Head Wounds sahm-3

by Chris Knopf

  I felt a little bad about lying to everybody about being there, and worse about the old lady who ID’d me, but I hadn’t seen any good in admitting the truth, and probably never would.

  “So as soon as I could, I drove the drawing up to Albany,” said Zack, “and after extracting a promise of anonymity, ostensibly to protect my ‘source,’ I handed it over to the State’s Attorney. At least I got one thing off my conscience. I’m glad they didn’t find anything. It makes it that much better.”

  I wanted to say his conscience seemed okay with letting me hang for something I didn’t do, but I had to keep him on my side. There was still a long legal road ahead.

  ——

  While we waited for Sullivan, Jackie advised them all on what she’d do if she were them, free of charge. By the time the big cop walked into the sunroom with Will Ervin and another uniform, Patrick was on his feet and the incriminating two-by-four back outside.

  Milhouser still looked indignant, even bewildered. I wondered if he’d convinced himself of his own innocence, the same brain that had reacted with murderous rage now settling into a soothing state of denial.

  I’d have to ask Rosaline.

  Sullivan decided the best thing was to bring everybody to the hospital so they could check out Patrick’s arm, then take statements there or head over to the HQ in Hampton Bays. He called ahead to Ross while Ervin and the other cops led Zack, Patrick and Milhouser out to their cruisers.

  Jackie said we’d be right behind. But when I got outside I plopped down on the muddy ground, then lay back, spread my arms and legs, and looked up at the starry sky through the spring leaves. Jackie squatted next to me.

  “You all right?”

  “I think so,” I said. I took a deep gulp of air into my lungs and closed my eyes.

  “Don’t ever do that to me again,” said Jackie.

  “What?”

  “Put me in a state of abject terror for weeks, thinking I’m going to make a mistake that puts my friend in jail for the rest of his life, then hide information from me, which I explicitly asked you not to do, goddammit.”

  “I wasn’t sure. Honestly. There was another thread I had to tie off.”

  “How long have you known it was Milhouser?”

  “About fifteen minutes,” I said.

  “Get out of here.”

  I sat up and looked at her.

  “It was obvious one of them had burned down Amanda’s project. But I never believed it was Robbie. Not given the way he was looking at Amanda that night at the restaurant. Despite all the bluster, there was something different in his eyes. The hope of forgiveness.”

  “For what?”

  “Robbie had a lot of natural bully in him, but his stepfather’s ridicule and brutality fueled the flames. The only parent he had and all he ever got was contempt. I knew that old bastard was the pivot point the day we went to see him. He said all the right things about his boy, but his eyes, like Robbie’s, said something different. It wasn’t grief, it was triumph. That and the booties.”

  “Huh?”

  “He has a floor-finishing business. Between coats of urethane floor guys’ll wear booties so they don’t mar the fresh finish. Same thing the arsonists wore when they torched Amanda’s house. A job in every way intended to send a signal. That takes the mind of a planner, a schemer, and someone unburdened by conscience. People have written Jeff Milhouser off as a basic screw-up, but he’s worse than that. He’s a basic sociopath. I thought his history might give up something I could use to trace back to Robbie’s death. And it did, in the form of Zack Horowitz.”

  “How the hell did Roy get in the act?”

  “I never understood why he put the brakes on developing Amanda’s property after the Town ordered an extensive environmental study. He said it was because of the notification requirements, which was legitimate enough, since all that attention could have blown the scam. But those cellars made the study itself the real worry. He didn’t even share the information with his partner Bob Sobol, who was an engineer. He’d have known they could be filled with hazardous waste. Roy’s another all-star schemer. He had the presence of mind to keep that drawing to himself, and then put it someplace safe—with Zack Horowitz—where it could be deployed at some future date.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  I leaned up on my elbow.

  “That’s because you’re a good person. You don’t think like they do. Roy has had plenty of time to nurse his bitterness. Jeff Milhouser was the perfect outside partner. Roy’s natural ally. And Patrick the ideal go-between. Roy thought he could manipulate his way back into Amanda’s project, sort of a silent partner, pick up a piece of the action. Wouldn’t that be a kick. But if all he managed was to wreak a little havoc and revenge on me and Amanda, that’d be fine.”

  Jackie was quiet for a moment.

  “Don’t get mad at me,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I ask you something.”

  “Okay,” I said, lying flat on the ground again.

  “You don’t ever wonder about Amanda?”

  “All the time.”

  “And?”

  “A priest once told me faith was believing in something even when—especially when—all the evidence pointed in the opposite direction.”

  “You know what that makes you?”

  “A recovering empiricist?”

  “I could list a few more things,” she said, standing and holding out her hand so she could pull me to my feet. Then we put Robbie’s monument at our backs and followed Sullivan over to the hospital, where Markham determined Patrick’s arm was just badly bruised. But he wanted to keep him there overnight for observation.

  “Anyt’ing of yours you want to get X-rayed while you’re here?” Markham asked me and Sullivan.

  A desk sergeant Ross sent over from headquarters was there to record everybody’s statements, helped along by Jackie’s notes and testimony. I was glad to hear all the stories come out like I wanted them to.

  After that they let me head back to the tip of Oak Point where I had a case of wine, a bottle of vodka and a dog waiting for me, along with a life filled with equal measures of hope, faith and exasperation.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  YOU’D THINK A FACE as big as Markham’s would be easier to read, especially when you’re sitting just across a desk from him. On top of the desk were open files and huge envelopes out of which he slipped X-rays and other gray-scale images. He had a phone up to his ear, held there with his shoulder so he could use both hands to hold the images up to the light.

  On the other end of the line was the neurologist who took all the pictures. I don’t know what his side of the conversation sounded like, but Markham wasn’t saying anything that made any sense to me at all. If it hadn’t been for the occasional verb or preposition linking the technical terms, I’d think he was speaking Greek.

  I’d already sat through two other calls he’d made to specialists who’d also reviewed the data. None of that made any sense to me either.

  “Well, Mr. Ah-quillo,” he said after ending the call and jotting down a few notes in one of the files, “you got all dat, right?”

  “Sure. Clear as a bell.”

  He gathered the stuff off the desk and led me over to a row of light boxes mounted to the wall, where he took me through a tour of my skull, moving from angle to angle, from MRI to X-ray and back again. He also used anatomical drawings, cutaways also rendered from several different angles. It was pretty interesting, and would have been more so if it hadn’t been my brain at the center of the discussion.

  When he finished the lecture he said, “Dis is usually when we ask the patient if he has anybody he can talk to about the situation.”

  “I actually do, believe it or not.”

  “Since dat’s about all you can do, I suggest you do it the next chance you get. Don’t go keepin’ dis to yourself.”

  “That’s the plan. Honest, Doc. What do I owe you?”

/>   He put out his giant paw to shake hands.

  “My new bookcase is already filled up,” he said. “Got space for another just like it.”

  It was hardly a fair trade, but that’s what he wanted to do and I couldn’t talk him out of it. I got him to agree to tell me if he ever needed help with anything. He shook my hand again and strode away, heading back to his trauma ward, eager to sort through other matters of life and death.

  I called Amanda from the nurses’ station and told her to meet me at Hodges’s boat where it was docked at Hawks Pond. I’d asked him the day before if he’d loan it to me for the afternoon. I knew I’d have something to talk to Amanda about and wanted to be somewhere other than Oak Point. The occasion called for a different setting, equally sublime, but distinctive.

  She arrived as I finished preparing to launch, dock lines untied, engine warming up, fenders stowed. She wore a broad-rimmed straw hat, yellow shorts, white top and high-heeled sandals like any sailor would. The beach basket in her hand was filled with wine and tasty things wrapped in tissue and foil.

  We followed the channel markers across the pond and then out into the Little Peconic. The breeze was out of the southwest, where it would mostly stay until late August. It warmed the air and rustled the trees, and provided just enough gusto to move Hodges’s heavy cruiser at a stately pace. I was glad for that, not wanting to wrestle with anything more challenging than a corkscrew.

  Amanda leaned back against the coaming and dabbed sun-tan lotion on her face and knees and gave me an update on her projects. We debated over which property to tackle next, deciding on a house between the current rehabs on Jacob’s Neck with a lease about to run out.

  I had a fresh backlog of architectural details to make for Frank—gates, benches, built-ins and custom trim that would keep me busy in my shop well into the summer.

  After clearing the last set of buoys, I pulled the ties off the mainsail and clipped the halyard to the head of the sail. Then I had Amanda hold us in the wind so I could raise it up the mast.

  “Not as easy to steer as the Audi,” she said.

  We managed it anyway, and I took the wheel from her, killed the engine and we heeled to starboard as I let the wind grip the sail and shove us back toward the north. Once the jib was out, we were fully underway at a gentle five knots. There were a few open fishing boats bobbing around the buoys, but otherwise we had the bay to ourselves.

  “I spent the morning with Markham Fairchild,” I told her once we were comfortably settled into a stable port tack.

  “Really.”

  “I already gave him his bookcase, so he had to give me all the test results.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he had just the right spot for the bookcase and ordered another one.”

  “If you aren’t going to tell me you shouldn’t bring it up.”

  “I want to tell you. That’s why I wanted to get out on the water today. To talk about it.”

  She looked ready to do that, but I suggested we wait for wine and cheese, having missed breakfast. She busied herself with that while I flicked on the ancient Autohelm and set a course we could hold for at least an hour.

  “Okay,” she said after we clinked glasses. “Spill it.”

  “Markham got the MRIs from when I got slugged by Buddy Florin back from the Town evidence room. Then he had me do it again, and took another set of X-rays. They also ran a bunch of blood and urine tests to compare with others in the past, including what I gave them the day after conking out in the shower.”

  She tensed.

  “You’re leading up to something.”

  “I am.”

  She set her wine glass on the cockpit table and sat back, folding her hands in her lap.

  “Before you say anything,” she said, “I want you to know that I’ll be there for you no matter what. I know I haven’t always been. I’ve sent you all kinds of foolish mixed messages. I think I’m over that. I think you’re over doing the same thing to me. I’ve been through too much with you now to have it any other way. So whatever’s ahead, I’m seeing you through it whether you like it or not.”

  “That’s fine with me, as long as you skip the cosmopolitans.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Yeah, keep your poisonous concoctions to yourself.” I stood up and leaned over her with as much grace as the sea motion of the boat would allow and kissed her forehead. “Now I’m confused,” she said.

  “My mother told me I was allergic to eggs when I was a little kid, but I grew out of it. As far as I know she never fed me pomegranate.”

  Amanda put her hand over her mouth.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Markham said my blood was still chock-full of histamines and leukotrienes the day after I passed out. So they ran allergen screens, including one for the component parts of pomegranate, which I told them I had the night before. Markham said it was pretty rare, but something in me really hates pomegranates. Enough to bring on anaphylactic shock. He said, ‘Don be t’inkin’ dis is all good news. Anaphylaxis do in more people every year den lightnin’.”

  “What about the MRIs? What did they say?”

  “He still thinks I should give up my boxing career, which I already have. But he said the latest stuff looked pretty good, that the neurologist saw little lasting damage from the last concussion. Doesn’t mean some evil crap couldn’t sneak up on me over time, but right now, all clear.”

  She got up this time and wedged herself next to me behind the helm. She put her arms around my middle and her head on my shoulder and stayed like that for a long time as we reached across the Little Peconic Bay, holding hard to the prospect of peace and serenity that the sacred waters promised to bestow.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks again to Mary Jack Wald, my literary agent and guardian angel, and to Martin and Judy Shepard of the Permanent Press.

  Special thanks to John Acquino of Southampton for the lesson in deconstructionism.

  Other special thanks to Norman Bloch of Thompson Hine for his tour of the New York criminal justice system, and his colleague Rich Orr for making that possible.

  For medical advice, my sincere thanks to the Docatola of Rock and Rolla, Peter King, MD. And for that connection, Dave Newell, native guide of the Vermont countryside.

  Any inaccuracies or hanky-panky with facts supplied are mine alone.

  For editorial wisdom and syntactical tough love, my thanks to Anne Collins of Random House Canada.

  On the visual side of the house, thanks to Patrick Kiniry for cover artistry, and Dan Lorenz of Lithographics for pre-pro generosity, and Susan Alhquist for tireless devotion to production quality.

  As always, deepest thanks to valued readers and advisers— in particular, Randy Costello, Sean Cronin and Mary Farrell. And Anne-Marie Regish, who keeps the whole machine running in the midst of startling chaos.

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2009

  Copyright © 2008 Chris Knopf

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  Chris Knopf, Head Wounds sahm-3