Head Wounds

NINE

“WERE YOU PLANNING to tell me, or do I always have to read about it in the newspapers?”

It was the morning after my pool game with Burton and Hayden, and my daughter was on the phone. This was an uncommon event, most of our communication being handled through postcards and the rare glorious time she came out from the City to spend a weekend. She was a graphic artist, and by my reckoning a first-rate talent, a fact too rarely appreciated by the long line of employers she’d already strung together since graduating from Rhode Island School of Design.

“Hi, honey. Nice to hear your voice.”

“Tell me it’s all a mistake.”

“A very big mistake. Definitely. I’m sure the paper had it all wrong. What did you see, Newsday?”

“Second-degree murder? Is that part right?”

“Well, somebody definitely killed the guy. It just wasn’t me.”

The phone went quiet, and my heart went cold. I hated those long empty pauses she bestowed on me when we talked on the phone. I hated the phone, period.

“How’s work?” I asked her, for which she rewarded me with another eternal silence.

“You told me you were on a program of self-improvement,” she said finally. “I assumed that meant no more fistfights.”

“He did all the fighting. I just got him to quit. You can ask Amanda.”

I gave her a thorough rundown of the situation as I saw it, pausing once in a while to make sure she was still on the phone, but not giving her much room to respond, even if she wanted to. I wanted to build up some momentum as a defense against the next span of dead air, which I tried to thwart by saying, “Okay, that’s where things stand at the moment. I’ll stop talking now so you can talk. Go ahead, it’s your turn. Say something.”

“I thought I was done worrying about you,” she said.

“That’s my line.”

“Burton Lewis won’t let anything happen to you.”

“He won’t. Neither will Jackie.”

“Why is it always like this with you?” she asked, not as a rhetorical question, but a matter of fact.

“Your mother taught you to ask unanswerable questions. From me you learned the biggest danger is trying to answer.”

“I think elegant evasion was part of the lesson.”

“Bob and Weave, two of my closest friends.”

There was another pause, but it had a chuckle built into it, which made everything okay.

“You could at least keep me informed of the situation,” she said.

“I certainly could.”

“Though you probably won’t,” she said.

“Jackie will. I’ll give her explicit instructions.”

“You’re way too old to be hitting people over the head.”

“Don’t tell your boyfriends,” I said.

“Boyfriend. A compound noun built on an interior contradiction.”

“Now who’s evasive.”

“I’m way too sleepy for this. Just keep me posted, okay? Can you do that?”

“Always.”

“Right. Bye, Daddy.”

A form of relief akin to joy swept through me after I hung up. I hadn’t let myself acknowledge how much I’d been dreading that call. That it happened so abruptly and painlessly sent my heart soaring like a hawk. And I hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee. I put two fisted hands in the air and jumped up and down like I’d just scored a goal for Manchester United.

Eddie, picking up on the emotional vibe, barked and spun himself around, his claws clicking on the hardwood kitchen floor.

——

Frank Entwhistle Junior represented the third generation to run the family construction business. His grandfather had started out as a cabinet and molding maker and general woodworker in the service of the wealthy estate builders, who were about the only people building anything out here in those days. He worked out of a cluster of barns and outbuildings that had been a farm in even earlier times, which was subsequently surrounded by development flowing steadily out from Southampton Village. The buildings eventually became a base of operations, storage facility and handy custom shop for his son’s and grandson’s construction trade. Consequently, the Entwhistles were in a constant state of siege by their neighbors, mostly summer people in renovated shingle-clad Federal-style mansions, who thought the Village should do something about the sounds of table saws and planers, and the flow of pickup trucks and vans going in and out of the compound at all hours of the day. Most egregiously before seven o’clock on Saturday morning, when rational people were doing yoga or warding off hangovers.

My favorite part of the complex was a little white building housing the office where a woman named Glenda Ray Whittle worked for about fifty years as the shop’s secretary. These days Frank Junior liked to do his paperwork there, which had more to do with keyboards and liquid-crystal monitors than paper. I liked that he kept the rows of tiny oak drawers against the wall where they used to store file cards and spare parts for the machine tools, and calendars with paintings of hunters blasting pheasants, and airbrushed women in denim short shorts and gingham shirts tied off below their breasts holding half-ton adjustable wrenches like they were feather dusters.

Frank was a short meaty guy with a broad flat nose, round cheeks and a bald head. He was usually preoccupied with managing his business to the point of near obsession, but that never stopped him from having a friendly conversation or taking the time to ask how you were doing.

In defiance of the warming weather he wore a quilted, blue down vest over a heavy chamois shirt. If he’d had the misfortune of marrying my ex-wife, she’d have told him it was a faux pas to accentuate a stocky figure with dark, puffy clothes.

“I’m about eight hours away from finishing the mantel,” I told him over the top of his computer screen. “I’ll need somebody to come out with a truck to pick it up.”

“That’s great, Sam,” he said, pleased with my progress. “You’re ahead of schedule.”

“After I finish the other stuff, I better lay low for a while. Can’t make any time commitments.”

He looked at me sympathetically.

“Yeah, I guess you got some stuff going on.”

“It’ll be over soon.”

“Sure, Sam. I’ll always have something for you. You know that.”

“Say, Frank. How well did you know Robbie Milhouser?” I asked him.

He didn’t like that I asked the question, but was too polite not to answer.

“Not too well. He’s a few years older. Was. Three years ahead of me in school. Never had much to do with him. Even after he started building houses we didn’t knock into each other very much. He got his crew from Up Island, don’t know much about ’em.”

“Your dad and his are about the same age.”

Frank snorted at that.

“Jeff Milhouser was one of only two people Dad ever said anything bad about. Probably said something like, ‘That fellow is a disappointment.’”

“Who was the other one?”

“Nixon. Had more to say about him.”

“Any reason for the grudge?”

He thought about it.

“They served on the Board of Trustees together for a while. I don’t think there was anything Milhouser wanted to do that Dad agreed with. And I think he stuck us once on a remodeling job we did at his house. Not enough to make it worth going after, but enough to be irritating. We like to be flexible about everything but our receivables. It’s why we’re still around.”

I was there the day Frank disassembled his scaffolding, reloaded a truck with lumber the yard had just dropped in the driveway, and started to peel a big green tarp off the open second story of a house where he’d just stripped off the roof. The owner stood in the muddy yard and hurled threats of dire retribution while Frank calmly referred back to an unpaid pre-bill, including the cost of the tarp. As a band of thunderstorms gathered over the horizon, the guy relented, handing over a check and tearing off in his Mercedes station wagon. Frank had his crew re-secure the house, cashed the check, deducting the cost of the tarp and the labor to reinstall it, then returned the rest of the money and left the job for good.

“So,” I said, “you didn’t know Robbie in high school.”

“Not really. He was in my brother Joey’s class. You’d have to ask him. He’s coming over this weekend. I’ll tell him to call you.”

Joey Entwhistle was a physics professor at Stony Brook. Like Frank, he’d worked for his father every summer through high school and college, then he’d disappeared for about ten years, coming home as the prodigal son, leaving behind a full professorship at Cal Tech and a half dozen published papers on theoretical physics. Another victim of Long Island’s gravitational pull.

“He’d be okay with that?”

“Come on, Sam, nobody thinks you had anything to do with that thing.”

“Nobody but the Town police, the DA’s office, the news media and the entire civilian population of the East End.”

“They just don’t know what a sweetheart you are,” he said, grinning at his deft use of irony.

——

True to his word, Frank delivered his brother Joey to me a few days later. I suggested a lunch meeting at a restaurant on Job’s Lane.

“Feed me burgers and I’ll tell you anything you want,” he said to me over the phone.

Joey was the physical countertype of his brother, slim to the point of scrawny and several inches taller. Yet clearly related, with a more angular version of the same features and hair the same color and composition. He wore a white shirt that had likely never seen a tie and thick, frameless glasses.

“Iced tea’s fine with me,” he said, sitting down with an eye on my vodka and tonic. He checked his watch. “For the moment, anyway.”

“I’m with you. I usually wait till the afternoon to get rid of the tonic.”

I have no facility for small talk with people I barely know, but I forced myself to ask about his family and work at Stony Brook so he could get comfortably through his meal. It was easier than I thought. Joey shared the family penchant for social grace.

“So,” he finally said, to politely get me started, “you wanted to know about Robbie Milhouser.”

“Frank thought you might have known him in high school.”

He wiped his mouth with his napkin, then folded it carefully and placed it on the table. His eyes studied me through the heavy plastic lenses.

“Let me make some assumptions that might focus the discussion,” he said. “You are accused of killing him, which you say you didn’t do. I’m happy to take my family’s word for it that you are, in fact, innocent. However, the forces of justice are now entirely focused on prosecuting you and, consequently, no one’s out there looking for the real killer. So it’s left to you, which if my reading is correct, represents your only hope.”

“That’s right, Joey, something like that,” I said, feeling a little iced over by the stark assessment.

“So what did you think of Robbie Milhouser?” I asked, in the spirit of focusing things.

“An incredible asshole.”

“That’s established.”

“But not without substance or complexity,” said Joey.

“About two hundred and forty pounds worth of substance.”

“Used effectively to brutalize his fellow students.”

“But that’s not what you meant.”

“Ever see him dance?”he asked.

“Only stagger.”

“Danced like Fred Astaire. A natural. What does that tell you?”

“Looks deceive?”

“Indeed. Deception is Nature’s masterwork,” he said.

“Two minutes into the conversation and you’re already pulling a Heisenberg.”

“Frank said you went to MIT. Physics?”

“Mechanical engineering. No room for uncertainty,” I told him.

“How’s your natural history?”

“Took my daughter to the museum to see the dinosaurs.”

“Evolutionary biology’s always been a hobby of mine,” he admitted, sheepishly.

“Never had a hobby. Too busy competing with the fittest.”

“If you ever want to study sociobiological dynamics at their apogee, there’s no better laboratory than the American public high school.”

“Especially if you knew the rats I went to school with.”

“Do you remember how kids with above average intelligence were always targeted for persecution? Usually by a few specific bullies, but with the tacit approval of the school population at large. This used to strike me as a perversion of Darwinian principles. Why would the group attack the most gifted individuals, presumably the most able to generate valuable resources for the community, which in turn would contribute to the group’s survival?”

“Smart kids aren’t necessarily philanthropic?”

“Exactly. Nature considers standouts as much a threat as an asset. Just a theory, of course. Not my field. But as a teenager I instinctively kept my brains to myself, as well as I could. No chess club, no valedictorian addresses. Straight A’s in science, so-so in art and literature. Had a secret life from everybody but guess who.”

“Milhouser.”

“Caught me at a weak moment in the cafeteria. Started grilling me about a lecture on the environment we’d heard during assembly. Got me going on sensitive interrelationships within complex systems, hidden causalities and the law of unforeseen consequences. All the stuff that had my eighteen-year-old brain on fire. I was halfway through an immature dissertation on the paradigm shift of emerging chaos theory before I remembered I was talking to the biggest bully in school. I thought, holy shit, I must be out of my goddamned mind.”

“Fred Astaire meets Robert Oppenheimer,” I said.

“Not exactly. I think he was just sort of inspired by that lecture. The point is, he knew to talk to me. He sought me out. He had my number, but never did anything about it but have a little chat and scare the crap out of me.”

“So you didn’t hang with him.”

That amused Joey.

“I said I kept my head down, I didn’t say I was cool. You could only be cool by wearing a letter sweater, consuming intoxicants or victimizing weaker kids. None of these were appealing to me.”

“I think Robbie managed two out of three,” I said.

“You mean sports? It was generally assumed he could kick the ass of any starting lineman on the football team, so he didn’t have to play ball. Plus, he had the one thing that virtually guaranteed absolute, irrevocable coolness.”

“His girlfriend was the hottest babe in school.”

“Precisely.” He put his hand over his heart. “The only other thing that set my eighteen-year-old brain on fire. Amanda Anselma.”