by Chris Knopf
“Sure, hide behind the badge.”
“You wouldn’t let me anyway.”
“Probably not.”
“Too pigheaded.”
“There’s beer in the refrigerator.”
“I can help you with that.”
“On duty?”
“They encourage it.”
He disappeared into the original part of the cottage. I was working on an addition off the back. Improving my place in the world. I’d drawn it up, and so far had done all the work myself, shy of pouring the concrete. My father had dug the hole for the original building with a pick and shovel and laid up the foundation out of cinder block. It was more necessity than heroics. He had very little money. Made up for it with grim determination.
“I got you one,” Sullivan called up from just outside the rear door.
I slid the hammer into the holster on my tool belt and lowered the unraised rafter down to the floor deck. Maybe the whole roof system would work itself out while I was having a beer with Sullivan. Sometimes lumber would do that if you left it alone long enough.
“What’s it gonna be?” Sullivan asked me as I was climbing down the ladder.
“What?”
“That.” He pointed with the neck of the beer. “What’re you building?”
“Bedroom. Bath. Little storage upstairs. More shop room in the basement.”
He took a long drink.
“Why don’t you plow the whole thing under and build a new house?” His gaze wandered out on the bay as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You gotta great lot here.”
“How’s that beer?”
“Cold.”
I unbuckled the tool belt and let it drop to the ground. It was an electrician’s belt, but I liked it for carpentry, too. Lots of clever little pockets and a sturdy, built-in hammer holster. I took off a separate nail apron and pulled up my terry cloth sweatband so I could wipe the bottle across my forehead. The heavy wet heat made it a bad day to toss around Douglas fir and dimensional calculations. Sullivan, Eddie and I walked over to the two handmade Adirondack chairs I kept under a leafy Norway maple. Eddie spread himself out on the grass. Sullivan and I took the chairs.
I liked all the seasons here at the edge of the Little Peconic, but the extremes of summer and winter were a little less likable. In dead winter you had howling, salt-filled winds blowing through secret cracks in the walls and down the front of your foul-weather gear. In deep summer the air would often come to a dead stop, letting all that drippy, cottony heat glob up your cardiovascular system and dull your mental functions.
“How’s your ass?” he asked me.
“Beg pardon?”
“I heard they pulled about a hundred glass splinters out of your ass.”
“Less than fifty Out of my back. Nothing in the gluteus.”
“So no big sweat.”
“All the little cuts are sealed over, but I’m still sleeping on my stomach. Got back seventy percent in my right ear, eighty percent in my left. Jackie’s right came all the way back. Her left is gone forever. Funny break.”
Sullivan still wore a smirk, but it slipped a little.
“Yeah. Luck’s an odd thing. You’re lucky you’re alive.”
“Don’t get metaphysical.”
“No problem there. You’re not my type.”
I tried to keep part of my mind calculating the rafter cuts, but it wasn’t happening. I stared up at the precariously placed ridge plate and waited for inspiration.
“Don’t you ever wonder why?” Sullivan asked.
“All the time.”
He nodded like I’d just won him a private bet.
A windsurfer came into view. He was long and muscular, wearing a small blue tank suit and gripping the boom with a lanky confidence. His hair, long enough to fall down his back, was pressed wetly between his shoulder blades. There wasn’t nearly enough wind to give the guy much of a ride. I wondered what my father would think of windsurfing and jet skis and parasailing and the other modes of modern recreation that flew by on the bay. Not that he ever paid much attention to all the salt water sitting there outside his front door. Except for the occasional trip out to catch bluefish for dinner, he was a land guy—all grease, earth and dust.
“They’re not getting anywhere,” said Sullivan.
“I figured.”
“Not what they’re telling everybody, of course. They’re calling it an ongoing investigation, which means they got squat. I ran into the lead guy over at Bobby Van’s. Having dinner with his wife. She didn’t want him talking shop, but you could tell he was fed up with the whole thing. He used to think it was a ticket to Hollywood. Big high-profile thing. Now two months later it’s an embarrassment. Even I’m embarrassed for him.”
“You’re an empathetic guy, Joe.”
“Embarrassed, empathetic, it’s all the same to me. Adds up to nothin’ for the prosecutor, nothin’ for the press. Nothin’ for the grieving widow.”
“Nothin’ for the innocent bystanders.”
“Yeah,” he said, “that, too. Not a happy place.”
He seemed pensive. Almost philosophical. Even empathetic.
“So, you got a deadline on this thing?” Sullivan asked, looking up at the addition.
“What do you mean?”
“You work on it every day?”
“When I’m not working for Frank.”
“A lot of work doing a whole addition. Especially doing it yourself. Lotta work.”
“Yup.”
“I know. I’ve done it. It’s tough.”
“Definitely.”
“Hard work.”
“Yeah.”
We sat in silence for a while, then Sullivan let out a noisy sigh to fill the dead air.
“Of course, I’m the only one officially working,” he said.
“And drinking on the job.”
“Long as we’re not out of beer.”
He dragged himself out of the Adirondack and lumbered into the house. While he was gone I busied myself thinking about the geometry and load distribution of roof rafters. And my high school girlfriend Sylvia Granata’s jawline, which I’d always admired as one of God’s acts of architectural perfection. Sullivan rolled back across the lawn and flopped into the chair, disrupting the image I’d almost formed in my mind. He handed me a Sam Adams and kept the microbrew from a case my friend Burton Lewis gave me the last time he was over. Sullivan never let his working class roots drag down his finer sensibilities. Especially when I was buying.
“What do you know about the guy that was blown up?” he asked.
“Papers said he was some sort of securities broker. Up island.”
“Close.”
He dug a small notepad out of his back pocket. It was covered in a cramped but orderly script.
“Investment adviser. With a broker’s license. Had one office, in Riverhead. Spent part of the time there, the rest on the road. Specialized in high tech. IPOs. LBOs. SOBs, that kinda stuff.” He looked over at me. “Typical smart young prick, like we got out here a dime a dozen.”
“Along with all the smart old pricks.”
“BMWs and cigars. Usually with a nitwit model or nose job JAP.”
“Sometimes both.”
“Only this guy was married. And local, too, if you think about it.”
“Riverhead. Close enough.”
“Yeah, right.”
Sullivan pulled himself to the edge of the chair so he could lean into his story.
“That’s all there is on this guy. There’s nothing else to say about him. Had a little shit office, traveled all over hell checking out high techs and start-ups. Worked through cell phones and fax and email—basically a one-man money machine with zippo overhead, and zippo contact with the rest of humanity.”
“Tech’s had its ups and downs.”
“Not an issue for this guy, from what they tell me. Up, down, middle, didn’t matter. Got paid comin’ or goin.”
“No friends or family?”
“No friends that they know about. Mother’s in a home in Riverhead. Off her rocker. Been there forever. A brother in Southampton. Some hippie artist. Can’t find the father, presumed dead. No other relatives. No record, no arrests, no press clips. No nothing. Very low profile.”
“Pretty interesting.”
“You think so?” he asked.
“Well, yeah. An invisible guy somebody thought interesting enough to blow to smithereens.”
“Yeah, totally. Nothing left. They said the car was wired with more explosives than that suicide thing in DC that killed, like what, thirty people? Dug a deeper crater.”
“Hamptons are always topping everybody.”
“Made the national news.”
The windsurfer flipped up over a wave made by the wake of a big sport cruiser and landed with the sail flat on the surface of the water. I watched until I saw the guy pop back up again with his hand on the boom. Wind filled out the sheet and shoved him off in another direction—out of harm’s way.
“Well, who knows,” I said, looking back at Sullivan. “The wrong advice from a broker, or an adviser, can lose you a lot of money. Can piss people off”
“Like how much? I mean, like how much can you lose?”
“Well, geez, I don’t know. Millions. Jillions.”
“That’s what I keep telling these guys in East Hampton. They don’t get the dimensions of this thing.”
“Aren’t there State and Federal people mixed up in this?”
“There were—two months ago when it happened. I think the FBI interviewed his clients. Didn’t come up with anything they liked. The Staties gave a lot of forensic help and stuff, but they’re too busy setting speed traps and polishing their holsters.”
“Sounds like Smokey envy.”
The second beer killed whatever carpentry ambition the sun hadn’t already baked out of me. I took a bigger swig and leaned back in the chair, closed my eyes and tried to redraw Sylvia’s jaw in my imagination.
“At least it’s not your headache,” I said to him.
“Well, it’s not like it’s anybody’s headache, exactly. It’s like our job.”
“East Hampton’s.”
“Well, not really. Now that it’s all screwed up everybody’s got a piece of it.”
I opened my eyes again and saw him staring down the neck of his beer. Sullivan wasn’t always the easiest guy to read. Probably because he often concealed what he was actually thinking. When he actually knew what he was thinking in the first place.
“Things have been sort of slow for some reason,” said Sullivan. “Even with all the summer people pulling their usual crazy shit. Ross got us all together this morning and handed out copies of the file—had witness interviews, including yours, and the names of State and Federal people whore still officially assigned. Who’ll be happy to have somebody else to blame for turning up a big goose egg.”
“Should keep you out of trouble,” I said, lofting my beer.
The bottle felt cool in my right hand, and I thought I felt a little breeze coming in off the bay. I slumped down deeper in my seat and put my head back against the wooden slats of the Adirondack. Trying to achieve a momentary state of perfect relaxation.
The windsurfer took a sharp turn to the left in the freshening breeze and headed straight toward the big gray-green buoy I’d been watching bob around out there for the last fifty years. I hoped he knew it was there. He wouldn’t be the first gentleman sportsman to plaster himself all over its battleship-grade plate steel hull.
“So, Sam, how busy’re you with that thing?” said Sullivan. “You got a deadline or anything?”
“What thing?”
He pointed at the addition.
“That thing. What you’re building.”
“I don’t know. Close it in before winter, maybe.”
“Yeah. You gotta do that.”
“Get the roof on.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Windows, siding.”
“Still have plenty of time to go talk to the guy’s wife,” he said to me, offhand.
“The guy’s wife?”
“The dead guy. The guy that got blown up.”
“I’m talking to his wife?”
“Well, somebody’s got to. They took her testimony, or whatever you call it. But they didn’t get shit out of her. She’s a doctor, but not the medical kind, some kind of PhD. Ed Lotane, the lead guy in East Hampton, told me she was loony, couldn’t go out of the house. Acraphobic or something like that. Afraid of the whole freaking world.”
“Agoraphobic.”
“That’s it. Plus, she’s kind of skinny and sickly, and has a big house, so naturally the cops think she’s got some heavy juice. Even though she only lives in Riverhead, and was married to a local guy, for Christ’s sakes, which shouldn’t bother those yokels in East Hampton. But, for whatever reason, this broad’s statement is about half a paragraph, and made’a nothing.”
“What has this got to do with me?”
“Aw, geez.”
He tossed an imaginary object to the ground and stood up. His blue polyester uniform strained at the midriff, revealing a T-shirt at his belly button. Two shirts and a leather harness. Just the thing for July.
“What’s the big deal?” he asked. “You just go up there and talk to her. I’ll tell you what I need to know. It’s no big deal.”
“What’re you talking about? That’s probably not even legal. Even if I wanted to do it, which I don’t.”
“You don’t care if the people who busted up Jackie’s face just get away with it? You said you were curious.”
“Sullivan, you’re the cop here. This is your job. I’m a private citizen. What’s the problem with talking to his wife, anyway?”
I raised my voice so he could hear me as he walked away, heading toward the Little Peconic. “Aw, Christ,” I said to myself, before getting up to follow him.
Eddie and I caught up with him at the edge of my backyard. Beyond that was about thirty feet of polished beach pebbles, and after that, the blue-green Little Peconic Bay. A thrity-eight-foot Catalina was sliding by just outside the green buoy that marked the Oak Point channel. By reflex I checked the tide. It was low. If he’d passed inside the buoy his keel would have dug a nice furrow in the sea bottom.
“What,” I said.
“Forget about it.”
Eddie hopped down off the breakwater that defined the line between my yard and the beach. He liked to keep tabs on things at water’s edge, ever watchful for maritime threats, like beach balls and lobster buoys.
“What do you think Ross would say if he knew I was interviewing your witnesses?”
“She’s not a witness. She’s just his wife. You find out what you find out, I’ll just go back and ask the same questions, and that’s it. Never stopped you before.”
“That was different. I had an interest in that.”
“You don’t got an interest in this? You got your ass tattooed with glass, your ears blown out and your friend’s walkin’ around with half a face. Not to mention all the dead people.” Sullivan’s voice had started to move up a notch in volume, but he caught himself.
“Anyway” he said. “You’re a nosy bastard, everybody knows that. There’s no statute that says you can’t pay a call on somebody. It’s a free country.”
“Interfering with an ongoing investigation.”
“What interfering? You’re just talking to her.”
“I don’t get it, Joe. What’s the hang-up?”
Sullivan found a small rock in the grass and tossed it across the beach and into the bay.
“Two years is all I got,” he said.
“Two years?”
“Of college. Two years at the community college. Studied beer mostly.”
“We had that at MIT.”
“Exactly my point. You went to MIT. You been around, you did some things. You got the education. The problem with those boys in East Hampton is they don’t even know what questi
ons to ask. Fuckin’ PhDs, financial analysts, all that shit, it’s like, you know, inhibiting.”
“Not for you.”
He put a meaty fist up on his hip just behind the black leather holster that held his .38.
“That’s right. I’ll talk to anybody. But I need an angle,” he said. “Something they haven’t thought of yet. Something to chase down. You might come up with it, you might not. Plus, I’ll owe you a favor. That’s got to have some appeal.”
I made him look me in the face.
“I can’t afford to go messing with anything more controversial than breathing Southampton air. The Chief frowns every time he sees me.”
“That’s just Ross. He’s suspicious of his own mother. Assuming he’s got one.”
“His mother wasn’t a murder suspect.”
“That case is closed,” said Sullivan. “Over and done.”
“I need to keep my head down.”
“Right,” he said, “and I need you to go talk to this lady and tell me what you find out.”
He turned away from the bay and slapped my shoulder as he walked by on the way back to his car.
“This is entirely fucked up,” I called to him.
“Just let me know how it goes.”
“I don’t even know who she is.”
He turned around and walked backward as he spoke.
“I left the name and address on your kitchen table. And phone number. And a list of questions. And a summary of the case I got from East Hampton. Burn it all when you can. Ross finds out I gave it to you he’ll can me in half a New York minute.”
After he left, I went up the ladder to set the two rafters that formed the addition’s south gable. First I measured the dimensions with my lucky twenty-five-inch tape. Then I recut the angles at both the ridge and the top plate to suit the measurements instead of the math I’d been using before. The rafters fit perfectly. I checked it all with the framing square, then re-checked all the elevations with the transit. For added insurance, I scabbed a few Techo gussets at the joints and tacked the sixteen-foot two-by supports to the floor deck.
Then I went inside and got another beer, which I drank out at the edge of my lawn, waiting for the first signs of sunset to form over the top of the North Fork and looking for errant sailors and windsurfers to come crashing into my private coast, and yet again mess up the layout of a life that always worked better by eye than formal calculations.
