by Chris Knopf
“I don’t think so. Theymight record the bank code. I can ask. This could take a little time.” There was a pause. “I’m trying to write it all down.”
“I appreciate it.”
“I’ll need an original death certificate and a copy of whatever says you’re the administrator of the estate.”
“I got that.”
“If there’s a safety-deposit box the Town attorney might have to be there when we open it up.”
“Okay. Whatever you got.”
“I don’t think I ever saw her in here.”
“I think Regina ran everything out of her mailbox. The flag was up all the time. Didn’t drive. Cabbed or took the Senior Center shuttle to the IGA, unless she could nag me into getting her groceries.”
“You’d do that?”
“Occasionally.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Nothing relating to Regina was sweet. Least of all me.”
“No safety-deposit. No investments, no savings account. Just one checking. Originally opened in 1987, which was the year Harbor Trust bought out East End Savings and Loan, so it could be a much older account.”
“That was fast.”
“We have computers.”
“How much she got?”
“If you’re planning to abscond to Mexico you won’t get far. Eight thousand, two hundred and sixty-seven.”
“Dollars?”
“Not pesos.”
“Deposits?”
“One thousand, fifty-two dollars and thirty-five cents deposited, let me see,” I heard the keyboard tap, “every month for the last twelve months, which is all I can pull up on this computer.”
“Social Security.”
“Looks from the balances like she basically washed it all out every month paying bills. Thirty-two, eighty-one, fifty-five. Here’s one back in May for two hundred and eighty-three. Nothing bigger than that.”
“What’s the number on the last check she wrote?”
“Six two oh four.”
I wrote it down.
“Nothing bigger than two hundred and eighty-three dollars?”
“No. I’m looking.”
“Like in January or June?”
“No.”
“No property taxes.”
“Wouldn’t tell me that, but I wouldn’t say so from the size of the checks.”
“Lived on about twelve thousand a year.”
“I’ve done it on less,” she said.
“Yeah, but not with Regina’s lavish lifestyle.”
“Which was financed by tax evasion?”
“She didn’t pay property taxes.”
“She must have paid it some other way.”
“No. Didn’t have to pay because she didn’t own the house.”
“A rental?”
“I’m not sure. Can you give me hard copies of all that stuff?”
“If I ask Roy.”
“I appreciate it.”
“He’s back in the City tomorrow.”
“Busy boy.”
“I’ve got the day off.”
“Me, too.”
There was another pause on the other end.
“I’m going to start my day off by walking on the beach. I usually park at Little Plains.”
“Must be pretty in the morning.”
“At nine in the morning the sun’s still fresh, but the mist is lifting. My favorite time.”
“I bet it’s possible you’ll be bringing along a stack of account records belonging to Regina Broadhurst.”
“Not my normal routine, but the chances are good.”
“Well, thanks for your help. Hope you have a good day tomorrow.”
“I’m guessing I will.”
Eddie was looking at me when I hung up the phone.
“What.”
He didn’t answer.
“I know. Stupid.”
When I went to bed it was unseasonably warm and humid. At 8:45 the next morning the air had switched back to clean and clear, with a steady offshore breeze blowing in cool dry Canadian air. I was sitting on the petrified remnants of an old wooden breakwater and looking out at the ocean. The wind was knocking the tops off the waves before they broke on shore, sending up a foamy spray that the sun lit into slivers of pale gray glass. The rim of my Yankees cap was pushed down low to keep the hat from blowing off my head. I was wearing clip-on sunglasses over my wire rims and had the collar of my jean jacket pulled up around my neck. The overall effect made me feel undercover. It was working with the seagulls flying overhead— none of them seemed to recognize me.
Behind me were low dunes covered in feathery dune grass that the wind combed into a green pompadour. Behind the dunes were shingle-style mansions spaced every three to four acres—mountainous houses dressed up with terraced balconies, octagonal windows and colonnaded porches. Mostly empty this time of year, they faced the ferocious sea and never blinked.
I watched her walk out on the beach from a path that led between the dunes. She stopped when she saw me and looked surprised, acting out the part. As she started walking again, the dry sand forced her hips to swing outside their normal arc. She wore a beat-up gold barn jacket, a white silk blouse, jeans and sunglasses. Her thick hair flared back from a hand-painted silk scarf tied around her head. I sat still and silent as I watched her approach. Still incognito.
She walked right up to me and stood there enriching the beauty of the beach.
“You.”
“Me,” I said back, still stumped for words.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” She looked out at the ocean for confirmation.
In profile, lit by the sun’s glare off the sea, the lines that defined her cheek and jaw looked crisper than I’d remembered them. I realized those lines were usually hidden behind heavy reddish-brown waves of hair. The wind was now sweeping it back from her face, clearing the decks. I liked the symmetrical proportions. Her skin was even smoother and more richly tinted than I’d noticed under the fluorescent lights of the bank or in my dimly lit house. It began to dawn on me that Amanda Battiston was actually a very beautiful woman. I don’t why it took that long. Maybe she’d been shrouded within a translucent veil that prevented me from seeing what she really looked like. And now, under the autumn light, everything was revealed.
“What?”
“Very nice. The ocean.”
“You weren’t looking at the ocean.”
“Yes I was. Out of the corner of my eye. You can’t tell with my clip-on sunglasses.”
She smirked.
“They’re actually kind of cute. Your sunglasses.”
“Fifty-two-year-old ex-prizefighters can’t be cute. Puppies are cute.”
She looked skeptical.
“Prizefighter?”
“Well, sort of. Sounds more impressive than it is.”
“That’s why your nose is a little off to the side?”
“That’s why.”
“Ouch.”
“That’s what I said at the time.”
“I was never a prizefighter.”
“And not always a personal banker, I’m guessing.”
She still smiled, a little less firmly.
“No. I did some other things.”
“Me, too. I improved the fuel efficiency of your Audi Quattro and sired the only perfect female to ever trod the earth.”
“Next to me.”
“I’ll take that up with your father.”
“Can’t now. He’s been dead for a while.”
“So you can be the only other perfect female. By default.”
She sat down next to me on the old bulkhead.
“Finally, perfection. And still young enough to enjoy it.”
I felt her shoulder through the various layers of denim, suede and cotton that separated us. All my nerve endings must have traveled over there for the occasion.
“You’re right,” she said. “You’re not cute. Cute’s a demeaning term to apply to a fifty-two-year-old anything. You are, however, someth
ing that has been disturbing my sleep.”
“Medication’ll fix that.”
“I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she said abruptly, like I always did when I was having a hard time getting to the point.
“You don’t have to be even partially honest with me. You don’t owe me anything.”
She was focusing on the soft straight line of the horizon. Probably helped keep her level.
“Look,” I said to her before she could speak again, “some people think, female people usually, that you can’t properly know someone unless you spill your guts all over the place and reveal every goddam thing you ever thought, felt or did.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
“Doesn’t have to be. Frankly, I think a keen sense of privacy, emotional atrophy and repression, especially as regards personal history, are highly underrated behaviors.”
A bright little laugh popped out of her.
“Where did they make you, anyway?”
“In the Bronx. I think people pile their past up in these big emotional landfills where they decompose and produce nothing but toxic emissions. Personally, I’m working at shooting all that stuff out into space. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want mine, I don’t want yours.”
She looked toward me and pulled back—maybe to see me better through her sunglasses.
“You can’t forget your whole life. Why live it in the first place?”
“No reason I can think of.”
“Maybe you don’t want to.”
Now I got to laugh.
“Jesus, this is exactly the kind of shit I’m trying not to talk about.”
“You started it.”
“I did?”
“Because you thought I was going to say something. Maybe I wasn’t.”
I loved the way the waves were breaking under the offshore breeze. Tidy, well-organized curls. Good surfing waves, especially for Long Island.
“I like you, Amanda. But I’m really not what you’re looking for. Whatever that is. I tend to end in disappointment.”
I felt a subtle increase of pressure at the point where our two shoulders touched. Maybe a millionth of a psi. She was also looking intently at the ocean. The two of us, sitting there side by side. Nobody talked for a while.
“Okay,” she said, finally.
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I understand. Here.”
She stood up, brushed off her butt and pulled an overstuffed, sealed number ten envelope from the inside pocket of her barn jacket. She sort of tapped me on the forehead with it before she put it in my hand.
“Copies of her last twelve statements. That’s all I have. Anything older would be buried in old microfiche from the original bank, if it exists at all.”
She started walking back to the path through the dunes. I followed her, feeling a little off balance walking across the dry sand. Probably what she intended.
When I came up over the slot in the dunes I saw her Audi and the Grand Prix. Along with a big black BMW 740 IL sedan parked there looking invincible and overpriced. Apparently it came with a matching guy in a long black leather duster, black peg-legged pants and motorcycle boots. Even his hair was black as an oil slick. Only the half ton of gold wrapped around a meaty pinkie introduced a touch of color. Any other beach he’d look out of place, but this was Long Island. He was leaning against his car, staring at Amanda.
She acted like she didn’t notice him. I acted like I did, looking him straight in the eye to pull his attention away from her. When he finally looked, it was like eyeballing a black bear. Only less sentient.
I moved a little quicker so I could escort Amanda to her Audi. She probably thought I was being chivalrous holding her door—she had that awkward, shy smile back on her face.
When I went to get into the Grand Prix, the trained bear was leaning up against my driver’s side door. I took my hands out of the pockets of my jean jacket and approached him without hesitation. I wondered what kind of traction I’d get from the old Adidas Countries I had on my feet.
I stood there and waited for him to move. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. Amanda was busy backing out of her space, and wasn’t noticing anything. After only a few seconds he shrugged, like we’d just wrapped up a long conversation, and moved out of the way. I waited until he was outside cold-cock range and climbed into my car. My hand shook a little when I put the key in the ignition. Adrenaline.
I made a wider than necessary arc when I backed out of my space so I could align the rear bumper of the Grand Prix with the BMW’s. I looked at the guy when I gave his car just the gentlest little tap, the armored-car-gauge chrome of the Grand Prix thumping wetly into the polymer composite that tucked around the ass of the BMW. He didn’t seem to mind. He just looked at me with a pair of eyes that would have cooled off a ski slope. They were pinched tight to the bridge of his nose, then angled off to the outside of his face. I couldn’t tell if they’d grown that way naturally or been mashed into place. Either way, they showed no affect. He just stood there and looked.
By this time, Amanda was long gone. A little red warning light went on somewhere way in the back of my head. But like we usually did with those things back in the plant control rooms, I ignored it, hoping it would shut itself off again.
THREE
I COULDN’T DRIVE into Southampton Village unarmed, so I bought a cup of Hazelnut at one of the roadside delis. It tasted like burnt oak leaves, but at least it was hot and caffeinated.
I crossed Sunrise Highway and drove into the Village, noticing as I always did the sudden change in foliage, the native scrub oak and pine turning into luxurious shrubs and cultivated hardwoods, sycamore and dense privet hedges that rose like battlements in defense of shingled mansions and social status, however tenuous and dearly bought.
I arrived at the Village offices a day later than I’d planned. The autumn season for building permits and zoning appeals was going full tilt. People with briefcases and rolled-up blueprints were meeting with officials out on the steps between the oversized Doric columns. The smell of negotiation tinged the air. Faces looked sincere and cooperative. It’d be an ordinary scene if it wasn’t for the money at stake. There were plenty of people from Manhattan with bank accounts and egos large enough to fill twenty-thousand-square-foot houses built on the most expensive sand in the world. More than the East End would ever be able to absorb, which kept constant upward pressure on real estate values. A small group of regular people who lived out here—teachers, carpenters, pediatricians—had the job of controlling the demand, keeping the golden goose from being strangled by overdevelopment. It wasn’t easy. Every day Planning and Zoning faced down the kind of venal avarice that used to overrun entire continents.
I passed through the middle of the transactions unseen, like a wraith, and entered the building. There were a lot of cops hanging out in the lobby, buckling holsters, drinking coffee, going on and off shift. None of them seemed to want to arrest me for anything, so I moved on down the corridor to the Records Department.
She was still at her station behind the tall counter. She didn’t look up, even after I cleared my throat. I cleared it again.
“Yes?”
“I’m Sam Acquillo. I was here a few days ago about a property up in North Sea.”
“That’s the Town. You’ll have to go there.”
“Yes, we talked about that. The Town told me the records for this place were stored over here. You were going to research it for me and make some copies.”
She looked at me through the tops of her bifocals.
“You were going to come in the next day. I made copies for you.”
Now that she had me on a breach of promise her memory flooded back.
“I had it all ready for you.”
“Yeah. Sorry. If I could have it now I’ll get out of your hair.”
She tapped a few more times on her keyboard, then hauled her mass up out of the chair. Her glasses, secured by a beaded chain, rested on
a shelf formed by her uplifted bust. The furrow above the bridge of her nose had formed a permanent crease, casting her irritation into a structural component of her face. She dug a nine-by-twelve-inch brown envelope out from under the counter.
“There’s a charge for these copies.”
“A day late, but,” I said to her, plunking down a five-dollar bill. She snatched it up and held it stuffed in her fist. She waited for me to go.
“I guess that’s all I need,” I said. She nodded once, smiled and went back to her computer. The end of our relationship made her happy.
“Have a nice day,” she said to me, before smacking the enter key on the computer.
“Too late for that.”
Everyone had cleared out from the front steps by the time I got back outside. The autumn leaves were thinning out overhead and the October air was beginning to lose the fight. The sun still had enough strength to warm the paving bricks and the teak bench directly outside the Village offices where I sat to slide the contents out of the envelope.
There were about ten pages. Some were clean Xeroxes, others were slippery old-fashioned photostats. Some had the fuzzy edges and optical distortion common to microfilm enlargements. On top was a site plan, dated 1939. The lines were neatly drawn and the hand-lettering true to the engineering calligraphy of the time. I’d seen the style before on old drawings. I thought it was incomprehensibly beautiful and otherworldly. The plan was covered with stamps noting perk tests, septic and well locations. There were separate sheets with revisions overlaid, and dated as recently as 1998. These were certified by the surveyors, Spring & Spring, in Bridgehampton, and signed off on by the Town building inspector, Claude Osay. Suffolk County had its own stamp, warning all concerned to submit wetlands clearance with any application for a building permit.
The site itself was roughly rectangular, the borders straight and at right angles, matching the one my father bought about six years later. The adjacent lots weren’t drawn in, but there were numbers suggesting subdivisions distributed around the map in a neat pattern. Regina was number thirty-three. We were number thirty-two.
It didn’t say who owned the property at the time the site plan was drawn. Another hand notation, far cruder than the ones made in 1939, read “Bay Side Holdings, Inc., Sag Harbor,” with an arrow pointed at Regina’s lot. I guessed its vintage to be the same as the recent building inspector stamps. There was nothing at all about a Mr. or Mrs. Broadhurst.