Head Wounds

ELEVEN

JACKIE SWAITKOWSKI NEVER MET a piece of 8½-by-11-inch paper she didn’t cherish or seek to preserve for all eternity. Sometimes filed in a manila folder or stuffed in a big envelope, or functioning as a structural unit within one of the towering stacks of documentation that rose like volcanic eruptions from every horizontal surface in every room of her house, and even more frighteningly in the glassed-in rear porch she called her office.

Over time, the paper piles began to merge with other classes of printed material—magazines, newspapers, continuing education course descriptions from Southampton College—creating a tangled mass within which lurked material objects of entirely different composition—CDs, Christmas wreaths, used plastic dinner plates, hookahs and bongs, triple-decker skirt hangers, framed watercolors. As these piles coalesced, mountain ranges rose, swallowing up coffee tables and sideboards, engorging spare closets and bedrooms, twisting through the house, the strata folding and contorting in a domestic diastrophism that eventually formed the component parts into an unrecognizable concretion.

All of which escaped Jackie’s notice until the day her computer keyboard dropped in her lap, having slid off the desk on the crest of a breaking wave of Victoria’s Secret catalogs.

Her solution was to take the computer and move to a rented office above an antique shop on Montauk Highway in Watermill. Looking around the place only a week into her occupancy, and making a rough estimate of available cubic footage, I gave it about a year before she’d be searching for more capacious accommodations. As of now, however, there was an upholstered love seat to sit on, facing a set of leather club chairs, and a coffee table in between to rest your feet.

Eddie claimed one of the club chairs, circling around and scratching at the seat cushion a few times before dropping with a grunt into an alert state of repose.

“Make yourself at home,” said Jackie, swiveling around in her chair after a finalizing tap on her keyboard.

The office door had been unlocked, so I’d let myself in, juggling a pair of large Viennese cinnamon coffees.

“That one’s yours. Light on the cream, half a pack of chemical sugar.”

Jackie dove into the other club chair and snatched up the coffee.

“What a gallant,” she said.

“You told me to bring you some.”

“I know. I’m just pretending you did it all on your own. Delusion goes good with coffee.”

She was wearing a freshly pressed, white Oxford-cloth shirt under a vest made of synthetic fleece and khaki shorts, rushing the season. After reaching over to scrunch around with Eddie’s head, she kicked off her flip-flops and, wriggling deeper into the chair, popped the plastic lid off the coffee cup. Her face looked scrubbed, slightly flushed under the freckles, her blue eyes salubrious and radiant.

She’d woken me up that morning with a phone call. It wasn’t that early, but I was out cold. I don’t set an alarm because I normally wake up on my own, usually an hour or two before I want to, so I can lie there and pretend that being supine with your eyes closed had the same restorative benefits as heavy REM sleep. I was startled by the sound of the phone in the kitchen, and when I got there I couldn’t remember what to say when you pick up a receiver.

“Huh?”

“Christ, Sam, it’s the middle of the week.”

“Jackie.”

“Doing anything at the moment?”

“Regaining consciousness. What the hell time is it?”

“Nine something. I think you’re drinking too much.”

“Or not enough.”

“I need you to come over here. There’s some stuff we have to talk about.”

Eddie walked stiffly into the kitchen, head and tail down. He nosed at his bowl, then looked up at me as he stretched, his forepaws extended and his ass in the air. Then he yawned.

“I know who’s got the hangover,” I said to him.

“Not me, straight as a judge,” said Jackie.

“I’m talking to the dog.”

“Oh, great.”

“Anyway, judges are sober. They may or may not be straight.”

“Speaking of which, I talked to Burton last night. There’re things we need to discuss.”

“Like what?” I asked her.

“Oh, I don’t know. College basketball, lawn care, your murder trial.”

“Okay.”

“Bring coffee.”

“Okay.”

Jackie’s law practice was a fair reflection of Jackie’s personality. Idiosyncratic. Though based principally on real estate, the largest local industry and the center of most legal disputes, public and domestic. Through a series of unconventional circumstances, some my fault, Jackie had found herself working both civil and criminal sides of the real-estate dodge, which put her among a rare breed of attorney, an exemplar of which was my friend Burton Lewis.

“Okay,” said Jackie from the club chair in her new office. She took a manila folder off the coffee table and opened it on her lap. On top of the papers inside was a yellow legal pad. She clicked open a ballpoint pen and looked over at me.

“Burton wants me to talk about your alibi. Let’s do that, okay?”

“Sure.”

“Okay.” She wormed down further into the leather club chair. “Milhouser was killed between eight and nine o’clock that night. His crew discovered him at the site the next morning.”

“I was eating dinner at the Pequot from about six to seven-thirty. Then I went home and mixed up a tall boy in my aluminum tumbler and went out on the porch where I read a hunk of Freud’s The Ego and the Id.”

“Of course you did. What the hell else would you be reading?

“Not as tough sledding as Kant, I’ll tell you that.”

“Did you go out of the house after that?”

“Nope. Me and Eddie were on the porch all evening.”

“Reading?”

“Just me. Eddie doesn’t think much of Freud.”

“You read the whole time?” she asked.

“Till I went to bed. Could have been as early as nine-thirty. I was working hard that week. Needed the sleep.”

“What about the woman on Bay Edge Drive who said she saw you jogging by at around nine o’clock?”

“What about her? She’s got it wrong. I haven’t run on that road for weeks. With the cold weather there’s been a lot of ice and snow, especially along that rutty part. I’m afraid of twisting my ankle.”

“But you told me you were at the job site a week before Robbie was killed.”

“Didn’t jog. I just walked over there.”

“That’s not what you told me.”

“I usually jog, but the road was too slippery. So I walked.”

“Remember to change your story like that a few times for the jury. They love that.”

“Not a change. A refinement.”

“Not a helpful one.”

“Why?” I asked her.

“Why take the trouble to walk all the way over to that site if you weren’t jogging? You say you were too tired, that it was cold, that the road surface was unsafe. And yet, you somehow forced yourself to walk all the way over there, almost a half mile, just to look at a construction site?”

“I was going to jog, but I changed my mind.”

“Super. Any more refinements?” she asked.

“That’s it.”

“So nobody saw you that night, or called you on the phone? Amanda?”

“Not likely around that time. We’d been a little on-and-offish.”

“I’m getting your phone records from the ADA. In case there’re any refinements hiding in there.”

“Nobody remembers everything perfectly.”

“No. Some people only appear to. People who successfully defend themselves from murder charges.”

“Nobody called me. That I remember.”

“And what’s the deal with Amanda? You were fighting?”

“Not then. Just taking one of our occasional time-outs. No particular reason.”

“Because of that altercation at the restaurant?”

I fought back a surge of frustration.

“It wasn’t an altercation on my part. All I did was save the poor jerk from getting hurt or embarrassing himself any more than he already had. Assuming you could embarrass him in the first place.”

“Not defending your lady’s honor?” she asked.

“Her honor was supposed to stay in the car and out of the way. She’s not big on taking direction. So, yeah. I was concerned for her safety. Three big threatening drunks, on a poorly lit sidewalk. Easy to get caught up in the action.”

“So that’s why you pushed Milhouser into the grille of an SUV”

“That’s why. To cool him off.”

“You claim to have done this to save Robbie from getting hurt. Smashing a man’s head into the front of a parked truck doesn’t sound exactly benevolent.”

“Even at my age, you wouldn’t want me to hit you hard enough to drop you to the pavement.”

“Then why did you lie to the police?”

“I didn’t lie. Robbie told her he fell.”

“And you didn’t correct a false statement. You lied by omission.”

“I guess we all did.”

“Including Tommy,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“He didn’t tell Judy Rensler anything at the scene. But he told me Robbie fell trying to land a punch. That you just stepped out of his way.”

“He might’ve thought that. He was down the sidewalk. A tree and Robbie’s meatballs were between us.”

“And he said you decked one of Robbie’s friends.”

“Didn’t deck him. Just settled him down before things got out of hand. He backed off when Judy arrived.”

“Doesn’t matter. If anyone testifies to what really happened it’ll prove you lie to cops, and that there was some version of a fight between you and Milhouser. That’s all the ADA needs.”

“To do what?”

“To prove there was bad blood between you and the deceased.”

“Just a dumb thing that happened one night. There was nothing else there.”

“What kind of dumb thing?” she asked.

“I told you already.”

“Let’s try it again. This time with every detail perfectly recalled.”

I took a deep breath and a big gulp of coffee.

“What are the smoking rules in here?” I asked.

“No dope before sundown.”

I offered and she accepted one of my Camels. I worked on my recall while I lit both cigarettes and watched her write some notes on the legal pad.

“I admit I was mostly distracted by my date, the best looking woman in the restaurant,” I began.

“Sounds more like ego than id.”

“Plenty of both,” I said.

From there I told her almost everything about that night, except for a few things I didn’t feel like throwing into the story. A couple of innocent omissions.

“So Amanda wasn’t that upset about Robbie and his friend trying to elbow into your dinner.”

“She didn’t like it, but she handled it.”

“So you’re the one who told them to get lost?” she asked.

“Using all my diplomatic skills, which are legion. Ask anyone.”

“What did you tell them?”

“To go fuck themselves.”

“Excellent. Save that for the jury. It’ll spice up the testimony. Did it have the desired effect?” she asked.

“Not right away, but they left. And we went back to our dinners, and I thought that would be the end of it.”

“So Amanda had no interest in Robbie’s business proposition?”

“No reason to. With everything she’s sitting on, she could buy and sell Robbie and every other builder in town a few times over. He’d be the last one she’d want to deal with.”

“What are you, next to last?”

“I’m just a carpenter, not a builder. And I didn’t want to work on her stuff, anyway. Bad for the relationship.”

“You didn’t, or she didn’t want you to?”

“Okay, neither one of us wanted me to,” I said.

“So Milhouser wasn’t just a rude intruder on your night out. He was a rival of sorts. A potential business partner for your girlfriend, filling a role you either wouldn’t, or couldn’t, fill yourself.”

“She had zero interest in working with Robbie Milhouser.”

“But you were the one who told him to get lost.”

“That’s right.”

“Then why did Tommy lie about that, too?”

“He did?”

She lifted up the pad and looked inside a stapled document.

“I have his whole statement. He said Amanda told Robbie and Patrick Getty to get lost.”

“Might’ve been that way. Middle-aged memory and all that. Didn’t know Getty was Patrick’s last name. Or else I forgot it.”

“He also said it was Amanda.”

“He’s also younger than me. Hit on the head less often.”

“Much less. Which is a real worry for you,” she said.

“That’s what everyone seems to think.”

“Which made Robbie a real threat.”

“Not Robbie. Patrick Getty and his buds. And they’re all still alive, at least as of last night.”

I told her about what happened at the Pequot. I kept to the same story I told Will Ervin, for consistency’s sake. I didn’t want another scolding about sins of omission, or get her any more worked up than she already was.

“When were you planning to tell me?” she asked, leaning half out of her chair.

“As soon as you stopped grilling me.”

“You think this is grilling. Just wait,” she said. “If you live that long.”

“Ervin will tell Sullivan, Sullivan will spread the word around the force. There’ll be too many eyes on them to try anything now.”

“I thought you said he was a threat?”

“Less now,” I told her.

“To you or Amanda?”

“He was never a threat to her.”

“Really? Tommy seemed to think so.”

“I like Tommy, but that guy oughta stop the speculation.”

“He said Patrick never took his eyes off her.”

“You could say that about half the guys at the bar. Like I said, she wasn’t threatened and she didn’t want a business partner.”

“Maybe she will now,” said Jackie, as she sunk back into the leather club chair and put her feet on the cushion.

“Why’s that?”

“She might. Given the circumstances.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You don’t know?”

“What?”

“The State had the inspector put a stay on her whole development project. Don’t know why. I heard about it yesterday when I was over at the Town building. It just came in. I called you, but you weren’t home and you don’t have an answering machine, which is unbelievable.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The inspector, Glen McDaniel, wouldn’t give me any more than that. ‘None of your damn business, cutie,’ was the elegant way he put it.”

“She has all her approvals.”

“Better hope it’s not environmental. When it’s the DEC, you’re never free, is what I tell people.”

“I think you got that from Yeats,” I said.

“Don’t start alluding. We had a deal.”

“This isn’t good.”

“She didn’t tell you?” she asked me.

“I don’t know where she is. I haven’t seen her since her house burned down. We’re back to offish.”

“Which reminds me,” said Jackie, looking at her pad again. “The same night you get into a fight with Robbie Milhouser—a builder who wants to horn in on your girlfriend’s construction project, but is rejected—that very project is torched. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

“Sullivan wonders the same thing.”

“So does Ross. And Lionel Veckstrom. Actually, they’re not wondering. They’re sure that Milhouser, in a drunken rage, burned down her house. And that a few nights later you confronted him and killed him. It hangs together very nicely.”

“That didn’t come up at the arraignment.”

“They don’t want to talk about it till they gather all the evidence and build their case.”

“Then who told you?” I asked.

“A little birdie.”

“You mean a big birdie with a blond crew cut.”

She smiled a tight-lipped smile and just looked at me.

“Okay,” I said, “so about this DEC thing.”

She pointed her pen at me.

“That’s not important now,” she said.

“You’re right. Why should I give a shit.”

“I’ll see what I can get out of McDaniel when he’s not trying to impress his homies.”

“Thanks, cutie.”

I spent another hour playing testimonial ping-pong with her before she had to go to another appointment, for which I was grateful. I don’t think what I said made her very happy, but she kept up a good face. I was glad to be back in the Grand Prix heading west with Eddie in the front seat, his head out the window, oblivious to the tempest this caused in the interior of the car. The air was too cool to be completely comfortable, but warm enough to qualify as another harbinger of spring. I rolled down my own window and propped my elbow on the door frame.

I felt an impulse to keep on driving until I was off the Island and through the City and on my way to other climes. Until I had a vision of being hunted down, pulled over, dragged at gunpoint from my car and returned to Southampton in chains. I had to accept being imprisoned in my childhood home, the place I’d left to engage the outer world, that I’d crawled back to beaten and deranged.

There had to be some weighty metaphorical significance in all that, I just couldn’t figure out what it was. Maybe if I kept reading Kant it would come to me. That might be all my memory- impaired, acuity- disrupted, faculty- degraded brain needed. A little philosophy to postpone the inevitable. The preordained moment when the center of consciousness either shatters or implodes, and like a dying star, shrinks down to a dimensionless point, a singularity where time and space, awareness and love, cease to exist.