The Water's Edge

by Daniel Judson

“Dennis what?”

  He waited a moment, uncertain whether or not to answer, then said, “Adamson. This is my place. I own it.”

  “You saw what happened, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you see exactly?”

  “Two men on the bridge. The first body was already hanging below it. Two men were standing up, struggling with another guy.”

  “What do you mean, struggling?”

  “One of the two guys got down and hit that other guy. Or something. I saw him raise his hand up, then bring it down a couple of times. The next thing I knew they were lowering the second guy down by a rope. Then the two guys took off.”

  “In which direction?”

  “That way.” Adamson pointed across the canal. “To the west.”

  “And that’s all you saw.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Would you be able to identify either of the two men?”

  “The ones who did this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, they were too far away.”

  Bechet nodded, waited a moment, then looked back at Falcetti.

  “A TV show is going to want this footage, Jake,” Falcetti said. “Cable or even network news, they pay money for stuff like this. Good money.”

  “It’s safe to say that whoever did this doesn’t want to get caught, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “When they hear someone has a tape of this and is looking to sell it to the highest bidder, what do you think is going to happen?”

  Falcetti shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “They’re going to come looking for the person who made the tape. They’re going to want it for themselves.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “How?”

  “Just listen to me, Bobby.”

  “But I got here after they left. All I saw was the crime scene, not the crime.”

  “They don’t know that, though, do they?”

  “Jake, you’re acting like an old man. We’re talking ten thousand dollars, maybe more. Maybe a hundred thousand.”

  “It’s not worth your life.”

  “I need the scratch, man. I’ll take the chance.”

  “Not while you’re driving one of my cabs.”

  “Jake, c’mon. You’re being paranoid.”

  Bechet ejected the microcassette from the recorder, handed the device back to Falcetti, and slipped the tape into his jacket pocket.

  “You’re going to have to trust me, Bobby. I’m doing you a big favor.”

  “Man, c’mon. You’re killing me here.”

  Bechet said nothing more, just stood there, staring.

  Falcetti turned to Adamson to plead his case to him, as though there was something Adamson could do. Falcetti was, of course, desperate now. Every second he wasn’t taping was a second something was happening that might just make the videotape as valuable as he dreamed it could be. He said nothing to Adamson, who was a little dumbstruck himself. Finally Falcetti looked back at Bechet. It was clear, though, by the way Bechet was standing there—nothing short of a wall—that Falcetti would get no sympathy from him.

  Finally, genuine pain on his face, Falcetti shook his head in frustrated resignation, then looked once more out the large window.

  Bechet looked, too, not at the bodies hanging from the bridge, he didn’t care about that, but at the scene along the access road below it. A fifth car, an unmarked sedan, had arrived. Among the uniformed cops now was a man in a dark overcoat. The head detective, Bechet assumed. Two cops were talking to him as he stared up at the bridge. He pointed down at the rushing water, said something to one of the uniformed cops. The cop listened, then ran to his cruiser. The detective gave orders to the other cop, and that one rushed off as well, took the remaining two cops with him. Probably to set up roadblocks, close off the perimeter, secure the scene.

  A second unmarked sedan pulled in then and parked behind the first one. The man that stepped out of that car, from its backseat, was wearing jeans and a tan jacket that hung to his thighs. He opened an umbrella, held it up against the rain. The driver of the second sedan was a uniformed cop, dressed, like the others, in rain gear. Together, he and the man in the tan jacket hurried toward the detective at the canal’s edge. When they reached him, the detective nodded at the man in street clothes in a way that told Bechet he was the detective’s superior. Roffman, then, the chief of police. Who else could it be? So this was big enough to bring him out, Bechet thought.

  He didn’t like what this was starting to add up to. The sooner they got out of there, the better.

  The detective pointed toward the bridge’s underside, and the uniformed cop, a female, not a male, Bechet realized by the way she walked, shined her flashlight there, waving it a little till she found her target. She and Roffman and the detective just stood there for a moment, staring up at the two dangling men.

  “Get going, Bobby,” Bechet said. “Go home and change, then get back out on the road. The cops will be stopping the trains in Hampton Bays for a while, so they can get the bodies down and check the bridge for evidence. Late commuters from the city are going to be stuck there, need rides to Southampton and points east. It looks like you’re going to have a busy night after all.”

  Falcetti watched the scene for a moment more, then turned to Bechet. “That’s not exactly the kind of windfall I was hoping for,” he said.

  “Go on, Bobby, get going,” Bechet said.

  Falcetti looked at Adamson once more but said nothing. What was there left to say? Finally he started toward the door. Bechet listened to him cross the empty dining room. His footsteps were heavy and fast. Angry, but Bechet didn’t care. When Falcetti was outside, Bechet turned to Adamson.

  “A detective is coming to take your statement, right?” he said.

  Adamson nodded. “That’s what I was told, yeah. I’m supposed to wait for him here.”

  Adamson was nervous, seemed even more uncertain about Bechet now that they were alone. Bechet made no effort to make him feel at ease. He wanted Adamson scared. There was, in his experience, a particular kind of clarity that came with fear. It would be better for all involved, Bechet thought, if Adamson knew that clarity.

  “If you could leave Bobby out of this, I’d appreciate it.”

  Adamson nodded. “Yeah, sure.”

  “I doubt he will, but if Bobby comes back after I leave, do yourself a favor and don’t let him in.”

  “What do you mean, do myself a favor?”

  “In fact, you might want to lock the door behind me. And when the detective shows up, make sure you see his badge.”

  “What’s going on?” Adamson said.

  Bechet shrugged. “You’ll just want to be careful, that’s all,” he said. He turned and started toward the door. The hard soles of his work boots echoed in the empty room. He made a point to step on the tracks he had left as he entered. Reversing treads in this manner was a way of making it difficult for someone to get a clear print, should it come to that. Falcetti’s two separate sets of tracks remained, but there was nothing Bechet could do about that.

  Adamson called, “Wait a minute,” but Bechet didn’t answer. He’d said all there was to say. Adamson called a second time, but Bechet was already at the door. He stepped out into the night, paused for a moment under the overhang, surveying the dark parking lot. Falcetti was long gone. The poor guy must have all but felt the money in his hands. Torture, no doubt, for a man like him. Bechet thought of the tape in his jacket pocket. How many minutes had Falcetti been there before he had arrived? Too long, however long it had been. Bechet knew he needed to get rid of the tape as soon as possible, but tossing it out of his Jeep window as he drove back to Gabrielle’s wasn’t good enough. The thing needed to be destroyed. Gone forever. And now.

  The noise of the rain was like static to Bechet’s ears. But it wasn’t just the rain, he realized. There was another noise, a hiss, lower pitched than the rain but just as
steady, a rumble, almost. It mixed with the rain like the two notes of a dial tone. This second noise was the sound of the water rushing through the canal on the other side of the restaurant. The locks were open, the rumble told him that. This water, moving fast from Peconic Bay to the north to Shinnecock Bay to the south, was his best bet at getting rid of the tape in a way that would guarantee it wouldn’t, somehow, come back to haunt anyone. He had learned a long time ago, from the cruel men who had taught him everything he knew, to leave nothing to chance.

  Bechet stepped to the building’s southern side. Most of the lights along the canal were to the north, so the shadow cast by the restaurant would conceal him. He made his way to the canal’s edge, pulling several feet of tape from the cassette as he went, then tossed the entire thing into the water. He watched it land on the rough surface, get caught instantly by one of the countless whirlpools that swirled just below the chop. It spun for a few seconds, then was pulled under.

  Gone.

  Once, years ago, a fisherman had fallen into the canal while the locks were open. His body, bruised and broken from having been yanked to the channel’s bottom and dragged along it, hadn’t been found till several hours later, and then not far from the inlet that connected Shinnecock Bay with the Atlantic. There was no reason, as he stood on the edge of that water, to doubt its danger and power tonight.

  Bechet watched the churning surface where the cassette had disappeared, then looked across the canal, not toward the police gathered near the support column of the train bridge, but directly across from where he now stood.

  To take a look, see it for himself. Face it, the past, his past, if only for this quick moment, then leave it far behind again.

  It stood there on the western edge of the canal just as it always has, or at least had for these past six years: a dark and dormant mammoth, three stories tall and sprawling out, all its windows boarded over, its white paint and red shingle roof long since faded. Close now to a century ago, it had been a hotel, a fashionable one, and then, decades later, in the wild eighties, it had become a popular dance club. But when the heyday of the dance clubs came to its end, the club closed down and was quietly sold to a South American family, reopening a few years later as a gin mill that quickly became a popular hangout for locals, a place called the Water’s Edge.

  There was, of course, more to that gin mill than selling drinks. There was more to pretty much every business the Castello family had their collective hands in. Even now, black smoke was rising from one of the three crumbling chimneys. Not wood smoke, Bechet would have smelled that, and anyway it was too heavy black for that, too thick. A running furnace, then—and a badly running one, at that. So much, Bechet thought, for this building being dormant.

  He didn’t stay for long; there wasn’t any point. He turned and headed back to his Jeep. It was time he got himself out of there, before anyone had the chance to see him. Prior to getting in behind the wheel he scraped the sediment out of the soles of his boots with a folding knife he kept in the console between the front seats. Dark dirt and shell fragments came out in clumps. He hurriedly got as much as he could, then climbed into the driver’s seat and, before swinging his feet in, grabbed a bottle of spring water and poured it over the soles, till they were as clean as when they were new. Steering across the parking lot, he thought about the second set of tire tracks he was leaving behind. Falcetti’s cab had no doubt done the same. He thought, too, about the boot prints he had left on his way to and from the canal’s edge. A good detective was likely to ask Adamson to account for them. Others, clearly, had been there tonight, had come and gone. What time were they here, what did they see, who were they? But these prints couldn’t last long in this rain. Maybe the detective would arrive too late to see them, or he would arrive in time to see them but not make the connection. Or not care. Maybe, knowing what Bechet knew about the cops in Southampton, the detective would have been told not to care about such things at all.

  A lot of maybes. Too many.

  Bechet felt now as if he was leaving something to chance. Doing so was like disobeying his deepest nature. Soon enough, all that would remain to prove he had been at Adamson’s restaurant were his prints on the floor. He had done his best to blur them, though that might not be enough. His work boots were common, he had bought them with that in mind. Old habits. They were sold in a thousand stores across the country. If it came to it, he would simply dispose of them, just as he had been taught to do, just as he had done before.

  He hated thinking like this, having been put once again in this situation. Fucking Falcetti. Bechet had to remind himself that this crime wasn’t his crime, that it had nothing at all to do with him, that it had only crossed his path because of Falcetti’s desperation. Still, here he was, covering his tracks, doing what was necessary to outthink the cops, looking to make a clean getaway from the scene of a crime.

  As he headed back toward Gabrielle’s he watched his rearview mirror carefully, making certain he was not being followed. He even pulled over and came to a stop just before South Valley Road, waiting for headlights—anything—to appear in his mirror. But he saw nothing. He waited a moment longer, again, just to be certain. Finally he made the left onto her road, started up the long incline toward its darkened end.

  He found the foot of her bed in the darkness and began to undress. His T-shirt was dry, except for around the collar, so it came off easy enough. His jeans, though, were soaked through, the heavy fabric clinging to his legs like cold hands. Removing them was like peeling off a second skin. He got down to his boxer briefs, then got out of them, tossing them onto the floor next to his jeans and shirt. He was now back exactly where he had started his night, standing naked in the cold, Gabrielle asleep just feet away, in the darkness. Hardly an interruption at all, really, this folly with Falcetti. Still, Bechet felt as if he had strayed too far from his life, had come too close to what he’d left behind, what had to remain behind at all costs.

  He looked out her window, saw again nothing but the darkness, heard only the sound of the rain. Perfect cover, this moonless, noisy night, for a lot of things. Perfect cover, too, should someone want to come for him. But why would they, and how would they find him?

  If Falcetti only knew the havoc he had come close to unleashing. Bechet could barely stand to think about that. The South American way, Castello, Sr., used to call it. Brutal but effective, yet that was Castello, his son, the men he employed.

  That was, too, once, Bechet. But not anymore.

  This wasn’t over, that much he knew. If this was what it appeared to be—and what else could it be?—there would be more violence tonight. Terrible violence. Adamson, no doubt, wouldn’t live to see morning, but there would be more than just that, much more, much worse. There was, though, nothing Bechet could do about that. Nothing he should do about that. He knew that.

  Closing his eyes, he willed these thoughts away. He could do that, when he needed to, disconnect. When he reopened them again he took one more look through the window, out of habit more than anything else. What would he see now but just more blackness? Then he sat on the foot of the bed, found his T-shirt on the floor, picked it up and began to wipe his head and face and the back of his neck with it. His hair was short, buzzed close to his scalp, little more than stubble. White beginning to take over the brown, mostly around the temples, more of it with each year. And in the three days’ growth on his face, too. He was lucky; Gabrielle loved it, thought it was distinguished. He’d looked a lot of things to a lot of people before, but never distinguished.

  When his head and face were dry enough he wiped off his hands, felt as he did Gabrielle’s feet moving beneath the blankets, searching for him at the foot of her bed.

  “You there?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Fine.”

  “I must have fallen back to sleep.”

  “You were tired.”

  “I feel like I’ve been asleep for days.”
r />   “You can sleep more if you want.”

  “No. I should get up.” She took in a long breath, let it out. “I dreamed about sirens.”

  Bechet said nothing.

  “How is it out there?”

  “The roads are washed over in some places. Fog is coming in.”

  “Bad.”

  “Bad enough, I think.”

  “We should probably stay here then, huh?”

  He’d forgotten about her plans for the night. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably a good idea.”

  She said nothing for a moment. Bechet listened to her breathe in and out again, shorter breaths this time. She was waking. Another set, even shorter than the one before, then: “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  “Just cold.”

  “C’mere, then.”

  He heard motion, knew that she was reaching for the reading lamp on the table beside her bed. It came on, barely lighting more than their corner of her room. The window near Bechet became a smoky mirror. He saw himself—as much shadow as man—reflected in it.

  Gabrielle pulled aside the blankets on his side of the bed. He tossed the wet T-shirt onto the floor, then made his way to his indentation, lay in it, on his back. She pulled the blankets over him, and he felt the touch of satin sheets on almost every inch of him. Cool now, but the warmth would come soon enough. Gabrielle turned onto her side, moved close to him, draped her left leg over his and her right arm across his chest. Like embracing the trunk of a tree, she’d once told him. He felt her breasts press against his shoulder, the soft strip of her pubic hair brush against his thigh. The warmth of her.

  “We should stay like this all night,” she said. “I can’t believe how tired I am.”

  “You work a lot.”

  She nodded. He looked at her, hadn’t seen her since the predawn light. A long time. Her face was oval-shaped, her features soft, almost delicate. Her short dark hair was a mess, as it always was after a long sleep, and her gray eyes—more sunrise silver than colorless and somber gray—shined like wet stones in the dim glow of her small lamp. Bechet sensed her body alongside his. She had that length of bone that came with generations of good nutrition. Strong, athletic, yet leisurely so—existence hadn’t depended on physical strength, not for her; hadn’t, for a long time now, for those who had come before her. A body built for tennis, long swims, weekend hikes. Sleek, well-tended, smooth to the point of polished. Unlike Bechet, then, and those who had come before him—rough, and built for survival, for a world that was far different from the one into which Gabrielle had been born.