by Chris Knopf
Over the first round of drinks Amanda endured a thorough examination of the current and prospective fortunes of the New York Yankees, which led to general agreement on the inevitable four-game sweep of the World Series. Back when I had a job I’d often duck out of the office to meet Burton down in the Bronx where we’d take our chances on general admission or patronize one of the resident scalpers with whom Burton had an ongoing business relationship. It was fun, but I admit I liked basketball season better in his private box at Madison Square Garden, which looked a little like the inside of his law offices on Wall Street, complete with a full bar and a happy Romanian kid named Mihail who always made me name my drink, even though it was always the same thing.
It took a little longer to catch him up with the Eldridge thing, but at least Amanda was able to join in. I told him about Joyce Whithers and her connections to Appolonia. And about Agent Ig, with his ominous cautions and impenetrable intimations. Burton started nodding when we got to the part about Joe Sullivan and my conversation with Ross Semple, a friend of Burton’s from a time years ago when they’d squared off over the case of a young black kid some people thought was getting railroaded by the Southampton DA. It all ended with the kid free, the community becalmed and only the media expressing disappointment over the expeditious resolution of the case. Burton himself managed to direct all the credit to Ross Semple, who accepted it, I always thought, as part of the deal.
“The Chief called me in the City to ask about Mr. Fleming. I told him I’d learn what I could as far as background, but any Federals investigating a car bombing were likely tied to Homeland Security and that means the proverbial black hole. I know a few folks who have access, but when it comes to that territory, one doesn’t even ask.”
“I wasn’t thinking you should, Burt. I was only looking for an opinion. What do you thinks going on?”
“Haven’t a clue. Anyone care for a snack? I seem to have missed dinner.”
People who worked for Burton had to get used to his indifference to conventions of time and space. You were as likely to find him reading in Battery Park in the early afternoon as you were having him show up at your apartment at three in the morning to consult on a case.
“I’ve got a list of Jonathan’s clients, along with some notes on three we’re calling the hostiles. Ivor Fleming and Joyce Whithers, along with his brother Butch Ellington, who’s in a somewhat separate category. Anything you or your hundred-thousand-person investigative staff can tell me about these people would be deeply appreciated.”
Burton sat back in his chair and crossed his legs, resting his drink on his knee.
“Does this mean I don’t have to browbeat you into accepting my help?” he asked.
I’d inherited a keen sense of reciprocity from my father. You borrow a guy’s tools, you lend him yours without hesitation. You help frame a garage, you get the same help when you build the addition off the back. This unspoken contract among working people sustained both a sense of community and self-reliance, because it was unspoken. Nobody made a big deal about it. Though it only worked if the quid pro quo was reasonably proportionate, an impossibility when you traded favors with Burton Lewis.
But I was on a program of self-improvement. I knew it would give Burton pleasure to help out, that he’d be slightly pained if I didn’t let him. Allowing him the chance to express his generosity for nothing in return was in this case the less selfish thing to do.
“Only if you come up with something good,” I said tossing the manila envelope toward his lap. “There’re plenty of rich lawyers where you came from.”
He snatched it midair and disgorged the contents.
“Since you’re making it competitive.”
He looked over the client list and notes, straining slightly to read without his glasses.
“I knew Walter Whithers, speaking of competition. An excellent attorney from a very wealthy family. More inclined to general corporate governance, not much in the tax game. Sat on several boards. We did his taxes. Died of a heart attack in his mid-forties. At least that was the family’s story. Undoubtedly true, though eyebrows were raised.”
“How come?”
“Walter was a bit of a gambler. High stakes poker, very high, with friends and associates, and even an occasional trip to the casinos, I was told. Didn’t know him very well personally.”
“So he blew a bunch of money and offed himself? And Joyce made it look like a heart attack. Would explain why she’s so pissed at him.”
“It would, except it’s highly unlikely. Walter was actually quite an accomplished gambler. Consistently won more than he lost. You can do that with poker, some make their living at it. It’s probably not too great a breach of ethics to tell you his tax returns always expressed a general northerly direction in his financial circumstances. Joyce came into the marriage with her own plethora of trusts and investment instruments. I wouldn’t know the particulars, but a dramatic shortfall would be noticed.”
“Maybe all the excitement got to him.”
“It’s possible. He was a very reserved person.”
At that point I lost his attention to a half-wheel of Brie and a small pile of hand-sliced baguette. Amanda and I helped him wipe it out over another round of drinks. I started to sink deeper into the lush padding that softened the ornate iron recliner, feeling the sea breeze gently stir the satin summer air, now inky black and flecked with the random twinkle of lightning bugs.
“So no thoughts on Ivor Fleming,” I asked him.
“As I said, no chance of any inside information if he’s connected to a car bombing. But I can speculate, Governor Ridge’s proscriptions notwithstanding,” he said while surveying a plate of assorted fruits and crudités that suddenly appeared from out of the night as if the woman with the tray had been poised on the lawn for his cue. Probably sensed the disappearance of the last slice of cheese.
“Option one,” said Burton. “The investigators know Fleming is their man, and are merely crossing every imaginable T and dotting every I in constructing a bombproof case, if you will, essentially eliminating Fleming’s ability to mount a successful defense. Which is their modus operandi. Once they indict, they win, virtually every time. With no statute of limitations, and a steady, albeit constrained, flow of public financing, time is on their side. Peaches, anyone?”
“That’s what you think?”
“Just a possibility. It’s also possible Fleming’s appearance on the client list was just a bit of bad luck for Fleming, drawing the kind of scrutiny that could yield a banquet of unrelated but delectable prosecutorial fodder. So, the Federals, and now the State it appears, could be focused entirely on these collateral opportunities, preparing to move ahead with or without a resolution of the Eldridge matter.”
“Or the Sullivan matter, for that matter,” I said.
“This is merely speculation.”
“But it’s possible they’d be satisfied with a racketeering conviction and to hell with the murder.”
“You try the case you can win. It isn’t always the one you want.”
“It’s not what I want. I could give a crap about Fleming’s rackets.”
Burton rummaged around for one more peach, which he took some care in selecting.
“I don’t suppose you’d listen if I suggested you leave well enough alone,” he said.
“I would, Burt, honest to God I would. I never wanted any part of this thing. I was only trying to have a drink with Jackie Swaitkowski. Sullivan never should have asked me. As soon as he revisits the planet I’m telling him. That’s what I really want. His goddamned fault anyway.”
“With a knife in the gut and a smack on the head for his trouble,” said Burton.
“I’d have smacked him myself if I’d known where this was going. Take a page from Joyce Whithers.”
“You know how it is with people like Ivor Fleming. Once the die is cast, the threat perceived, it’s on to the death. Lacking the subtlety for a less self-destructive course, they ne
ver know how to stop.”
“I know.”
I was talking to Burton, but I was watching Amanda. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Not surprising for a girl who led with her looks and knew how to keep herself to herself. Who only let you see the part of her she wanted seen and nothing more. Hunkered down within a reinforced bunker built of intelligence and effortless deceit, as much to conceal an essential goodness as to advance the cause of self-preservation. It might have been because she grew up without a father, alert and aware but unsure of where it was all going. Or the natural accumulation of experience that comes early to girls men admire, but fear to approach. In fact, she’d been knocked around pretty hard most of her forty years, though it didn’t show unless you knew where to look. Maybe I saw it more than most, since I could never stop looking.
“So you won’t be coming to Butch’s Council Rock on the Giant Finger,” she said.
“Wouldn’t miss that. Art lover like me.”
“Butch Ellington,” she said to Burton, “he wants me to let him assemble a giant sculpture in one of the WB buildings. I told him I’d think about it.”
“Do you want a lengthy speech on exposure to regulatory sanctions, property damage and the finer points of joint and several liability?” Burton asked her.
“Not particularly.”
“Then say no.”
“Attitudes like that are what calls for a Giant Finger,” I told him.
“Then tell Mr. Ellington he’s made his point, obviating the need for further implementation.”
Amanda laughed a light little laugh.
“What if Michelangelo had to contend with you two,” she said.
Isabella picked that moment to roll a tray out on the patio filled with serving bowls, vodka, bread and wine. I knew what Burton was doing. He wanted company and was asking us to stay. Further evidence that anyone can be lonely. Or that everyone is lonely in one way or another. He tolerated, or maybe even enjoyed, the eager flock of sycophants that usually fluttered about. But a man like Burton would starve on a steady diet of that. For some reason he hadn’t found a partner he could stick with. Or more likely, one he could trust. But all in all he was a happy man. Like Amanda, content to live within a containment field of his own design, occasionally foraying out to the territories to refresh his sensibilities and re-establish affiliations, before returning gratefully to the worn enclosure of his mind—safe, free and secure.
SEVENTEEN
I WAS ABLE TO EXAMINE Burton’s theories on the inexorability of aggression a few days later at the big lumberyard. Frank had sent over a set of plans for me to build an elaborate architectural detail for Melinda McCarthy’s backyard. A pair of custom benches, merged into a freestanding fence and gate affair that would anchor a future flower garden. My favorite kind of job, where I could prefab most of the pieces at the cottage, then have a gang of Frank’s guys haul the stuff to the site for me to install. Best of all I got to work with clear cedar and mahogany, nice smelling, straight grain stuff you can easily shape and join.
Wood like this is a specialty item, but I could usually buy what I needed from a regular yard if I had the time to pick through the stacks. They kept it out of the weather in a large shed at the far end, away from the main traffic area. It was open on one side where you could back up your truck, or in my case, your ’67 Grand Prix with a set of rusty roof racks temporarily bolted on the top.
It was early but the sun was already heating up the air. In a few hours the lumberyard would be a cruelly hot and dusty place, filled with runners from the big construction sites sent over to resupply the crews. The yard guys knew these often weren’t skilled people, more often simple haulers, Spanish speakers or somebody’s drunken or nitwit nephew who knew enough to stand in line, put an order on account and drive a truck that somebody else helped load. They didn’t get a lot of respect from the yard guys, whose status was only marginally greater than the runners. Which was why the yard guys were generally disrespected by the skilled tradesmen and contractors. And by their own counter guys, whose craft was plied indoors, and who therefore disrespected everybody, though most earnestly their customers.
I usually got there at opening time while it was still fairly cool and all the employees were too groggy to engage in hierarchical power plays. I’d just finished selecting and stacking a load of clear cedar on the roof and was about to tie it all down when a noisy diesel pickup backed in hard against the right side of the Grand Prix. I didn’t have to look up to know who it was, so I kept uncoiling and untangling a length of clothesline I’d just pulled out of the trunk, smoothing out the twists and kinks.
“Hey lookee here,” said Ivor Fleming’s skinny guy, now in a baseball cap, chewing something like tobacco or a big wad of bubble gum. “The crazy dude.”
He walked around the Grand Prix and stood a few paces away from me. Without looking up I turned slightly and leaned up against the rear fender of the car, seeing in my peripheral vision to my left, as expected, the shape of the fat one, Connie. I looked over at the skinny guy.
“‘Lookee here?’ You from Arkansas?”
“Bed-Stuy man.”
“That explains it.”
The skinny guy moved out a few more paces, filling the space between the back of my car and a stack of decking lumber.
“Interesting,” he said. “Financial fucker and carpenter. You’re a busy boy.”
“Diversification. Ask any financial fucker.”
He pointed at the lumber on my car.
“Talk about Arkansas. That looks like the Beverly Hillbillies.”
“Maybe you boys could haul it for me.”
That made the skinny guy smile, which was unfortunate since it partially exposed whatever it was he had in his mouth.
“So what are you here for?” I asked him. “Ivor building a new doghouse?”
“Just passing through,” he said.
“Passing through? You know this is a lumberyard. You can tell from all the wood.”
“I told you he’s got a mouth, Ike,” said Connie.
“Ike?” I laughed. “That’s your name? Ike and Connie? Is that like Ike and Tina? Must be why you guys are always together. Good thing Connie’s the fat one. Be tough with him on top.”
“A mouth with a death wish,” said Ike.
I thought about that. Conceptually anyway, he’d raised an important issue. After losing my job, my wife, most of my money and the affection of my daughter, my only child, I might not have wished for death, but I had little interest in living. Of all the loss the worst was the loss of time. I’d used up all those irreplaceable decades formulating an existence that turned out to be largely illusory. A mental construct within which I accomplished things of substance, but when the artifice became impossible to sustain, it all collapsed, every achievement and satisfaction taking its place amongst the rubble.
“Not true. Maybe at one time, but I’m over that. Death’s way too permanent. Ruins any chance of catching an upswing in circumstances. Guarantees you’ll miss out on things like the World Series and the Little Peconic Bay. And then there are other human beings.”
Though that was always the hard part for me, the human beings. The division I ran for my company was called Technical Services and Support, which better described its heritage than its eventual raison d’etre, which was essentially research and development. The original TS&S was a maintenance and repair operation that mounted expeditions into the company’s sprawling industrial infrastructure to optimize processes, troubleshoot failures and invent new systems. I liked that part of the job. They paid me to solve puzzles and crack codes. I thought at the time my skill in this derived from solid, clearheaded engineering, though in retrospect I ran almost entirely on intuition. I could see the resolution almost as a thing, an image in my brain, and then I’d reverse-engineer the steps needed to accomplish it. It was a game of physics, and chemistry and mechanical engineering, in which nobody scored more points than me. So they rewarded me by stirring pe
ople into the mix, thereby complicating the task a thousandfold with every unit of humanity introduced into the intricate, but far more predictable universe of fluid dynamics, energy and mass, cause and effect.
“Jesus, what a head job,” said Ike, spitting whatever he’d been chewing on the ground.
“Come on, think about it,” I said. “Once you decide you’re not gonna be dead, at least for the foreseeable future, you start facing the fact that you have to live among other human beings. Some, if you aren’t careful, you get to know. Get used to them hanging around. Not everybody, just certain ones. You can even start liking them. Take you guys. I feel like I’m really getting to know you.”
I was still leaning against the car, but I shifted forward enough to spread my weight more evenly to the balls of my feet.
“I think he’s a philosopher,” said Connie. “That’s what he is.”
“It’s rude to talk about people in the third person when they’re standing right next to you,” I told Connie, while keeping eye contact with Ike.
“Yeah fuck the third person, and the fourth,” said Connie, settling the etiquette question, if not the grammatical.
He inched a little closer, but I stayed focused on Ike.
“Speaking of human beings, after a fashion, how’s Ivor? Still concerned?”
“I can’t speak for the man, but I’d say he’s feeling okay” said Ike. “I’d be interested in telling him there’s nothing about you that oughta be concerning. Not that he’s thinkin’ that much about it, but you know, it’d be nice for me to tell him that you’re off the list of potential concerns.”
