by Neil Gordon
With a low whistle the man inspected the table, circling it entirely, bending slightly to look at the legs. He wore a gray Burberry raincoat with a checkered lining and, emerging from its bottom, khakis and L. L. Bean rubber shoes. His hair was thick, brushed back dramatically across his head, and though he was only five-six, at close quarters a nearly graceful energy animated his movements, one that made his smallness seem rather an asset.
It was with this grace that, now, he set to work.
Sitting at the table, he turned on the small computer. While it booted he leafed, quickly and with a light touch, through the papers before him. One, a ledger for Rosenthal Equities, particularly attracted his attention: he opened it carefully, then withdrew an envelope of deposit slips and leafed through them. By the end of the small pile, his lips were pursed. For a time, looking up, he calculated. Then, as if having reached a conclusion, he laid the last five deposit slips in a row and withdrew from his raincoat pocket a small automatic camera, in whose flash he took three shots of the slips. He replaced them in the envelope and closed the register.
Much of this process was repeated again, moments later, when he came across the small pile of summer leases, each signed only by the tenant. Then again when he reached, in turn, the bank statements and the correspondence regarding the impending federal escrow seizure. When this was finished, he pocketed the camera and turned to the computer.
Here, with practiced movements, he went through the folders on the hard drive, but did not launch any of the documents, which would have changed their date registries. Instead, from his jacket pocket he withdrew two floppy disks in a small plastic case. He chose one, apparently formatted for a Macintosh, for it booted immediately, and copied onto it a number of files. Then he pocketed the disk, closed the box, shut down the computer, and closed its cover.
He stepped away from the desk now, and checked again out the wide glass front doors.
Satisfied, apparently, that he was still unobserved—searching this glass-walled house was rather like searching a fishbowl in a crowded room—he crossed the living room again, then climbed up the stairs, gingerly, as if aware that he was, now, more deeply invading Allison’s privacy. Upstairs, he peeked first into the master bedroom, then the three smaller ones, the beds stripped to the mattresses. Only one, facing northward, had a made bed, or rather unmade, the sheets and blankets spilled to the floor. This room, like a strange Goldilocks, he entered.
There was a small desk, a bed, and a wicker chair. The desk drawers were filled with papers, limp, yellowed, clearly old. The closet held clothes of which the contemporaneity was indicated not only by their labels, but by the degree to which they were scattered around the floor; the desk housed a brush, a can of deodorant, a tampon. Finished searching, in the middle of the room he paused. Then he crossed to the bookcase and genuflected.
The books were exclusively poetry, mostly by women, though laced with classics. One was the paperbound Norton Anthology, and from its top he could see the edge of a piece of paper. He withdrew the volume and unfolded the clipping, a front page from the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette with the headline “Suicide at Gay Head.” While he read it a car engine sounded, distantly, outside.
Unhurried, he crouched in the little room and watched out the window at the moving gray clouds in the sky. Like this, he remained for a long time, bathing his unusually regular features in the dim light while he considered the approaching noise of a car engine. Then he looked back to the book. There was, with the newspaper clipping, another sheet of paper. He refolded both, and put them carefully into the inside of his shirt. He reshelved the Norton Anthology. Still crouching, he took three photographs of the room. Then he rose and, through the window, watched a Fiat pull into the carport. In an unhurried movement he backed away from the window.
Moving very lightly now the man stepped down the stairs, two at a time, across the living room, and through the kitchen. From here, he quickly photographed the living room, three times. Then he turned to a door that gave onto a wooden deck; it opened easily and he slipped out, vaulted the deck railing, landing lightly on the grass, and began to jog, down the beach again, west.
4.
Hope had risen in Dee’s stomach with something like an ache when he’d seen Alley’s Cherokee parked in the carport. Then it died when he saw the note taped to the wall: “Marty, out riding, don’t wait, repeat don’t wait, will call.”
The strength of his disappointment, in fact, surprised him. He was early, true. But he had not known when he left Ocean View that morning that he had only hours, not days, before he had to return to the city. The Steamship Authority was confident the ferries would be running by evening, and he had a State Police reservation on the six P.M. from Oak Bluffs. Six P.M. It was nearly nine-thirty in the morning now.
Frustration hot in his stomach, he approached the farmhouse’s vast sliding doors, just in time to see three quick flashes light the living room and then, clean through the big windows, a man running away from the house at an angle toward the sea.
Dee was stopped by a jet of adrenaline that seemed to start at his feet and spread iciness to the top of his skull. Without thinking, he stepped through the living room, into the kitchen, through the back door, and vaulted the little wooden fence from the deck to the lawn.
From the top of the dune he saw, perhaps a hundred yards ahead, the man, still moving fast, and, again without thinking, Dee began to run through the wet sand after him.
In perhaps ten minutes or so the man, clearly out of breath, slowed to a walk along the waterline. Dee slowed too, unsure of what to do if he turned around. But, he thought, why would he turn around? There was only one house on the water between Long Point and Ocean View: this man had no reason not to assume that the beach behind him was deserted. Dee wiped the rain from his face, then trudged ahead on the harder sand by the waterline.
After a time the man reached into his raincoat pocket for a small camera, which he unloaded as he shifted direction, cutting now at an angle up the beach. Slowly Dee realized that the man was heading toward the Long Point parking lot, and then he understood: this man had parked there and walked down the beach, putting himself in a position to spy on Ocean View. That’s how he’d known it was empty: he would have seen Allison leave.
But what time did he get there? Had he seen Dee? Had he photographed him? A great, debilitating anxiety seemed to overcome him at the thought, and he slowed. At the entrance to the Long Point Beach parking lot, the man shifted direction abruptly and crossed the beach to the little wooden walkway to the parking lot.
Dee hesitated again, watching the figure recede up the path to the parking lot. Then he followed. When he had crossed the wooden walkway, the figure came back in view, and apparently he had been running, for now he was far up the mossy path toward the parking lot.
Still undecided about what he was doing, Dee started up the path at a jog. There were two cars in the parking lot: one a rental Jeep of the sort that filled the island during the summer, parked at the far end of the lot by the entrance, the other a black Land Cruiser, probably a fisherman’s, parked at the closer end, by the walkway to the beach. The short man looked behind him, saw Dee, then continued passing the Land Cruiser toward the Jeep.
And then, Dee saw something very strange indeed.
As the short man passed by the Land Cruiser, its two front doors opened and not fishermen, but two men in black suits stepped out. Both were fairly tall, but where one was also large, with a head of close-cropped, curly black hair, the other was slim and wore glasses, looking something like a university professor. Both were perhaps in their forties. Without thinking, Dee stepped sideways and crouched next to a shrub, not too obscured to see the scene taking place.
A short exchange ensued among the three. The thin man stood easily on the balls of his feet, hands in his pocket; the bigger man, meanwhile, moved to the short man’s right. As for the short man, his left hand, Dee noticed, seemed to be doing something in its coat pocket.
In time, it slowly emerged, and took advantage of its owner’s shortness to drop two small objects behind his leg into the sand. One seemed to Dee to be a film canister, the other a computer disk, but Dee had no time to be sure, for the man then stepped back a half step onto the objects, pushing them into the sand under his foot. Dimly, in the muting rain, Dee heard his voice rise.
No sooner had he spoken when, in what seemed from Dee’s vantage a casual movement, all the more shocking in its violence, the larger man hit him very hard in the belly. The short man doubled over, and as his head came down the large man kicked his cheek with his knee, a short movement that sent him over onto his shoulder in the fetal position. Then, stepping around, the large man kicked him once again, with his foot, in the stomach, and had lifted his foot again when Dee, without thinking, shouted.
Later, Dee would guess that he had saved the short man from being beaten to death. The thin one looked around, alarmed, while the other searched the short man’s pockets, turning him with one hand to get to the other side of the coat. He withdrew and pocketed a small camera. Then he searched his inside pockets, dropping his wallet and car keys into the sand. When that was done he turned and walked back to the Land Cruiser, where his comrade had already started the engine. The Land Cruiser drew up the sand road.
For a long time, perhaps ten minutes, Dee watched the small man lying in the sand under the dull gray sky. A wind had come up, carrying the noise of the surf, blowing before it the thin rain. He waited, crouched by the bush, heart pounding. Then the small man stirred, groaned, and rolled onto his back.
Another period of time passed without the small man moving again, but Dee found he had lost track of time and could not tell whether it had been a minute or ten. The sun had come out somewhat, he suddenly noticed: the gray clouds parting to show a slash of distant blue, somehow autumnal in its depth. Without thinking, Dee stepped hesitantly out toward the man. But he halted abruptly when the man stood, gingerly, his back to Dee, and then sank again to his knees to throw up while Dee retreated. When he’d finished, he did not rise again, nor did he sit down. Instead, he crawled forward a few feet, then a few more, apparently searching through the sand. Finally, from where he had been standing before being hit, he found and pocketed what Dee could now clearly see to be a roll of film and a blue floppy disk. Then he stood, slowly, turned a half circle to find his wallet and car keys, and made his way unsteadily to his Jeep.
5.
Allison arrived back at Ocean View early, her morning ride curtailed by the rain, and found Dee’s Fiat in the carport. She pulled up next to it, dropped her bike into the sand, and ran up the path into the house, unbuckling her helmet.
Inside, it was empty, but through the living room windows she could see Dee approaching, at a run, over the beach. She watched for a moment, then took a towel from the downstairs bathroom and, drying her face, met him at the kitchen door.
Ignoring the towel, out of breath, he told her quickly what he had seen. His face, pale from the cold, dripped with rain. She listened, then dried his face and drew him inside.
“Okay. I understand. Take it easy.”
“Alley, your father’s a fucking thug.”
“Yeah, unlike yours. Sit down.”
She spoke with a kind of command, new to Dee, and calmed, he sat and began taking off wet clothes. Allison, meanwhile, walked to the living room and poured two scotches at the liquor cabinet under the Soutine.
Dymitryck. A reporter waiting at the top of the road to follow her, that was one thing. One who came all the way down to spy on the house? With a camera? That was, she said to herself, something else altogether. The attack couldn’t possibly be the result of her call, hours before, to Stein—her father must have had Falcon security watching Dymitryck already. Or were they there to protect her? Anyhow, she thought—with a detachment that surprised her—the important thing was to calm Dee. Later, she would wonder how she had known that. Now, she returned to the kitchen with the drinks.
“Dee. He’s just another reporter. I’m telling you, every damn paper in the country’s been to the island this summer. If this guy was at the house, it must have driven my father crazy.”
But Dee was not placated.
“Crazy? Alley, that was a criminal action I witnessed.”
“Oh, don’t be a baby. My dad isn’t some street criminal. His security’s provided by the Israeli embassy, for God’s sake. They’re armed and they’re legal. This guy was here, at my house.”
“What I saw wasn’t legal.”
“Maybe not. Go to the police.”
For a moment they regarded each other in silence. Then Allison spoke in another tone.
“I told you: I’ll speak to my dad. I’ll make sure that’s the last time.”
“That’s not all.” Calming, somewhat, with his drink, Dee—now in his underwear—crossed his legs. “They’ve called me back to New York. I have to be on the six o’clock ferry.”
“Why New York?”
“Press conference, tomorrow. Announcing the prosecution’s team.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I told you. I’m going to quit.”
For a long silence, they gazed at each other again, but this time, instead of hostility, with anxiety.
And as they did so, suddenly, unexpectedly—more shocking than any of the events these past forty-eight hours—a movement of enormous force went through Allison’s stomach.
She turned away from him and struggled to come to terms with the feeling.
Turning back, she regarded him gravely.
“Would you have left the case if we hadn’t . . . met again?”
Dee answered in a soft voice:
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?”
“Because that was then. Everything’s different now.”
“And what then? After you withdraw?”
Dee stared back. When he answered, it was simply.
“I want to see you.”
She approached him now, crouching at his knees, her hands on his bare waist. “You don’t have to do it for me.”
He nodded. “Thank you. I hear you. I’ll be off the case by the time you get back to town.”
Alley watched him for a long moment. So he was determined. And if that was so, whatever doubts she had, they were her own. She exhaled a huge sigh. Then she rose, taking his hands, pulling him after her, relief flooding her, her words coming in whole breaths, like the big wind from the ocean. Soon he would be off the case. That was that. But what was it she felt, with the relief? Whatever it was, it was hard to distinguish in the rise of her longing. “Okay. Come upstairs now. Dee. Before you go. Come upstairs.”
CHAPTER 6
September 4, 1994.
Ocean View Farm.
1.
After he left that evening, she lay watching grayness creep across the ceiling, the evening falling outside so starkly she could nearly hear it, a faint exhalation, like a sigh of defeat.
He had dressed, standing next to the bed, his eyes on her body. Watching him watching her, she had wondered if anything ever happened in one focus, not two; if anything was ever single, not double. She did not wish to hold him, she wished to cleave to him, her face buried in the crook of his neck, her breast against the muscle of his chest.
When at last he was ready, she sat up and swung her legs out of bed, wrapped the sheet across her waist and legs. They did not kiss, but watched each other, silent, serious. At last he leaned, ran the back of his fingers against the inside curve of her breast.
And then he was gone. He was gone. By the morning, he would have spoken to Shauna McCarthy and she would have scheduled a hearing with the trial’s judge to have Dee replaced on the prosecution team.
There might be some media attention to her following that. She needed, she knew, to be ready for it. But more important, at the moment, seemed to her that Dee was gone, with the deserting summer crowd, leaving the island to its winter, empty,
isolate, at the edge of the killing sea. From now until spring the Atlantic snows would drift over the duotone countryside, the ocean churning cold and alien, the occasional ferries the single lifeline to the mainland. And when she, too, left this place to its bad season, it would be for the last time.
She rose and dressed, went downstairs and out to the car, moving slowly, deliberately, as if in mourning. By the time she reached Oak Bluffs Dee’s ferry would be gone, the Ritz beginning to take on its winter desolation. She hit the main road and turned right, not even looking for Dymitryck, no longer caring if he was there.
The evening, against the windshield, falling, sighing, in defeat.
Inside the door of the Ritz the familiar noises of the bar swirled: the clink of glass, running water, the murmur of conversation. As she entered, Allison felt entirely, irremediably, alone; so alone that as the door swung shut behind her she felt her mouth, entirely out of control, turning down at the corners. A few seats were available at the bar, and without thought, she took one and slowly sipped a beer, looking over its rim to the bar mirror. In its frame she watched, behind her, a couple of men in Timberland boots shooting pool. They wore plaid shirts and jean jackets. The few other people in the bar were also islanders. And the man who had just walked into the bar was Nicholson Dymitryck.
Even in the mirror she could see the bruise that spread from his right eye on to his cheekbone. He was carrying two bags, one for clothes, one a briefcase. That made her think that he had not followed her here, but was waiting for a ferry—the six o’clock, clearly, had been full.
And he was approaching her. Without thinking she turned, holding him in her green gaze.
He noticed her now and stared back, his face grave.
For a moment, everything paused.
Then he altered his direction to sit next to her at the bar.
2.
Even with his bruised cheek, she could make out the extreme regularity of his features. His eyes, large and brown, his hair thick enough and well enough cut not to need combing. Unshaven, his lower face was a perfectly even shadow of black, and his expression—curious, interested—held, as far as she could see, not the slightest aggression. She judged him to be in his mid-thirties.