Cop Job (2 page)

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 salt water in his nose and mouth.”

”How do you know that?” asked Sullivan.

“I can smell it,” said Carlo, holding up a gloved hand. Everyone 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 onto 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.”

I
T WASN
’
T
all that late when I got back to my cottage. 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 onto 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 cottage 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 midsized 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—storm 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.

N
OT LONG
after that, the phone rang. 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?”

C
HAPTER
T
WO

I
once worked as an executive for a multinational industrial corporation where I was in charge of about a thousand people, mostly technicians and engineers. Now I’m a cabinetmaker working for a builder in Southampton, New York. I like this job better, though it doesn’t pay as well.

The corporation is gone, sectioned off to eager bidders after it succumbed to an ugly financial scandal. I’m still here. So there you go.

I’m fifty-nine years old. It’s not a bad age, though I wish I were more like thirty-nine. That’s a better age, though I’d rather be thirty-nine without all the drama and trouble that went along with that time of my life.

I have no idea how old Eddie is, since I rescued him from the pound, though he seems like the same dog that first jumped into my car, tail sweeping the air in a gentle wave, mouth an eager grin.

We live together in an easy alliance. I feed him, give him shelter and complete freedom, and he lets me. I also hit golf balls off the breakwater above the pebble beach for him to retrieve, which he never tires of doing. Probably why both of us are more limber and lively than our ages should allow.

Remarkably enough, it’s been about twelve years since I lost my job, and subsequently my wife, the big house, and all that money. I’ve recouped a bit since then, but not a day goes by that I don’t miss things about my old life, while thanking God that it’s gone forever. This is the kind of cognitive dissonance I specialize in, which will likely be the case to the end of days.

Amanda inherited the house next door, along with a lot of other houses, which she spends her days fixing up and selling. I help her out occasionally, though we know it’s better for us to keep our homes and jobs separate. We still manage to visit each other a lot, facilitated by the convenient proximity.

Amanda turned forty-six the week before Alfie was killed. We celebrated by ignoring the birthday and getting drunk out in the Adirondack chairs we keep at the edge of our common breakwater. It takes a lot to get us drunk these days, but we gave it our all, and the fact that we woke up that morning still on the lawn was proof of success.

We did it all over again the night Alfie died. Whether we were in the mood for more denial or a new routine was settling in, it was hard to tell.

I was first up, and used the time to look at Amanda’s beautiful Italian face, framed perfectly by an indomitable head of thick, auburn hair, seeing her brilliant green eyes flash open, uncomprehending at first, but then light up with gentle good humor.

“We passed out again,” she said.

“We did.”

“Who got the blankets?”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Does it matter?”

“No.”

More than anything, this was the musical score accompanying my life. I liked how it sounded, though I didn’t know exactly where it came from, or how long it would last. But who knows anything about good fortune, tight-lipped and capricious that it is.

“So now what?” she asked.

“Coffee,” I said, forcing myself to my feet to head for the kitchen, leaving Amanda sprawled and semiconscious on the dew-soaked lawn. Eddie appeared out of nowhere and trotted along next to me.

“How did you let this happen?” I asked.

He looked unready to accept responsibility.

I was halfway through building a pair of double espressos when my cell phone rang.

“Ross wants to see you,” said Joe Sullivan, referring to his boss, Ross Semple, the Southampton Town police chief.

“How come?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A friend of yours is murdered. Ross is in charge of solving murders. Coincidence?”

I had an uneven relationship with Ross Semple, forged over years of complex and conflicted interactions. This was inevitable, for a variety of reasons. Jackie and I had interfered quite a bit in official police business, a chronic source of ill will, leavened by appreciation when things for his department worked out well in the end, aggravated when they didn’t. Though like all complicated relationships, it went deeper than that, in ways neither of us quite understood.

“When?”

“Today would be good,” said Sullivan. “Does an hour from now suit your schedule?”

I thought about the dovetail joints for a stack of drawers I was planning to cut that day. Frank Entwhistle, my steady source of work, was a very patient man, a quality I strove to reinforce by relentlessly meeting his generous deadlines. I’d built plenty of give in the timing of the current job, so a day off would have little or no effect. I just hated to lose the time. It was the principle.

“I’ll be there in an hour. One hour for the interview, then I’m on my way back to the shop,” I said.

“Wow, that’s really good of you. A whole hour,” said Sullivan.

“We don’t need an hour.”

“If it goes past that, are you going to leave?”

“No.”

“I’ll see you when you get here,” he said, then hung up on me.

I checked the clock on my phone. Not even seven thirty in the morning and I was already preparing for combat.

M
Y EX-WIFE
, Abby, and I probably shouldn’t have married in the first place, a lament you hear all the time from divorced people. However, I can’t express the same sentiment about sleeping with her, which resulted in a lot of memorable occasions, and most importantly, our daughter, Allison, our only child.

Allison had caused me great joy and nearly limitless grief. But I never once regretted her existence. I’d do it all over again, even if it meant all the grief and none of the joy. She wasn’t an easy kid to raise, and as it turned out, not so easy an adult either. Though she and her mother stayed close after I left, Abby secretly called her The Apple, as in an apple that hadn’t fallen very far from the tree. The tree being me.

This is probably why it took me so long to establish a relationship with Allison that involved more than relentless gales of hostility and recrimination. All generated by her and directed at me. My part was to answer the tempest with lavish praise and abiding affection, though making little effort to stem my own heedless self-destruction, which aroused much of her fury to begin with.

Somehow we managed to stumble into an uneasy compromise. I took better care of myself and she redirected her pummeling toward boyfriends, employers, and the representatives of our great civil institutions, whom she lumped under the general rubric “worms.”

It didn’t hurt that she liked Amanda and Amanda liked her in return, enough to occasionally drive into New York where Allison worked as a freelance graphic designer so the two of them could shop, talk, and indulge in the kind of Broadway entertainment you could only get me to as a corpse.

I was about to leave to go see Chief Semple when Allison called me on my cell phone.

“I think Nathan might be sociopathic,” she said, when I pushed the answer button.

“That’s a pretty serious charge.”

“Why else would he get another sales job?”

“Because he’s a good salesman?”

“He gets a new job without discussing it with me? Without even considering the type of job we’ve talked about?”

“He might have considered it and decided it was a bad idea,” I said.

“We’re supposed to talk about these things. People who aren’t sociopaths know this.”

I knew taking Nathan’s side was the wrong strategy if I wanted to advance his cause. Not that I cared much about his cause, having no say in the matter. I liked this kid better than the previous two dozen, though I avoided meeting him in person. As with new recruits joining a battle-weary platoon, you didn’t want to make friends with people who’d likely be gone within the week.

“Why not let him work the job for a while and see what happens. Maybe he’ll come to his senses.”