Nice Place for a Murder (14 page)

“I know,” I said. “But right now we have to consider your theory. If Felix is running the show in place of Ingo, then that would explain about Lisa. I mean, before the crash she had something hot going with Felix. Now it looks like she’s with Ingo. Unless, of course, Ingo is really Felix, and she’s still with the same guy, and playing the game.”

Alicia held her palms up, a gesture of triumph. “You see.”

I sat on a kitchen chair and studied the wine in my glass. “Then what about Brody? He was tight with Ingo — or Felix, if you’re right. Now they don’t talk. How does that fit in?”

We bounced that question around while we drank more wine, and created a half dozen scenarios, none of which made sense. Then we decided we’d burned out the subject for now, and it was time to commit ourselves to our dinner.

When the chicken was nicely done, the skin charred a bit and the juices running clear, I cut it into pieces with a sharp knife and put it back in the pan. Alicia chopped some fresh parsley and added it into the sauce just before I poured it over the chicken, and put it all back to broil for a few minutes more. She grated some parmigiano reggiano cheese into the rice, added her toasted pine nuts and fluffed it up with a fork.

Soon it was all on the table. The chicken and the rice, plus a green salad from the refrigerator and some crusty bread to mop up the lemon sauce. It was delicious beyond description, and we lingered over it for an hour, draining half of the second bottle of chenin blanc as we ate.

“You saw this Lisa woman today?” Alicia said. It was ten-thirty when we finished cleaning up.

“You know I did. I told you.”

“But you didn’t kiss her this time. I can tell.”

“She begged me for a kiss. But I said no. I told her it would be too dangerous, that you’d know in a minute, and you’d put an Italian curse on her.”

“I would, too,” she said. She stroked my face. “You’re tired. You shouldn’t drive home. All that wine, too. You stay here tonight, OK?”

“Are you telling me what to do again? You said we’d negotiate.”

“All right, we negotiate. What is it you want?”

“Your undivided attention.” I turned out the kitchen light and we walked to the bedroom at the back of the house.

CHAPTER XIV

The first call came on my cell phone at eight forty-five, after I’d breakfasted on one of the bagels Alicia kept for me in her freezer, and some of her exceptional coffee, made from a dark roast she imported by the case from Italy. We’d both perused the Friday New York Times in contented silence for twenty minutes, passing the sections across the table. Only the sports went untouched, due to mutual lack of interest. Now Alicia was ready to drive to her gallery in Southampton, and I to my house in Greenport. This morning I was determined to apply the final touches to the shattered front window I’d repaired.

It was Hector Alzarez on the phone from New York. “I thought you should know I’m coming out there. Ingo called me at seven-thirty this morning. He and Lisa are going to Shelter Island for the weekend. Spur-of-the-moment thing, he says. He wants me to go with them.” He sounded gloomy, unusual for him. “They’re picking me up here in half an hour.”

“Why does he want you?” I said. “I mean, people tell me you’re charming, but won’t you feel a little out of place at this party?”

“I’m not ecstatic about it, Ben. I’m canceling a whole day’s meetings because Ingo suddenly got an idea. It’s making a mess of my schedule. But listen to this. He says he has to spend some time with me about Brody. He wants to mend some fences. He thinks I can help him get talking again with Brody. Maybe now I’ll be able to answer what you asked me — how they happened to wind up at each other’s throats.”

I was still sitting at the kitchen table as I talked into my phone, but Alicia was ready to leave for Southampton. She kissed the back of my neck and whispered, “Lock when you go.”

“Why this new twist, do you think?” I said into the phone. I took Alicia’s hand and gave it a squeeze. She responded with a naughty smile, then left through the back door into the garage.

Hector said, “Did you read The Wall Street Journal this morning?”

“It’s not on my usual reading list.”

“There’s a big piece on page two, right up on top. ‘Will Management Tiff Threaten Julian Communications IPO?’ That’s the headline. Somehow the word about Ingo and Brody got out, and now Ingo’s worried. He wants the market to know the top management of the company is stable. Brody’s had a lot of press over the last few years. Some analysts feel he’s the real brains behind the company’s growth. If they think he’s in jeopardy, they’re not inclined to be bullish on the stock offering.”

“Why do the analysts think Ingo and Brody don’t talk to each other?”

A long sigh. “They can only speculate, just like we’ve been doing,” he said. “They think it’s a power struggle — Brody flexing his muscles too much to please Ingo.”

“Did the Journal mention Newalis?”

“Just in passing,” Hector said. “They accept it as an accident. Not a big deal, really, because Newalis wasn’t a key player. It’s Ingo and Brody they’re watching. And maybe Lisa, because she’s the one who talks to them all the time — corporate communications.”

“They looking at you, too?”

“I suppose,” he said. “The Journal mentioned me in the story.”

“So this is a big strategy session today. Away from the office.” I got up and walked across the kitchen to make sure the electric range was off. Dumb, I realized, because Alicia had done the same thing before she left.  “Be careful,” I said to Hector. “Sosenko is out there, New York or here or someplace in between. See if you can’t convince Ingo to let me call up tight security. Tell him if he thinks his trouble with Brody makes bad press, just imagine what would happen if the headlines were about murder.”

“I’ll try,” he said. “But there’s no way Sosenko could know we’re coming out.”

“He seems to have a way of knowing things,” I said. “When will you be here?”

“We should be out of Manhattan through the Midtown Tunnel by a quarter to ten. If the expressway traffic isn’t terrible, we should be on the ferry in Greenport by twelve-thirty, one o’clock.”

“I’m going to make sure I’m around,” I told him.

“That’s good,” he said. “You know, I wouldn’t go through this except for one thing.”

“Let me guess. All that money.”

“You always did understand me, Ben,” he said, and hung up.

The second call of the morning came just as I was opening my car door, and it was from Wally Prager. “I’m in Shinnecock, amigo,” he said. “Came down to get some parts for a Merc engine I got in my shop. We don’t generally do Mercs. Anyway, figured I might as well check out that shit-hole Sosenko calls home. And guess what? There’s a rusty old pickup parked alongside it this morning. I don’t know if he’s in the shack or not. Figured finding out’s a job for a hero with a gun. Does that description sound like anybody you know?”

“How long have you been watching the place?”

“How long? I watched it about twenty seconds. Then I got out of there, muy rapido. There’s nowhere near the place where you can park in broad daylight and not get noticed. Course, I’m not a trained investigator like you are. Just an eager civilian who doesn’t want to get clipped by a maniac.”

“Then where are you?” I said.

“I am just finishing coffee with Lulu Lumpkin,” he said with a cozy little laugh. “In her renowned gin mill.”

“I’m going to Sosenko’s,” I said.

“A better plan would be for you come here on your way. You might want to hear what Lulu’s got to say.”

I could smell Wally’s Napoli cigar as soon as I stepped through the door. It added a unique note of pungency to the assorted aromas of stale beer, fresh coffee and ripe fishermen that clung to the place. Wally himself was on a stool facing the door, leaning back, his elbows on the bar, his long legs crossed. “Lulu’s brewing a fresh pot for you,” he told me. “She’ll be right out.”

“You think Sosenko is going to wait for me while I sit here drinking coffee?” I said to him.

“I told Lulu you’d have a cup,” Wally said. “She’s making it specially for you.”

Right on cue, Lulu came behind the bar with the coffee. “Bring your own donuts this time, sport?” she said, pouring me a cup.

“I’m off donuts, actually,” I said. “Too fattening.”

“You ain’t so fat, really,” Lulu Lumpkin said. “Anyways, a skinny man’s no use on a cold night.”

“That’s what my lady friend says.”

“Smart lady friend.” She warmed up Wally’s cup, then her own. “I was telling this doofus here that your pal Hick Sosenko was in last night. Very late, just before last call. First time in over a week. Jesus, I hate to see him walk in here. Soon as he came in, I looked under the bar to make sure my gun was where I could get at it.”

“He give you trouble?” I said

“Nothing lethal,” she said. “That was some surprise, and a relief. He had himself a shot and a beer, and didn’t flash a knife or anything. But you know what?” She leaned across the bar. “He had a pocketful of money. He pulled out this big wad of cash and laid it right down on the bar here. All hundreds and fifties, as I could see. Said he had four thousand dollars. He was so proud of it. That’s why he came in. To show off to me.”

“You think it was really that much?” Wally asked her.

“Looked like,” she said

“Did he say where he got it?” I said. I drank some of the coffee. I didn’t want Lulu to think she’d made it for nothing.

“All he said, he was doing a big job for somebody,” she said. “Can you imagine? Who’d pay him that kind of money to do anything?”

“First-class question,” I said. “Did he say anything else?”

“Just that he liked to look at my titties.”

“They are nice,” said Wally, but Lulu ignored him.

“I have to get over there. Don’t want him to disappear again.” One final sip of coffee.

“I’m going with you,” Wally said, sliding off his stool. He put some dollar bills on the bar.

“Follow me over, then,” I said.

Lulu picked up the money and stuffed it into Wally’s shirt pocket. “You keep your money. And I’ll tell you what. If Hick Sosenko just disappears off the earth somehow, you two can drink here free for the rest of your lives.”

The corroded Dodge truck was still there next to the shack, all right. But now so was the pot-bellied neighbor with the crutches, leaning against the fender, so I knew Sosenko wasn’t around anywhere. The old man wouldn’t be so bold if the holy terror of the neighborhood might be watching.

“You look like you’re waiting for somebody,” I told him, as Wally and I approached.

“I saw you nosing around before,” he said to Wally. “Thought you might be back.”

“You’ve been waiting out here that long?” Wally said.

“Taking the sun.” Everything he was wearing was exactly the same as he’d worn the first time we’d seen him, only dirtier. “Still looking for my beloved neighbor, are you? Sad to tell, you missed him again.”

“His truck is here. Where did he go? And when?” I asked him.

“He’s out on his boat. Who knows where? Left an hour ago, maybe a little more.” The old man lifted one of his crutches to point down the path that led to the water.

“Well, his truck’s here, so he’s got to come back,” Wally said to me. “All we do is wait.”

The old man said, “You might want to know this. That wooden sign he painted? He took it with him when he went to his boat. I saw him paint out the letters with white paint before he left. What did it used to say? I forgot.”

“Lulu,” I told the old man. I took Wally by the arm. “We can’t wait here,” I said. “Sosenko is out to kill somebody. And there’s a car-full of candidates heading east on the Long Island Expressway right now.”

CHAPTER XV

I gunned the car and kicked up gravel in Lulu’s pockmarked parking lot as I swung

out onto the highway. In my rearview mirror, I could see Wally following in his pickup truck.

Once again Sosenko was setting the pace, taking the initiative, making me react. Time I stopped chasing after him, I thought. Time I got ahead of him.

Peconic Bay is the water that divides the South Fork of Long Island from the North

Fork. If Sosenko motored north to Greenport, it was a twenty mile trip, give or take. Just spitballing, then, I judged he was already there, if that’s where he’d headed. It would take Wally and me fifty minutes or so, driving around from one fork to the other. We’d get to Greenport after Sosenko, but before Ingo, Lisa and Hector showed up there from New York. That was one scenario.

Then I thought: would Sosenko have used his boat if he were going to Greenport? Taking his truck would have been simpler. He could park the old Dodge anywhere, much easier than looking for a place to tie up thirty feet of boat. But who knows? The bastard did crazy things.

If logic had any place at all in his plans, he’d taken his boat because he wanted to go where only a boat could take him. Like Shelter Island. That started to make the most sense. By the time I drove up to the North Fork and turned onto the main road toward Greenport, I’d just about convinced myself that Hick Sosenko had set out for Shelter. He wouldn’t go there by ferry to do something evil, because then he’d be easy to nab when he tried to take the ferry back. No, he’d need his boat to return to the mainland. Don’t do a crime on Shelter Island because it’s tough to make a getaway. Unless you’re a powerful swimmer. Or you have a boat waiting for you.

If I was right, if he did head for Shelter, the trio from Julian Communications would be at risk as soon as they drove off the ferry there. Only a guess. Best I could do. Sosenko could be anywhere. Defying logic, he might be in Greenport right now, ready to raise hell with that rifle of his as soon as the Julian people drove in from New York. The possibilities for disaster went on and on.

Wally and I parked near the ferry terminal, a gray wooden building a few blocks from the collection of stores and restaurants, plus the aptly named Whiskey Wind saloon and an ancient movie theatre, that are Greenport’s commercial area. 

“Something’s going to happen,” I said to Wally.

“Smell that way?” he said.

“Sosenko on the move and the Julian people on the way out. Coincidence, right?” I told him the possibilities I’d considered. Then, “I need you. Another pair of eyes. You up for this?”

“Do I get hazard pay? Seems to me if I’m likely to be shot at, there should be a little something extra in it for me.”

“Lobster roll. Chocolate pie,” I said.

“No es basta,” he attempted. “Not for this kind of work.”

“What?”

“Not enough,” he told me. “Means I think it’s stingy.”

“It is stingy,” I said. “Look, the Julian people won’t get here for an hour or so. We’ll split up, check things out around town.”

“What am I supposed to be looking for? I never saw this Sosenko guy before.”

“Tall and skinny. Shoulders out to here. Pushed-in mug with ratty yellow hair. And tattoos up both arms. Snakes, I think.”

“That narrows it down,” Wally said.

“I’ll take Front Street and check the docks. Go up to Main, and work your way north. If you find anybody looks like him, even a little bit, don’t do anything dumb. Just come get me.”

“Because you have the gun.”

“Yes, because I have the gun,” I said. “Meet back here in half an hour.”

Wally took off toward Main Street, and I started working my way on Front, where the shore of the bay ran behind a row of stores, a new hotel, the movie theatre and the town’s waterfront park. I heard music from the park’s merry-go-round, its glass-walled enclosure open to the street. There were still visitors in town, come for the tastings at nearby wineries, and to enjoy the last of the good weather before the North Fork turned dreary.

Looking from the park, I could see the whole waterfront. There were a few commercial fishing boats in their slips, but they were much bigger than Sosenko’s thirty foot Tiderunner — or whatever name he had painted on it today. That boat wasn’t anywhere within sight of the ferry terminal. That’s not to say it wasn’t nearby, tucked away somewhere, with Sosenko on the loose around town.

I looked into every store, first on one side of the street, then the other. I’d just returned to the sidewalk after my inspection of the Arcade, an old fashioned department store with a wooden floor that squeaked when you walked on it, when a police car pulled to the curb, and the driver rolled the window down. It was Phil Rutkowski, a feisty young cop I’d met at the Whiskey Wind one cold December night when Alicia was in Italy for a Christmas visit. We’d shared a few stories and a lot of Scotch, and discovered we got on well. He’d never met a private investigator before, thought they were only in paperback books. In the spring, when the weather finally warmed up, I’d taken him fishing with
Wally and me a few times.

“Hey, mister, you lost?” he said to me, a grin on that angular Polish face of his.

“Such a nice day,” I said. “How come you’re not up on the North Road handing out speeding tickets to the tourists?”

“Made my quota already today,” he said. “You looking for somebody? I just saw Wally over on Main. He was wandering around, too.”

“Yeah, thanks. I knew he was here someplace.” I looked at the shotgun clamped upright to the dash of Rutkowski’s cruiser. It would be comforting to have an armed cop on hand if trouble broke out, I thought. But what could I tell Rutkowski ? And if Ingo saw the police with me, he’d know I wasn’t playing by the Julian rulebook. Maybe I can finesse the situation, I thought. “Park this thing,” I said to Rutkowski, “and I’ll buy you a coffee.”

“Can’t do it,” he said. “Can I have the money instead?”

“Come on. Ten minutes.”

“I’m on call.  Hey, take care of yourself, big bad Ben.” He gave a cocky wave of his hand, and drove off.

I thought: we’re on our own, Wally and I. I touched my elbow to the gun in the holster under my jacket, just for reassurance. High noon in little old Greenport, New York.

I walked back to the ferry terminal and watched cars drive on and off the two open boats working the route. Six weeks earlier, in the summer, there’d been three, to handle the lines of cars, and still you’d often wait half an hour to get across. It would be no great engineering feat to build a bridge to Shelter from Greenport, and another one on the south side, connecting the island to Sag Harbor on the South Fork. But nobody wanted bridges to Shelter Island. Not the people who had homes there. And certainly not the ferry companies. Shelter Island would lose its romance if it became too easy to get there.

Soon Wally appeared. He handed me a coffee in a cardboard cup with a plastic lid, then drank some from the one he’d brought for himself. I took a swallow. “It’s cold,” I told him.

“Can’t understand it,” he said. “I kept it under my armpit all the way over here.”

“See anything I should know about?”

“Didn’t see a single person with snake tattoos up his arms. Funny, on a sunny day there’s generally two, three,” he said. “So now we wait?”

“Part of the job.”

“I appreciate the lesson,” Wally said.

We didn’t have to wait long. At twenty minutes past noon, Ingo drove up at the wheel of a Mercedes E500 sedan, a serious automobile in which the “E” clearly stood for “Expensive.” The color was a rich metallic green I’d never seen before on any car. Hector was at Ingo’s side in the front and Lisa Harper in the back seat, munching an apple. Ingo pulled his car behind the half dozen others in the ferry line, and they all got out.

“We made good time,” Hector said, shaking my hand. “Long Island really flies by when you’re doing ninety miles an hour.”

“The car has excellent performance, for a sedan. I like the feeling of stability at high speed,” Ingo said. “Hector told me you’d be here. This Sosenko, he’s out here someplace and you think he’s going to make trouble.” He looked at Wally. “And who is this?”

“He’s a friend, Wally Prager. He spotted Sosenko’s truck on the South Fork this morning.”

Wally said nothing.

“So why do you think he’s on the North Fork now?” Ingo asked me.

“He left in his boat this morning. There’s a chance he went to Shelter.” I pointed across the bay.

“You don’t know that. He could have gone anyplace. Maybe he went to Connecticut. Maybe he went to Cuttyhunk.” Again Ingo was denying the danger, quarreling with efforts to keep him and his people safe. And there I was, trying to save their lives and my future, with plenty of ways to fail, no way to quit. Ingo was pissing me off.

Hector, always the diplomat, saw my temper rising and stepped in quickly. “I asked Ben to be here,” he said to Ingo. “Why chance it? Sosenko killed Newalis —“

“Are you so certain?” Ingo said

“I’m certain,” I told Ingo. “And I’m nearly certain he killed him by mistake. It was you he wanted.”

Lisa dropped her apple core into a trash can. “Ingo, let him help us,” she said. “What’s the downside? If he’s wrong, nothing’s been lost. But if he’s right, and we need somebody — well, he does have a gun.“ She turned to me. “Or did you leave it in your bureau under your shorts?”

“I hadn’t so much as touched my gun in years, even to clean it. Now I’m carrying it all the time. I don’t do that to impress the other cowboys down at the corral.” I said it to Ingo.

A ferry had finished discharging its cars, and the mate was motioning the waiting vehicles waiting to make their way onto the boat.

“All right, then, let’s go. You can check things out, but then Hector takes you back to the ferry, yes? I don’t want my place turned into an armed camp.” Ingo got into the Mercedes and started the engine. Hector got in next to him. Wally and I climbed into the back with Lisa, and Ingo inched the car onto the boat. The mate motioned us to a spot on the starboard side. Wally and I got out to look around.

With only six cars on board, the ferry was only half full. There were two cars beside ours, a Buick sedan with an elderly couple inside, and a yellow two-door Toyata driven by a teen-age boy with too much hair, the back seat packed to the roof with what looked like dirty clothes. There was a Lexus SUV driven by a pretty mother, her little girl asleep in a child seat behind her. A middle-aged woman was at the wheel of another SUV, a Honda, the back filled with clay pots of chrysanthemum plants, all in bloom with red and purple blossoms.

The last vehicle on the boat was a Ford van-style truck covered with scrapes and dents from front to back, and painted with various white paints, none of which came close to matching the truck’s original white. It looked as though there had once been signs on the truck’s sides, but they’d been painted out. I couldn’t see inside, because the windows on the two back doors were blocked from the inside with plywood. The driver appeared to be a tradesman of some sort, in stained chino clothes, and badly in need of a shave. He sat staring ahead stoically, his hair hanging down over his forehead, and didn’t bother to look at me as I passed by. I wasn’t at all sure, because of the throbbing of the ferry’s idling engines, but I thought I heard movement inside the rear of the truck.

The mate was securing the sliding gate at the stern. I went to him and said, “I’m trying to find out if a friend of mine made it to Shelter this morning. I think he arrived on the north side of the island. Do you remember seeing a commercial fishing boat, about thirty feet, pretty grimy, around here this morning, maybe an hour, two hours ago?”

“I don’t know. Lot of boats go through here,” he said. He looked up to the captain in the ferry’s wheel-house and made a signal. The engines revved and the boat slowly left the slip.

“I thought you might have noticed. It’s kind of a shabby boat. White.”

“Can’t be sure,” he said. “Maybe something like that headed into Dering Harbor on Shelter. Or was it yesterday? I’m back and forth fifteen, twenty times a day. Hard to say. Sorry.” He moved away. “Got to collect the fares.”

Now Hector got out of the car and stood leaning on the boat’s rail at the starboard side, looking out over the water as we began our ten-minute trip to Shelter. In the car, Ingo turned around in his seat and was talking to Lisa, who remained in the back. He was probably bitching to her about me, I thought.

Wally made a quick tour of the boat, then returned to me. “That Ingo guy, he’s the boss, right?”

“Right.”

“Where’d he get all those scars. Looks like he fell into a meat grinder.”