Hard Stop

SIXTEEN

THE NEXT MORNING my case for avoiding a physical exam was compromised by my inability to move without wincing or crying out in pain.

It was those damn ribs, pre-softened by Angel Valero.

So the first part of the day was spent in the tender care of a house-sized Jamaican trauma doctor named Markham Fairchild, whose bedside charm barely compensated for an obvious lack of sympathy.

“I tell you no more bangs to de head, and what do you do?” he said, looking down at me as they slid me into a thumping MRI.

“I didn’t bang my head. Just the rest of me.”

“Let me and dis machine be the judge of that.”

A few hours later I was back with Amanda in her pickup with a bellyful of lectures and a pocketful of prescription painkillers, none of which I intended to use.

“Can’t take the side effects. Rather have the pain.”

“Then give them to me,” said Amanda. “Fair compensation for all the chauffeuring.”

Our next stop was the Southampton Town Police, who were politely withholding the APB in anticipation of my prompt arrival.

Officer Orlovsky was way off her regular game. She called Ross without an argument and said please when she asked us to wait in the reception area. I whispered my amazement into Amanda’s ear.

“She’s got a crush on you, obviously,” she whispered back. “Doesn’t want to let on to me.”

The thought made me want to run back to the car and eat a handful of Markham’s pills.

Ross called for me the moment Jackie came through the door. She nodded at Amanda and glowered at me.

“Would you ask Ross if I can have a couple private moments with my client before we sit down?” she asked Orlovsky. “We haven’t had a chance to talk.”

“Sure thing, hon,” said Orlovsky, smiling graciously at Jackie, assuming common cause. “Take the interview room, down the hall, second right. I’ll tell the Chief.”

She buzzed us through the door, leaving Amanda out in reception with the public safety posters and dog-eared copies of Cop Station Quarterly.

Jackie wore black stretchy slacks, an iridescent green silk blouse opened one button too many and a camel hair sport coat that I swear had tails like an antique tux. I wanted to chase down the sadist who sold it to her and get her money back.

“Looking good, Jackie,” I said, as we pulled chairs up to a small conference table.

“You’re supposed to call me at the moment of catastrophe, not the next morning.”

“You’d only just yell at me for waking you up.”

“I’m yelling at you now.”

“Here’s the headline: Two guys tried to run me off the road and shoot me. Instead, they ran into the back of the Grand Prix and killed themselves. I recovered the gun and at least one of the bullets, which I gave to Joe Sullivan. There are no witnesses I know of, and yes, I’d been drinking heavily, but I always drink heavily, and no, I wasn’t drunk.”

“Breathalyzer?”

“Nope. Joe got there in time,” I said.

“Anything else you want to tell me?”

I told her everything I’d done in the last twenty-four hours, as thoroughly as my memory would allow. She huffed through the entire thing.

“I was going to brief you as soon as I had a chance,” I said. “I didn’t think we’d have to work against a deadline.”

“Deadline. Nice choice of words,” said Jackie.

“What matters is what I think now. I think it’s all connected to the maneuverings over Con Globe. I think all sorts of interested parties, including Angel Valero and nominally Phillip Craig, Eisler, Johnson, and insiders like Marve Judson and Mason Thigpen, are licking their greedy chops over the possibilities. An aberration in George Donovan’s behavior lit the fuse. Uninteresting to the casual observer, shocking, or inviting, to the insider. And somewhere in all the fog and fury some bastard thought killing Iku Kinjo was a good idea.”

“So it’s all connected,” said Jackie.

I huffed this time.

“Of course it’s connected. Occam’s razor. The most obvious interpretation is almost always the right one.”

“Almost.”

I huffed some more.

“Okay. I used the word ‘almost.’ A concession to relativism. A polite qualification meant to dress up a naked absolute. What do you want, a philosophical debate or an assessment of the situation? Either one’s okay with me.”

“How about a quieter voice?”

I realized I’d reared up off my chair and was half pitched across the table. Nerves.

“Sorry,” I said, settling back down.

“I’m on your side,” said Jackie.

“I know you are.”

“I would be even if you didn’t pay me.”

“And what have I paid you so far?” I asked.

“A dollar. I’ve invested it wisely.”

“Keep up the good work. There’re more dollars where that came from.”

“I’ll inform my broker.”

“I can’t let this stand,” I said.

“Our compensation arrangement?”

“Iku’s murder. There’s an assumption in the air that it’ll never get solved. You can smell it. The stink of inevitability. They’ve already conceded defeat with barely a fight.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Jackie asked.

“The collective ‘they.’ Cops, associates, reporters, friends—ostensibly—prosecutors. I’ve seen it before. Iku Kinjo becomes a casualty of war. An unidentified soldier in the battle between the difficult and the expedient.”

“Not Joe Sullivan.”

“No. Not Joe,” I said.

“And I think it’s a little early to start judging.”

“Probably is. We allowed to smoke in here?”

She made that face that was part grin, part smirk.

“You haven’t asked me about my trip to Princeton,” she said.

“You went there?”

“I assume all this condemnation doesn’t apply to me. The person who drove all the way to the middle of New Jersey in response to a single harebrained request from a guy who the next second forgot all about it.”

“I didn’t forget. I thought you forgot.”

She milked her triumph. I waited it out.

“Okay,” I said. “What did you find out.”

“Princeton is a beautiful place. People are always pissing on New Jersey, but parts of it are like paradise.”

“I feel that way about the Bronx.”

“Harder sell.”

“You learned some things at Princeton,” I said.

“I did. I don’t know how much bearing it’ll have on our chat with Ross,” she said.

“Give me a headline.”

“Your group renters were a bunch of art majors.”

“Iku?”

She laughed.

“Hell, no. Double major in economics and political science. Magna cum laude. No sports, no sororities, no clubs. Her extracurriculars were all curricula.”

“How’d you find this out?”

“Like I always do. I traded sex for information.”

“Now you tell me.”

“I found a guy in the alumni office who knew Bobby Dobson. He knew another guy in the office where they keep student transcripts. We formed a love triangle. At least in their dreams.”

“Why would an artso like Bobby hang around with a grind like Iku Kinjo?” I asked.

“He didn’t. He hung around with her roommates.”

I could tell by her face that we were about to play the guessing game.

“How ’bout we skip all that and you just tell me, in the interest of time.”

She shook her head.

“Ross’ll wait.”

“Elaine Brooks and Zelda Fitzgerald,” I said.

“You are such a pain in the ass.”

“Lucky guess.”

“Student housing had a computer program that matched incoming freshmen with their opposites. Diversity training 101. They were together through sophomore year, though by then Elaine was hanging out with Bobby in his off-campus apartment. Then Bobby, Elaine and Zelda went to Florence for their junior year. They shared a villa in the hills above the city with a few kids from the University of Bologna who were enrolled in the same program. Senior year the three of them got a country place in Hopewell, New Jersey, an easy commute to Princeton.”

“Recapturing the thrill of Tuscany?” I asked.

“Or togetherness. According to the boys at Princeton, Elaine, Zelda and Bobby ran as a pack. Inseparable. Iku had dropped out of the clique by now, either because of her academic schedule, or because she and Zelda were on the outs, or both.”

“On the outs? How come?”

“If you believe Bobby’s dear friend back at Princeton, Zelda was the jealous type. Especially when it came to Bobby and Elaine.”

“Or maybe just another rift between the arts and sciences,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“Meanwhile, Elaine ends up in an art gallery and Bobby works the help desk at Eisler, Johnson. Thy art, where goest thou?”

“Up his nose, probably. While Elaine was getting her art history MBA at Columbia, Bobby was working the bar at CBGB and studying a famous Columbian agricultural product. Intensely enough to wind up in a rehab tank in Connecticut.”

“I think I know that place.”

“Bobby’s disappointed parents paid the fare with the proviso that Bobby make something of his life, like get into the financial trades like his daddy did and stop all this artistic foolishness. Hence the MSc in computer science and the IT department at Eisler, Johnson.”

“And Elaine’s still his girlfriend?” I asked.

“Yes. According to What’s-his-name at Princeton, whose card is in my pocket, but am I going to call him? Not likely.”

“Is cruelty in the service of the truth actually cruel or merely expedient?”

“I let him kiss me. Better men have earned less.”

“Elaine,” I said, “was she a particularly committed girlfriend to Bobby, or did she, you know …”

“Did she play the field? Definitely.”

“What’s-his-name confirmed that?” I asked.

“He called her omnivorous. Claimed personal experience, but that doesn’t undermine the testimony. It was universally believed that she and Zelda were as much an item as she and Bobby, but again, no empirical evidence.”

Jackie said Elaine’s relationship with Bobby was assumed to be a safe haven from whence occasional forays were made. No evidence that this was reciprocal, nor that it wasn’t.

“All this from only two guys?”

“You remember the college social scene? Everybody’s business is everybody’s?”

“I never socialized, but I’ll take your word for it.”

A phone mounted on the wall of the interview room rang and made us both jump. Jackie answered and heard Ross tell her the leadership of the Southampton Town Police Force bore waiting with the patience of Job, but that even Job had his limits.

“We’re on our way,” she said.

When I stood up, she put her hand on my shoulder and gently pushed me back down.

“Before we go, do you remember Oswald Endicott?” she asked me. “He was the Director of Finance for TSS. His office was next to yours.”

“I remember Ozzie. Hard to forget now that his name keeps popping up. Not a bad guy. Worked like a bastard. Was always leaning over his file cabinet. Good at what he did. Loved surprise audits, which happened to us a lot, especially near the end.”

“Any reason why he’d refuse to cooperate with Tucker, Blenheim?”

“Who’re they?”

She stiffened.

“The outside counsel Donovan retained to look at your severance. Christ, Sam, you’re paying me way too much to ignore everything I tell you.”

“I’m not paying you anything.”

“Apparently Ozzie wouldn’t answer his phone, or the door, when they sent an associate up to Connecticut to interview him.”

I tried to get a better picture of Ozzie in my mind. What I saw was a disheveled workaholic. Obsessed with detail and precision. But joyfully so, because it came to him so easily. The perfect guy for the job, which is why I rarely thought about him, because he rarely gave me any trouble.

“What’s Ozzie got to do with this?” I asked.

“He’s also refused to cooperate with the intellectual property suit. Something Tucker didn’t know when they got your case to look at. When Mason Thigpen found out they were trying to talk to him they got a wrist slap and an order to back-off-in-no-uncertain-terms. Makes it a little hard for Tucker to do their job, since nobody would know more about your division’s numbers than your Director of Finance. So they were curious. They asked me if you had any ideas.”

None. I was still trying to remember if Ozzie had a wife and kids, where he lived or what he did on the weekend. Since I never asked about the personal life of anyone I worked with, this wasn’t surprising. But like Jackie said, and Marve Judson before her, he did sit in an office next to mine, and I spent a lot of time with him managing our divisional P&L.

Another call from Ross propelled us out of the room and into the arms of Officer Orlovsky, who herded us all the way to the little conference room that Ross and his detectives used to browbeat, manipulate and cajole unwary souls into abject self-incrimination. I’d been in that room a few times before and couldn’t say I was glad to be back.

On the way we walked through the squad room with all the cops and administrative people staring at me like they’d never seen me before. I wanted to lean into one of those portly desk jockeys and say “boo!,” but I knew that wouldn’t sit well with Ross, the guy who always seemed to have my future well-being in the palm of his capricious little hand.

I was relieved to see Ross alone this time. Mercifully, Veckstrom was out on assignment. This cleared the way for the three of us to cloud up the room without all the hacking commentary.

“Hey, Sam,” said Ross, “long time no interrogate.”

“Not an interrogation, Chief,” said Jackie, dropping the fifty-pound feed bag she used as a purse on the table, “a courtesy interview. Agreed to voluntarily.”

Ross took off his glasses and used both hands to rub his face hard enough to cause red marks to form on his cheeks.

“I love a lawyer with a sense of humor,” he said.

“There’re people you probably love, Ross, but none of them are lawyers,” I said, pulling our regular ashtray out of a battered credenza. I lit Camels for everybody and settled in.

I went to Southampton High School with Ross, but couldn’t remember ever talking to him there. We were both loners, each in a separate universe, though he managed to make a name for himself by appearing on a TV quiz show. He won a partial scholarship, which he used to study English literature, which everyone knows leads invariably to a life in crime and punishment. I do remember him as the only socially inept kid the whole school was afraid of. Even teenagers can sense a vibe, and Ross Semple’s said, “Don’t underestimate.”

“You know, Jackie,” he said, “any time there’s a fatal auto accident, we’re obligated to look back on the prior twenty-four hours of everyone involved. Dead or alive.”

So I told him what I told Jackie, which wasn’t entirely everything that happened in the last twenty-four hours, but I didn’t know how to explain finding Honest Boy Ackerman inside Amanda’s pickup truck or how I came into possession of Elaine Brooks’s coffee mug.

“I’m mostly interested in the connection between that poor girl’s death and those two bozos who ran into the back of your car.”

“Me, too,” I said, “and I’m certain there is one. They didn’t just ram into me, they tried to shoot me.”

“I don’t know if that’s so strange, Sam,” said Ross. “I can think of a lot of people who’d like to shoot you. Sometimes I want to shoot you myself.”

“Ever heard of El Cerberus?” I asked. “That’s who sent the killers, according to the killer who lived long enough to tell me.”

“Cerberus? The ugly dog guarding the gates of hell?” he asked. “Christ, has that damn thing got loose again?”

Jackie rolled her eyes up at the ceiling.

“Honestly, Ross.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“That pretty soon America will have out-sourced our entire civilization. But we knew that already.”

“The Chinese can have my job any time they want it,” said Ross. “They can figure out how to deal with Venezuelan hit men.”

“So you know they were Venezuelan,” I said.

“Geez, Sam, let’s try something different this time. Why don’t you tell me everything you know and I’ll tell you everything I know, so we both end up knowing the same things?”

I tried again to remember everything I felt okay telling him, which was most of it. He returned the favor by telling me he was the Chief of Police investigating a homicide and didn’t tell God what he knew until the case was cleared and the perp had died in prison or gone to the electric chair. Which sounds like a one-sided standoff, but I was good at reading between Ross Semple’s tortured lines. He liked having me out there poking around this one, especially since he was reasonably sure I hadn’t done it myself, which wasn’t often the case. And maybe he’d get lucky and catch the next guy who came after me, which could uncork the whole mess. Better bait than a red herring any day.

So after tossing out a few more softballs, he let us leave without even strong-arming Jackie into running an ad in the Police Ball program guide.

“Don’t get too comfy,” said Jackie, as we scooped up Amanda and walked out to the parking lot. “You’re not done with this yet.”

“Not until I fix my car,” I said.

“Oh, heavens. Why would you do that?” said Jackie.

“It’s my car.”

“It’s not a car, dear. It’s a battleship,” said Amanda.

“So far on the winning side of the battle. When do you think the cops’ll give it back?” I asked Jackie. “I’m a little worried about the frame. Be a bitch to find a straightener big enough.”

I let Jackie give me the usual warnings, remonstrances and pleas for sanity before she left in her pickup and we jumped into ours, the official vehicle of the East End’s local populace.

Amanda took the driver’s seat and started the engine.

“Where to, boss?” she said.

“Oak Point.”

“I know the place,” she said.

“Proceed briskly, but keep an eye on the rearview.”

“As unfunny as that is, at least you’re beginning to take this seriously.”

“Although prepared for martyrdom, I prefer that it be postponed.”

“St. Francis?” she asked.

“Winston Churchill. A hedonist more to my taste.”

“Indomitable?”

“Unrepentant.”

Eddie had everything under control when we got back. He greeted me first, but fussed more over Amanda. I attributed that to her lavish distribution of Big Dog biscuits and crostini slathered with Fromage d’Affinois.

I tried to use the rest of the day to build lawn ornamentation for Frank Entwhistle, but my mind stubbornly refused to concentrate on the task. Instead, I sat at my drawing table and allowed discontinuous images of Iku Kinjo, George Donovan and dead Venezuelans to crowd into the under-equipped, overlit little workspace.

This was apparently a time-consuming enterprise, because I was surprised to get a call from Amanda telling me it was already well past cocktail hour and we were still without food or drink.

I took a shower, and then in accordance with our usual division of labor, I stirred gin and Tom Collins mix into an icy tumbler and Amanda filled a bowl with yellow grapes. We lugged it all out to the edge of the breakwater, along with sweatshirts and flannel blankets, embracing the cooling season on its own terms.

“So what are you thinking now?” asked Amanda. “You must be thinking something.”

“I need to spend more time on the computer.”

“You don’t have a computer,” she said.

“Not working on it. Finding it.”

“Iku’s.”

“Sullivan’s scouring Vedders Pond. Worth doing, but it could be in a landfill somewhere, gone forever.”

“Unless the killer kept it,” she said.

“That’s what Bobby Dobson said.”

She asked what I thought the computer would tell me. I said I didn’t know, but probably a lot. It was a vast repository of data, ready to give up its secrets if you knew where, and how, to look. I talked about patterns and rhythms, but also how anomalies stand out against a background of consistencies, speed bumps on the smooth road surface. I told her you can read stress in even the most innocuous exchange, if you look for it. That you have to read the voice, not just interpret the words.

“Sounds like voodoo.”

“More like jazz,” I said.

“Okay.”

“Human language isn’t just the notes, it’s how they’re put together and played. Listen to a little early Coltrane before you boot up.”

“You learned this at MIT?”

“First semester, freshman year.”

From there we transitioned onto more productive topics, like the price of lumber and the relative merits of Tom Collins mix over standard tonic water and lime. Thus agreeably occupied, we burned up the early evening, which was relatively warm, and slipped into solid night, which wasn’t.

“I’m cold,” said Amanda.

“Cold, of course. Explains the shaking.”

We each suffered an overflowing armload of grape stems, glassware and dog biscuits, and made our unbalanced way across the broad lawn. Eddie, always overjoyed to head for the next thing, whatever it was, bounded toward my cottage, thinking that was our destination.

Partway there he broke into a full run, barking furiously.

We both stopped and looked into the blacked-out space between us and the cottage, made more so by the dim glow of the light above the front door.

Eddie’s bark went up another register.

I dropped the stuff I was holding and grabbed Amanda’s arm, causing her to drop her own load. I bent over and ran, pulling her along, at least for a few seconds before she started to run in earnest. I held on to her hand, and she dragged me across the last few yards of lawn to the small porch on the side of the cottage. We slid between a pair of bushy yews and dropped to the ground.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“No idea.”

“Maybe it’s nothing. We’re just being jumpy,” she said.

“He never barks like that.”

“He doesn’t.”

“Stay here,” I said, and immediately felt her start to rise.

“I mean it,” I said. “Just let me do this. I can’t be worrying about you.” She fell back down on the ground, letting my forearm slip through her fingers as she went.

“Write home.”

I moved along the periphery of the house, inside the overgrown shrubbery, and worked my way around to the front, peering as hard as I could into the dark, which revealed nothing outside the ordinary. A white-painted wooden porch lit by a yellow bulb in a glass shade above the door, a galvanized milk box from my childhood I was too stupid to throw out and the three-quarter-sized baseball bat I used to hit tennis balls for Eddie and occasionally whack people over the head.

I reached through the bushes and wrapped my hand around the bat, pulling it silently toward me. The feel of the handle flowed up through my wrist and all the way to the middle of my body. Courage transferred through the hardwood fibers.

Thus emboldened, I walked through the bushes and past the porch and out to the front lawn. I could hear the nervous whine Eddie used when trying to flush a bird out of a stand of sea grass, or a tennis ball from under the living room couch.

He was out to the lawn, prancing side to side, and staring at the narrow alley that led though the mounds of antique yew bushes to the front door. I shot the flashlight through the hole and saw it right away. I yelled to Amanda to come and take hold of Eddie’s collar. The thing was high up on the door, but well within his vertical lift.

“What? What?” she asked as she came around the corner.

“Just hold him,” I said.

Even in the colorless glow of the flashlight I could make out the component parts. A slick mass of grey cauliflower partially covered by a photograph of Amanda in her work shirt and headband, sweaty, pointing at something above her head. The image was seriously compressed, the telltale of a big telephoto lens. At least 400 mm.

Both were pinned to the door with a long Japanese knife.

A dark bead dripped off the cauliflower and landed on the floor. I followed it with my flashlight. It looked black, but when I bent down for a closer look, it was dark red. Confirming what I already thought.

A brain. A big bloody brain.