Hard Stop

SEVEN

I SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY at Sonny’s beating on leather bags until my legs, wrists and lungs were equally sore. Then I poached myself in the hot tub, which almost put me to sleep. In that somnambulant stupor I was defenseless against visions of Iku Kinjo caught in a fervent embrace with George Donovan, lounging around afterward wrapped in desultory pillow talk.

I felt better after nullifying the hot tub with a long, cold shower. Better than I felt after leaving Robert Dobson.

It was late evening by then. I’d left Eddie’s secret entrance open so he could come and go as he pleased. By now, Amanda was likely home diversifying his diet with hors d’oeuvres selected to accompany her first glass of pinot.

So when Robin and Laura from House Hunters of the Hamptons called me on the cell phone I felt free to join them at a place in Southampton suitable to their social aspirations.

I was met at the door by a guy in a white coat and black bow tie. He was a lot taller than me, but about the same weight. He spoke with an accent, though too quickly for me to make it out. All I heard was something like “the ladies has been waiting you to be here.” I followed him through the noisy roomful of entrenched City people, the ones who got to stay on after the season because they owned the houses they lived in during the summer. Most of them probably knew each other. None of them knew me. Except for Robin and Laura, who made a ridiculous show of standing and waving me over to their table.

“A rare man to get such greeting,” said the maitre d’, pulling out my chair with one hand and fiddling with my place setting with the other.

“Medium,” I said to him. “Medium rare.”

“Don’t let him fool you,” said Robin. “Red meat all the way.”

“Just bring the vodka,” said Laura. “There’s plenty of time for ordering.”

Laura’s wavy head of dark brown hair had been recently cropped and inexplicably combed and glued into jagged stalagmites. I’d known her to be the staid and restrained member of the pair, so it caught me by surprise. Robin was still her loud, brassy blonde self, with a lot more lipstick than self control. Judging by Laura’s stiff posture, despite the hair and a green drink in a platter-sized martini glass, their respective social styles remained stubbornly unresolved.

“So, things are good?” I asked.

“Been worse,” said Laura.

“Fab-ulous,” said Robin. “We just closed today on the Garrison place. Ox Pasture, don’t you know. La-di-da.”

“Co-brokers. Discounted commission,” said Laura, looking out across the big low-ceilinged room. Scanning for the next prospect. “Some la-di-da.”

“She’s such a killjoy. It’s in the genes.”

“Scandinavian.”

“Bergman on quaaludes.”

“I’m an ant,” Laura said to me, pointedly. “Robin’s a grasshopper. What can I say.”

“So, you called,” I said, snatching my vodka off the waiter’s tray as he lowered it to the table.

“Somebody asks me for something I put out,” said Robin.

“There’s a straight line deserving attention,” said Laura.

“Can you believe what I have to suffer?” Robin asked me.

“I like your hair,” I said to Laura, stopping them both in their tracks. “The ants are going to heave you out of the anthill.”

“Is he a goof or what?” asked Robin, fumbling for a cigarette, then realizing they were banned. She folded her arms and sank back in her seat.

“Robin’s the one who called you here, but I’m the one who got the goods,” said Laura.

“This is not a competition,” said Robin.

The waiter, who’d discreetly disappeared for a while, reappeared with pad and pen in hand. Both woman looked defensive, caught unprepared.

The waiter covered the moment by reciting specials and making doodles on his order pad. I focused on the vodka. The women kvetched and bickered over the menu until the suspense became nearly unbearable. I saved the waiter’s sanity by ordering a selection of appetizers for the table. That and another round of drinks.

“So you got the goods,” I said as the two of them sipped on single malts served neat in tiny brandy snifters. “I’m all ears.”

Robin jumped in.

“We found the Japanese girl’s rental. Or rather, Laura did.”

“Is she still there?” I asked.

“Don’t know about that. She wasn’t on the lease. We found her through Mr. Dobson, who was. The agent lent me a copy of the file. Out of professional courtesy.”

“And for a free dinner at the Silver Spoon,” said Robin.

“How do you know Iku was there? Or is there?” I asked.

Robin looked at Laura, eager to tell the story but afraid to grab the floor. Laura made a show of looking nonchalantly around the restaurant.

“Oh, just clever detective work, you could say,” she said.

“Clever detective work. She read the file.”

“The police file. If that isn’t detective work I don’t know what is.”

“Police file?” I said.

“They had a note in the file that the Town cops paid a call on the place one night. Noise complaint,” said Robin, unable to resist stealing Laura’s thunder. “I think ‘noise complaint’ and ‘group rental’ are the same words in the dictionary.”

“Synonyms,” said Laura.

“Sin’s another story,” said Robin. “Plenty of that, too.”

“The cops usually alert the owners through the rental agent whenever they’re called to a property. This is a big issue around here, you probably know. Lots of people want more control on the groups, which is fine with me. Who needs them?”

“People who want to come to the Hamptons and can’t afford a kazillion dollar rental,” asked Robin.

“So this complaint,” I said, wedging my way back into the conversation, “what was it about?”

Laura shrugged.

“No biggie. Some neighbor said they were blasting their stereo out the window. Cops get there, a woman named Iku Kinjo apologizes and immediately turns off the music. Cops leave. No further complaints. Not exactly an earth-shattering event in the history of law enforcement.”

“Didn’t make the cover of The New York Times,” said Robin.

“Maybe page three.”

“Do you have the names of the cops who made the call?” I asked.

They looked at each other, then nodded.

“Sure. It’s right in the report. Don’t remember their names, but it’s in there,” said Laura, pulling a big pink envelope out from somewhere under the table and plopping it down on top. “Address, telephone number, owners’ names, square footage, number of bedrooms, instructions on cleaning the swimming pool, it’s all there.”

“Us agents are thorough,” said Robin.

“We’re anal,” said Laura. “You’d be, too, if you had to deal with these owners. You’d think we were renting out their children.”

“That’d be easier. Kids are an expense. The house in the Hamptons is an asset.”

“You’re so cynical.”

I slid the envelope off the table and onto my lap, and then sat on it.

“You’re both brilliant,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

That stopped them faster than the comment about Laura’s hair. Robin nodded appreciatively.

“That is the nicest thing I’ve ever heard you say about us, Sam. Shit, it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard you say period.”

Laura nodded, too.

“I hate to agree with her, as you know. But it is.”

The waiter came to the rescue again with the appetizers. While he hurriedly spread them around the table I ordered the next course, lecturing everyone on the merits of the selected dishes, entirely contrived for the occasion. The women didn’t object. In fact, they seemed to like it. I toughed my way through the meal, which I tried to pay for, but Robin had already slipped the waiter her credit card.

After I got out of there I headed to another place partway up North Sea Road, where I could take a look at the envelope. It was one of the last local hangouts that still looked like it did twenty years ago, when a City person would as soon pop in for a drink as stroll naked through Bedford-Stuy. Though compared to the Pequot, it was like sipping at the Ritz.

“Vodka. Ice. Swizzle stick. Nothing else,” I said to the bartender.

“You want a glass with that?”

“No. Bring it in your hands. I’ll suck it out with a straw.”

Ten years ago this might have escalated into something more serious, but we were both older and a lot smarter, and in no way a lot tougher. So he laughed along with the other jean-jacketed, grey-haired, rosacea-encrusted barflies and went to get my drink.

I opened the envelope and slid the contents out on the bar. I stuck a tiny Maglite in my mouth so I could read the papers under the low, neon-tinted light.

On top was the rental agreement signed by Robert Dobson and the owner, John Churchman. The lease was still in effect. Two years, five thousand a month, utilities, pool maintenance, lawn crew and trash pick-up generously included. From what Robin told me, that was considered quite the bargain, with comparable houses going for sixty K or more for the summer season. She speculated that Churchman discounted the rate to secure the full-time, two-year term. A bird in the hand.

Much more interesting was the police report, a grainy Xerox of a filled-out form. As Robin said, a neighbor’s noise complaint led to a visit by two Southampton Town patrolmen, one of whom wrote that the sound levels coming from the Dobson residence were “excessively voluminous.” An apparent resident, a young woman who identified herself as “Ikoo Kent Jew,” was waiting for them as they came up the front walk. As Robin reported, she immediately complied with the cops’ request to turn down the music, and that was that.

The cop who made out the report remarked on Iku’s willingness to cooperate, despite “The young woman’s obvious state of advanced intoxication as the result of unidentified substances.”

I took a sip of the easily identified substance in front of me on the bar and leafed through the rest of the file. Then I asked the bartender for a pen and wrote down the address of the place on a cocktail napkin.

“What’s ’at?” he asked, when I gave him back his pen. “Writin’ down a poem?”

“Yeah. An ode to drunken Japanese girls.”

“That’d be a haiku,” said the guy sitting next to me. “Japanese don’t go in for a lot of words.”

“This is why I like working behind a bar,” said the bartender. “You learn shit every day.”

“Do you know where this place is?” I asked him, spinning the napkin around so he could read the address.

He frowned at it for a few moments.

“Vedders Pond, right?” he asked the poetry expert sitting next to me. He studied the napkin.

“Yeah, not even a mile from here. Little shit-ass freshwater pond with a half a dozen places, give or take. Can’t build more’n that on the wetlands.”

I knew where he meant. I jogged through that area back when I was motivated to jog more than a few miles from my house. The last time I’d passed through I noticed how the original shacks had been upgraded to suit their new status as waterfront property. Robin and Laura were right to say it was a bargain. Waterfront was liquid gold in the Hamptons. They once proposed an inflated price for a house in the shadow of the Village water tower. When the buyer balked they pointed skyward and said, “Hey, check it out. Water view.”

I decided it was too late and I was too tired to do anything else that night but go home and discuss the day with my dog. And if I got lucky, have a chance to hear Amanda tell me about hers.

I pulled the Grand Prix into its usual parking spot next to the shack at the back of the property, leaving plenty of room for Amanda to zip by in her Audi. Eddie didn’t run up to greet me, but otherwise things were normal. On the other hand, he didn’t always do that, so it was normal enough.

When I got out of my car I looked toward Amanda’s place and was stopped by an unusual shadow pattern on the driveway. I’d been looking in that direction for a few years now, and no matter what my state of sobriety, I knew when it wasn’t like it was supposed to be.

I shut the door of the Grand Prix with conviction and rather than heading toward the cottage, crouched down and ran over to a swayback shed at the back of my property. It was hemmed in by a robust assortment of indigenous foliage, which helped cover a move around to the other side, where I saw a bulbous pale blue minivan, half submerged in the brush, and half gleaming in the light of Amanda’s post lamp.

In another reckless action, however foresworn, I strode up to the driver’s window with my left fist cocked and self-discipline temporarily disarmed.

I looked through the open window and in the dim light saw Marve Judson trying to adjust the radio dial to a more diverting station. “Where’s the dog?” I asked.

He jumped violently in his seat and said something like, “Christ, shit, what dog?”

“The dog that runs around my yard. Where is he?”

“I saw a dog run down the basement hatch a few hours ago,” he said.

With that Eddie ran back out the basement hatch, finally noticing I was there in the driveway. He jumped up on the side of the minivan and tried to get a look inside, excited by the prospect of fresh company.

That’s when the gun came out. Judson must have had it stowed somewhere near the center console. I watched the arch of travel until it was almost level with my head, then grabbed the barrel and snapped the gun and the hand holding it against the window frame. I stuck a few tidy left jabs into Judson’s face until he let go. Then I opened the car door and pulled him out.

I hit him again, then got a better grip on the front of his shirt. I dragged him across the lawn, opened the door, and dumped him on the kitchen floor. I ejected the clip and a round from the chamber of the silver .45 right before Amanda swept festively into the kitchen.

“Oh, my God,” she said, seeing the gun in my hand.

I used the barrel to point at the guy moaning on the floor.

“Again?” she asked.

“Meet Marve Judson,” I said. “I think I’ve told you about him.”

She held up a china plate overflowing with cheese wedges and crudités.

“How does he feel about Fromage d’Affinois?”

“We’ll ask him when he regains his faculties.”

“Your hand is bleeding.”

“Not my blood. Can I open that?” I asked, pointing to the bottle she was holding under her arm.

Eddie stopped for a second to sniff Marve’s head, then followed Amanda out to the screened-in porch, where she dropped off the cheese and came back with the bottle held like a club.

“Just in case,” she said, as she watched me hoist Marve up on his feet. I fed his face into the kitchen sink, rinsing off the blood and half drowning him, until he shook himself and put up a legitimate effort to fight back. I pulled him up and handed him a dish towel.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I asked him.

“I look after my own,” he said, through the soggy towel and his mashed-up face.

“Not too effectively.”

Marve was short and wiry and probably five years younger than me. His hair was as thin as he was, but ambitiously bolstered by the kind of hair dye women chuckle over in the ladies’ room. He was wearing a safari jacket, which would have been a tip-off even without the bad hair job and the steely set of the jaw. He was the kind of guy who might have been redeemed by a self-deprecating, worldly sense of humor, if he’d only had one.

“I think you broke one of my crowns,” he said through the towel.

“One’s better than nothing.”

“You’re supposed to be a degenerate alcoholic.”

“Still working on that.”

I grabbed him again, this time by the shoulder, and pulled him with me through the kitchen and out to the screened-in porch. Amanda followed with a pair of glasses and a cork-screw, though still looking tense and wary.

I sat Marve on the floor and took the stuffed chair, holding Eddie back from the nearly irresistible allure of an accessible, albeit hostile, human being at his own eye level.

I picked my cell phone out of my pocket and flipped it open.

“I don’t know what Honest Boy told you, but I only let one person per year pull a gun on me. The cop on the other end of this phone insists upon it.”

A spray of alarm passed behind Judson’s eyes.

“It was self-defense,” he said.

I continued to punch in Sullivan’s number.

“You’re not going to talk first?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Marve. I’m pretty mad at you. I either call the cops or shoot you and toss your body in the Little Peconic. You pick.”

“He’s not a very good shot, but you are rather close,” said Amanda. I kept dialing Sullivan’s number.

“Okay, I apologize,” said Marve.

“Huh?”

“That’s what you want me to do, right? I apologize for the gun.”

One of the many things I learned after being ejected from the corporate bubble was just how strong that bubble can be—an impervious, impenetrable membrane. Nothing gets in, nothing comes out. A self-sustaining ecosystem.

Even as Judson imagined himself the rogue agent of mystery and truth, he was ultimately no different from any sweaty schlub locked inside one of thirty thousand cubicles in fluorescent-lit, grey-toned offices around the world.

I wanted to hit him again, and at one time in my life I would have. Instead I tossed Amanda the phone and went back to the kitchen to fill my aluminum tumbler with Absolut and ice. When I got back, Marve was still on the floor, looking suspiciously at Eddie standing over him with slack tongue and wagging tail.

“Don’t worry about the dog,” I told him. “The only thing that bugs him is talk radio.”

“I’m allergic to dogs.”

I knelt down across from him and took a pull off my tumbler. Eddie moved in and I scratched his ears.

“So, Marve. What the fuck.”

He stopped fiddling with his busted crown.

“Things have been pretty stressful lately at the company,” he said, as if that explained it all.

“Yeah? How?”

“Rumors, weird signals, comings and goings. That sort of thing. You can smell it. Especially if it’s your job to have your nose in the air.”

“Or up somebody’s ass.”

“I’m responsible to every stakeholder in the Con Globe organization. Lotta asses.”

“You like a challenge,” I said.

“Change is in the wind. But it’s an evil wind.”

“Who else have you been spying on? Donovan?”

Judson actually stuck out his lower lip like my daughter used to do when told to finish all the green things on her plate. The association probably saved him from another shot to the face.

“You can’t spy on people and threaten them with guns in pursuit of business interests,” I said. “You live in a nation that’s bigger than Con Globe. Hate to break it to you, but there’re laws that supersede the corporate charter.”

“All fine and good, Mr. Acquillo, but you violated that charter. You have no standing in this discussion.”

I felt a wave of resigned fury wash over me.

“Hey, Amanda, can I just beat this guy to death?”

“That’s for you to decide.”

“I want to.”

“Then I suppose you should.”

Before I had my fist two-thirds of the way raised he was yelling through his hands.

“The board thought Donovan was behaving strangely. Unexplained absences, after-hours meetings with people nobody recognized, that kind of thing,” he said as quickly as he could. “They directed me to investigate. It’s a sacred trust. And presumed to be confidential,” he added, then groaned, as if in dismay over the forced admission.

“Boy, there’s a startling revelation. The Chairman of the Board having late night meetings. Never heard of that before.”

“Oh, yeah. Like you never heard of the Mandate of 1953,” said Marve. “You wouldn’t think all these shenanigans would have something to do with that?”

He had me there. I wouldn’t think anything about it because I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

He didn’t believe me.

“You were a corporate vice president. Of course you know.”

“Pretend I don’t and tell me what it is.”

“The mandate establishes corporate independence in perpetuity. Donovan’s elevation to chairman was contingent on his unqualified allegiance to this decree,” Marve snarled into his bloody dish towel.

“No kidding.”

Marve huffed wetly through his nose.

“Boy are you out of the loop,” he said.

He told me that before the founding family gave up full control they had the board vote on a charter resolution that prohibited the company from ever being purchased as an entity. No more than twenty percent could be sold off in any five-year period and no investor could own more than thirty percent of the voting stock. Every new board member had to sign a pledge to defend this resolution before their election. Some thought Donovan was secretly examining legal tactics for breaking the charter in hopes of driving up the value of his considerable stock holdings.

“The board resolution is only a theory,” said Judson. “Not binding until it’s tested in court. You didn’t know any of this? What a putz.”

I had to agree. I was a putz, with no inkling of these corporate convolutions. I’ve been told that my ultimate downfall at the company was my political naiveté. The comment never bothered me, because one man’s naiveté is another’s disdain. I don’t know which is worse, or more dangerous.

“Even if Donovan’s trying to break up the company,” I said, “it’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Oh, sure. That’s why he gave Ackerman an ex-officio assignment to spy on you and sent your severance agreement to outside counsel. Can’t have anything to do with that.”

“My division’s long gone.”

“Your ex-division is ass deep in a massive intellectual property suit with the company. Nobody knows more about that property than you, except maybe Ozzie Endicott. How is old Ozzie, anyway?”

“I have no idea.”

“Really,” said Marve, in a way that made clear he didn’t believe me. I realized I still had a grip on Judson’s shirt, and when I felt the urge to give him a shake I snapped it out of my hand.

“Get lost,” I said to him.

He stood up, looking equal parts confused and defiant.

“I don’t know what your game is,” he said, “but …”

I cut off whatever he was about to say.

“My game is carpentry. And that’s the only game I’m interested in. I don’t know what George Donovan is up to and I don’t care. It’s got nothing to do with me. Go back and report that to the board. They already killed me once. Can’t do it again. Divine double jeopardy. Just don’t come back. You only get one pass. Next time I break your neck and dump you in the lagoon.”

I twitched in his direction and he lurched back a few steps, then turned and made a run for it. I whistled for Eddie to stay when he tried to follow Marve out the door. I busied myself sliding the clip back into the .45 and acquainting myself with the gun’s general operations. It was a beautiful woodhandled chrome automatic, an expensive limited edition Smith & Wesson.

“What do you think?” asked Amanda, looking over the top of her book.

“That I ought to quit while I’m ahead.”

“After you find the Japanese girl.”

“That wouldn’t be quitting while I was ahead.”

“Just try not to get killed,” she said. “I’m starting to enjoy it over here. All sorts of interesting people always dropping by.”

After a decent wait I went outside with Eddie to look around. All clear. The sky was blue-black and salted with stars. The air was dry but still warm from the early autumn day. We walked out to the street and looked for overembellished SUVs and loopy minivans. Marve was probably gone for now, but I knew I wasn’t done with him. Guys like him often display obsessive determination as a stand-in for genuine courage.

The aftershock of adrenaline release was zinging around my nerves again, which helped lift the dreary weight of the past. Con Globe had consumed the central core of my life, the vital arc from young adult into middle age. I’d been gone for years and still didn’t know how I felt about the whole thing. I preferred to concentrate on the present. The immediate present and then maybe a few hours ahead of that. This strategy was now threatened by the arrangement with Donovan and its by-products, like Honest Boy Ackerman, Marve Judson and disturbing photographs of Iku Kinjo.

I’d been living with a long list of feelings in need of repression, in particular disappointment and regret. Now here I was experiencing both. I looked back at my cottage, lit stem to stern. I could just make out the top of Amanda’s head bent over a book. An improvised riff of elevating emotion rose in a flourish around my disconcerted heart. It had come late to me, and was hardly a sure thing, but there it was. Heart and home all in one place, in plain view. Who knew.

I whistled for Eddie, who heeded the call, and we strolled slowly back home. I fingered the hard barrel of the .45 automatic and set aside further deliberation. I tucked it all into one of the few empty corners of my brain, stuffing it into a deep cabinet and slamming shut the door, a housekeeping chore at which I’ve proven myself particularly adept.