by Chris Knopf
I stuck out my hand, which he took with awkward indecision, and thanked him for his beautiful story.
“I didn’t know you were such a fan of poetry,” Carlo said. “I’ve seen you here before,” he said to Sam, then looked at me as if he wished he hadn’t.
“He was with Amanda Anselma, his girlfriend,” I said. “Sam and I are mixed up on a project. That’s actually why we’re here. We’d like to ask you about something, if you don’t mind a little shoptalk.”
Carlo surprised me for the hundredth time that night by nodding eagerly.
“Sure. Happy to help as long as it’s not an ongoing.”
I started with the night Sullivan called me to identify Sergey Pontecello and how I’d found Edna Jackery’s nipple in his back pocket.
“That’s definitely an ongoing. I still have Mr. Pontecello in a drawer.”
“Dr. Vendetti,” I said.
“Carlo.”
“Carlo, as much as I’d love to hear what you have to say about Sergey, I just want to know one thing. When you examined Edna Jackery, was she, you know, all there?”
This confused Carlo, of course.
“Did she have all her body parts?” I asked. “Specifically nipples, fingers, and toes?”
“And eyes and ears,” said Sam.
Carlo suddenly perked up.
“We just received several samples of desiccated human tissue from Southampton. I’m running the DNA tomorrow. Is this what you’re referring to?”
“We think they might belong to Edna Jackery,” I said. “You’ve already identified a nipple as hers. It’s a cold case, by the way,” I quickly added.
“Not if we’re checking that material now,” he said.
“No chance some of her got separated in the course of the examination?” I asked. “Any reason to do that?”
He shook his head, still looking cordial and unoffended.
“What for?” he said. “I only determine COD and check for trace evidence. We like to keep all the parts connected to the bodies. Easier to ship that way,” he said, enjoying his own joke.
“Of course it is, Doc,” I said, suddenly struck by a ridiculously obvious thought. “I’m an idiot.”
Sam looked at me, waiting for an explanation.
“I guess I am, too,” he said. “Because I have no idea what she’s talking about.”
“They call you lots of things, Sam,” said Carlo, “but never an idiot.”
“Can I buy you guys another round?” I asked.
Sam called over the waitress/owner of Chez Slam. Ordering drinks was one of Sam’s greatest delights, in no way diminished by constant repetition. I waited till the whole transaction was complete before broaching the obvious.
“Okay, I’m ready,” he said. “Spill it.”
“What?” I said.
“What you’re thinking.”
“Rigor mortis.”
“Huh?”
“I’m also thinking we need a way for Carlo to give his opinion of Sergey Pontecello without compromising investigatory confidentiality.”
Carlo sat back in his chair and folded his arms. He looked sympathetic but unmoved.
“I wish I could help you guys, but you know how it is.”
I patted his shoulder.
“Of course we do, Carlo. Anyway, I saw the body right after it happened. Somebody obviously beat him up pretty badly.”
Carlo shook his head.
“Really?” I said.
Carlo nodded. Excellent, I thought. The old guessing game.
“Of course, somebody tosses you from a car, you can look pretty beaten up,” I said.
That got a small tilt of the head, the equivalent of “maybe.”
We ran a few more options by him, from the obvious to the absurd, yielding nothing but head shakes. Before he started getting dizzy, we let him take a break and talk for a while about sports and Suffolk County politics. Since I wasn’t much interested in either, I just listened to the conversation. This probably relaxed my own inflexible brain, because that’s when it popped into my head.
“Macadam. All over his face and in his hair. On his poor old Howard Hughes shirt. That’s what all that grimey black stuff was. Oh my God, he was dragged.”
He nodded, then looked furtively around the bar, as if his boss was within earshot. Whatever line he’d just crossed in his mind wrecked the mood, and though still friendly, he was done giving up official secrets.
Out of kindness to Carlo, Sam moved us off the subject. Which didn’t stop the images of Sergey flooding my mind, of him bouncing and twisting over the gravelly road, and probably screaming for his life, while his life remained. I hoped not for too long.
Sam did his best at happy talk for a few more minutes, then used my pained silence as an excuse to call it a night and get us out of there.
On the way back to Bridgehampton, he said, “I know why you feel like a idiot.”
“Yeah?”
“You said ‘Rigor mortis.’ You were thinking about corpses. The first stop is the autopsy tables. Next up, the embalmers. Edna was intact when she left Carlo’s lab. What happened to her happened after that. Sometime between Riverhead and the crematorium.”
He went on to almost compliment me for the way I’d handled Vendetti, but I wasn’t paying much attention. It’s funny how sometimes a revelation comes with the feeling that you’ve known the truth all along. This was one of those times. It might be just a manufactured recollection, made to make you feel less stupid for missing the obvious. Or less cowardly for shying away from what your heart already knows.
In my case, the realization came with a recrimination. Sergey might have been dragged to death, but the cause of death was me.
15
The first thing I did the next morning was get into an argument. Well, not exactly. First I had to drag my butt out of bed, shower, brush my teeth, pretend to fix my hair by patting around my head, pull on whatever clothes were within reach, and stagger out to my car.
I was on autopilot and wanted to stay there until comfortably ensconced in front of my computer in Water Mill with the largest cup of coffee the place down the road would sell me.
So I wasn’t even awake enough to be grumpy. I was mostly groggy. Somnambulistic. Legally dead, by Carlo Vendetti’s more liberal definition, and happy about it.
I’d almost used up the tank of gas I’d bought with the car, so the first fill-up on my own felt like a legitimate moment. The problem came when I had to open the little door covering the gas spout. The Volvo was my first experience with a modern car, and I hadn’t learned all the fancy new protocols, the value of which I’d be willing to debate, but right then it was more an issue of social harmony. I’d already pulled up to the gas pump, but rather than filling my tank, I had my head stuck in the owner’s manual. The guy behind me was unsympathetic.
After a few minutes he yelled, “Come on. I don’t got all day,” in his finest Long Island accent, the one precisely engineered to bring out the fundamental Long Island in me.
“Yo, dude,” I yelled back, without looking up from the manual. “Give it a second.”
A few moments passed, and I’d almost penetrated the Swedish mechanical mind when the guy behind me stood on his horn.
“Park that fucking thing,” he yelled as he nudged the towering wall of pickup grill closer to the pristine butt of my pretty new car.
I got out and held up the manual.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t get into my fuel tank.” I pointed to the bay of pumps next door, clear of traffic. “Would you mind?”
He didn’t react either way, so I sat back in the car with my legs outside on the ground and my brain struggling to decipher the instructions. I had the radio on, which became an unfortunate distraction. Before I knew it my attention had slid away from “Fuel tank–access, unlock” and on to “Morning Edition.” I’d also forgotten the agitated truck driver behind me. But he hadn’t forgotten me.
It wasn’t a big jolt, but it was
big enough. My heart thrilled in my chest and I heard myself make a sound. Not a scream, more of a terrified, stifled yelp. I looked behind me and the pickup was nearly in the Volvo’s cargo area. The guy had somehow thought it was a good idea to roll his truck into my rear bumper, giving it a nasty little tap.
“I told you to move that fucking thing somewheres else,” he yelled out his window.
I slapped the manual shut and looked up at the heavens. The sky was blue, the air was clean, and if God was watching, so be it. I got out of my car and walked back to the truck. The imbecile behind the wheel had his baseball hat turned backward and his elbow resting out the window. I started the festivities by sticking my fingernails in his arm. He pulled it back into the cab.
“Somewheres?” I yelled. “Is that what you meant to say? You think somewhere has an s on the end of it?”
The guy was immediately conflicted. Belligerence is so much easier when you’re safely strapped into two tons of motor vehicle and the person you’re trying to intimidate is an abstraction. Not a genuine flesh-and-blood woman.
It wasn’t just the symbolism that got to me, it was the fact of it. Another attack from the rear. And even inside a mass of mechanized metal, the guy is bigger and stronger, and thus more entitled than the woman. But maybe this time not as thoroughly and irretrievably enraged.
I grabbed the chrome handle mounted next to the door and hoisted myself up on the running board of his pickup truck.
“Do you own this gas station?” I yelled at him. “Did the pope anoint you king of all gas stations? Did the president of the United States give you special permission to be this big a fucking asshole?”
In retrospect, I might have taken things further than I would on a normal day. You run into a lot of guys like this one, young and dumb, born and bred on Long Island, or somewheres in the five boroughs, and unlike me, without the benefit of a postgraduate education to hone his social skills. It was just this particular jerk’s fault for being a jerk with the wrong woman on the wrong day.
“Christ, lady, what the fuck,” he said, rearing back into the cab of his truck.
“ ‘What the fuck’ is right,” I said, sticking my head halfway through his window and digging my fingernails into his arm again. “Be nicer to people. It’s not that hard. And someday it might save your worthless, ugly, pinheaded life.”
I yelled a few more things until I got him to say, “Okay, okay.”
Then I jumped down off his running board and went back to my car. He sat there a few moments, then drove to the other bank of pumps and filled up. After that, he pulled into a parking space but stayed in the truck. I assumed to reevaluate his life’s choices. Or to decide how he was going to kill me and when. Or to feel safe until the lunatic woman figured out how to put gas in her car and leave.
I know behavior like this is reckless, immature, and clearly dangerous. But I felt better for it. It wasn’t the dope in the truck’s fault that Sergey Pontecello had been dragged to death, or that I’d been run off the road by another pickup, but that didn’t give him license to abuse me or any other woman in similar circumstances. So like the owner of Chez Slam, my conscience was clear and my debts paid in full.
With the exception of Sergey Pontecello.
I was sickeningly sweet to the young man behind the counter at the coffee place, another victim of my vacillating mood, but luckily the rest of the morning I was on my computer, safely adrift in cyberspace.
Until my cell phone, vibrating in my pocket, scared the crap out of me. I thought for a second there was a giant bug in my pants. I leaped up and screamed, though not loud enough to alert the somber surveyors across the hall, something I noted for future reference.
“Yeah,” I said into the vicious little thing.
“Yeah? Is that how lawyers answer their phones?” said Joe Sullivan.
“Yeah. Did you get an answer back yet from DNA?”
“Why am I talking to you again?” he asked.
“That’s what Fuzzy wanted to know.”
“Who’s Fuzzy?”
“Oscar Wolsonowicz,” I said.
“Right. The witness you tampered with.”
“That conversation never came close to the definition of tampering.”
He was quiet on the line. The dead air gave me time to get my mouth under control before I drove myself off a cliff.
“Sorry,” I said. “You were just about to do me a favor.”
“Not exactly. I got the clerk from Surrogate’s Court on the other line. I need him there with me when I open the Pontecello safe-deposit box. I also need the estate administrator. That would be you.”
“It would.”
“You never told me how that happened,” he said.
“Greed. Sometimes it’s good.”
“Meet me there in an hour. I’ll be the one with a gun.”
I hadn’t dressed for an official visit to the bank but, I thought, the hell with it. Nobody would care but me, and I didn’t have the emotional wherewithal to go home and search my house for a pair of panty hose that didn’t have a run or a pair of decent shoes that weren’t scuffed or in need of reheeling.
So instead of going home to change, I took the time to walk across Montauk Highway to the park with the big windmill so I could lie on the grass and stare at the sky. I didn’t know how to meditate or do yoga or any of those other cleansing, rejuvenating things that sound so wonderful when people who know how to do them describe the results. But I did know how to lie flat on my back and listen to the birds and passing traffic.
This worked for about five minutes. Then, being untrained in transcendental meditation, I started obsessing again over Sergey Pontecello.
I knew more about the circumstances of his life than I had before, but none of it brought me closer to understanding his miserable death.
I knew his wife, Betty, was a bit of a train wreck, but so what? Everybody’s got an Aunt Agatha who worked at a job like executive secretary for some big shot in the City and who drank, smoked, cursed, and screwed her way to a ripe old age. They all had husbands or boyfriends who were less of a sport but stuck with their wild women. Sergey was her sidekick. He tried to look after her as best he could. He probably loved her. Why would anyone kill him over that?
The family itself was a dysfunctional mess, but again, so what? Whose isn’t? Fuzzy was a jerk. Wendy a recluse. Eunice a bossy prig, but this was the Hamptons—we crank out so many self-appointed, überbroads like her you could probably trade them on the commodities exchange.
Then there was a little matter of the pickup assassin. What was that—a random psycho or conclusive evidence that Sergey’s killer thought I knew a lot more than I did? Enough to make it worth killing me, too.
What was sorely missing was the thing my favorite judge insisted the prosecutors provide. A motive. The Big Why. There was always a reason for a murder, even if it didn’t make sense to normal people or the killer himself, once he had a chance to sit down and really think about what he’d done. Usually it was more than “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Most of the cases I handled for Burton Lewis were so open-and-shut it was embarrassing for all of us to go through the necessary formalities. Either the accused was an obviously evil or hopelessly stupid social misfit, or the cops and D.A. had been running a tissue-thin case that a third-rate pre-law college student could have blown to smithereens. There was almost never a lot of gray area in criminal justice, despite the impression given by the entertainment industry.
“I don’t know enough,” I said to the birds flying overhead. They didn’t comment.
The clerk from the Surrogate’s Court was young enough to be my son, if I’d had a son when I was twelve years old. His chin was smudged with fine hair and his clothes were made of the wrinkle-free synthetic once favored by the immigrant engineers who worked for my father. His head was all brown curls, cut rather than combed into place. He had a tiny diamond earring in each ear and looked happy with himself, as if findi
ng the bank on his own was an accomplishment worthy of acclaim.
Sullivan was also wrinkle-free, the result of precise and thorough ironing. You could cut your hand on the seam in his khaki pants. Ostensibly a plainclothesman, he was supposed to blend in with the general populace, which he would have done on a military base on Okinawa, but not in the Hamptons. His olive drab shirt had two pockets with flaps, one of which had a slit to let out the top of his mechanical pencil. The lenses in his sunglasses were thick and utterly black, contrasting starkly with his pale skin and platinum-blond hair, cut close to the scalp. His sport coat was a loose blue silk, selected for the way it disguised the shoulder holster and provided quick, unobstructed access to the Smith & Wesson .45. Though I had to say, it looked pretty spiffy. I told him so.
He scowled. “I’ll tell the wife. Her fault.”
“The wife? Does that make you the husband?”
“The spiff. Who’s this?” He pointed at the clerk.
“Brad Sullivan,” said the kid, sticking out his hand.
“No, it’s not,” said Sullivan, ignoring the hand.
“Huh?”
“Sullivan. That’s my name.”
“What,” I said, “only one Sullivan allowed per acre? Give the guy a break. Shake his hand and let’s get this thing done.”
Sullivan grunted but did as I asked.
The Harbor Trust in Bridgehampton was the bank’s biggest building on the East End, even though their regional headquarters was in Southampton. It was new and built with stone, marble, towering colonnades, five-foot-high crown moldings, and once-skyrocketing mortgage revenue. I’d watched them build it over two years ago, a display of extravagance that would have embarrassed the Vatican. The original headquarters was a square block of granite, solid enough for me and the rest of the bank’s loyal customers, which could have saved them a lot of money if they’d bothered to ask us.
Elvin Graveley met us in the lobby.
“Elvin,” I said, “how’d you draw this duty?”
“Curiosity. Autumn said she felt like she’d been renditioned to Warsaw.”
