

  More than anything, this was the musical score accompanying my life. I liked how it sounded, though I didn’t know exactly where it came from, or how long it would last. But who knows anything about good fortune, tight-lipped and capricious that it is.

  “So now what?” she asked.

  “Coffee,” I said, forcing myself to my feet to head for the kitchen, leaving Amanda sprawled and semiconscious on the dew-soaked lawn. Eddie appeared out of nowhere and trotted along next to me.

  “How did you let this happen?” I asked.

  He looked unready to accept responsibility.

  I was halfway through building a pair of double espressos when my cell phone rang.

  “Ross wants to see you,” said Joe Sullivan, referring to his boss, Ross Semple, the Southampton Town police chief.

  “How come?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. A friend of yours is murdered. Ross is in charge of solving murders. Coincidence?”

  I had an uneven relationship with Ross Semple, forged over years of complex and conflicted interactions. This was inevitable, for a variety of reasons. Jackie and I had interfered quite a bit in official police business, a chronic source of ill will, leavened by appreciation when things for his department worked out well in the end, aggravated when they didn’t. Though like all complicated relationships, it went deeper than that, in ways neither of us quite understood.

  “When?”

  “Today would be good,” said Sullivan. “Does an hour from now suit your schedule?”

  I thought about the dovetail joints for a stack of drawers I was planning to cut that day. Frank Entwhistle, my steady source of work, was a very patient man, a quality I strove to reinforce by relentlessly meeting his generous deadlines. I’d built plenty of give in the timing of the current job, so a day off would have little or no effect. I just hated to lose the time. It was the principle.

  “I’ll be there in an hour. One hour for the interview, then I’m on my way back to the shop,” I said.

  “Wow, that’s really good of you. A whole hour,” said Sullivan.

  “We don’t need an hour.”

  “If it goes past that, are you going to leave?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll see you when you get here,” he said, then hung up on me.

  I checked the clock on my phone. Not even seven thirty in the morning and I was already preparing for combat.

  MY EX-WIFE, Abby, and I probably shouldn’t have married in the first place, a lament you hear all the time from divorced people. However, I can’t express the same sentiment about sleeping with her, which resulted in a lot of memorable occasions, and most importantly, our daughter, Allison, our only child.

  Allison had caused me great joy and nearly limitless grief. But I never once regretted her existence. I’d do it all over again, even if it meant all the grief and none of the joy. She wasn’t an easy kid to raise, and as it turned out, not so easy an adult either. Though she and her mother stayed close after I left, Abby secretly called her The Apple, as in an apple that hadn’t fallen very far from the tree. The tree being me.

  This is probably why it took me so long to establish a relationship with Allison that involved more than relentless gales of hostility and recrimination. All generated by her and directed at me. My part was to answer the tempest with lavish praise and abiding affection, though making little effort to stem my own heedless self-destruction, which aroused much of her fury to begin with.

  Somehow we managed to stumble into an uneasy compromise. I took better care of myself and she redirected her pummeling toward boyfriends, employers, and the representatives of our great civil institutions, whom she lumped under the general rubric “worms.”

  It didn’t hurt that she liked Amanda and Amanda liked her in return, enough to occasionally drive into New York where Allison worked as a freelance graphic designer so the two of them could shop, talk, and indulge in the kind of Broadway entertainment you could only get me to as a corpse.

  I was about to leave to go see Chief Semple when Allison called me on my cell phone.

  “I think Nathan might be sociopathic,” she said, when I pushed the answer button.

  “That’s a pretty serious charge.”

  “Why else would he get another sales job?”

  “Because he’s a good salesman?”

  “He gets a new job without discussing it with me? Without even considering the type of job we’ve talked about?”

  “He might have considered it and decided it was a bad idea,” I said.

  “We’re supposed to talk about these things. People who aren’t sociopaths know this.”

  I knew taking Nathan’s side was the wrong strategy if I wanted to advance his cause. Not that I cared much about his cause, having no say in the matter. I liked this kid better than the previous two dozen, though I avoided meeting him in person. As with new recruits joining a battle-weary platoon, you didn’t want to make friends with people who’d likely be gone within the week.

  “Why not let him work the job for a while and see what happens. Maybe he’ll come to his senses.”

  “You hated your corporate job,” she said.

  “I loved my corporate job. I just hated the corporation. And its employees. Not all of them.”

  “He’ll make enough money to afford an apartment we can both live in.”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Never room with people you sleep with.”

  “Do you have any idea how ridiculous that sounds?”

  “Are you still liv
ing on sour cream and potato chips?” I asked.

  “You’re changing the subject and sounding like my mother.”

  Allison somehow combined my intemperate approach to wellness with Abby’s native gifts. In other words, she could trash her health, bypass the gym, and still look like a million bucks. Though she was still young and unaware that nature really does play a relentless game of catch-up.

  “Your mother is an intelligent woman.”

  “She hates Nathan.”

  “There’s a mark in his favor. Maybe you should move in together after all.”

  “I’m not going to. I probably never will. I wish I could blame it on you, but it’s actually what I want.”

  “If he’s worth anything, it’ll be okay with him.”

  “I shouldn’t talk to you about this sort of thing.”

  “No, you shouldn’t. We can chat about hydrocarbon processing or the relative merits of structural composites versus dimensional lumber. Safer ground.”

  “He should have talked to me before accepting that new job,” she said, her voice a low growl.

  “He should have. Next time I see him I’ll break his arms.”

  “Thanks, Daddy,” she said, before hanging up.

  I BROUGHT Eddie with me to the HQ. This was flagrantly manipulative. It took a heart of stone not to bend to Eddie’s canine charms. And lucky for the plan, he was pretty indiscriminate about whom he charmed, assholes included who were in good supply at the HQ.

  To be fair, the majority of police I’ve known are not only decent, hardworking, and principled people, they’re mostly better than the rest of us. But positions of power have a way of attracting those who assume institutional prerogatives, resulting in a lot of struggle and strife for people like me who contend otherwise.

  Since I was there for a command performance, I knew I’d easily breach the HQ’s first line of defense, a female pit bull named Janet Orlovsky. Eddie did his part by jumping up on the bulletproof glass that sealed her booth and giving her the full force of his dazzling personality.

  “Look at you, you handsome guy,” said Janet, touching the glass that stood between Eddie’s big black nose and her eager fingertips. “Don’t tell me you brought along that curly haired, pain-in-the-ass Guinea.”

  “Mostly pain-in-the-ass Canuck,” I said, which I often had to do. “Not that we favor ethnic pejoratives.”

  “Try being a Russian Jew,” she said. “Then talk to me.”

  “My grandfather was a Polish Jew,” I said. “On my mother’s side. Eddie was a mutt left in the woods to die. Do you want to hire an ethnologist to determine which of us suffered greater persecution? Or do you want to call Ross and tell him I’m here?”

  She kept her disdainful eyes on me as she dialed Ross’s internal number. I held her gaze.

  Without breaking eye contact, she buzzed us through the door. Eddie trotted along, staying mostly by my side with a minimum of urgent commands. The worst distractions were corners and baseboards, where the scatterings from hungry cops eating on the run had found their way.

  Ross met me halfway through the squad room. I hadn’t seen him in a few months and was surprised that he’d put on some weight. It always seemed his nervous intensity made up for a prideful lack of athleticism, though as noted, nature catches up with everyone eventually.

  “Sam Acquillo,” he said, “a sight for sore eyes.”

  “That’s what eye drops are for.”

  “What brings you to our humble abode?”

  “Sullivan said I had to come,” I said.

  He put a hand on his cheek.

  “He did, did he? Follow me,” he said, turning and walking back toward his office. I followed.

  His office had been a dump when I first saw it, and over the years had gone downhill from there. The piles of paper on his desk were only distinguished from the piles on the floor by a difference in elevation. He sat in the desk chair and waved me into the only other chair you could actually sit in. Only Jackie Swaitkowski was a bigger slob, which defined their sole patch of cluttered common ground.

  Eddie lay on a low pile of periodicals, local newspapers, and law enforcement trade journals after letting out a sigh that sounded more like acquiescence than satisfaction.

  Ross offered me a cigarette, which I turned down. I looked around at the surrounding combustibles and took note of available exits.

  “So you really gave it up,” said Ross. “The smoking thing.”

  “I’ve confined reducing life expectancy to straight vodka and watching professional basketball.”

  “My dad smoked till the day he died, at eighty-five. Got hit by a car.”

  “The luck of the fathers doesn’t always descend upon the sons,” I said.

  “You ought to hope that’s true, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  He meant that my father had been murdered in a restroom at the back of a crummy old neighborhood bar in the Bronx. Beaten to death, though the damage to his knuckles showed he didn’t go easily.

  “I don’t mind, though I don’t like talking about it.”

  “Who would. Speaking of untimely death, what’s your take on Alfie Aldergreen?” he asked.

  “No idea. Nowhere near enough data.”

  “I forgot. You’re Mr. Empiricist.”

  “You didn’t forget. You know I never speculate on things I know nothing about. Neither do you. Sometimes we have testable hypotheses. Tracks to follow. But not with this one. Not yet. Clean slate.”

  “Tabula rasa.”

  “So why all the questions?”

  “I’m the chief of police. They pay me to ask questions.”

  I breathed in his cigarette smoke and fought the powerful urge to ask for one of my own. I’d quit the year before, and this moment confirmed what I already knew. Quit all you want; you’re never free of it.

  “What about you?” I asked. “What can you tell me? Not that the chief of police has to tell me anything,” I added, sparing him from saying it himself.

  “We got nothing,” he said, pushing back in his battered desk chair and sucking in a huge drag of smoke. “I can’t stop you and Jackie from sticking your noses into this thing. We know that from past experience. You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do. So let’s try something different this time. You guys can go to places it’s hard for us to go. But we’re the police, and can do things you can’t do. If we cooperate, if you communicate as you go, and tie us in as a resource rather than an adversary, it could mean a swift and just resolution to this tragedy.”

  That really was a first. Ross Semple, undisputed master of Southampton law enforcement, asking me and Jackie, unrepentant meddlers in police affairs, to let them in on our investigation, before we even had one.

  The role reversal was so startling and abrupt, it almost wrenched my neck. Though I tried not to let it show.

  He flung himself back in his chair and took another huge draw on his cigarette, causing the burning tobacco to outrun the paper, and consequently dropping a large dollop of glowing ash on his polyester pants. He brushed if off as well as he could, but I could imagine his dry cleaner confronting a constellation of irreparable pinprick holes.

  “Sure, Ross. Whatever we find out, you find out. I’d like it if Joe Sullivan stayed on the case. Your other guy is a little competitive. But that’s your call.”

  “Joe’s on it,” he said. “And me, too. My brother was wounded in Vietnam. Lived in a chair, like Alfie. Though not that long. Too many complications.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’m sick of conflict. I don’t want to fight with anyone anymore, especially you. Maybe it’s age. Just stay inside the legal lanes—Jackie knows what they are—talk to us on a regular basis and don’t get in our way when things heat up.”

  Ross grew up like me in Southampton, but spent the first half of his career as a homicide detective in the most savage neighborhood in New York City during some of the bloodiest, crack-infested times. It was hard to overlook the we
irdness, but the wise never underestimated the man.

  “I hear you,” I said.

  His face slipped into serious.

  “The same goes for that freckle-faced cyclone. Latitude doesn’t mean carte blanche. Remind her of that, if you would.”

  “Jackie’s her own girl, Ross. You know that. Anyway she’s my boss. She tells me what to do.”

  “Interesting role reversal. You know you need a license to be a PI in this state.”

  “I’m not a PI. I’m a personal assistant.”

  “Right. You know Esther Ferguson accused us of harassing Alfie,” he said.

  “I didn’t.”

  “He lived in the Village. Not even our jurisdiction. But he insisted that Town cops were threatening him.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Looking at him, as it turned out. Even Esther backed off after that.”

  “The Town and Village have different uniforms, patrol cars.”

  “He described us,” said Ross. “Pretty accurately.”

  “Alfie surprised me plenty of times.”

  “Terrible thing to be afraid of your own mind,” said Ross. “It scares the hell out of the general public, but their fear is nothing compared to what people like Alfie go through. Did you know the incidence of violent crime perpetrated by paranoid schizophrenics is roughly the same as the population at large?”

  “No, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “I didn’t think you were such a sensitive guy,” said Ross.

  “Sensitivity’s got nothing to do with it. Simple fairness. Even lunatics have a right to life.”

  “You almost just improved my opinion of you, Sam.”

  “Always the underachiever.”

  “I’ve got another Alfie problem,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Alfie himself. Can’t find any next of kin. Carlo’s okay keeping him on ice for now, but he’ll be needing the drawer space.

  “Jimmy Watruss might know,” said Ross.

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  Despite all that talk about cooperation, Ross knew a lot more than he was willing to share, but it was all I’d get. So we tossed around the Latin allusions, semi-non sequiturs, and trivia one-upsmanship that served as conversation between us, and then I got the hell out of there.