Cop Job

by Chris Knopf

  “Cop, huh?” she said. “Love cops, when they aren’t arresting me. Just a joke. Not a very good one.”

  I showed her my driver’s license.

  “Not a cop,” I said. “I’m Allison Acquillo’s father. Somebody beat her up yesterday bad enough to put her in a coma. I was hoping you could talk to me about her work life.”

  “Fucking shit. You are fucking kidding me.”

  “I’m not. Can you spare a minute?”

  “Yeah,” she said, in the two-syllable way people do now when they mean of course. “Follow me.” She led me into a big room full of long tables at which mostly young people clothed as haphazardly as Althea worked side by side at computers.

  “Interesting setup,” I said, as we wormed our way down a narrow aisle.

  “We did away with private offices, then cubicles, and now we all work at whatever work station is open when we get here. Two thirds of our people work remotely. I don’t know where they are. I think a few of them are on the moon, but I can’t prove it.”

  She led me into a room with a door, walls made of whiteboards covered in script and sketches, and a few overstuffed chairs.

  “War room,” she said. “For the big pitches and projects.”

  “Tough business.”

  “You have no idea.” As soon as we were in the comfy chairs she said, “Allison is one of my favorite designers. Great left brain/right brain thinker. Not that common.”

  “She got the best of her parents,” I said, leaving out that she also got some of the worst of me, but I didn’t have to.

  “Not first rate in the interpersonal department, no offense I hope.”

  “So she had some enemies,” I said, “if that’s not too strong a word.”

  “Will it surprise you to learn that creative people can have delicate feelings? No, enemies isn’t too strong. It’s a tough business even when you get along with people. I call Allison for the work that’s so tricky and complex it makes your hair hurt. But never as part of a team. Growing up, did she share her toys and play nicely with the other children?”

  “You probably know the answer to that.”

  “I put her on staff once for about a week. Disaster. I sent her back home with a plaque that said ‘suffer fools.’ Probably threw it out.”

  “She didn’t. Can you tell me who had a bad beef with her?”

  “Bad enough to beat her up? No. Designers specialize in stabs to the back, though entirely metaphorical. I’m really sorry about this. Terrible thing. Do you want some coffee?”

  I admitted I did. She called somebody on the phone and a few minutes later two mugs were brought in by a young guy attempting to grow a beard, maybe to balance out his glasses, which had frames made of thick, black plastic.

  “Do you know who else hired her?” I asked.

  “Other than Brandon?” I must have looked confused. “Brandon Weeks, my former partner. The only writer who could work with her. Just as smart and difficult, but a lot crazier.”

  “Explains the name of the place.”

  “I bought him out in the nineties when he was trying to single-handedly sustain the Manhattan cocaine industry. Laudable, but not business friendly. Rehab saved his life but didn’t do much for his people skills. He makes Allison look like Dale Carnegie. Though I think they’ve been on the outs the last couple years. They used to sweep the awards shows. Now it’s just her. I don’t hear much about him. I don’t care. Some people are so toxic you’d need about a million years to even look at them without a beta blocker.”

  “I don’t know any of this,” I said, mostly to myself.

  “Kids don’t tell you shit. I have two sons who work in theater and nuclear biology, respectively, and live in apartments that I can find on a map and that’s about all I know. Oh, one of them has a cat and the other dated a girl who liked him to wear dresses. Don’t ask me how I found that out.”

  We talked a little more about all the changes going on in her business, how the Internet had turned everything on its head, which I could have guessed on my own even though I didn’t own a computer. She promised to think about whom Allison might have worked with beyond the already mentioned Brandon Weeks, and anything else that might shed some light. I thanked her, gave her my cell phone number, and got up to leave. She stood up and loomed over me.

  “I probably gave you the wrong impression about me and Allison,” she said. “We actually get along great. I love her even if she keeps me at arm’s length. I just figured she had a lousy childhood or something. Oh shit, I just said that to her father. I’m sorry.”

  I shook her offered hand.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Interpersonal skills aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

  And just to prove the point, on the way out I told the kid with the wispy beard if he ever wanted to get laid to get contacts and shave off the stupid beard. Althea said, “Listen to the man,” and crushed my knuckles with a handshake that sent me back to the street thinking that fools weren’t the only people worth suffering.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Abby managed to time her appearance at the hospital a few minutes before the doctors let us into Allison’s room so we could watch her come out of the induced coma. Abby’s husband was there as well, a man with a handsome chiseled face and slicked-back hair that started halfway up his skull, bestowing an even greater air of gravity and importance than his substantial résumé and investment holdings already conveyed.

  Amanda was back at the hotel, wisely reducing the awkwardness of the moment to the merely surreal.

  Abby looked great. Only a few years younger than I, it didn’t remotely show. The same gifts that made her such a neck-snapping beauty when we met in our twenties up in Boston hadn’t flagged, rendering an unachievably fine specimen of middle age without a lick of surgery or prosthesis.

  Her family always assumed I married her for her money and social standing, when in fact it was for her body and its rapacious appetites, no less a foolishly unsustainable motivation.

  “Samuel,” she said to me in the waiting room, offering her cool, dry hand and a dig she liked to give my long-dead proletarian parents for officially naming me Sam. She, on the other hand, insisted everyone call her Abigail.

  “Hello, Abby.”

  “You better brace yourself. We’re in for a long haul.”

  “I knew living in this city was a terrible idea.”

  Handsome as she was, her face was taut with worry. Her husband, Evan Quirogo, in turn was clearly worried about her. He put a thick arm around her, pinning her arms, and spoke in his musical accent a few inches from her ear.

  “We’ll get through this, darling. I promise you.”

  She nodded, eyes downcast.

  “I know, Evan. I’m just so frightened.”

  I might have done things a little differently with our daughter if I’d been around more as she grew up, but I knew as a matter of faith and observation that Abby was a good and caring mother. It wasn’t easy for her to see her rampant and groundless fears become not so groundless after all.

  “Do they know who did this?” Evan asked me.

  “Not yet,” I said, “but they’re working on it.”

  “I should hope so,” said Abby, betraying to my sensitive ear her abiding conviction that all official institutions were inherently incompetent.

  The East Indian doc who’d first briefed me and Nathan came into the room with Nathan at his side. Abby was polite but cool when shaking Nathan’s hand. She thanked him for getting Allison to the hospital. Evan chimed in with “Good show.”

  “Experience tells me her eyes will be open, but don’t expect much awareness,” said the doc. “That’ll come along slowly.”

  “So she’ll recover?” Abby asked.

  “How far we don’t know. Not yet.”

  He described the procedures needed to get her through the initial stages in medical terms I mostly understood. I knew Abby didn’t, but she nodded along with confidence, then led our
party behind the doc as we made the short trip into the ICU.

  Having seen the cliché of people lying still in a hospital bed with their heads wrapped in bandages was inadequate preparation for the real thing. Especially when the person in question was the dearest being in the universe whose safety and well-being had been an all-consuming obsession for more than thirty years. Abby actually staggered on her sensibly shod feet. Evan and I each took an arm. Nathan took Allison’s hand.

  With the doc’s help, Nathan described what all the tubes, wiring, and electronic monitors were for. I didn’t follow it very well, though I was glad someone was speaking, saving me from talking through the wad of anguish stuck in my throat. Abby just wept while Evan murmured reassurances in her ear.

  “We’re pretty liberal about visiting hours,” said the doc. “It’s good to talk to her, even if she’s nonresponsive. It’ll help her regain consciousness.”

  “I’m here for the duration,” said Nathan.

  “Good of your employer,” I said.

  “I quit that job. Allison didn’t want me to take it anyway.”

  “That kid’ll do anything to get her way,” I said.

  Abby frowned at me, though mostly out of long habit.

  “We need to open up the city place,” said Abby, “but then I’m available. We can take shifts.”

  I left them to figure that out and scrammed out of there as quickly as good form would allow. I hated hospitals to a degree you might call phobic, though more importantly, they could look after Allison better than I at this point, and there was no place for them in what I had to do.

  JOE SULLIVAN met me and Detective Fenton at a bar in Midtown. When they shook hands I learned Fenton’s first name was Bill. They didn’t know each other, but had a lot of common acquaintances in different police units in and around the city. Most prominently Ross Semple.

  “You heard about the shoot-out in Bed-Stuy when Semple and his partner went to interview a homicide witness and stumbled into a drug deal,” said Fenton.

  “Ross doesn’t talk about his time here,” said Sullivan. “We just hear it from guys like you.”

  “The people in the apartment thought the cops were the buyers, which they went along with. Then the real buyers show up. Semple shot his own partner in the arm to prove his cred. The sellers then start shooting the real buyers, and after the smoke clears, Ross is the last man standing. Said he couldn’t hear for a month.”

  “What happened to the partner?”

  “Became a gym teacher over in Lindenhurst. Semple pretty much worked alone after that. You can understand why.”

  “Any new thinking on my daughter’s situation?” I asked, hauling the grinning cops back to the present.

  Fenton nodded.

  “We’re interviewing everybody she worked with, including the attack-of-the-fifty-foot-tall woman at Brand & Weeks that you apparently softened up for us.”

  “She didn’t help much,” I said.

  “Employers usually don’t. Most don’t ask about their workers’ personal lives and most workers don’t tell.”

  I could attest to that. When I supervised a few thousand people I kept the rules to a minimum, but one was keep the home junk at home. Abby saw that as another misanthropic impulse blocking my rise up the career ladder.

  “Did she tell you about Brandon Weeks?” I asked.

  “Sure. The wacky partner. He’s on our list.”

  “I was going there next.”

  “Be my guest,” said Fenton. “Joe and I can canvass the neighborhood and pay calls on the local low life. She let the guy in, but that doesn’t mean she knew him that well. People do stupid shit like that all the time. Sorry. No offense.”

  “People in this town keep thinking they’re offending me,” I said. “You need to get to the Hamptons where nobody cares what you say.”

  “Offensive comments are sanctioned by municipal code,” said Sullivan.

  They left after that and I sat at the bar and called Randall Dodge, the computer warrior working on the hard drive from Allison’s computer.

  “I like her stuff,” he said when I told him who was calling. When he cracked Allison’s e-mail account he opened some of the attachments.

  “Me, too. Got it all from her mother.”

  “Not so sure about that. There’s a lot of engineering under those designs.”

  “What’s in the e-mail?” I asked.

  “Usual boring stuff. She could use a little help with her bedside manner. Would get more business.”

  “Anything stand out, hostility-wise?” I asked.

  “Lots of drama with some dude named Weeks. Your basic fuck-you-he-said, fuck-you-she-said. Whatever happened was off camera before the e-mails started. Sounds bad, but who knows. Allison’s a pretty straight-ahead communicator, a little too straight ahead, but writing to Weeks, she gets positively poetic. And we’re not talking Emily Dickinson.”

  “Sylvia Plath?”

  “More like it.”

  “Anything else of note?” I asked.

  “Can’t say yet. Just started digging around. How much time do I have?”

  “Take all you want.”

  “Say hi for me when she wakes up,” he said.

  “I will.”

  I put the phone down and ordered another drink, feeling that it was fair recompense for taking up bar space, even though there were only two other guys on the other stools. To make the time even more productive, I called Jackie Swaitkowski.

  I let her tell me how sorry and angry she was over what happened to Allison. She asked me if there was anything she could do and I had an answer for that.

  “Don’t let up on Alfie Aldergreen,” I said.

  “I’m not. Carlo told me he conveyed the disposition of Alfie’s remains to the VA, who’ll give him a decent burial in one of their cemeteries. Jimmy Watruss is taking care of the details. I still want to have a memorial service, though, when I get you back in town.”

  “You don’t have to wait for me,” I said.

  “I know. But I’m going to wait for you. Carlo also gave me the results of the blood sample off your rear window.”

  Sullivan was right. Jackie could move the ME to feats of speed unavailable to his official clients. I didn’t ask her how she did it.

  “And?”

  “He’s a cow.”

  At first I thought she meant Vendetti.

  “More like a skinny rooster,” I said.

  “No, I mean the guy who busted in your windshield. The DNA was from a cow. Could have been a bull or a steer. Clearly bovine.”

  I had to think about that for a moment, so I was quiet on the phone. Jackie hates dead air.

  “Say something,” she said.

  “Be careful out there. When livestock go rogue, who knows what’s next.”

  “Sullivan’s there with you?” she asked.

  “Yeah. He’s hanging out with the plainclothesman they put on Allison’s case.”

  “Speaking of plain clothes, there’s an article in the Times today on Veckstrom running for DA. They actually think he has a chance.”

  “The better candidate?”

  “The richer. Edith Madison never had to do much in the way of fund-raising. Lived off connections, but a lot of those are dead, or moved to Florida. You can tell she hasn’t the stomach for an all-out fight. Too unseemly.”

  “Who cares. A pox on both their houses.”

  “You know that fat manila envelope Oksana kept waving in front of your nose? Veckstrom gets the job, that’s the first place he’s going to look.”

  “I’m not worried about that. I got a good lawyer.”

  “She’d be better if you actually paid her.”

  “I know I took Joey Wentworth’s parents, but I’m a little distracted. What do you say?”

  “I said I’d help, but they’re right there in the east eighties.”

  “Okay. I got it,” I said. “After I visit Brandon Weeks.”

  “Who’s that?”

/>   “Someone Allison hated, apparently. I assume he hated her back.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said.

  “This is what lawyers are good for. Wise and temperate counsel.”

  I went outside and looked at the piece of paper with Brandon’s address that Althea gave me. It was in a part of Greenwich Village that I knew well from my young years as an urban desperado. I didn’t know if the neighborhood would be the same as I remembered it.

  It wasn’t. It was a lot cleaner, flush with active commerce and free of the day-to-day impoverished specters that used to haunt those environs. Brandon had a walk-up in a building that had started life as a townhouse, long ago succumbing to subdivision. I pushed the button on the outside panel.

  “You’re kidding me,” the intercom squawked at me.

  “Not yet. Haven’t had the chance.”

  “I don’t take deliveries unannounced. Call and make an appointment.”

  “It’s not a delivery,” I said. “It’s about Allison Acquillo.”

  “Oh that’s priceless. She’s not suing me is she?”

  “Somebody tried to kill her. She’s in a coma. Buzz me in.”

  “Oh my lord. Are you the cops?”

  “No. The father. Talk to me now or talk to me later. But you’re gonna have to talk to me.”

  A moment went by, then the buzzer buzzed and I walked in the building and up the three flights to his apartment where he was waiting for me. With a sharp nose, high forehead, long neck, and thick round glasses, my first thought was startled terrier.

  “When did this happen?” he asked, his voice crisply modulated and much deeper than it sounded over the intercom.

  I told him the basic facts as they currently stood. He listened without moving in or out of the doorway to his apartment. He wore a starched white shirt and bow tie, suspenders, and old-fashioned armbands that held the french cuffs away from his wrists. I asked him if he was going somewhere.