The Water's Edge

by Daniel Judson

  Neither spoke for a moment, then Bechet said, “As far as what was stolen, it might help me to know what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

  “Let’s just call it merchandise. Merchandise that has a significant street value. Romano’s girlfriend is dead, according to our informant. She was killed a few hours ago, so that leaves the other girlfriend, Michaels’s girlfriend.”

  “And if I can’t find her?”

  “I don’t think you really want the answer to that.”

  “What if she doesn’t know anything?”

  “She knows.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “She’s a slippery one. Plus, there’s someone in her past. For all I know, he’s the one behind all this, pulling all the strings.”

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Miller. He used to work as a PI. Before that he worked for a man with whom I had an arrangement.”

  “What kind of arrangement?”

  “Let’s just call it a treaty of nonaggression. So far it seems this Miller character has been honoring it. For him to suddenly come after me like this means that the sins of our fathers just might be catching up with us.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The chief of police before Roffman was Miller’s father. You may remember that he was murdered.”

  Bechet thought about that. It didn’t take long for him to put things together. “My father was hired to kill him.”

  “Yes.”

  “By your father?”

  “No, he just arranged it, put the person who wanted Miller dead in touch with your father. He put a small team together. But I would imagine that might just seem like splitting hairs to Miller.”

  “Why now, though? I mean, after all these years of honoring his boss’s treaty with you?”

  “I don’t know. He could have only recently been told who had killed his father. He met with Roffman last night. Or it could have nothing to do with that at all, be about the girl only. Whatever his motivation, I need to know what, if anything, he has to do with this. I need to know if my informant is right or selling me a bill of goods.”

  Bechet thought about his father, the building in Brooklyn. That, of course, made him think about Gabrielle, waiting for him in that desolate, rundown place, hiding, alone, scared. No way to live, even for one night.

  “It’s interesting, though, don’t you think?” Castello said after a moment’s silence. “Your having left us like you did is what makes you the only man I can come close to trusting right now. You’re not part of my family, so you can’t be the traitor in my family. You went your own way, got out of reach and stayed there, are therefore clean because of that.” He paused, then said, “I remember when you came to us. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, you were a man with nothing to offer. You knew how to hurt, you were a savage, but what use is that in the civilized world, right? We offered you a chance to be useful, paid you more than minimum wage, a lot more than minimum wage, which is all you would have gotten working any of the jobs available to you. Dishwasher, day laborer, some dingy loading dock somewhere. You needed us and we needed you. It seems to me now that we—you and I—need each other again.”

  “So who is she?” Bechet said after a moment. “Michaels’s girlfriend. A name would help.”

  “Shepard,” Castello said. “Abby Shepard.”

  Again, Bechet said nothing.

  Castello must have sensed something different about this silence. “Do you know her?”

  “No,” Bechet lied.

  “Well, as I said before, she’s a slippery one. No address, no phone number, no trail at all. She doesn’t even have a car registered to her.”

  “So how exactly am I supposed to find her?”

  “That PI is still around. He owns a building by the train station, lives in the apartment above.”

  “Which building?”

  “The last one on Elm. The one with the restaurant.”

  “L’Orange Bleu?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bechet thought about that. He had stood in sight of that building mere hours ago, while he and Gabrielle had waited for the train to Hampton Bays. He had studied it, searched its doorway and windows for any sign of someone taking note of them. How many other times, he wondered, had their paths almost crossed?

  “I want to hear from you in twelve hours,” Castello said, “whether you find anything or not. Sooner, of course, if you’ve found what we want. If I don’t hear from you then, we go after one of your friends. It’s as simple as that. You can’t warn all of them, get them out of town. Even if you could, we’d just pick a stranger.” Nothing for a moment, more than enough time for his point to sink in. Finally, Castello said, “You’re calling from a pay phone now, right? In Southampton?”

  Bechet hesitated, then answered, “Yeah.” There was no point in denying it.

  “I want your next call to come from a local phone as well. I don’t care if it’s a pay phone or not. I don’t want any calls from a cell phone, do you understand? I need to know that you haven’t said the hell with everyone but you and your girlfriend and skipped town. Also, remember, you don’t work for me, so there can be nothing connecting me to you. Otherwise, this whole endeavor is pointless. Is that clear?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should have listened to me before, Pay Day. I told you, I’m not my father.”

  And I’m not mine, Bechet thought.

  “You’d better get going. The clock’s ticking.”

  The line went dead.

  Bechet stood there for a while before hanging up. He felt numb, the way he used to feel after a twelve-round fight, his body and mind past beaten, past tired, off in worlds all their own, nothing at all to do with him, nothing at all to do with each other. But he couldn’t give into that feeling now, wouldn’t. He headed back toward the village, the drizzle that had started just a few hours ago now a steady rain again. At least it broke up the ground fog, made it easier for him to make his way around. In his motel room, he retrieved the notebook and cell phones and batteries from the toilet tank, removed them from the Ziploc bag and put them in his shoulder pack, then powered up his cell phone—his everyday phone, not his emergency phone—and keyed in a number.

  His precaution, despite everything Castello had said, still needed to be put into place. There was always the chance now that Castello wasn’t sending him to find the girl and the traitor and what had been taken but instead setting him up to take some fall, or to be in the position where he had no choice but to make a hit, take out someone Castello wanted taken out without having to worry about it being connected back to him. There was the chance, too, that Bechet was being sent to be the target of a hit, that this was retribution for his having done what he had to do to get away, both years and hours ago. Everything and anything was possible now, and should something happen to him, Bechet wanted the evidence, all that he had collected, to find its way to the proper authorities. Maybe, as Castello had insisted, it would accomplish little, but the fighter in Bechet—the fighter he had been, the fighter he was still—was all too aware of the fact that if one must go down, if there was no way to avoid that, then it was always better to go down swinging. Maybe he couldn’t bring Castello down with him, but he could at least hurt the man, maybe even like no one else had ever hurt him, in a way his onetime brother would not ever forget.

  But I’m not there, Bechet told himself. Not yet, not by a long shot. There was still plenty of fight in him, and still ways this could turn to his favor. There had to be. It was just a matter now of waiting for the moment to present itself, of being in the right place at the right time, and doing then whatever it was that needed to be done. In the meantime, he would do enough to appear as though he was obeying Castello, keep this up till the time came for him to make his move, whatever that move might be.

  After the third ring the phone was answered by a voice Bechet hadn’t heard in a long while.

  It paid, indeed, to have fr
iends in the right places.

  “Hello.” It was a male voice, groggy. Bechet had clearly awakened him but didn’t care.

  In fact, he cared about very little at all now.

  “It’s me,” Bechet said. “Listen, I’m going to need a favor.”

  Miller watched from his window as Barton crossed through the straining morning light toward the Southampton train station. The rain was steady but weak, and the Tylenol Barton had brought for him of course did little to ease the pain in his knee. But while a dull ache had a way of distracting Miller, all-out pain had a way of clearing his mind, doing so like nothing else. He needed that right now, needed it in a way he hadn’t in a while, since he had retired two years ago, let his beard grow, and made the choice of wanting nothing more than to live his life within the tight perimeter of Elm Street and Railroad Plaza, in the privacy of his unchanging apartment above, enjoying when he felt like it the sometimes chaos of the French-Moroccan restaurant below.

  Once Barton reached the station she climbed the short steps leading to the empty platform and placed a call from the pay phone. Soon after she dialed, the station lights went out, and then the streetlights lining Elm blinked out as well, one by one down the length of the road. Morning, then, was officially here. Miller watched Barton as she spoke, then watched the two streets leading to the station, checking for cars—cop cars, any cars, at this point, anybody, anything. The early westbound train had left a half hour ago, so none was due from either direction for another hour. This meant any car approaching the station now carried the potential of trouble. No, probably was trouble. But none did approach, and when he was certain that Barton was okay, Miller grabbed his corded phone and, still watching his friend, dialed a number from his landline.

  He didn’t want to make this call, was hoping for another way to get what he needed, but with the clock ticking there was no point in taking any chances. If it turned out that he didn’t need the person he was calling, if Barton got the information they needed from Spadaro, then he’d call back, say thanks but never mind. No harm done. In the meantime, though, he wanted this in motion, wanted help on the way, just in case.

  The phone rang twice, then was answered.

  “I need to talk to you,” Miller said.

  “What’s up?”

  “Can we meet?”

  “I’m driving tonight. One of my drivers was a no-show.”

  “I only need a few minutes. Can you maybe swing by?”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I’m in Water Mill. I can be there in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be looking for you. Park at the train station, I’ll come down.”

  Miller hung up. Behind him, Barton’s VCR, which she had brought along with a three-pack of blank videocassettes she had purchased at the 7-Eleven on her way over, was coupled with Abby’s DVR. Miller and Barton had made one copy already, and a second one was in the machine, in the process of being made. They were duplicating the contents of the entire DVR, not just the segment showing Roffman but all of it, everything recorded from installation to discovery. The two weeks’ worth of comings and goings totaled just more than fifteen minutes.

  Miller glanced at his watch. There was about another ten minutes left to go on that copy. Then he looked through the window for Barton again. She talked for a few minutes more, then hung up and made her way back to his building’s street door, a solitary woman in a dark leather jacket and jeans and work boots moving through the raw light of a rainy morning.

  Miller was still at the front window when she entered. He turned sideways so he could face her as she stood in the kitchen and keep the train station within his peripheral vision. His front room was so large, there were a good fifteen paces between him and Barton. Neither made an attempt to bridge that gap.

  “What did Spadaro have to say?” Miller asked.

  She shook the rain from her sleeves and hands. “Someone called in a disturbance. That’s how the cops showed up at the cottage when they did.”

  “Who called it in?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “How do they not know that?”

  “It was an anonymous call.”

  “But where’d the call come from?”

  “A pay phone in town. Either someone had left the cottage, didn’t know you were there and made the call from town, or someone watching the cottage had seen you go inside and called a second person in town, and that person called it in. But either way, why call the cops?”

  “So I’d be found in a house with a dead woman.”

  “But that’s if someone was watching and called someone else. What if the person who had killed her had driven to town and called the cops from there. Why would he do that?”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “So that means someone was there, watched you go in and called someone else. There wasn’t enough time for the person watching to drive to town and make the call himself.”

  Miller thought about that, then said, “What else?”

  “Whoever called it in didn’t identify you by name. So they either didn’t know who you were or did but didn’t want the cops to know.”

  “But then why call them in the first place?”

  “Yeah, I know, it’s all fucked-up. At least we know no one’s looking for you. You don’t have to leave your truck parked at the end of Powell anymore.”

  “What did Spadaro tell you about Bechet?”

  “He’s pretty sure Jake Bechet and Jonah Bechet are the same guy.”

  “How does he know that?”

  “The address on Bechet’s registration is a garage behind a private residence on Hampton Road. Three floors of apartments above, a four-car garage below. The garage has been divided up and rented out as individual storage units. Ricky says there’s nothing but stuff in Bechet’s. Surveillance equipment and old boxing gear and clothes. Between the surveillance equipment and boxing gear, he figures Bechet goes by Jake instead of Jonah.”

  “Spadaro went inside?”

  “I guess, yeah.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he get a warrant?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Miller thought about that. “Anything else?”

  “Bechet seems to change vehicles about every six months. All different kinds of cars—a sedan, then a truck, then a station wagon. Right now he’s driving a Jeep Wrangler. Green, with a black hardtop, according to the registration. That should be easy enough to spot.”

  “Were his cars old or new?”

  “They were all older models. The Jeep’s a ’94. Some were even older than that. Why?”

  “The first thing I think of when I hear that someone keeps trading in one old junk for another is that he’s probably trying to keep somebody from picking up his trail.”

  Barton thought about that, didn’t understand what Miller meant, then realized his point and said, “You think he’s the one who taught Abby how to live the way she was living.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So who the hell is this guy?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “But you had a hunch the camera was his almost from the moment we found it, so you know something about him.”

  “I know that Abby worked for him one summer.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Painting houses.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A few years.”

  “I don’t understand. What’s a housepainter doing with surveillance equipment?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the thing. He wasn’t always a housepainter.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It looks like at one point he may have worked for Castello.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But he used to be a boxer, one of those fighters who after ten years of almost making it realizes he isn’t going to. There aren’t exactly a lot of options for someone like that, are there?
”

  “You think he was an . . . enforcer.”

  “You look at the guy and it’s hard to imagine him doing anything else.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “Once, yeah.”

  “When?”

  “Back when I found out Abby was working for him. I went out to where they were painting to get a look. That’s when I decided to find out what I could about him.”

  “And you found out he used to work for Castello.”

  “Nothing conclusive, but, yeah, everything pointed to that.”

  “And yet you let Abby keep on working for him?”

  “I didn’t want to, but I didn’t really have a choice.”

  “Because of your promise.”

  Miller nodded. “Partially, yeah. I know you think it’s stupid, Kay, but it’s best for everyone if I leave Castello alone like I was asked to. But anyway it was more than that. Bechet was running a kind of halfway program, hiring troubled kids, working them hard and paying them well. He was obviously trying to do some good. So maybe what I’d heard about him was wrong, or maybe it wasn’t and he was trying to make up for his past. Either way, I knew it would piss Abby off if I interfered. I didn’t want to run the risk of giving her a reason to not come back to me. I guess back then I was still thinking she might.”

  “Does Bechet still paint houses?”

  “No, he got out of that business. The last thing I heard he and Eddie went into partnership together.”

  “The cab company? That Eddie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So why don’t you call him, ask him what he knows about Bechet?”

  “I did. Call him, I mean.”

  “When?”

  “While you were on the phone with Spadaro. He’s on his way over, should be here any minute.”

  Barton waited a moment, watching Miller. She took a few steps into the living room.

  “What exactly are you hoping to find out? By locating this Bechet guy, I mean.”

  “Abby installed a surveillance camera he had purchased. She did it two weeks ago. They might still be in contact.”