Hard Stop

TWENTY

“BUT WHY, SAM?” said Jackie. “Why when I’m so overbooked and tired and in need of personal hygiene, starting with a soapy shower and dental floss?”

“It’s way too early to be in bed,” I said. “You still have that old computer at home, right?”

I was on the landline back at the cottage. Before she could fill the phone with complaint I caught her up on the past few days. It was enough to revive her attention, if not her spirits. I told her I really needed her to find some things on the Web. She asked me for the millionth time why I didn’t get a PC of my own and look it up myself. I told her I could do that, but then she’d miss out on all the fun.

“What a doll.”

I waited for her to go to the back porch and boot up the good old HP. Through her portable phone I could hear the sound of keys tapping, ice in a glass and a match being struck.

“No dope until you do the search,” I called into the phone.

“I’m not even going to dignify that,” she said, coming back on. “What am I looking for?”

“Not what. Who. Oswald Endicott. Located somewhere in Connecticut.”

“Westbrook, according to Tucker.”

“Okay, Westbrook,” I said.

I waited through another minute of key taps.

“Whoa,” said Jackie, in a barely audible voice.

“What?”

“We’re too late,” she said.

“We are?”

“He’s dead.”

“He is?”

“Give me a second to read.”

I gave her a few minutes, which I used to light the first of the next day’s Camel ration.

“This from the online edition of Shoreline News,” said Jackie. “Oswald Endicott, sixty-one, was found at four a.m. in a car parked at West Beach in Westbrook with a fatal bullet wound to the head. Police are investigating what they say is an apparent suicide, but have not released additional details. Endicott, a native of Flint, Michigan, has lived in Westbrook since the late nineties. He retired there following a nearly thirty-year career as a financial manager for Consolidated Global Energies in White Plains, New York. Divorced in 2000, Endicott has no living relatives. A memorial service will be held at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Stamford.”

She read the time and date.

“That’s tomorrow.”

Jackie was quiet on the other end of the line, but I could hear the keys rattling like machine-gun fire.

I took the phone with me out to the screened-in front porch and sat at the pine table so I could look at the bay. The sun was barely angling above the line of mist on the eastern horizon, just below the tree tops, so I didn’t see it, but saw the effect on the surface of the water. The air was clear enough to see the North Fork lit up along the horizon. I liked looking at it better than the images forming in my head of the table in some airless, joyless conference room where Ozzie and I would go through the monthly financials, him patiently explaining the numbers and teaching me for the hundredth time the accrual method of accounting and the difference between labor and material inventories.

“This from the archives of The Wall Street Journal,” said Jackie, coming back to life. “Con Globe announced on Monday the early retirement of another key executive within its Technical Services and Support business unit, which was spun off last month in a sale to the European oil giant Société Commerciale Fontaine. Oswald Endicott had been Director of Finance at the division for more than a decade. His follows a series of similar departures, beginning with TSS Divisional Vice President Sam Acquillo, whose resignation immediately followed announcement of the TSS sale to Fontaine. According to Con Globe spokespeople, Acquillo’s decision to resign was for personal reasons unrelated to the sale … Wasn’t the reason you personally socking Mason Thigpen in the jaw?”

“In the nose. Important distinction.”

So Ozzie had bailed out with the rest of the old TSS hands. Not surprising, since we all knew what Fontaine would do with our operation—essentially chop it up and scatter it across their organization, which was even more global than Con Globe, and probably three times the size. There might have been some nice opportunities in playing on a bigger stage, so it might not have been the smartest thing to do, but it didn’t surprise me. We’d built TSS from next to nothing, operating with relative autonomy outside the attention, and thus meddling, of corporate management. The better of our people would never stomach working for people they hadn’t chosen. They were too independent and obstinate.

Of course, Ozzie probably had a few other incentives. Probably a whole bucketful of carrots and sticks.

I asked Jackie what he did post–Con Globe.

“As far as I can tell, nothing,” she said.

“No jobs, no hobbies, no charities?”

“No nothing. If I didn’t have his address in Westbrook, and the news clip, I wouldn’t know he even lived there.”

I ask her to look up his ex-wife, admitting, to my regret, that I didn’t know her name. I probably never knew her name.

“I can find it by checking genealogical records. Or it might be on the title to his house, since they were still married when he bought it.”

“Great. I’ll wait.”

“Gee thanks.”

While I waited I tried to remember the names of the secretaries we shared. There were a lot of them, so I should have recalled at least one. But I didn’t really see the need for a secretary, so I didn’t give them much to do. There was a typing pool in the sales department that took care of my letters and I didn’t want anyone answering my phone. I was perfectly capable of saying hello all on my own.

Ozzie gave them too much to do, so it should have balanced out, but it was really too much. He was always respectful and polite, but with the exception of an ex-cop who was going to night school for accounting all of them quickly succumbed to the tidal wave of work flowing from his office.

“How does Priscilla sound?” asked Jackie.

“Like it goes with Oswald.”

“Until 2000.”

“Who got the house?” I asked.

“He did, apparently, since it’s still his address. You didn’t tell me he had money.”

“He does.”

“Well, the place cost him over five million dollars in the mid-nineties,” said Jackie. “You can triple that now.”

I switched on the light beside the pine table and pulled a yellow pad out of the magazine rack. I sat down and started to draw boxes and arrows. I couldn’t help it. Next to looking at the Little Peconic Bay, nothing worked as well to organize my brain.

“What do we do now?” Jackie asked.

“We take a trip.”

“No we don’t.”

“Just a short trip.”

“To where?”

“I’ll bet Priscilla lives in Stamford,” I said.

The line went quiet for another few minutes.

“She does. Unless it’s a different Priscilla Endicott.”

“Then that’s where we’re going. In time for the memorial.”

“You’re not going to share this theory with me, are you. What happened to full and free disclosure?”

“I’ll fully disclose on the way to Connecticut. I’ll pick you up at nine. We’ll take the ferry. Suck in a little sea air. You’ll love it.”

“You’re going to hang up on me, aren’t you? After all I’ve done.”

“You’ll love it, I promise,” I said, then hung up on her and called Joe Sullivan.

The water in the Little Peconic Bay would usually stay warm well into October, but warmth is a relative thing. That night it was plenty cold, though not enough to discourage me from stripping off all my clothes and jumping in and swimming out as far as I dared.

As more of a thrasher than a swimmer, keeping close to shore was advisable, even when I feel energetic enough to swim to the North Fork and have a beer at a bar I know off Corey Creek.

Looking at the Little Peconic was great for clearing the mind. Jumping into it even better.

Especially since it gave me the opposite vantage point, looking in at the cottage, with its screened-in porch, now lit by a single standing lamp next to the pine table on which sat a yellow pad filled with a fresh set of schematics and calculations.

I didn’t like seeing Amanda’s house mostly in the dark, only brushed by the glow of the post lamp next to her driveway. I’d seen it like that before, during the bad times when I’d lost her to the lunacies of the moment. For George Donovan, that loss was unrecoverable. How did it feel for Ozzie Endicott when Priscilla packed her bags and walked away from the big new house? Who was grief-stricken and who relieved?

Burton once told me that behind every murder was either love or greed.

Or both.

I spent most of the next morning in bed. I’d woken up later than usual, lulled by the absence of the near bark Eddie used to roust me to make breakfast.

I lay there for another hour running the numbers—the probabilities, however half-baked and ill-conceived. I missed Amanda’s warm body, though it was probably better not to have the loss of concentration, of focus. I called her to tell her that.

“I’m concentrating on fresh melon, prosciutto and a mocha latte with cinnamon sprinkled on top,” she said.

“So Burton’s feeding you all right.”

“Food, shelter and a small security detail. Fernando and Jarek are actually quite the carpenters. Eddie stays here with Isabella. She’s teaching him Spanish. He already knows ‘come eat’ and ‘no pissing on the furniture.’ But believe it or not, we’d still rather be back at Oak Point.”

I briefed her as well as I could, sticking to what I knew, and letting the theories stay theoretical. She acted as if that was good enough for her, which was good enough for me.

After hanging up I went into the kitchen and brewed a large pot of Gevalia chocolate raspberry coffee, which I drank as accompaniment to my first Camel ration. I brought the pot into the outdoor shower where I spent the next half hour pondering the plan. And as usual I failed to advance the plan, even fractionally. But I did get through the whole pot of coffee.

Jackie was in full mourning regalia: black leather jacket over a black cashmere sweater, black pleated miniskirt over black woolen tights, black motorcycle boots out of which poured thick-knit black socks.

“Do you think this is formal enough?” she asked.

“Not for the Hells Angels. They’ll probably be there.”

“I don’t have a lot of black.”

My daughter could’ve helped her there. That’s all she had. Claimed it saved on laundry bills, but I knew it meant fewer decisions to make in the morning.

The day was fresh and clean. The sunlight hard and clear. We were in Amanda’s red pickup with the windows down so we could smoke without smelling up the upholstery. The soft air, blessedly dry, swirled around and created a pleasant side benefit: the resulting noise gave me an excuse to avoid anything so complicated as an explanation.

“But you’re going to tell me when we get on the ferry,” she said.

“Definitely.”

As it turned out a swarm of motorcycles was unloading from the ferry when we got there. I told Jackie to slide down in her seat.

“You can’t have her,” I said, as they roared by. “She’s mine.”

The sun reflecting off Long Island Sound as we crossed was nearly blinding, but we stayed topside, leeward of the hard breeze and secure in a pair of white plastic chairs.

“So,” said Jackie.

“So it’s quite a day.”

“Come on.”

“When I was a troubleshooter in the oil refineries I liked it when things didn’t make sense.”

“Typically perverse.”

“That meant I didn’t need to waste my time with the obvious. That I could focus everything on the unlikely, the unanticipated.”

“So what doesn’t make sense about Iku Kinjo’s murder?”

“It’s obvious.”

She swatted my shoulder.

“Come on.”

“Sometimes Occam’s razor needs to stay in the drawer.”

The look she gave me complimented her outfit.

“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t tell me.”

“There’s nothing to tell you that you don’t already know. Only a few figments of my imagination.”

“Criminy,” she said, and let it drop.

I celebrated by getting us both coffee and spending the rest of the trip describing the potent currents of Long Island Sound, how they flowed like a bastard to the east for a while, then switched and flowed like a bastard to the west, making sailing a complex triangulation between wind, tide and expectations. And fishing an adventure in riding the chop above the shoals. She acted like she didn’t care, but I knew she was paying attention. Among Jackie’s more reliable afflictions was an uncontrollable interest in arcana. A sucker for a good fish story.

I hadn’t seen Bridgeport in almost ten years, and it looked a lot better than I remembered, especially around the harbor where the ferry pulled in. At the time, I was fresh out of Con Globe and fully invested in Jack Daniels, so the details were a little fuzzy, though I remember the lifestyle offered a marked contrast to the one immediately prior. I wondered how my associates in the inner city had fared after that thing with the dead guy and the shotgun.

To get to Stamford from Bridgeport you had to go down the coast and up a few socioeconomic strata. It was a short trip, with one stop to let Jackie pee and me refill my mug.

“Does the heart attack tell you when you’ve had enough coffee?” she asked me.

St. John’s Episcopal Church sat on a small hill, exaggerating the impression of a towering fortress. It was built out of Connecticut brownstone and establishment presumptions. You had to park in a lot to the side and walk up the hill to the front doors. There were only three vehicles in the lot, including a panel truck pulling a lawn tractor on a trailer. One of the cars was a nondescript General Motors station wagon, the other a familiar Volvo.

I let Jackie hold on to my arm as we slogged our way up to salvation.

The priest came out the door before we were halfway there and walked down to meet us. He was startlingly young, with round frameless glasses and a smile that looked beatific, though that was probably influenced by the setting.

He held Jackie’s elbow when he shook her hand, as if to maximize the strength of the greeting, then did the same with me.

“Here for Ozzie, I hope,” he said.

“We are, Father,” said Jackie.

He nodded, obviously pleased. Then he took us each gently by the arm and guided us up the hill.

“I didn’t know him myself, but Priscilla is a regular here at St. John’s. She said she was doing this for herself and didn’t care if anyone came, but one always cares, right? Are you family?”

“Ex-coworker,” I said.

“His lawyer,” said Jackie, jerking her thumb toward me. “Here for moral support.”

“Lovely to have you,” said the priest. “Moral support is one of our specialties. By the way, I’m Hank Ortega,” he added, turning to walk backwards so he could get our names.

He looked at his watch.

“We’re actually about to start,” he said. “I was just checking for stragglers. Come meet your fellow mourners.”

The inside of the church was predictably dark, with vaulted oaken arches absorbing the meager light from the tall stained glass windows and incandescent lanterns. We walked down the center aisle past the empty pews to the last row before the altar and sat down. At the far end was a beefy, grey-haired white guy in a flannel shirt. Next to him was a woman Ozzie’s age, squat, with a fleshy face and thin blonde hair.

Sitting next to her was Bobby Dobson.