by Chris Knopf
“Really?”
“I wouldn’t think you’d want to know.”
“If I’m asking, I want to know. Rest assured.”
I shrugged.
“Oxygen,” I said.
“Now who’s being subtle.”
“You can tell how much oxygen a flame’s getting from its color. And how hot it is. And the balance between the two. The flame inside the car was starved of oxygen, but very hot. All the windows were shut, but the heat was great enough to melt glass, which would suddenly let in a lot of air. That would cause a rapid acceleration of combustion. Rapid enough to be, for all intents and purposes, an explosion. I didn’t know about the C-4. I might’ve tried to get further away.”
“So he went quickly.”
“Yeah. Quick enough.”
She looked away from me, and might have been ready to tear up, but the doorbell rang. Saved.
Belinda let in a short guy with thinning, slicked hair and glasses. He wore a gray suit and held a worn leather briefcase tightly under his arm like he was afraid one of us might try to snatch it. Belinda looked like she was mad at him. For showing up, or not showing up sooner, or on general principle, hard to tell.
He walked right up to me and stuck out his hand.
“Gabriel Szwit.”
“Sam Acquillo.”
He was one of those jumpy, fidgety kinds of guys who gravitate toward professions like accounting and law so they’ll have an official stereotype to justify their social insecurities.
Appolonia also shook his hand and got Belinda to bring him a glass of water. He sat on the sofa facing us with his briefcase held upright in his lap. Maybe he had lead weights in there to keep him anchored to the ground.
“So, can somebody catch me up?”
“Nothing to catch, Gabe,” said Appolonia. “We’re just chatting.”
He looked confused.
“The police said you had some information that might interest Mrs. Eldridge.”
“They did?” I asked.
Gabe looked over at Appolonia for a little help. She looked at me for the same thing.
“An officer Sullivan called and said you wanted to share a piece of information that hadn’t been included in the original report. I agreed to you coming on that basis, though I’d thought Mrs. Eldridge might have waited for me to get here before engaging you in conversation.”
Mrs. Eldridge didn’t seem to notice the reproach.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I guess we were so engaged I lost track.”
“I see,” said Szwit. “Perhaps now that your memory’s been refreshed.”
Appolonia looked over at me, calmly composed, as if I had the next month and a half to cough up the goods. Szwit took the other tack.
“Otherwise,” he said, looking at his watch.
“The phone, of course,” I said, as if relieved by the return of my short-term memory.
“Of course,” said Appolonia. “To be fair, Gabe, Mr. Acquillo mentioned early on that he knew something about the phone.”
Her delivery was so deadpan I couldn’t tell whose leg in the room was being pulled, or even if that was what she was doing. The undercurrents flowing through that silent house were powerful enough to dislodge it from its foundation.
“You know that Jonathan got a call on his cell minutes before the explosion,” I said.
Neither of them nodded, but I pressed on anyway.
“It wasn’t his phone,” I said.
I sat back in my chair and took a sip of my tea, shrugged my shoulders and asked, “Which raises the question, whose was it?”
Szwit shook his head.
“I’m sorry, you’re saying the cell phone on which Jonathan received that last call did not belong to him? How could you possibly have known that? Did you speak with him? That certainly wasn’t in the report.”
It wasn’t in the report because I hadn’t said anything about it when they grilled me. For some reason it just hadn’t registered until that moment sitting in Appolonia’s living room.
“I was watching him,” I said. “Killing time waiting for my friend. I watched him try to answer the call. He pecked at the keys, hunting for the right one. You don’t do that with your own phone.”
“It might have been a new one,” said Appolonia. “I certainly wouldn’t have known,” she added, for Gabe’s benefit, I thought.
“Might’ve been,” I said. “Easy enough to check out.”
“You could ask Alena.”
“Mrs. Eldridge,” said Gabe, “I don’t think this conversation should extend to Ms. Zapata.”
“Don’t you love lawyers?” she asked me. “Is no’ the only word they know?”
“You should meet Jackie Swaitkowski. Full of surprises.”
“I should.”
“This is your piece of vital information?” Szwit asked, simultaneously suggesting it was neither vital nor information.
“Yeah,” I said. “You explain it.”
“Jonathan had trouble answering his cell phone? It means nothing. Everybody struggles with those phones.”
“A guy who ran a multi-million-dollar consultancy through his computer, and spent half his life on the road, couldn’t answer his own cell phone?”
“If it was new,” Appolonia repeated, trying to steer me toward a safe harbor.
“Should be easy enough to find out.”
She looked over at Gabe.
“Any objections?” she asked, as if to say, don’t even try.
“Hell, no. I was just hoping for something more substantial. Something that went somewhere.”
I was hoping the same thing, but at that point I was more concerned with getting out of there before the lawyer, or Belinda, made a leap for my jugular.
“You should talk to Jonathan’s assistant. Alena Zapata,” said Appolonia. “She’s still working for his business, tidying things up. Though not for much longer. I have the number and address.”
She rose with little effort and went to get a piece of paper out of a small fold-down desk. She stood with her weight on one leg while she wrote down the information. I noticed for the first time that she had a little shape around the chest and hips, despite her thin arms and legs. She actually was, or could have been, very attractive, if you like your women in black and white. I wondered if Jonathan liked having her all to himself. She’d always be there whenever he came home. To sit and engage him in witty, sophisticated repartee. Fragile and desperately in need of protection. To be indulged, and coddled. His own alone. No one else to see or hear. A world unto themselves. Refined, yet profoundly isolated. Until it collided with several pounds of high-grade plastic explosive.
She walked over and handed me the slip of paper.
“I do have one thing to tell you, though you’ll find it of no use whatsoever.”
“Sure. Can’t hurt.”
She was now close enough for me to smell her. It was a flower smell, sweet and fresh. Like Easter Sunday. Or something you’d get from Crabtree & Evelyn. She seemed to be unsure about telling me what she wanted to tell me.
“Go ahead.”
She pursed her lips and nodded. She went back and sat down in her yellow chair. The flowers lingered in the air. I waited until she was ready.
“Have you ever looked over at the person you’re closest to, and thought, just for an instant, that you have no idea who they really are?”
“Yes.”
“I never felt that way about Jonathan Eldridge. Some people are just so completely who they are. I don’t believe he knew he would be killed, because I would have certainly known it, too.”
She didn’t expect me to respond, so I didn’t. I just finished my tea, thanked her for her time, shook Gabe’s hand and made for the door, one eye peeled for Belinda. Before I could grab the doorknob, Appolonia called to me.
“Mr. Acquillo.”
I stepped back so I could see her in her high-backed chair.
“Yeah.”
“Jonathan was everything to m
e. I can’t imagine going on without him. I don’t know why I bother.”
Belinda finally came from wherever she was lurking and made a grab for the door, hoping to propel me out of the house. I held my ground.
“Maybe you’re more curious than you think,” I said to Appolonia. “About how it happened.”
She nodded, a faint, indifferent little nod.
“Perhaps. Some perverted form of curiosity.”
“Hey people have lived for less,” I said, backing out of the door and into the color-drenched heat where I belonged, where I could take a few big gulps of air and re-establish my bearings.
But the day had turned cooler, for no reason I could divine. The weather in the Hamptons is like that. It can fool you all the time. You might think it’s a metaphor for human nature, but that’d be presumptuous. A truly pathetic fallacy. Nature as a whole never did, and never will, care all that much about the contradictions of human behavior. The zigs and zags between philanthropy and betrayal, adoration and deceit.
FIVE
JACKIE O’DWYER MADE THE MISTAKE of marrying the first guy she slept with after graduating from law school and moving back to her hometown of Bridgehampton. A mistake rectified when Bobby Swaitkowski inserted his brand new Porsche Carrera into the trunk of a two-hundred-year-old oak tree that was protected by the Historical Society, and therefore allowed to define the inside of a very tight curve along a back road connecting Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor. The Highway Department moved to clear the hazard—an impulse not unlike shooting a trained bear that’s attacked a tourist—but were immediately thwarted by members of the Society who pointed out that Bobby’s Porsche hit the tree about twelve feet off the ground, which, extrapolating from an abrupt rise in the road some distance away, meant his forward velocity was in the neighborhood of a hundred and ten miles an hour. You could hardly blame the tree for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The chairman of the Society even asserted that Bobby’s estate should cover the cost of a tree surgeon. Bobby’s widow, being a lawyer, advised the chairman and others of like opinion that any payment from her would coincide with a cold day in hell. It was a painful way to launch her legal career, but indicative of the type of law you practiced out on the East End of Long Island.
Bobby left her a house he’d built himself on a heavily wooded flag lot about a half-mile down the road from the old oak tree. He wasn’t much of a carpenter, so Jackie didn’t end up with much of a house. It was a 3,500-square-foot box sheathed in vertical rough-hewn batten and board cedar that was supposed to turn a weathered gray but by now was mostly mildewy black. There was no trim on the casement windows, or exterior architectural detail of any kind. Jackie still drove Bobby’s Toyota pickup with oversized wheels and big lumber racks welded to the frame. I parked the Grand Prix next to it in the driveway and rang her doorbell.
It usually took her about half a second to answer, so it felt funny standing there waiting. Maybe my doorbell karma wasn’t what it used to be. Years of misanthropy catching up. When the door opened, it was a crack.
“Hello out there.”
“Jackie, it’s Sam.”
She swung the door open like she did in the old days, with authority.
“Sam. A sight for.”
“Sore eyes?”
“Yeah. Especially this one,” she said, pointing to the massive bandage on her head.
Since I’d seen her the week before they’d done some more work on her. She was wearing something new, kind of a white helmet with a cap and chin strap that covered most of the left side of her face. The right side was black and blue, which she’d tried to soften with face powder. Jackie’s proudest feature was a mane of wild, tightly curled strawberry-blond hair. Now contained, it made her face seem small and strangely defenseless. There was an opening in the bandage at the back of her neck that set free a shock of blazing frizz, but all that did was call attention to its overall absence, advertising the tragedy.
We stood in her doorway looking at each other until I had the sense to realize she was crying. The kind of thing I was always late to see.
“Ah, Sam,” she said, and fell forward into my arms. I held her with my hand resting on the back of her head, letting her cry into my shirt. I didn’t know exactly what else to do, so I just stood there with her in the doorway and waited it out.
“So you’re doin’ great, huh?” I said, when the sobbing slowed down.
“Couldn’t be better,” she mumbled into my chest. “Top o’ the world.”
“Nice to hear. Wanna sit down? Lie down? Curl in a ball?”
“You hate this, don’t you. Having to act like you’re sympathetic.”
“Not a lot of practice.”
“I know. I’m so damn dumb.”
“No, you’re chatty. Dumb means mute. Wordless, silent. At best reticent, laconic and taciturn. You’re none of those things.”
She pulled back and wiped off her good eye with the back of her hand. She picked at the bandage.
“I’m getting this thing all soggy. What do you think?”
“It’s a look.”
She turned and took my hand and pulled me into her chaotic mess of a living room. We had to pick our way around gigantic piles of magazines and God knows what else, and a collection of engorged cardboard boxes that might have been storage, or might have been furniture. Eventually we reached the massive white sofas that anchored the center of the room, and dropped down into the cushions.
“Wow. That was great,” she said. “Should’ve done that a while ago.”
“I always love a good cry.”
“You’ve never cried in your life, you thug.”
“Yeah, but I’d love it if I did.”
She worried at her bandage.
“They say this ll take a few more weeks to get right. You gotta heal between surgeries. I feel like I been storing my face in a Veg-O-Matic,” she said, slumping deeper into the floppy, marshmallow cushions.
Jackie was one of those people who threw more energy out into the world than the atmosphere was able to absorb. It caused her to ping-pong around through life. You thought you knew where she was heading, and then suddenly, zing, she’d be off in some other direction.
“Hodges said he saw you in Town. Steppin’ out.”
“At the grocery store. First time. I like Hodges, but he always looks at my tits when he talks to me.”
“He sent me around to check on you.”
“Not necessary. I’m a brick.”
“So, you’re okay.”
She stopped picking at her bandage and started picking at her shirtfront.
“No, I’m not. I’m all fucked up.”
“So let’s unfuck you up.”
“How’re you going to do that?”
“By getting you out of the house.”
“I’ve been to the grocery store.”
“No, like out and around.”
“Not like this. The stares.”
“Let’s fix that.”
“Oh, sure.”
I took her into the master bathroom and sat her on the john. I studied the bandage for a while, then went through her closet and vanity for supplies.
“You gotta talk to the doctor,” she said.
“What do they know about it?”
She saw me with her big hair-trimming scissors in my hand.
“Jesus, Sam, what the hell are you doing?”
“Just stay still.”
First I cut a line from the knit of her brow to the back of her head, right above the little dent everybody has at the back of their heads. Then I cut away most of the helmet. I had her hold the important part of the bandage against the wound while I reconfigured the chin strap into a single piece over the right side, secured below by a gauze choker. The net result freed her mass of hair so that it covered most of the damage and exposed the uninjured, though black and blue, side of her face. I tied things off with some yarn that I could string through her hair, and fooled around with her coif until she almo
st looked normal, for a girl with a stoved-in face.
I made her stand in front of the mirror.
“How did you do that?”
“I’m a design engineer. The doc took a more expedient, less cosmetic approach. This’ll work just as well.”
“It still looks pretty bad.”
“Way less bad. Got anything to drink in this house?”
It took about a hour for her to shower, shave her legs and put an inch of makeup on her face, but eventually I got her out of the house. She hadn’t worked around to thanking me yet, but at least she’d stopped sighing and moaning. By the time we were in the Grand Prix it was late morning. The sun was all the way out and the sky all the way blue. The air was dry and clean, so I kept the windows rolled down to air things out. The wind tossed around some empty coffee cups and messed up Jackie’s hair a little, but she didn’t seem to mind. Liberation.
This time of year I never drove on Montauk Highway, the main artery on this part of the Island. It was filled day and night with summer people. But you had most of the secondary routes to yourself because the summer people were mostly from Manhattan, and were afraid to deviate from established routes. They’d all seen Deliverance.
Hodges once told me the East End of Long Island had a different kind of light from the rest of the country. He’d learned this in the 1950s from one of the artists who’d set up shop out in Springs, then a homey little enclave in east East Hampton. He compared it to the light of Florence—bright on a sunny day, but with all the edges burnished off, as if filtered through a diffusion screen. Hodges told me it was caused by the way the big river of weather coming out of Pennsylvania and North Jersey would clip the Boroughs, then push up over Long Island Sound into Connecticut, leaving the East End in its wake, covered by a thinned-out trail of cloud cover. I don’t think any of this was scientifically valid, but I knew he was right about the way the light looked because I saw how it composed shadows and drenched the leaves and potato fields with an oversaturated blue-green and cast dollops of chiaroscuro under the spreading boughs of red oak and silvery elm. As you moved from forest to fields, the landscape was recast and the light embraced the whole, claiming the separateness of this narrow, peninsular world.
I decided we’d go to Riverhead by way of Shelter Island, the chunk of wooded landmass caught between the jaws of the North and South Forks. It was less direct as the crow flies, but you got to catch little ferries on and off the island. There was usually a nice breeze and some sea spray over each of the narrow channels and I thought Jackie could use the extra oxygen.
