Head Wounds

SIX

“I CAN’T FUCKING BELIEVE that fucking Veckstrom. And you,” said Jackie, swatting my shoulder with the back of her hand. “You do know he’s one of the people officially in charge of ruining your life?”

I didn’t answer right away, which failed to shut her up, more the pity. I was trying to avoid all conversation until I got a cigarette lit and a decent cup of coffee from the diner down on Montauk Highway. I’d been at the Hampton Bays Police HQ on several occasions, but remembered it to be longer on amenities. This gave weight to the theory that murder suspects receive a different standard of hospitality than casual drop-ins.

When we walked into the squad room that morning, composed in our shroud of surrender, Jackie stopped suddenly, grabbed my arm and pulled me back.

“That’s Lionel Veckstrom,” she hissed in my ear. “He’s assigned to your case. You do not talk to him.”

Veckstrom was a slender, pretty-faced guy deeper into his forties than the dye in his hair would want you to think. He stood at the door of Ross’s office with his shoulders sloped forward, sculpting a shell where his chest should have been. As we approached, I had an urge to grip him by the neck and straighten out his posture, though Ross would have likely shot me before my hand could wrinkle the guy’s suit jacket. A very expensive jacket with a perfectly coordinated handkerchief and tie. His glasses were the thinnest horn-rims I’d ever seen. When he talked to Ross he waved a ballpoint pen made of burled wood that he gripped like a pointer. I noticed his nails were more nicely manicured than Amanda’s.

“We’re here on a voluntary basis,” said Jackie as we closed in. “No interrogation. Just the usual print ’em, shoot ’em, plead ’em and release ’em.”

“I like the shoot ’em part,” said Veckstrom, offering Jackie his hand.

She shook it, I’m sure with a grip Veckstrom felt the next day.

“Ross, we need to move to processing immediately,” she said.

“I agree,” said Veckstrom. “Shouldn’t encourage violent behavior.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jackie asked.

“Your client is well known to engage in brawls. Like the one with Robbie Milhouser the night of April fifth in front of a restaurant on Main Street in Southampton.”

“You’re planning to characterize what your own police report describes as a man slipping on a curb, and then accidentally hitting his head on the front of a parked vehicle, as a brawl? Interesting.”

“Witnesses claim otherwise.”

“After the fact. No mention of it in the report. Revisionist history.”

“You want us to believe that a former professional boxer threw not one single punch in the midst of a street fight?”

“If you call that a street fight, better steer clear of the real thing,” I said.

“Oh, experienced in that, are we?” asked Veckstrom. Before I could answer back, Jackie kicked me in the shins, right out where everyone could see.

“What did I tell you?” she said.

“He addressed me,” said Veckstrom to Ross, obviously for the record.

“Don’t address him,” Jackie said to me. “Ross, we process right now or we start talking police misconduct.”

“Go ahead,” said Veckstrom. “It’s not going to change the fact that Acquillo had motive, malice and means. Confirmed by forensics and eyewitnesses.”

“The witnesses are the victim’s asshole buddies at a street fight that didn’t happen and one half-blind old lady,” said Jackie, warming to the taunt, “who thinks she saw somebody who looks like Sam running at night.”

“Twenty-twenty with her glasses on. Which in fact doesn’t matter. Your client has already admitted to jogging past the murder scene.”

“But never at night,” said Jackie.

“His memory could be faulty.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my memory,” I told him. “For example, I remember hearing you’re an asshole.”

Veckstrom smiled at me, but not endearingly.

“We’ve stipulated that Sam runs on Bay Edge Drive,” said Jackie, reaching for my arm again, but missing. “But hadn’t been in the vicinity of the Milhouser project for at least a week.”

“At least a week?” asked Veckstrom. “Do you mean seven days or five, or twenty? Or do you mean a single day?”

Ross picked that moment to light up the cigarette I wasn’t allowed to have. Cheap psychological torture. So I spoke to him.

“Somebody tell this dickhead that a week is seven days. At least a week means seven days, plus a couple more. How many’s up for grabs. I’ll let you pick a number.”

This time Jackie got a good grip on the sleeve of my jacket and yanked me down the hall toward the room where you got photographed and fingerprinted and filled out forms. The administrative cops who handled this stuff were friendly and chatty, not unlike nurses who took your blood pressure or gave you a cup to piss in. We didn’t see Veckstrom after that, which I was glad for. Too hard a load on the Zen mantras of patience and forbearance.

——

As the coffee from the diner soaked in I started to hear what Jackie was saying from the Grand Prix’s front passenger seat, which to be fair was pretty far away.

Ross was in a patrol car escorting us to the arraignment at the Town courts in Southampton Village. I’d offered to bring out some of the same coffee for them as well, but they demurred. A wise choice.

“My experience in criminal defense amounts to about a half dozen cases, only one of which had any substance,” said Jackie, referring to her defense of Roy Battiston, “but even I know sometimes police officers, especially hard-ons like Lionel Veckstrom, use overt antagonism as an investigative technique to provoke idiot suspects into incriminating themselves. Easy to do with a hothead whose lack of self-control likely got him in the situation in the first place. Wouldn’t work with everybody. Not your well-educated corporate executive types. Cool as a cucumber, those guys.”

“It’s hard to be cool with a tie on. Squeezes all the blood out of my brain.”

“Then loosen that top button. Because if you pull that shit in front of the judge I swear to God I’ll plead you guilty and leave you there and go work for clients who actually deserve to be saved.”

“I’ll be cool. As well as nattily turned out.”

“No. You’ll be silent. Neutral. No looks, no noises, not one tiny little peep.”

“Okay, but my stomach’s been growling all morning. This shitty coffee doesn’t help.”

I burped to prove my point.

“Unbelievable.”

——

The arraignment was an interesting theatrical performance. Jackie’s role was righteous defender of civil liberties. Deferential, while exuding confidence that the issue at hand would be easily and promptly resolved as soon as the wise and distinguished judge had a chance to merely glance at the ludicrous proposition the prosecutor was peddling as a pathetic excuse for a case. The Assistant District Attorney equaled Jackie’s confidence, but was more sparing in her commentary, as if patiently indulging Jackie’s childish flights of fancy.

Any of the third-graders sitting in the back of the courtroom, victims of a civics lesson gone terribly wrong, could see the judge was playing along with various fictions created by people for whom he had little or no professional regard.

The ADA was a tall young woman with translucent skin like Jackie’s, though with none of the ruddy blush or seditious fields of freckles. In fact, her flesh tone was so uniform it looked applied with a spray gun. Her blonde hair was thin, longer than it would be ten years from now and securely restrained behind a hedge of hairpins that pulled the edge of her scalp tight against her skull. Her legs, on the other hand, were very nice, and she filled her light blue suit the way fashion magazines wanted every woman to think she could.

The only time she looked over at me I winked at her. She instantly flicked her eyes back to the judge.

My timing probably wasn’t all that good because that’s when she entered a charge of second-degree murder.

“Your honor,” she said, “Mr. Acquillo clearly went to Mr. Milhouser’s work site with the intention of causing him bodily harm. Transporting to the scene a construction tool that could be easily adapted to lethal purpose.”

Jackie jumped in there with a flurry of counterarguments. The judge listened as if he was trying to read The Daily News on a subway while Jackie blared a boom box. All I remember of the exchange was the prosecutor’s riposte.

“The People are willing to concede to Ms. Swaitkowski’s assertions if she can prove that a hammer stapler is common accoutrement among joggers plying the sand roads of North Sea,” she said, the word “accoutrement” spoken in what I fancied to be perfect Parisian French.

After that the judge cut Jackie off mid-sentence and ruled that they could hold me over for trial. Then the discussion shifted to the prosecution claiming I was poised to zip off to Brazil immediately following the proceedings, countered by Jackie’s rather poignant description of my voluntary surrender, my reduced financial circumstances, my devotion to my daughter in the City—which I wished Allison was in the audience to hear—and other proofs of my general compliance, incompetence and ineptitude, which rendered flight from prosecution not only unlikely, but sadly impossible.

The kicker to Jackie’s argument was that Burton Lewis, a towering figure in the legal profession of New York State, was standing by with his checkbook and personal assurance that I’d show up for all scheduled appointments with the court.

I must have been the ADA’s only case that day, because she quickly packed up her stuff and left the courtroom as soon as the judge passed down the weary opinion that he was happy to hold Burton’s million bucks in lieu of providing room and board to another worthless miscreant.

Jackie was also eager to get out of there, so we got to follow the leggy blonde up the long aisle. As we walked along, Jackie saw where I was looking and gave me another hard smack on the arm.

“Un-goddamn-believable,” she said.

——

After we left the parking lot Jackie wanted to talk about the evidence against me, examining in detail the content and style of the prosecutor’s delivery. I tried to pay attention, but all I really wanted to do was have a cigarette and feel the wind blasting in through the yawning window of the Grand Prix.

“You’re not listening to me, are you?” she said finally. “I’m listening. I’m also thinking. I can do two things at once.”

“I’m glad you’re so dismissive of the case against you,” she said. “That gives the competing advocates clearly delineated positions.”

“They have to tell you about everything they got, right? Not allowed to spring any shit?”

“It’s called discovery. We get to see their dirty details, we don’t have to show them ours. The only problem is it doesn’t take effect until after an indictment is handed up. Before that, it’s a confidential police investigation.”

“I just want to know the set I’m working with.”

“Set of what?”

“Operating conditions. The parameters. Engineering talk. Not on the English curriculum.”

“You’re already thinking something you’re not sharing with me. We can’t have that this time, Sam. Don’t do that to me.”

“Okay. Then you can come along.”

“Come along where?”

“To the scene of the crime.”

After she was finished giving me all the reasons why we had to clear it with the DA’s office, I got Jackie to give up her cell phone so I could call Joe Sullivan. He was also in his car, heading over to Bridgehampton, where a horse farm had reported a break-in.

“Just took riding gear, saddles and stirrups. Not the horses themselves,” he said.

“Probably not as easy to fence a horse.”

“Don’t put it past these bozos.”

“Say Joe, any reason why I can’t go over to that job site where Robbie got killed?”

“I can’t talk to you about the case. You know that.”

“So in other words, no problem.”

“We’re not having this conversation.”

“Excellent. Thanks.”

I hung up the phone and tossed it back to Jackie. “He said it was fine.”

It was a good day for a drive. The sun was out and making things warmer, both the temperature and color of the light.

Buds were bursting into little flowers on the trees and ornamental shrubs and the pin oaks were finally shedding their leathery brown leaves, yielding to the yellow-green nubs that would be fresh growth by late May. I turned off Montauk Highway at Southampton College and traveled north over the railroad tracks and through the Shinnecock Hills Golf Course, where the PGA occasionally held the U.S. Open. Must be a proud moment for the Indians living south of there on a reservation about the size of the golf course. I passed some of the tiny inlets and harbors that sculpted the bay shore and formed the grassy pools from which the more entrepreneurial of the persistently poor pulled a sizeable share of their daily calories.

I slowed the car considerably when we reached Bay Edge Drive. A ‘67 Grand Prix isn’t much good on sand. I alternately hugged opposite sides of the road to clear ruts and avoid scraping the exhaust system off the undercarriage. I’d installed aftermarket shock absorbers to reduce the car’s natural seagoing effect, though the stiffer suspension made for a less-than-creamy ride over the gutted surface. Jackie patted around the door and headliner in search of a handhold, eventually wedging herself into the seat with her feet pushed against the dashboard.

“Let me know when you’re going to stop so I can puke out the door,” she said.

“Almost there.”

Robbie’s project was on a narrow two-acre lot that was solid woods until you reached the bayfront. There it opened up to a yard that once comfortably held a single story bungalow not unlike my parents’ cottage, but was now filled with Robbie’s architectural grotesquerie. It had been a while since I’d seen it up close, and I was surprised at the progress. If it wasn’t for all the vans and pickups scattered around you’d think it was ready for the new owners to move in. I stopped the car and let the implications sink in.

“Where’s the yellow tape?” I asked Jackie.

“Long gone, Sam. Before you start in on me, it’s almost impossible to keep a crime scene frozen in the middle of a construction site, especially after everything’s been gone over, photographed and videotaped. As it was, Milhouser bellyached every day until it was released. Claimed financial hardship.”

“Milhouser?”

“Jefferson. Robbie’s heir. His father.”

“So that’s that,” I said. “We have to trust the cops got everything. That they got it all right.”

“Not cops, exactly. Forensics experts. They don’t usually miss anything, but yeah. What they got is all we got.”

“Interesting.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

“Don’t be. It doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“Let’s go look anyway,” I said, getting out of the car.

I was halfway to the front door, with Jackie a few steps behind, when Patrick and his sidekick from the other night came out to greet us. They were wearing loaded tool belts and were covered in sheetrock dust. Patrick held a slim tacking hammer.

“You got some kind of balls,” he said, slapping the tool on his thigh.

“If it’s gonna be hammers, let me get my sledge out of the trunk.”

He looked past me at Jackie bringing up the rear.

“Who’s the new chick?”

“His attorney, Sport,” said Jackie, moving in front of me before I could stop her. “And an officer of the court in an active homicide investigation. You’ll want to think very hard about what you’re going to say before you say another word,” she added, sticking her finger in his face, her new thing, which I preferred looking at from that vantage point.

He started to open his mouth and she moved in a little closer.

“You were saying?” she asked.

A long pause followed.

“I was saying,” he took a fake little bow, “what can I do for you folks?”

“We’re here to examine what’s left of this crime scene,” she said, putting her hands on her hips, but holding her ground. “What you can do is move out of the way. Please.”

Patrick spread his arms and backed off to the side, shoving the other guy along with him.

“Be my guest,” he said.

Jackie strode passed him and I followed, giving Patrick a friendly little nod.

The interior of the house was partially sheetrocked, which explained the dust, but far less finished than the outside. Electricians were still pulling cable and a pair of framing carpenters were ripping out a section of wall. A Vietnamese insulation crew, the only guys I recognized, were sitting in the middle of the room with a stack of woolly pink rolls waiting for instructions. A big Sub-Zero refrigerator was half-uncrated in what would become the kitchen. A cluster of copper plumbing protruded from the middle of the floor, promising a center island that I could tell by eyeball the kitchen was too narrow to accommodate.

Jackie led me to the bay side of the house, anchored by a large glass-enclosed room. Not quite a living room, but more than a porch. No plans I could see for a woodstove, daybed or busted-up pine table.

“This is where they found Robbie,” said Jackie. “Right in the middle of the room, which I guess is here.”

She stood looking down at the freshly laid hardwood floor.

“They took a lot of photographs,” she said hopefully

“Was it one whack, or a bunch of whacks?” I asked her. She looked up again.

“More than one. Several. More than necessary.”

“Assuming the killer knew the necessary number.”

“Right.”

“Front of the head, back of the head, side?” I asked.

“Back. All in the back.”

“Which way was he lying?”

“I don’t remember. It’s in the photographs.”

I walked over to the window and looked at the Little Peconic. With the sun’s arc getting higher with the changing seasons, the water more clearly reflected the blue sky. Seasonal navigational aids—red and green buoys and flags—were back in place outside Hawk and Towd Ponds. Across the bay off the North Fork a sliver of white sail, heeled hard against the persistent northwesterly, moved slowly across a background of gray trees and a blur of waterfront development.

“Let’s get some air,” I said, walking out a set of French doors onto the muddy plain surrounding the construction site.

“Dog prints in the mud,” I said. “I know the culprit.”

“Good. They only took casts of the human’s.”

We walked down to the beach.

“Not much sand,” said Jackie.

“Yeah. Only a little up above the waterline. The rest is pebbles. No footprints there.”

“The stapler must have been thrown from here,” she said.

“But why into the grass? There’s only about twenty yards of pebble beach between here and the shoreline. If you’re going to ditch a murder weapon, why not just toss it in the water?”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s your tool, your fingerprints.”

“Now who’s being nihilistic?”

Jackie walked up next to me and put her arm through mine. She laid her head on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Sam. I’m not up to this. I want to be, but this is so way over my head. We need Burton to get you a lawyer who knows what they’re doing.”

I used my arm like a nutcracker to give hers a little squeeze.

“If Shakespeare’s out, so is self-doubt.”

“I want to do it for you, Sam. God knows why. But it’s your actual life at issue here, something I can’t seem to make you understand.”

“I know it’s hard to believe, but I used to have a job,” I whispered into her ball of frizzy hair. “Before they made me manage everything, I was a troubleshooter. When trying to diagnose a systems failure I’d waste a lot of time with engineers obsessing over current conditions, rehashing what we already knew over and over and over. This would come close to destroying what little sanity I had.”

“And your point,” said Jackie into my suit jacket.

“You’re worrying about the wrong things. I want you to represent me because you already know me. And I know you. And trust you, more than you trust yourself. Burton will look after the technical stuff. He trusts you, too. Neither of us care about your experience in criminal law. We care about your brain. It’s a good one.”

After a few minutes she nodded. An abrupt, decisive little nod. I let her go and she followed me back through the house.

We maneuvered around various tradesmen, who politely shifted to the side, and Patrick, who didn’t. I kept Jackie between us knowing her finger was mightier than a fist. Though she’d been known to bring both into play. Patrick stared at me, transmitting his eagerness to rip me from limb to limb. I’d had a lot of practice with stares like that, professionally and otherwise, so it didn’t bother me. I was more concerned about his long reach and ropey arms. Even an amateur can do a lot of damage, any of which I could ill afford.

We made it out alive and I drove her back to my cottage where she’d left her Toyota pickup. The vagaries of the sand road kept her preoccupied and mostly silent, so I was able to send her on her way with a minimum of commentary. I was happy about that. After a while all that white noise gets tiring.

Eddie greeted me with his normal routine—walking up my pant leg so I could scratch his head. After some of that, I took him and my blind allegiance to foolhardy decisions into the cottage to fill up my aluminum tumbler, which I brought out to the screened-in porch, sealed off against encroaching common sense, and drank until absorbed into the black forgiving night.

——

Around three in the morning I got dressed in a fresh set of jogging clothes. It took a while to lace up a new pair of sneakers. My treasured Sauconys, broken-in to the point of disintegration, were in an evidence bag with the rest of the stuff at the Suffolk County police lab. Eddie, cued by the outfit, sat and waited, though none too enthusiastically. He led the way to the side door, where we met the predawn chill of early spring on the Little Peconic.

I led us to the start of the sand road that paralleled the coast. It was still dark, though a pale glow to the east showed the sun threatening to break through the horizon. Most of the houses along the way were still blacked out, but a few had a light on here and there, tradesmen getting ready for the seven-thirty start time or commuters contemplating distant journeys Up Island. Twenty minutes into the run I turned onto Bay Edge Drive and came up to Robbie’s project. Without breaking stride, I jogged up to the house. There were two battered step vans parked on the lawn.

I tried the van doors, which were locked. Then I tried the doors to the house, which were also locked, uncharacteristically. So I kicked out a basement window and shimmied inside. The smell of partially cured concrete mingled with that of fresh-sawn fir and composite beams from the first floor structure overhead. I opened the basement hatch and whistled for Eddie, who streaked across the yard and shot down the hole as if pursued by avenging waterfowl. The two of us trotted upstairs.

I’d brought a flashlight, which I used to light my way from room to room. Though a masterpiece of misguided strategies, the house was stumbling toward completion. Tile covered the foyer floor and light fixtures were being installed in ceilings and over kitchen countertops.

I carefully examined every room, then moved back down to the basement, where I shot the little Maglite into all the dark corners. Then I went back up through the basement hatch to where the step vans were parked on the muddy front lawn. I was wearing a pair of cowhide work gloves, which protected my hands when I punched out the glass in the driver’s side door of the first van. The back was jammed with crap—chop boxes, collapsible work stands, table saws, battered plastic and metal tool chests, milk cartons stuffed with cans filled with sheetrock screws and random bits of hardware, tool belts and salvaged plumbing and electrical parts—the generic flotsam and jetsam of the average construction site. I looked, but didn’t find what I wanted.

That’s because it was in the other van under piles of pink fiberglass. A white cardboard box. I stuffed it under my arm and left the van, whistling again for Eddie, who was out on the beach scouring for detritus more to his liking—horseshoe crabs and gobs of putrid seaweed salad.

Under a decent moon and propelled by a lopsided inter-species competition, we made it back to the cottage while it was still dark. I brewed a huge pot of Viennese cinnamon coffee, made with freshly ground beans imported from the corner place in the Village, and a mess of eggs and tasty protein to fortify myself against the upcoming round of peril and deception.