by Chris Knopf
NINE
SAGAPONACK IS a sprawling billionaire preserve along the ocean in the Town of Southampton. A lot of stupid big houses were built there in the eighties and nineties, and development was still going strong in the new century. When I was a kid I used to ride through the area on my bike. Then it was mostly farmland with an occasional summer bungalow, but I’d long since given up those associations, as if my childhood had taken place in another part of the universe.
I was driving over to Ivor Fleming’s house with the windows down to mix some air in with the cigarette smoke and smell of Viennese cinnamon from the coffee place on the corner in the Village. I missed having Eddie to run back and forth between the two rear windows searching for ground threats, like summer people walking miniature purebreds, but it was still too hot to leave him in the car. I’d actually snuck out the basement hatch so I wouldn’t have to endure him looking at me with that what-the-fuck look on his face.
Not surprisingly, Ivor’s house was oversized and foolishly conceived in the fashionable dormer-ridden, cedar-shaked, postmodern vernacular of the times. It had a full length porch along the front of the house and a big circular driveway to allow maximum display area for indigenous and foreign luxury cars.
It was Saturday, so I thought the chances were good I’d catch him at the house. I parked behind a shimmering black Mercedes, climbed the porch steps and rang the doorbell.
A Doberman answered the door. Or, at least tried to knock it down from the other side. I looked back over my shoulder to plot an escape route. Then a woman’s voice, speaking urgently in Spanish, quieted the dog. I was glad I’d left Eddie at home. He’d scratch the hell out of the Grand Prix trying to defend my honor. Doberman or not.
“’Ello?” said the little Spanish woman who opened the door.
I held up the letter Gabe had drafted for me.
“Is Mr. Fleming home?”
“He know you coming here?”
I shook the letter.
“I just need to ask him a few questions. He’ll want to see me.”
“He not tell me you’re here.”
I slipped Gabe’s letter through the door opening.
“I’ll wait.”
The door closed and I could hear the woman drag the Doberman across the tile floor. A lot of time went by, so I sat in one of Ivor’s big white caned chairs. Victorian, with a high back. Not too comfortable, but sturdy. Creaked when you shifted around, which I did a lot while waiting for Ivor.
“I already talked to the police,” a man’s voice said through the closed screen door. I stood up.
“I’m not the police. I represent the firm.”
“The firm?”
“Jonathan Eldridge Consultants. His company.”
The door opened and out stepped a pasty little guy in a slippery nylon shirt two sizes smaller than him, which was an accomplishment. The color was indefinable. Maybe shiny rust, or diluted magenta. His hair was too thin to completely cover his head, but what was left was died black and smeared over his skull from ear to ear. He wore heavy black-framed glasses that exaggerated his bony little face. He looked at least part Asian. Maybe Filipino or Indonesian.
“You’re talking about this at my house?”
“Sorry. Just trying to expedite.”
He was reading the letter I’d shoved at the Spanish lady. Like me, he probably had trouble understanding Gabe Szwit’s legalese.
“I don’t understand.”
“I’m doing a valuation on the firm.” I pointed to the part of the letter I thought might have the relevant language. “Not easy with a closely held entity. Lots of intangibles.”
Ivor looked up at me like he was having trouble believing his ears.
“This has got nothing to do with me.”
The Spanish lady who’d answered the door popped out on the porch and asked him something in Spanish. I tried to follow it, but the words zipped by too quickly. She had an eye on me while she talked, gauging my reaction.
“Si, si,” said Ivor and shooed her off with the letter. Then he flicked it at me. “Sit down.”
I sat.
“I’m sorry the man’s dead,” said Ivor, joining me in the adjacent porch chair. “But I don’t have anything to say about him or his business. This is what I told the people who investigated this thing. We did business over the phone. I hardly knew him.”
“Good will is a big part of a valuation. I’m interested in assessing his client relationships. How was yours?”
Ivor looked out over his soulless acreage as if seeking divine guidance. It let me get a better look at his face. He’d had cosmetic surgery—you could tell from the stretched translucent skin around his eyes. Explained the Ferdinand Marcos grimace.
He looked back down at Gabe’s letter.
“What the hell are you talking about? There’s nothing to value. Just this one guy giving investment advice. Who’s dead.”
“So you’re probably unaware of the methodologies Mr. Eldridge used in assessing investment potential. His proprietary tools.”
Ivor looked neither surprised nor impressed.
“For what, losing money? I can do that all on my own.”
“So things didn’t work out that well with Jonathan’s advice.”
“Not so good, but that’s the game. I hire guys like Eldridge all the time. Some of em hit it, others don’t. I don’t know why I bother. Odds’re about as good at the casino.”
“Most of Jonathan’s clients seemed satisfied.”
“Suckers. Rather lose their shirts than admit stupidity.”
Ivor sat back in the big white wicker chair and slid down like a teenager watching T V, his dark little body almost disappearing into the floral cushion meant to soften the hard wicker surface.
“Look, uh,” he checked the letter again, “Mr. Aquo.”
“Acquillo.”
“Aquo. It’s the weekend. My time off. This here,” he waved his hands around, ”is my weekend house. Where I come to get away. I don’t see people here, and I sure don’t talk business here with people I don’t know who turn up on my doorstep. With letters.” He shook it at me.
I didn’t have a good response, mostly because I sympathized with his position. I didn’t like people turning up uninvited at my house either. Messes up my balance, which is what I had in mind for Ivor.
“So,” he said to me, getting up from his chair, “you want anything? Iced tea? Beer?”
“Iced tea’s okay” I said, caught by surprise. I thought about the beer for a second. Too early, even for me.
When he went inside he let out the Doberman. It was a black-and-tan mass of coiled springs and dead-eyed menace. Big, especially for a female, maybe eighty pounds. Her long claws tapped across the wood floor over to my chair, where she turned and sat down, pressing up against the armrest to make it easy for me to stroke her smooth, rock-hard shoulders.
“Wait’ll Eddie smells you. Will take some explaining.”
Didn’t faze the Doberman. She just sat there and soaked up the attention. I scratched up under her ears. She lifted her head and pushed it into my hand. Big old baby. Just looked scary.
“Perrito, que pasa contigo? Hay que chula eres!” mewed the Spanish lady at the Doberman when she came out on the porch with my iced tea. “Que tienes, Pobrecita? Quieres un beso?”
The Doberman stood partway up and shoved her long snout into the woman’s leg as she put down the tray.
“Scratch her ears. She digs that,” I suggested, but the Spanish lady ignored me. I searched around my long-dead memory for a translation, but she left before I could embarrass myself with an attempt.
“Portate bien y sientate alla con ese caballero,” she called back from inside the house.
The Doberman sat back down so I could continue ministrations.
“Perrito?” I said to her. “More like caballo grande.”
Ivor came out with a beer and handed me an iced tea. I immediately regretted my decision.
“So,
you met Cleo.”
“Big girl. Likes her ears scratched.”
Ivor had put on a pair of oversized sunglasses, rendering the Marcos imitation nearly complete. He got back in his chair and took a long pull on his beer. He snapped his fingers at Cleo.
“Ven aca.”
She shot over to his chair and took up her usual spot next to the arm.
“Dogs’re smarter than people, sometimes I think,” said Ivor.
“I know one that won’t dispute that.”
“Course you were smart enough not to get out of your chair with Cleo wanting you to stay”
“Hadn’t indicated that.”
“Didn’t have to. You stayed put. I just wanted to get my beer before concluding our conversation.”
I toasted him with my iced tea.
“Gracias.”
“De nada. So you understand. I have nothing to say about Jonathan Eldridge or his business. The entire subject is as dead as he is. Though I’m puzzled about this valuation. I’m not an expert in the investment adviser business, as you could tell if you looked at my investments. But to my knowledge there’s nothing there to sell. And why you’d come here to talk to me about this on a Saturday, that’s puzzling, too. The whole thing is puzzling.”
He looked like he was grappling with the puzzle, then he snapped his fingers.
“Unless,” he said, “you were thinking I’d be interested in buying something from you. That this is some sort of a roundabout sales pitch. Is that what this is?” He directed the question to Cleo. She didn’t give it up.
“I guess that’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I told him. “If there’s anything of value here. For the estate. Mrs. Eldridge.”
Ivor was stroking Cleos side, but otherwise sitting very still in his chair. I assumed he was looking at me closely, but I couldn’t tell with his sunglasses on. Though I was more interested in Cleos stare, which was fixed steadily in my direction. I guessed at the distance between me and the Grand Prix. No way.
I had a little bit of iced tea left, so I took my time finishing it. I finally set it down on the wicker side table and was about to experiment with leaving when I heard a truck pull into the driveway. A black pickup, with a deep bed and a double rear axel. Diesel. It pulled up behind the Grand Prix and two guys got out. One really meaty guy in a blue nylon warm-up jacket and dirty bone-colored polyester pants. And a much skinnier guy, some kind of white and African-American mix, though with the same taste in couture. They both looked to be in their early forties, but were probably younger. Hair salon haircuts. Bad skin. Hard lives.
“What do you know, more company,” said Ivor, sitting back in his chair. “And I thought it’d just be another quiet Saturday morning.”
The two bounded up onto the porch. Cleo never looked away from me. I had the feeling she and the meatballs had already met.
“Hello, Mr. Fleming,” said the skinny guy. “How is everything?”
“It’s about to get better. Mr. Aquo here was just planning to leave.”
“If it’s cool with Cleo,” I said.
Ivor snapped his fingers and pointed to the floor. She dropped down on her belly, but her haunches were still bunched up, ready to launch.
“Thanks for stopping by” said Ivor, though the sentiment lacked sincerity.
On the way to the Grand Prix I realized I had an escort.
“Gonna be another hot one,” I said to the big guy, who fell in on my right. “What do you think?” I asked his partner, now on my left.
“Hotter’n shits my guess,” he said.
They walked me over to my car and watched me get in. Then went back to their truck. I snuck around the Mercedes and rounded the parking circle. The pickup had gone the other way on the circle and gotten ahead of me, so I followed them out to the road. There was a white gate at the entrance of the driveway made to look like the ones at the old estates over where my friend Burton lived. It had been open when I came in, but now it was closed. The pickup stopped and the two guys jumped out and came back to my car. The skinny guy leaned down to look in my window.
“Get out a minute, would ya?”
“Needed to stretch my legs, anyway,” I said. “Long driveway.”
I swung the Pontiac’s gigantic door wide enough to force him to move back a few paces. The big guy leaned against the pickup’s tailgate and started picking his teeth with a wooden match. All style, these guys.
“Mr. Fleming probably explained to you that he doesn’t appreciate being disturbed at his weekend house. During the weekend,” said the skinny guy.
“Probably okay during the week. When he’s not here.”
“That’s right. You can see that when shit like this happens it makes him feel,” he searched around for the right word, “concerned.”
The skinny guy didn’t look like he was carrying anything he could use to hit me over the head. Or shoot me. So I had to assume his job was to scare me to death with talk, and the other guy, who’d thus far remained eloquently silent, was there to provide a physical component if necessary. So I started looking him over.
Heavy arms, but mostly fat. Face clear, pockmarks aside. Hadn’t given or taken much in any actual fistfight. Probably specialized in baseball bats and kicks to the gut. Snubby gun barrels crammed up under the chin. Though at the moment the biggest challenge these guys presented was their black pickup truck.
“So, you’re going to kill me,” I said to the skinny guy.
He jerked back his head and smirked.
“Kill you? What the hell for?”
“Well, it’s either that or beat me up. But, if you beat me up, you’ll have to kill me.”
The skinny guy didn’t like where this was going. He was thinking we’d have more foreplay ramp up to the scary stuff about killing and maiming.
“Connie won’t kill you unless I tell him to.”
“Connie?”
The meaty guy stopped picking his teeth and looked at me like he’d heard that plenty of times before.
“Short for Constantine. My grandfather’s name. From Hungary.”
“Oh, sure. They’re still talking about him in Budapest.”
The skinny guy struggled to get control of the conversation.
“You’re a talker,” he told me.
“Design engineer. Even worse.”
“So you understand what I’m sayin’.”
I hated it when I said things to myself like, “there was a time,” but that’s what I was thinking standing there, leaning against the Grand Prix’s ten-ton driver’s side door, sizing up Jack Sprat and his fat friend. I’d been coming around to the realization that fifty-three-year-old guys aren’t as resilient as they used to be. I could probably drop both of them, but there was a real danger somebody’d get a shot in on the way down, and they told me at the hospital that I was one shot short of my life’s allotment.
“Yeah, you’re gonna have to kill me. Because if all you do is beat the shit out of me, you’ll only mess up my brain. It’ll make me crazy, and then I’ll have to hunt you both down and kill you.”
Then I shrugged, like it was all out of my hands.
The skinny guy ran a long finger down his hollowed out cheek and squinted at me.
“I think maybe you’re already crazy. We’re just talking here.”
“That’s a relief. I got a lot of things to do today. You just got to let me out so I can get at it.”
I made a show of climbing back into the Grand Prix. I stuck my head out the window.
“You gotta get that tank out of the way. This thing’s too big to squeeze around.”
Then I lit a cigarette to give the meatballs time to gather themselves up enough to open the gate and move the pickup truck. Which they did, slowly, like it was their idea, or to buy time to figure out what had just happened. I cruised casually out of the driveway, but gave the Grand Prix a good kick once I was looking down a clear stretch of pavement.
Like Satchel Paige, I resisted the urge to look back un
til I’d made it out of Sagaponack, up through Bridgehampton and on to Sag Harbor and the Pequot, where I could get Hodges’s daughter Dotty to give me a midmorning glass of vodka to counter the nerve-unsettling effects of all that iced tea.
TEN
I NEVER TIRE of the smell of fresh-cut Douglas fir. I guess I would if I smelled it all the time, but I didn’t have to because Frank Entwhistle let me work more or less when I felt like it. Though he was definitely glad to hear from me when I called, the day after I’d been to see Ivor Fleming.
“I need a guy to do finish at the Melinda McCarthy job. Actually, tomorrow would be a good time to start. All the rock’s up and the floor’s in. She’s sort of eager to get in while there’s still a little season left. She’s on me pretty hard.”
“Timing is everything.”
“I’m ahead of what I told her, but she doesn’t remember.”
“I can only go so fast.”
“Not your problem. The pool’s almost finished. That’ll cool her off”
“Good way to focus the crew.”
“Don’t hammer any fingers.”
I didn’t call Sullivan or Gabe Szwit or anyone else that week. I didn’t want to think about Jonathan Eldridge or Jackie’s face. I wanted to earn a little money and chew on my meeting with Ivor Fleming without having to share every little detail with people who’d have more questions than I was ready to answer. I thought about Ivor’s meatballs, wondering what would have happened if anything had actually happened. It made me a little nauseated to think about. I’ve had too much of that kind of thing in my life. It’s not like exercise, where repetition builds up your strength. It’s the other way around. The more you get, the less you can withstand.
Not that I got hit as much as other people during my brief boxing career. I wanted to hit harder, I was just better at avoiding than delivering a punch. I was fast and athletic, but lacked the pile-driver power real fighters brought to the pursuit. I usually made up for it with a kind of blind, reckless fury.
But I got hit enough. In and out of the ring. And now, at this age, intimations of mental deterioration were stealthily eating at what was left of my indifference to consequences.
