Head Wounds

THREE

THE MONDAY AFTER Amanda’s house burned down I was at the corner place in the Village buying a large Viennese cinnamon coffee and a customized croissant stuffed with cheese and Virginia ham. After five years of steady seduction I’d finally established a fragile rapport with the tiny Guatemalan woman who ran the pastry counter. This allowed me to wrangle special orders, managed mostly through the lavish use of terms like bonita, guapa and Señorita Lista.

It was half an hour before I had to show up at Joshua Edelstein’s house, so I sat on the teak park bench and pretended the temperature was above freezing. The coffee helped the cause, steaming up in my face and easing down the ham sandwich.

A battleship gray Crown Victoria swung so abruptly into the parking space in front of the bench I almost pulled my feet out of the way. It was Sullivan, resplendent in Yankees cap, tough-cop sunglasses and aftermarket battle wear. He said something into a radio before getting out of the car.

“You like that faggie coffee,” he said, standing in front of the bench with his hands in his jacket pockets.

“You’re blocking my sun.”

“Stay put,” he said and went into the shop, returning soon after with a bagel and a tall cup of his own. Looked like a latte. He sat down next to me, taking up more than half the space.

“I got the prelims on the fire from the County,” he said. “Wasn’t much of a challenge, even for those bozos.”

“Arson.”

“Oh, yeah. Gasoline siphoned out of a step van the finish carpenters had left on the site. The hose was still sticking out of the tank. Filled up a couple of empty compound buckets. Threw it all over the house, then tossed the buckets in the backyard.”

“Didn’t put up a sign that said, Arsonists at work?’”

“Next-door neighbor heard voices right before noticing the big glow. Heard a truck pull away.”

“Heard but didn’t see,” I said.

“Said he was just lying there in bed, trying to sleep. Understandable. No reason to look. You usually don’t know you’re a witness to something until some cop shows up at your door.”

He took a bite of the bagel. Cream cheese oozed out of the middle and tumbled down the front of his camouflage field jacket.

“Not a professional job,” I offered.

“Unless their profession was advertising.”

“P.T. Barnum invented advertising. Said there was a sucker born every minute.”

“These guys weren’t suckers. Smarter than that.”

“Smart?”

“Wore gloves and something on their feet that disguised their footprints. Just looked like blobs in the mud. Almost no sole prints.”

“Booties,” I said, after a moment’s thought.

“Booties?”

“Lightweight, disposable shoe covers. Made of Gore-Tex or Tyvek. Used in ultra-sterile, ultra-pure environments. Like clean rooms, where a single piece of dust can louse up a semiconductor. Or in bioresearch, or drug production.”

“You know this?” Sullivan asked.

“I know about booties. I don’t know if they used them. Just a guess. If they did, you’re right. They’re smart.”

Some more deliberation time passed, which I used to finish off my coffee as a distraction from the envy I was feeling over Sullivan’s chocolate-sprinkled latte.

“They wanted to advertise the act, not the actors,” said Sullivan.

“A summation both trenchant and poetic,” I told him, sincerely.

“I’m gonna assume that wasn’t an insult,” he said, downing the last of his bagel and cream cheese. “Speaking of which,” he said, brushing crumbs off his jacket, “have you talked to Amanda?”

“Had a few insults of her own?”

“After you ran off. She wasn’t happy.”

“Did she hear the discussion with the County people?” I asked.

“Wasn’t supposed to, but yeah. Elbowed her way in. Heard it all.”

“Must have been interesting.”

“Actually shut her up. I figured exhaustion finally got to her. I had Will Ervin escort her back to her house and told him to keep a tight eye on her and her other place.”

“Have any theories?”

“I might ask you the same thing,” he said.

“Nothing worth talking about.”

“In other words, you’re not talking.”

“In other words, if I start talking about it to you in your official capacity, I might be jumping the gun.”

He savored a gentle pull off the top of the latte, smacking his lips like he’d just dipped into Aunt Tillie’s prize-winning apple pie.

“I’m in the mood to try something new this time, Sam. What say you tell me everything you’re thinking now, no matter how half-baked, rather than making me guess until I’m ready to start beating you over the head to get it out of you.”

“No more beating on the head. Doctor’s orders.”

“So I hear,” he said.

“Yeah? From whom?” I asked.

“I’m not ready to talk about that.”

“Christ.”

“Though I might’ve heard a few things one time when I was lifting weights next to a trauma doc. Somebody we both know.”

“Fucking Markham.”

“He said the same crap about me. You’re not the only one who’s had his bean used for batting practice.”

I’d been through some stuff with Joe Sullivan, and truth is, I probably hadn’t been as fair to him as I should have. It was an old habit of mine to keep my lunatic musings to myself until I thought they deserved to be shown the light of day. People misinterpreted that to mean I didn’t think they had worthwhile thoughts of their own. That’s not what I wanted. I just wasn’t done cooking the stew.

“I got into a dumb little dustup with Robbie Milhouser Friday night. Him and a couple of his boys.”

“I know. Judy told me.”

“Hah,” I said. “Who’s withholding now?”

“Ross wanted me to ask if you thought there was a connection between that and Amanda’s fire. Like I wouldn’t have wondered that myself.”

Ross Semple was the Southampton Town Chief of Police. The gripe aside, we both knew he held Sullivan in fairly high regard. The only strike against him being his association with me.

“I’ve got no reason right now to think one way or the other,” I told him. “But it’s a place to start.”

He nodded.

“I’m sure Amanda would get behind that,” he said.

“Who the hell knows.”

“Still not talking, are we?”

“Not at the moment.”

“None of my business,” he said, holding up his hands defensively. “It’s your love life.”

“There’s an oxymoron.”

“Now who’s insulting?”

I stood up and tossed the butt end of the croissant to a skittery flock of chickadees working the sidewalk.

Sullivan looked up at me, squinting behind his tough-cop sunglasses against the sun rising above the storefronts across Main Street. He looked like he wanted to say more, but I left before he had a chance and drove over to Joshua Edelstein’s house, where I worked another ten-hour day. I kept my mind focused on cutting miters, coping inside joints and not shooting myself with my pneumatic brad nailer. It was a nice peaceful day, just me, two other finish guys working in other parts of the house, and a pair of electricians installing switches and wall plugs.

In answer to my quiet prayer, nobody turned on the radio, which was invariably set to the most brainless meatball station Frank’s crew could pull in from Up Island. All you heard were the cutoff saws, the pop-pop of nail guns, compressors turning on and off, and the sound of work boots scraping around the plywood subfloor. We even had heat, since the tapers who came through over the weekend had jacked up the thermostat to hasten drying between coats. I never had to say a word to anybody all day, not even to myself.

After work I stopped off at the cottage long enough to wash my face and hands, change my clothes and feed Eddie. He was free to use his secret door to go in and out of the house, but couldn’t open a can or pour out his own dry food. At least that’s what he wanted me to think. I left him there to chow down and drove over to the Pequot, the crummy little joint next to the marina in Sag Harbor run by Paul Hodges and his daughter Dorothy. It was the only place around where you could avoid the plague of sophistication spreading through the Hamptons, infecting even indigenous dive bars. The clientele was mostly fishermen or mechanics working the marina, so the olfactory ambience alone was enough to frighten off normal people, even if you could stand the smell of Hodges’s cooking.

Dorothy was in her mid-twenties and looked like she’d died recently after being trapped inside a dark closet. Based on seeing other young people around the Village, I guessed the sepulchral disposition was intentional. Something I meant to ask my own daughter when I had the chance.

Tonight she was wearing a wifebeater undershirt, over a black bra, with black polyester slacks and mechanics boots. Her hair, also black, had been forced into angry, slickened spikes. Her skin was so pale you could distinguish between veins and arteries. I thought if you looked closely enough you could see the shadows of muscle, ligament and bone. A tattoo on her left shoulder said “Recriminate.”

“Hey, Sunshine,” I said to her as I pulled up a barstool.

“Vodka on the rocks, no fruit, swizzle stick,” she said without looking up from wiping down the bar.

“Make it two swizzle sticks. Feel like changing things up a little.”

“You want a menu?”

“Bring me whatever you been pulling out of the water,” I told her.

“Not a problem. My father’s been serving fresh snorkelers all week.”

“I thought it was too cold for snorkeling.”

“That’s why they’re so fresh.”

Hodges must have heard me, he came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on the bib of his apron. Somewhere in his sixties, he looked like a guy whose life had shown him some hard treatment. Years of commercial fishing had turned his skin the color and consistency of walrus hide, though the wide shape of his mouth and his bugged-out eyes looked more amphibious than mammalian. He was surely wider around the waist than he’d been as a younger man, but his arms were still thickly muscled and his hands looked capable of squirting clams out of their shells.

“Dotty tell you about the specials?” he asked.

“Dorothy,” she said, though mostly to herself.

“She did. Sounds great. Just hold the flippers.”

“Flippers are the best part.”

He left me alone to drink while he put together my meal. Dorothy talked to me about a story she’d read in the local paper about the rumrunners who used to ply the waters of the South Fork during Prohibition.

“They’d bring the stuff in from big ships that sailed down from Canada and anchored twelve miles off the coast, which was international waters in those days,” she told me while she stuffed beer mugs into the dishwasher behind the bar. “They’d use hot-rod boats loaded to the gunwales. Zip around the forks and make stops all up and down the bay shores. Jacob’s Neck was famous for it.”

“My home waters.”

“I know. That’s why I’m telling you. I think that old factory was in on it,” she said, popping back up and slamming the dishwasher door closed.

“WB Manufacturing. Wouldn’t surprise me. Do anything for a buck.”

“Why not? Can’t stop people from drinking, for Lord’s sake.”

“No argument here,” I said, with conviction. “Though you could drink less, if you know what I mean.”

“And threaten a cornerstone of the Pequot’s revenue stream?”

“Good point. Want another?”

“Sure.”

The company of the Pequot’s owner came with my meal, as it usually did. Hodges had known my father, which made him think of me as a point of continuity with the dead past. A past he remembered as if it were last week, a penchant that caused him comfort and confusion in equal measure.

When I took my first mouthful he looked at me expectantly.

“So, what do you think? Succulent or merely piquant?”

I chewed on the question.

“More abundantly audacious. Exuberant.”

“See, Dotty,” he yelled to his daughter, “Didn’t I tell you?”

She brought him a bourbon so I wouldn’t feel bad being the only one with a drink. We talked about nothing for a while, then migrated into the realm of the merely inconsequential.

Then I made the mistake of telling him about Amanda’s house.

“No kidding. Wow. There’s a pity,” he said. “How’s she taking it?”

I told him what happened after Sullivan woke us up, including what led to my decision to jog home. He maintained a look of neutrality, which I appreciated. I was less sure how Dorothy, who was nearby pretending not to listen to the conversation, took the news.

“At least she can afford to start over,” said Hodges. “Even without insurance, though I guess that’s not much of a consolation.”

“No. Apparently not.”

“That girl’s had more than her share of trouble.”

“There’s something wrong with this drink,” I said, holding the empty glass up to the light.

Dorothy plucked it out of my hand and filled it with a handful of fresh ice. Hodges took the cue and launched down a different conversational byway. I don’t know how it happened, but something led to something that caused me to mention Robbie Milhouser.

“Knew his father,” said Hodges. “Quite an operator.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Okay, sleazebag. But looked good, you know? Handsome. Like that Bouvier guy. Jackie’s old man. Slick.”

“A dickhead with a pretty face is still a dickhead,” I said.

“Easy to say when you got a nose that’s always signaling a right-hand turn. No offense.”

“Why would I be offended at that?”

The fragrant and boisterous arrival of a pack of fishermen drove Hodges back into the kitchen, giving me a chance to finish off my meal and a few more drinks. Dorothy occasionally slid over to give me an installment of her moonshiner story, trying to persuade me to search Jacob’s Neck for evidence of contraband booze. I told her I’d investigated the WB property personally two years ago and found only abandoned machine tools and bowling trophies. And if there was anything in the muck of the lagoon, it could stay there until it turned into fossils.

“Besides,” I told her, “who’d drink eighty-year-old booze?”

“You see who comes in this place?” she said, nodding toward the fishermen, now crowded around a pair of tables pulled together in the center of the room, drinking bottled beer and shoving handfuls of fried clams into their mouths.

“If I ever find anything, I’ll turn it over to you. For the sake of history or commerce, whatever your mood at the time.”

When Hodges came back he still had Robbie Milhouser’s old man on his mind.

“You know he was a Town Trustee for a while,” he told me, settling in with his second bourbon on the rocks. “Proof that politics is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

“I thought that was patriotism.”

“The Town had its share of crooks in those days. Not that there was much to steal. Mostly a little skim here and there and a chance to get out of parking tickets. Milhouser still managed to get caught scamming the highway department. I think it was over road salt. I don’t remember the details, but he had to quit the board and was lucky to stay out of jail. Still alive, you know. At least as of a month or two ago. Saw him in the hardware store. All grins and handshakes. Good old Jeff Milhouser.”

“Jeff. Didn’t remember his first name.”

“Short for Jefferson. Folks had a lot of money. Or used to. Lost it in the Depression or something. Had the Ivy League airs. Used to see that a lot around here when the place was full of Waspy old money. Not so much anymore.”

“You knew this guy?” I said.

“Only for a while. When I was working for him at the Esso station out on County Road 39.”

“That’s where I worked for him.”

“Get out of here. Don’t remember you. What was it, early sixties?” Hodges asked.

“I was there a little later. You wouldn’t have seen me anyway. Always had my head stuffed in an engine compartment. You’re right, though, now that you mention it. Milhouser always wore a pinstriped button-down shirt. And boots from L.L. Bean, back when New England swells were the only ones who thought that stuff was hip.”

I listened to him talk while I ate another plate of fish he’d brought out for me, which was nicely seasoned and well cooked, though like all Hodges’s preparations, unidentifiable. You could ask him what it was, but it wasn’t worth the trouble. You never got a straight answer.

“So we’re agreeing Jeff Milhouser was a dickhead,” he said in summary.

“We are. Him and his offspring.”

“Don’t know the kid,” said Hodges. “Not that I know of, anyway.”

“He’s been building houses around Noyac and North Sea. His crew’s from Up Island.”

“They might be a little too refined for the Pequot.”

“Better to stay clear of that bunch. You don’t need the trouble,” I said.

“Can’t be worse than a crew of fishermen after a few weeks at sea. Anyway, we got equipment for that behind the bar.”

“They aren’t always men,” Dorothy interjected from across the room.

“Pardon me, I meant fisherpeople,” said Hodges. “She’s right, though. Some of those ladies are scarier than the men.”

After that we found ourselves diverted along some other long and circuitous conversational paths, which was the norm with Hodges. It was still early, but I was getting heavy with tiredness and iced Absolut, the hard labors of the day catching up with me. I told Hodges I had to call it quits.

“I’ll go dig up the check,” he said, starting to stand up, and then paused and sat back down.

“Now I remember,” he said. “It wasn’t the road-salt scam that got Milhouser in all that trouble. It was bank fraud. Damn, I can’t believe I’m remembering this.” He nodded to himself as he chewed over the memory, his face furrowed with concentration. I was almost too tired to take the bait, but I wasn’t getting the check without letting him spill the story.

“Gee, Hodges, what was that fraud all about?” I asked.

“What he did was move a bunch of Town money into one of his own accounts, just long enough to collateralize a loan, then moved it all back out again. This took place inside the same bank, so it must have looked easy to Milhouser, though of course the genius never thought anybody’d notice the transactions. Could have been real trouble, but he got probation on a plea of irreconcilable stupidity.”

“Which bank was this?” I asked.

“Right there on Main Street. Don’t remember the name.”

“Harbor Trust?” I asked him. It was the bank where Amanda used to work and her husband Roy was the manager.

“I think it was some savings and loan. Local deal. They all disappeared a while ago.”

Dorothy saved me from more talk about the Milhousers by bringing me the check and gently shooing her father back into the kitchen. I got out of there and headed back to the tip of Oak Point.

I drove past my house and up to Amanda’s. The Audi was gone and her house was blacked out, leaving only my post lamp to light our two properties. I walked up to the door anyway and rang the bell. After waiting a minute, I went around to a side window and opened it up. I knew about the missing lock from when the place was owned by an old lady named Regina Broadhurst. I knew about it because she was always on my ass to fix it.

I found my way to Amanda’s bedroom and turned on the light. Her suitcase was missing from the closet. The hair dryer and her makeup bag were gone from the bathroom.

The only thing that could nail it down more was a note that said, “I have left for the night.”

When I got back to my cottage Eddie was waiting on the little porch off the side door. My plan had been to go right to bed without a last cigarette or nightcap, but now I decided on both. Eddie went with me out to the Adirondack chairs. The surface of the Little Peconic was racing toward Sag Harbor before a stiff westerly pouring in through the slot between Robbins Island and Cow Neck. The air was clear enough to turn the lights on the opposite shore into sharp little pinpricks randomly arrayed along the blackened horizon.

I thought drinking out on the lawn would force me into bed, but it had the opposite effect. So instead I went and put on my running shoes. Eddie looked skeptical, so I stowed him in the house and headed off along Bay Edge Drive. The only car to pass me was a BMW roadster going far too fast for the sandy rutted road surface. It would have hit me if I hadn’t jumped out of the way. But I was never in any danger.

I’d been running on that road since time began, and every turn and roll inked into my memory so indelibly I could run it mindless and blind, sure in the embrace of invulnerable night.