The Last Refuge (10 page)

A heavy gray blanket of fog was lying all over the area when I got up the next morning. The automatic coffee pot was prompt and at the ready. A shower, a shave, a worn pair of jeans and a freshly washed shirt from out of the dryer. Things that make me feel a little less like an animal.

For almost thirty years work would get me out of bed in the morning. It would wake me up before dawn, with all the imperatives of the coming day rioting in the corridors of my nervous system. Sometimes
I’d actually bolt upright in bed with a scream choked off in my throat. Usually the transition was slower and more tortured. I’d open my eyes and check the clock. I’d never go back to sleep. I never noticed what the weather was like outside. There was no outside; it was irrelevant. Abby was a blanketed mound on the right side of the bed. I’d be on my second cup of coffee at my desk about the time her alarm went off.

She’d tried a lot of different jobs. They all made her unhappy. Raising our daughter was her defined purpose, and she did the job very well. Our daughter was exquisite. The world loved her. She hated her father, so I didn’t know her very well. I didn’t even know why she hated me, though I could’ve probably figured it out easily enough.

We lived in a large contemporary house in the woods north of Stamford, Connecticut. I drove to work at an engineering center in White Plains, New York. In the early days I was on my dictation machine before I started the car. Later it was the car phone jacked into voice mail. Except for an hour or two at a boxing gym I found in New Rochelle, I worked all day and into the evening without a break, even for meals. I ate frozen bagels and prepared foods heated in a microwave in my office. I drank coffee until I could hear my heart rate fluttering in my ears. All day long I’d count my responsibilities in my head like an obsessive compulsive counting his fingers or the days of the week. Agonies and ambitions streamed through my office, afloat on a river of selfishness and sacrifice. From phone to fax to face I’d hurtle in a vertiginous sprint, breathless and jagged. With the help of one or
two other people, I held a slender tether on a twisting angry chaos. Like a bull runner of Pamplona, I knew the beast could turn and gore me at any moment. But I saw no other way.

The building we worked in had a square jaw and was charged with purpose. Our ostensible mission was to give worldwide R&D and engineering support to the company’s manufacturing operations. For some of the employees the goal was to provide a staging area from which to launch elaborate corporate intrigues and
sub rosa
advancement schemes. I was a lot better at managing the engineering than the politics. Some felt this was my downfall, but that wasn’t really true. A little more political acumen, however, would have helped.

I steered the Grand Prix cautiously through the fog on the way down to the Village. I felt like I was in a submarine. The mist was cold—a winter harbinger. I flicked on the heater for the first time of the season. It smelled like burnt mold. I was glad I was still in a pretty good mood.

The Village municipal offices were on Main Street behind a colonnaded facade that guarded the occupants from the citizenry. The interior smelled like the lobby of an old hotel. The walls were decorated with aerial photos and geographical surveys hung like family portraits over waiting areas and brochure stands. Cops with creaking leather holsters and contractors angling for zoning breaks greeted each other as they passed in the halls. One of them pointed out the stairs that took you down to the Records Department.

A chest-high counter anchored the front of the
room. A woman sat at a desk on the other side, looking at a computer screen through the bottom half of her bifocals. Her iron-gray hair was chiseled into a helmet that perched on top of her head. Ceiling-high metal racks, filled with oversized leather binders, stood a few feet from her desk and ran to the back of the room, the end point disappearing into darkness. She ignored me. I waited her out.

“Can we help you with something?”

“I need everything you’ve got on this property in North Sea.”

I slid a slip of paper with Regina Broadhurst’s address written on it across the top of the counter.

She hoisted her wide bottom off the chair and used its mass to propel her up to the counter. She wore a cotton print dress and blocky high-heeled shoes. A bead chain was clipped to the temples of her glasses so they could double as a necklace. She looked at the address and handed it back to me.

“North Sea is in the Town. You’ll have to ask them.”

“They sent me here.”

She looked at me like I was the agent of a hostile power.

“It’s an estate matter. I’m the administrator.” I showed her my credentials. “All I need is the title, deeds, maps, whatever you’ve got.”

“That’s all you need? It’s not in one place. It’ll take some time.”

I wondered what purpose she thought all those records had. Saving them for the Second Coming.

“How long?”

“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t begun to look.”

“Okay. When should I come back?”

“You’re not going to wait? What if I have questions?”

I held my ground.

“All you need to know is that I need copies of everything in this building relating to that address.”

She saw an opening.

“You’ll have to pay for copies.”

“That’s okay.”

“And that will add to the time. You can’t just look at the documents here?”

I looked at the sign on the wall over the counter. It said the Village of Southampton was pleased to promptly provide copies of official documents. Word hadn’t filtered down to the troops.

“They’re not the ones who have to do it,” she said, catching the drift.

“I’ll be happy to go through the files myself, if you’re too busy.”

“We have to do it for you. Can you imagine if people just came in here and went through everything?”

I saw hordes of Long Islanders rampaging through moldy real-estate records.

“Is there anyone else who can help me?”

She snatched the address back out of my hand. “I don’t know why the Town thought this information would be here. Unless it’s in the dated stacks.”

“I don’t know what those are, but I bet that’s where you’ll find what I’m looking for. Let’s see.”

She left me standing at the counter and went off into the tall stands of metal racks. She came back a half-hour later to tell me she needed the rest of the day
to do all the copies. I said fine, I’ll be back in the morning. I left her in the glow of her weary indignation and went to the corner place to caffeinate what was left of my good mood.

The fog had risen above the rooftops. Underneath the light was shadowless and diffuse, deepening the color of the red municipal mums tucked around the base of an ancient Village shade tree. I sat on a teak park bench to drink my coffee. The bench had been donated in loving memory of Elizabeth McGill. I thought about the flow of property through successive generations of the dead and their donators. Maybe I should get a bench in honor of Regina Broadhurst. Something hard with a lot of sharp edges, too uncomfortable to spend much time on.

Except for the cottage, all my parents left me was fifty thousand dollars in unpaid nursing home expenses. My sister and I split it. She handed me a check before boarding her plane back to Wisconsin. She told me she was never coming back again. The relief in her voice was deep enough to float an ocean liner. A week later a quitclaim deed to her half of the cottage arrived in the mail—stuck like a bookmark between the pages of a standard King James Bible. I don’t remember the exact psalm that it marked, but it was all about forgiveness. Who in my family was supposed to be forgiving whom, and for what, God only knows.

Joe Sullivan glided by in his police cruiser. He saw me on the bench and pulled into one of the parking slots. I slid my ass over to clear him a spot.

“They’re doin’ it. The coroner,” he said, dropping into the bench. “The autopsy.”

“That’s good.”

“I know a couple people up there. Bunch of ghouls if you ask me. But we need ’em. doin’ me a favor.”

“That was good of you.”

“No biggie. I’ll let you know if there’s anything you should know about.”

I looked over at the side of his face. He was looking across the street at Harbor Trust, Roy and Amanda’s bank.

“Anything at all is what I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”

He looked back at me. Some of the old mix of duty and defiance was sketched across his face. Local guys often have that look. A vague sense of being one of the chosen, born to the South Fork, and yet one of the conquered, bound to the service of a powerful elite— an occupation force who had swept in from the west, taking possession of the land, plundering her gifts.

“We’ll keep you informed,” he said to me.

I felt my face warm despite the cloud cover.

“If there’s ever any reason to look into somebody’s death, you know, if there’s any questions that come up, who does it? I mean, who opens up the case, you?”

“Basically. If there’s any goddam reason to. I go over the situation with my boss, who’ll talk to the Chief, who’ll talk to the DA’s office. They officially tell us to go look a little more. And the day sergeant and administrative lieutenant usually get involved. Then if there’s what you’d call an actual investigation it gets assigned to one of our plainclothesmen.”

“So it’s your call provided three-quarters of the local judicial system say it’s all right, and your role is to hand everything over to other people to do the actual work.”

His rounded jowls turned the color of the Village mums. He slapped his thigh with an open hand as if to drain off the urge to turn it into a fist.

“You can really be a dick sometimes, Mr. Acquillo.”

Anger rose in my throat, but I choked it off. I shook myself like a wet retriever. Shedding heat. I stared at the ground until I knew my voice was level. Sullivan was trying not to breathe too hard. His hands were on his hips, pushing down on the holster belt. I noticed for the first time that he was chewing gum. Probably learned that from the Big Tough Cop Instruction Manual.

“I’m a dick most of the time. Don’t take it personally. It’s this thing with Regina Broadhurst. It’s bugging me.”

“Like how?”

“Are you going to take this seriously?”

He shook his head. Reminded me of a bull shaking off flies.

“I’m trying to.”

“Regina didn’t take baths. She couldn’t get in and out of the bathtub. She always used a walk-in shower.”

“Getting’ dotty. Got confused. Slipped and fell.”

“I knew her. She was clear as a bell. She’d lived with arthritis for a million years. She wouldn’t suddenly forget she had it.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t fall.”

There, I said it. Right in front of God and local law enforcement.

“Oh, come on.”

“I found an industrial strength neoprene plug in the bathroom. It has a series of O-rings to force a tight
seal. We had them in the chem lab at work. You’d need something like that to keep the tub full as long as possible. Any fan of long baths will tell you that ordinary bath stoppers are pretty leaky—the water usually runs out in a few hours.”

Sullivan let out a man-sized sigh and sat back on the park bench.

“Doesn’t mean shit. Won’t mean shit to the DA, much less to the Chief. I go to those people talking about a neighbor of a dead old lady who’s worryin’ about a bath plug, they throw me out on my can. We deal with enough crazy shit every day from people we actually have to pay attention to.”

It would be a mistake to underestimate the Southampton Town cops. They covered a big area, and not all of it what you’d expect to find out here. There were some tough little spots filled with hard-case locals and immigrant labor. And the Summer People themselves weren’t all affected fops. Others thought a little money, or the show of money, bought immunity. Especially during the season when the clubs were in full riot. Guys like Sullivan were serious and could handle stuff. But the trouble they knew would tend to come right at them, out in the open where they could see it plain and simple.

“I’m not really asking you to do anything. I’m just talking here.”

He looked relieved.

“Talking’s okay.”

“Not accusing anybody.”

“Accusations, not okay.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t talk to you once in a while so
somebody other than me knows what I’m thinking. Even if it’s nuts.”

“Like I said, talking’s okay.”

“Like getting an autopsy report. No big deal.”

He made a noise and stood up.

“Okay. Jesus, what a pain in the ass,” he said as he walked away, trying to maintain a little obstinacy, keeping the narrow, ill-fed portions of his mind in reserve. The cloud cover broke at about the same instant, and the sun tossed a few splashes of brilliance on the sidewalk to help light his path back to the cruiser.

I spent the late afternoon and evening at the Pequot. I thought it would help me think. Or, better yet, not think at all.

That’d been my plan, if you could call it that, when I moved into my parents’ house. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, or anything else to do. Or, rather, I didn’t want to do anything else. I was expected to find another job, which I probably could have done. Some type of job. I still had a good name in the industry. Outside the management of my own company. Abby had kept me somewhat involved in professional organizations, and in contact with people who could help my career, in her opinion. But I let those contacts lapse.

The divorce from Abby was a sleepwalk. My terms were so generous her lawyer really had nothing to do until I gutted our house, which got things a little livelier. If I’d tried to get work at that point, it might have been harder, but I still had a few friends around the business. They took it on themselves to try on my behalf, but I kept my head down until they went away.
I started to really like wearing blue jeans and sweatshirts every day. And once I got to Southampton, all the old links just evaporated. I calculated how long I could live on whatever money was left after the carnage and figured if I kept down expenses I’d almost make it to early retirement age. Or, with a little luck, I’d be dead by then.