Two Time (27 page)

“I don’t expect you to believe me, Ross, but I got next to no interest in doing your job. What I’d really rather be doing right now is working on my addition instead of sitting here with you, no offense. I just think you oughta take a look at that forensics report and see if there’s anything other than the material of the shirt mixed into that hole. Any other kind of fibers.”

Ross’s face stopped its endless wiggling as it momentarily formed into a scowl.

“If somebody gave that up to you I’ll have his behind,” he said.

“Same stuff was stuck to his other clothing. And in his hair. Unless the hospital got to him before you could brush it out. Is that it?”

“One other place, Sherlock.”

“The abrasion on his right hand along the knuckles.”

He extracted another cigarette from the soft pack and lit it with the one he was already smoking. He offered me one and I took it.

“Joe’s not doing too good with this thing,” said Ross.

“I know.”

“No you don’t. The Hamptons aren’t exactly Fort Apache, but every cop everywhere knows there’s an everyday potential of getting hurt. You’re not the same after it actually happens.”

“Intimations of mortality.”

“There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, the earth and every common sight, to me did seem apparelled in celestial light,”
said Ross, flatly, with little puffs of smoke punctuating every word.

“Nobody told me anything,” I said. “Especially Sullivan. It was just a guess.”

“Sullivan doesn’t know anything. Because I haven’t told him anything.”

“He’ll be okay. Just give him time.”

“I know he will. It’s you I’m not so sure about.”

“Come on, Ross. I’m on your side.”

“I’m not talking about me. Whoever took out Jonathan Eldridge knew what they were doing. Quite a coincidence that Joe Sullivan gets found in your front yard stuck like a pig about the time we opened the case to the whole squad. Which was about the time I find out from some lawyer over in Riverhead that you’re pestering Eldridge’s widow. If you think I don’t know what you two were up to, you’re not the brain Sullivan says you are. If Sullivan was onto something, so were you.”

Throughout the conversation Ross maintained the usual unmodulated tone in his voice that always seemed out of synch with his twitchy body. Flat, but friendly. Unthreatening. Analytical. Make a fine addition to my new engineering staff. Ross, Charles, Scott and Edgar.

“What do you want to know?” I asked him.

“Who killed Jonathan Eldridge,” he said without hesitation.

“I don’t know.”

“But you have theories.”

“Not really. I wish I had,” I said, with all the earnest conviction I felt.

“I thought you liked Fleming.”

“I do. My favorite, but far from a slam dunk.”

“Eldridge and Sullivan are connected.”

“Maybe.”

“Christ.”

“Parallel unrelated component failure we used to call it. What looks like cause and effect is just dumb coincidence.”

“Why not Fleming?”

“Can’t see what’s in it for him. Sure, Eldridge screwed up on his investments, but why the big bang? Seems like a statement, but what’re you saying? Pick better stocks? And to whom, your other financial consultants? You think Merrill Lynch management has a memo out to all their brokers, please be advised in handling Ivor Fleming’s account to show a positive return or take the train home.”

“His sheet has about a half-dozen suspected homicides. Not like he’s not up to it. And the State people sure seem interested. We can hardly find a place to park near his house in Sagaponack for all the plain-wrapper Fords.”

“Rackets. The bombing investigation gave them something to go on. New, or supplemental, who knows, but that’s their game.”

“You know this.”

“I do, but I can’t tell you how. I’d be giving somebody up. But it’s good information.”

“I could make you.”

“I know, but you’ll wish you hadn’t. Not because of me, because of the source. Talk to Burton. He can probably plug you in.”

It was impossible to read Ross Semple. But I thought as we talked through everything I knew, or wanted to share, including my chat with Ronny that he was feeling a little better about me. I wanted him to. Not only to get out from under his suspicious gaze, but to honor Sullivan and Burton’s faith in me. To not let them down, even in the abstract.

When we were finished he walked me out to the reception area. Janet Orlovsky was still on duty. I noticed she was wearing her service revolver. Thought she ought to arm herself with me in the building. She buzzed me back out and Ross followed me into the parking lot.

“I hope you don’t come down on Sullivan for anything that’s been going on,” I said. “Not that I’m saying he’s done anything he shouldn’t.”

“He’s done all kinds of things he shouldn’t. But I’m okay. Just keep talking to me, or I won’t be.”

“Okay.”

He followed me all the way to the Grand Prix and opened the door for me. Eddie jumped out so he could take a piss on the post that held up a sign that said “Visitors Only. Southampton Town Police.” I thought of a way to divert Ross’s attention.

“Those fibers you found on Sullivan,” I said. “I got a guess.”

Before I had a chance to say it he told me what it was.

“Burlap. Heavy weave. The kind the potato farmers have been using out here for years.”

“I thought you were concerned about the DA,” I said.

“Not when it’s just you and me out here in the parking lot where nobody can hear us talk. Anyway, you guessed it already.”

“What does that tell you?” I asked him.

“Somebody made the mistake of putting a burlap bag over Sullivan’s head.”

“Caught him sleeping in my lawn chair.”

“Yeah. That’s the point. Your chair. They thought he was you. Sullivan must’ve put up a hell of a fight.”

“Probably didn’t even mean to stab him. Or clobber him on the head. The situation just got away from them. When they realized they had the wrong guy, they just left him
there. Might’ve thought he was already dead or would be soon enough.”

“Like I said, him I’m not so concerned about.”

As I drove out of the parking lot I looked in my rearview mirror. He was still standing there, as if waiting to be sure I was completely gone. He was watching me steadily as he rummaged around his shirt pocket for cigarettes. Nicotine addict and inscrutable fidget that he was, sent down from the Planet Zircon to serve and protect the safety of all the souls within the confines of the Town of Southampton, Long Island.

I wrote her back:

W
ITHOUT
A
MANDA’S HELP
it took longer to lay down the rest of the subroof, but she had a different job to do that day, lying on her chaise lounge with only bikini bottoms and a trade paperback as defense against the pounding July sun, providing an incentive for frequent water breaks and a considerable upgrade in the aesthetic character of the neighborhood.

The addition was now a defined building, a plywood box with a roof jutting perpendicular from the ridge line of the original house. I’d waited for this stage to stand back and take it all in, deferring disappointment until it was too late to do anything about it. But it looked okay. I don’t know what my father would have thought. He had no design sense as far as I knew, though I could hear him growling that I’d messed up the look of the place, even though all the angles were his angles, established by feel and eye over fifty years ago.

I wasn’t sure why I’d starting building it in the first place. I’d lived with what I had for almost five years. I didn’t want or need much more than the screened-in front porch with a kitchen stuck to it, and two miniature bedrooms, one that was my parents’ and the other a glorified closet where my sister and I slept on bunk beds, both paneled in Masonite and lit by an assortment of randomly sized windows retrieved from surplus bins, or possibly stolen off job sites up island in the dead of night and hauled out east, old man Semple’s assessment of my father’s honesty notwithstanding. But there it was, a product of physical effort unencumbered by self-reflection or analysis, which I was happy to defer to some indefinite time in the future.

By the time I’d showered and climbed into clean clothes, Amanda had switched over to my Adirondacks, still lined up along the breakwater, box seats for the evening’s performance in the sky. The grandiflora was coming into bloom, the leggy stems curved groundward under the weight of giant balls of tiny white petals, shaded with pink and blue hues cast off by the light show over on the horizon. The Little Peconic was rendered passive by the innervating south-southwesterlies that coasted in over the South Fork from the Atlantic Ocean, the weak trails of the African trade winds that once spent their energy sweeping in rapacious Caucasians
and now merely cooled their Niveasoaked skin as they sprawled across the Caribbean and up the East Coast. The only sailboats within view were drifting upright, their sails ballooning and collapsing as the evening zephyrs taunted with the possibility of a freshening evening breeze. Others had wisely given up the quest and were ghosting under power with bare poles to the next anchorage or back to home moorings. A yellow-and-orange cigarette boat shot across the bay, a steady streak over still waters, its rumble of exhaust tones felt as much as heard through the weathered slats of the Adirondacks, leaving behind a slim white wake that looked from a distance like a foamy contrail.

Amanda had brought a little side table with her, on which she’d stocked all the necessary provisions. She wore a white cotton beach shift and her new favorite wraparound sunglasses. Having abandoned the book, she was calmly watching the bay when I approached.

“I could see you finished the roof. I thought that called for a celebration.”

“Just the ply, but who’s counting.”

“When do you think you’ll be all finished?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a full hold on expectations.”

“And that’s news?”

“I liked your tanning outfit, what there was of it.”

“So you still believe repression, avoidance and denial are effective operating strategies? Doesn’t leave much to expect.”

“Unavoidably.”

I thought there must have been a time when all I had were expectations, probably in the form of goals and ambitions. Maybe not fully formed, more like focused impulses that thrust me through successive days and nights of compulsive determination and professional tumult. But all that was getting harder to remember now. Probably because I’d spent the
last five years determined to repress, avoid and deny it all ever happened, which had worked to the extent that specific images and streams of anxious recollection had dissipated, now replaced by a vague hollow pain, an awareness that much had passed raucously through my consciousness, leaving only impressions of destruction, free floating and indistinct, the phantoms of experience.

“You’re not asking,” said Amanda, “but I’d like you to know I’ve adopted your strategy, at least for the time being.”

“It’s the air at the tip of Oak Point. Gets to everybody eventually.”

Amanda had been raised by her single mother on a tight budget. Not quite poor, but lean, stuck along the fringes where my own family lived. She’d lived a comfortable life with Roy financially anyway, but now that she’d come into her inheritance she could afford to withhold any expectations she wanted to.

“You haven’t asked me what I’m going to do with Reginas house,” she said.

The muscles along the back of my neck and across my shoulders stiffened in that dreary involuntary way they often did when topics arose that I’d rather avoid.

“Your house, you mean.”

“I’m not going to knock it down, or even alter the exterior dimensions. In fact, for now, I’m keeping it just the way it is. If you ever come inside you’ll see. Her nephew took all her furniture. I brought in just enough. Nothing I care about, strictly utilitarian. So when I leave, if I leave, I don’t have to care about what’s left behind.”

“You’ll need a new furnace. Circulating fan and heat exchanger are on their last legs.”

“My, you are a champion avoider,” she said.

“Just leading by example. More wine?”

I did get to see the inside of her house that night, and she was true to her word. She’d stripped out all the furniture, dug up the rugs and whitewashed the walls. I was glad for it. I didn’t want to be reminded of Regina any more than I had to. The interior spaces felt like they’d doubled in size, and as she said, they were furnished in a spare and simple style that would be easy to forget. Though my mother would have thought it all decadently luxurious. An air of sanctuary mingled with one of impermanence, which likely expressed the climate of Amanda’s mind. Whatever effect that had on my own mind, I couldn’t tell, since my recently discussed life scheme was in full operation. I did like sitting on her own version of the screened-in porch, and wandering along circuitous and mostly meaningless conversational pathways. I liked her loose lavender translucent dress and bare feet, and noticing the beginnings of razor-thin crow’s-feet beside her eyes formed solely by an occasional laugh, or a particular breed of smile I could generate with a particular style of wisecrack. Eddie, bribed into stupefaction by cheese and duck pâté, slept in a ball on a cushioned wicker chair. Out of deference to me, I’m sure, Oscar Peterson was playing somewhere in the house, and when I took the trouble to search for it I seemed to have misplaced that ugly hollow pain. Or its location inside my chest had been appropriated by something else, though in no way did I want to think about what that could be.

Trouble, I thought, as she took my hand and led me to another part of the house. I knew it the moment I first saw her car in Reginas driveway. More trouble than I’d ever be equipped to endure.

—

Jackie Swaitkowski showed up the next day for a road trip we’d been planning. The Grand Prix was all ready to go, having been thoroughly cleaned and maintained by a team of crack performance artists. Eddie was happy to live outside, using a little covert dog hatch to get in and out of the house, but I felt better having Amanda keep an eye on him, bringing him in her house if it got late. Not a hard sell given the leftover cheese and pâté.