by Chris Knopf
“I can’t promise that.”
“I know,” said Jackie. “But when we tell you, you’ll know why you have to.”
Sullivan looked at me with more than a little exasperation.
“What the hell, Sam.”
“There’s something rotten inside Southampton Town Police,” I told him. “The whole force is under investigation.”
His frown was a complicated affair. Concern mixed with recognition.
“The snitches,” he said.
“I didn’t know Alfie was a CI,” said Jackie. “What court would accept evidence from a full-out paranoid schizophrenic?”
Sullivan got more irritated.
“Who told you about Alfie?”
“Edith Madison,” I said.
He pinched his lips together as if to throttle an ill-advised remark.
“How could anything he said be admissible?” Jackie asked, not ready to give up her point.
“They wouldn’t know it was Alfie. That’s why they’re called confidential informants. Anyway, Alfie was more directional with his information than specific. Sam knows what I mean.”
“He heard and saw a lot,” I said. “Wouldn’t necessarily know what it all meant.”
“Where’s Ross in all this?” Sullivan asked.
“Out of the loop,” I said. “There’s an official probe under way. No idea how they’re going about it. But Edith Madison asked us to go CI ourselves.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” said Sullivan.
“Meanwhile Ross invited us to go ahead and dig around Alfie’s murder despite the ongoing investigation,” I said.
“What the hell’s going on, Joe?” Jackie asked.
He didn’t want to answer, but knew he had to say something after we’d shown him such unconditional trust and regard.
“I don’t know. Don’t even know how to think about it. Ross runs such a tight ship, no way he doesn’t know. But if he knew, heads would already be rolling all over Southampton.”
“Why did you jump to the snitches?” I asked.
“Three in a matter of weeks? Basically the whole snitch staff. Either an incredible run of bad luck, or somebody inside is dropping dimes. That makes sense up to the point it doesn’t. Officially the only people who know who’s snitching are me, Veckstrom, and Ross.”
“Officially?” Jackie asked.
Sullivan let a little embarrassment intrude on his general air of defiance.
“First off you don’t know who says what on the outside. Inside, none of us tried too hard to keep it confidential. Talk can be loose around the squad room. Occasionally a snitch will come in for a longer session, and never get booked, which was supposed to be the cover. Sloppy, now that I think about it, though you never think you have to hide stuff from your own cops.”
“You know them all that well?” Jackie asked.
He thought about it.
“Sure, except for the new guys. One rookie from town and one transfer from Up Island. Both been there about a year. Normal replacements for two retirees. Just cops from what I can see.”
“So nothing else?” Jackie asked.
Sullivan’s face froze in place.
“Already said too much. If you don’t mind, I’ll be getting back to my burger before it turns into a block of ice.”
Then he walked back into the restaurant, and we followed.
We flopped back at the table and ordered some food for ourselves and a few rounds of drinks, but it was a pretty subdued affair, not being able to talk about the thing most on our minds and too distracted to talk about anything else.
EDDIE WAS waiting on the lawn with a rubber ball between his feet. He looked down at the ball, then up at me, his face saying, “You know what to do here.”
I’d never seen the ball, which looked fairly new. I hoped it was scavenged and not an outright theft from a small child on the beach, not unprecedented.
We went out to the Adirondack chairs where Eddie could perform his Rin Tin Tin leap off the breakwater. I was pleased to see Amanda sitting in one of the other chairs, slumped down with her head back, pitcher of cosmopolitans and a bowl of red grapes on the side table. I tossed the ball hard down the pebble beach and sat next to her.
“Don’t let him fool you,” she said, without opening her eyes. “I’ve been throwing that ball for hours.”
“You can just say no.”
“I did. That’s when he went to wait for you. Sucker.”
“Where’d he get it?”
“Don’t know, but I heard wailing and assumed the worst.”
“How was your day?” I asked.
She scrunched up her face and stuck out her tongue.
“I’d rather hear about yours.”
So I told her everything I could remember. It took awhile since I had to answer perfectly reasonable questions I hadn’t yet broached myself.
“Okay, so you had a worse day,” she said. “Now I feel like a fool.”
“It’s not a contest. We’re bad-day neutral here on Oak Point.”
I couldn’t see her very well in the pale moonlight, but I could sense her pulling back her thick hair to better see me.
“I find it hard to believe. It’s about the last thing I’d think our cops would do,” she said.
“You don’t know all our cops.”
“True.”
“And though it looks like Ross and Edith have handed us the keys to the realm, I don’t believe anything they say.”
“I recall you once saying, ‘Nothing is ever what it seems,’ ” she said.
“ ‘Nothing’ might be overstating the case.”
“You can’t possibly think Joe Sullivan is involved.”
“He better not be. We just spilled the whole pot of beans.”
“You told him?” she asked.
“We did. But if he’s dirty, we’ve been transported to an alternate universe, one not worth living in.”
“Speak for yourself. I might like it.”
“It seems like Edith and Ross want people on the outside, but we need people on the inside. Which has to be Joe Sullivan.”
“You like Danny Izard. Still a beat cop.”
“Exactly. Too far from the action. It has to be Sullivan. Anyway it’s too late to change course. The deed is done.”
Amanda put her head back against her Adirondack chair and closed her eyes. She stayed like that for so long, I thought she’d fallen asleep. I occupied myself drinking and watching for subtle changes in the Little Peconic’s ecosphere. So I was startled when Amanda, without moving, said quite clearly, “So what the hell is going on?”
I wanted to give her an entirely honest answer, so I thought a bit before answering the question.
“Unusual things are happening for sure, likely related, though maybe not. Everyone is suddenly behaving contrary to established norms. Unless I never really grasped those norms to begin with. There is almost no data, and no clear way to develop any, and the major players are either territorial, conspiratorial, manipulative, unreliable, or certifiably insane. Or all the above.”
“In other words, you haven’t a clue,” she said.
“I haven’t. All the more reason to refill the tumbler.”
“I’ll be here when you get back.”
CHAPTER SIX
The next day I was deep into coping joints for the cherry molding I’d custom-shaped for the built-in china cabinet when Jackie trotted down into my shop through the basement hatch. She wore flip-flops and a yellow cotton dress over a wet two-piece bathing suit.
Her frizz-ball hair was partially air-dried and the bright summer sun seemed to have added a few hundred new freckles.
“Welcome, I think,” I said.
“You’re always glad to see me.”
She picked up a piece of the curved molding and examined the coped angle. “You know making this stuff doesn’t seem possible,” she said. “To the layperson.”
“Seems that way to me, too,” I said. “What’s on your
mind?”
“I really meant the compliment.”
“Okay. Thanks. But you’re not here to assess my carpentry skills.”
She continued to study the wood pieces. “If someone gives you the keys to a house, where all but one of the doors inside are supposed to be locked,” she said, without looking up at me, “but you’re, like, really good at jimmying locks, so you do, because, what the hell, you’re already in the house and all, so why waste an opportunity? What’s the moral hazard?”
“I’m supposed to do the breaking and entering on this team,” I said. “You’re supposed to tell me not to and then I do it anyway.”
“I’m speaking metaphorically. It’s not actually a house.”
“I guess that’s good.”
“It’s a database.”
“Maybe not so good. So you had access to a specific file and you hacked your way into other files you weren’t supposed to see?”
“Not me personally. Randall Dodge.”
Randall was a tall, skinny Shinnecock Indian (technically sort of an Indian/African American/Irish gumbo) and former cyber sleuth for the US Navy who ran a computer hardware repair and software training operation out of a storefront in Southampton Village. Jackie and I had taken occasional advantage of his technical skills in return for help with some legal entanglements.
“You had him hack the database,” I said.
“I’d rather not use the word ‘hack.’ Sounds unseemly.”
“No. Sounds illegal. Depending on whom you hacked.”
“I guess I should know that better than you. From a legal perspective.”
“So who’s the victim?” I asked.
She stood there silently, indecision scrunching up her pretty round face. “You’re going to tell me eventually. Stop wasting time and just get it out.”
“The New York State Police?” she said, with enough up-speak to lift a truck.
“Not really.”
“Really.”
I put down the coping saw and sat on a tall stool. I looked at her face for traces of humor, in the hope it was just a bad joke.
“It’s not a joke,” she said, interpreting my look. “Tucked inside all the paper Oksana gave me was a link to the master CI file on the State Police server. I’m guessing there’s a lot more information there than what Oksana gave us. It was password protected, of course, but I thought Randall might find it fun to see if he could crack the code.”
“Fun? How much fun do you think he’ll have in Hungerford State Penitentiary?”
“Randall doesn’t get caught,” she said, though with less conviction than she might have wanted to express.
“Not yet.”
She reached in a pocket of the yellow dress and took out a flash drive. She held it up to the bright light of the shop. “It’s amazing how much stuff you can stick on one of these things.” Then she looked at me. “I don’t suppose you’d want a look.”
I didn’t own a computer. I’d barely touched a keyboard since using the dumb terminal in my office to run technical analyses through a roomful of IBM mainframes. Getting cashiered from my corporate job had more or less killed my interest in digital technology, now preferring information delivered by the printed word or words spoken over the rim of a glass.
“No. I’m not even touching it.”
She wiggled the drive in the air.
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“Why take that kind of risk? What were you thinking?” I asked.
“That Edith wants to keep us in a tight little maze. That always makes me want to jump the walls and take a look around.”
“Go ahead and look,” I said, picking up the little coping saw and piece of molding, trying to remember where I’d left off. “I’ll be working on my deniability.”
She put the flash drive on my workbench and backed away.
“I might’ve accidentally dropped that on the floor. How would you know where it came from?” she said, then added, “It’s a download. A copy. They can’t know you’re rummaging around in the attic. Just stay off the web while you rummage.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. Ask Randall.”
I looked at the drive, pausing over my work piece.
“What’re we looking for?” I asked.
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
“You really don’t know.”
“I don’t. I could do this all by myself, but four eyeballs are better than two.”
She left the flash drive on the workbench on her way out. I ignored it for the rest of the day, concentrating as best I could on the cherry china cabinet.
After freshening up in the outside shower, I walked across our common lawn to Amanda’s house—a creamy stucco- and blue-trimmed deal that looked like it’d been airlifted in from Provence. Amanda was out on her patio reading a thick, glossy publication issued by one of the bigger real estate agencies.
“Scouting the competition,” she said, as I loaded up at the wet bar.
“How do you stack up?”
“Well in the running, buddy, if you filter out lovers of bad taste and ostentation.”
“That covers a lot of territory.”
“How was the woodshop?”
“Productive, despite an appearance by Jackie Swaitkowski.”
“More on Alfie Aldergreen?”
“Sort of. Do you know how to work one of these things?” I asked, holding up the flash drive.
“I do. What’s on it?”
“Dossiers on confidential informants, past and present. Illegally obtained.”
“Eek.”
“I’d rather not make you an accomplice after the fact, but I don’t have a computer.”
“I thought being an accomplice was the centerpiece of our relationship?”
“Let’s boot it up.”
We retired to her business office, an airy space with glass-topped furniture and white walls, darkened only by a shelf full of catalogs for building materials and household appliances.
“Jackie said to stay off the Internet when you’re downloading or accessing this information,” I told her as she plugged the flash drive into a CPU on the floor.
“How come?”
“Some sort of security alchemy.”
“That’s comforting.”
After starting the machine and clicking around folders and files, she stood up and offered me the mouse.
“Why don’t you drive the car,” she said.
It took a moment to remember how to use the mouse and navigate the file structures, but I got there. Like riding a bicycle.
“This isn’t so hard,” I said. “What’s everybody talking about?”
“They aren’t.”
The first layer of the file structure was by date. Within that, it was broken out by police jurisdiction, a complicated thing in New York State where geopolitical bureaucracies are configured like a Russian nesting doll—Southampton Village inside Southampton Town, inside Suffolk County, inside New York State. I went into Southampton Town, started on current investigations, and burrowed down from there.
Two hours later, long after she’d wandered away, Amanda came into the office to announce dinner. I must have looked reluctant to move.
“You have to eat, darling. Your fingers need their strength.”
After a tasty, but nearly silent meal—my mind being too cluttered with police procedure and jargon to manage a coherent conversation—I went back to the computer.
I was no stranger to the addictive properties of computer-aided research, but even I was surprised by how seductive it could be to rifle through utterly forbidden information. Another two hours passed before Amanda visited again, this time holding a big glass of vodka.
“I’m trying to knock you out so you’ll abandon your new love and come to bed with me.”
I looked up at her.
“I need another couple hours.”
“Wake me up,” she said, drifting back out of the room.
I could see why CIs could be such a crucial resource. Joey Wentworth, like Lilly Fremouth, was a fountain of insider information on the shipping, handling, and distribution of drugs. At the same time, they were both skilled in what to share and what to withhold. It was simple economics. If a snitch shared too much it reduced the value of the product, and often increased the possibility of getting caught by the snitched-upon. A bad career move.
With Alfie it was hard to tell. Sullivan was terse and to the point in his reports. Tempering with heavy qualifications any of Alfie’s commentary. Unlike Joey and Lilly, who had a focus—heroin and prostitution respectively—Alfie was more generalized. A good example concerned an elegant woman with an indefinable foreign accent who frequented the more expensive boutiques in Southampton Village. Alfie noticed that she looked heavier leaving a shop than she did going in, and always seemed to be carrying the same bags every day. Sullivan worked with a Village cop named Judy Rensler to set up a sting, and sure enough, the woman was a professional shoplifter born and raised in Babylon on Long Island.
Other cases involved an old lady who picked up the wrong pug from where it was tied to a street sign, a team of teenaged pickpockets—a girl and a boy who used the proceeds to buy surfing gear—and a skinny but lovely Latvian hostess at one of the restaurants on Jobs Lane who supplemented her income by giving blowjobs to anyone weighing less than three hundred pounds and in possession of an exotic sports car.
Hardly the stuff that should lead to summary execution.
Veckstrom, on the other hand, wrote like a career journalist with pretensions toward literary fiction. He had a law degree and a wealthy wife whose family’s house on the beach in Southampton had been the original draw to the East End. The guy hated my guts, so it took a little effort to appreciate the intellectual sophistication beneath the arrogant sneer and relentless accusation.
He described his dealings with Joey Wentworth in terms of a psychological dynamic that had more to do with Joey’s relationship with his rich, effeminate father and overbearing, but infantile mother than the kid’s thirst for quick, sleazy profiteering. It was police paperwork in the form of Ibsen and O’Neill, though I admit it had me reading to the end, with Joey splattered all over the inside of his SUV, leaving Veckstrom at a loss over motive or perpetrator.