by Chris Knopf
“You’re living in a gas station?”
“Former. More recently a vegetable stand and most recently, before me, an artist’s studio. Sculptor. Liked the big doors for hauling in and out big hunks of steel.”
“Big hunks in, fine art out,” I said.
“We’ll let history be the judge of that.”
I found the place easily enough, even in the dark, which it wouldn’t have been at seven, but I was running a little late. I’d made the mistake of peeking at the computer before getting into the shower. I’d typed “lawn irrigators, Southampton” in the search box.
Slim Jackery was there on the first page, three-quarters of the way down, so he wasn’t the area’s premier irrigator, though you wouldn’t know it from the name. His phone number was there, so I called.
“Rainmakers International,” said the guy who answered.
“It’s good to know you can water my lawn anywhere in the world.”
“Strictly Southampton at this time, ma’am, but we’re always looking to expand. Where’s your property?”
“Bridgehampton. Might be a good stop on the way to Marrakech.”
He pressed me on the type of lawn I’d be asking him to water, but I was evasive. The type of lawn I had was a narrow strip of weeds and moss that made a border between the driveway and the woods. Pete didn’t believe in lawns, and I was indifferent. Only later did I truly appreciate his vision. Not just the grounds, but the whole place was designed for low to no maintenance. It didn’t look like much, but it saved a lot of time and energy I could spend on messing up the inside.
“I’d rather discuss this in person,” I said. “Can we meet somewhere tomorrow?”
He gave me an address in the estate section of Southampton. He said the owners were in Europe, but he preferred I use the service entrance. On the way to Harry’s I drove by, just to get my bearings. The service entrance was about a quarter mile east of the main drive. Place probably needed a lot of watering.
All this distraction meant I didn’t knock on what I thought was Harry’s front door until almost nine. He answered the door wearing a terry-cloth towel around his waist and another on his head, turban-style.
“Oh, is it seven already?” he asked, hand to cheek.
At moments like this, the complete character of a relationship tends to emerge, its subtleties, hazards, and enchantments exposed for all to see.
So where do I start?
My brain and Harry’s are made of different component parts. Or maybe they’re just assembled differently. All my life I’ve heard about how opposites attract—you’re this, and I’m that, so here we are great together!
Not true. Opposites irritate and confuse, disorient and breed unrelenting conflict. There are times when these friction points are suppressed, which is nature’s way of getting us to reproduce with people who under normal circumstances we’d rather shove in front of a subway. I read once there were mathematical formulas that have tiny inconsistencies, called statistical noise, that grow every time you run the formula, until eventually they take over and blow the whole thing to smithereens. This is what happened to Harry and me. The noise of our small but essential incompatibilities grew over time until it was all I could hear.
I thought about this as I stood there on his doorstep, but not so much about what caused me to drive him away. More about what got us started in the first place. Two things, actually. His deep humanity and that gigantic slab of masculine glory now on vivid display above the towel. So while my thoughts ran amok, my breath was snatched.
“My,” I said.
“That’s it?”
“Okay. Amusing. And understood. I apologize. Nice towels.”
“You want ’em?” he took off the turban and started to unhook the other towel from the side. I put my forearm over my eyes.
“I want you to get dressed and come out with me. Please. I’ll make it up to you. As agreed, I’ll drive and provide.”
I felt him drape the towels over my shoulder and heard him walk away. I peeked just in time to catch the back half of the presentation, and it was worth the peek.
“Oh, crap,” I told myself, to all of myself, top to bottom.
At Harry’s request, we tossed his portable table and umbrella in the back of my Volvo, along with two folding chairs and the provisions I’d picked up along the way at the wine store and deli. I knew a spot on the beach where a tall dune had been scooped out by a storm, leaving an area protected on three sides from the prevailing breeze. It was a warm night for that time of year. The moon was out and the sky was clear, and there was no one else around.
I left my heels and reservations in the car and followed him across the sand with an armful of food and Australian shiraz. He carried everything else as easily as a normal person would carry a rolled-up newspaper.
I set the table while Harry rigged cute little battery-powered lanterns to the underside of the umbrella. Harry was completely fluent in the black arts of modern technology, without all the self-congratulation and “I can do this and you can’t” attitude that guys like him usually have. Gadgets were just a natural extension of his personhood. They were always around. And always worked, for which I was very grateful.
We spent at least a half hour exchanging ever more inflated pronouncements on how great it was to eat tasty food and drink wine at night on the beach, with the surf sounds and seagulls and fresh autumn air. And it was. So great I became almost stupefied by the sensations. That’s why I nearly forgot my obsession with Sergey Pontecello and his charming family. Nearly.
“Harry,” I finally said, with a change of tone signaling the shift in conversation. “You’re smart. How did Sergey Pontecello get Edna Jackery’s nipple in his back pocket?”
I took him through what I’d learned over the last few days, focusing on my conversation with Brandon Wayne and what he had told me about Edna’s general disposition and behavior.
“I normally only know how something gets from one place to another if I move it there myself.”
“This isn’t normal. Think abnormal.”
His face twisted a little with the effort. Then it straightened out again.
“Maybe you shouldn’t think so much about the how, and think more about the why,” he said.
He had a right to be proud of himself. It was a brilliant, albeit obvious, thought. Though it didn’t bring me any closer to either one.
“Excellent, Harry,” I said. “So, why do you think?”
“Why indeed?” he said philosophically.
I reached across the little table and plucked a pen out of his shirt pocket. I dumped the cookies out of a small white bag that I flattened so I could write on it.
“He found it,” I said as I wrote. “If so, where? It was night. He was home. I assume this because I talked to him on the phone earlier on, and that’s where he said he was. Phone records will confirm. Though they can’t prove he was home after that.”
“So he could have left the house later on and found the nipple, like, on the side of the road.”
“That’s where most people pick ’em up.”
“In other words, highly unlikely.”
I wrote down “Found it at home.”
“If so, where?” asked Harry, reading the napkin upside down. “On the floor? In a punch bowl? In his sock drawer?”
“He said he was just starting to go through his wife’s things. I assume that means the bedroom.”
“Also the kitchen. And the living room. Anywhere in the house. It could have been in the coffeepot, under the bed, in the medicine cabinet.”
“Not likely,” I said. “Eunice had locked him out of the bathroom.” I told him more about Sergey’s late-night call. “It was in an envelope, let’s not forget.”
“Then he found it in the mailbox,” said Harry.
“If it was in the mailbox, it wasn’t just found. It was delivered.”
We left that on the table while we each took a sip of our wine. The concept took root.
“Makes a lot more sense,” said Harry. “Somebody gave it to him. It was FedExed, hand delivered, tossed over the hedge, dropped off by carrier pigeon. Having the nipple in his possession can only be caused by willful action, not an accident.”
I tried to remember the night Sergey called me. Was there anything at all strained in the conversation’s tone or content? Given the dither he was in on being denied dental floss, it didn’t seem possible that the nipple had arrived before the call.
“He got it later that night,” I said. “Otherwise, I’d have known.”
Harry nodded.
“Okay, how much time between his last call to you and the call from the cops?”
I had the exact chronology written down somewhere back at my office, but I could get close.
“Between nine thirty and two in the morning. Assume the neighborhood lady found the body about a half hour before that,” I said.
“There’s gotta be a relationship between the nipple and his death,” said Harry. “You don’t have two things like that happen simultaneously without a correlation.”
“Sometimes it’s coincidence,” I said.
“But you don’t know.”
“I don’t know. I have too much ignorance,” I said.
Harry grinned at that. “I didn’t know ignorance had substance. I thought it was just the absence of knowledge. Like cold is the absence of heat.”
I shook my head. I explained that, to me, ignorance was a thing that tends to produce even more ignorance as you process all the things you don’t know until you generate this enormous glob of vile, worthless speculation.
“Ah,” said Harry, “to put this in terms I can understand, as you bring in small parcels of knowledge, it allows you to collapse the cubic footage dedicated to ignorance storage on a geometrically declining scale. This freed-up capacity can be repurposed to accommodate the resulting growth in knowledge stock, though more frequent utilization might actually drive a net gain in total volume requirements.”
“Like the man said, I store, therefore I am.”
I spent the night with Harry on a mattress reinforced by a four-by-eight sheet of birch plywood suspended between two sawhorses in the middle of the room the sculptor used for the final assembly of his creations. You could still smell the residue of arc welders and metal grinders and what I thought, to my pleasure, might have been marijuana. That was one of the issues on which Harry and I parted company, helping to lead to a parting of more material significance.
I smoked an occasional joint; he didn’t. He not only didn’t, but he also hated it, sort of the way religious people hated sin and some nonreligious people hated religion. A hate on the cellular level. Being me, of course, I had a hard time understanding this, assuming there was something bigger and nastier behind this unfettered antipathy, though every effort to ferret that out only made matters worse.
The lingering smell of dope was only one of the reasons I liked that place. The panels in the bank of garage doors were glass, so the whole wall felt like part of the outside, which the owner had generously illuminated, giving an all-night view of huge oak trees covered in ivy and blue-green azaleas and a pair of Volvo station wagons of competing vintage.
The ceilings were high to accommodate cars on lifts, which Harry said were still in the floor but long past operational. The prior resident had built all sorts of shelves and cabinets and workbenches, so the place had the feel of earnest industry, of foolishly euphoric enterprise.
There was a fair amount of euphoria of another type also expressed that night, but that’s a story that’ll have to stay between Harry and me.
The next morning I went directly to the address Slim Jackery had given me. He said he’d only be there till ten. I couldn’t risk the trip to and from Bridgehampton, so I went in the same clothes I’d worn to go out to dinner. It was the Hamptons; nobody would notice.
The place was at the end of a street of big estates, or what looked big until you got to this place. On the western border was a grassy swatch of wetlands along a shallow bay, across which was the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.
The service entrance paralleled a privet hedge on the left, leaving the right side open to the yard. Somewhere over there, snuggled in the embrace of towering, luxuriant birch trees was the main house, a four-story brick testimony to what you can do with your money if you have way too much of it and way too little sense of its genuine worth.
I was almost halfway to where I could see a small gathering of white vans decorated with scenes of exuberant tropical growth, which I thought had to be Rainmakers International, when I spotted something more familiar.
Out in the middle of the colossal lawn was a truck with a sign on the door that said RAY ZANDER ESTATE MANAGEMENT. SINCE 1984.
So I took a hard right and drove my Volvo like a Land Rover over to say hi to Ray.
He was on his hands and knees staring down at the grass. He looked up when he heard my door slam. I walked over to him.
“Lost your contacts?” I asked.
“Found some nut grass. Don’t know how the devil got in here, but sure enough there’s more. The stuff is like a horror movie. You can’t kill it. Spreads underground so you take out part of it, another part just pops up and thumbs its nose at you.”
He stood and gazed out on the vast landscape, the implication clear.
“Maybe you can negotiate a peace accord,” I suggested. “Give up a little territory in return for suspended hostilities.”
“You a diplomat?”
“No, but I took arbitration in law school. Do you work a lot with Slim Jackery?”
“Who’s that?”
“Rainmakers International,” I said, pointing at the white vans at the end of the drive.
“Is that his name? That’s a good one. No, but I don’t see any of the irrigators that much. We tend to work when they’re not around and vice versa. There’re no sprinklers for this lawn. They’d need their own reservoir. They just do the shrubs around the house and the vegetable garden, if you can believe that. The guy probably owns a chain of grocery stores and here he’s growin’ his own tomatoes.” Ray bent down and pulled a tuft of nut grass out of the ground. “We can do this all day and it won’t make any difference. Nut grass ain’t even a grass. They eat it over in Africa, use it for medicinal purposes.”
“Maybe we should export it back to them,” I said. “Help the balance of trade. How’re things over at the Pontecellos’?”
“Strictly Wolsonowicz these days. Other’n that, ‘bout the same.”
“Any other ideas on what happened to Sergey?”
He shrugged and looked down at the lawn, as if trying to catch a clump of nut grass sneaking up through the lawn. “Frankly, I do have a thought, but you gotta be careful sayin’ where you heard it.”
“Sure.”
“One of my guys told me he’d seen Sergey and Betty at the casino every time he went over there, which was a lot since the son of a bitch is always broke. They weren’t slot players, neither. All table games, high stakes. Of course, you figure they could afford it, though there’s no limit on what you can lose. If you’re catchin’ my meaning.”
I was. More than he knew.
“You’re wondering if Sergey got himself in trouble with gambling debts, maybe owed somebody dangerous.”
“Not the casino itself. Them Indian casinos are squeaky-clean. But they can only do so much about the side betting. That’s where you get them bad actors. Just a thought.”
My regard for Ray Zander, which hadn’t exactly started on a pinnacle, was rising rapidly.
“Which casino are we talking about?”
He told me. Of course, I’d heard of the place. There were two of them in Connecticut, an easy ferry ride from the North Fork. I’d never been to either, but most people I knew had.
I wanted to see what else Zander had growing in his fertile mind, but I was afraid of missing Slim. So I thanked him and got his cell phone number so I could chase him down
for further discussion. He seemed agreeable to that.
“Jawin’ is a lot more interesting than mowing lawns,” he said. “Just hard to get paid for it.”
I left him and drove back over the lawn and down to the end of the drive. The white vans were empty, but I could see several men waist-deep in a row of yews that bordered the west wing of the gigantic brick building. It was hard to think of it as a house, which is probably why I felt okay about invading their private property to mingle with the gardening help.
As I got closer it was easy to pick out Slim, but I called his name just to be sure. He waded out from the yews and came over to me.
Slim was as close to round as a being with arms and legs could be-maybe five foot five on the vertical and about the same on the horizontal. He had a shiny bald head like Harry’s but apparently no neck. Heavy as he was, he was light on his feet, and since he looked like a balloon or a beach ball, you could almost see a stiff wind blowing him up into the sky.
“You the lady that called?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Jackie Swaitkowski.” I gave him my card. “You know, when I called you about my lawn, I realized I recognized your name. I’m terribly sorry about Edna. I knew her from the Scuba Shack.”
His face showed sudden sorrow and a touch of embarrassment. I felt bad for thrusting this on him, but I was committed.
“Thanks, Ms. Swaitkowski. Still trying to make sense of it.”
“I do a lot of work with the police on things like this,” I said, which was a truthful statement, however misleading. “Would you mind if we talk about the accident for just a minute?”
He looked more than unsure, but eventually gave in to the full force of my sympathetic, girl-in-need, oh-please-be-kind-to-me look. As if I were the grief-stricken one.
“Sure,” he said. “There’s a table over on the patio. Let’s go sit.”
It was black, wrought-iron, with four chairs, each weighing approximately a half ton. Slim helped me get settled.
He told me he was at a meeting that night with a landscape architect working out an installation for a big new house in the Village. He said he didn’t know why Edna hadn’t called him or their son to come get her, except that it was like her to get a notion in her head and then act on it. In this case, the notion was they’d be mad at her about the car. As if it was her fault it wouldn’t start. He said he’d gotten plenty mad at her over a lot of things but never that.
