by Chris Knopf
Okay, I thought. That’s something.
“Why eliminate your own CIs?” Jackie asked.
“Snitches are information hubs,” said Oksana. “Not just one-way conduits into the cops. They knew too much.”
“We’re in a difficult position,” said Edith. “Ross spent five years at Internal Affairs in the Bronx. His former partner now runs the state unit, the only organization qualified to handle an undercover investigation, but he refuses to help us, citing conflict of interest. If he worked for me, I’d fire him. But he doesn’t.”
She sat back in her chair and waited for us to absorb the implications.
“You want us to investigate the cops?” said Jackie, losing some of her professional reserve.
Edith still looked pained.
“Not exactly. Very competent assets have been deployed. But it would be very useful to have you both as confidential informants yourselves.”
Jackie opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
“How do you know we won’t spill it all to Ross?” I asked. “He’s a friend of ours, sort of.”
Oksana dropped a fat manila folder in front of Jackie.
“This is the file we have on Mr. Acquillo. Read through it if you would, Jackie,” said Edith, “then explain his chances in open court.”
Jackie handed back the envelope.
“Not necessary. We get it,” she said.
Edith nodded. Oksana just sat there like an exquisite figurine, both present and detached.
“You won’t believe this,” said Edith, “but I have some respect for your investigative skills. As an elected official of the State of New York, I’m obligated to uphold official legal process, but privately, I can say you two have had some impressive success. I know I’m taking a big risk even having these conversations, but the matter of police corruption is so serious, and problematic, that I’m willing to suspend my better judgment.”
“That’s okay with me,” I told her, before Jackie had a chance to either cement the deal or leap like an Amazon warrior up on her high horse. “I like Ross fine, despite it all, and Sullivan really is a friend, but we’ll play by your rules. For now, anyway.”
“That’s reassuring,” said Oksana.
I shrugged.
“We’ll take you at your word. Until there’s a reason we shouldn’t,” I said.
Edith pointed at me again with no attempt to blunt the gesture. I felt like telling her, keep it up and I’ll bite it off.
“That’s the sort of impertinence I find so annoying,” she said.
“I’ll take annoyance. I’ve had worse from scarier people,” I said.
Edith retreated back into her chair, the look of unresolved conflict in her eyes.
“Impossible,” said Oksana.
“Agreed,” said Jackie.
“Who are the other dead CIs?” I asked.
“Not sure we should share that,” said Edith.
“Then the deal’s off.”
“Why?” Edith asked, looking startled.
“We’ll find out anyway on our own, but it’ll eat up time. We’ve got to know at least as much as you do. It’s stupid not to tell us.”
Oksana tapped the fat manila folder, probably unconsciously.
“If you want to stick any of that shit on me, go ahead and try,” I said. “If I do this, I do it for my own reasons. And I do it my way.”
“Our way,” said Jackie.
“Right,” I said, though I didn’t exactly know what she meant.
Edith sighed and looked over at Oksana.
“Can you get the file?” she asked. Oksana got up and left the room, expressionless and unhurried. “We don’t know what the police could be covering up. We assume it’s one of the usual suspects—drugs, prostitution, shakedowns, even larceny. Given traditional patterns, it’s unlikely that the participants extend beyond a small, tightly knit group. But we don’t know that. Ross is such a competent chief, it’s hard to imagine such a thing going on under his nose without his knowledge. Makes no sense.”
“Less sense than Ross Semple corrupting his office?” Jackie asked.
Edith took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
“You think you know people,” she said, leaving the sentence hanging in the air.
Oksana showed up with another manila folder, which she said contained a copy of everything they had. Jackie stuffed it into her giant purse.
“Please keep that confidential,” said Oksana to Jackie, drawing a look I’d seen before. I knew what it meant, but I doubt the same was true for Oksana. “There’s also a link with a password into our CI database. Good background information.”
“I hope we aren’t making a terrible mistake,” said Edith, with a lot of sincerity.
“You shouldn’t say stuff like that,” I said, standing up. “You made a decision, stick with it. No second guessing.”
“You can stop lecturing me,” she said.
“Maybe you need it,” I said, and walked out of there with Jackie and her emotions, all mixed up as usual, flowing along in my wake.
CHAPTER FIVE
The only thing I did the next day was the job I was actually paid to do—building architectural details in the basement woodshop of my cottage. I’d blundered into this work by doing finish carpentry for my friend Frank Entwhistle, who realized I could handle his fine woodworking chores at a far lower cost than he paid factory shops, with better quality, at only twice the time to completion that others promised but never delivered. This last discrepancy was allayed by an easy compliance on my part. I built whatever he asked me to build, which I reckoned was the job of a craftsman—not lecturing people who paid for the stuff on the idiocy of their requests. As much as I wanted to.
The way I saw it, this being the Hamptons, idiotic requests were more or less standard operating procedure.
The problem was one of an expanding universe. People living in three-million-dollar, eight-hundred-square-foot apartments could suddenly have a four-thousand-square-foot house for the same money. With no idea how to fill up all that space.
Ignorance rarely being a deterrent, these city dwellers were highly inventive in their dopey requests for interior appointments, and their architects more than happy to collect big fees for placing a single phone call to someone willing to accept the challenge, in my case Frank Entwhistle, who placed a call to me, who always said yes, and we all won.
A seamless and efficient transfer of wealth from the financial sector to the architects of their materialistic dreams, to the builders who translated architectural dreams into houses that wouldn’t fall down, and lastly to me, the master of the finishing touch.
ALLISON CALLED me when I was about to rip a five-quarter piece of antique mahogany retrieved from a pile of wreckage behind an abandoned nightclub and hotel. The place was shut down two decades before when a club goer shot a bouncer. The victim’s fellow bouncers responded by beating the gunman into a near vegetative state before bothering to call an ambulance, resulting in the original guy bleeding out on the dance floor.
The resulting blizzard of lawsuits and political hyperventilation overwhelmed the owners of the club, a pair of gay millionaires from Czechoslovakia, prompting them to simply close the doors and move back to Europe, where they still were as far as anyone knew.
Various vandals and enterprising salvagers had plundered the interior of what had once been a Victorian mansion, not realizing that the most valuable wood was locked up inside doors, windows, and architectural details covered in layers of paint, ripped out, and left outside to rot.
I had a separate section of my shop devoted to rough cleaning the stuff, the centerpiece of which was a cast iron planer about the same vintage as the quarried wood. With chipped blades and a DB rating comparable to a jet engine, it was a miracle I heard the phone ring.
“Doing anything?” Allison asked.
“Shaving off lead paint. You?”
“Nathan’s quitting sales and going to work for a star
t-up.”
“What are they starting?”
“I’m not sure. Half his pay is in equity.”
“Getting in on the ground floor,” I said.
“The other half won’t cover his rent, so he wants to move in with me.”
“Isn’t this the kind of job you wanted him to take?”
“It is. I didn’t realize the pay part,” she said.
“Meet the Law of Unintended Consequences.”
“I hate that,” she said.
“So what’re you going to do?”
“I was hoping you’d give me an idea.”
“Try it for six months. And get a dog.”
“To protect me from Nathan?”
“To have a friend, after you kick Nathan out of the apartment.”
I let her run through another half-dozen speculative scenarios, filling in all possible permutations of each, until her options and my forbearance were both depleted. But it made her feel better, which I guess was the purpose of the call in the first place.
“I can’t tell if you like Nathan or not,” she said, as a parting thought.
“Me neither. Let’s see how he does with the dog.”
LATER THAT night, it was Jackie’s turn. She called me when Eddie and I were rotting on the sun porch, him gnawing on a dinosaur bone, and me admiring the way the moon sketched flickering white lines across the blackness of the Little Peconic Bay. In other words, the two of us were thoroughly engaged in our favorite pastimes.
So it was a little annoying to see Jackie’s name pop up on the cell phone’s little screen.
“What.”
“What’s wrong with hello? Or, wow, Jackie! It’s so great to hear from you!”
“I guess if it was.”
“You love hearing from me,” she said.
“Not at eleven o’clock at night, when most responsible people are either drunk or trying to get there.”
“I read through all the files from Dame Edith and the White Witch. Do you want to hear what I found out?”
“You don’t fancy Oksana? She seems kind of cuddly to me.”
“If you like cuddling scorpions. Do you want to know what I learned or not?”
“I do.”
I could hear wine pouring over the sound of her perennial sighs.
“Okay, Joey Wentworth. Son of Manhattan rich people, high school dropout after eleventh grade (idiot), skinny, pimples, white skin, heroin habit (even bigger idiot), dishwasher at Jacques and Valencia’s for two years.”
According to Jackie, he was slowly getting turned by the Southampton cops, specifically by the other Town detective, Lionel Veckstrom, whom Jackie and I generally referred to as “Prick Cop.”
Few appreciate that the East End of Suffolk County, the farther reaches of which encompass the Hamptons, is essentially an island. A big swath of pine barren separates the East End from the rest of Long Island, and the Shinnecock Canal assures that the only way in or out is over a pair of bridges, unless you want to flee by way of the ferries to the North Fork, which run at the speed of number ten motor oil.
This was a big advantage for law enforcement, one Joey Wentworth recognized. And as a dedicated entrepreneur, figured out a work-around.
Speedboats.
“Joey had a twin engine picnic boat he could run to Bridgeport in just a few hours,” said Jackie. “Stock up on the bad stuff and be back at Hawk Pond before nightfall.”
“Nice gig.”
“Until someone emptied a twelve-gauge into the cab of his SUV. Needed DNA to confirm his identity.”
I knew Joey. Friendly, but twitchy guy. Docked his powerboat about five slips down from mine. Now I knew why I could hear the rumble of the big diesels five boats away and what was in the giant duffel bags tossed into his Range Rover, and why I hadn’t seen him around for a while.
Next snitch up was Lilly Fremouth. Black father, white mother. Waitressed at a diner up on Old County Road. Had an infant daughter and a pimp, who also happened to be the daughter’s father. Instrumental in busting a brothel and drug-retailing operation in Flanders, an impoverished backwater just south of Riverhead.
She was found strangled in her living room by her mother when she showed up to babysit for the grandkid.
“Ross has suspended all interaction with confidential informants while these killings are investigated,” said Jackie. “Trouble is, snitches grease the gears of investigations. So effectively, the detective squad is half shut down.”
“Might explain him letting us meddle in the Alfie thing,” I said.
“Might.”
“Is there a common thread?”
“Not that I can see. No evidence they knew each other. Joey was Veckstrom’s, Lilly and Alfie were run by Joe Sullivan. Any thoughts on how we deal with that?” she asked.
That was the Big Thing. What to do about Joe Sullivan. A good, true, and loyal friend, when we weren’t battling over alleged obstruction of justice or interference in police investigations. We’d all saved each other’s lives and been through a load of crap together over a lot of years, so it didn’t seem possible to hide this from him; the district attorney and her pretty pale assistant be damned.
“We tell him,” I said.
“Of course we do,” she said. “I just want to know how.”
“Tomorrow night at the Pequot.”
“Do I have to actually eat dinner, or just drink?”
We knew we’d find Joe Sullivan at the Pequot, Hodges’s ratty little bar and grill serving the remaining fishermen of Sag Harbor and other diehard locals. His daughter, Dorothy, a Goth depressive, mostly ran the joint at this point, though Hodges was usually there to eat and lend unwanted advice.
The food was actually more than edible, contrary to Jackie’s opinion, and the atmosphere truly distinctive, if your taste runs to red vinyl, weathered-grey wood, and the smell of fishermen fresh off the job.
“Drink all you want,” I told her. “I’ll drive you home.”
“Then pick me up at six. Don’t bother ringing the bell. I’ll know you’re there.”
Jackie lived above a Japanese restaurant in Water Mill, a hamlet just east of Southampton Village. It wasn’t a big place, just enough for an apartment and separate office. She’d know I’d arrived because the entire exterior of the building was under video surveillance, along with strategically placed alarms controlled by motion sensors.
I wasn’t the only one on the team with a history of mortal threat.
Despite all that, when I got there, Jackie was sitting on the stoop eating out of a take-out container. As she stood, she had to pull down the hem of her dress to get it within legal distance above her knees. She wore high-heeled sandals and her big ball of hair was pulled back from her face.
“Jesus, Jackie,” I said, “we’re going to the Pequot, not Studio 54.”
“I turn forty next year,” she said. “Got to use up the wardrobe while I still can. What’s Studio 54?”
“You’re gonna give Hodges a heart attack.”
“Then maybe he’ll stop staring at my boobs.”
Sag Harbor was an old whaling town bordering Southampton to the north. It had a lot of old houses densely packed together and a marina that accommodated giant yachts as well as the usual mix of merely unaffordable sailboats and cabin cruisers. Hidden away down a narrow channel on the other side of the harbor was the town’s fishing fleet, once focused on commercial catches like cod and flounder, now as likely chartered out by sport fishermen who liked catching their bluefish and bass in more rustic surroundings.
The Pequot was off the marina’s parking lot, so the fish was as fresh as the charter crews were ripe.
Sullivan was at his usual table for two, so we had to drag over another chair to all sit together.
“I don’t remember the invitation,” he said, as we plopped ourselves down. “What did you do with the rest of your dress?” he added, looking at Jackie over the top of his burger.
“She bought it off the midlife c
risis rack,” I said.
“Be thankful you’re only at mid.”
“We need to talk to you about something,” said Jackie. “It’s important.”
Sullivan looked over at me.
“Do you like it when she says stuff like that?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Sam knows it’s important. He’d just wait till the end of the night to talk about it. I’m not that patient.”
Sullivan held up his burger.
“What if we just wait till I eat this?”
“How come we’re not drinking?” I yelled toward the bar, where Dorothy looked up from a conversation with another tattoo-festooned ghoul. She gazed through curved, three-inch-long black eyelashes, then walked slowly over to our table.
“Vodka, Pinot, and Bud,” she said. “What’s shakin’?”
“A vodka, a pinot, and a Bud,” I said, “if they can find their way to our table.”
“What’re the specials tonight?” Jackie asked.
“Everything’s special,” said Dorothy. “Especially the wait staff. Certifiably awesome.”
“You added something,” said Jackie, studying Dorothy’s face.
“Interesting,” said Dorothy, “though consistent with clinical studies of the weak interplay between memory and casual observation.”
“She took something away,” I said, interpreting.
“Nose stud,” said Dorothy. “Sick of it.”
“In other words, eyewitnesses aren’t worth shit,” said Sullivan.
“How’s the interplay between memory and drink orders?” I asked.
Dorothy patted me on the shoulder and sauntered back toward the bar.
“Seriously, Joe,” Jackie said to Sullivan. “We need to talk.”
He put his burger down with some regret, and stood up. We followed him out to the Pequot’s rickety deck.
“What,” he said, when we got there.
“We’re going to tell you something you can’t tell anyone we told you,” said Jackie.