Cop Job

by Chris Knopf

  I told Eddie to go find Amanda and followed him as he sniffed his way down the hall and into Allison’s room, where Amanda and Nathan were using her sheet-covered legs as a black jack table.

  “Hello there, Eddie,” said Amanda. “Want to play?”

  “Never trust a mixed breed with a deck of cards,” I told her.

  “We have news,” said Amanda.

  “They’re busting Allison out of here,” said Nathan.

  “Into a nursing home,” said Allison. “Not exactly out out.”

  Her voice was hoarse and the words slurred, but you could understand her.

  Amanda gathered up their cards and shuffled the deck before handing it back to Nathan.

  “Technically she’s being transferred to a convalescent facility where they can maintain care and start rehab,” said Amanda. “It’s a big step,” she added lightly, squeezing Allison’s knee.

  “She means they need the bed for the next bleeding bag of bones,” said Allison.

  “We’re a little fussy today,” said Nathan.

  “That’s my girl,” I said. “A sure sign she’s on the mend.”

  “What’s with the chin?” Nathan asked, pointing to the scuff I got from hitting the pavement on Main Street. “What’s the other guy look like?”

  “The other guy was a truck. Looks better than me.”

  I put my hand over my wounded ribs out of habit. Amanda saw me and asked how I felt. Sore, I told her, but mobile.

  “Allison has some very interesting pain medicine,” said Amanda. “I’m sure she’ll share.”

  “I might take her up on it. Those things can be expensive.”

  “Her stepfather’s paying for everything not covered by insurance, which is quite a bit, I’m appalled to note,” said Nathan.

  “He doesn’t have to do that,” I said.

  “Are we about to look a gift horse in the mouth?” asked Amanda.

  Allison had her eyes closed, but she opened them again to give me a stare.

  “We’re not,” she mumbled.

  “Okay, but she’s not going into any nursing home,” I said.

  “She can’t stay here,” said Amanda.

  “No, but you’ve got plenty of room at your house,” I said. “For you and Allison, and Nathan, if he’s serious about looking after her.”

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  “The nurses and physical therapists can come to us,” I said. “Allison can have the guest suite on the second floor. It’s got its own bath and plenty of room for rehab equipment.”

  “Can you just do that?” Nathan asked.

  “My father often thinks he can just do things,” said Allison.

  “It’s certainly fine with me,” said Amanda to Allison. “I’d love to have you at my house.”

  It took a lot more to convince the discharge people at the hospital. At one point, they brought in one of the docs who gravely lectured me on the importance of full-time, institutional care for a case as serious as Allison’s. I listened politely before telling him to collect his kickback from the nursing home for warehousing some other poor schlub—he wasn’t getting my daughter. For some reason, he found this offensive, and stormed out of the office before I could further enlighten him. Though I did get a chance to chat with a hospital administrator who subsequently appeared, another imperious asshole who thought I’d be cowed by threats of legal action. I told him my friend Burton Lewis was richer and more powerful than any of his friends, and anyway, there was nothing legally he could do as long as Allison chose to go with us of her own free will.

  After that, the best he could do was tell me to stop bringing my dog to the hospital. Eddie handled the insult as graciously as usual.

  When I could use my cell phone out on the sidewalk I called Abby and told her our plans. Except for a half-hearted offer to use their apartment instead, she agreed it was far better for Allison to be surrounded by people who loved her, in a real home and away from the antiseptic, dehumanizing medical world.

  I heard Evan yelling in the background that he not only would pay the added freight, he knew how to set up all the necessary in-home care and rehabilitation. Before I got off the phone I told him through Abby to go ahead and make the arrangements. What the hell, he was paying.

  There was another reason I wanted Allison on Oak Point, which I hadn’t yet shared with anyone. I had some faith in the security people at Roosevelt Hospital, so far justified. I might not be as lucky at the next place. I needed Allison out on Oak Point so we could keep an eye on her. Whoever beat her up hadn’t meant to stop there. Whatever motivated him still existed. And as long as Allison lived, so did the motivation.

  So the odds were better than even that he’d try to finish the job.

  Unless I got to him first.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Evan had been true to his word. Within days we had a hospital bed, medical gear, monitors, and assorted scary-looking rehab equipment, plus a continuous flow of visiting nurses waiting for Allison after they discharged her from the hospital and drove her and Nathan out to Southampton in an ambulance.

  I was there to watch over the delivery, but I didn’t need to be. Everything was handled very smoothly and professionally. The only thing I did was carry Allison up to the second floor so they didn’t have to negotiate the wheelchair. It wasn’t a hard task, even with the bum ribs, she’d lost so much weight. Though her grip around my neck was stronger than you’d think possible, and I took advantage of the moment to breathe in the aroma of her hair, something I hadn’t been able to do since she was an early teen.

  After we got her and Nathan settled in, I told everyone that Paul Hodges was signed up to handle security.

  Amanda was happy about it, Nathan not so much.

  “You don’t think I can protect her,” he said. “You think I’m just a pussy nerd.”

  “Have you ever shot anyone?” I asked.

  “No.”

  I took him down to my shop in the basement and gave him a .45 automatic I’d lifted off a guy who’d once tried to kill me. We both survived, but I thought the wiser choice was to keep his gun. I showed Nathan how to load the clip, free the safety, and aim with both hands.

  “Go for the body,” I told him. “Makes it harder to miss.”

  We designated Amanda’s master bedroom next door for the security detail and put her in another guest suite on the first floor. As arranged, Hodges showed up around dinnertime so Amanda had a crowd to feed and water. She seemed to like it, though I wondered for how long. Amanda and I got along pretty well partly because we liked spending a lot of time on our own. Just another issue to push out into the indefinite future.

  When all the commotion calmed down, I went back to my cottage and out to the Adirondacks with Eddie to find my own seclusion, happy though I was to have the crowd next door. Safe for now, I hoped.

  JACKIE PICKED me up the next day in the rolling storage container she used as a car. She cleared a space for me in the passenger seat by heaving the stacks of paper, cosmetics, ice scrapers (useful in the middle of summer), bankers boxes, bulging tote bags, and changes of clothes that usually lived there into the back, which may or may not have had the seat unfolded.

  “When was the last time you checked for wildlife?” I asked her.

  “Get it out of your system now. I’m not listening to this all the way to Riverhead.”

  Jackie had tried to arrange a visit with Lilly Fremouth’s mother, but the woman was so deranged with shock and grief after finding her murdered daughter that she was essentially mute and nonresponsive. But Lilly’s father, divorced for many years, said okay. He lived in a section of Southampton in the north, hard up against Riverhead, called Flanders. It didn’t look much like Belgium, though it was home to a famous building in the shape of a duck where they used to sell authentic Long Island duck eggs.

  It wasn’t a part of the Hamptons that showed up in any of the slippery, four-color magazines that littered the Village all summer. Up there
nobody preened for society photographers or rode polo ponies. Instead they mostly worked hard jobs with landscaping crews and painting contractors, worried about their families, and tried to stay clear of the police.

  Ben Fremouth was in many ways an exception. He’d retired ten years before from teaching history and social studies at Westhampton Beach High School. He had a well-tended house on the same street where he’d grown up. There weren’t many places a black kid could grow up out here in those days, but after the Civil Rights movement, he could have moved out, but didn’t.

  Jackie told me all this on the ride up, but couldn’t explain that last one.

  A family passed by on foot on Ben’s street as we were getting out of the car, but they hardly looked at us. They were Latinos, who had become a much bigger percentage of the population over the last decade. I said hola anyway before following Jackie up the stone path.

  Fremouth was tall and gaunt with long enough hair to nearly qualify as an Afro. He stooped closer to our level when he opened the screen door and squinted at us through heavy glasses. Jackie told him who we were and he nodded, backing up to let us into his living room.

  Books lined one wall and surrounded an easy chair. It was the type you could sit in for about a thousand years. The smell of the books, not unpleasant, filled the room, as did a mix of floral and leather aromas the source of which was not immediately apparent.

  “I can offer you tea. Or Diet Coke,” he said. “That’s all I have here.”

  We said we were all set, and he said he’d have some tea himself, since that’s what he drank throughout the day.

  “Used to be coffee, but then my central nervous system started to rebel,” he said. “Getting old seems to be a process of serial deprivation.”

  Once he was back in the room in his chair, and we were on a sofa, Jackie started to apologize for bothering him about something he likely didn’t want to discuss, but he cut her off.

  “If I wasn’t willing to address the subject I wouldn’t have agreed to talk,” he said.

  “Of course,” said Jackie.

  “It was inevitable, what happened to Lilly,” he said. “Only a matter of time.”

  “Why was that?” I asked.

  He looked at me as if I were blind to the self-evident.

  “Once they become addicted to heroin, the odds of recovery are sadly long. It’s the financial pressure. Imagine having to buy something on a daily basis that you can’t afford, that’s illegal, that has no quality control, that is retailed by people of no conscience, social or otherwise, whose only goal is to ensnare you in further illicit activity, where is that going to end?”

  He spoke in a flat, matter-of-fact way that failed to entirely obscure the same anguish I’d heard in Jack Wentworth’s voice. Anguish without socioeconomic borders.

  And as with the Wentworths, part of me wanted to tell him at least Lilly had enough conscience of her own to help bust some of that low life, though I didn’t know the girl personally. Maybe it was only for the money.

  “Did Lilly seem different before she was killed?” Jackie asked. “Was she fearful, distracted?”

  Fremouth put a finger alongside his nose, in what looked like a habit of deliberation.

  “Yes. Not that we had much in the way of interaction. She only lived a few blocks from here, but I refused to aid in her lifestyle choices, to put it in the euphemism of social services. So I wasn’t much worth talking to.”

  “But enough to know something was up,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “She stopped by with my granddaughter, a certain way to have me let her in the house. I gave her tea. And braced myself for the money pitch, though it never came. She only seemed to want to talk. I was happy to accommodate that, and allow my granddaughter to sit on my lap and perform indignities with my reading glasses.”

  “What did she talk about?” I asked.

  “It was a desultory conversation. No particular themes. I mostly listened, since I never asked her about herself, wanting neither the truth nor a passel of lies.”

  His gaze had been mostly directed at the floor a few feet in front of where we sat. Now it drifted up toward his overflowing bookcase, as if the books held the answer to his life’s tragedies.

  “Did she talk about the cops?” Jackie asked. “Mention any by name?”

  He shook his head, tentatively, as if unsure that was the proper answer.

  “Not by name, but she did ask me if I thought the police who patrol Flanders were on the take, as if I’d know the answer to that. I’ve never spoken to any of them, with the exception of one fellow who I had as a student. I would see him occasionally. Actually more often lately in his cleverly unmarked police cruiser, as if anyone even more unschooled in law enforcement than me would be fooled by that.”

  “A plainclothesman,” said Jackie.

  “Is that what they’re called? In the nineteenth century they wore identical bowler hats and morning coats. No more convincing a disguise.”

  “Can you tell us his name?” I asked. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Joseph Sullivan,” he said. “I also taught his two older brothers. Both went into the military. One killed in the Gulf War. I read the other was in the State Department, but that might be very old information. I liked Joe. Had the wits of his brothers, but lacked confidence. I think he found his footing on the police force.”

  I didn’t want to break the news that Sullivan’s footing had been a little precarious of late. So I asked another question.

  “Did Lilly ever mention him?”

  He didn’t think so, but reminded us that communication with his daughter had been hit or miss in recent years. Then he veered into a description of Lilly’s mother, and how he thought her own battles with prescription drugs, legally obtained, had contributed to Lilly’s addiction. He said he didn’t want to cast judgment, but the scent of recrimination hung in the air.

  “Did she talk about any of the other detectives?” Jackie asked, ignoring the fact that we’d already asked that question. Fremouth took note.

  “You seem to have some focus on the Southampton police,” he said. “That’s interesting.”

  Jackie tried to backpedal.

  “Not really,” she said. “Just talking here.”

  “You brought it up,” he said.

  “Do you have any idea of who might have killed your daughter?” I asked.

  “Do you think I don’t wonder that myself nearly every waking minute of every day?” he said. “This neighborhood has been my home for my entire life. I’m old, but I still know a lot of people who tell me things. If it could be known, I’d know it. Everyone assumed her boyfriend was the culprit, but he was out of town, and frankly, lacks the courage for such a monstrous act. In my opinion. For people who live here, the police are a fact of daily life. A necessary evil much of the time, though often more evil than necessary. Though nothing leads me, or anyone I know, to believe they have any complicity in this. Does that answer your question?”

  “It does,” said Jackie, too quickly for my taste.

  It didn’t look like we’d get much more of use from the elegant, exhausted man, though we gave him the chance to tell us anything we hadn’t already asked about. So we thanked him, and were nearly out the door when I remembered what I’d meant to ask all along.

  “Mr. Fremouth, did Lilly know a mentally ill white guy in a wheelchair named Alfie Aldergreen?” I asked.

  “The one who was drowned in Hawk Pond?” he said. “I have no idea.”

  “What about another guy, Joey Wentworth?” said Jackie, catching the drift.

  Fremouth was standing at the door about to usher us out. He looked bothered all of a sudden.

  “He was killed as well,” he said. “You think there’s a connection to Lilly’s death?” We stood there immobile, unable to answer. “Yes,” he said. “Wentworth was a local operator. If I knew that, Lilly surely did as well. So there might be a connection. I’ll think about it. At this point,
there’s really nothing left to do.”

  When we got in Jackie’s car, I saw him still standing in his doorway like the monument to sad forbearance that he was, watching us, likely wondering whether agreeing to talk to us was a blessing or a curse.

  I NEVER go out of my way to follow the news, but if you want to listen to reasonable music where I live you have to listen to public radio, and if you do that, you can’t avoid bumping into a news story or two, even if you’re fast with the on-off button.

  That’s why I heard the next day a report on Edith Madison that said she’d been treated for clinical depression and anxiety for several years following the death of her husband. Since this was only about six years ago, some people were concerned that she had hidden this malady while continuing in her official duties at a time when her office was heavily involved in serious and sensitive prosecutions.

  The story was a big enough deal to make the national news, and apparently solid enough to meet the journalistic standards of National Public Radio, despite the anonymous sources. As her leading competitor in the upcoming election, Lionel Veckstrom was asked to comment, but demurred, sounding statesmanlike in his reluctance to discuss such a personal matter as the DA’s psychiatric status, even bemoaning the stigmatization of people with emotional disorders.

  A nice bit of damning with faint principle.

  I called Jackie who just said “Holy Crap” when she answered the phone.

  “What does this mean?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, but it can’t be that great for Edith.”

  “What does it mean for our snitch project?”

  “Don’t know that, either. Of course I’m wondering if her asking us to nose around about the cops was in any way improper, or God forbid, illegal. Not that there’s a connection with her health issues, but once there’s blood in the water, the sharks aren’t far behind.”