The Borzoi Killings

35.

Bo Halsey lived in a ranch house where he was raised in the Springs area of East Hampton. Still covered with dense woods, Springs was where Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning had lived. It was where Pollock had driven his car into a tree at ninety miles an hour. Bo knew their names and had seen pictures of the paintings. Awed tourists sometimes knocked on his door for directions to the artists’ shingled weather-beaten houses. For Bo, the blessing of the area was not that these inexplicably famous men had once lived there but that the bay waters were less than a mile from his house, the waters where fish were abundant every day of the year.

When he heard the knock on his door as he cooked a breakfast of eggs and bacon, he thought that tourists had come to the house for directions.

There were no tourists this morning. The men at the door were Vic Santangello and Paul Arena, two FBI agents who had worked from time to time with Bo.

Bo Halsey knew exactly why they were there.

“Hey, guys, come on in. I just made some coffee.”

Santangello and Arena followed him into the kitchen. Just outside the big window two deer stood completely still. The woods in Springs were filled with deer. “When I was a kid,” Bo said as he pointed to the coffee, which he still made in an old Pyrex percolator his mother had used years ago, “I loved to see the deer. It was like Christmas all the time. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Now there are so many of them they look like rats on long legs to me.”

“Bo,” Santangello said, “I gotta get this out because we really hate doing this.”

“It’s part of being on the job, Vic. We’re supposed to hate doing the things we do. It’s lousy work no matter how you look at it.”

Arena said, “They want to talk to you. There are two fucking U.S. Attorneys waiting for you in Riverhead. You gotta come with us.”

“My, my. U.S. Attorneys? When did the feds get involved in this?”

“When that gook who works for you went to the Justice Department and said you were a racist who suppressed evidence in order to convict a Mexican.”

“Since when,” Bo said, “was that a crime?”

“The Italian broad took him to our bosses in the city. They think the DA out here can’t really investigate one of his own people.”

“And that would be me, right?”

“Appears to be,” Arena said.

“Sorry about this, Bo,” Santangello said, genuine apology in his voice.

“No problem, guys.”