Head Wounds

TWENTY-THREE

“HOW DID I GET STUCK coordinating this ground-opening ceremony?” Jackie complained over the phone, which rang as I was on my way to the outdoor shower. “I’ve got nothing to do with this thing.”

“You’re the one with the modern communications capability.”

“Modern last century. How can a former head of R&D be such a Luddite? Or maybe the answer’s in the question.”

“The real question is when are we getting together.”

“Twelve noon. Bring a sandwich.”

I was happy with the timing. It gave me a chance to call Joe Sullivan to see if he could meet me before that. He suggested the diner in Hampton Bays, a chance to stock up on a year’s worth of trans fats and triglycerides. The day was bright and clear, making the trip south a good opportunity to take in the fresh growth on the oaks and maples and catch the occasional ornamental bush looking like a pink cotton ball or lavender sachet.

The white narcissus were reaching their peak, rising proudly above beds of viny groundcover lapping at their feet. Passing Hawk Pond the water was a blue steel, pestered by the cool northwesterly that had been with us all spring.

The diner was full of tradesmen diverted from the exodus that flowed in every morning from the west. There were a lot of older guys there, more Anglo than Spanish, foremen and contractors who could afford to get on the job later in the morning. Guys with swollen hands and bellies pushing through suspenders, with swordfish embroidered on their baseball caps and cell phones on their belts instead of hammer holsters.

Sullivan both fit in and stood out in black T-shirt and baseball cap, fatigue pants and belt-mounted two-way radio. Softer hands but bigger shoulders, nonchalant, but more alert to his surroundings. He was already halfway through a greased aggregation of starchy breakfast food, lubricated with maple syrup, color added by the ham steak on a separate plate. I pointed to the ham as the waitress came over.

“Just one of those and some wheat toast,” I said. “Hold the cardiac arrest.”

“So you’re still here,” said Sullivan.

“Where else would I be?”

“Ross said he let you leave town. He asked me if you were a flight risk. I said only if you bring the dog.”

“I also brought Jackie. The deciding factor.”

“Did we learn anything useful?”

I slid a sheet of paper under the edge of his plate.

“I’ll know after you pull these records.”

He looked at me skeptically before looking down at the paper.

“Records?”

“Phone records. Between these people on these dates.”

He picked up the paper and held it at arm’s length, the inaugural sign of middle age.

“As usual, you’re not asking for much. Just the highly difficult, career-threatening and time-consuming.”

“Can’t take too much time. I’ve got the sword of Damocles hanging over my head.”

“Don’t know him. Sounds like an Arab.”

“Greek. Same basic neighborhood.”

“You gonna tell me what all this means?” he said, looking more closely at the paper.

“It’s a theory,” I said. “I just need a little corroboration. You can see how I’ve written it up, so if I’m right, you should see calls at certain times between certain people. You can do this, right? Find this stuff out?”

I never knew what cops could do and what they couldn’t. I was always surprised either way.

“Technically, yeah. Falls within the parameters of a routine investigation. Now that I’m on the case, I don’t have to clear it with Ross, unless you want me to.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Let’s see what we come up with.”

He slid the paper back to me.

“Some of these dates are a little general. Get as specific as you can,” he said.

I’d just finished doing what he asked when my ham steak showed up. We ate in silence for a while, then Sullivan said, “I heard about your chat with Veckstrom. He’s lovin’ you more every day.”

“That’s good. There’s not enough love in the world these days.”

“He asked me about the prints on that hammer stapler. He wanted to know why I told you there weren’t any on the handle. I said, ‘There aren’t?’ We looked at the file and sonofabitch, there aren’t.”

“That’s what I was hoping.”

“You didn’t know?” he asked.

“If I used that stapler to club Milhouser over the head, why aren’t my prints all over the handle? And if I wiped them off, why didn’t I wipe off the whole thing?”

He shoveled a few pounds of home fries into his mouth to help him concentrate.

“It’s a little insulting that the State’s case relies heavily on me being either stupid or crazy,” I said. “Jackie keeps telling me intelligence is a lousy defense, but for Pete’s sake, give me a little credit.”

Sullivan looked sympathetic.

“I think you’d be a much smarter killer than they do, Sam,” he said. “Sincerely. I wouldn’t want you killing me.”

“Thank you, Joe. Very good of you to say.”

Sullivan picked up the paper again and took more of it in.

“There’re some interesting names on here,” he said. “One in particular.”

“Are you going to make me explain?” I asked.

He dropped the paper back down on the table and shook his head.

“Nope. If I do that, you’ll tell me you don’t want to, then I’ll get all pissed off and say you have to, and then you’ll tell me some sort of bullshit to get me to back off, and that’ll be that. So why don’t we skip the dance and let me just pull the phone records.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s your ass.”

“That’s what people keep telling me.”

——

I got to the WB plant ahead of schedule, but Amanda was already at the front gate. She had peg-legged khaki jeans stuffed into boots with laces that started at the toe and went most of the way up her calves. She had a lightweight leather jacket on top and a white shirt with the collar pulled up. I looked around to see where she’d landed the Sopwith Camel.

“Should I be paranoid that I haven’t heard from you for a while?” she asked when I got out of the Grand Prix.

“If I said no, would you still be paranoid?”

“Of course.”

“You’re a great-looking paranoid.”

“Mother always said to dress for disaster.”

“Or celebration.”

“I’m trying to get used to the new optimistic you,” she said.

“The realistic me. The odds are there’s nothing toxic down there. Otherwise it would have shown up by now.”

“I was up to my armpits in soot again all morning,” she said, leaning against the Grand Prix’s sturdy left front fender. “But we’re officially done with the gutting. The building inspector told us we could keep most of what we wanted to. I had to start before dawn to be ready to see him, then get cleaned up and over here in time for this.”

“Good work ethic.”

“Always had one of those, Sam. You can’t fault me there.”

“Me, too. To a fault.”

“What are you working on so hard these days?”

“Saving my ass,” I said.

“I like your ass. I’m just not always sure you want to save it.”

“Me neither,” I admitted. “But I want it to be my decision.”

By this time Dan and Ned’s DEC adventure van arrived pulling a trailer with a tiny backhoe. We watched them pull up next to the Grand Prix and roll out of the vehicle in down vests and white hard hats.

“Hey, folks,” said Dan. “Who’re we missing?”

“Burton Lewis. The lawyer.” I checked my watch. “Just give it a few minutes. He’ll be here.”

Ned took the opportunity to hand out Styrofoam cups, which he filled from a huge thermos, much to my joy. As we drank the coffee, he briefed us on how we were going to approach the operation and the probable sequence of events. He’d just started to hand out neoprene boots and flashlights when Burton thundered up in his yellow and fake-wood paneled Ford Country Squire.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, stepping out of the Ford, looking like he’d answered the same casting call as Amanda, wearing khakis over a pair of L.L. Bean Maine Hunting Shoes, red flannel shirt and a herringbone marksman’s jacket. He reached into an inside pocket of the jacket and pulled out a silver case.

“It’s my new digital camera,” he said. “Can’t hurt, right?”

“Tally-ho.”

Dan reviewed everything again for Burton while we put on the boots and hard hats and played around with the industrial-strength flashlights. Then Burton, Amanda and I followed the van on foot as it plowed its way over the undergrowth that had filled in the path running along the cyclone fence, heading down the east side to where it took a sharp turn and paralleled the strip of territory next to the lagoon where the storage cellars were located.

Driving like a dauntless field guy, Ned got the van within twenty feet of our destination. Then, with ill-disguised enthusiasm, stuffed himself into the caged cockpit of the backhoe and drove it off the trailer the moment Dan had him unhitched.

The noise and fumes coming from the little beast were unsettling after the subdued tone of our preparations. Amanda held my arm as we watched Ned use a handheld GPS to zero in on his point of penetration.

In about five minutes we were looking into a slanted black hole in the side of a bank of tangled foliage.

“Fascinating,” said Burton. “It’s like bloody archeology.”

“How bloody depends on what we find,” I said, edging up to the hole with my flashlight.

Dan cleared his throat and gently moved me out of the way. Then he stuck his own flashlight in the hole, immediately followed by his head.

After an intolerable wait, we heard him speak.

“Cool.”

He sat on the ground with his feet in the hole, then popped out of sight,

“Come on in,” he called from the darkness. “Just watch your step.”

I let go of Amanda’s hand and followed. The hole was in a stone wall that curved up to a concrete ceiling. You only had to step down about two feet to reach the floor, which was also concrete. As the beam of my flashlight flicked around with Dan’s, I saw a room lined with stone and filled with exactly nothing.

“So far, so good,” I yelled out the hole. “Come see.”

The space had a heavy, choking smell, like fetid vegetation. The air was damp, but the floor was dry to the touch, as was the laid-up stone wall.

“Look over here,” said Dan.

He’d been in front of me, blocking the view of an arched doorway at the far end of the room.

“Let’s wait a second so Ned can take some samples,” he said, using his flashlight to guide Ned’s less graceful entrance through the hole. We watched him kneel and swab the floor, open and wave around little canisters, open others and set them on the floor, shoot his flashlight at the face of a handheld device and do all those other things chem engineering people delight in doing.

As he worked, we listened to Burton reminisce about trips into the Pyramids and catacombs, the sewers of Paris, the caves in the cliffs of Monte Carlo and a coal mine in West Virginia. The closest I’d come to that experience was crawling inside a giant pressure vessel to grab a sample of a contaminated catalyst. I didn’t like this environment a whole lot better, so I was glad when Ned said we could move on.

Dan made us wait until he checked out the next cellar, which proved to be an exact duplicate of the one before. We had to endure another round of test sampling and travelogues before we moved on. This time, however, things were a little different.

“Barrels,” Dan called out from the darkness.

Amanda grabbed my hand again.

“Ned first,” said Dan, although Ned was already on the way. “Damn,” said Burton, quietly.

“Let’s just see,” I said.

So the three of us stood in the semi-dark for about ten minutes, listening to the rumble of their conversation on the other side of the wall.

“It doesn’t mean you can’t have remediation,” I heard Burton saying. “It’s done all the time.”

“He’s right,” I said to Amanda. “I worked a lot of these sites at the company. Every time we closed a plant something like this happened.”

“Any in the Hamptons?” she asked.

“We need Sam,” Dan called.

I asked Burton to take Amanda’s hand, then went through the passage. It took me a few seconds to locate them in the bigger room and I was confused by the frenzied criss-cross of flashlights. I followed the sound of their voices.

“Check it out, Sam,” said Dan. “What’s your opinion?”

They cast their flashlights on a wall of containers, stacked three high. The bright, colorless light of the flashlights made it hard to focus at first, but as I got closer detail began to emerge. And then I was close enough to reach out and stroke the side of one of the containers.

“Wood,” I said. “They’re old wooden barrels.”

“Right,” said Dan. “Not good. Porous.”

I squatted down and felt the dry floor. Then I stood again and took a few paces back.

I don’t know if I started laughing before or after the thought struck me.

I went to the end of the wall where the barrel that began the first row was almost clear of the one above. I muscled it out away from the wall.

“Hey, careful,” said Ned, flashing his light at the floor under where the barrel had been standing. While he was doing that I slipped the little geologist’s hammer out of his utility belt and swung it down hard on the top of the barrel. Both Ned and Dan literally jumped back in horror.

“Hey!”

I hit it again and then a third time, finally loosening a slat on the top so I could get my hands around and pull it upward.

“Jesus, man, we need special equipment if we’re gonna do that kind of stuff,” said Dan.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ve got it back at the house. I just didn’t think to bring along ten-ounce glasses and a couple trays of ice cubes.”

I dipped my hand in the barrel and held the liquid up to my nose, then touched it with my tongue.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Sampling a little Scotch. Could be bourbon. It’s been sitting here a long time. Anyone bring peanuts?”