Hard Stop

FOUR

WHEN I GOT BACK TO Southampton I drove right past the turn off Route 27 that led up to Oak Point—the peninsula in North Sea I shared with Amanda—and headed east. It was about four in the afternoon, so I thought I’d just catch Jackie Swaitkowski at her office above the shops that lined Montauk Highway in Watermill. I probably could have stopped at the cottage and switched back to my Grand Prix, but I was reluctant to let go of the zippy little station wagon.

Jackie was nominally my lawyer. I’d never paid her anything and she hadn’t done much for me but keep me out of jail at a few critical junctures, for which I was sincerely grateful. Actually, I owed Jackie a lot more than simple gratitude. So I didn’t think it would hurt to toss a few more items on the bill.

I jogged up the outside stairs and tried the door to her office. It opened only partway. So I gave it a shove and pushed a bankers box clear of the passageway.

“Hey. I wanted that there,” she said from somewhere behind the piles of paper on her desk.

There were a half dozen more bankers boxes on the floor, since there was no room to put them on the desk, or the sofa and chairs, or work tables, or any other horizontal surface in the room, all of them already groaning under a year’s accumulation of professional detritus, indispensable possessions, objects d’art, flotsam, jetsam and the unimaginable heaps of worthless junk that gathered around Jackie like the drifting snow of an arctic blizzard.

“If you can’t get out the door you’ll starve in there,” I said to her. “Unless you’ve put up survival rations.”

Jackie stood up so I could see it was actually her. She was a medium-sized, curvy thing with a lot of freckles and a head full of kinky strawberry-blonde hair. It was only the second week of September, so she was still in her summer wardrobe—a scoop-necked cotton dress and flip-flops. Her glasses were pushed up into her hair, where she also stored a pair of number two pencils. An unlit cigarette bobbed between her lips when she spoke.

“No, but if you could find my lighter, I’d really appreciate it.”

I tossed her mine.

“Keep it. I don’t need it anymore.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m giving it up. After I have one of yours.”

“In other words, you’re giving up buying and moving on to mooching full-time.”

I scooped the piles off the two easy chairs that faced the loveseat and waved her over. I found an ashtray under a wet beach towel and balanced it on the last six months of The Economist.

Jackie flung herself over the arm of the chair and landed with her knees already tucked up under her butt. We lit our cigarettes.

“Where’s the mutt?” she asked.

“With Amanda. I left him with her so I could go into the City.”

“Biz or pleasure?” she asked.

“A little of both. Though mostly manipulation, extortion and threats of violence.”

She blew a lungful of smoke up at the ceiling.

“I hope that’s just the amusing way you express yourself.”

I disappointed her by telling her the whole story, beginning with the visit from Ackerman straight through to my conversation with George Donovan. I filled in as many details as I could remember. I was starting to appreciate the concept of free and full disclosure. It was liberating. Rosaline Arnold was right. If you just open yourself up to people you care about, you get so much back in return.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re out of your fucking mind.”

I tossed her the micro-recorder.

“Download it for me, will you? I’ll probably never need it, but you never know.”

“Sure, why not. Anything else I can do for you?”

“Yeah, a bunch of things, actually.”

Her shoulders dropped.

“Goddammit, Sam.”

“Come on, Jackie. What’s so bad about tracking down a missing management consultant? How hard can that be? I’m not asking you to do anything illegal.”

“Not yet.”

“I need her background information. Her parents’ names and where they lived. Her address in the City, which I don’t even have for Christ’s sake. The boyfriend, Robert Dobson. All those vital statistics. You just have to climb back over to your computer and look it up.”

“Or you could buy a computer.”

“Donovan said she was heading for a weekend in the Hamptons right before she disappeared.”

“We’ve heard that one before.”

“I need to know where she stayed. Who she stayed with.”

“Sure. I’ll just do a search—‘Iku Kinjo weekend Hamptons.’”

“You can do that?”

She sighed.

I remembered something Donovan had told me.

“Let’s look at her,” I said.

I coaxed her back to her desk and watched her call up Eisler, Johnson’s website, click on the annual report and scroll through the pages until we came to a photo of a half dozen bright-looking young professionals sitting around a conference table pretending to be engaged in earnest and penetrating deliberations. One of the women had an Asian cast to her features, and the caption confirmed it was Iku Kinjo, EJ associate and specialist in the energy and chemical-processing industries.

“Can you isolate her face, blow it up and print it out?” I asked.

“This is a basic office PC. It’s not Industrial Light & Magic.”

“What can you do?”

“I can put the whole group shot on a disk and give it to you, and you can take it to a guy I know in the Village who can isolate her face, blow it up and print it out.”

Ten minutes later she was still trying to figure out how to capture the image. It was all pure alchemy to me, so I wasn’t much help beyond offering cheerful words of encouragement. I could smell her starting to smolder.

“How urgent is all this?” she asked, glowering up at me. “Believe it or not I have people who pay me to do things for them. Quite a few at the moment.”

“It’s pretty urgent to George Donovan. Enough to risk a loaded gun at his head with my finger on the trigger.”

She frowned, but kept at it until she had what I needed transferred to a disk, which popped out of a little door on the front of the computer.

“He must really want her back,” she said, handing me the CD in a flat plastic case.

“Oh, yeah.”

“You know why? Beyond the obvious?”

“Mostly fear. Maybe love. Those are good enough ‘whys’ for starters.”

“Good enough for you?”

“Sure. I’ve seen what fear and love can do. You have any other theories?”

I could almost see the imperceptible tug as the hook caught. It was hard to know all the forces that drove Jackie’s busy, chaotic brain, but I knew one of them was curiosity. And its co-conspirator—the fear of boredom.

“Do you think Donovan will hold up his end of the deal with you? If you find Iku?” she asked.

“I’m wondering the same thing. I want you to take a look at my severance agreement and the settlement of the intellectual rights suit. Let’s see if Donovan’s as omnipotent as he thinks.”

“Could be a lot of money.”

“That’s what Donovan thinks.”

I spent another half hour making sure Jackie had what she needed to do whatever she did on the Internet. The potency of the Web was just starting to take hold about the time I evolved from divisional vice president to finish carpenter, and I’d seen my friend Rosaline Arnold pull off some astounding online research. I promised I’d learn how to do it myself someday. After I evolved a little more.

I left Amanda’s Audi Avant back in her driveway before sunset, which was just starting to heat up over on the western shore of the Little Peconic Bay. Clumps of luxuriant clouds were getting into formation, bathing in the first golden wash that radiated from the horizon. Eddie ran up to me just long enough for me to rub his head, then darted back toward Amanda’s. A true loyalist.

I peeled out of my clothes and put on a pair of swim trunks. The September air was only slightly cooler than late August, but the bay was still warm. I walked gingerly over the pebble beach and dove through the miniature waves, feeling the salty grey-green water scrub off a coating of City grit, startling disruptive revelations, and unexpected possibilities.

I’m not a great swimmer. My body’s too dense to float, though as a little kid I’d mastered a sort of hybrid dog paddle–Australian crawl that would keep me from drowning as long as my stamina held up.

I swam out as far as I dared and looked back at the tip of Oak Point. My cottage and Amanda’s stood side by side a few hundred yards apart, two Foursquare testaments to the power of hope, forbearance and weathered cedar. My father built mine during the Second World War. Amanda’s had also been raised by her father, though not with his own hands. He built about thirty other houses along with it, most of which she still owned, along with a big piece of abandoned industrial property at the base of the lagoon that bordered her lot. This alone would have made Amanda a very wealthy woman, even without the bulging portfolio of investments she’d inherited along with the real estate.

Besides the cottage, all I inherited was a debt from the nursing home that looked after my mother during the last years of her life. I was able to pay it off before taking my career, my marriage and my financial wherewithal off a cliff, leaving me with just enough to live on for a while before I had to reacquaint myself with finish hammers, nail sets and miter saws.

I wanted to think the financial discrepancy between us didn’t matter, but it always does. I didn’t feel I had to match her net worth to be worthy of the relationship, but having nothing versus having enough to underwrite a small country was a pretty big gap. Not a rich girl growing up, it had taken Amanda a little while to get used to fathomless resources, but she was getting there. She’d never be extravagant, but she had a right to have as full a life as her means would allow. It had never been an issue between us, but I wasn’t about to let it become one. I’d never let her let me hold her back.

So it wasn’t only concern for my daughter that caused me to drop for Donovan’s offer. Sitting there in his library—funded by the river of technology royalties that had flowed daily into his company, technology I’d had a major hand in developing—I felt an unfamiliar tug of self-interest. It wasn’t until I was out there trying to float around the Little Peconic Bay that I fully understood what it really meant.

I wanted some of my past back. A past I’d shed like a suit of flames. I didn’t want my job back, and surely not my ex-wife. I didn’t want the icy, faux-modernist house we had in the woods above Stamford, or the garden parties on the velvet lawns of Fairfield and Westchester Counties. I didn’t want the crushing responsibility or nerve-searing professional stress. I didn’t want to stand in front of the Board of Directors and sell them on the need to preserve one of the few assets they owned that actually contributed to the long-term health of the corporation—an asset they then threw away for eighteen months of stock lift. All I wanted was something I had truly lost all hope of ever having again.

I wanted the money.

The next evening Amanda and I hit the nightclubs.

It was more like late afternoon, since I wanted to talk to the bartenders and waitresses before things heated up. Not long ago all the clubs would have been closed by mid-September, but seasonal boundaries in the Hamptons were steadily blurring. There was still a big drop in population after Labor Day, but not like the old days when everyone from the City and beyond—renters and owners alike—would suddenly vanish and the locals would have the South Fork to themselves again. The socioeconomic Left Behind, and happy for it.

On the way to the first club on our list we stopped at the small shop off the main parking lot in Southampton recommended to me by Jackie Swaitkowski. It was called Good to the Last Byte and its purpose was akin to that of the auto repair shops I used to work for as a kid: basic computer maintenance and repair. It was cleaner and smelled better, but looked as if somebody’d set a bomb off inside a bank of mainframes—wire racks crammed with cartons, boxes and devices with faceplates splattered with tiny LEDs, heaps of printed circuits, loose CDs, stacks of packaged software, monitors of every vintage and size, plastic crates disgorging tangles of cables and surge protectors, pizza boxes and a full-size trash barrel filled with empty Mountain Dew cans.

“No wonder Jackie likes this guy,” I said to Amanda as we picked our way to a rolling wire rack recruited as a service counter by the owner of the place.

“Randall Dodge,” I said.

“That’s me, Sam. Nice to see you again,” he said, unfolding his full six-foot-eight frame and putting out his hand to shake.

Randall lived on the Shinnecock Reservation and was a racial gumbo of African, European and indigenous peoples. I knew him from Sonny’s, the boxing gym I went to north of Westhampton Beach. I met him one day when he found himself at the top of a bench press with a bit more weight then he could safely put down. His request for a little help was remarkably calm and polite, given the circumstances. From then on we spotted for each other, and I had a chance to show him some things, like how to hit the speed bag and how to stay on his toes when moving around the ring. Like me, he almost never sparred, which was lucky for the rest of the kids who worked out at the gym. He was thin and slower than an earth mover, but he could reach halfway across the ring, and if he ever managed to connect with a punch it’d be good night, Irene.

“This is Amanda Anselma.”

Randall took her hand and gave a little bow.

“My pleasure to meet you, ma’am.”

“This your place?” I asked.

“For certain. Used to be my uncle’s, but the technology got a little ahead of him. I was sorry to see him go. He didn’t talk much, but you get used to the company.”

Randall’s head was big even for his beanstalk body. Or maybe it just looked big because of his broad face and high cheekbones, framed by a pair of slender, tightly woven braids. I never saw him form a smile, but his eyes were perpetually alight.

“I thought you were going to Hofstra,” I said.

“I dropped out after taking all the computer science courses they had. After four years in the Navy I’m too old to be sitting through lectures on poetry and poli-sci. Got to get down and dirty with the circuits, you know?”

“Yeah, I do. What do you know about digital photography?” I handed him the disk.

“I’m a warrior of the Photoshop,” he said, studying the disk as if the silvery surface could reveal its inner mysteries. “What are the issues?”

He slid the disk into an aquamarine Macintosh and brought the picture up on a big flat-screen monitor. I explained how we’d pulled the shot off a website, but needed a clearer image.

“The first thing you have to deal with is the low resolution,” he said. “The original photo was probably high-res, but you can’t have that on the Web. Slows everything down.”

I reached over his shoulder and pointed at Iku.

“That’s the girl. I’d love a good-sized printout. Clear enough to make an ID.”

“Hard to do, boss,” said Randall.

“Not for a Photoshop warrior,” said Amanda.

Randall’s sparkly eyes looked at me.

“Did you tell her pretty women drive me to impossible feats?” he asked.

“Why do you think I brought her along?”

“Go buy her a cup of coffee. I need a few minutes. The impossible could take a little longer.”

We got drinks instead, at the big restaurant on Main Street. Seemed an appropriate way to ramp up to the evening. I had vodka. Amanda sipped red wine and filled the joint with radiant beauty. I never tired of looking at her. It was one of the few failings I allowed myself without reproach. When I wasn’t feeling charmed by her smile I was lost in her pale green eyes. Or distracted by an ankle or the shape of her neck. I used to like looking at Abby, my ex-wife, but that was different. More an objective admiration of elegant, comely form. There was nothing objective in my appraisal of Amanda. Quite the contrary. The longer I lingered, the weaker my judgment.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I am.”

“Shouldn’t we see how Mr. Dodge is fairing? While we can still see?”

“I’m clear as a bell.”

“Of course you are. It’s so irritating.”

We paid the bill and walked back to Randall’s shop. It wasn’t a long walk, but I enjoyed every step. It was times like these, random events, that reminded me I’d given a lot of my life to misplaced ambitions and faulty desire. Not to dwell on regret, but to better appreciate the moment.

I watched Amanda as we walked, at once a presence so close at hand the barest twitch would alert her attention, yet as distant as the moon. This was something I’d learned about Amanda. She was there, and then not. And that was okay, now that I knew her better. I’d been through a lot of trial and error, sorting it out. But as long as she was there, walking next to me, I assumed she was willing to press on, even without a confirmed destination.

“You’re staring at me again,” she said.

“I am?”

“I don’t mind as long as I haven’t done something ridiculous.”

“I’ll tell you when you do.”

“And they say you aren’t a gentleman.”

“They do?”

Randall looked hypnotized by his computer screen when we got back to his shop.

“I’ve got something, not sure what,” he said to us without looking up. I walked into his work area and looked over his shoulder. A vivid portrait of Iku Kinjo filled the screen.

“You got what I wanted,” I said.

He looked up at me.

“You sure? The skin tone doesn’t look right.”

“Her father was African-American. A soldier.”

“Shoulda known. I got a big dose of that myself. On my mother’s side.”

“And you’re just as pretty, Randall. Give me a half dozen copies.”

In a few minutes we were out of there with a big white envelope stuffed with pictures of Iku. The whole experience made me feel as if the world had surged abruptly into the future without me—caught unawares and preoccupied with the Little Peconic Bay, questioning the point in having any future at all.

“You didn’t actually box with that young man, I hope,” said Amanda as we walked back to the Grand Prix.

“I never fight with techs. Too good at getting even.”

The first two clubs were a bust. Nobody remembered Iku or took any interest in helping advance the cause. It wasn’t worth the effort. They wore indolence as a cloak of pride. It made Amanda a little tense, glancing sideways to gauge my reaction. But I remained circumspect and polite. Pacing myself.

By the time we hit the third place, a dance club called the Playhouse, the early autumn nightlife had gained some traction. The house system was at close-to-full roar and a quorum of happily scrubbed and perfumed young aspirants were executing arrhythmic contortions on the dance floor. The men, anyway. The women moved much more fluidly, their eyes on each other, or the ceiling, or otherwise disengaged from their partners so as not to betray their amusement or horror at the situation they’d put themselves in.

I waited until we were hard up against the bar before showing around Iku’s picture. Safe haven.

“Sorry, man. Haven’t seen her. Friend of yours?” was the usual response.

“Sister.”

After a long string of blank faces, Amanda decided to take over. As if the beauty of the investigator determined the results.

“Oh yeah. My favorite look,” said the second guy she approached. A bartender.

“But did you see her?”

“Oh, yeah. Love the multiracial thing. In a thousand years we’re all gonna look like Halle Berry and Tiger Woods. It’ll be Earth Beautiful. Until some recessive ugly gene takes over and we’ll have to mix it all up again.”

“So you know her.”

“Not really. Campari and soda is all I remember. Always came in with two other women and a guy. I see those three all the time. Live together at a share. All strictly Caucasoid.”

“When was the last time they were here?” I asked.

“Labor Day weekend, I think.”

Amanda stuck her thumb at me.

“Any chance they’ll be here tonight?” I asked.

“Anything can happen, chief,” said the bartender.

“I guess we’re forced to wait here at the bar,” I said to Amanda.

“No sacrifice too great.”

We ordered gin and tonics and took a position where we could watch people coming through the door. We filled the time talking about the houses Amanda was knocking down and rebuilding on Oak Point and around the corner on Jacob’s Neck. I worked for Frank Entwhistle, but occasionally consulted for Amanda. For no charge, unless you counted frequent use of her pickup truck and outdoor shower.

The Playhouse slowly filled to near capacity and the volume finally overwhelmed our ability to converse, neither of us inclined to shout over the noise about Sheetrock crews and building permits. So we settled on watching the pulsing throng on the dance floor and the people standing around and drinking, the couples entangled or ill at ease, the packs of men in baseball hats and baggy pants trying to look nonchalant as they surreptitiously scanned the crowd for targets of opportunity.

The bartender who’d seen Iku sidled up to me at the bar and put his hand on my forearm.

“There’s the dude,” he said. “Over there next to the pole. White shirt. Heineken.”

I watched him for a while. He was apparently there alone, leaning on the pole and looking out on the dance floor, but otherwise disengaged. He had short brown hair and a few days’ growth of beard. He was slight, just shy of delicate—Iku would have been close to his height in her bare feet. But he wasn’t a bad-looking archetype of the generic young professional class.

“What do we do now?” asked Amanda, shouting in my ear.

“I don’t know,” I yelled back.

The guy stayed put through a half dozen musical segments—I don’t know what else to call them—strung together with the non-stop thump of the underbeat. Then he put his empty bottle on a table and headed for the men’s room. I told Amanda to save my seat and followed him.

A short line formed at the door. I stood behind him until we were through and waiting for vacancies at the urinals along the wall. It was a good time to take out the picture of Iku and hold it in front of his face.

“Hey, Bobby.”

He whipped around.

“Get away from me,” he said in a strained whisper. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for your girlfriend. What are you doing?”

He pushed past me and plunged back into the crowd. I followed him across the club floor to the main entrance. He maneuvered his way through the oncoming flow and shot through the door. When I got outside he was already partway through the parking lot. I ran after him.

“Hey, just want to talk,” I called, which had the effect of shooting him into a full run. I saw him point something at a row of cars and the lights inside a Volvo sedan lit up. By the time I got there he was in the car with the engine running, his headlights blinding me as the car pulled out of the parking space and tore down the lane. I turned around and ran for the entrance to the lot, zigzagging through the rows of cars, hoping to cut him off at the pass.

Which I didn’t quite do, but as he squealed out onto the street the headlights from the other cars lit the rear of his car and I could make out the license plate. I pulled a pen out of my shirt pocket and wrote the number on the inside of a pack of matches.

A man and a woman I’d nearly plowed over on my way across the lot came up behind me.

“What was all that about?” the woman asked me.

“That guy hit my car when he was backing out. Didn’t even bother to look.”

“Fucking Volvos,” said the man, as if that explained everything.

When I got back to the bar Amanda asked me how it went.

“It went out the door and down the road. In a big hurry,” I shouted in her ear.

“Interesting.”

“You think?”

“Did he say anything?”

I told her what he’d said, as best I could above the noise.

“Odd,” she said.

“I got his plate number. I think.”

“So what do we do now? All this shouting is hurting my throat.”

I looked around the inside of the club, which was now filled with young bodies and energetic foolishness.

“We dance,” I told her, pulling her out on the floor and holding her in a traditional slow dance embrace, contrary to the pace of the music. It was the only kind of dancing I knew how to do, though empirically speaking, it was also the best.

We left after that, which I was happy to do. I was never much for nightclubs, and they made even less sense at this stage of the game. Amanda always looked great to me, but looked best when I could hear her speak, when she was animated by the conversation, whatever the content.

I cashed in my rain check for the outdoor shower before we went to bed. Cleansed by the steaming water, the pinprick stars overhead and the proximity of the sacred Little Peconic Bay, I slept hard. For once the swarm of bitter wives, alienated daughters, conniving plutocrats and light heavyweight contenders stayed out of my normally snarled dreams. Held at bay by the surge of gratitude that com mingled with the scent of Amanda’s thick brown hair and filled my mind as I let go and yielded to the night.