“How far are we from the Village?” she asked. “Eight, ten miles? How would he even get here?”
“There were no wheelchair tracks leading up to the breakwater,” said Sullivan, nodding toward a gravel-covered area cordoned off with yellow tape. “He’d have to fly to get there himself.”
“Any other tracks?” I asked.
“Trucks, trailers, footprints everywhere. Nothing you could take an impression of. Not in gravel. We’ll be back in the daylight for a closer look, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up.”
Alfie had a one-room apartment behind a small, freestanding art gallery a block from the center of Southampton Village. The gallery space changed hands every season, but the owner, Jimmy Watruss, let Alfie rent the back area for a small percentage of his disability check. Like Alfie, Jimmy was a veteran attached to a mechanized unit during the Second Iraq War. The only thing Alfie told me about his service was when the wizard Gandalf joined up with his platoon. Apparently, his fellow soldiers demurred when he set out across the desert to challenge the rising threat of Mordor.
Back stateside, the army shrinks set him up with a drug regimen, and after a few months of observation, sent him into the civilian world. The first thing Alfie did was buy an old Fiat S1955 Ducati motorcycle, which he drove into a bridge abutment trying to avoid a volcano that had suddenly erupted on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The VA put most of him back together, but there was no saving the bottom half of his spinal cord.
Alfie wore his DCU – short for desert camouflage uniform – every day, though he’d never let people draw him into a conversation about the war. I don’t know how he ended up living in Southampton. I never asked, and even if I had, he probably wouldn’t have remembered. I did get to see his apartment once, when the batteries in his chair ran out and I volunteered to push him back home. The room was spare and immaculately clean, his uniforms and modest belongings neatly stored in portable, olive drab metal closets.
*****
Paul Hodges, who lived aboard an old 48’ Gulfstream motor sailor in the Hawk Pond Marina, emerged from a cluster of men watching the crane. I waved him over. In his late 60s, Hodges’ arms were still strung with ropey muscles, the legacy of long years in commercial fishing, construction and slinging questionable sustenance at his restaurant in Sag Harbor. Never an attractive man, age had been unkind to his grey puffs of curly hair, and his face, which you might mistake for a less attractive version of Ernest Borgnine’s.
“That poor son-of-a-bitch sure didn’t catch his share of luck,” he said.
Despite myself, my eyes were drawn to where Alfie sat in his DCUs, slumped over in his chair, his long brown hair stuck in sodden, forlorn strands across his face. He was guarded by two of Sullivan’s men so no one could touch the body before the medical examiner arrived. Not that anyone wanted to.
“I feel bad about this,” said Hodges. “There he was the whole time I’m fishing. I thought his hair was seaweed. Sorry,” he added, looking over at Jackie.
“You ever see him motoring around the marina?” Sullivan asked.
Hodges shook his head. “Never seen him anywhere but the Village. Never really knew the guy. Not like these two,” he added, using his thumb to point at Jackie and me.
“Was he on his meds?” Sullivan asked Jackie.
“I don’t know. I’m his lawyer, not his case worker. But I know who is. Esther Ferguson.”
Sullivan looked at his notebook and wrote down her name. “I know Esther,” he said. “Tough cookie.”
Tough as in a cross between Joe Frazier and a rabid badger. She didn’t like me, which placed her within a fairly crowded field. Her beef was my occasional intervention on behalf of Alfie, which offended her social worker prerogatives. I was offended that she didn’t always do as good a job looking after her clients as she did upholding her exclusive right to their care.
So we were even.
“Alfie was murdered. That’s the gist of it,” I said.
“I could make a case for it being an accident, or suicide,” said Sullivan. “But why?”
Sullivan had been a plainclothesman for about five years. Before that he was a patrol cop assigned to North Sea, the wooded, watery territory just north of Southampton Village. I lived in North Sea in a cottage off the Little Peconic Bay – when I wasn’t staying on the Carpe Mañana, which was berthed next to Hodges in the Hawk Pond marina.
A Smart Car pulled into the parking lot and I knew the ME had arrived, based entirely on the weirdness of the vehicle.
Carlo Vendetti was a cheerful scarecrow of a guy with long, slippery black hair stuck out of his baseball cap, disguising the fact that the rest of his head was bald as a baby’s ass. You’d say he had a weak chin, if he actually had a chin. With a beakish nose and black-rimmed glasses, Carlo was a right geek if there ever was one. That was okay with me. I got along fine with geeks.
“Sam the Man,” he said, as he approached our little group. “Detective,” he said to Sullivan. “And the most stunning defense attorney in the Eastern United States,” he said to Jackie, taking her hand by the fingers and giving her knuckles a light kiss, much to her dismay.
“Hi, Carlo,” she said, gently extracting her hand.
I didn’t disagree with Carlo on Jackie’s looks, I just never thought of her in that way. Too much of a tomboy, too frenetic and churned up with Catholic guilt and attention deficit disorder for my taste. I liked her better in the steady hands of her boyfriend, a guy about the size of a Sequoia with the equanimity and forbearance to match.
“Come with me, doctor,” said Sullivan, placing a guiding hand on the ME’s back. “Let me introduce you to Alfie Aldergreen.”
Hodges tagged along. I waited until they were all out of earshot, then asked Jackie, “What do you think?”
She pushed a wad of kinky reddish blond hair back off her face, a gesture signaling equal parts confusion and distress.
“First I thought, ‘Who’d want to kill a harmless, crazy guy in a wheelchair?’” she said. “But, of course, people like him get killed all the time just for being harmless and crazy.”
“Did he say anything unusual last time you talked to him?” I asked.
“Like I told you, he was really worked up. He said a secret organization was out to get him. You know he was paranoid, but not that big on conspiracy theories. More focused on individuals. Conan the Barbarian comes to mind. Most would think crazy is crazy, but these folks have their themes. They usually don’t deviate.”
I’d spent enough time with Alfie to know that was true. His main thing was imaginary people, either inside his head or hanging around nearby. If you spent enough time with him, you could almost believe they were actually there.
“So, no ideas,” I said.
She shook her head, hard enough to cause the brushed-away hair to fall back into her face. She swept it back.
“Nothing. Zilch. In a big city you might think sicko sadists preying on the disabled. But we don’t have that sort of thing around here, do we?” she asked, hopefulness in her voice.
“We might,” I said. “Who knows.”
“There’s a cheerful thought.”
I pulled her over to where officialdom circled Alfie’s dead body. Carlo Vendetti had Alfie’s shirt open and was feeling around his inert chest, looking inside his mouth and probing his lower abdomen. I noticed Alfie’s hands were wrinkled like an old lady’s and there were red ligature marks on his forearms, just above where they’d been duct taped to the chair.
“I’ll know a lot more when I get him on the table,” Vendetti said to me, as if I had some official standing. “But since the water’s still pretty cold for July, the body’s in decent shape. There’re no apparent wounds or contusions, no external bleeding, though there’s saltwater in his nose and mouth.”
”How do you know that?” asked Sullivan.
“I can smell it,” said Carlo, holding up a gloved hand. All fought to keep the cringing under control. “Plus, his skin
is blue, indicating oxygen starvation, and his limbs are secured with duct tape.”
“So?” Jackie asked.
“So he drowned. Correct that, he was drowned, intentionally. Not conclusive until we do the lab work, but you asked.”
An ambulance came shortly after that, and Carlo directed Sullivan and his men on how to get Alfie out of his chair and on to a gurney. The chair went into the back of a police SUV as evidence and the paramedics got in the front seat of the ambulance, since there was no need for life support.
I hung around until the area was clear of all but a single patrol car left to secure the crime scene, then dragged Jackie over to my boat where we could have a few drinks in the cockpit with Hodges and settle our nerves for the tough night’s sleep ahead.
“Why do I get the most upset when bad things happen to people with the least intrinsic value to society?” Jackie asked, looking down into a plastic cup full of red wine.
“I’d tell you if I knew what intrinsic meant,” said Hodges.
I swirled around my own cup, giving the ice cubes a chance to chill the vodka to the proper temperature.
“We’ve got to let Sullivan get to Esther before we do,” I said to Jackie, “but that’s where I’d start. I’d also go see Jimmy Watruss. He’ll talk to me. I’ve done a lot of carpentry work for him over the years.”
“So he likes you?” Jackie asked.
“Didn’t say that. Just said he’d talk to me.”
“I’ll be fishing,” said Hodges. “In the Little Peconic.”
It wasn’t all that late when I got back to my house. My dog Eddie was sitting on the lawn waiting for me, recognizing as he always did the sound of my old Pontiac rumbling up the street. As soon as I turned into the driveway, he jogged over to the parking area so he could try to climb into my lap when I opened the door. He never made it all the way in, and I never made it out without a small struggle. It didn’t matter that we repeated this ritual several times a day. For him, at least, it was endlessly engaging.
“Such a pain in the ass,” I said, gently shoving him back on to the grass, where he bounded off toward the cottage for the next stage in the process. I followed.
Amanda Anselma met me out on the lawn, which wasn’t a surprise. She often drifted over to my house from next door and let herself in when I wasn’t around. Eddie didn’t mind, since she was a reliable source of Big Dog biscuits, a reward he officially didn’t qualify for, being more of a mid-sized dog.
She also fed him aged brie and fresh grapes, biscotti and prosciutto, albeit in small doses, so maybe that had something to do with it as well.
“I hope everything’s okay,” she said, as I slipped my right arm around her and pulled her into me.
“It’s not,” I said, kissing her full on the lips. “I hope you weren’t worried.”
“I always worry. Everything could be fine, but why waste the emotion?”
“Somebody murdered Alfie Aldergreen,” I said. “Dumped him in his chair off the breakwater on Hawk Pond. Hodges found him.”
She pulled away from me so she could put her hand over her heart.
“That’s horrible. Who did it?”
“No idea.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know how hard you tried to look after him.”
“Sort of,” I said. “Others did a lot more than me. Like Jackie. She’s got that look on her face.”
“The avenging angel?” she asked.
“Something like that.”
We all went out to the sun porch, which was in its summer mode – windows off the screens, ceiling fan engaged, cool drinks in slippery wet glasses on the side tables. The Little Peconic Bay sending in the musical lap of tiny bay waves, the southwesterly breeze rippling the lawn, Eddie panting and slurping water from his bowl in the corner of the room.
“So what are you going to do?” Amanda asked.
“Find the bastards.”
“Of course you are.”
She chose that moment to thrust a slender, naked leg out from the silk robe she’d chosen to wear for the trip across our adjoining lawns. I got the not-overly-subtle message.
We hurried through the rest of our drinks and took it from there.
The phone rang at two in the morning. It was Jackie.
“How often do you listen to your voice mail messages?” she asked.
“I never listen to my voice mail messages,” I said, once I was awake enough to talk.
“Me neither. Most of the time. But I saw the little light on the answering machine and thought, what the hell.”
“And?”
“It’s Alfie. Two days ago,” she said.
I listened to some clunking sounds as Jackie put her cell phone within proximity of the answering machine.
“Jackie, Jesus Christ, they’re going to kill me,” said the tinny, yet unmistakable voice of Alfie Aldergreen, clearly agitated. “I mean, after all these battles with the forces of eternal darkness, I get wasted by some cop job? What the hell is up with that?”
Reproduced by permission of The Permanent Press
Interview
MG: Do you write naked?
CK: Who doesn’t?
MG: Sorry I asked that. You write about some tough characters. Have you yourself ever been in trouble with the police?
CK: When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I thought it was fine to walk along the Schuylkill Expressway in Philadelphia with a BB gun. Explaining to my parents and the cop standing in our living room that our goal was shooting at stumps and rocks and not passing windshields was good training in extemporaneous narrative.
This also came in handy as a college student when I thought using a license plate found by the side of the road on an unregistered truck was a good idea. Turned out both the truck and the license plate were stolen property. I managed to get the Grand Theft Auto charge reduced to Incredibly Stupid, which carried a much more lenient sentence.
MG: Have you ever gotten into a bar fight?
CK: I went to grad school in London and my wife and I used to hang out at the same pub as the cast and writers of the Monty Python show. We knew nothing about Python at the time, just enjoyed those wacky men and women, whose privacy the other pub goers also honored, albeit adequately informed. One night, a drunk guy we’d never seen before got into an argument with one of the Python writers. The angrier the drunk got, the more cutting the writer’s remarks – imagine a swordsman dispatching an opponent with a hundred tiny incisions. Having been in similar situations, I knew where this was going. I jumped in to pull them apart just as the fists started to fly, and nearly had a chair bashed over my head. I assisted the drunk to the door, obliging the writer who was a few steps behind, and who knows what happened outside. Only that the writer returned to the pub and bought us drinks for the rest of the night.
For a description of my experience with an all-out, bar room brawl in a saloon on the Jersey Shore, may I refer you to my book Elysiana. Only the names have been changed to keep me on the fiction shelves.
MG: When was the last time you found yourself in a situation you couldn’t get out of?
CK: I’m not exactly answering the question, because I did get out of that situation, since otherwise I’d be dead. I was stepping off my sailboat one evening after getting her secured to the dock, and caught my foot on the standing rigging. I managed to get a hand on the dock ladder, but ended up slamming into the side of the dock, falling in the water and sliding into the dense muck under the boat. The next thing I remembered was sitting in the cockpit, soaking wet. I don’t know how I got out of that situation, nor much of anything else, since my memory was wiped clean by a mild concussion. What I couldn’t forget were two broken ribs, multiple abrasions and a punctured lung. Makes me wonder how many passes I get from my guardian angel.
MG: What do you want your tombstone to say?
CK: Trial and Error
MG: What secret talents do you have?
CK: I used to be able to touch my nose with my
tongue, but some dental work screwed that up. Though I can still wiggle my ears, move my eye brows independently of one another, curl my tongue and flip it upside down, and both flare and compress my nostrils. None of these talents are a secret to my children and grandchildren.
MG: Where is one place you want to visit you haven’t been before?
CK: New Zealand. They got everything there. Snow-capped mountains, rain forests, indigenous people with state-of-the-art tattoos, the world’s best sailors – by far – Hobbit theme parks and kiwis, which are not a fruit, but rather tiny flightless birds. I want to know why New Zealanders think so much of them.
MG: If you could have an accent from anywhere in the world, what would you choose?
CK: I lived in England just long enough to contrive an accent that sounded convincingly legitimate to everyone but the English, who thought I was Australian. This was lots of fun, and came in handy whenever mobs on the Continent passed by carrying signs reading “Kill Americans”. Unfortunately, six months home and I lost it. I’d like to have it back. An English accent compels American listeners to award you at least an extra 50 IQ points.
JESSIE BISHOP POWELL
Jessie Bishop Powell is originally from Ohio but now lives in Montgomery, Alabama, with her family. She considers herself a Midwesterner with distinctly Southern roots. When she isn’t writing, she can be found grading college essays at a frenetic pace and begging her children to stop making rubber-band bracelets.
Her first novel Divorce: A Love Story, was published as an e-book by Throwaway Lines in 2011. Her debut mystery, The Marriage at the Rue Morgue, published by Five Star (a Division of Cengage, not a vanity press) came out in 2014, and its sequel The Case of the Red-handed Rhesus will be available in February 2016.
You can read more of Jessie’s words at her blog Jester Queen http://jesterqueen.com. She’s on Facebook as https://www.facebook.com/thejesterqueen, and she tweets, unsurprisingly, as @jesterqueen.
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