by Chris Knopf
Jackie walked back toward us.
“Burton, where were you when Darby fell?”
“Walking down the front path toward my car. I heard a crashing sound and a muted thud. But not where it came from. I went back inside and heard lots of shouting and running about. It was a very confusing situation.”
“Who found him?” I asked.
“The housekeeper. Violeta. I was right behind her, and then Rosie, but Violeta got there first. She was crossing herself and praying. I felt like doing the same.”
Isabella showed up with refreshments which no one hesitated to accept. She stood as if ready to join the meeting, but Burton gently asked her to give us some privacy. She didn’t like it, but left with quiet grace.
“We’ll have to give a more detailed statement,” said Jackie.
“I know,” said Burton. “It’s just the beginning.”
The reason he’d founded a pro-bono defense practice in the first place was to be part of the other side of life while running up his late father’s corporate law firm and real estate holdings into a multibillion-dollar enterprise. The pro-bono operation was a classic storefront in Manhattan, with Burton the only employee for the first few years. So he knew well the sequence of events that would relentlessly proceed from there.
Jackie’s smartphone rang. On cue, it was the Southampton Town chief of police, Ross Semple.
We watched her listen, then heard her say, “Certainly, Ross. Tomorrow afternoon is fine. No, we’ll come to you. But thanks for the offer.”
If you spend enough time with a person, and I’d spent countless hours with Jackie Swaitkowski, you learn how to interpret their physical habits, the tics and gestures that run alongside verbal communication, often more telling. Jackie’s hair was thick, strawberry blonde, and curly. When stress got the best of her, she used both hands to pull it back from her face. I watched her do this when she said, “We’re going through everything again, everyone. And then again, before we get a little sleep and go over to see Chief Semple. I’ll take notes. Sam, it’s your job to bring coffee and keep Isabella from eavesdropping.”
The first part of the job I knew how to do. The other, not so much.
CHAPTER THREE
Mike Cermanski was one of the two plainclothes detectives on the Southampton Town police squad. The other was a blond bear named Joe Sullivan whom I’d known since first coming back to Southampton to move into my dead parents’ cottage where I could embark on a new career of determined self-destruction.
In those days, he wore a uniform and drove a patrol car. Dedication to the job earned him his new position, a quality that figured largely in his wife’s decision to lock him out of their house, leaving a suitcase on the front stoop along with a philodendron he’d brought into the marriage.
“Why the plant?” I asked him.
“She hated the competition.”
In addition to our common marital fortunes, we shared an interest in working out at a boxing gym, where you could build your aerobic health and occasionally deck someone with few legal repercussions.
Having spent most of the night listening to Jackie working on Burton’s version of events at the Edelsteins’ house, I went there to clear my head before we reconvened that afternoon at the Southampton Town Police HQ. I was surprised to see Sullivan in sweats, pulling on a pair of sparring gloves.
“It’s ten A.M.,” I said. “You’re supposed to be at work.”
“No work for me. Ross put me on leave.”
“What the hell for?”
“He said I’ve been putting in too many hours. But I don’t believe him.”
“You do put in too many hours,” I said.
“Not the real reason. He wants me as far from this case as possible.”
“What case?”
He stuck out his hands so I could lace up his gloves.
“Burton Lewis. What other case is there?”
“Because of me?” I asked.
“You, Jackie, Lewis himself. I’m too close.”
“That’s unfair.”
“He’s doing it for my sake,” said Sullivan. “Partly. If anything leaks out of the squad room, it can’t be because of me.” He started doing a little warm-up dance, thumping his gloves together. “Want to go a few rounds?”
“I’m here for the steam bath. I guess you haven’t heard anything.”
“See? This is what I’m talking about. I don’t have to hear anything to know this is as high profile as it gets, which means lots of publicity, which Ross hates even more than extra scrutiny by the DA, which comes with all the publicity caused by the DA talking to the press. You got your vicious cycle.”
“What are you going to do with yourself?”
“Catch up on my origami. Maybe run for the Senate.”
I’d stripped down and was fixing a towel around my waist when I said, “You could work for us.”
“Nothing illegal, unethical, or inappropriate about that.”
“Might be a nice change of pace.”
I was at the door to the steam bath when I realized he was walking behind me. He held the door open and motioned me to go in. We had it to ourselves.
“Isn’t this where Russian gangsters make all their deals?” I asked, sitting on the bench.
He stayed standing, his static bulk always ready to launch, nearly filling the room.
“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I only talked to Ross for a few minutes before he asked me to take a hike. On the department’s budget. But I do have a feeling about this.”
“I thought you might.”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Try me.”
“Ross knows something you don’t,” he said.
“Not the first time.”
“Something big.”
“How do you know that?”
I knew it wasn’t because he’d learned to read Ross Semple’s mind. Nobody knew how to do that, and if they did, they’d regret it.
“Guess who I saw coming in when I was going out the door?” he asked.
“I love guessing games.”
“Judith Paolini, assistant director in charge of the Manhattan field office of the FBI. And two of her top special agents. All that for a little old dive out a second-story window?”
WE DIDN’T expect and hadn’t asked for any extra courtesies. Jackie’s only concession to the seriousness of the moment was a pair of slacks and sensible shoes. Burton wore a few thousand dollars-worth of clothes designed to look straight off the budget rack, per Jackie’s specifications. She frowned at my jeans as if wishing she’d done the same for me.
Ross, on the other hand, only owned ugly striped polyester shirts and ties from the set of a sixties sitcom, but it was his police station and he could wear what he wanted. He waved us through the security door off the reception area as if impatient with a burdensome formality.
“Come in, come in. Who needs coffee?”
Everyone but I demurred, deepening Jackie’s frown.
Ross settled us in interview room one—a spare, windowless box decorated with video cameras in every corner. I watched a camera follow me to my seat and gave it a little wave.
Cermanski was already there, relaxed in his chair, hands folded in his lap. His case book was open on the table. I nodded to him and he nodded back.
Burton sat at one end of the table, with Ross at the other. Jackie dropped the scuffed-up leather sack that mimicked a purse on the table. She extracted a yellow legal pad, and after a minute of tedious rummaging, came up with a pen.
“Even though I’ve given it before, I’ll spare you the need to ask for my account of the other evening and just start at the beginning,” said Burton. “If that’s acceptable.”
Ross leaned back in his chair, gripping the arm rests.
“Fire away, Mr. Lewis.”
So he did, in quiet tones with precise inflections. There was nothing new for me to hear, so I admit my attention drifted. I saw in my mind’s eye Burt
on working at his storefront criminal practice, earnestly listening to his indigent, mostly guilty clients, helping them build a convincing testimony out of raw incoherence. And Ross Semple during his days in deep undercover, in a dim room in the South Bronx, wearing sunglasses and long slimy hair, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, weighing bags of cocaine. I wondered if they ever crossed paths in those days, in or out of court.
Ross waited till the end of Burton’s statement to ask, “Mr. Lewis, could you roll up your sleeves?”
Jackie sat up straight in her seat.
“What the hell for?”
Burton ignored her and unbuttoned his cuffs. Then pulled his sleeves up to the elbow. The red lines on his left forearm were obvious.
“The epithelials that we scraped from under Mr. Darby’s nails will match your DNA, am I right?” asked Ross.
“Wait a minute,” Jackie started to say.
“Undoubtedly,” said Burton. “He grasped my arm and scratched me when I pulled away.”
He described the scuffle in the hallway outside the second-floor bathroom, something he’d left out of his original statement. Cermanski asked why, and Burton admitted he should have mentioned it.
“He was trying to get the watch?” Cermanski asked.
Burton shook his head.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Then what was he doing?” asked the detective.
Burton seemed unsure.
“I don’t know. Just grabbing at me.”
“Quite the altercation,” said Ross.
“No,” said Burton. “Not really. I don’t know what he was thinking. Said he wanted to talk, invading my personal space. I must have reared back, and he tried to stop me.”
Neither Cermanski nor the chief were easy reads, but they looked unsatisfied. The questioning continued along those lines, but it did nothing to change their mood.
“So you were already outside when Mr. Darby fell,” said Cermanski.
“Asked and answered,” said Jackie. “Multiple times. Make note of that and move on to something else.”
Ross gave her a vague smile.
“Thanks for the insight, counselor,” he said. “And help with the interview.”
“You bet, Ross. That’s what I’m here for.”
Soon after, Semple checked his watch and said he’d promised to get us out of there in prompt fashion. None of us objected to being escorted from the building. Though before I made it out the door, he took me aside. Jackie stared as he led me to a private spot.
“Don’t be under any illusion that I’ll be helping you with this situation,” he said to me.
I’d already told him we expected nothing of the kind and reminded him of that.
“Good, then you won’t misinterpret the advice I’m about to give you.”
I knew what his words meant, but there was no other interpretation than he was about to help us with our case. It didn’t surprise me, since there was little about Ross that wasn’t unexpected.
He shook a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket and put it in his mouth, but didn’t light it. It moved up and down when he delivered his counsel.
“Your client, Burton Lewis,” he said, “and everyone else in that house last night, is lying.”
CHAPTER FOUR
My ex-wife had urgent social aspirations. Having been born to a wealthy Boston family, and given the name Abigail Adams Albright, this was likely preordained. Family connections led her to Burton Lewis, who invited us out to his mansion in Southampton, sparing Abby the indignity of staying at my parents’ tumbledown cottage in the North Sea area of the Town of Southampton.
She miscalculated Burton’s interest in high society, which was close to zero, as well as her own ability to ingratiate herself into the East End’s glitterati. To be fair, Burton did his best to make introductions, and was abidingly kind to Abby despite her transparent ambition, but I was the one who became his good friend, trading on our mutual interest in pool, the New York Yankees, woodcraft, and meandering, slightly sodden conversations about satisfying, though entirely forgettable, subject matter.
She never forgave me for this, though I’d committed so many unforgivable sins, it hardly rated notice.
When we divorced, I’d already blown up my corporate career, and was working hard on drinking myself into oblivion, so it was easy for the courts to give her the lion’s share of our liquid assets and our big house in Stamford, Connecticut, which I later destroyed in a fit of misplaced initiative. I dodged a well-deserved prison sentence through no fault of my own, emerging with an old car, a young dog, and my parents’ cottage on the edge of the Little Peconic Bay.
Things have improved somewhat since then.
Most notably in the form of Amanda Anselma, who lived next door and was a frequent presence bearing platters of unwholesome, delicious finger food and oversized biscuits for the dog, Eddie Van Halen, who would likely prefer the contents of the platter.
Since our properties shared the point of a peninsula that stuck into the Little Peconic Bay, we each had our own uncluttered view of the impatient water, so we alternated between two possible sets of Adirondack chairs to sit and discuss things, or just sit and quietly waste away the evening.
That night we were at her house with plenty to discuss.
“I’m just sick about this,” said Amanda, after I’d shared everything I could about the meeting with Ross Semple and Mike Cermanski. Leaving out Ross’s parting shot, for reasons I hadn’t worked out in my head. It’s not that I usually withheld stuff from Amanda, I just hadn’t processed it well enough to answer her inevitable questions.
“After you, Burton’s my favorite person,” she added.
“Mine too.”
“After me, you meant to say.”
“I didn’t say that?”
“There’s no reason to call it anything other than an accident,” she said. “In my opinion.”
“Which is why there’s no point in getting sick over it. You want the cops to do a thorough job so the conclusion is never in doubt.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t worry anyway.”
“No. That’s your prerogative.”
The night was flirting with too warm, a light southwesterly doing little to sweep away the day’s humidity. Amanda said it justified wearing a silky, floor-length thing she called a peignoir, which I liked looking at as much as saying the word with an exaggerated French accent. T-shirt and shorts were good enough for me. Eddie wore his standard fur coat, cut for the summer.
She held up the mangled remains of a tennis ball.
“If I throw this disgusting thing one more time, can we call it a night?” she asked him. He took a few steps toward the breakwater above the pebble beach, his eyes fixed on the ball, promising only to give an honest chase.
“Eddie’s not bound by prosaic concepts such as ‘one more time,’” I said. “He’s transcended all that, recognizing that each toss is part of a timeless continuum, an eternal regimen of chase, secure, and return.”
“I admit it feels that way.”
She faked a throw to the right and threw it to the left. Eddie started to run off in the wrong direction, then stopped and listened. When the ball hit the beach, he turned and headed that way.
“You can’t deceive the pure of heart,” I told her.
“But you can fool them if you’re fast enough.”
The moon chose the next moment to clear a bank of clouds, surprising us with a bath of bright, colorless light. The peignoir was so white and her sun-scorched Italian skin so dark, the garment almost looked uninhabited. I reached over and caressed her above the knee, just to make sure she was still there.
When Eddie returned, I told him to cool it. He lay down with the ball under his chin.
“Why doesn’t he ever do that for me?” she asked.
“I give him dog food.”
“I feed him pâté. You’d think that would give me a leg up.”
She raised her leg to demonstra
te. The peignoir fell away as designed. This time the moonlight was enough to show her perfect contours. Perfect for me anyway.
“I’m not that easily fooled, you know,” I said. “Impure as I may be.”
“No, but you have your blind spots.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Not what, who.”
“Like who?” I asked.
“People you love.”
“Like you?”
“So you love me. Now you tell me.”
She stood and slipped off the peignoir. She balled it up and dropped it in my lap, then turned and walked toward her house.
“Bring that with you, would you?”
MY FIRST rule of driving into the city was to bring comforting reminders of home, like a large mug of coffee and the dog. To me, my aging Jeep Cherokee was solid, no-nonsense transport, but to Eddie, it was a thrilling, breezy playscape with seating and pacing options galore. I kept the windows down enough for him to stick his head out, but not enough to fit his whole body, never sure if some provocation from another dog in the back of a pickup would lead to a daredevil assault.
My object was the home office of Worldwide Loventeers, the nonprofit that had employed the late Elton Darby as fund-raiser in charge of major donors. A full staff of earnest youngsters worked the phones, put out e-mails, and made direct public solicitations, but only people like Darby were entrusted to squeeze out contributions from people like Burton Lewis. Those with oceans of tappable, tax-deductible largesse, the true lifeblood of any self-respecting charitable institution.
More specifically, I wanted to speak with his boss, a guy named Milton Flowers, who must have changed his name for professional purposes. I got the assignment from Jackie, who rightly chose to focus on the legal necessities of the moment, letting me put my PI license, recently acquired, to better use.
“Be nice to these people,” she told me. “They do good deeds for a living.”
“So no hitting or threatening.”
“None of that. Just pleasant talk.”