by Chris Knopf
The coming spring was apparent in the cool sea breeze and light green fuzz on the boxwoods that lined the back of the building. Despite the breeze the sun was warm enough to heat up your face and throw a glare off the lawn furniture. Jackie and I put on our sunglasses. Milhouser just squinted.
“You’re probably wondering why I haven’t called the cops or thrown you out on your asses,” he said after we sat down.
He looked from me to Jackie and back again while he stirred a packet of artificial sweetener into his tea.
“A little,” I admitted
“You want to talk to me. Maybe I want to talk to you.”
“About what?” asked Jackie.
“I want to know why he did it.”
“I didn’t,” I told him. “No reason to.”
“Not according to Ross Semple.”
“You talked to Ross?” Jackie asked.
“Hell no. I read it in the paper. I’m no fan of Semple’s, but he can’t be wrong all the time.”
“He usually isn’t. He’s just wrong this time.”
“My wife’s dead, did you know that?”
“No.” said Jackie, quicker to catch the implication.
“Too bad. Might’ve made Acquillo here think twice before taking the only other thing that mattered to me.”
“I’ve got a daughter. I couldn’t imagine losing her,” I told him.
He watched me carefully as he took a sip of tea. In the bright sunlight he looked more his age, his pale eyes nearly bleached white, the age spots on his cheeks and forehead more noticeable, drawing attention to a pattern of broken capillaries at the tip of his nose.
“So this is why I can talk to you,” he said. “You can’t do me any more harm. Even if you came here to kill me.”
“Honestly, Mr. Milhouser,” said Jackie.
I just let the comment sit where it fell.
“So you’re taking over Robbie’s project,” I said.
“Projects. You wouldn’t believe all the things that kid had going on.”
“I was thinking about the place over on Bay Edge Drive,” I said.
“Beautiful house. Just beautiful. It’s Robbie’s monument.”
“I hear when it’s finished you’re moving the crew on to another job.”
He looked down into his iced tea and grinned.
“So that’s what this is all about. You want to steal Robbie’s crew. You got some kind of gall.”
Jackie rose to object, but I put up my hand to stop her.
“Why would I want to do that?”
“To give them to the Battiston woman. Who else?”
“Not a chance. I just want to know how they hooked up with Robbie.”
“I don’t know. They’re from Up Island. Seem like good men to me. I put that tall one Patrick in charge. A natural leader. Already been doing some floors for me. Loyal to my boy, that’s for sure. Honest, too. I checked all the books, nothing funny going on. All on the up and up.”
“Did you have a reason to doubt that?”
He grinned again and looked at Jackie.
“I always knew he was a smart one, even though he never said much of anything. The only kid at the station who could fix anything. It didn’t surprise me when the Fourniers snatched him away from me.”
What I remembered was going to work for Rudy and John Fournier because Milhouser didn’t like me hanging out in the repair shop. He wanted me manning the pumps and cleaning windshields.
“Do you remember a guy named Paul Hodges? He worked at the station a few years before me.”
Milhouser frowned as he tried to remember. Then it came to him.
“Now, that was a mechanic. Knew his boats. Took care of all the outboards. I used to send him to the marinas. Wasn’t our main trade, but with Hodges I thought it might turn into something. You could always charge an extra forty percent for marine work. More mystery in it, which equals more money.”
“Why’d he leave?”
“Typical Vietnam vet.” He twirled an index finger around his ear. “Prone to moods. Couldn’t control him.”
“Still can’t.”
“That’s how I thought of you. Like a moody jarhead without the medals. Hodges a friend of yours?”
“I guess so.”
“Figures.”
“I never gave you any trouble,” I said.
“I knew your old man. Apples don’t fall too far from the tree.”
Jackie suddenly had a coughing fit noisy enough to make me start thinking Heimlich.
“I’m okay,” she croaked out. “Sorry. I think I swallowed a lemon seed.”
“I’ve told them about that,” said Milhouser.
He sat quietly with me as we waited for Jackie to catch her breath. When she got there she took up another thread of the conversation.
“So why did you check the books?” Jackie asked.
“You’re back on that?” he asked.
“Just curious.”
He shook his head in disgust.
“Wouldn’t you? What kind of a businessman would I be if I didn’t check the books?”
I knew what kind of businessman he was, but he still had a point.
“So Robbie ran a tight ship.”
“The tightest. Could teach his old man a thing or two.”
“Your crew said he left plenty of work for them.”
“He left some. I had some. Now it’s all in the same pot. Though I don’t know what that means to you. What do you care?”
He was still squinting, either because of the sun or to improve his concentration, it was hard to tell.
“I’m just curious about those guys.”
“You still haven’t told me,” he said.
“What?”
“Why you killed him. God knows I can’t figure it out. They said you had a fight at a bar someplace. Everybody drunk. Making assholes of yourselves. No reason to kill a man.”
“That’s right. No reason. That’s what I’ve been saying.”
“That was your tool that had Robbie’s blood all over it. You can’t explain that away.”
“Those matters will be thoroughly dealt with when we get into a court of law,” said Jackie.
He looked at me this time.
“She’s a heck of a mouthpiece, I can see that,” he said. “Didn’t used to be so many lady lawyers. I like it.”
“You ought to see her break a horse,” I said.
“I’d like that.”
“So,” said Jackie, slapping the tops of her thighs. “I think we’ve covered everything we wanted to cover today. We should let you get back to your work.”
“I’m just gonna get back to enjoying this glass of iced tea, if you want the truth.”
“We do, actually, Jeff,” I said. “The truth is exactly what we want.”
“Thanks for talking to us,” said Jackie, standing and pulling me up on my feet. “I know it’s hard hearing it from us, but we’re sorry for your loss. And we hope eventually justice will be served.”
“In a pig’s eye,” he said, almost cheerfully. “But thanks anyway.”
We’d almost gone beyond earshot when we heard him call us back. Jackie sighed, but let me retrace our steps. He still sat at the table, but now more relaxed, with his legs crossed.
“Do me a favor when you see that Battiston woman,” he said to me.
“Amanda Anselma. She’s divorced from Roy Battiston.”
“Whatever. Just tell her the offer’s still open. It’s not too late.”
“What offer?” I asked.
“She’ll know.”
“I want to know. Tell me.”
That made him smile. A smile without humor, all teeth and no eyes.
“You don’t matter, Sammy. Just tell the girl the offer’s still sittin’, but the clock she’s a-tickin’.”
I heard Jackie take in a big breath through her nose. She stuck her hand through my arm and got a grip on my bicep, then pulled me around and drove me out from the back of buildi
ng and into the Grand Prix. We rode in silence to the coffee place where she’d left her Toyota pickup. Before she got out of the car I asked her.
“Thoughts?”
“I’m over my head again, Sam. Where I always am when I get within ten blocks of you, feeling like people are laughing at all these punch lines and I’m just sitting there thinking, ‘What the hell’s so funny about that?’”
“What did you think of Jeff Milhouser?”
“It’s not him I’m worried about.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s you. You’re no different than any other dumb lunk all tangled up with a smart woman. Let me rephrase that, a very smart man, made dumb in the presence of a very smart woman.”
She snapped open the door and started to step out when I grabbed a wad of her jacket and pulled her back into the car. “What does that mean?”
She kissed the tips of her fingers, then used them to tap the hand that held her. I let her go.
“Ask your girlfriend,” she said, then sped across the seat, opened the door and disappeared into the crowds of preseason pedestrians out testing the weather and searching for paradise.
I drove back to Little Plains Road so I could look at the ocean again and mete out a few more unanswerable questions.
Like why my father had asked Milhouser if he needed a kid to work at the station during the busy summer months, a fact I’d forgotten until Milhouser dredged up the recollection. And how well they knew each other. There were only a few gas stations in town in those days, all of which did repairs, a necessity of the times. Milhouser’s was at the intersection of County Road 39 and a connector leading up to North Sea, a logical stop for my father on the way home.
I never saw them speak to each other. I only remembered the day my father told me to go over there and apply for a job. That was when Milhouser told me my father said I was handy with cars. Last year Ross Semple told me my father bragged to his father that I was a tough fighter. He hadn’t said these things to me, and never would. In fact, he never said anything to me I could remotely construe as a compliment, or even a criticism, right up to the day he died, beaten to death by a couple of punks in a men’s room at the back of a bar in the Bronx.
Consequently, I never really knew what he thought of me. Maybe now that he’d been dead for a few decades I’d start to get new information. I just had to keep my ears open and listen for echoes from across the divide.
SEVENTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING Burton called me on his cell phone. It was early enough to catch me en route to the outdoor shower with a big mug of cinnamon hazelnut in my shower-safe New York Yankees mug. Eddie had been asleep on the braided rug, but the phone startled him into action. Which amounted to a stiff, yawning stagger into the kitchen. He looked at the coffee like he’d consider giving it a shot.
“Forget it, you’d be up all day.”
Then I picked up the phone.
“Yeah.”
“What an eloquent salutation,” said Burton.
“Social niceties don’t start around here until after nine.”
“Niceties being a relative concept.”
“I guess you got the message.”
“Yes. Very interesting. I’m on the Long Island Expressway and expect to be at the house in less than an hour. What say we meet there? Isabella will arrange for breakfast.”
“Fine with me. Just tell her to keep the vitriol out of my eggs.”
“Certainly. Niceties are standard at the Lewis residence.”
The weather looked eager to repeat the performance of the day before. Most of the morning mist had burned off and the bay was etched with wavelets that were barely ripples. The breeze was decidedly south-southwest, mild and kindly. The maples along the back of the property were freshly regaled in light-green baby leaves, and the lawn—a refined blend of native grasses and invasive flora—expressed an exuberance that it seemed uncivil to restrain with anything as pitiless as a lawn mower. At least not this early in the season.
Eddie followed me out on the lawn, where he stopped and shook himself out. Then he trotted on, crossing the end of Oak Point Road and disappearing into the wetlands where he usually went in the mornings for purposes unknown. It might have been a way to vary his diet, or maybe it was just a dog’s version of the morning paper. Catching up on events of the night before.
I saw something move out of the corner of my eye and turned to see Amanda waving from her side door. I held up my mug and motioned her to join me, which she did, resplendent in a terry-cloth bathrobe, a headband holding back her unbrushed hair.
“Burton called from the highway,” I said, handing her a filled mug and leading her to the Adirondacks at the edge of the breakwater. “He wants us to come see him when he gets here, in about an hour.”
The rising sun warmed our necks and threw our shadows down over the breakwater and across the pebble beach. Even with the light air there were two or three sailboats plying the shallows off the south shore of the North Fork. Serious sailors impatient for a change of season, happy just to be out there feeling the glare of the sun off the water and sniffing at the nascent south-southwesterly. Hodges might have been one of them, having endured the battering winter firmly tied to the dock aboard his old Gulf Star. He’d been known to take an occasional winter sail, feeling his way past the unmarked shoals just to demonstrate to himself that it was smarter to stay hunkered down in the teak-lined warmth of the cabin and wait for spring like everybody else.
Amanda cupped her coffee with two hands, her long slender fingers, with freshly polished nails, linking gracefully as if in prayer.
“I have to apologize again,” she said.
“Oh, hell.”
“I know you hate apologies.”
“They’re a waste of breath,” I told her.
“I feel like I can’t continue with you unless I can have recurring and ongoing forgiveness.”
“You do. Glad that’s settled.”
“It’s not only what I’ve done. It’s how I’ve been.”
“You got reasons to be a little edgy.”
“You think I’m edgy?” I laughed.
“Don’t try that trap on me, Miss Anselma. I used to be married. Learned all the tricks.”
“Edgy would be nice. I was thinking I’ve been hysterical and neurotic.”
“Yeah. With an edge.”
“And paranoid. I’m definitely getting paranoid.”
“What, just because somebody burns down your house and your development project’s sounding like a Superfund site?”
“Not funny.”
“No, the funny part is the anonymous tipster whose information was convincing enough to get the DEC to get a TRO out of a sympathetic judge. PDQ.”
“So you’re saying I should be paranoid?”
“No. Paranoia’s delusional. You should be suspicious.”
“Big downgrade from paranoia.”
“Burton will ask you how much you knew, if anything, about those cellars,” I said. “Don’t get offended. He has to ask.”
“What do you think? About how much I knew?”
“You didn’t know anything. Otherwise, you’d have checked them out well before the phase-one inspection. To do otherwise would be both foolish and immoral.”
“Qualities I could tack on to edgy and paranoid.”
“Don’t forget,” I said, “I didn’t know they were there, either. And we’ve been over that place pretty thoroughly.”
“Thank you. I’d forgotten that.”
“But if it’ll help, I’ll cop to it. What’s a little environmental racket on top of a murder charge?”
“That’s so sweet.”
“My first nicety of the day.”
I’d seen the original drawings of the WB facility, but never a cellar elevation. They had the same identification box in the lower-left corner as the ones Ned showed us. I didn’t remember the exact date they were drawn, but it was sometime in the early twentieth century. I’d never
forget such a thing, even with my degraded frontal lobes. If nothing else, I’d remember they were built with stone and not the prevailing brick of the complex. Stone wasn’t used much on sandy Long Island, and certainly not for large industrial construction. As far as I knew, all the WB buildings were built on thick, raised slabs, better to stand up to heavy equipment and avoid water infiltration. They were, after all, adjacent to a lagoon.
“Have you accepted my apology yet?” she asked. “I’ve lost the thread.”
“I accept whatever it is you want me to accept. Unconditionally, and in perpetuity, so we don’t have to keep going through this.”
“Does that preclude occasional pleas for reassurance?”
“Yup. You’re all set, for life. Imagine the time saving.”
With bold concepts like this, you wonder why my relationships with women were often less than entirely successful.
For the sake of efficiency I convinced her to take her shower with me in the outdoor stall, which turned out to be a fun idea for everybody. It meant that we were an hour later than I’d promised Burton, but he assured us Isabella didn’t mind watching her homemade Belgian waffles and cheese omelets cooling on the serving trolley. Our guilt was soothed by the fact that Burton and Hayden had already downed two platefuls, along with a bowl of fresh fruit and half a carafe of café noir.
They were sitting on a slate patio beneath a pergola laden with emerging clematis and wisteria. Hayden was in a white-and-blue-striped tennis outfit last worn by Jay Gatsby and Burton was in a state of exhaustion. Since he could never talk specifically about his work, the only polite thing to say was, “So, workin’ hard?”
“Indeed,” he said, telling us he’d been up all night preparing a bankruptcy filing that was big enough to affect global financial markets when it was announced later that day. “You won’t be surprised to know there are weighty tax implications surrounding the implosion of a large corporation— rather like a pack of jackals feeding on a staggering herbivore. Get it while you can.”
“I feel that way about the waffles,” I told him.