by Chris Knopf
Allison was in her wheelchair looking pale and shrunken, but as we walked up to the patio I saw her smile at something Nathan was saying. I was pleased to see Amanda’s outdoor dry bar had been rolled out onto the paving stones, and even more delighted to see the Penguin ice bucket covered in condensation. Eddie barely stirred from his spot next to Amanda, who he could safely assume would slip him treats off the cheese and cracker tray. At least he wagged his tail at me, acknowledging that the serious food was only delivered next door.
The sun was where it was supposed to be over Robbins Island, getting ready to turn red and ignite a row of clouds on the horizon put there to make a flashy production out of the sunset.
The surface of the Little Peconic Bay was rippling, but the breeze had yet to push up respectable waves. Out of habit, I located a sailboat and tried to judge sea conditions by the angle of heel and the amount of sail the captain was putting into the wind. With a twinge, I decided conditions were likely perfect. Dry air, decent wind, moderate wave action, magic-hour light. I asked myself why I wasn’t out there, and the answer was the same as always. Too much happening on shore. This time that was indisputable, which made the other times seem foolish. I made a mental note. If I get out of this situation intact, I’m getting out on the water.
Jackie poured her requisite tall white wine. Then she brushed her big ball of strawberry blonde hair away from her face before pulling a chair up next to Allison, a not-so-subtle display of the wonders of reconstructive surgery.
“It went okay,” I said. “Do you know a deputy inspector named Josh Gilliam?” I asked Sullivan. “Runs a precinct on the Upper East Side. He’s Bill Fenton’s cousin.”
Sullivan said he’d heard of Gilliam from his time with Ross and Gardella, but never met him.
“Edith Madison’s apartment is in his jurisdiction,” said Jackie. “His detectives handled her husband’s death. Determined it accidental.”
“Was it?” Sullivan asked.
“No reason to think otherwise,” she said. “Unless you’re Sam, who also has no reason to think otherwise.”
“Contrarian suits him,” said Amanda.
“How ’bout that sunset?” I asked.
We lapsed into a frequently repeated appreciation for the rosy sparkle of late afternoon on the Little Peconic Bay. It gave me a chance to down half my tumbler, which did the job of settling the agitation that crackled like background static through my nervous system. A pack of cigarettes would have helped that, too, I thought, for the millionth time.
“Speaking of Edith Madison,” said Amanda, spoiling my diversion strategy, “she’s down in the polls. Not so much because of Veckstrom. Some people are questioning whether she really wants to win.”
“I’m one of those people,” said Jackie. “You can’t blame her. After all the years in the job, her reward is listening to Veckstrom and his party dump all over her performance.”
“And having her personal life dragged through the media,” said Amanda.
“If she quits now, she hands the job to Veckstrom,” said Jackie. “It’s too late for another contender.”
“That’d be a big disappointment to Oksana Quan,” I said.
“The Snow Queen,” said Allison. “That’s what we called her at RISD.”
“So you knew her,” said Amanda.
“A little. I don’t think anyone actually knew her, like, as friends. She just walked around campus looking gorgeous and then disappeared on breaks and weekends. The word was a guy at Brown. That happened. Not everybody liked the freaky, deaky social life at RISD.”
“She said they were all jealous of your talent,” said Amanda.
Allison looked surprised.
“They did? News to me.”
“I bet the guy was prelaw,” I said.
“Might explain it,” said Jackie.
Allison disagreed.
“There were a lot of brainy kids at RISD who ended up there through some romantic notion about the life of the artist,” she said, “or because they got accepted and didn’t know what else to do. You could take courses at Brown, and we’d see some of them drift away. By senior year, the hard core was still there spending all night in the studio and experimenting with their hair. I should have bought a tattoo franchise.”
“So Oksana bailed,” I said.
“I guess. She wasn’t at graduation. I assumed she finished over at Brown, though who knows. We didn’t exactly care what happened to the HPSS types.”
“HPSS?” Jackie asked.
“History, philosophy, and social sciences,” said Allison. “You could actually major in that if you didn’t like getting oil paint all over your clothes.”
“Sounds like prelaw,” said Jackie.
“Closest thing we had,” said Allison.
As they talked I imagined Oksana drifting like a wraith through the crowded, narrow streets of academic Providence, aloof from the burning passions of the confused creatives, yet possessing a passion of her own, finally realized as the fierce defender of another Snow Queen, this one doomed to fade back into the shadow world.
I managed to finish off my tumbler, and a second, by which time all I wanted was to fade back into my cottage next door, where with any luck I would get through to morning with the spirits that haunted my inner consciousness bludgeoned into submission.
PERHAPS INSPIRED by the word bludgeon, I found myself the next morning on the way to Sonny’s boxing gym with my workout clothes and a tankard of dense coffee. Mostly on autopilot, I didn’t fully realize my actual motivation until I was pulling into the parking lot right behind Bennie Gardella. He gave me a blank look as we got out of our cars, but said nothing as I followed him into the gym.
And that was how it stood as we both went through warm-up exercises at opposite ends of the room. I’d always known the value of stretching, which at this point had nearly existential importance. So it was over a half hour before I put on my gloves and started working on the speed bag.
I rarely allowed my ego to infect any of my life’s pursuits, feeling that a wary humility was a safer posture, having seen hubris bring down any number of aspiring boxers, carpenters, and corporate executives. But I had a secret pride in my ability with the speed bag, and even at this stage of waning reflexes, I knew how to keep the thing chattering away without looking like I was much trying.
I often got a little grudging validation for this from the kids who hung around the gym, leading to more than one impromptu boxing lesson for the ones who also knew how to keep their own egos from cluttering up their progress.
So I wasn’t completely surprised to realize Gardella was standing there watching me, though it did disturb my rhythm. So as not to completely flub the performance, I stopped the bag with both gloves.
“Anything I can do for you?” I asked.
“Just watching the circus act,” he said.
He wore a set of gloves himself. They were well broken in and of an expensive type the pros used for sparring. He was shaking out his arms as if getting ready for just that.
“Want to see how that fancy shit works out in the ring?” he asked me.
I said I already knew.
“And I don’t do that anymore. Doctor’s orders.”
“Old age?”
“Concussions,” I said. “Three at least. You’re only allowed so many.”
He didn’t exactly jeer at me, but I could feel waves of menace coming off his face. I let go of the bag and adjusted my stance.
“So not just because you’re a pussy?” he said.
A blanket of weariness settled over me.
“Jesus Christ, Gardella, what’s with the hostility?”
He didn’t hesitate to answer.
“I don’t like you,” he said. “I don’t like amateurs with their noses stuck up the asses of professional cops. People who never had to actually live with the responsibility for containing the lowlifes of the world while the world treats us like we’re even lower. Self-righteous suck-ups li
ke you who hang around cops like a groupie trying to fuck some brainless rock star.”
As with many contact sports, boxing is in great part a head game, and not just as a punching bag. You need to have as much control over your emotions as your body. Muhammad Ali demonstrated that with poetry and precision. Gardella would have to do better than insult to goad me.
“You won’t believe me,” I said, “but I admire what you did back in your undercover days. From what I hear, you did a lot. So maybe that explains the bad attitude. I don’t know, but I’m not risking dementia just to help out with your anger management therapy.”
He stood and processed that for a few moments, though it didn’t seem to quell the animus.
“I know what you’re up to, Acquillo,” he said, pointing at me with his glove. “I’ve been on you every step of the way. You want to drag Ross and the Southampton cops into some trumped-up corruption charge. Some snitches get wasted and everybody’s first thought is dirty cops are in on it. That’s bullshit. Nobody’s going down for this other than the bastards who actually did it. I’m here to make sure that’s what happens.”
One of the most important benefits of keeping your head in these situations is it allows the thinking part of your brain to keep working while the more animal parts are picking out targets.
“Who have you been talking to?” I asked him. “I thought Ross brought you out here to help him look inside his department. And not just their filing system.”
“Is that what he told you?”
I admitted he didn’t.
“No. I inferred.”
“Well, you can stick your inferring up your ass. That’s bullshit.”
“Inferences. I think that’s what you meant to say,” I said.
He dropped his right shoulder and took a step toward me, his face shifting from seething rage to something a lot more businesslike. I knew what was coming.
So I sat down on a bench and put my gloves over my ears.
“What the hell are you doing,” he said.
“Protecting my head. It’s the only one I have.”
“Chicken shit.”
“Fear is sometimes a useful thing,” I said. “Do you know it’s physiologically akin to anger? The old fight-flight.”
“Crazy fucker.”
I took my gloves away.
“You get the same basic adrenal response,” I said. “Good for clubbing a predator to death with a stone ax or running like hell. In either case, the things you need the least are your higher-level cognitive functions. So they essentially switch off so your animal brain can take over and do its job. In other words, nothing makes you stupider than fear and anger.”
His own cognitive functions were grappling pretty hard with some of these concepts, which at least caused him to hesitate long enough for a couple of my unofficial boxing students to wander into that part of the gym. Neither one of them would be much use against Gardella, but there were plenty more where they came from.
I pointed that out, causing his hesitation to turn toward uncertainty.
“I’m not going to fight you, Bennie. I’m not that angry, or afraid.”
I waved over the two kids. Gardella took a step back.
“Hey, Lewis,” I said to the bigger one. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
He looked disturbed by the question.
“Shit no, Sam. You be more of a smart motherfucker.”
His friend agreed.
“That’s right,” he said. “Sam’s in possession of some serious knowledge.”
“The rest of your posse here?” I asked him.
Lewis gestured toward the far end of the gym.
“Five, six of ’em if they can get they asses out of the locker room.”
“Do any of them think I’m stupid?” I asked him.
Lewis got even more upset.
“Nobody thinkin’ you do stupid shit, Sam. Exceptin’ that dumb ass ride of yours.”
“I think that settles it,” I said to Bennie, and pushed past him on the way to the locker room. I could hear the two kids saying things like, “Maybe that old fucker gez got hit too many times,” but I didn’t much care, still in possession of all my higher-level cognitive functions, to say nothing of my serious knowledge.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I drove directly to Southampton Town Police HQ to save Ross the trouble of demanding my presence. Orlovsky was back at her post behind the glassed-in desk, so that saved me the need to be nice to the new adjutant. She was thinner and darker, as if she’d tried to bake off her sorrow in the sun. She showed little affect as I approached the window.
“Tell him I’m here,” I said, and sat down to wait. She made the call then, a moment later, buzzed me in. I walked back to Ross’s office.
Sergeant Lausanne looked up as I passed her desk without saying anything. Her face was still sprightly, though the effervescence had lost some of its froth.
I didn’t bother to knock. Ross was in his chair, seat pulled back and feet on top of a pile of papers. Cigarette smoke clogged the room.
“Ronny called me,” he said. “So spare me the commentary.”
“What the hell is going on, Ross? You bring this head case out here from Up Island to help you investigate your own police force and he thinks he’s on a crusade to defend it from me. I’m getting the feeling he’s got a point. Something’s very fucked up around here.”
He took his feet off the desk with some effort to avoid spilling the papers off onto the floor, with partial success. He lit a fresh cigarette with the half-smoked one still in his mouth.
“It’s interesting how so many people in and out of the police department think I have some sort of control over Bennie Gardella,” he said.
“You don’t?”
“I didn’t bring him out here. I just requested an administrative officer to clean up the mess we’ve made out of our paperwork. I want to go digital. Stick everything in the computer. A false hope, some may say, but we need to keep up with the times.”
He gathered up the remainder of his footrest and dropped it on the floor.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’m sending Bennie back to Nassau County. They need to give me somebody who actually wants to sit in front of a computer screen all day. Lucille’s pretty good, but she can’t do it all herself.”
“You really didn’t bring him out here.”
“I really didn’t. I’m the one who pulled him out of undercover, before he got so buggy that the bad guys shot him out of sheer self-preservation. I’m the one who sent him into rehab as a condition of his continued employment in law enforcement, though I almost regretted that he took us up on it. I was hoping I’d seen the last of him when I took the job out here.”
I couldn’t tell if it was all the smoke in the air or my state of anxious confusion that made me want to leap across the desk and grab the pack of Winstons out of his shirt pocket and stuff the whole thing in my mouth.
“You like reminding me that you owe no explanation for anything you do,” I said, “but at this point, it would sure help.”
He leaned forward and put both elbows on the desk so he could use his hands to roughly illustrate his narrative.
“Do you know how they find new subatomic particles?” he asked. “They first have to theorize their existence. What makes a good theory? Things are happening that make no sense. Even in the weird world of quantum mechanics, reality has to operate within certain constructs, even if they’re only explainable mathematically.”
I told him they mentioned something about that in physics class at MIT.
“Really? I barely got past Aristotle,” he said. “Anyway whenever there’s anomalous behavior by various forces and objects in the universe, scientists start thinking, well, if this thing is doing this, and that thing is doing that, ergo, there must be some unseen agent, whether made of energy or mass, that causes these things to happen.”
“Alfie might have suggested the Nazgûl.”
&nbs
p; “Trouble is, theorists can’t just say, ‘there’s this thing we’ve never seen nor heard from that is causing all this nutty behavior by all these other things.’ They have to prove its existence. So what do they do?”
“Break for lunch?”
“They call in the experimental boys, the ones with the colliders, the particle accelerators, who basically smash things together until the thing they’re looking for zings out of the ether.”
“Which one are you?” I asked him. “Theorist or collider?”
He seemed pleased with the question.
“I tend to the empirical, the demonstrable truth. But when it comes to collisions, no one’s better than you, Sam. I admit it.”
“Not sure if I should say thanks.”
“What’s more, you’re good on the theoretical side. It’s no wonder your company let you run R&D. You were a double threat. Until you fucked it up, of course.”
I learned from the professor who taught Zen at MIT the importance the masters put in humility. A lesson Ross seemed particularly suited to reinforce.
“You’re the one who told Gardella I was out to screw the Southampton Town Police,” I said. “At the same time you had me out there chasing the snitch killers.”
“God, that’d be devious.”
“You wanted to smash some things together to see what popped up.”
“Some metaphors are a little too close to home,” he said.
“So what did you learn?”
“Inconclusive, though I don’t think you’re done colliding.”
There wasn’t a lot of lightness in the way he said that, and I took it accurately as a dismissal. I wanted to stay in that sulfurous atmosphere as long as it took to wrench more information out of the chief’s byzantine mind, but I knew I had all I was going to get. I also understood, as exasperating as the situation was, that Ross had told me the truth.
Just not the whole truth, so help me God.
ON THE way back to Oak Point I called Jackie before she had a chance to call and accuse me of holding out on her. I made her listen to the whole story, despite several attempts to interrupt me. When I got it all out, she said, “Oksana called. Edith wants to see us ASAP.”
