by Chris Knopf
It was within easy walking distance of Flowers’ favorite hangout and he was already sitting there when I arrived.
He’d lost some weight since the last time we got together. Other than that, still had the same lively aspect of an aging French bulldog.
“Yo, Sam. What’s with the PI ticket?”
I explained Jackie’s rationale for making me official, which I still didn’t quite buy. Neither did Fenton.
“Won’t help you much around here,” he said. “Might even hurt. Unless you’re retired police, or military, or something like that.”
“So not mechanical engineer.”
“Maybe. Your boy John Mercado got quite a workover.”
He said they found him on his bed, where he was likely murdered. Strangled, beaten, fingers broken—probably defensive wounds, along with the bruising on his forearms.
“Dressed?” I asked.
“Yeah. I think he was dumped on the bed to keep things quiet.”
He said there was no evidence of a robbery. Mercado’s wallet and smartphone were still in his pockets. Laptops and electronics everywhere, sterling silver in the cupboard. No forced entry. I tried out the scenario.
“People come to the door. Maybe just one guy. Mercado recognizes him, lets him in. Guy pulls gun, directs Mercado to the bedroom, where he grabs Mercado by the throat, forces him on the bed, and finishes him off, choking him with one hand, socking him with the other.”
“That’s pretty much how I see it,” he said.
“Would take some strength.”
“And experience.”
“So a professional hit.”
“That would be my opinion,” he said. “The victim either knew the assailant, or had reason to let him in.”
He said they were running prints and collecting forensics, but not to expect too much.
“If the pro theory is right, there’ll be nothing,” he said, then got a little more serious. “What’s your interest in this anyway?”
I’d been introduced to Fenton by Joe Sullivan, and he came with an okay from Ross Semple, so that meant a lot. Though Fenton was a twenty-year veteran of the New York City streets, so wariness was built in.
I told him the story of Elton Darby going out the window and my friend Burton Lewis getting indicted for it, which had led me to Johnnie Mercado’s door.
“I read about that in the Post. I think the headline was ‘Billionaire Gets Top Billing for Charity Heave-Ho,’ or something like that.”
“Mercado was there, but he wasn’t a direct witness. There weren’t any, if you believe the others in the house. Even if Mercado had been a direct witness, we know definitely that Burton didn’t drive into the city to knock him off.”
“How come?”
“Joe Sullivan’s hanging out with him in Southampton. On paid leave.”
I explained Semple’s decision to give Sullivan a vacation, which made sense to Fenton.
“He’s just protecting his cop along with the investigation. Sullivan should give him a big hug.”
“I’d like to see that.”
I asked if he knew anything about the Loventeers, which he didn’t. Or Mikolaj Galecki. Nothing there either.
“I could run a search through our databases, and Interpol, if that’d help,” he said. “Likely find out more than your lady lawyer.”
“That’d help a lot. And don’t call her a lady. Not to her face anyway.”
I thanked Fenton by picking up the tab for his burger and two double bourbons. That pleased him, I think. He said he’d call me with whatever he learned. I said I owed him one.
“Don’t worry. It’s like the Mafia. Someday you’ll get a knock on the door and it’ll be payback time.”
BY THEN it was getting late enough to dodge the commuter traffic heading out to Long Island. So I beat it out of there and made it to Burton’s in good time.
“Who’s there?” Isabella barked at me over the intercom at the gate.
“Sam.”
“Sam who?”
“Acquillo,” and spelled it for her.
“Then you’re pronouncing it wrong.”
I wondered how many times we’d have to have this debate.
“Just open the damn gate, Isabella. Or I’ll have Sullivan shoot you.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “He’s the polite one.”
“Then I won’t forget to thank him.”
I’d noticed the absence of media at the end of the driveway. It was good to live in the age of the twenty-second news cycle.
Sullivan met me at the door, and as we walked the long road to the patio at the other end of the house, I filled him in on Johnnie Mercado.
“That puts a wrinkle on it,” he said.
“Could be a coincidence. The director of the Loventeers quit today, before he found out about Mercado.”
“Another coincidence?” he asked.
“Maybe. Cum hoc, ergo propter hoc. Correlation doesn’t always equal causation.”
“Soon as you say something I understand, I’ll probably agree with you.”
I asked him how things were going around the old mansion.
“Burton’s kind and considerate, Isabella suspicious, and Amanda’s cranky. Not at me, mind you. Eddie’s clearing rabbits out of the flower gardens. The cats have disappeared, not hard in a house like this. Basically, all quiet on the western front.”
I told him I’d spent some time with his friend Bill Fenton, who said he’d nose around for us. Sullivan told me Fenton’s wife had died a few months before.
“Didn’t show,” I said.
“They grow ‘em stoic on the NYPD.”
“You lost your wife and you’re pretty stoic,” I said.
“She threw me out of the house. Important difference. Though if she hadn’t, I might’ve killed her, and then we’d have more of an apples-to-apples comparison.”
Burton, Amanda, and Eddie were on the patio when we got there. Burton seemed glad to see me. Amanda was too brimming with unspoken words to give more than a quick peck on the cheek. Eddie brought me a new ball to admire.
“He’s been digging them out of the underbrush next to the tennis court all evening,” said Burton. “I won’t have to replenish for years.”
“I thought he was chasing rabbits,” I said.
“They’re in full retreat.”
Isabella showed up on cue with her traveling food cart, which I was glad to see, even if she wanted to swat my hand when I reached for a hot spring roll. I really didn’t want to drag myself through another debriefing, but I owed it to them, so I did. Burton seemed to absorb it all, then saved the situation by declaring the subject dead for the rest of the night and launching us down the path of desultory and meaningless conversation on the current state of arts, culture, and major league baseball.
We all jumped aboard the evasion and distraction railroad and thus fully depleted our energies, and Burton’s wet bar, before staggering off to bed and our respective apprehensions.
“ART REYNOLDS wants to date me,” said Amanda, when I awoke to her sitting up in bed reading the New York Times.
“Really.”
“He called me on my cell phone, a number I only give to my closest friends and clients, by the way, and said he had two tickets to that Broadway musical no one can afford to go to. He said one of them had my name on it. I don’t know how it got there.”
“You gonna go?”
“I’ve been debating it.”
“With whom?”
“Me and my alter ego, the one who goes on dates with handsome, rich, and powerful men from the city.”
“You know he’s married.”
“I do. He said she has her social life and he has his.”
“You might call her to confirm,” I said.
“And spoil all the fun?”
I swung my legs out of bed and went into the bathroom to throw cold water on my face. I looked up at myself in the mirror. After several decades of doing this, I still didn’
t like what I saw. Especially the broken nose, which hadn’t seemed to repair itself, despite subtle urging.
“He didn’t seem to notice I’m also already in a relationship, to use the modern nomenclature,” she called to me.
“You are?”
“That was my understanding.”
I stuck my head out the bathroom door.
“So what did you tell him?” I asked.
“I’d think about it.”
I went back in the bathroom and took a shower. Like all Burton’s bathrooms, there was plenty of room in the shower stall for a junior varsity volleyball team. I would have invited Amanda, but she was still reading and grappling with her dilemma. The bathroom came equipped with all the necessities, though the hairbrush had a hard time with my disreputable mess of curly hair, surprisingly undiminished in volume and tenacity, if losing color, now nearly all the way grey.
“You seem to completely lack the capacity for jealousy,” she said, when I came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a terry-cloth robe with enough heft to endure an arctic winter.
“I’d never stand in your way,” I said.
“The last time someone tried to pursue me, he ended up dead. You were indicted.”
“And acquitted,” I reminded her, in case that important detail had slipped her mind.
“I think I should go,” she said. “You’ll want to know everything you can about him. I can report back. Like Mata Hari.”
I actually didn’t like the sound of that, for reasons beyond jealousy. In fact, the whole thing caused my heart to climb into my throat, or drop to the earth and burrow underneath. It was hard to tell.
“It might not be safe,” I said. “In fact, I think it’s anything but.”
She arched her eyebrows, in a way I always adored, even when they were arched unhappily at me.
“I can’t take care of myself?” she asked.
“You can.”
“You don’t think so. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. The concern is fine. The presumption intolerable.”
I sat on the bed and took her in. This was one of my favorite things, looking at Amanda. No one had more thick and luxurious hair, tending toward brunette, with scintillations of red, tumbling in big waves down over her shoulders. Olive skin like mine, but with eyes made of an almost unnatural crystalline green.
None of it would have mattered if there wasn’t such a powerful dose of pained brilliance and vitality behind those eyes, but just the sight of her never grew old.
Like Allison, I’d almost lost Amanda, not that long before. Another head wound, but this one from within, a cluster of tiny brain tumors that would have driven her insane, and then killed her, if we hadn’t made it to the ER in New York City at just the right moment. She still had the lingering trauma to deal with, mine was more subterranean. Or not.
“Let me know how it goes,” I said. “If you want. Just leave the dog with Burton.”
I got dressed and went downstairs to where Sullivan had set up his command post, a pair of big flat-screen monitors hooked up to sensors and video cameras distributed around the property. He didn’t have to watch every move—programmed alarms would let him know if something was amiss. Otherwise he’d never be able to sleep or take a few moments to catch up in the bathroom on Hard Case Cops Weekly, or whatever else kept him interested.
“Isabella made a few gallons of coffee,” he said. “If you drink some of it, I won’t have to listen to her bitch about all the wasted caffeine.”
“I’ll do my part. Amanda’s probably going back to her house. Don’t try to stop her or have her monitored at work.”
“I could have told you that.”
“You did, sort of. Que sera, sera.”
“I know what that means,” he said. “Fuck it, she’s on her own.”
“Not exactly. More like, ‘how people want to live their lives is not up to you.’”
I went straight to the job I was working on and spent a joyfully distracting day taking measurements and jawing with Frank Entwhistle on the best strategic approach to the customer’s fine woodworking aspirations. I left at the end of the day with a manifest of needed materials and a series of drawings already cooking in my head. To scale.
Back on Oak Point, Amanda’s lights were on, but she didn’t come visit me above the breakwater. I had Eddie at my feet, retrieved from Burton’s. I’d picked him up before heading to North Sea. I’d only brought him to Burton’s with the expectation we’d all hunker down in safety, but now that I just had the two of us to look after, it wasn’t worth it. Eddie could stay with me and be no worse for it. At least in my mind.
So all I had to do was finish off some bourbon left over from who-knew-when, which seemed like a worthy pursuit, if only to clear space for happier times.
CHAPTER TEN
The next morning, I made it to the hardware store in Southampton right as it opened. The store was a family business that had been there a long time, so it was a real hardware store crammed with every imaginable item, useful for the building trades as well as the summer people who considered the experience of buying utilitarian goods a type of adventure. Most of these folks, who often came as couples, showed up after a sixty-dollar breakfast at one of the sidewalk cafés, so guys like me knew to scoot in early.
The sales clerks were clustered around the middle of the store drinking coffee and gearing up for the day. I usually knew where to grab what I was looking for, so they just said good morning and commented on the cooler day. Eminently helpful and patient—whether a builder needed to configure an elaborate set of cabinet hardware or a benighted flower from the Upper East Side was looking for a “thingy”—these were men and women who had seen it all and been asked every question there was to ask, and yet approached their duties with unflagging enthusiasm.
I loaded up on miscellany, then went to the cash register that fronted a wall of nuts, bolts, and screws in boxed order, maintained that way by keeping customers from touching any of the merchandise. I told him what I needed. He got the right box down on the counter and I pointed out the proper nut and bolt combination.
“Stainless steel,” he said. “That’ll cost you almost two dollars.”
“Means you guys can make payroll this month.”
“Is this for a job or your boat?” he asked.
“The boat.”
“Oh, then that’ll be twenty bucks.”
I was on my way out the back of the shop when I saw Violeta, the Edelsteins’ housekeeper, approaching the door. She recognized me, and hesitated, as if not knowing whether politeness called for her to say hello or avert her eyes.
I said hello in Spanish.
“Qué bonita mañana,” I told her. What a beautiful morning.
This brightened her up and she answered in the same language, happy not to struggle along in English.
“Especially since it’s been so hot.”
“I apologize, but I don’t think I know your last name,” I said.
“Zaragoza. Violeta Zaragoza.”
I loved the way that sounded, but didn’t say it, not wanting her to misinterpret my intent. Intentionally demure with no makeup and hair pulled back, and wearing a loose lightweight polyester jogging suit, young and as pretty as her name, and thus likely subject to endless flirtations, in a variety of languages.
“I’m sorry you had to go through all that the other night,” I said. “I’m sure it was awfully shocking.”
She looked down at the ground and nodded.
“Such a terrible thing. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Burton Lewis said you were the first to find him,” I said. “I think that makes it worse.”
She agreed, though said the worst for her was speaking to the police. She said it was hard to find the right English words, and even though Cermanski was being civil, his eyes were stern and unwavering.
“I’m sure that was rough, but that’s just him doing his job,” I said.
“I’m Puerto Rican, but sometimes people make
you feel like you shouldn’t be here. So many undocumented.”
I told her I hated that as much as anything could be hated. She smiled at me.
“I know. You are always respectful. And I hear you talking to all the men working on the house, like you are one of them.”
I asked her how the Edelsteins were doing, not knowing if she’d overheard our last conversation over the intercom. It didn’t seem like it, though her face clouded over.
“It’s not the same. They are very unhappy all the time. The señor mostly stays in the city and the señora eats by herself when he’s here. I shouldn’t tell you that.”
She looked like she was actually relieved to talk about it, however tentatively.
“That’s okay. I know you’re just concerned about them.”
She gave me a hard look, the type that suggested she was weighing just how much to trust the respectful Anglo.
“Not really, Mr. Acquillo. I’m afraid.”
With that, she darted into the hardware store. I followed her to the housecleaning department, which was conveniently in the back of the store, away from the gathered sales clerks.
“I’d like to talk some more, if that’s okay,” I said. “Could you meet me somewhere? Jackie Swaitkowski, the lady lawyer you saw that night, will be there.”
She looked over my shoulder toward the front of the store and shook her head.
“I’ve already talked too much. My mother always said that about me. My mouth and my brain need to be better connected.”
“You said you’re afraid. That’s a big thing to say. It’s a miserable thing to be alone and afraid. We can help you. Give us a chance.” I took the store receipt out of my pocket and wrote Jackie’s address and phone number on the back.
“Give Jackie a call. She’s a good egg,” the rough translation of a Spanish idiom.
“It has to be soon,” she said. “The señora is away until tomorrow. It’s how I got to go out and do some things on my own.”
“The sooner the better,” I said. “You can come to Jackie’s office in Water Mill. The entrance is in the back. No one will see.”
The calculations going on behind her eyes were vastly deeper and more complex than anything I could likely imagine. What showed was an electrified admixture of hope, wariness, and dread. She took the pen out of my hand and wrote a number on the receipt. She tore it off and handed it to me.