The Last Refuge sahm-1

by Chris Knopf

  “What’ll they find?”

  “Conflicted interests.”

  “Caught between the Bar and a hard place?”

  She sunk deeper into the couch and draped her long bangs over her face the way my daughter would do when she didn’t want to talk about something or finish all the peas left on her plate.

  “You’re not as funny as you used to be.”

  “That’s why you’re so pissed at those guys,” I told her, “not because they wouldn’t press the case. Because you thought they weren’t telling you everything you needed to know to do your job. They were holding out on you, treating you like a lesser partner. Like a local.”

  “You’re also not as nice.”

  “Quite a conflict. On one side, a great case, lots of interesting law, the kind you could take advantage of out here. Lots of money. And a heartthrob for a co-counsel. On the other side, a feeling you’re aiding and abetting the enemy. The City People, with all the money and none of the feeling for the real Southampton. Where you were born and raised and still refuse to leave, even though you’re smart enough and capable enough to have a real career anywhere you want.”

  “Time for the fifth.”

  “I could get you one.”

  “The amendment, dummy.”

  “Something about this whole scene really bothered you. But you’re constrained by attorney-client privilege. Though not enough to stop you from giving me that map.”

  “You know, I’m either too stoned or not stoned enough to listen to all this.”

  She gave my leg a squeeze, then used it to haul herself up on her feet. I gripped her forearm and hauled her back down again.

  “You don’t have to tell me anything. Unless you want to.”

  After that she seemed happy enough to stay put. I slurped my coffee and lit another Camel. We sat quietly for a little while.

  “I never saw them.”

  “The clients?”

  She nodded. Then shook her head.

  “Client. Only spoke to one guy. Never saw him in person. Just talked to him on the phone. Me, Hornsby and Hunter would sit in Hornsby’s office with a speakerphone. Hornsby always made sure he knew we were all in the room. Never even heard his name. When I asked Hunter, ‘Does this guy have a name?,’ he’d say ‘Mr. Client.’ He was nice enough about it, but you know. Mr. Client was a very uptight person. Insistent, or insinuating, or insulting, one of those ‘in’ words. Hunter handled him fine. Whenever the guy handed him some crap, he’d hand it right back. That’s what made me think there were other clients behind the client. I know it sounds terrible, but the real giveaway was the way Mr. Client talked. You know, a little of the ‘dese,’ ‘dem’ and ‘dose.’ I guess that’s snobby of me.”

  “A little.”

  “And the profanity. Fuck this and fuck that. Like he was trying to sound tough. He did sound tough. And the way he talked about handling the Appeals Board, and the DEP, how to get around this and get around that, and who do you have to take care of, and whose arm do you have to twist and who’s got the juice with who and all this stuff that had no regard for due process or the spirit behind all these regulatory hurdles, no matter how stupid they might look to these developers. Jesus Christ Almighty.”

  She reached over and took my cup out of my hand, downed a gulp and handed it back. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and burped. I wondered how Jackie got to sleep at night with all that noise in her head.

  “Of course, they had a lot of hurdles to leap,” she said. “They probably couldn’t believe the regulatory resistance they were getting. All the signs, stated and unstated, that said this project was going to get the full treatment. And that’s no idle threat from a town that’ll fight like rabid badgers over the slightest variance. If they’re in the mood. Mr. Client was nervous as a cat. Until the Town told us the next steps and he pulled the plug.”

  “Stopped the project?”

  “Cold. Just ended it. I got a check, cutie pie went home. That was it.”

  “What did the Town want?”

  “Neighborhood Notice. Couple different types. For a normal variance, you only need a four-hundred-foot radius around the property. Send the neighbors a postcard, tell ’em there’s going to be a zoning hearing, if you want to come and raise a stink, here’s your chance. Appeals Board takes these things seriously. Neighbors can make board members miserable.”

  “What other kinds of notice?”

  “Bay Side pulled the absolute worst kind you can get because of the old factory. It’s a DEP thing—they go out like a mile and send everybody this big questionnaire that just about begs you to come up with environmental reasons to oppose the project. It’s really punitive, frankly, but that’s federal Super Fund shit and nobody screws with that.”

  “Bummer.”

  “So who gets blamed? The co-counsel. The local. Like I’m supposed to anticipate this kind of thing? I felt so bad.”

  “Was Hunter mad at you, too?”

  She looked thoughtful. “I guess not. He didn’t ask me out afterwards, like I thought he would, despite it all. But, no. He wasn’t pissed. He said I’d done my job as well as I could.”

  I realized she was crying. I should have seen it earlier. It was the kind of insensitivity I’d honed through years of practice. I hauled myself from out of the white couch and went to the bathroom for tissues. I’d done a lot of that, too. Going to get tissues was one of my specialties.

  She looked up at me after she blew her nose.

  “Is this some investigation? Are you really from the goddam FBI? Are you going to ruin my life?”

  “I’m an industrial designer. No arrest powers.”

  She pulled another joint out of the ashtray, then tossed it back.

  “Enough of that shit. Makes me all weepy.”

  We sat quietly for a little while. Talked out. I tried to listen to the sub rosa soundtrack coming from the stereo while I looked around the heap of a room, wondering how you could maintain all that chaos and your sanity at the same time. Maybe that was part of the point. Maybe sanity wasn’t such a great thing to aspire to.

  “I’d really like to talk to Milton Hornsby,” I said to her.

  “Not a very talkative guy.”

  “Tell him I think I know why he won’t talk to me. At this point, I’m keeping it to myself. Which is not going to last forever. If he’s interested in getting a little ahead of things, he’ll sit down with me. With you present if he wants. It’s up to him.”

  “Officially I’m fired. What’s my interest in this?”

  “I got your name from the public record. You’re just facilitating communications.”

  “I guess you won’t tell me what’s really going on. After I spill my guts and violate every canon in the book.”

  “Probably better if you didn’t know beforehand.”

  “Because I’m a dumb local?”

  “We’re all dumb locals. That’s the problem.”

  Drove down from Bridgehampton and out to the shore. I meandered through the new developments carved out of the potato fields and joined the parade of vans and pickup trucks that constituted most of the traffic between weekends. At Mecox Bay I turned north again and got on Montauk Highway until I cleared the water, then dropped back down Flying Point Road toward the sea.

  I stopped off at the Town’s beach access. This close to the ocean the sea air dispersed the sunlight, deepening all the colors and setting snares for unsuspecting painters and sentimentalists. The wild roses that lined the parking lot were still enjoying the last cool autumn days before winter; they would stay green and semi-floral well into December. Sand, blown over the dunes, formed a grainy skim-coat over the black asphalt, empty now since early fall. In the spring, maintenance crews would sweep it all up again and renew the illusion that you could halt nature’s irresistible advance.

  I continued to follow the coast until I was all the way out on Dune Road in Southampton Village, where giant shingle-style mansions and architectural fantasies st
ood like devotional monuments before the sea. To my right, the sun dropping toward the Shinnecock Bay was airbrushing the underside of the clouds a soft reddish yellow. In the morning, people who lived on Dune Road could walk to the other side of their houses and watch the sun rise over the ocean. All for an admission price that started around twenty million dollars. When my father first started digging the foundation hole for his cottage, nobody but reclusive eccentrics wanted to live out in the dunes. It was a wilderness where locals like us camped and had family barbecues and risked our lives bodysurfing in storm-swept seas. Now it was the realization of billionaires’ dreams.

  I recalled what Amanda’s friend Robin said as she distractedly searched the Playhouse for someone to break her heart. “What do you get when there’s more demand than supply, and the demanders have more money than God and all His angels put together?”

  I added to the list of things I knew one thing I knew so well I’d completely forgotten it. People made huge fortunes somewhere else so they could bring them out here. And there was only so much here to go around.

  This time I didn’t have a newspaper to give Rosaline when she answered the door. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her clothing was in the same loose, deconstructed style I’d seen her in before. Comfort designed for the long haul. I held my hands up.

  “No offering.”

  “I think we’re past that,” she said quietly. “Come on in.”

  Arnold was in his seat in the living room, asleep. Rosaline put her finger to her lips and led me into a graceful study across the hall. It was walled with overstuffed bookshelves and furnished in early-twentieth-century oak. A pair of brown leather chairs were placed side by side in the middle of the room, each with an ottoman and reading lamp.

  “My parents’ inner sanctum.”

  “Readers.”

  “Never owned a TV.”

  “My kind of people.”

  “Good. I share the genes. What can I get you?”

  “I’m intruding again.”

  “You are.” She checked her watch. “Close to cocktail hour. Forces me to offer you a drink.”

  “Vodka on the rocks. No fruit.”

  “Coming up.”

  I sat in the chair and rested my manila folder on my lap. It felt better to have a prop, more official.

  “Did the information I gave you do any good?” she asked, coming back with my drink and a large red wine.

  “Yeah. Helped a lot.”

  “But you want more.”

  “After I thank you again for what you did. Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Though I’m not sure if you’re the one to ask about this other stuff.”

  “Ask.”

  “I was thinking about what you said about the Internet.”

  She looked a little uneasy.

  “I was nosy.”

  “Not what you said, but the fact of it. You’re probably a good surfer.”

  “What, with all the time I have on my hands?”

  “That’s right. You need to tie up that busy brain.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “I don’t own a computer. I’ve never seen a website that wasn’t a print out. People did that stuff for me.”

  “Mr. Big Shot.”

  “I had a PC, but I used it to access technical data from the central servers.”

  “So what do you want from me?”

  I took a sip of the vodka.

  “Nosy work.”

  “For pay?”

  “For the hell of it.”

  We were both jarred by the sound of Arnold calling from the other room.

  “Who’s there?” he yelled.

  Rosaline put a calming hand over her heart.

  “Can usually sleep through an atom bomb.”

  She got up and waved to me to come along. Arnold was trying hard to make out who I was. He wasn’t wearing his glasses.

  “Sam Acquillo, Daddy. You remember he came to visit last week.”

  Arnold put out his hand to shake.

  “Sorry to bother you again, sir. I was asking your daughter for a favor.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” he said. “I do it all the time.”

  He liked to tease her. She liked it, too, only not as much.

  “We’re drinking, Daddy. Care to join?”

  This sent him into a prolonged deliberation, but he was clearly interested. He looked at the glass in my hand.

  “That’s vodka. You want rye on the rocks?” she asked, loudly.

  He nodded, as if convinced by a superior argument.

  Once we were all set with our drinks I explained to Arnold how I needed Rosaline’s help looking up some things on the Internet.

  “She’s the one to ask. Spends a lot of time on that thing,” he said, then he had another thought. “Maybe you could explain something to me.” Rosaline looked like she knew what was coming. “I know you can look up anything you want on the computer, but how did all that information get in there in the first place? Who put it in there?”

  It took him a while to get out the whole question. But not long enough for me to come up with an answer.

  “It’s kind of complicated.”

  Rosaline was enjoying this.

  “Mr. Acquillo supervised hundreds of engineers, Daddy. What could he possibly know about computers?”

  “You haven’t told him about shared databases and search engines?”

  “He doesn’t know, Daddy. Nobody does. It’s a modern mystery.”

  “Phoof,” said Arnold, a sentiment I shared.

  “I do have something for you, however,” I told him. “I asked you about Bay Side Holdings and you thought they were a captive. Turns out they were. Part of WB, the old manufacturing plant out there between Oak Point and Jacob’s Neck. Bay Side was WB’s real estate arm.”

  “I suspected as much.”

  Rosaline looked proud of him.

  “I told you he knew his stuff.”

  “How well did you know Carl Bollard and Willard Wakeman?” I asked.

  He worked on his drink while he pondered.

  “I never met Wakeman, he died many years ago. But I knew Carl Bollard well. And his idiot son.”

  “Daddy.”

  “Not my cup of tea, Carl Junior. A wasteabout. Most people in town were glad to see the place close down, except for the ones working there. Not the right image people thought Southampton should have, even though it was up there in North Sea. There was a deep harbor there long ago. You could bring a large vessel all the way down from Greenport, which had ships coming in from all over the world.”

  “What’s that got to do with Carl Junior?” asked Rosaline, gently keeping him on track.

  “He shut it down. Everyone thought it was his fault. Though, in truth, a little outfit like that wasn’t going to make it out here. That sort of plant belongs in New Jersey, for God’s sake, not a resort area like this.”

  “You still didn’t like him.”

  “My father came to this country with nothing. He had to work like a dog, and so did we. This was the way it was. And this boy is handed everything, and what does he do? He drinks it all away.”

  He punctuated every sentence with a knuckle pointed at my chest. You’d think he took lessons from Regina.

  “He drives expensive cars and lives in nightclubs. Dishonors his father. All he cares about are the fancy people at the Meadows. As if they would ever accept a boy like that.”

  There it was again. The ultimate betrayal. Consorting with City People.

  “Carl Senior must have been disappointed.”

  “Broke his heart. Every day I thank God for a daughter like Rosaline.”

  Her face looked skeptical, but she was clearly pleased.

  “Only because I feed him rye on the rocks.”

  “So if your agency was retained to manage the Bay Side rentals, in effect you were hired by Carl Senior. He didn’t tell you?”

  “Carl Bollard died a few ye
ars after the war. His company lasted another twenty years or so. I don’t know what happened to his son. I never met the people who retained the firm. It’s hard for you to understand, but this happened over a very long period of time.”

  I’d probably worn him out. That and the rye on the rocks. We both noticed it, and Rosaline gracefully picked up the conversation so Arnold could rest. I spent another hour with them before Rosaline said she had to fix dinner.

  “You’re welcome to stay.”

  “Nah. I’ve already taken too much of your time.”

  “Time we have in abundance. You spoke about a project.”

  “I just got a lot from your dad. Maybe enough for now.”

  “Really.”

  “Though if you learn anything more about Carl Bollard, Junior, I’m interested.”

  Her eyes scanned my face.

  “You ask a lot for someone who doesn’t give up much in return.”

  “I’d tell you more if I knew myself.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’d tell you more if I knew what was true and what wasn’t.”

  “Better.”

  She kissed me again as she escorted me out the door. It wasn’t as serious a kiss as the last time, but more confident. Arnold called for her again and she slipped quietly back into the house, a place where time both advanced and stood still, a paradox that was understood and embraced by the occupants.

  The next day I had to do something I didn’t want to do, so I hoped the ride over to Hampton Bays would help me feel better about doing it. It didn’t.

  The Town police HQ was just north of Sunrise Highway in an area reminding me of the pine barrens that started in earnest a few miles to the west. I’d called Sullivan on his cell phone and he asked me to come there since he was deskbound for the day doing paperwork. I asked for him when the lady desk sergeant slid open the security glass.

  “He said you’d be here,” she said, buzzing me in. “Wait over there.”

  I stood in an outer office that had a general purpose feel about it, with safety posters and duty rosters covering the walls and casual debris strewn around the desktops. A bulletin board displayed a crowded gallery of federal fugitives, artist’s sketches and missing children. Also a notice from the Labor Department that gave explicit instructions on how to rat out management for hiring violations. It was partially obscured by a note about one of the cops’ kids selling giftwrap to raise money for the school band.