by Chris Knopf
One of the best things about living alone is getting off the bra and scratching that poor, tortured skin under my boobs that no matter what kind of bra I buy always feels itchy and chafed at the end of the day. You can’t do this with full satisfaction in front of somebody else, I don’t care how long you’ve lived with him. There’s no such thing as a bra that fits and looks good at the same time. Anyone who says there is owns a bra factory or is lying through her teeth.
Some people in the Hamptons, either crazy old-money types or tasteless slobs flush with undeserved good fortune, name their houses. They put out signs such as DUNE VIEW or BUY LOW, SELL HIGH. If I were going to do that, I’d call my house Cognitive Dissonance.
It’s a horrible, horrifying mess. My brain has no idea how it got that way and how anybody could possibly live in such squalor. My heart loves it.
This is another advantage of living on my own. I only have to make excuses for the house to myself. Since I’m easily swayed by my own arguments, the conflicts are more fleeting and less destructive to the relationship than when there was a whole separate human being to contend with.
I was there in my squalid house trying to remember how to run the VCR, which I was determined to get some use out of before replacing it with a DVD player or whatever dazzling technology they came up with next, when my cell phone rang. I usually remember to turn it off at night, so I found the sound a little disturbing. I answered it anyway.
“Why can’t I just call the police?” said Sergey, after I said hello.
“You can. But they’ll probably tell you to take a sleeping pill and go back to bed.”
“It’s the same as having an intruder. They’d do something about that.”
“They would, but this isn’t the same. Not technically. Can we talk about this tomorrow? I’m sure we can work something out, but I don’t think now’s the time. Bold accusations in the middle of the night, however legitimate, can only work against us.”
He was quiet on the other end of the line.
“I suppose you’re right. It’s only that she’s taken over the master bath, put all my toiletries in a paper bag, and locked the door. She’s in there now, I’m sure of it. I’ve been standing here holding my damn toothbrush for an eternity. It’s beyond the pale.”
A tiny traitor part of me urged the more sensible part to ask about the lien the dirty bathroom hog had on his house, but the sensible part shut her up. Nothing was going to happen between now and tomorrow, which would be soon enough to confront that issue. All that was needed now was more wine.
With the cell phone held to my ear by my shoulder, I was able to open another bottle and pour a big girl’s glassful.
“I’m going to immerse myself in your case first thing in the morning, Mr. Pontecello. You are my highest priority. I’m sorry about the bathroom, but I’m sure there are other places around the house to brush your teeth. Just console yourself with the fact that these indignities are nearly at an end.”
He was quiet again for a while, which, of course, I interpreted as hurt feelings, but then he said, “I suppose I could continue organizing Elizabeth’s papers.”
“You could. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it might be therapeutic.”
“You are a thoughtful person, Miss Swaitkowski. I am grateful. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, matching the gravity of the moment. Then I hit the end button.
I went back to the VCR, which rewarded me about an hour later with a tape that started jumping around right at the moment the serial killer was using a skeleton key to jimmy the heroine’s apartment door lock. The cell rang again just as the door clicked open and the music turned Hitchcock. I looked at the screen and saw Sergey’s number.
“Sorry, dude, done for the night,” I said, and let the phone ring itself out. Then I turned it off like I should have done in the first place.
I downed the wine and refilled. I tossed the remote for the VCR back on the landfill in the middle of the room and lit a cigarette. I scratched my head as a totally ineffectual way of dealing with that other itch growing in my brain. The one no amount of scratching would ever relieve. That jittery, nasty, unscratchable itch of curiosity.
Like a girl attached to someone else’s remote control, I felt myself lugging wineglass and cigarette out to the dank and moldy sunroom off the back of the house where I had my home office, now more a museum dedicated to my early professional inadequacies. The old computer was still there, however, still hooked up to the Internet and eager to please.
I snuggled my butt into the office chair and fired up the old HP. The feel of the mouse and keyboard was comforting, like the busted-in driver’s seat of a paid-off car. I shoveled off a clear spot on the desk for my wineglass and waited for everything to boot.
First I searched for Eunice Hamilton Wolsonowicz. Which yielded nothing on her but a few hundred thousand bits on Antonin Wolsonowicz, the painter. I’d never heard of him, but a lot of other people had. He’d come from a well-off family in Czechoslovakia, owners of a furniture business that he was supposed to take over, but instead he ran off to Paris to be an artist. Whatever conflict this might have caused was settled by the Munich Agreement, which basically handed the country over to Hitler. Mom Wolsonowicz was a Polish Jew who’d turned Catholic for her husband but wasn’t about to take any chances. They were lucky enough to sell the factory and split for Paris, where Antonin found them a villa in the outskirts of the city. It was a great gig for Tony, a rising star of the salon, with his doting parents and their deep pockets still out there in the burbs, within easy reach.
Great gig until Hitler was back on their doorstep and once again they had to get out of town. This time they opened up a little more air, escaping through the Azores to Havana, and from there slipping into Miami as the guests of a drunken American war correspondent they’d known in Paris who by all rights should have been Ernest Hemingway but instead was a guy named Edgar Staltz.
The rest of the commentary featured Tony W., as he became known, showing up in all these American cities where he was a dazzling success as an artist, a rakish bon vivant, an A-list partygoer, and all this other stuff that went with being rich and famous and that always sounded made-up to me. Though I know sometimes it’s not. Some people just end up living those kinds of lives. I know this because I’ve lived in the Hamptons all my life, and I’ve met a few of those people, some I actually like.
In 2000, a month into the new millennium, Tony dropped dead at his studio in Scottsdale, Arizona. This made me sorry for him but glad for my research. I dug up the obituary and finally found evidence that he had a wife named Eunice, who was fifteen years younger, a daughter named Wendy, and an adopted son named Oscar. The subtext of the reports was that he’d sold a lot of art in his life, and bought a lot of real estate with the proceeds, leaving Eunice, Wendy, and Oscar pretty free to grieve in the comfort to which they’d become accustomed.
The kids had both moved to Long Island after college. Mom kept the house in Arizona as home base, while maintaining a membership at the Gracefield Tennis Club in Southampton—complete with residence privileges—inherited from her parents. The second thing the English settlers did when they got to the Hamptons, after thanking God for the great-looking real estate, was to found the Gracefield Club. Anyway, that’s what the club wanted you to think. The place was so exclusive the members would exclude themselves if they could figure out how.
There was more I could have read, but I’d finally tired myself out, which was part of the strategy. I need to be completely exhausted to go to sleep at night. I need to feel myself nodding off at the desk or on the sofa in front of the TV. Otherwise I might be in bed with my eyes closed but my brain still dangerously in gear, revving up for a nighttime of psycho-insomnia.
This is another key to living alone. Never go to bed with your hopes and fears still awake. Make sure they’re beaten unconscious before you get within ten feet of the bedroom.
Which is what I did successf
ully that night. Teeth brushed and lights out, the alarm set with a half-hour snooze already programmed in, flat on my back on top of the covers in my favorite pajamas, the ones plastered with pictures of tropical drinks, about to pass blissfully into the abyss.
Then my home phone rang. I keep it on the night table on the left side of the bed. So when it rings and I’m half asleep, I stick the receiver to my left ear.
What happens then is nothing, because I’m totally deaf in my left ear. The eardrum and all the cute little bones that make it work are gone.
The night table’s always been on the left, and I can’t seem to muster the energy to move it to the other side, partly because there’s so much junk piled on top I’d need a wrecking crew to move it.
When I realized I wasn’t hearing anything, I rolled all the way onto my stomach, stuck the phone to my right ear, and rolled back again.
“Uh,” I said eloquently into the receiver.
“Hey, Jackie,” said a cheerful male voice. “If you’re doing something I don’t want to hear about, I’ll wait till you finish up.”
“Jesus.”
“He doesn’t want to hear about it, either.”
“Sleeping. I’m trying to sleep.”
“If that’s all, I need you down here right away.”
It was Joe Sullivan. A Southampton Town plainclothesman and conditional friend. I usually cooperated with him on my criminal cases, when I wasn’t trying not to, which was why the friendship had always remained conditional.
“Where’s here?”
“Sagaponack. Got a stiffy with your name on it.”
“What?” I asked, finally relenting to the inevitable by sitting up and rubbing thwarted sleep out of my eyes.
“Dead guy in the middle of the road. Has your business card in his pocket.”
I held the phone with my shoulder as I stood and dropped my pajama bottoms.
“A little more detail would help,” I said.
“We got a call from a lady in Sagaponack about a guy lying in the street. She thought we might want to know so we could put up protective barriers or something. I was in the neighborhood, so I took the call with Danny Izard. Your card was in the guy’s shirt pocket.”
By then I was all the way out of my pj’s and riffling through the central clothes pile for jeans, a clean shirt, and cowboy boots.
“I mean the guy. What’s he look like?”
“Older guy,” said Sullivan. “Approximately five-eight, dark hair, maybe one-forty, wearing the remains of a two-tone shirt and some kind of silk pants. Pretty chewed up.”
For some reason I’d already heard that description in my head before he said it. It might have been the timing or a legitimate premonition. I don’t know, but it didn’t make it feel any better.
“Aw, Christ. Sergey.”
“Russian?”
“Just give me directions. I’ll need about twenty minutes to get there.”
I grabbed my purse—too elegant a word for the battered feed bag I hauled around—and jumped into my trusty Toyota pickup. Another legacy of my time with Peter Swaitkowski that I couldn’t seem to part with. I didn’t even like the thing. I’m more of a Volvo station wagon than a Japanese pickup kind of girl. But as long as it refused to die, I couldn’t find a way to part with it.
Sagaponack is a made-up village southeast of Bridgehampton with the dubious distinction of having the highest average property values in America. They didn’t have the highest top end in the Hamptons, but they’d managed to draw the borders in a way that kept people like me from dragging down the mean.
I like driving through there in the daylight. Lots of open space despite the sprawling mansions and towering privet hedges. Most people like me who are born and bred and forever stuck in the Hamptons spend lots of emotional energy fretting over how it’s changed. They don’t seem to realize that everything’s changed everywhere, including places like North Dakota, where everyone’s moved out. Don’t get me wrong, I miss a lot of what used to be here, but I’m not going to ignore some of the good things that have come in. Like clueless clients willing to pay decent money to local real-estate lawyers.
I’m not so crazy about driving in Sagaponack at night. Too easy to make a wrong turn and end up stuck in a cul-de-sac. Though, that night, I just followed the flashing lights illuminating the trees. A few hundred yards out, a pair of cruisers and a few sawhorses established a roadblock. I recognized one of the cops.
“Hey, Danny, waz up?”
He leaned halfway into my window. I leaned back.
“Whatcha doin’ here, Jackie, ambulance chasin’?”
“Christ, that’s insulting, Danny. I don’t chase ambulances.”
“’Course not, Jackie. You race ’em.”
“Sullivan called me. I’m supposed to be here.”
Danny pulled away from my window.
“In that case, Miss Attorney, you oughta go on in.”
“You think? Ambulance chasing. Jesus Christ.”
“Don’t start gettin’ the way you get,” Danny called to me as I accelerated away from him. “Just makin’ fun.”
Yeah, bullshit, I said to myself as I ran through the notchy gears of the old bucket of Japanese bolts.
A car, I said to myself. What would be so wrong with having an actual car? With comfy seats and an automatic transmission. A radio that works and a parking brake that actually stops the thing from rolling down a hill. What would be so wrong with that?
I ran into another blockade a hundred feet down the road and had to go through the same rigmarole.
“It’s a pretty unpleasant scenario over there, miss,” said a cop I didn’t know. “You sure you want to be exposed?”
“Please inform Detective Sullivan that Attorney Swaitkowski is here,” I said, then rolled up my window in his face.
The cop stood there looking through the window for a minute, then knocked on the glass.
“I guess you really want to go in,” he said when I opened the window again. “Go ahead.”
Joe Sullivan was standing in the middle of the street outside a corral of yellow police tape. His back was to me, but I knew it was him by the general shape: round head and bulked-up body without a neck in between. He had his hands on his hips and was staring down at the person lying perpendicular to the solid yellow line, facedown.
I walked up and stood next to him. He kept staring.
“Hey, Joe.”
“Hey, Jackie. Anybody you know?” he asked.
I looked down at Sergey Pontecello. I knew it was him from the shredded remains of the Howard Hughes getup, blackened with filth, not from his face, which was turned away and floating in a pool of blood. I felt something tighten at the top of my throat. I took a deep breath.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but looks like severe assault followed by ejection from a rapidly moving vehicle.”
I knelt down so I could get a better look.
“Did you get his wallet?”
“All he had on him was your card. And this envelope, in his back pocket.”
I looked at the envelope in Joe’s hand.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“In what?”
I sighed loudly enough to wake the neighbors.
“The envelope. What’s in it?”
“I don’t know.”
“So why don’t you take a look?”
Sullivan glowered at me.
“That’s forensics. We don’t do forensics.”
“Oh,” I said, “you just call it in and wait for the smart people to show up.”
He glared at me and opened the envelope to look inside. After a few moments, he closed his eyes and turned away.
“Christ,” he said, handing it to me. “Help yourself, you’re so gung ho.”
I looked inside and tried to figure out what was in there.
“It’s a nipple,” said Sullivan, tired of waiting.
“Oh my God.”
“Why don’t you just go home now, Jackie. We’ll take it from here.”
I threw up in a big blue hydrangea bush, but I didn’t go home. Going home would have been like running away, something I was never very good at doing.
3
One of the problems with being a lawyer in small-town America, which is really all the Hamptons are if you live here year-round, is nobody’s sure how to behave around you. The uneducated think you think you’re too smart for them, and the overeducated are afraid a simple conversation could get them sued.
This can lead to being left out of a lot of things. It’s isolating. Not a good thing for a woman who was never particularly artful at connecting with people to begin with. Not just the lover kind, even the regular day-to-day kind.
The other thing that happens, partly because of all the above, is the only people you end up talking to, besides your clients—who you really want to avoid talking to as much as possible—are other lawyers or paralegals or prosecutors, or if you’re lucky, a cop or two or a private investigator. You talk to judges once in a while, but there’s nothing to love about that. In other words, you can get up in the morning a creature of the American legal system, stay that way until you go to bed, and never talk to anybody who isn’t ass-deep in a lawsuit or putting somebody in jail or about to go there themselves.
This leaves you without a lot of friends. In fact, I have only one by the standard definition, and even he’s sort of connected to the law, though not in the usual way. His name is Sam Acquillo, and I’d either defended him or simply consulted with him on a few criminal entanglements he’d gotten into, all slightly extralegal and definitely ex officio.
The man has learned more about more things than anyone else in the world, but he’s also the most frustrating and difficult person I know. He used to be a big-time corporate whiz, an engineer like my father, but he’d managed to screw that up, along with the rest of his life. He lives in a cute little house, inherited from his parents, at the end of a peninsula that sticks out into the Little Peconic Bay. He has a dog and a beautiful girlfriend named Amanda who lives in the house next door. So no, he’s not that kind of friend.
