by Chris Knopf
“You can also choose a meadow or a grove of trees. You’ll love them. May I show you?” he asked Amanda, gently taking her elbow.
I watched the two of them move away.
“Don’t love them too much,” I said, just before they were out of earshot.
I thought I should go talk to somebody involved in our case, since Jackie would be asking me. I looked around and saw Johnnie Mercado over at the bar, a place I’d rather go anyway. I watched the bar kid pour him a stiff bourbon.
I reintroduced myself to Johnnie, though he seemed to remember me.
“In all the confusion over at the Edelsteins’, I didn’t properly tell you I was sorry for your loss,” I told him.
“I think you did, but I appreciate it,” he said. “Can’t have too many sorries.”
He had the type of Latino beauty that women would note as heart stopping, or further proof that all the best-looking young men in New York are gay. A mellifluous Spanish accent completed the picture.
“Anyway, you were busy being the only grown-up in the place,” he added.
When he took a healthy pull of the bourbon his hands had a slight tremor.
“Nobody’s prepared for that kind of thing,” I said. “You did okay.”
He managed a weak smile as his eyes scanned the crowd.
“Is there anything more awkward than a boyfriend at a dead man’s funeral?” he asked.
“A girlfriend at a married man’s surprise party?”
He thought that was great, the smile taking a stronger hold.
“Or a boyfriend,” he said. “It happens, you know.”
“I’m sure it does. So you don’t know these people.”
“I met his mother. She’s the one in the veil. Her and Aunt Marcia, also in a veil. Don’t bother trying to figure out which is which. They’re interchangeable.”
We stood quietly for a while working on our drinks. Partners in isolation, until I messed it all up by asking how Elton had been getting along at work. Mercado looked put off for a moment, but answered me.
“Not so great,” he said. “He was always tense about his job, but tenser than usual lately. It was actually good in some ways. Seemed to want to have more fun. Get away from all the office bullshit.”
“I guess even do-gooders have their own crap to deal with,” I said.
“You think that’s what they do? Good deeds? Pretty amusing.”
Rosie picked that moment to roll up next to Johnnie and put her arm through his, the one holding his drink, causing some of it to splash on his silvery rayon pants. He ignored it.
“Johnnie, Johnnie, how are you feeling?” she asked.
“I’m okay, Rosie, Rosie. Still absorbing it all.”
“Of course. Such a terrible, terrible thing,” she said. “Thanks for coming,” she added to me. “Is the darling Amanda here?”
“She was a moment ago,” I said. I’d introduced Rosie to Amanda during a party of hers we’d stumbled into several years before. Rosie still had a suspicion Amanda was someone important, she just couldn’t put her finger on why. I remained safely in the category of a working guy her husband had some confusing affinity for. She’d talk to me to uphold his support of the common man.
“Well, don’t lose track of her. Attractive women are getting harder to replace,” she said, meaning by me, who clearly didn’t deserve Amanda’s notice. Then she drifted away, leaving me and Johnnie alone with an unanswered question about the Loventeers’s good deeds. Though I didn’t get a chance to ask it, because Art Reynolds was standing near the food table trying to get everyone’s attention. Amanda stood nearby.
He ran through the usual rehash of the sentiments expressed during the ceremony, nicely condensed, before leaving us with his gentle hope that we’d find a way to add to our latest donations to the Loventeers in honor of Elton Darby. No one seemed to be reaching in their pockets for a checkbook, but they took it well enough.
When he was finished, I looked around for Johnnie, but he’d melted into the throng. Amanda turned up instead, and that was the better thing.
“Pick out a nice place?” I asked her.
“I think maybe,” she said. “I’ll have to show you.”
“Just give me the GPS coordinates.”
“Mr. Reynolds wanted to know if I was married. I asked if he wanted to add me to the family plot.”
“Might be a good real estate move. I was told these graves cost a king’s ransom.”
“I’d rather be back on Oak Point. For the time being.”
Leaving it at that, we took off, making it out of there still in full possession of our earthly souls and disposable income.
CHAPTER SIX
I did a lot of work for Frank Entwhistle. That morning was no different, down in my basement shop with a roll of detailed architectural drawings from Entwhistle and a long list of expensive materials.
This was the part of fine woodworking that most woodworkers disliked, the nonphysical desk work of planning and calculation. But I liked it a lot, a holdover from my days as a mechanical engineer preparing to travel to a remote industrial plant that faced some inscrutable production breakdown I was paid generously to solve.
The answer was often hiding within the reams of technical specifications, if you had the patience and determination to plow through it all. Which I actually found more soothing than onerous. I called my approach guilty until proven innocent. The crime against an effective process had usually been committed before the mammoth facility was ever assembled, the fault of design engineers. It was worse when everything seemed to work fine, until it didn’t.
I was thus engaged when my cell phone rang, reminding me again how much I hated those things. Unless I wanted to call someone from my car, a convenience I still marveled at. Like air travel. Didn’t seem possible.
“Mr. Acquillo?” asked a woman with a low, hoarse voice, as if she’d expended her mortal vitality talking on the phone.
“Yeah. Who’s this and how’d you get this number?”
“I’m calling from the office of Arthur Reynolds.”
“Really. Is he in it?”
“In where?”
“His office. You said you’re calling from his office.”
“On behalf of Mr. Reynolds’s office.”
“Oh. You should tell Mr. Reynolds.”
“Tell him what?”
“That his office is calling people. I wouldn’t stand for that.”
“Mr. Reynolds asked me to call you. To set up an appointment.”
“Sorry. I’m not taking new clients.”
“This is for you to see him.”
“I’ve already seen him. Once is enough. If he wants to talk to me, he can call me himself. And tell his office to stay out of it.”
“Is this Samuel Acquillo?”
“Just Sam. My parents couldn’t afford two syllables. I’m hanging up now.”
Which I did, though it took a few minutes to regain my concentration. Just enough time for Reynolds to get the message and figure out how to use a phone all by himself.
“Hello, Sam?” he asked. “This is Art Reynolds. Chairman of the Loventeers.”
“I remember you. An expert on cemeteries.”
“I was hoping we could have a conversation,” he said.
“Sure. I’ll talk to anybody. As long as I know what it’s about.”
“I was hoping to meet in person. When will you be back in the city?”
“I’m never back in the city. I live in Southampton. I can give you the address.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed.
“You ever hear of the Pequot? It’s a joint in Sag Harbor. I can meet you there.”
“I thought you said Southampton.”
“The Pequot’s my business address. When’s good for you? How about tonight?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Check with your office. It seems to know everything.”
“Would any other time work for you?” he asked.
“Will Miss Anselma be joining us?”
“That’s up to her.”
“Charming woman.”
“If you like the type,” I told him, and hung up, then turned off the phone and struggled to return to the alpha state of unhindered clarity, with eventual success.
AMANDA WANTED to know if Reynolds had asked for her specifically. I said yes, and that he thought she was charming. She had to concur.
“You don’t get to be a chairman of the board without keen powers of observation,” she said.
“Any idea why he’d want to talk to me?”
“When we were on our walk he tried to find out every which way what you were about. I guess I disappointed him.”
We were out on Amanda’s patio waiting for the sunset to make an appearance over the Little Peconic Bay. I’d already invited her to go to the Pequot with me, but just then broke the news that Art Reynolds might be joining us. We were dressed for the occasion, which meant the way we dressed for work. Jeans, boots, and T-shirts flecked with paint and dried glue. Amanda had her hair tied back and makeup minimalist. Though freshly showered, contrasting with the Pequot’s regular clientele who usually showed up straight off the fishing boats.
The owner, Paul Hodges, was an old friend of mine, going back to when I was a kid growing up in North Sea, when I wasn’t in the Bronx. In his seventies, he’d turned over management to his daughter, but was often there for dinner and to encourage the preservation of the Pequot’s ambience, which was to say, obstreperous and unrepentant.
You got there by sneaking past the few houses held on to by Sag Harbor natives, defiantly holding their ground against the tidal forces of heedless prosperity overrunning the rest of the Hamptons. Then you went under a narrow bridge and onto a spit of land where the fishing charters plied their trade. Once a lively little commercial enclave, they’d traded harvesting cod and fluke for the striped bass, blue fish, and tautogs favored by sportsmen. It wasn’t what any of them preferred, but it kept the boats running and the families fed and educated.
The decor and basic menu had been established sometime in the 1950s, and Hodges never thought it worth tampering with a successful formula. I’d driven us there in my father’s ‘67 Pontiac Grand Prix, which I kept in decent mechanical shape, deferring unnecessary body work until a future date I’d already determined to be never. It made finding a parking spot wide enough to contain the stately vessel a challenge, but I never worried about the consequences of doors swung by drunken sailors trying to plot a course into their pickups.
Hodges’s daughter, Dorothy, in the command position at the bar, nodded to us when we came in, our regular drinks dispatched to one of the waitresses a few seconds later. The lighting had always been just within the range of normal vision, if your pupils were racked open to full stop, but that night it seemed dimmer than usual.
Dorothy came over to watch the waitress set down our drinks.
“You could go blind in this place,” I told her.
“What you don’t see can’t hurt you. You wanna know the specials?”
“I thought everything was special.”
“My brother just brought over a pail of flounder caught a couple hours ago,” said the waitress. “Can’t get any specialer than that.”
“We’ll take it. Whatever way suits the chef,” said Amanda.
“That’d be cooked,” said Dorothy.
I asked if her father was around. She said he was in the kitchen shelling clams.
“Tell him we’re here, if you would,” I said. “Just wait till he puts down the knife.”
Amanda reached out to touch Dorothy’s forearm and said, “That’s new.”
There wasn’t much of Dorothy’s skin left to decorate, so it took a keen eye. She was pleased.
“It’s a dodecahedron,” said Dorothy. “A Platonic solid with twelve faces. Two D, unfortunately, but you get the idea.”
“What does it symbolize?” asked Amanda.
“A woman nearing middle age who thinks she can still hold her liquor on a date with a geometry professor.”
“Is that why it’s Platonic?” I asked.
“No, but it’s what I tell my father.”
Not long after, Hodges emerged from the kitchen, drying off his thick arms with a paper towel. His hair started thinning out years ago, but then held on, leaving a fine mist of white tangles. Face like a ceramic gnome, you wondered how he could have produced a lean and angular daughter like Dorothy, a woman whose comeliness seemed impervious to the color-shifting hair, facial jewelry, and swirling, chaotic tattoos.
He drew himself a beer and came over to our table.
“Dottie told me you were here,” he said. “I hope you’re having flounder. Got a ton of it back there. Cheap too. Unless you want to call it sole, in which case we’ll have to double the price.”
“So business is good,” said Amanda, looking around at the tables and booths filling up with the sunburnt, aromatic trade.
“Yeah, they keep coming in here,” he said. “Despite our best efforts.”
We caught up on our latest news, leaving out the matter of Elton Darby. It made me lose track of time, so I didn’t have a chance to warn Hodges about Art Reynolds, who suddenly appeared at the door of the restaurant wearing a pair of salmon-colored slacks, light green polo shirt, a white cashmere sweater tied around his neck, and a vague look of dread.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Hodges whispered.
“He’s with me,” I said. “Nobody fuck him up.”
He was about to spin around and take a powder when I got to him.
“So you found the place,” I said, slipping between him and the door.
“There’s no sign,” he said. “I took a chance.”
I tried to remember if there ever was a sign.
“Come on in. We got a table.”
He pointed toward the parking lot.
“I have a colleague with me. He’s waiting in the car.”
“Room for him too. How do you feel about flounder?”
I half expected him to bolt when he had the chance, but he came back in with an even taller guy, this one with a linebacker’s build, wary eyes, and skin that hadn’t spent much time outside. He wore white on top and black on the bottom, as if he’d just come from waiting tables somewhere in Southampton Village. Reynolds introduced him as Mikolaj Galecki. His handshake was soft and loose, which was good, since his hand was almost too big to grip.
“Mikolaj drove, I navigated. Pretty successfully, if I do say so.”
Hodges had beaten a retreat before we got back to the table, so there was room for four. Amanda let Reynolds take her hand as if he were going to kiss her ring. Galecki just gave her a quick nod.
“Are you sure this is the best place to talk?” Reynolds asked, reluctantly taking a seat.
I looked around the noisy restaurant.
“Not holding any of them back,” I said.
Our waitress cemented things by taking drink orders. Reynolds wanted to know what they had in a red, and she told him wine. He thought that sounded fine. Galecki ordered a beer. They passed on food.
“Are you also with Loventeers?” Amanda asked Galecki.
He looked over at Reynolds, who said, “He works for me. Personal assistant.”
“And translator,” said Galecki.
“He speaks ten languages,” said Reynolds. “Very handy in Europe.”
“And Brooklyn,” said Galecki.
“Serait-il utile a Montréal?” Amanda asked, wondering about Montreal.
“Seulement si vous pouvez tolérer l’accent Canadien,” he said, a jab at Canadian French.
“Sam’s mother was French Canadian,” she said.
I told him I never understood a word she said.
“Je n’ai pas compris un mot qu’elle a dit.”
“Oh, no, I’m surrounded by polyglots,” said Reynolds.
; “I dislike that word,” said Amanda. “Sounds like an affliction of the throat.”
Our flounder showed up, providing a timely break in the conversation. Reynolds urged us to go ahead and eat, something I was already starting to do.
“Why don’t you tell me what you wanted to talk about,” I said to Reynolds, between bites.
Reynolds settled himself back in his chair, as if preparing for an arduous task.
“It’s delicate,” he said.
“I’m not,” I said. “Just say it.”
He made a little sigh, resigned to the inevitable.
“How well do you know your friend Burton Lewis’s private life?”
An unanswerable question, since I didn’t know much, though I couldn’t imagine who knew more.
“It’s none of my business,” I said. “And none of yours.”
Reynolds agreed that was true.
“But it is of material importance to the police,” he said.
“So talk to them about it.”
Galecki, never quite comfortable in his chair, rolled his shoulders, like fighters do before a workout. I took a closer look at his face. His nose was even bigger than mine, and just as crooked. One ear might have been a little puffy, and some of the flesh around his eyes. He rested a bear paw on each knee. Poised.
“I’m trying to help you,” said Reynolds.
“And yourself, I suppose,” said Amanda.
“Everyone loves a win-win,” he said.
“What does your win look like?” I asked him.
“It doesn’t involve negative publicity for the Loven-teers,” he said. “We’ve been lucky so far. I hope to keep it that way.”
It felt a little like a poker game, where my opponent knew my hand, but for me, all the cards were blank. And I sure as hell couldn’t read his. I bought some time by savoring a mouthful from the mountain of flounder piled on my plate. And then some more by waving to our waitress to ask for another round. Reynolds covered the tab.
“So what do you want me to do?” I asked him, after the waitress left.
“Absolutely nothing,” he said. “I think that’s the point. If everyone just stays calm and quiet, this will all blow over. Burton Lewis is in no danger here, I can assure you. Darby’s death will be ruled an accident and that will be that.”