Hard Stop sahm-4

by Chris Knopf

  “So you know they were Venezuelan,” I said.

  “Geez, Sam, let’s try something different this time. Why don’t you tell me everything you know and I’ll tell you everything I know, so we both end up knowing the same things?”

  I tried again to remember everything I felt okay telling him, which was most of it. He returned the favor by telling me he was the Chief of Police investigating a homicide and didn’t tell God what he knew until the case was cleared and the perp had died in prison or gone to the electric chair. Which sounds like a one-sided standoff, but I was good at reading between Ross Semple’s tortured lines. He liked having me out there poking around this one, especially since he was reasonably sure I hadn’t done it myself, which wasn’t often the case. And maybe he’d get lucky and catch the next guy who came after me, which could uncork the whole mess. Better bait than a red herring any day.

  So after tossing out a few more softballs, he let us leave without even strong-arming Jackie into running an ad in the Police Ball program guide.

  “Don’t get too comfy,” said Jackie, as we scooped up Amanda and walked out to the parking lot. “You’re not done with this yet.”

  “Not until I fix my car,” I said.

  “Oh, heavens. Why would you do that?” said Jackie.

  “It’s my car.”

  “It’s not a car, dear. It’s a battleship,” said Amanda.

  “So far on the winning side of the battle. When do you think the cops’ll give it back?” I asked Jackie. “I’m a little worried about the frame. Be a bitch to find a straightener big enough.”

  I let Jackie give me the usual warnings, remonstrances and pleas for sanity before she left in her pickup and we jumped into ours, the official vehicle of the East End’s local populace.

  Amanda took the driver’s seat and started the engine.

  “Where to, boss?” she said.

  “Oak Point.”

  “I know the place,” she said.

  “Proceed briskly, but keep an eye on the rearview.”

  “As unfunny as that is, at least you’re beginning to take this seriously.”

  “Although prepared for martyrdom, I prefer that it be postponed.”

  “St. Francis?” she asked.

  “Winston Churchill. A hedonist more to my taste.”

  “Indomitable?”

  “Unrepentant.”

  Eddie had everything under control when we got back. He greeted me first, but fussed more over Amanda. I attributed that to her lavish distribution of Big Dog biscuits and crostini slathered with Fromage d’Affinois.

  I tried to use the rest of the day to build lawn ornamentation for Frank Entwhistle, but my mind stubbornly refused to concentrate on the task. Instead, I sat at my drawing table and allowed discontinuous images of Iku Kinjo, George Donovan and dead Venezuelans to crowd into the under-equipped, overlit little workspace.

  This was apparently a time-consuming enterprise, because I was surprised to get a call from Amanda telling me it was already well past cocktail hour and we were still without food or drink.

  I took a shower, and then in accordance with our usual division of labor, I stirred gin and Tom Collins mix into an icy tumbler and Amanda filled a bowl with yellow grapes. We lugged it all out to the edge of the breakwater, along with sweatshirts and flannel blankets, embracing the cooling season on its own terms.

  “So what are you thinking now?” asked Amanda. “You must be thinking something.”

  “I need to spend more time on the computer.”

  “You don’t have a computer,” she said.

  “Not working on it. Finding it.”

  “Iku’s.”

  “Sullivan’s scouring Vedders Pond. Worth doing, but it could be in a landfill somewhere, gone forever.”

  “Unless the killer kept it,” she said.

  “That’s what Bobby Dobson said.”

  She asked what I thought the computer would tell me. I said I didn’t know, but probably a lot. It was a vast repository of data, ready to give up its secrets if you knew where, and how, to look. I talked about patterns and rhythms, but also how anomalies stand out against a background of consistencies, speed bumps on the smooth road surface. I told her you can read stress in even the most innocuous exchange, if you look for it. That you have to read the voice, not just interpret the words.

  “Sounds like voodoo.”

  “More like jazz,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “Human language isn’t just the notes, it’s how they’re put together and played. Listen to a little early Coltrane before you boot up.”

  “You learned this at MIT?”

  “First semester, freshman year.”

  From there we transitioned onto more productive topics, like the price of lumber and the relative merits of Tom Collins mix over standard tonic water and lime. Thus agreeably occupied, we burned up the early evening, which was relatively warm, and slipped into solid night, which wasn’t.

  “I’m cold,” said Amanda.

  “Cold, of course. Explains the shaking.”

  We each suffered an overflowing armload of grape stems, glassware and dog biscuits, and made our unbalanced way across the broad lawn. Eddie, always overjoyed to head for the next thing, whatever it was, bounded toward my cottage, thinking that was our destination.

  Partway there he broke into a full run, barking furiously.

  We both stopped and looked into the blacked-out space between us and the cottage, made more so by the dim glow of the light above the front door.

  Eddie’s bark went up another register.

  I dropped the stuff I was holding and grabbed Amanda’s arm, causing her to drop her own load. I bent over and ran, pulling her along, at least for a few seconds before she started to run in earnest. I held on to her hand, and she dragged me across the last few yards of lawn to the small porch on the side of the cottage. We slid between a pair of bushy yews and dropped to the ground.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “No idea.”

  “Maybe it’s nothing. We’re just being jumpy,” she said.

  “He never barks like that.”

  “He doesn’t.”

  “Stay here,” I said, and immediately felt her start to rise.

  “I mean it,” I said. “Just let me do this. I can’t be worrying about you.” She fell back down on the ground, letting my forearm slip through her fingers as she went.

  “Write home.”

  I moved along the periphery of the house, inside the overgrown shrubbery, and worked my way around to the front, peering as hard as I could into the dark, which revealed nothing outside the ordinary. A white-painted wooden porch lit by a yellow bulb in a glass shade above the door, a galvanized milk box from my childhood I was too stupid to throw out and the three-quarter-sized baseball bat I used to hit tennis balls for Eddie and occasionally whack people over the head.

  I reached through the bushes and wrapped my hand around the bat, pulling it silently toward me. The feel of the handle flowed up through my wrist and all the way to the middle of my body. Courage transferred through the hardwood fibers.

  Thus emboldened, I walked through the bushes and past the porch and out to the front lawn. I could hear the nervous whine Eddie used when trying to flush a bird out of a stand of sea grass, or a tennis ball from under the living room couch.

  He was out to the lawn, prancing side to side, and staring at the narrow alley that led though the mounds of antique yew bushes to the front door. I shot the flashlight through the hole and saw it right away. I yelled to Amanda to come and take hold of Eddie’s collar. The thing was high up on the door, but well within his vertical lift.

  “What? What?” she asked as she came around the corner.

  “Just hold him,” I said.

  Even in the colorless glow of the flashlight I could make out the component parts. A slick mass of grey cauliflower partially covered by a photograph of Amanda in her work shirt and headband, sweaty, poi
nting at something above her head. The image was seriously compressed, the telltale of a big telephoto lens. At least 400 mm.

  Both were pinned to the door with a long Japanese knife.

  A dark bead dripped off the cauliflower and landed on the floor. I followed it with my flashlight. It looked black, but when I bent down for a closer look, it was dark red. Confirming what I already thought.

  A brain. A big bloody brain.

  SEVENTEEN

  HOSPITAL WAITING ROOMS are designed to guarantee that the experience of waiting is so dreary, monotonous and dehumanizing that you’ll think twice before ever going to the hospital again. Wait long enough and you’ll begin to question relationships with people close to you who might sometimes need to go to the hospital, like your parents or children.

  The person at the hospital who sat at the reception desk behind a small set of sliding glass doors seemed busy and engaged in what she was doing, so much so that it was impossible to make eye contact with her. A television, hung from a bracket off the ceiling, was set on a show where nice-looking people made sober accounts of the day’s events while a confusion of ticker-tape messages scrolled along the bottom of the screen. Though Amanda had occasionally tried to explain modern television to me, I still found it impossibly strange. Luckily, the volume was below audible, reducing the thing to a simple distraction, like a spoiled child running around a train car, or a drunk in a nice restaurant.

  “You’re sure we shouldn’t just take this directly to the police?” Amanda asked, pointing to the bundle I held in my arms.

  “Nah. We’ve already wrecked the crime scene. And I can’t wait for all the official pronouncements. We’ll call Sullivan as soon as I get Markham’s opinion.”

  The woman behind the glass doors finally noticed we were standing there. She slid one of them open.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I need to see Dr. Fairchild,” I said.

  “What’s the nature of the emergency?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I need to see him.”

  She slid a clipboard over the opening.

  “Fill this out,” she said.

  After a few moments, she realized I hadn’t taken the clipboard out of her hand. She looked up at me.

  “I don’t need to fill that out. I need to see the doctor. He knows me. Just give him a call.”

  “I’ll call someone,” she said, the words burdened with the weary residue of constant repetition. “But I need you to fill this out first.”

  Amanda leaned into me and stuck her head through the opening.

  “Dr. Fairchild will be very disappointed when he learns we were here to see him and he wasn’t informed,” she said.

  “You think so?” the woman said, slightly more sincere than sarcastic.

  “I do,” said Amanda.

  She frowned, but picked up the phone. Amanda did her best not to look too pleased with herself.

  It was another half hour before Markham showed up, time we spent playing a variation on “blissful ignorance” you might call “flagrant denial,” dissecting the performances of the baseball players on the TV and utterly ignoring the fact that I had a brain in the gym bag on my lap.

  I always felt Markham approach before I saw him. Probably because his density and mass affected the local air pressure.

  I stood up to shake his hand. He looked me over.

  “So I don’t need a gurney,” he said.

  “Just a quiet place out of the public eye,” I said, holding up the bag. “Something with stainless steel tables and running water.”

  He looked over at Amanda and smiled.

  “Dis fella never fail to keep t’ings entertaining,” he said.

  “Indeed.”

  He took us up a level to where they did on-site lab work. The usual cast of anonymous people in white coats, blue scrubs and face masks wrapped around their necks buzzed around with a look of distracted intensity. They all smiled at Markham, but gave him wide berth, advisedly.

  The room fit my specs. I set the gym bag on the table and handed out rubber gloves from a dispenser mounted on the wall. Markham shook his head at my offering and pulled a pair of his own out of his pocket.

  “Triple XL,” he said.

  I used two hands to pull out the gallon-sized Ziploc bag and set it on the examination table, then backed away. Markham hummed with curiosity as he dug his hand into the bag and picked up the rubbery mass within. He held it up and turned it in his hand, squinting with concentration.

  “Ris de veau. Who brought the chives?” he said, after a few minutes.

  “Ick,” said Amanda.

  “Technically, ris de taureau. A big one,” he said.

  “Bull brains,” I said.

  “Not a definitive conclusion, but most likely. Unless you slaughter a bison, or maybe African water buffalo. Herbivore for sure, bigger den a deer, smaller den elephant. Much smaller. For that you need a bigger bag.”

  “Locally available?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “For sure. Out on Montauk dey got a regular cattle ranch. I sometimes get to patch up holes these beauties leave inna cowboy’s thigh.”

  “Can you trace the exact source? Through DNA?”

  He enjoyed that thought.

  “Not me, Mr. Acquillo. But maybe somebody can. They don’t cover that at Georgetown Medical School.”

  I held the Ziploc bag open for him so he could drop it back in. I asked him if we could leave it in one of his refrigerators so the cops could pick it up in the morning. I had to endure some more jovial sarcasm, but he said okay. I thanked him for his time, and he did me the honor of letting it go at that.

  When we made it out to the sidewalk I called Joe Sullivan, waking him up.

  “I think I discovered the brains of the operation,” I said.

  I waited while he apologized to his wife and found a quiet place to talk.

  “This had better be good,” he said.

  I didn’t disappoint him. Except that I’d waited until then to call him. I didn’t offer any sort of defense, and he was too tired to rail at me for more than a few minutes, so I got off the phone in relatively short order.

  “So what now?” Amanda asked.

  I looked around the hospital parking lot, searching for guidance.

  “I know a place a few blocks from here that serves drinks by the glass,” I said, as if assaulted by a revelation.

  “How novel,” she said.

  “I think it’s gonna catch on. With the right public support.”

  The hostess at the big restaurant on Main Street found two stools to pull up to the crowded bar, a courtesy I credited to Amanda’s effective social graces. Between the pumped-up stereo and competing conversational blather, it was almost too noisy to talk. The ubiquitous flat-screen TVs blinked and flashed at the corner of my eye, but the vodka was cold and the light a warm amber glow, making the women look as great as they hoped for and Amanda impossibly beautiful.

  “So,” said Amanda, “as you’d say to me, theories?”

  “You need to go stay with Burton. Have the biggest guys off your crew pick you up and drop you off. Maybe get a dog. Eddie’ll write up the specs.”

  “You’re concerned.”

  “I am. I’m not used to this kind of heat. A few meatballs here and there, no problem. But these people, out of my league. I don’t want something to happen to you or Eddie because I didn’t take it seriously.”

  “What people?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I need to concentrate, which’ll be hard if I’m constantly worried about you.”

  Faced with that kind of indisputable logic, there wasn’t much she could say.

  “No way I’m being driven out of my own house. I’ve faced worse than this. Just give me one of those guns you took off Con Globe security. My mother taught me how to shoot,” and more of the same.

  I waited it out.

  “I’ll call Isabella,” I said. “She’ll get the east wing ready.”


  On the stagger back to the car she put both arms around me and squeezed.

  “You don’t want me to be horribly murdered,” she said. “But you don’t think I care if the same thing happens to you.”

  “It won’t.”

  “You don’t know that. I can’t bear another gigantic loss.”

  Loss was something Amanda knew a lot about. When I first met her, she’d lost her only child and only parent. Her grief was most of what was left. And I was a fine one to turn to, addled by loss and regret of another sort. Now here we were, in a truce with grave misfortune, which I was threatening for no other reason than the death of my old boss’s girlfriend.

  “I’m in it, now,” I said. “The only way out is through.”

  A faint breeze, cool and hollow, blew between us, but she squeezed harder and left it at that.

  We drove back to Oak Point. While Amanda packed up her things and connected with Isabella, Burton’s major domo, I put a few weeks’ worth of Eddie’s food, Big Dog biscuits, tennis balls, dog bed and the only chew toy he hadn’t chewed to oblivion into a big garbage bag and brought it out to Amanda’s Audi.

  “He’ll have to forage locally for rotten logs and bird carcasses.”

  “I didn’t tell Isabella about a dog.”

  “Better a surprise.”

  On the way over Burton called my cell phone. I told him about what I knew, and what I feared. He backed the plan.

  “I’ll have Fernando and Jarek join her crew. Both handy with pneumatic nailers and throwing knives.”

  The atmosphere inside the Audi was tense and quiet. Eddie sat up in the back seat and panted. Amanda fiddled with her seat belt and sighed.

  “You’ll visit,” she said.

  “I’ll visit, I’ll call, I’ll write long letters.”

  The big white gate that guarded the entrance to Burton’s long driveway opened as we approached. We made the four-hundred-mile drive through the bordering privet hedges in decent time, and were met at the front porch of the main house by Isabella, along with a tall, tattooed ghoul with kinky pink hair and another hard case that looked like Charles Bronson’s anemic, mentally ill younger brother. Part of Burton’s domestic staff, most of whom had stayed on after his defense practice saved them from long jail terms, or worse.