Two Time (4 page)

“You burning some of that for me?” I asked Hodges as we approached down a slender swayback dock.

“I knew the smell of food would turn you up,” he said, standing in a cloud of smoke coming from the rusty Weber
grill he’d set up on the dock next to a short mahogany gangplank. Some of the smoke was caught under the market umbrella that shaded a white plastic table and two canvas director chairs. Hodges was somewhere in his mid-sixties, big around the middle and heavy shouldered, with short, gnarly legs. His arms were formed out of thick bunches of twisted cable. He’d seen forty years of fishing boats and construction crews, which had turned his skin into the working side of a catcher’s mitt. Under the best of circumstances you wouldn’t have called Hodges a good-looking man. He looked more like a superannuated frog. The gray-white hair that burst out in lunatic clumps from his head and chin didn’t help.

Hodges had a pair of Shih Tzus he’d inherited from his wife. They treated Eddie like he was some sort of rock star, skittering up to him, all sharp-edged noise and wiggling fur. Eddie was magnanimous.

“Canadian bacon on the grill. Scrambled-up shit in the skillet. Season to taste. Want a beer with that?”

“Coffee’s fine.”

“Not if you’re drinking mine.”

He dumped our breakfast out on paper plates and went below for beverages and sesame seed bagels. The swan couple who freeloaded around the marina glided up to the side of the boat, hoping to get in on the action, which provoked Eddie and the Shih Tzus to go berserk. The swans floated away, deciding it wasn’t worth the trouble.

“And don’t come back,” Hodges called to them as he came through the companionway.

“I thought you were a bird lover.”

“In the sky or on the grill, exclusively.”

We ate and drank coffee under the big umbrella and watched the colorless sky turn blue overhead.

Hodges ran a bar and grill out of a dilapidated boathouse on the grounds of a commercial marina up in Sag Harbor. Most of the trade were professional fishermen or men and women who crewed on the charter boats during the season. The place was called the Pequot and it had a rickety deck out back where Hodges and his daughter Dotty, who helped him run the restaurant, ate most of their meals. At least until one afternoon when the deck collapsed while Hodges was finishing off a plate of the house special—baked, stuffed whitefish of unknown origin.

“How’s the rib cage?” I asked him.

“Almost healed. Give’s new meaning to breathing easier.”

“And the neck?”

“Good as it’s gonna get.”

“Can still make breakfast.”

“They want me to do more rehabilitation.”

“Some people are beyond that.”

“That’s what I tell em. How’s your butt?”

“My back. It was my back.”

“We’re a pair of sorry chewed-up fuckers, aren’t we. More eggs?”

I was still hot, but the breeze coming off the bay had started cooling me down. Hodges’s cuisine was sitting surprisingly well in my belly. All of which was eroding the desire to run back home. Hodges sat back in his chair with his coffee and looked at me intently. Something he rarely did.

“What?”

“I saw a friend of yours in Town yesterday. Jackie What’s-her-name.”

“Swaitkowski,” I told him.

“Looked like crap.”

“I know.”

“She said you’d been around.”

“I saw her before she went in for another round of surgery.”

“She’s not telling you,” said Hodges.

“Telling me what?”

“She’s not doing too good, but she won’t tell you.”

Jackie’s moods had always flown around the room like a drunken sparrow. But since all this she had trouble getting anything off the ground.

“I can’t do anything about that,” I told him.

Hodges grunted and looked up at the sky. The sun had done its work on the low clouds. The bay water reflected the color of the sky and the languid disposition of a midsummer’s day.

“Ross Semple’s got the Southampton cops working on the case,” I told him.

“Joe Sullivan to the rescue.”

“I guess. It’s sort of out of his league.”

“At least he’ll work the crap out of it,” said Hodges.

“He wants me to talk to the guy’s wife. The guy who got blown up.”

Hodges seemed to like that.

“Excellent. Get the old team back in action.”

“Sullivan and I are not a team. Not remotely.”

Hodges scraped a few spoonfuls of some indeterminate fried stuff up against the side of the pan and hovered over my plate.

“More?” he asked.

“Nah. No sense pushing my luck.”

He shrugged and served it to himself.

“You are full of shit, you know,” said Hodges.

“Just full, thanks.”

“You’re dying to stick your nose into this thing.”

“No, I’m not. I’m really not. I want to work on my addition, put up a little crown molding and make a few cabinets
for Frank Entwhistle, and stay out of trouble. Stay about a million miles away from anything that even remotely looks, sounds or smells like trouble. For the rest of my damn life.”

“I guess that’s what Jackie’d want you to do. Stay out of trouble.”

“She’s alive.”

“That’s right.”

“Aw, Christ.”

“All you have to do is go talk to the guy’s wife,” he said, and folded his arms.

Eddie and the Shih Tzus clattered down the dock and jumped into the cockpit of Hodges’s boat, looking at us like we were supposed to provide the next segment of entertainment.

“One thing I can do,” I told Hodges.

“What’s that?”

“Have a little more of that coffee.”

Hodges went below deck to retrieve whatever was left in the antique pot. He poured us both a cup. I took a sip and looked up at the sea gulls cruising in random patterns, cool white marks of brilliance against the deep blue background.

“Fucking hell,” I told Hodges while I tried to drink the sludge from off the bottom of his crappy old percolator.

I
T WAS GRAY AGAIN
the next morning. Warm, wet air was stuffed in all the enclosed spaces, and my skin stuck to everything it touched.

My car was a
’67
Pontiac Grand Prix with a modified 400-cubic-inch V8 and a four-speed manual transmission that my father and I had installed at great cost to the harmony of our already disharmonious household. A car this old and poorly conceived took a lot of effort to keep running, but replacing it seemed pointless. The body was free of rust or Bondo, though I needed to add a coat of paint over the gray-brown primer. The interior still smelled of leather, or at least I imagined it did. Maybe moldy leather.

That morning I built myself an extra-large mug of Belgian chocolate nut coffee from beans I’d bought at the corner coffee place in the Village. I liked it a little better than French vanilla or caramel classic, my other favorites. I
poured it into an enormous insulated travel mug with a New York Yankees logo printed on the side.

I was wearing an off-white linen suit, last cleaned and pressed in the middle of the prior decade. It was still wrinkle-free, but a little musty. I was counting on natural forces to air it out. I put it together with a striped tie and an Egyptian pima cotton shirt that cost my ex-wife Abby a hundred dollars twenty years ago. It felt like liquid silk.

It was too hot to leave Eddie in the car, so I had to lock him up in the house. I felt like a rat, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate if I was worrying about him asphyxiating in the backseat of the car.

I left the radio on for him. Morning jazz on WLIU. Plus a full bowl of fresh water and a few Big Dog biscuits, even though he was officially more of a medium-sized dog. I still felt like a rat.

The linen suit, insulated Yankees mug and I climbed into the car and spun out of the driveway. The Grand Prix was an extreme example of an absurd era of automotive engineering. Heavy as a bulldozer, powered like a jetfighter and roomy as the penthouse suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Strictly mid-twentieth-century technology gone psychotic. A good car for my father. People in the Hamptons just averted their eyes.

I don’t know why my father bought the car in the first place. He didn’t have much money and was hardly much of a sport. I don’t remember ever seeing him laugh out loud, or express a materialistic desire for anything, mechanical or otherwise. He just showed up one day driving the thing. It looked almost new, unsullied and legally registered. My mother was suspicious.

When I was the head of R&D at one of the big hydrocarbon conglomerates, I drove a string of serenely perfect European sedans. They were better cars than the Grand Prix,
but none of them had a center console big enough to stow a huge mug of Belgian chocolate nut coffee.

I dug a piece of paper with the directions Sullivan gave me out of my breast pocket and spread it out on the passenger seat. I wouldn’t have to look at it until I was in Riverhead, the tired old mill town at the crotch of the North and South Forks of Eastern Long Island. I knew how to get there, but I didn’t know much about the place. It used to be where local people could shop affordably for things like groceries and Barcaloungers, but strip development up island and general prosperity had eroded that role. Now it was just a little urban barge afloat on an ocean of wealth and aspiration. Not a likely place to lodge a high-tech financial consultant.

To get there, you had to go west from Southampton, cross the Shinnecock Canal and head up Route 24, past an enormous stucco duck and through Flanders, another raggedy old town that looked like it had wandered away from somewhere in rural Alabama. When I hit town the directions sent me up an incongruous four-lane divided highway toward Long Island Sound. As I crossed the river that named the town, I looked east toward Southampton but saw only gray translucence enveloping the Great Peconic Bay.

To either side of me were flat open fields. Huge irrigation machines were spraying geysers over the crops. Banged-up pickup trunks were out there, too, throwing up dusty contrails. Before I turned off the highway I noticed it was a sod farm. But not like the ones in Oklahoma. They were growing instant lawns. Just cut it up, haul it off to Biffy and Foo-Foo’s, roll it out and the automatic sprinklers do the rest. I wondered if they also harvested cappuccino or BMW convertibles somewhere in the area.

In a few more turns I was on her street. It was an arid subdivision, sparsely developed. The curbs and asphalt
were fresh, but the common areas were weedy and poorly graded. The lots had all been clear-cut, realtor signs providing the only visual relief. I felt like I’d just toured the United States and ended up on the outskirts of Des Moines. I hoped the Grand Prix didn’t frighten the neighborhood kids.

Her house was a huge white two-story colonial with black shutters, a two-car garage and a professionally manicured lawn, cut to the length of a putting green. I waited a long time for someone to answer the doorbell. I rang it twice to make sure it was working.

The door opened a crack.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Eldridge?”

“No.”

“Is she home?”

“Who’s this?”

“My name’s Sam Acquillo. I’m here about her husband’s death.”

“She know you?”

“No.”

“You have to call the attorney.”

“I’m with the police.”

It was quiet for a moment.

“You have to call the attorney.”

The door shut softly and latched with a barely audible click. I rang the doorbell again. A few minutes later, the door opened.

“Yes.”

“What’s the attorney’s name?”

“Gabriel Szwit. S-z-w-i-t.”

“Here in Riverhead?”

“In the phone book. That’s why I spelled it.”

The door closed again. I spun on my heel and walked back to the Grand Prix with an air of cool self-possession. I didn’t want the neighbors to see me sweat. That’s okay, Mrs. Big Shot Widow. Just wait. I’ll be back.

I drove to a phone booth on a far corner of a gas station in Flanders and called information. Mr. Szwit was in Southampton Village. I called Sullivan.

“What do you mean call the attorney?”

“That’s what she said, Joe.”

“Well, you don’t gotta do that. You’re the police. All you got to do is say you want to talk to her.”

“I’m not the police, Joe. You’re the police.”

“Jesus Christ. Nothin’s easy.”

“Call Szwit. Have him tell her to expect a guy named Sam Acquillo. Then call me back. I’ll wait here.”

“He might want to be there.”

“Great.”

“No big deal.”

“Don’t take too long. It’s hot.”

The station sold a brand of gasoline I didn’t recognize. A small crowd of young black kids were hanging out front, mumbling to each other and watching a skinny gray dog peel a wad of gum up off the hot tarmac. Their clothes poured down off their bodies and curled around their feet. They drank diet soda from liter bottles and stayed clear of the wiry little white guy manning the full-service pumps. Everyone was smoking cigarettes despite the pervasive gasoline vapors. So I lit a Camel. Solidarity.

The phone rang.

“Go on over. But go slow. The lady’s some kind of dipsoid.”

“What kind of dipsoid?”

“I told you. Some sort of phobiac. Afraid of the outside or some shit.”

“Agoraphobic.”

“Yeah. I think we covered this.”

“Szwit isn’t coming?”

“My wife’s afraid of birds. Scare the shit out of her. We never get to eat on the patio at the Driver’s Seat. She thinks they’re gonna get caught in the umbrellas, panic and dive into her ears.”

“Her ears?”

“Yeah. She thinks birds want to fly in her ears. This has never happened, to my knowledge, to anybody, but this is what she thinks.”

“Otherwise, a pretty normal gal.”

“Outside of marrying me.”

“So he won’t be there.”

“Who?”

“Szwit.”

“He’s on his way.”

“Okay”

“Let me know how it goes.”

The kids had melted off under the late morning sun. I looked for little puddles of denim and nylon. I bought a liter bottle of Fresca and climbed back into the Grand Prix. I was starting to lose whatever enthusiasm I’d stirred up for this whole thing. I thought about my roof rafters and tool belt. I lit another Camel and turned on WLIU to distract the whiny little voice inside my head.