Head Wounds

TWENTY-FOUR

I LEFT AMANDA AND BURTON with Ned to guard the inventory while he took test samples and went with Dan to check the rest of the cellars. Unfortunately, no more booze appeared. The last cellar had a door to the outside, a table and chairs and what were probably canvas cots, now just piles of musty disintegration.

We tried to push open the door but only managed a thin slice of daylight. We could see the tangle of flora through the crack. It would be easy enough to find from the outside.

“Let’s go rejoin the party,” I said to Dan.

Ned, wearing official DEC goggles and gloves, was filling and corking the last of his glass cylinders. Amanda was standing with her arms around Burton and her head on his shoulder. She looked up hopefully when I shot her in the face with my flashlight.

“All clear,” I said. “Nothing down there but a rumrunner’s dormitory.”

I got the next hug. It was nice, especially with the buttery soft leather jacket in between.

“We’ll go through the whole place and take samples at regular intervals,” said Dan. “You’d want us to do that.”

“Yes we would,” I told him.

“I’ll get a generator and some can lights and see if we have enough sample kits. Ned, you can start prescreening the hooch so we can help Sam’s internist work up an antidote.”

After showing Amanda and Burton around the rest of the place, we went back outside to the bright daylight and renewed circumstances. Burton gave us a history lesson on liquor trafficking on the East End during Prohibition that was more thorough and no less enthusiastic than Dorothy Hodges’s. I stuck in a joke where I could, but Amanda was too stunned with relief to absorb wisecracks.

I drove her back to her house where she said she wanted to curl up in a ball and sleep for a few weeks. She asked me to come by later in the evening to watch over her, if I wanted to.

“Leave the vodka at home,” she said. “I’ve got some Glenfiddich stashed somewhere. More appropriate to the occasion. Why are you looking at me?” she added.

“I like looking at you.”

“Not usually like that.”

“Sorry. It’s not you. I’m just thinking.”

“Okay. I’m too wasted to think. Offer’s still open,” she said, and then disappeared into her house. I kept looking at the space she’d just left behind until I was distracted by Eddie with his paws on the car door, looking in the window. I let him ride the hundred feet back down our common driveway. They say dogs have no sense of time, so I told him we were driving to Maine and back. It made him happy.

The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door. It was Rosaline Arnold, only this time I was dressed for it.

“I think I know what was wrong with Robbie Milhouser,” she said when I answered.

“You’ve been thinking?” I asked.

“I’ve been researching. I went back to storage and pulled everything they had on him all the way back to grade school.”

“Wow.”

“Then I cross-referenced everything with data pulled off the Internet. Just to get a little corroboration.”

“And?”

“Come on, Sam, I’m not doing this over the phone. Plus I have visual aids.”

“You’re in luck. My afternoon schedule just opened up. How do you feel about dogs?”

——

I fed myself out of Tupperware containers while changing into sneakers and a silk baseball jacket. Eddie hung around the whole time, knowing as he always did that he was coming along.

The nice weather seemed determined to persist. Now late afternoon, the sun’s angle was deepening the color of the trees, and the sky was working on a design for the upcoming sunset. It was cool. Too cool with the window down for a lightweight jacket, but I was committed.

For no good reason, I took a slightly different route over to Rosaline’s. I wanted to see how the day was treating the potato fields just north of County Road 39 and wasn’t disappointed. The sun’s clear light through the cloudless sky turned the bare, freshly tilled earth a supple gold. The trees and bushes planted around the new houses forming along the fringes between fields had begun to fill out and a few years of wear had settled them into the landscape. With spring’s emergence the traffic on County Road 39 had also begun to bloom, so I waited awhile to cross and head south to Rosaline’s condo complex.

“No newspaper?” she asked when she answered the door, genuinely disappointed.

“I took the high road. No newsstands.”

“You did, however, bring a dog. As promised.”

Her hair was piled on top of her head, held precariously with bobby pins and stuck with a yellow pencil. She wore a men’s dress shirt and melon-colored shorts. I guessed her father’s, since they were several sizes too big. Eddie expressed his social grace by jumping all over her.

“Is it too early for cocktails?” she asked in a gross display of the rhetorical.

“Out on the patio. I want to see the latest perennials.”

Eddie started sniffing the corners of her apartment while I went straight to my favorite wicker chair. She followed soon with glasses, bottles and several fat old manila folders. I helped her unload.

“Sit, sit. I’ll pour.”

“I didn’t expect you to keep digging,” I said.

“I’m compulsive, what can I say. It’s the Internet’s fault. It’s an amazing research tool, but can only take you so far. Eventually you have to get your hands on some good old-fashioned paper and ink. Cheers.”

She pulled up her legs so her heels were hooked on the edge of her seat, using her thighs to support the files as she leafed through. Eddie gave a sharp little bark from the other side of the French doors and I went to let him out. I walked him around the garden area for a few minutes so he could sample the local scents and piss on a few flowers, then bought him back with me to lie on the patio.

“Anyway,” said Rosaline, picking up where the conversation left off, “I already had my name all over requests for Robbie’s high school file, so why not go for broke. I still haven’t figured out what to say if I’m questioned. Maybe you can come up with something.”

“How about the truth?”

“Illegally sharing a student’s confidential information?”

“I’ll keep thinking.”

“The good news is what I uncovered is in the public domain.”

“Like what?”

She handed me a photocopy of a page from a church ledger. St. John’s Episcopal Church, Southampton. It listed marriages performed from January through April, 1966.

“Find Milhouser.”

I followed the columns till I came to “Emilia Silverio and Jefferson Milhouser.”

“Nice Italian girl,” I said. “Must have felt funny in that bastion of Waspdom.”

“You see the date?” she asked.

“Yeah. 1966.”

“Here,” she said, handing me another piece of paper.

It was a printout from the birth registry at Mt. Vernon Hospital, Mt. Vernon, New York. I traced down the columns until I found “Robert, to Emilia and Marco Silverio.”

“And the date?”

“1961. Son of a bitch.”

“Son of Italians. Very unlucky ones. Let’s move to the obits.”

The first was a scanned clipping from Newsday. An obit with a little American flag, indicating a veteran. Marco had owned a shipping and storage business out of Long Island City until a sizeable hunk of something to be shipped or stored fell on his head. He left a wife and a one-year-old son.

Rosaline waited until I finished reading so I could look up at her face and see another piece of paper held in her hand.

“I’m enjoying this, Sam,” she said. “Rummaging around in archives, on and off the Internet, especially those involving vital statistics, gives me an intense voyeuristic delight. In fact, at certain times it actually makes me a little wet. Does that sound perverse?”

“Not at all. What else you got?”

She handed me another scanned clipping, this one from The Southampton Chronicle.

Emilia had been spared the violent death of her first husband, but she was just as dead, this time from multiple myeloma, a less immediate but far more painful way to go. She left a husband, Jefferson Milhouser, and an eight-year-old son, Robert.

“Jeff’s not his father,” I said.

“Nope. It’s amazing how you see a family resemblance that’s not actually there. Think about it. They don’t look anything like each other.”

She put Robbie’s high school yearbook picture down on the table next to a headshot of Jeff from his days as a Town Trustee. Broad, burly Mediterranean next to lean, lanky Anglo.

“What kind of a teenager do you think you’d be if Jeff Milhouser was your only parent, your principal mentor?” she asked. “You don’t need a degree in psychology to figure that one out. I have one, by the way, and I did figure it out,” she added.

I picked up a picture in each hand and looked at the faces.

“Can I use your phone?” I asked her.

She looked disappointed.

“You’re brilliant, Rosaline,” I said when I realized why. “But you know that. You did an amazing thing. And you didn’t even have to.”

Her face lightened up again.

She stood up and ran her fingers down my cheek. Then went inside to get the portable phone. Eddie jumped up, too, but I told him to relax. I finished off my drink and poured a fresh one over the dwindling ice and stared some more at the Milhousers.

I couldn’t remember Sullivan’s direct line, so after Rosaline brought me the phone I went through the cumbersome process with the switchboard. I paced around the garden to help speed things up. He eventually came on the line.

“Got me just in time, Sam. Ready to head home.”

“How’d you do with those phone records?”

“Not sure. They might be in the fax bin. When do you need them?”

It was one of the things I missed about a hyperproductive, anxiety-fueled corporate environment. Everyone knew you wanted everything immediately all the time. Even when you didn’t. I took a breath.

“Sooner better than later, Joe. I’m sort of snuggin’ up to an indictment here.”

“Yeah, Veckstrom said it could be any minute. Who told you?”

I felt a sharp tug in my chest.

“Nobody told me, Joe, I hadn’t heard. But you can see why I’d be feeling a little urgency.”

“Let me go check.”

A hundred years later he came back on the line. “Yep, I think it’s all here. Expedited, by the way. Don’t think I just was sitting on my hands.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“Nah, I’m here with Will Ervin. He’ll drop ’em off at your house. Courtesy of the Town of Southampton, Department of Public Safety. To schlep and protect.”

I thanked him in a way I hoped he’d know was genuine.

“Do you have your computer turned on?” I asked Rosaline.

“No, but it doesn’t take long. What do you want to know?”

“If you can pry around in my personal life, I’m assuming you can do that with anybody,” I said.

“Depends on the person.”

“Show me.”

Eddie peeled off to explore more of the condo while she took me to her office in the second bedroom. Like the rest of the place it expressed a comfortable, cheerful wear.

She brought a kitchen chair with her to set next to her office chair so I could watch the action. I’d spent a large part of my working life staring at computer screens, though the displays looked nothing like you see today. Just a lot of data stacked in rows against white or dark green backgrounds. I was aware of the Web in the last years of my career, but I was too involved in other things to pay much attention. It was now a few years into the twenty-first century and I was about to get my first close-up look.

“Okay,” she said, her hand poised on the mouse. “Who’s the target?”

“Zack Horowitz.”

“Can you narrow that? Dates, places?”

“Long Island. Fifteen years back to today.”

The whole world knows now how this stuff works, but it was a shock to me how fast things came up on the screen, and how nice everything looked. And how much information there was. All of this amused Rosaline.

“Did you know that TV is now in color?” she said.

The path was a little jagged, but we could follow Zack’s life backwards from his current role as Assistant Regional Director of the New York State DEC through a stint as Head of Environmental Affairs for a tech company in Bethpage, several years as a staff consultant and then as a specialist in governmental contract compliance with the Long Island office of a Big Five accounting firm, a period of private practice, and finally arrived at his gig as Treasurer for the Town of Southampton.

Buried in the middle of a brief profile of Zack was a piece of biographical chaff that appeared nowhere else, which Rosaline insisted was pure chance.

“Everyone commands the Web. No one has control.”

That didn’t matter to me. Just that it was there: “While serving as Director of Lending at the Southampton branch of East End Savings and Loan, Zack was elected Town Treasurer, beginning a long, successful career bridging the professional worlds of private enterprise and community-based public service …” And from there it blathered into self-serving corporate propaganda, which surprisingly made no mention of Zack’s intimate involvement in Jeff Milhouser’s attempts to bridge public service with commercial fraud.

As interesting as this was, it didn’t distract me from Rosaline’s hand resting on my thigh, slowly sliding toward the inside. I put my hand on top of hers to halt the progress.

“Sorry, Sam,” she said. “It’s the proximity.”

I knew what she meant. This close in you can easily get caught in a cloud of scent-borne pheromones.

“It’s a nice thought,” I said.

“But.”

“But I don’t know. There’s some sort of life at the tip of Oak Point. Can’t see past it right now.”

“I know. I’ll print this stuff out while you go back to the patio. Unless you want to try a cold shower for two.”

I opted for another vodka instead. By now the sun was hugging the horizon and cooler air was riding in on lengthening shadows. I settled into my wicker chair, in no hurry to leave. It wasn’t just Rosaline’s comfy aromatic apartment. I wanted to wait for the cover of darkness, an ambiance more conducive to both love and ruin.

Reflecting the mood on the patio, she came out in a linen dress and sandals, carrying a platter of munchies and a handful of printouts. She asked if Eddie could have some cheese.

“If you can stand all the adoration.”

“So what’s with Zack Horowitz?” she asked as she tossed hunks of cheddar in the air for Eddie to catch. “If you want to tell me, which you probably don’t.”

“You know as much as I do,” I said. “Except that he was Roy Battiston’s boss back at East End Savings when Jeff Milhouser was caught mishandling Town assets. The Town’s treasure, you could say. And, as you know, Zack was also the Town Treasurer.”

“Lovely,” she said, popping a chunk of peppercorn cheese in her mouth.

I could have said the same thing about her. She’d never believe me, but I liked the nose. A clever joke on God’s part. Build a softly sensual, brainy woman with a nearly perfect physique, then throw in a prominent irregularity and see what happens. For me, it just made the rest of the package that much more appealing. A handy point of contrast, always in evidence.

I had a habit of seeing the same divine sense of humor manifest in lots of people’s lives, in those random intersections where luck not only meets opportunity and preparation but other forms of luck, both good and bad.

Even as I rode the waves of destruction, I couldn’t think of myself as unlucky. I had experiences and warehouses filled with memory. I didn’t have the grace to attribute that to good luck. I held those achievements as mine alone. Along with all the responsibility for what followed. I wouldn’t allow fate a role in any of it. Fate was a disinterested bystander, preoccupied with the work of elevating and devastating other people’s lives. But never mine.

That was the arrogance of defeat. That it was all my fault.

I wondered if that same habit of thought plagued the mind of Zack Horowitz. Or if he’d tried to banish history through selective amnesia, concentrating on a life of service, built on atonement and rationalization. Either way, none of it amounts to a hill of beans when fate comes to call.

I spent another hour watching night fall with Rosaline. She let me move the conversation onto other things, so the time spent was even more agreeable than it had been, making it harder to pull away.

“I know it doesn’t seem like it, Sam, but I don’t want to add to your burdens,” she said. “I know it wouldn’t do any good, and might even scare you away, and then I’d really feel like crap.”

“We’re fine,” I said. “Better than fine. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Okay,” she said, and softly shut the door, floating back into her world of comfort and order, sparked by the mutually sustaining forces of lust and curiosity.