Two Time (2 page)

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Some time after that a small woman with short cropped black hair was pulling at my fingers. They were woven together behind Jackie’s head, which I was holding off the ground. The woman was speaking only to me, since Jackie had her eyes closed. Or one eye for sure. The other was too mashed up to tell.

The woman said something to me, but I couldn’t hear her. I shook my head.

“It would be helpful if you let me examine her, sir,” she shouted.

The big slab table had saved our lives, but hadn’t stopped the blast debris from swirling down on top of us. A piece of something, maybe the big glass salad bowl from the appetizer table, had slammed into the side of Jackie’s face. I didn’t see it happen, but I saw the result. When the short woman found us, I was telling her why baseball was never the same after the advent of free agency, and checking her breathing periodically by putting my cheek down next to her nose.

I let the short woman move her hands down under Jackie’s head as I moved mine under her neck. She used her thumb to pull open Jackie’s good eye, into which she shot the beam of a tiny flashlight. When she was done she poked around Jackie’s chest with a stethoscope. While she was doing that another medic ran up with an elaborate-looking plastic thing in tow that he threw on the ground with a clattery smack. Without looking up, the short woman shot out an order that caused the guy to turn on his heel and run off.

“What about the others?” I asked, but she didn’t answer me, and I didn’t want to ask her again until she was ready.

She eventually looked at me.

“Sorry?” she asked.

“The others. On the deck. What about them?”

“How many were there?”

“I don’t know. Five?”

She went back to Jackie, gently folding her hands down by her sides and configuring the plastic thing into the brace it was obviously meant to be.

“I’ll tell the recovery people. Locate parts for five,” she said.

“Parts?”

“I really need you to let me work, sir.”

She put her soft little hands on my wrists and I let go. That’s when I realized I was listening to my breathing from inside my head, and the sound of a little dog barking frantically in the distance.

I lay back and looked up at the sky, still a lovely pale blue, with a faint hint of pink and purple from the sunset over on the western horizon and the flickering remains of the fire on the edge of the docks, seagulls drifting into view, wondering what all the commotion was about.

J
OE
S
ULLIVAN
was the kind of guy directors always cast as a cop—thick around the middle, bullet-shaped head upholstered in blond crew-cut hair and dotted with small, close-set eyes. That he was, in fact, a cop didn’t help. Always wore a cynical, half-bored, half-suspicious expression to match the big Ford patrol car and tough cop sunglasses. Smith & Wesson short-barrel .38 and a walkie-talkie on his belt. Starched shirts and spit-polished shoes. Natural defenses.

I was up on a ladder when he pulled into my driveway. It was mid-afternoon and the sun was parked directly over the Little Peconic Bay. There was just enough haze in the air to diffuse the light and contain the fuzzy summer heat. A seasonal southwesterly was blowing hard enough to move the leaves on the trees along the back of the property, but not enough to dry off sweat or clear the air. Eddie, the mutt that shared the house with me, was curled up under the scraggly rhododendron that flanked the side porch. I was in a white
T-shirt and cut-offs, work boots and white socks. The tool belt and nail apron cinched around my waist dragged the cutoffs uncomfortably down on my hips. I had a framing square in one hand and a hammer in the other. I was trying to grow a third hand to hold a level when I heard Sullivan’s car crunching up the gravel drive. I’d already set the ridge beam, now secured by two temporary sixteen-foot two-by’s. At least I hoped I had. The top angle on the first rafter seemed right, but there was something wrong with the bird’s mouth notch where it joined the plate. So maybe the top angle really wasn’t as good as I thought it was.

“Yo, Sam,” Sullivan called from below. “What’re you doing?”

I took the two framing nails out of my mouth.

“Raising high the roof beams.”

Eddie staggered out from under the rhododendron to say hello. Normally he’d have hopped up to a visitor with a sort of sideways, wagging bounce, but the heat had undermined his social skills. Sullivan squatted down to scratch his ears.

“Those ain’t beams,” he yelled up to me. “Beams’re horizontal. Those’re rafters.”

“Take that up with Seymour.”

“Who’s Seymour?”

“Seymour Glass.”

“Don’t know him.”

“Hell of a carpenter.”

“Work alone, does he?” Sullivan asked.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Maybe he could help.”

“This is the only hard part.”

“What, framing the house?”

“Setting the ridge plate. Confounds even the most subtle minds.”

“Not the guys I used to work with. Dumber’n shit. Could still set a ridge plate.”

I tapped the side of the rafter into perfect position with the ridge and checked it with the framing square. The joint at the plate still had a big ugly gap.

“Done some building?” I asked Sullivan.

“All over the Island. Set a lot of ridge plates. Never did it by myself.”

“It’s simple engineering. It’s all in the numbers. A few calculations and about a hundred years of fiddling around and she’s in there, dead nuts.”

“I’d come up there and help you but I’m on duty”

“Sure, hide behind the badge.”

“You wouldn’t let me anyway.”

“Probably not.”

“Too pigheaded.”

“There’s beer in the refrigerator.”

“I can help you with that.”

“On duty?”

“They encourage it.”

He disappeared into the original part of the cottage. I was working on an addition off the back. Improving my place in the world. I’d drawn it up, and so far had done all the work myself, shy of pouring the concrete. My father had dug the hole for the original building with a pick and shovel and laid up the foundation out of cinder block. It was more necessity than heroics. He had very little money. Made up for it with grim determination.

“I got you one,” Sullivan called up from just outside the rear door.

I slid the hammer into the holster on my tool belt and lowered the unraised rafter down to the floor deck. Maybe the whole roof system would work itself out while I was
having a beer with Sullivan. Sometimes lumber would do that if you left it alone long enough.

“What’s it gonna be?” Sullivan asked me as I was climbing down the ladder.

“What?”

“That.” He pointed with the neck of the beer. “What’re you building?”

“Bedroom. Bath. Little storage upstairs. More shop room in the basement.”

He took a long drink.

“Why don’t you plow the whole thing under and build a new house?” His gaze wandered out on the bay as he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “You gotta great lot here.”

“How’s that beer?”

“Cold.”

I unbuckled the tool belt and let it drop to the ground. It was an electrician’s belt, but I liked it for carpentry, too. Lots of clever little pockets and a sturdy, built-in hammer holster. I took off a separate nail apron and pulled up my terry cloth sweatband so I could wipe the bottle across my forehead. The heavy wet heat made it a bad day to toss around Douglas fir and dimensional calculations. Sullivan, Eddie and I walked over to the two handmade Adirondack chairs I kept under a leafy Norway maple. Eddie spread himself out on the grass. Sullivan and I took the chairs.

I liked all the seasons here at the edge of the Little Peconic, but the extremes of summer and winter were a little less likable. In dead winter you had howling, salt-filled winds blowing through secret cracks in the walls and down the front of your foul-weather gear. In deep summer the air would often come to a dead stop, letting all that drippy, cottony heat glob up your cardiovascular system and dull your mental functions.

“How’s your ass?” he asked me.

“Beg pardon?”

“I heard they pulled about a hundred glass splinters out of your ass.”

“Less than fifty Out of my back. Nothing in the gluteus.”

“So no big sweat.”

“All the little cuts are sealed over, but I’m still sleeping on my stomach. Got back seventy percent in my right ear, eighty percent in my left. Jackie’s right came all the way back. Her left is gone forever. Funny break.”

Sullivan still wore a smirk, but it slipped a little.

“Yeah. Luck’s an odd thing. You’re lucky you’re alive.”

“Don’t get metaphysical.”

“No problem there. You’re not my type.”

I tried to keep part of my mind calculating the rafter cuts, but it wasn’t happening. I stared up at the precariously placed ridge plate and waited for inspiration.

“Don’t you ever wonder why?” Sullivan asked.

“All the time.”

He nodded like I’d just won him a private bet.

A windsurfer came into view. He was long and muscular, wearing a small blue tank suit and gripping the boom with a lanky confidence. His hair, long enough to fall down his back, was pressed wetly between his shoulder blades. There wasn’t nearly enough wind to give the guy much of a ride. I wondered what my father would think of windsurfing and jet skis and parasailing and the other modes of modern recreation that flew by on the bay. Not that he ever paid much attention to all the salt water sitting there outside his front door. Except for the occasional trip out to catch bluefish for dinner, he was a land guy—all grease, earth and dust.

“They’re not getting anywhere,” said Sullivan.

“I figured.”

“Not what they’re telling everybody, of course. They’re calling it an ongoing investigation, which means they got squat. I ran into the lead guy over at Bobby Van’s. Having dinner with his wife. She didn’t want him talking shop, but you could tell he was fed up with the whole thing. He used to think it was a ticket to Hollywood. Big high-profile thing. Now two months later it’s an embarrassment. Even I’m embarrassed for him.”

“You’re an empathetic guy, Joe.”

“Embarrassed, empathetic, it’s all the same to me. Adds up to nothin’ for the prosecutor, nothin’ for the press. Nothin’ for the grieving widow.”

“Nothin’ for the innocent bystanders.”

“Yeah,” he said, “that, too. Not a happy place.”

He seemed pensive. Almost philosophical. Even empathetic.

“So, you got a deadline on this thing?” Sullivan asked, looking up at the addition.

“What do you mean?”

“You work on it every day?”

“When I’m not working for Frank.”

“A lot of work doing a whole addition. Especially doing it yourself. Lotta work.”

“Yup.”

“I know. I’ve done it. It’s tough.”

“Definitely.”

“Hard work.”

“Yeah.”

We sat in silence for a while, then Sullivan let out a noisy sigh to fill the dead air.

“Of course, I’m the only one officially working,” he said.

“And drinking on the job.”

“Long as we’re not out of beer.”

He dragged himself out of the Adirondack and lumbered into the house. While he was gone I busied myself thinking about the geometry and load distribution of roof rafters. And my high school girlfriend Sylvia Granata’s jawline, which I’d always admired as one of God’s acts of architectural perfection. Sullivan rolled back across the lawn and flopped into the chair, disrupting the image I’d almost formed in my mind. He handed me a Sam Adams and kept the microbrew from a case my friend Burton Lewis gave me the last time he was over. Sullivan never let his working class roots drag down his finer sensibilities. Especially when I was buying.

“What do you know about the guy that was blown up?” he asked.

“Papers said he was some sort of securities broker. Up island.”

“Close.”

He dug a small notepad out of his back pocket. It was covered in a cramped but orderly script.

“Investment adviser. With a broker’s license. Had one office, in Riverhead. Spent part of the time there, the rest on the road. Specialized in high tech. IPOs. LBOs. SOBs, that kinda stuff.” He looked over at me. “Typical smart young prick, like we got out here a dime a dozen.”

“Along with all the smart old pricks.”

“BMWs and cigars. Usually with a nitwit model or nose job JAP.”

“Sometimes both.”

“Only this guy was married. And local, too, if you think about it.”

“Riverhead. Close enough.”

“Yeah, right.”

Sullivan pulled himself to the edge of the chair so he could lean into his story.

“That’s all there is on this guy. There’s nothing else to say about him. Had a little shit office, traveled all over hell checking out high techs and start-ups. Worked through cell phones and fax and email—basically a one-man money machine with zippo overhead, and zippo contact with the rest of humanity.”

“Tech’s had its ups and downs.”

“Not an issue for this guy, from what they tell me. Up, down, middle, didn’t matter. Got paid comin’ or goin.”

“No friends or family?”

“No friends that they know about. Mother’s in a home in Riverhead. Off her rocker. Been there forever. A brother in Southampton. Some hippie artist. Can’t find the father, presumed dead. No other relatives. No record, no arrests, no press clips. No nothing. Very low profile.”

“Pretty interesting.”

“You think so?” he asked.

“Well, yeah. An invisible guy somebody thought interesting enough to blow to smithereens.”

“Yeah, totally. Nothing left. They said the car was wired with more explosives than that suicide thing in DC that killed, like what, thirty people? Dug a deeper crater.”

“Hamptons are always topping everybody.”

“Made the national news.”

The windsurfer flipped up over a wave made by the wake of a big sport cruiser and landed with the sail flat on the surface of the water. I watched until I saw the guy pop back up again with his hand on the boom. Wind filled out the sheet and shoved him off in another direction—out of harm’s way.

“Well, who knows,” I said, looking back at Sullivan. “The wrong advice from a broker, or an adviser, can lose you a lot of money. Can piss people off”