Hard Stop

TEN

I HAD TO SPEND THE NEXT two days in the little shop I built for myself in the basement of the cottage, to catch up on all the work I owed Frank Entwhistle. It was barely adequate to the tasks he’d normally assign: architectural details like mantelpieces, built-in bookcases and corner cabinets, and garden gates. I’d bought all the heavy equipment, like the table saw and lathe, and most of the smaller tools, from tradesmen I worked with on various job sites. The wear on some of those tools meant a fair amount of maintenance and repair, but I didn’t mind. In fact, I liked the chance to mix a little mechanical and electrical tinkering into all the sawdust.

I was ambivalent about the construction boom that had been going on in the Hamptons since about the time I wandered back home. Lucky for me, it provided a living. Enough to pay the taxes on the cottage, buy dog food for Eddie, parts for the Grand Prix—not an easy or inexpensive proposition—keep the lights on and fuel oil flowing, and sustain frequent forays to the Pequot.

My new woodcraft career bore some resemblance to the job I once had with the company. Design and fabrication, problem solving, enabling technology and a fair amount of trial and error. The only differences were the pay scale and the level of complexity.

And the management demands. At the company I had about four thousand people working in my division. Half of them were at headquarters in White Plains, the others scattered in field offices and operating plants all over the globe.

Nobody worked for me on Frank’s jobs, so I marked that as definite progress.

The equipment I once maintained and repaired was also more elaborate, with some petrochemical plants in the U.S. sprawling over an area the size of a small city. We built even bigger ones for the Saudis, Kuwaitis and Malaysians. All shiny new and run by automated control systems that reduced operating personnel from a few hundred to maybe two dozen. What a world.

The pay was a lot better at my old job, of course, I’d made a startling amount of money before losing most of it to Abby when we got divorced. I don’t know what she’s done with it because I haven’t spoken to her since the last time I saw her. If I can preserve that record till the day I die, it will have been a worthwhile investment.

It’d be nice to say my interest in engineering came from my father, who was a car mechanic his whole life and never designed a flue gas scrubber or optimized a single ammonia plant. For me, every faulty device was a little puzzle that was fun to solve. For him, it was a battle against evil, intransigent machines possessed by demons whose sole purpose was to frustrate his every honest effort.

As I moved into designing the devices themselves, the puzzle became making things that had never been made before. My reward was more than a favorable outcome, it was the thing itself, something I could look at, touch, contemplate in three dimensions. Tangible manifestations of imagination, of dreams.

People think things of substance are where legitimate value lives, where wealth is created. I learned wealth actually comes from manipulating the consequences of having material things. It’s the financial side of the house that ultimately matters. Since finance is based more on assumption and belief than empirical reality, it’s far closer to the world of imagination than the steel, gears and wiring of a complex process application.

So who am I to beef? It wasn’t the company’s fault I wanted my imagination to produce something more tangible than a number in the middle of a ledger column.

I don’t know where Iku Kinjo stood on this question. I know she had little difficulty absorbing the technical information I threw at her, never looking intimidated or knocked off balance. This was a woman who lived entirely in the world of the immaterial, the theoretical. The consultant’s world of genius, smoke and mirrors.

If the young Iku thought my operation could stand as a model for the rest of the company, I’m sure it pained her to admit it, but that was what her research and judgment yielded, and that was what she was going to report. No matter her personal feelings toward me.

Thoughts like this set my mind adrift as I worked alone in the shop. Mostly alone. Eddie would hang around when the power tools were off and I was drawing or noodling out a design. That’s why he was down there when I heard a gentle knock on the hatch door. Like the valiant watchdog he was, he looked up half interested. When Burton Lewis came down the stairs it was a different story.

“Quit sucking up,” I said, watching Eddie’s fawning attentions. “You’re already in his will.”

“You and your heirs,” said Burton.

“The ones we can find.”

“That’s what DNA is for. How about a beer?”

Despite the best efforts of visiting cops and intruders, I still had some of the good stuff. Burton dug one each out of the basement fridge and pulled a stool over to my drawing table.

Burton was about ten years younger than me, but still managed to look at least as weathered and roughed up, in a boyish, handsome sort of way, if all those things can be present in a single individual. It wasn’t because of a hard life, though Burton certainly worked as hard as anyone I knew. His great-grandfather had established one of the notable American fortunes in the early part of the last century and Burton had built it up from there. He was unquestionably a rich guy, though with little interest in pampered indolence.

He once said, “Spending the precious hours of one’s life pursuing leisure and entertainment, or obsessed by self-glorifying avocations—what could be more abhorrent? What are you if you aren’t contributing to the economic advancement of the community at large? A silly, emasculated contrivance whose sole purpose is the redistribution of someone else’s hard-earned treasure.”

Before building his tax law business he’d founded a free criminal defense practice that operated out of a storefront in the City. Over the years it continued to expand and command a large portion of his precious hours and concentration. Everyone assumed this was standard noblesse oblige, but the truth was Burton loved the challenge and access to lives lived far closer to the bone than he’d otherwise ever experience. Along the way, he’d made a home for the idealists and misfits of the legal profession, and provided first-class defense to any and all, the less deserving the better.

He was able to work at whatever he wanted to work at, when he wanted to work, but I didn’t begrudge him that.

“So,” he said, “I’m holding two beers. Why loiter in a woodshop when the Little Peconic awaits just outside the door?”

On the way to the Adirondacks I started to brief him on current events, which I continued through two more rounds of beer.

He listened carefully throughout, then said, “The promise to modify your severance agreement offers some intriguing possibilities.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it. Anyway, it’s not about that now. It’s about the dead girl.”

“Not your obligation. You found her. There was no proviso concerning dead or alive,” he said.

“What do you know about the Phillip Craig Group?”

“The company reflects the personality of the founder: deranged by ambition and greed. Talented investors, though, I have to say. Creative. Our firm has managed the tax particulars on their major acquisitions. Most of the work had been done for us by their own excellent counsel. Anticipated nearly everything.”

“Iku was involved with them on the big oil deal,” I said.

“Big is right.”

“You know Angel Valero?”

“Nominally. The name comes up in relation to Craig. I see him at fundraisers, the Financial Roundtable. Nothing beyond that.”

“Reputation?”

“Deranged by ambition and greed. I thought we covered that.”

“We did.”

This time of the season most of the big powerboats had emptied out of the Little Peconic Bay. There were still small fishing boats hugging the buoys and rocking in the turbulence above the shoals, and a scattered fleet of sailboats responding to the better wind and lighter traffic. Again, I felt a pull as I watched the sails angled to the wind glide across the green coast of the North Fork.

“Getting out on the boat much?” I asked Burton.

“A cruise or two. Club racing. Enough to satisfy the impulse.”

“Is that impulse a lifetime thing?” I asked.

“Begins in utero,” said Burton.

“Hm.”

We studied the approach and subsequent disorganized tack of a small sloop. Neither of us wanted to break the spell by criticizing the maneuver.

“I need to talk to Angel Valero,” I said. “I think I have an introduction, but I need a shtick. Something to get him talking.”

Burton always looked slightly in need of a haircut. A thing he drew notice to by frequently using his fingers to comb his hair off his forehead, a futile gesture when sitting at the edge of the breezy Little Peconic Bay.

“Large-scale investments are at once dauntingly complex and simple as it gets,” he said. “The complexity is all in the targeting of opportunity, the valuation and subsequent number crunching, the accounting and regulatory contortions, conflicts in corporate structures, tax implications—our bailiwick—and personnel considerations, mostly as it relates to management, though sometimes middle management and unions come into play. To say nothing of core business practices and strategic planning.”

“What’s the simple part?” I asked.

“The motivation.”

“Ambition and greed?”

“Natural economic evolution. The formation and reformation of corporate enterprise, a necessary function of a dynamic free market system. Anyway, people like to buy and sell things, and when those things are worth billions of dollars, it calls for robust capital markets. It also breeds people like Angel Valero.”

“A dealmaker.” I said.

“Not exactly. Angel operates on the outer fringes of the hedge fund and private equity business. Very aggressive, creative, risk-based. The type who buys a business, usually distressed, at a big discount, reorganizes the company, then rearranges the playing field, changing not only the business model but the market in which it operates.”

“You can do that?”

“Angel runs a unit at Craig they all call Special Ops, short for special opportunities, meaning anything you can turn into a huge profit if you have huge capital to invest and a willingness to take the accordant risk. A slot machine maker in country A is bankrupt, partly because country B next door has banned gambling. You buy the slot business, figure out a way to repeal the gambling law, and bingo, if you’ll forgive the expression. A bank in the next country is collapsing under defaults because management is made up of second cousins who happen to be the brothers and sisters of the borrowers. You buy the bank at a fire-sale price, broom everyone in management, entice a third party collections operation with giant commissions and have at it. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, but people like Angel Valero do it every day.”

“Make good money, does he?”

“A few hundred million a year, if you believe the street. I think that’s an underestimate. Craig is privately held, and pretty opaque, but the word is Special Ops comprises a tenth of the revenue and forty percent of the profit.”

“So Angel will talk to me if I have a lead on an exotic, undervalued financial opportunity.” I gestured toward the driveway. “Like a 1967 Pontiac Grand Prix.”

“An asset to tantalize the cagiest investor.”

For some reason Eddie brought us a slimy piece of driftwood that he’d pulled from one of the tidal pools next to the beach. He dropped it in front of Burton and stood poised to chase it like he usually did with normal things like oak limbs and tennis balls.

Burton obliged and we watched Eddie do his soaring wonder dog routine off the breakwater.

“Sorry about that,” I said to Burton, watching him wipe his hands on his khaki duck hunters.

“Interesting departure.”

“That’s what he wants you to think.”

Eddie’s toss-the-beach-debris game and a few more beers occupied the rest of the productive day. We wandered down some desultory conversational paths, some relating to the dismal prospects of any baseball franchise arrayed against the Yankees. Burton caught me up on the garden renovations at his estate over near the ocean, and his success at tiling the master bathroom. Years ago he’d set himself the challenge of mastering—or at least making an honest go of—the construction trades, an area of common interest that first brought us together. As with most things Burton did, it was misinterpreted as a way to get in touch with working-class sensibilities. Burton just liked to build stuff, and uncover wonderful new experiences, like meeting the dry cleaner or using an ATM card at the grocery store.

“By the way,” he said to me as I walked him back to his car, “Angel worked as a professional wrestler while earning his MBA. His nom de guerre was ‘The Brainiac.’ Word is physical intimidation features largely in his negotiating repertoire.”

While I watched Burton drive off in his late-seventies Ford Country Squire, an automotive atavism as illogical as the Grand Prix, Eddie trotted up to me with another hunk of driftwood, more slickened with saliva than brine. I reached down to take it, but he moved out of the way and headed for Amanda’s place.

“Good luck with that one,” I called to him, but he continued undeterred, head upright and tail under sail, happy in his eccentricities.

For all I know Eddie and Amanda spent the rest of the evening tossing and retrieving smelly chunks of petrified wood. Neither of them interrupted me as I sat at the pine table on the screened-in porch scribbling on a yellow legal pad. This was a habit of mine left over from my troubleshooting career. Writing things down helped me think, if only by holding certain thoughts immobile as suppositions to validate or upend.

Deep into the night, I was still underlining and pointing arrows at one of these suppositions when a thought occurred to me. I picked up the phone.

“Wha’,” said Jackie.

“If you’re stoned I can call you back.”

“Asleep. What time is it?”

“Bedtime. If you live in the next time zone.”

“Christ.”

“Is your computer still on?” I asked her.

“My computer’s at the office. My old computer that I hardly ever use is on the porch disintegrating in the salt air.”

“Can you use it to get on the Internet?”

“Oh, you heard about the Internet? Did you also hear that you, too, could access this modern marvel simply by buying your own fucking computer?”

“Start ’er up. I’ll hold,” I said, lighting a cigarette and settling into a more comfortable chair.

She said a few more things I couldn’t make out, I guess intentionally. About ten minutes later she came back on the line.

“Finding the thing under all the stuff on my desk was the biggest challenge,” she said. “Started right up. Good old HP.”

“See what you can find on Jerome Gelb, an employee of Eisler, Johnson.”

“Iku’s place.”

“Former place, according to Gelb.”

I knew enough not to interrupt her when I could hear the tap-tap of the keyboard, so I let her work in silence.

“He’s a senior partner,” she said, several minutes later. “Way up the food chain. Specialist in strategic mergers and acquisitions within global heavy industry. Ran Eisler offices in Zurich, Mumbai, Tehran—I didn’t know you could have an office in Tehran—Caracas and Tokyo, for ten years, before returning to New York to head up their International Energy Practice. A graduate of Wharton, he’s married with two children, his hobby is foreign languages, and his favorite quote is ‘If you snooze, you lose.’ I wonder how you say that in Farsi.”

“No mention of Marla Cantor,” I said.

“Who’s that?”

“His girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

“How’re you on American literature?” I asked.

“Excellent, Bub. I was an English major.”

“See if you can get Zelda Fitzgerald’s address and phone number.”

She was quiet on the end of the line.

“Sorry, Sam. I focused on the early nineteenth century. Mostly Romantics. Like me.”

“Just look. I think she’s here on Long Island. Maybe in the City.”

I could hear the patter of Jackie’s fingers on the keys, frantic little bursts alternating with cautious deliberation. In my mind’s eye I could see her staring, more like glowering, at the screen. Coaxing the computer to give up the goods.

“Holy cow, there she is,” she said, after about ten minutes. “In Amagansett.”

“You have her address?”

“She’s a big donor to the East Hampton Library.”

“And why not?”

“It just says ‘Zelda Fitzgerald of Amagansett.’ Let me see if I can get closer than that.”

I could almost hear the baying of hounds as Jackie mounted the chase. Even dragged out of a deep sleep, she was helpless in the face of her own inquisitiveness.

“Unless there’s more than one Zelda Fitzgerald on the East End, I’ve got her address. Phone’s unlisted. I could try the wireless directory.”

“You could?”

“Oh, please.”

When I was a kid, Amagansett, on the east side of East Hampton, seemed as far away as Chicago. Later it was a stop on the way to Montauk, where my father and I hired out to the sport fishermen, a part-time trade he brought me into out of some peculiar sense of paternal obligation. I didn’t like the work or the clients, but I liked being out on the water with the captains and crew.

“I can’t find a phone number,” said Jackie. “Maybe Zelda doesn’t have a phone.”

“It could be in Scott’s name.”

“I’m assuming this is connected to Iku Kinjo,” she said.

“It is.”

“Keep Sullivan in the loop,” she said. “Even the guesses.”

“I will. You should go to bed. It’s way too late to be messing around on the computer.”

“Unbelievable.”

I’d been messing around myself for the last five or six hours with little in the way of drink to keep me company. This left me strangely sober and awake, a condition I corrected with a sturdy nightcap. My mood lately had been drifting alarmingly toward unaccustomed moderation. I should keep an eye on that, I thought to myself as I fell back on the daybed, flicked out the light and looked at the big blue moon staring brilliantly above the black horizon.

I tried to get Sullivan the next morning but he was up island visiting the DA. So I left a message on his office answering machine. I told him about Jerome Gelb and Marla Cantor. And Angel Valero. I told him I got Angel’s name from Bobby Dobson. Then I told him I was on my way to Zelda’s house in Amagansett, but if he could call me with any news I’d be grateful. I didn’t know if they monitored his voice mail at the station, so I didn’t mention forensics, but he’d know what I meant.

I’d decided to head over to Zelda’s since I still hadn’t worked out my approach to Angel Valero. It was a Friday in late September, so there was a better than even chance she’d be in the City. Jackie’d told me there were a dozen Zelda Fitzgeralds in Manhattan alone. More specifics would have to wait.

Anyway, it was a good day for a drive. I had Eddie with me, who was having a hard time deciding which window to stick his head out of. I tried to focus him by shutting the two in the back, but he barked at me until I opened them again.

“Next time you drive. See how you like it.”

He stared at me, considering the offer.

“Not until you learn the stick shift.”

The calendar said it was fall, but it still looked and felt like summer. A few of the trees, mostly unhealthy maples, had begun to turn red and yellow, but the rest were still green. The clearest sign of the change in seasons was the traffic on Montauk Highway, still heavy but moving. I took the back roads anyway, partly out of habit and partly to catch the views off Scuttle Hole Road, the white fences, barns, vineyards and potato fields. And to give Eddie a chance to yelp at the show horses, none of whom were inclined to retort.

According to the map, Zelda’s house was equidistant between the beach and downtown Amagansett, which was essentially a short row of shops to either side of Montauk Highway, which I passed before dropping down toward the ocean. The houses lining the streets were mostly standard Hamptons shingle-style cottages of a certain vintage. Out in the fields beyond were clusters of newly developed attempts at postmodernism, and the occasional all-out mansion. The really serious stuff was at the end of white-pebbled driveways, standing like citadels behind towering fortifications of privet and arborvitae.

Knowing this, I was interested to see the number for Zelda’s place beside a drive made up of two parallel bands of sand, with a strip of grass in between, that disappeared around a curve a hundred yards into a stand of scrub oak and evergreen.

The Grand Prix wasn’t the world’s best off-road vehicle, so I took it very slowly. I pulled Eddie back from the window and raised it so he couldn’t jump out. I was afraid of creatures lurking in the woods whose scent might prove irresistible.

As I approached the house, I was braced for Jay Gatsby. What I got was Brothers Grimm.

The cottage looked like it had been built inside a pair of gigantic holly trees. The front door was in the middle of the gable end, with a pair of windows to either side, and a Palladian half-circle above. It was stucco imbedded with wide slabs of wavy planks of thickly painted wood. The front stoop, a single rounded chunk of grey stone, was only a few inches high. In fact, it looked like the house was set directly on the ground, a possibility given its vintage, which I guessed to be late 1800s. The driveway ended under a pergola, which was doing a poor job of sheltering a leaf-splattered Nissan Altima.

I left Eddie in the car and did my best to wield the ten-ton brass door knocker. The door was snapped open by a very tall young woman in a kimono. Her features were unnaturally small for her size, probably exaggerated by the cut of her dark black hair, which curved down from a center part to form two sharp points just below her chin. The color of her eyes was at that moment a mystery, covered as they were by tiny black sunglasses.

“I saw you coming,” she said. “I don’t usually stand by the door.”

“Zelda Fitzgerald?”

“And who would be asking?”

“Sam Acquillo. I was a friend of Iku Kinjo.”

Her sloped shoulders fell a few degrees forward.

“It’s horrible,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

She leaned against the doorjamb, taking the weight off one long leg. “How did you say you knew Iku?” she asked.

“I didn’t. I knew her from work.”

She stood up straight again and reached for the door.

“Not a client, I hope,” she said, her voice gaining a notch in volume.

“Not Angel, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

“Fucking Angel is how we put it.”

She started to close the door. I put my hand out to stop her.

“I’m the one who found her.”

She let go of the door and leaned back on the jamb, and studied me. At least I think she did. It was hard to tell with her eyes blacked out.

“It’s malarkey, you know,” she said, after a pause.

“What is?” I asked.

“Suicide. Would never happen.”

“That’s what they’re saying?”

“Possible suicide. It was on the news this morning.”

News to me.

“What do you think?” I asked. “If not suicide.”

“I have a kettle boiling. You drink tea?”

“Under duress.”

“Come in anyway. Maybe I can find some coffee.”

She fell back into the house and I followed her. The style of the interior carried through the general motif. I was glad she was leading the way. The woodwork was so dark I could barely see where I was going as we moved through the front hall, which was dominated by a stubby grandfather clock and the stuffed head of a black bear. The ceiling might have been seven feet high, probably less. Zelda almost had to crouch to get through the doors. In the kitchen things lightened up considerably, helped along by a wall-length window made of maybe fifty individual panes of glass. The kitchen was packed into a tight space, but sparkling clean and organized.

The smell from a thick, blue-grey spice plant, I guessed thyme, filled the air. A fat little tea kettle whistled on the stove, as advertised.

“I used to drink coffee,” said Zelda, “until my father died of cardiac arrest one morning at breakfast. The sight of him sitting there in disbelief sticks with a person.”

She scooped up the kettle and dumped the steaming water into a mug. It smelled great.

“I’m sold,” I said. “Give me one of those.”

“It’s Hibiscus Paradise. Irresistible aroma.”

“Apparently.”

After handing me a mug, she leaned up against the counter and clinked around hers with a spoon. She still wore the black-dot sunglasses. The kimono told about as much as any kimono about the shape underneath. The V at her neck took a pretty severe plunge, but I was trying hard not to look. I was only able to judge the shape of her shoulders, which were wide and angular, like a swimmer’s. The fingers that held the mug were also long and thin.

“I only knew Iku on the job,” I said to her. “I’m glad to know she had friends. Had a life outside.”

Zelda clinked the mug a few more times.

“How did you know she was a friend of mine?”

I picked a New Yorker off the counter.

“You get these at Bobby’s house.”

She pursed her lips.

“Quite the long shot,” she said.

“With a name like yours?”

“My great-grandparents owned a place out here two doors down from Gerald and Sara Murphy. My mother married a pretty drunk named Mike Fitzgerald. You can guess the rest.”

She told the tale like she’d told it a thousand times, which she probably had.

“Lucky for you Tallulah Bankhead preferred Atlantic Beach.”

Something like a smirk formed across her narrow lips.

“Funny,” she said. “No, honestly. Very funny. What did you say you did?”

“I didn’t. But I used to be an engineer. Iku advised the company I worked for. How’d you know her?”

“Robert, the dear heart. He brought her home like he’d found a wet puppy by the side of the road. Not exactly wet. Wrecked would be more like it.”

I clinked my own mug a little. Getting into the groove of Zelda’s kitchen.

“Where was home?”

She pointed at me with the handle of her spoon.

“You don’t think it was suicide either, do you? And you’re not an engineer, are you?”

“I am. And I’m not a cop. And no, I don’t think it was suicide.”

“You think somebody killed her,” said Zelda.

“I do.”

“And you are, again?”

“Sam Acquillo.”

“Should I be expecting a call from the police?”

“Probably.”

“I thought so,” she said, half to herself. “From the moment I saw you walking toward the door. You were intense.”

She put her foot up on the rung of a kitchen chair, and in so doing allowed the kimono to part across her leg. It was a very long, very slender leg that I could follow almost as far as it went. The way she covered up when she noticed me looking made looking feel that much worse.

“I hope you find him quick,” she said, pretending what had happened hadn’t happened. “We can’t have people out there killing our brilliant and beautiful.”

“So where was home? Vedders Pond?”

“You engineers are very persistent,” she said. “Dogged even.”

“If you like dogged, I got some in the car.”

“Yes. That was our place, on the pond. Robert, Elaine and I. Robert has rented it every summer since college to get away from his parents and we chipped in. Others would come and go, and help spread the burden. Like Elaine’s brother this summer, with his unfortunate girlfriend.”

“Sybil Shandy?”

She nodded.

“The hostess at Roger’s,” she said “You probably know her.”

“If I could afford to eat at Roger’s. And Iku?”

“She joined the party this summer.”

“As Bobby’s girlfriend?”

She looked startled. Then she smiled an actual smile.

“Is that what I should tell the cops?” she asked.

“Is it the truth?”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“Yeah, it matters. Your friend’s dead. Not coming back. It matters how that happened.”

She pushed herself off the kitchen counter and leaned over the table, supporting herself with her palms flat on the cherrywood surface.

“I loved Iku. She was a superstar. A shooting star. Robert, Elaine and I had all lived together since our junior year in Florence. We wore each other like comfy old clothes. Too comfy. Iku lit up the world. Our little world. Having her around was the best thing that could have happened to us. Don’t lecture me on what it means to lose her.”

She seemed to be trying to stare me down.

I leaned across the table myself, meeting her halfway. “Fair enough,” I said. “So who killed her?”

She finally took off her black sunglasses, revealing a set of brilliant cobalt blue eyes.

“She loved all of us,” she said. “Why not try the ones she hated? The people she worked with. Clients and colleagues. She loathed them all.”

“Not all of them. Me she merely disliked.”

Zelda had something to say about that, but was interrupted by the shrill twitter of my cell phone. It took a few moments to remember how to answer the thing.

“Hey, Acquillo, good news,” said Jerome Gelb. “I’m leaving my wife. And I owe it all to you. I thought you should know right away.”

“Mazel tov. Though I told you I’d keep Marla to myself.”

“Sure, so you can keep a gun at my head. Not anymore, compadre.”

“So how’d you get my name?”

“I got a call from Mason Thigpen.”

“How is the little craphead?” I asked.

“Talkative. He told me who you are and what you are.”

“An altruist?”

“A violent sociopath. He called to warn me about you. He said his security team was investigating your activities. They sound like some pretty tough customers.”

“The toughest.”

“But you know what?” he said. “I don’t care. I’m in way too good a mood. Before you know it, I’m going to be a free man. Of course, it’ll cost a fortune.”

“Yeah, but what cost freedom?”

“By the way, I also called Angel Valero to warn him, too. I gave him your name. He was very appreciative.”

“Who’s talkative now?”

“Ah, it’s a great day. I’m going to take some time off to smell the roses. You should think about doing that yourself.”

“All I smell is Hibiscus Paradise,” I said.

“Hey, Acquillo, one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Fuck you,” he shouted, then hung up.

I flicked the phone shut and stuffed it in my pocket.

“Sorry about that,” I said to Zelda.

“It’s hard to imagine the other side of that conversation.”

“It is for me, too, and I was listening to it.”

Zelda looked eager to rid herself and her Hobbit hole of my presence, and I couldn’t blame her. I made it easy by stumbling through the dark toward the front door without being asked. Though there was one question in serious need of answering.

“So did Iku actually have a boyfriend?”

She seemed to enjoy the question. Though now that I could see her eyes it seemed I knew even less about what she was thinking. So her smile might have been genuine, or I might have just thought it was in the dim light of the foyer.

“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think?”

On the way back to North Sea I was jarred again by the ring of my cell phone.

“You want to talk to me?” said a voice so deep I thought it was synthesized.

“Depends on who you are.”

“Angel Valero. You want to talk to me?”

“Yes. I want to talk to you.”

He gave me an address on Dune Drive in Southampton.

“Five o’clock. I’ll be down at the pool,” he said, then hung up.

“Doesn’t anybody say goodbye anymore?” I asked Eddie, but he couldn’t hear me with his head out the window, trolling the breeze for bugs and the streets for miniature French poodles to roust from their coddled complacency.