by Chris Knopf
The fog had risen above the rooftops. Underneath the light was shadowless and diffuse, deepening the color of the red municipal mums tucked around the base of an ancient Village shade tree. I sat on a teak park bench to drink my coffee. The bench had been donated in loving memory of Elizabeth McGill. I thought about the flow of property through successive generations of the dead and their donators. Maybe I should get a bench in honor of Regina Broadhurst. Something hard with a lot of sharp edges, too uncomfortable to spend much time on.
Except for the cottage, all my parents left me was fifty thousand dollars in unpaid nursing home expenses. My sister and I split it. She handed me a check before boarding her plane back to Wisconsin. She told me she was never coming back again. The relief in her voice was deep enough to float an ocean liner. A week later a quitclaim deed to her half of the cottage arrived in the mail—stuck like a bookmark between the pages of a standard King James Bible. I don’t remember the exact psalm that it marked, but it was all about forgiveness. Who in my family was supposed to be forgiving whom, and for what, God only knows.
Joe Sullivan glided by in his police cruiser. He saw me on the bench and pulled into one of the parking slots. I slid my ass over to clear him a spot.
“They’re doin’ it. The coroner,” he said, dropping into the bench. “The autopsy.”
“That’s good.”
“I know a couple people up there. Bunch of ghouls if you ask me. But we need ’em. doin’ me a favor.”
“That was good of you.”
“No biggie. I’ll let you know if there’s anything you should know about.”
I looked over at the side of his face. He was looking across the street at Harbor Trust, Roy and Amanda’s bank.
“Anything at all is what I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”
He looked back at me. Some of the old mix of duty and defiance was sketched across his face. Local guys often have that look. A vague sense of being one of the chosen, born to the South Fork, and yet one of the conquered, bound to the service of a powerful elite— an occupation force who had swept in from the west, taking possession of the land, plundering her gifts.
“We’ll keep you informed,” he said to me.
I felt my face warm despite the cloud cover.
“If there’s ever any reason to look into somebody’s death, you know, if there’s any questions that come up, who does it? I mean, who opens up the case, you?”
“Basically. If there’s any goddam reason to. I go over the situation with my boss, who’ll talk to the Chief, who’ll talk to the DA’s office. They officially tell us to go look a little more. And the day sergeant and administrative lieutenant usually get involved. Then if there’s what you’d call an actual investigation it gets assigned to one of our plainclothesmen.”
“So it’s your call provided three-quarters of the local judicial system say it’s all right, and your role is to hand everything over to other people to do the actual work.”
His rounded jowls turned the color of the Village mums. He slapped his thigh with an open hand as if to drain off the urge to turn it into a fist.
“You can really be a dick sometimes, Mr. Acquillo.”
Anger rose in my throat, but I choked it off. I shook myself like a wet retriever. Shedding heat. I stared at the ground until I knew my voice was level. Sullivan was trying not to breathe too hard. His hands were on his hips, pushing down on the holster belt. I noticed for the first time that he was chewing gum. Probably learned that from the Big Tough Cop Instruction Manual.
“I’m a dick most of the time. Don’t take it personally. It’s this thing with Regina Broadhurst. It’s bugging me.”
“Like how?”
“Are you going to take this seriously?”
He shook his head. Reminded me of a bull shaking off flies.
“I’m trying to.”
“Regina didn’t take baths. She couldn’t get in and out of the bathtub. She always used a walk-in shower.”
“Getting’ dotty. Got confused. Slipped and fell.”
“I knew her. She was clear as a bell. She’d lived with arthritis for a million years. She wouldn’t suddenly forget she had it.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t fall.”
There, I said it. Right in front of God and local law enforcement.
“Oh, come on.”
“I found an industrial strength neoprene plug in the bathroom. It has a series of O-rings to force a tight seal. We had them in the chem lab at work. You’d need something like that to keep the tub full as long as possible. Any fan of long baths will tell you that ordinary bath stoppers are pretty leaky—the water usually runs out in a few hours.”
Sullivan let out a man-sized sigh and sat back on the park bench.
“Doesn’t mean shit. Won’t mean shit to the DA, much less to the Chief. I go to those people talking about a neighbor of a dead old lady who’s worryin’ about a bath plug, they throw me out on my can. We deal with enough crazy shit every day from people we actually have to pay attention to.”
It would be a mistake to underestimate the Southampton Town cops. They covered a big area, and not all of it what you’d expect to find out here. There were some tough little spots filled with hard-case locals and immigrant labor. And the Summer People themselves weren’t all affected fops. Others thought a little money, or the show of money, bought immunity. Especially during the season when the clubs were in full riot. Guys like Sullivan were serious and could handle stuff. But the trouble they knew would tend to come right at them, out in the open where they could see it plain and simple.
“I’m not really asking you to do anything. I’m just talking here.”
He looked relieved.
“Talking’s okay.”
“Not accusing anybody.”
“Accusations, not okay.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t talk to you once in a while so somebody other than me knows what I’m thinking. Even if it’s nuts.”
“Like I said, talking’s okay.”
“Like getting an autopsy report. No big deal.”
He made a noise and stood up.
“Okay. Jesus, what a pain in the ass,” he said as he walked away, trying to maintain a little obstinacy, keeping the narrow, ill-fed portions of his mind in reserve. The cloud cover broke at about the same instant, and the sun tossed a few splashes of brilliance on the sidewalk to help light his path back to the cruiser.
I spent the late afternoon and evening at the Pequot. I thought it would help me think. Or, better yet, not think at all.
That’d been my plan, if you could call it that, when I moved into my parents’ house. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, or anything else to do. Or, rather, I didn’t want to do anything else. I was expected to find another job, which I probably could have done. Some type of job. I still had a good name in the industry. Outside the management of my own company. Abby had kept me somewhat involved in professional organizations, and in contact with people who could help my career, in her opinion. But I let those contacts lapse.
The divorce from Abby was a sleepwalk. My terms were so generous her lawyer really had nothing to do until I gutted our house, which got things a little livelier. If I’d tried to get work at that point, it might have been harder, but I still had a few friends around the business. They took it on themselves to try on my behalf, but I kept my head down until they went away. I started to really like wearing blue jeans and sweatshirts every day. And once I got to Southampton, all the old links just evaporated. I calculated how long I could live on whatever money was left after the carnage and figured if I kept down expenses I’d almost make it to early retirement age. Or, with a little luck, I’d be dead by then.
Now, four years into it and for the first time I didn’t like the mood I was working myself into. I was getting nervy. It was messing up my sleep, nagging at me in the middle of the night.
Dotty Hodges had the old place under control.
She wore a tight T-shirt that rode up above her belly and matched her raven-black hair. Her jeans were cut like pedal pushers, and accentuated a clunky pair of yellow-stitched Doc Martens and blue and white horizontally striped socks.
I ordered the fish of the day without further inquiry and pulled out good old Tocqueville to give it another try. I had a rule not to quit a book after I started it, no matter how daunting it got.
The fish took a long time, but it was delivered by the chef.
“It’s the baked.”
“Great.”
“Bon appétit.”
He let me take a few bites of the fish before interrupting.
“That Miss Filmore’s a hard on, isn’t she?”
“I don’t think I made her happy.”
“It’s like her little empire. Likes to keep things under control.”
“Always been there?”
“Nah, I’ve been through a bunch of directors. Used to be all volunteer till the widow of a guy who’d cashed out his potato farm left money for a professional staff. It’s a good place, though, Sam. Don’t take a broad like Filmore too seriously.”
I got in a few more mouthfuls while he talked. Dotty brought him a beer and refilled my glass.
“Didn’t learn much,” I said.
“I called a few people I know from over there. They’ll ask around. Never know.”
“Thanks, Mr. Hodges,” I told him, pleased.
“Paul.”
“Paul.”
“You spooked her with that thing about recent deaths.”
“Didn’t mean to.”
“She thought you were Social Services heat.”
“Nope. Just nosy.”
He took some time out to drink his beer and let me finish my meal. Dotty swept up the plates the moment I put down my fork and recharged our drinks. It struck me she liked seeing her father talk to somebody. That it was me showed how out of touch with people Hodges probably was. Would’ve given my own daughter a good laugh.
“I did find out a few things, though” said Hodges. “I was hoping you’d come in so I could tell you.”
“Really.”
“Regina and Mrs. Anselma hated each other’s guts. It was like a blood feud, some thought, only way below the surface. You know, act all civil with each other, but the air’s filled with little invisible daggers.”
“That fits.”
“It fits with Broadhurst, but Mrs. Anselma wasn’t that way. A sweet lady, refined. You know, maybe a little higher class, but everybody liked her. Never had a bad word for nobody but Regina, who she’d stick it to whenever she got the chance.”
“Raised a daughter on her own.”
Hodges was warming to his subject.
“Yeah, well, that’s the other interesting thing. No dad in the picture. Ever. Back then this wasn’t something that went unnoticed. But Mrs. Anselma was such a class act nobody’d talk her down, though it sorta hung around her all the time.”
“Amanda. The daughter. Married Roy Battiston.”
“I knew most of the Battistons. Lowlifes.”
“You think?”
He raised his hand.
“Just an opinion. Shouldn’t say that kind of thing about people.” He glanced over at Dotty. “I just never liked them much. Used to be a passel of them livin’ year round in an old summer colony in Noyac. All the houses up on cinder blocks. Shacks is what they were.”
“Roy runs the local Harbor Trust.”
“No shit. Must’ve got the brains in the family.”
“Must’ve,” I agreed. “So you knew him.”
“Yeah, though mostly his family. I crewed with his uncle and grandfather out of Montauk. They were serious hard cases. Only worked off and on. Construction labor. Pumping gas. Cheating County Welfare. Kind of like me, without the style.”
“Amanda said Roy worked his way out of it.”
“Roy didn’t talk much. Big fat serious kid. Looked like a bed-wetter to me. But yeah, hard worker. Stuck to himself. Stayed clear of his grandfather’s backhand. Grandmother was no better. Big-time drunk. Had a huge rosy face—nose full of busted capillaries. Beautiful people.”
“Including his mother?”
“Oh yeah, Judy Battiston. Worked at the Anchorage for years. Another drinker. Anybody that could stand her could take her home. Ended up at the 7-Eleven. Pretty sad.”
Hodges waited a moment before adding, “Now they’re all dead.”
“Who?”
“The Battistons. The whole clan. Including his mother. Everybody but Roy.”
He had to leave after that to look after the other customers. I was able to concentrate on forgetting about everything but my vodka and Alexis de Tocqueville, who was having a great time boppin’ around the old U.S. I guess I could see some relevance to the country that’s here now, but a lot of it seemed alien. I wondered if he ever made it to the Hamptons. Would have found a bunch of hard-nosed Yankee farmers and a few beat-up Indians. And the Bonnikers crabbing like they still do over in Springs. Oceanfront was where you grazed cattle.
Hodges came back at the end of the night and settled in at my table like I’d invited him. The old bastard was growing on me a little, I had to admit.
Not that I was looking for a friend. I never had a lot of friends in the first place, and since moving to the cottage I’d kept to myself. Friends were another thing I wasn’t very good at. Probably why I got a dog.
When I was a kid my only friend enlisted in the Army to avoid going to jail for car theft. He and I used to borrow expensive convertibles from used-car lots and bomb around the South Fork like we were rich city kids. I did the hot wiring and he did the driving, so when the cops were chasing us he was the one who slowed down just enough to let me jump out of the car. I landed in a sandbank covered in wild roses and he sped away. They caught him trying to swim across Mecox Bay, the front end of the convertible nearly submerged in the stony bay beach.
The only hitch in the enlistment idea was he had a genuine phobia of guns. His father was a hunter and had decided the only way to cure his son’s fear was to take him deer hunting in Connecticut. The woods were full of deer, so there was ample opportunity to get the rifle stock up to his shoulder, but he couldn’t get his finger to pull the trigger. By the third try, the old man lost his temper. He started to yell. The kid yelled back. The old man yanked the rifle out of the kid’s hands and slammed the butt into his face. Inexplicably, the old man’s thumb had slipped into the trigger guard, so the cocked rifle went off right at the moment of impact. The recoil knocked the kid out, so he didn’t see the heavy deer shot blow his father’s face off. He only saw the results when he woke up a few hours later, half dead himself from a huge gash in his forehead.
The recruitment officer, having literally heard it all, promised the kid he could enlist as a medic, stationed in Germany, and would never have to carry a gun. Half the promise was kept. He was trained as a medic, and up until an hour before he boarded the transport he assumed he was going to get a chance to learn German.
He drank all the way to Saigon and watched a fire-fight light up the skies as they landed that night. Two days later, he was in the front seat of a jeep in a small convoy winding along a jungle road on the way to an ARVN firebase somewhere near the western border. They were behind a canvas-covered deuce and a half. Another jeep leading the convoy was the only other vehicle, since the road was supposed to be secure. That was why the machine gunner sitting behind the kid had his M-60 stowed at his feet, with the bandoleers safely packed in boxes in the back of the deuce. Not that he could have done anything about the sniper who shot him through the throat.
That night the kid slept with the machine gunner’s blood in his hair and an M-16, his regular issue Colt .45 and a half-dozen ammo bags full of clips snuggled up next to his body like a child’s stuffed animals.
He got plenty of opportunity to use it all, right up to the moment the Vietcong ripped him to pieces while he was trying to stuff a Huey full of wounded
grunts. That was near the beginning of his second re-up. He was pretty badly strung out on heroin by then and had forgotten that there was a place called Long Island he could come home to.
My mother got me one of the last deferments you could get for having a dead father. I almost enlisted anyway, thinking I could wrangle school money out of the deal. She fought me on it. Said if I went in I’d never get my degree. Her interference bothered me at the time, since she’d never interfered with anything I’d ever done before. I tried to thank her later on, but she’d forgotten about Vietnam by then, along with everything else.
When I got home Eddie was passed out on my bed on the screened-in porch, snoring. I had to wake him up. Fearless watchdog. But he was glad to see me and glad to get outside.
I had a nightcap and watched Eddie under the moonlight, running the yard, securing the perimeter. It was bright and clear enough to light up the bay so you could see all the way across to Southold. Some lights were still lit over on Nassau Point and Hog’s Neck, full of guys on porches, staring back into the mysteries of the Little Peconic Bay.
In the morning I called my personal banker.
“Amanda Battiston.”
“Hi. It’s Sam. On official business.”
“Ready to open that investment account?”
“And plunge Wall Street into chaos?”
“I’m ready when you are.”
“I need everything you got on Regina’s account.”
“We have her account?”
“I got the checks to prove it. I want to cash one to pay her bills. Keep the lights on. I need to know how much she’s got. If there’re any other accounts. Savings, or one of your aggressively promoted investment accounts. Any account history as detailed as you can give me. I have one box of canceled checks, which I’m guessing goes back a few years. I haven’t found her checkbook, so current stuff is important. I need to know what obligations she’s got, premiums, taxes, that kind of thing. Do you take pictures of checks from other banks that are deposited?”