The Last Refuge sahm-1

by Chris Knopf

  “We’ve had quite the schedule at the Center lately, Mr. Acquillo,” said Barbara. “I expected a visit.”

  “Been pretty tied up.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if suddenly remembering there was a guy standing next to her, “this is Bob Sobol. This is Sam Acquillo.”

  “How’re you doin’?” he said absently, looking past my shoulder at the sun and fresh air blowing in from an open door. His grip hurt, which surprised me a little.

  “Bob is thinking about buying property out here. He’s staying with me. Maybe you could tell him what you know about the area, investment-wise—you’ve owned out here for some time, haven’t you?”

  “I inherited.”

  Bob didn’t seem to care either way.

  “Bob also has retirement to consider, so it has to be livable,” said Barbara, leadingly. She looked at Bob for a little help.

  “I like the area,” said Bob, finally relenting. There was a touch of the Bronx in his accent, the one I knew as a kid.

  “I know some good real-estate people I can refer you to,” said Amanda.

  The two of them stared at her till she put out her hand.

  “I’m Amanda Battiston. Regina was a friend of my mother’s.”

  “Is that Mrs. Battiston?” Bob asked her, looking at her left hand.

  “It is,” she said brightly.

  On cue, Roy came up behind her and stuck his out as well.

  “Roy Battiston,” he said.

  “My mother was Julia Anselma,” said Amanda. Barbara perked up.

  “Of course, I’m very sorry.” She turned toward Bob. “Amanda’s mother was a regular at the Center. She also passed away recently.”

  Barbara placed a blocking shoulder in front of Bob so he couldn’t move closer to Amanda. He didn’t seem to notice, or care.

  “That’d be nice of you, Mrs. Battiston. I haven’t found an agent I like.”

  “These folks are very likable. At least to me.”

  “Long’s they’re good,” said Bob.

  “Yes, they’re good, too. Good and likable.”

  Bob pursed his mouth and acted convinced.

  “Maybe you could show me where some of the better areas are, Mrs. Battiston. You must know your way around pretty good, being a native.”

  “Most people out here aren’t natives.”

  “But I guessed maybe you were.”

  “I didn’t know it showed.”

  He shrugged as a type of sympathy for her shortcomings.

  “How about financing?” he asked. “I could use some tips there, too.”

  Roy dove right in.

  “Absolutely, Bob. Come see me at Harbor Trust. Always there to help.”

  I started looking around for Jimmy Maddox. Maybe the two of us could go find a piece of heavy equipment to play with.

  “But surely you could help me find a place, Mrs. Battiston,” said Bob.

  “Amanda. I can point you in the right direction,” she said sprightly.

  “Should I get a pencil?”

  Barbara Filmore’s smile stayed put as her mood took a right turn.

  “I’m sure Amanda has plenty to do already.”

  “Actually, I do, but I promise to keep my eyes and ears open.”

  Bob gave a curt little nod that reminded me of Claude Rains. I thought he was going to click his heels together.

  “You must be so busy looking after your mother’s things,” said Barbara, putting a little meat on Amanda’s excuse. “I’ve been through it myself, so I know.” She hooked her oversized pocketbook on her shoulder and slid the other hand through Bob’s arm. He didn’t put up much of a fight when she tugged him gently toward the door.

  “I’m so sorry about your mother. And Regina, of course. Two friends, so close together.”

  “They weren’t all that close,” said Amanda, spoiling the mannerly mood.

  “Well, it’s all part of life,” said the other woman, backing the two of them through the door. I was happy to let them go.

  When the ushers finally cleared the room, I followed Amanda and Roy out to the parking lot. I let them get a little ahead of me. Amanda walked with her back straight and her shoulders level, with a fluid, feminine roll to her hips. It made me want to follow her out to Montauk and back. But she stopped and turned around, held Roy’s arm and waited for me to catch up.

  “Thanks again, Sam,” said Roy.

  Amanda pulled off a pair of old-fashioned black kid leather gloves a fingertip at a time. When they were off, she opened and shut her fists as if restoring circulation.

  “I think Bob wants a native guide,” I said to both of them.

  “Ick,” said Amanda.

  “He seemed all right,” said Roy, looking at me for confirmation.

  “Could be some business for you.”

  “That’s what we’re here for.”

  Amanda looked around the parking lot, presumably for her car.

  “We’re going to get a little breakfast,” she said. “Care to join us?”

  “Yeah,” said Roy before I could answer, “Sip and Soda. Best waffles in town.”

  He looked genuinely excited.

  “Sorry,” I told them, “got to wrap up here. Some other time.”

  “You sure?” asked Roy, face bright and eager as a Midwestern regional sales manager. “I always order Amanda the blueberry Belgian waffle with a side of bacon. Don’t I? It’s her favorite.”

  Amanda cocked her head at me, her face neutral.

  “That’s a lot of trust to put in a person. Ordering your breakfast,” I said to her.

  “Some people you just trust with certain things,” she said.

  Roy looked at her.

  “Some people you trust with everything,” he said, then looked at me. “I keep telling her that.”

  He smiled with the sort of self-effacing beneficence you like to see in priests. I smiled back.

  “I’ll take a rain check. You guys go ahead.”

  They drove away in Roy’s Audi—bigger and darker than Amanda’s—leaving me alone with the hard light of autumn trying to bust out from the cloud cover and the rest of the afternoon to torture myself with conflicting urges and pointless self-analysis.

  The little Aztec lady at the coffee place on the corner didn’t know Arnold Lombard Co. Neither did the tough woman from Brooklyn with the pretty skin and chipped tooth who ran the cash register. Luckily, a gang of gnarly old regulars, who hung around in the afternoon doing crosswords and lying about their investment portfolios, did.

  “Used to be across the street there where what’s-his-name opened his real-estate office.”

  “Sinitar.”

  “Yeah. Joey Sinitar and his brother. Builder’s kids. Don’t know if they actually sell any real estate.”

  All the guys smiled as if they had the inside scoop on the Sinitar boys.

  “Lombard’s dead.”

  One of the guys shook his head.

  “Ain’t dead.”

  “Somebody told me he was dead.”

  “Come as a big surprise to Arnie.”

  “You know him?” I asked him.

  The old man had dry silvery eyes and the complexion of roughed-in stucco.

  “More or less. Kind of a stiff. Sold real estate and life insurance. Mostly to locals. Drove a Lincoln Continental, ’bout the size’a the Queen Mary.”

  “Had a daughter.”

  “Yeah. Looked like him. All nose. No sense of humor.”

  “Know where he lives?” I asked.

  They all looked at each other, seeing who wanted to field the question.

  “Florida,” one of them finally said.

  The guy in the know shook his head again. I waited.

  “Ain’t in Florida.”

  “What’re you, his biographer?” said one of his buddies.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “Lives with his daughter. Nobody’d marry the poor thing.”

  “Nose like a masthead.”

  �
��More like a banana.”

  “In town?”

  “Village. Over near the hospital.”

  “Got a place in Florida, but never goes there.”

  “Hah.”

  “But he’s definitely not dead.”

  “How do you know?”

  The guy in the know let it all sit there for a few seconds to build suspense.

  “I saw him yesterday at the pharmacy.”

  “What’re you doing in there, Charlie? Buyin’ Ex-Lax?”

  “Trojans.”

  They all grinned into their coffees. I thanked Charlie and paid for their next round of Hazelnut. The Brooklyn woman thought the largesse ridiculous, but she wasn’t a sensitive girl.

  I pulled the street address to Arnold Lombard’s house out of a disheveled phone book shoved under the payphone at the back of the coffee shop. It was an easy walk over toward the hospital, so I walked.

  It was a single story, asbestos-shingle bungalow painted white with black trim and leggy, dejected-looking shrubbery. In front of a tiny single-car garage was a boxy, early sixties Lincoln Continental covered with a tan canvas tarp.

  Green algae was growing up from the bottom of the wooden storm door. There was no doorbell, so I knocked. I picked the blue-plastic-wrapped New York Times up off the driveway so I could give it to whoever opened the door.

  It was a woman with a hatchet-shaped nose thrust forward like an angry remark. On either side were gentle, watery blue eyes. Her dark brown hair hung in a loose perm past her thin neck and tumbled down around wiry shoulders. She wore a ragged baby blue tank top, bra-less, baggy, dark blue sweatpants and dancing slippers. I guessed her to be around forty-five. The smell of too much time spent indoors spilled out around her, warming up the autumn air.

  She looked at me in a tired, kind way.

  “Yes?”

  I stuck out my hand. She took it without hesitation.

  “I’m Sam Acquillo. Here’s your Times.”

  “How nice,” she said.

  “Is this where Arnold Lombard lives?”

  “What can I help you with?”

  “It’s kind of a long story. Is he in?”

  She stood a little straighter.

  “Now that would depend entirely on your story, Mister … Acquillo. Italian is it?”

  “Italo-Canuck is the way my father put it.”

  “We’re Jewish.”

  I didn’t know where to go from there, but she was patient with me. She put a hand on her hip and leaned on the door jam. I tried not to look at her chest.

  “Your interest in Mr. Lombard?”

  “I’m trying to work out some tricky ownership issues on a piece of property up in North Sea. Your father’s name was all over the documents, so I thought maybe he could help clear it up.”

  “Real-estate matter.”

  “That’s pretty much what it is, yeah.”

  She shrugged and walked away from the door. I took that as an invitation and followed her in. Time inside the house was stalled in midcentury. Glossy white trim paint covered lumpy woodwork. The wallpaper was covered with baronial garden parties and foxhunts. Pipe tobacco and unwashed wool mingled with kitchen grease and sachet.

  Arnold was sitting in the living room in an overstuffed easy chair. His hands gripped the armrests like he was preparing for takeoff. He was much older than I thought he’d be, well over ninety. His clothes were clean, but ancient and threadbare. There were pipes arrayed around a freestanding ashtray, but no ashes. A dusting of white hair covered his long, bone-hard skull. His daughter had come by the nose honestly.

  “Daddy?”

  He looked up at her.

  “This gentleman has a real-estate matter to discuss.”

  He frowned with the effort to understand.

  “A real-estate matter,” she repeated. He looked over at me.

  “Then what’s he doing here?”

  “I thought maybe you could answer some questions for me about a property up in North Sea.”

  “I’m retired.”

  “This was a property you handled back in the seventies.”

  He looked down and shook his head.

  “I don’t know if I can remember all that.”

  His daughter massaged his shoulder and smiled sweetly.

  “Oh, sure you can Daddy. You know about every piece of property on the East End.”

  He raised his thin eyebrows in a type of smile.

  “That’s true. Your mother says I’m nothing but a head full of topographicals.”

  “That’s what she always said,” said his daughter, correcting the tense.

  She swung around and dropped into a love seat and patted the space next to her. I sat down and pulled out the file from the Town records. She drew her legs up so the soft soles of the dancing slippers applied a slight pressure to my right thigh.

  I handed him a copy of the rental agreement his firm had drawn up for Bay Side Holdings. He took it with one hand and, with some difficulty, dug his glasses out from under his wool cardigan. His daughter let him struggle on his own. Patience hung in the air.

  When the tiny silver wire rims were finally perched on that mighty outcropping it made him look like a sorcerer in a Disney movie.

  “Oh yes, well, we did a lot of these. Certainly.”

  I let him read for a while.

  “Hm, hm,” he said, and handed it back to me.

  “Yes, we managed all the Bay Side leaseholds. Had the exclusive.”

  He sat back, satisfied.

  His daughter had her chin cupped in her hand with an index finger braced against her nose. She closed her eyes, shook her head and smiled that beatific smile.

  “That’s fine, Daddy, but I think he’s looking for a little more detail,” she said.

  Arnold thought about it. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Well, as I recall, that outfit owned a fair number of these parcels up there in North Sea, some of which had houses built on them. They were concerned they’d be vandalized if left unoccupied. We were charged with keeping them filled with the best possible people—considering the location, mind you, which was not ideal.”

  Class paranoia washed over me.

  “That outfit was Bay Side Holdings.”

  “Well, certainly, Bay Side were the people who engaged the services of the firm. However, they were the agents for the actual owners. This was made clear to me from the start. I don’t recall their names, precisely, but I believe we could discover that in our files.” He looked over at his daughter for confirmation.

  “I’m sure we could dig something out, Daddy.”

  He swung his gaze back to me as something else occurred to him.

  “I do have a theory about Bay Side, however.”

  “Do you.”

  “Yes. But,” he pointed at me with a bent knuckle the way Regina always did, “it would likely be a sensitive matter. The firm’s standing depends on discretion.”

  His daughter looked over at me. I kept my eyes on Arnold.

  “You shouldn’t tell me anything that would betray a confidence, Mr. Lombard.”

  “I don’t believe in that.”

  “I can’t promise I won’t use information you give me in dealing with this—it’s an estate settlement, by the way—but I’ll keep your name out of it.”

  “You’re an attorney?” his daughter asked.

  “Estate administrator.”

  I didn’t think Arnold understood the distinction, but I was more concerned about his daughter. I wanted her to like me.

  “Well,” he looked up at the ceiling again as if his thoughts were written out up there, “I always felt that Bay Side was a captive. You’re familiar with the term?”

  “You mean the owner of the property was their only client. They were owned by the owners.”

  “Yes, something like that. I’m not suggesting there was any impropriety, just that Bay Side was a dummy. You know, a front. Perfectly legal, of course. Commerci
al interests often structure real-estate management as a separate enterprise—a subsidiary.”

  “Daddy started in corporate real estate. In the city,” she said, looking at him.

  “What gave you this idea, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Well, I’ve done quite a bit of this sort of thing, sir. You get to know how things are. Patterns and rhythms. A feeling, really. Ask Rosaline.”

  She puffed out a little breath.

  “He thinks I’m psychic because I predict the weather. Hasn’t caught on to the Weather Channel yet.”

  Humor lit his eyes to spite his deadpan face.

  “I know perfectly well how to locate the Weather Channel. I only mean that we often discuss the mysteries of intuition.”

  She shrugged at me again. I think she did a lot of shrugging.

  “I’m a big supporter of intuition myself, folks,” I said. “No need to explain further.”

  “Would you like some tea? Caffeinated or Red Zinger,” she said, now that we’d bumped the conversation up a notch.

  “Sure. A little Zinger’d be good.”

  “Daddy?”

  He made an ambiguous gesture with his mottled hands. She seemed to know what it meant.

  “I’ll help,” I said, and followed her into the kitchen.

  All the appliances were stainless steel Hotpoints from the mid-fifties. The linoleum on the counter was covered with colorful little boomerangs. We had the same thing in our house when I was growing up. The association was oddly appealing.

  “Are there files?” I asked her.

  She looked surprised.

  “Why of course. Why wouldn’t there be?”

  “Uh.”

  “You think I’m just humoring him?”

  “Sorry. I guess I was.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with his mind, Mr. Acquillo. He’s just old.”

  “I can see that.”

  She brushed past me and put a full kettle on the stove. “He was almost fifty when I was born,” she said, apropos of something that wasn’t apparent to me.

  “Can I take a look at the stuff relating to this property?” I wrote out Regina’s address on a memo pad.

  She took it out of my hand and studied it.

  “Sure, but you’ll have to do the digging. We don’t have much of a research staff.”