by Chris Knopf
“The clients don’t have to know all their money is getting pooled in a single account at the buy-sell end as long as their statements from Jonathan and Alena accurately reflect what they bought and sold, and the consequent proceeds. Which is what everybody got, lots of nice proceeds. All but Ivor Fleming and Joyce Whithers. No evidence, according to Mr. Doll Face, that Jonathan was skimming or misrepresenting the performance of individual portfolios. He might have made some bad calls for Joyce and Ivor, but it’s all accurately accounted for, fair and square.”
“He took better care of Butch.”
“Splendid care. I should have such care from my broker. If I had a broker.”
“But Alena called him hostile.”
“Strictly personal reasons. Tense phone calls overheard in the office, nasty little notes he gave her to pass to Jonathan, family crap. She really despises him, and I can see why.”
It must have been irresistible for Butch to have such an obvious target for his flavor of social rebellion so close to home, such an easy mark, yet apparently free of consequences, at least financial. But when I brought up Jonathan at the fundraiser, his regret was palpable. I didn’t have a brother, but I had an understanding with my sister that neither of us ever articulated. It was the bond of a common enemy, and a shared defensive strategy. We never contended with each other, conserving our resources for the real battle. There wasn’t a lot of warmth, but certainly an abiding respect for the private nature of the other. Not that any of that was obvious. What family opera is ever understandable by people watching from the outside? There’s no decoding an underlying communication that even the participants aren’t fully aware of.
“Unless you’re packing a few more revelations, I’m going for that cup of coffee,” I told Jackie.
“You drink a lot of coffee.”
“Keeps me calm.”
“That’s all Web would let me have. And I’m serious about burning this, and you have to promise me not to give him up.”
“I don’t know what we’re doing here, Jackie. So sure. He’s safe with me.”
“I don’t know what we’re doing, either, but I’m going to corroborate this so it looks like I dug it all up on my own. Then look brilliant. For whom, I don’t know. For what reason, I don’t know either.”
“Okay.”
She walked me back to the cottage, but I let her walk on her own to her Toyota pickup. I knew she’d seen Amanda sunning herself next door, but held back the wisecracks, either being overly distracted or suddenly afflicted with a case of good manners.
But when I heard the little truck start up something occurred to me. I ran outside and caught her at the end of the driveway.
“Say Jackie, what about undergrad? Where did Jonathan go to college, or did he fake that, too?”
“I don’t know. Though I haven’t looked everywhere. I did pin down Butch’s transcript. Went to BU, graduated with honors.”
“Really. What’d he major in?”
“You’re gonna love it.”
She reached out the truck window and patted my shoulder, an uncharacteristically familiar gesture that caused an unwanted recollection of Joyce Whithers’s scaly hands.
“Economics.”
TWENTY
BACK INSIDE THE COTTAGE I was delighted to see it was well past noon, so I bypassed the coffee and filled up a fishing cooler with the fixings of a batch of gin and tonics and hauled it over to Amanda’s recliner. Eddie popped out from one of his summer hiding places beneath the yew bushes and followed along.
“You can have a lounge of your own if you don’t mind dragging it out from behind the house,” said Amanda without looking up from her book. “You could have invited your lawyer friend, too. I wouldn’t mind.”
“Not until you get a third recliner.”
Her bikini was stark white, what there was of it, contrasting brilliantly with her skin, which was deepening toward a test of the term Caucasian. I busied myself setting up the G&Ts and fetching the chaise lounge so I wouldn’t be caught like a dolt just standing there looking at her.
I used to like looking at Abby I never tired of it, actually, long after she tired of me. She wasn’t an artistic girl, but the way she put herself together, the precision and care that went into preserving her body and maneuvering around the consequences of aging, showed an artistry of a sort. Amanda somehow achieved more or less the same thing, without appearing to try.
We spent the early afternoon catching her up, though I left out Ike and Connie as I had with Hodges. I didn’t want her to worry, though more importantly, I was afraid of what she’d think. Maybe another echo from my long marriage. Abby took it for granted that I could protect her from physical threats, yet hated any demonstration of my ability to do so. She saw it as proof of my incorrigible brutality, a matter of breeding, that I was genetically destined to play out the baser impulses of the immigrant class.
Socking our chief corporate counsel hadn’t done much to improve her outlook.
I also needed Amanda to believe that Jackie had turned up all the new information on Jonathan Eldridge on her own. Barely into my first new relationship in years and already the deceptions were piling up.
“You’re not going to say anything to Butch,” said Amanda, suggesting by the question that she didn’t think I should.
“There’ll be plenty of other distractions at the Council Rock. Do we need to prepare for this?”
“I was wondering about the dress code.”
“Come as you are?” I offered.
“In my case, that might prompt revision of the code.”
“Not if Butch is enforcing.”
“He’s harmless enough,” she said.
“If it helps your planning, I’d like to leave a little early so I can stop in on Sullivan.”
“How’s he doing?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m stopping in. Markham told me he was healing but still couldn’t remember anything past the night before. Probably won’t ever at this point.”
“I won’t forget it,” she said, quietly.
“Bummer alert.”
She laughed a sharp little laugh.
“Where did you come from again?” she asked.
“The Land of Thuggery, darling, born and raised.”
—
I found Markham Fairchild seated in front of a computer at the nurses’ station. He didn’t look up but must have seen me in his peripheral vision.
“I be right with you. Just getting a step-by-step lesson in double amputation. You can learn anyt’ing on the Internet.”
I was prepared to believe him when he said he was kidding.
“I was just checking on Jamaica Defense Force, who I’d like to amputate at the neck the way they play dis year. You looking for the officer?”
“Is he awake?”
“Oh yes. Very much on the mend. Go home in a day or two. Get him away from this germ factory we like to call a hospital. Good patient. Much more cooperative than other people we could talk about.”
I’d dropped Amanda off in the Village. I knew Sullivan wouldn’t like somebody he didn’t know very well to see him in this situation, and anyway, she wouldn’t get past the uniform at the door without getting frisked. Luckily I knew the cop already, so I got through with my modesty intact.
Sullivan was sitting up in bed watching the Mets on TV He’d lost weight, too quickly, causing his skin to hang loosely around his neck and jaws. Always pale, a platinum blond who never saw a day at the beach, Sullivan now nearly disappeared into the starched white hospital sheets. But there was nothing lost in the vitality of his eyes, hard as a pair of light-blue marbles.
“What’s the score?” I asked him.
“I don’t know. Not really paying attention.”
“I’ve heard of the Mets. Play for Queens, I think.”
“Don’t like baseball. But it’s better than game shows.”
“How you feel?”
“Like I been bashed over the head and stuck with a kni
fe.”
“That’s an improvement on the last time I was here. You were sure it was a batch of bad baked ziti.”
“Don’t bullshit me. Everybody’s bullshitting me.”
“About what?”
“Who did it.”
He was motionless in the bed, his hands resting atop the covers, palms raised, one holding the remote for the TV You could see the bulge of bandages around his midsection pushing out from the hospital gown. Only his head moved as it followed me across the room to the other bed where I could sit down.
“I don’t know, Joe. Nobody does.”
“More bullshit.”
“I’m not bullshitting. All I have is a theory.”
“Ivor Fleming. The guy we talked about at the diner.”
“Yeah. Ivor Fleming. More specifically, a couple of his goons. But like I said, just a theory. Itd help if you could remember something.”
“Shock, loss of blood to the brain, blow to the head, natural defenses against severe trauma. All that shit wipes out the memory. Erases the disc. Cleans the slate. Nothing’s left. Nada, zilch. I’m sick of explaining this to people. Ross is in here every other day asking me the same stuff. I’m ready to start making shit up just to get him to lay off.”
“Sorry.”
“Like I’d want to blank it all out. Motherfuckers.”
I was happy to see him shut off the T V, a blessed silence, moderated only by the low whir of an air conditioner filling in for the nattering announcers.
“I know you’ve been going over all this with Ross, but the Chief isn’t inclined to keep me in the loop. So you could get me up to speed, or use this time to yell at me some more and I’ll come back tomorrow and try again.”
“Ah, Christ, who’s yelling,” he said, then clammed up.
I just sat there on the bed and waited him out. It’s a trick I learned from a shrink I once had to see in a deal with a prosecutor. Most people hate dead air, so if you make some, they’ll fill it.
Sullivan lasted about five minutes.
“My shift that day is all on record,” he said. “In my case book, and through all the contacts with the dispatcher. All routine stuff. I must have come home at the end of it at about three-thirty in the afternoon. Judy’s still at work then, and I normally either go work out, or play softball, or screw around in the yard, making sure I get back by dinnertime, say six-thirty Though that night she was working late, so I’m not sure about that part. I always change my clothes as soon as I get home, which I did, of course, then I took the Bronco to wherever I took it. For whatever goddamn reason.”
“And no prints, hairs, anything traceable?”
“Oh, you think we shoulda checked for prints? Geez, didn’t think of that.”
I saw something that made me go over and take a closer look at his right hand. He pulled it away and looked at me like I’d tried to give him a kiss.
“Give me the hand,” I said. “Palm down.”
He did it despite himself.
“Interesting. Did Markham say anything about this?”
“What?”
“The abrasion. Been over a week and it’s still healing. Must have been a good shot. Can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”
Sullivan took a look himself, rotating his hand under the pale bedside lamp.
“It’s been sore. Though not a big deal given the hole in my gut.”
“You see? You got one in. Probably a couple. They had to club you or you would’ve beat the crap out of them. You were unarmed. Nothing you could’ve done.”
Sullivan looked at his left hand.
“Not much on this one. Little sore, though.”
“You’re too much of a righty I’ve seen the way you use your left. More defensive. Your right’s the big one.”
As we talked the climate in the room took a decided turn for the better. Clouds of humiliation cleared enough to let a little sun peek through. A little sea breeze blew away some of the fear and the unfamiliar shame of vulnerability.
“I bet I remembered to keep my shoulder up,” he said.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
There wasn’t much else he could tell me. It might be that Ross was holding out on him. Though probably not. Ross had a high regard for Sullivan, trusting his basic good sense and honest cop way in the world. So I chatted some more with him about everything but getting stabbed, until the evening shift nurse showed up, which was good timing because now I was having trouble getting him to shut up so I could leave.
I was half out the door and he was about to chug a little white cup full of pain pills when another thought intercepted me.
“Joe, tell me something.”
“What.”
“Why didn’t you have your gun?”
“I never carry it when I’m off duty. Don’t believe in it.”
“But if you were going to do a little off-hours, semi-official thing, like get in your civvies to pay a call on Ivor Fleming, you’d bring your gun.”
“In which case, I’d be wearing my sport jacket that’s cut for the holster, because yeah, sometimes there’s call to wear civvies on duty. I thought about that. Don’t know what it means.”
“Me neither. Just interesting.”
I left him to think for a few minutes before those happy pills knocked out his ability to think and then knocked him out for the night. But he’d keep chewing on it. Maybe it’d help him turn something up. There wasn’t much else I could do. I really didn’t know what I was thinking about any of it, except to think I wasn’t really thinking properly at all. Ever since Jackie told me Jonathan Eldridge had ginned up his credentials I’d slipped my moorings and been carried off by the tide. With a central assumption destroyed, every other assumption looked devious and contorted.
Just thinking about that gave me a slight case of vertigo as I walked out of the hospital into the early evening light, the sun low on the horizon, casting the surrounding neighborhood into a shadowless glow and capping off the treetops with what looked like gold paint against the deepening blue sky. Seemed like the right time for a drink, and luckily, I’d arranged to rendezvous with Amanda at the big bar on Main Street, so my powers of judgment hadn’t completely abandoned me.
TWENTY-ONE
MONTAUK HIGHWAY, the east-west artery of the South Fork, established an economic Maginot Line as it ran through Southampton. To the south you had to add a decimal point or two to the price of a house, but it also marked a horticultural divide between a hundred years of decorative landscaping and open farm country, now interrupted by strips of new construction featuring halfhearted nods to late-twentieth-century architectural detail appliquéd over standard suburban boxes, and an occasional old farmhouse accompanied by a cluster of outbuildings of the same vintage, tucked inside a grove of sugar maples or white oaks once planted by an actual farmer. When I was growing up one of these places had evolved into an auto repair and body shop specializing in foreign sports cars when the farmer’s kids, Rudy and Johnny Fournier, returned from World War II thoroughly seduced by the exotica of Alfa Romeos, bathtub Porsches and T-series MGs. It was called Contemporary Car Care. I liked to hang around there and watch the mechanics, some of whom were French and Italian imports themselves, deconstruct peculiar little engines and transmissions and restore lithe lowrider auto bodies to their original insouciance. Eventually they started to ask me to hold a wrench or change a tire, which led to simple repair tasks, which evolved into summer and weekend jobs managing progressively more sophisticated undertakings. It was good training for an engineering career, in some ways better than what they taught me at MIT, where the puzzles were more logical and failure had less immediate consequence.
The mechanical design of those postwar European cars was idiosyncratic at best. Parts were hard to come by, or completely unavailable. What manuals we had were usually in the car’s native language, like British English, which stubbornly renamed every automotive component and included tips on driving like “when coming upo
n an unexpected incline, briskly engage the braking mechanism.” It made working on their American counterparts, with their cavernous engine compartments and adjustment tolerances as wide as the Great Plains, seem entirely sensible and effortless.
So when Amanda gave me the directions to Butch’s place, I knew exactly where it was. The big painted sign with three nesting Cs had disappeared years ago. When you live in the place where you grew up you get used to the continual destruction of familiar reference points. After the sign was gone and the jumble of sports cars in various states of disassembly and repair had vanished from around the only outbuilding visible from the road, I’d never bothered to see what had taken its place. It turned out to be Butch’s Institute of the Consolidated Industrial Divine.
We pulled in the driveway and rounded the first big curve into the main area. The tall trees on the property had grown considerably, crowding the house in a leafy embrace. The house itself was almost unrecognizable. The screened-in front porch was furnished in mismatched overstuffed chairs and couches, bicycles, a refrigerator, an old streamlined gas pump that used to sit over by the repair bays, a pair of armless mannequins standing front to back, and a jumble of coffee cups, oriental vases, carved wooden statues of Dali’s camel-legged elephants, hookahs, a TV set and a big scale model of a three-masted schooner. On the wall hung a large abstract painting in predominantly reds and oranges, which contrasted alarmingly with the flaky putty-gray color of the cedar siding—the result of some distant ill-advised paint job. I vaguely remembered a neat lawn, which was now full of rocks, weedy broad-leafed plants and feral perennials. Though long gone to neglect, you could discern an underlying order, suggesting the tangled remains of a Japanese garden.
I turned off the engine and was about to get out when the door of the house and the garage doors of the closest outbuilding were flung open and people in bright red jumpsuits, black ski masks and goggles poured out. They quickly surrounded the car and opened both doors, motioning with a flourish for us to step out. Amanda was saying things like, “well, hello,” but I was too busy keeping an eye on everybody. They all carried some sort of tool, and two of the bigger ones were rolling a big hydraulic jack out of the garage. No one spoke, but their gestures were exaggerated, theatrical, like mimes. One motioned for us to step back from the car while the others circled it, using a lot of extra steps and movements, nodding at each other and shrugging and waving their tools in the air. The pair with the jack rolled it under the car and one dropped to the ground to set the lifting pad under a sturdy part of the chassis. At least I hoped that’s what he, or she, was doing.