The Last Refuge

FOUR

MY OFFICE HAD a sprawling overgrown schefflera that filled the space in front of two huge sheets of plate glass that formed one corner of the room. Right next to the plant was a steel desk Abby bought me soon after we were married. I used to sit on top of the desk cross-legged, yogi style, and talk on the phone. Of the thirty-five-thousand people worldwide in our ten-billion-dollar corporation, I was the only one who did this.

I was sitting there looking through the leaves of the schefflera at a resplendent spring day when a call came in from the chairman of a corporate sub-committee. I’d never heard of it before, but this was nothing new. Big corporations are like gas giants—huge swirling balls of toxic, overheated gas held together by gravity, and controlled by a form of planetary tectonics that forces the entire mass into endless cycles of expansion and collapse. The energy unleashed throws off institutional debris that recombines as tiny sub-spheres of frantic activity. They drift free for a while before getting snagged by the gravitational field and sucked back into the body of the organization. But along the way there was always the danger that one of them would call you on the phone.

“We’re doing a performance audit on your area,” the voice on the other end of line said, or something like it.

“Sounds fine. When you’re done we’ll come over and do one on yours.”

“We’re hoping this can be as undisruptive as possible.”

“That’s good. Because shit like this plays hell with our performance.”

I knew most of the people who ran the company. I’d say hi to them in the halls and occasionally stand in front of the board of directors, priestly looking guys in shiny gray suits and white hair, and tell them how I was looking after our $45-million divisional budget. They never looked all that happy or secure. I guess you can make your own crap to live in even when you earn enough in stock options alone to buy a medium-sized city. I think some of them actually liked me. I was one of the few people in the company who did something tangible, who made things you could touch. I symbolized for them a mythical time when substance was presumably valued over style.

But still, when it all hit, they watched in silence through neutral eyes, their minds preoccupied with portfolio management and grandchildren.

One day two big security guards, black guys I’d greet every morning as I walked through the parking lot, stood and watched me empty out the desk Abby gave me. I left it with the schefflera. It didn’t seem right to break up the set.

They helped me throw the stuff from the desk into a dumpster behind the building. We talked about our kids and the sad decline of the normally aspirated big block V-8 engine.

I thought of them when I came to in Southampton Hospital, watching a huge dark brown and white mass take shape as a Jamaican physician.

“Hey ’der, you know what I’m saying to you?” I heard him say through all the wet glop stuffed inside my brain.

I think I nodded.

“Dat’s a yes? You call dat a yes?”

“Yuff.”

“Oh, so dat’s a yes. I get it.”

His hair was cut close to his scalp and he wore neat gold wire-rim glasses. His face would have been more handsome if it was smaller. The white medical coat stretched impossibly across his shoulders and chest, and a pink button-down Oxford cloth shirt showed at the neck. He had about a half dozen pens and a few evil-looking chrome instruments stuck in his front pocket. He leaned into me and adjusted something attached to the side of my skull. Nausea crept around inside my gut. My head felt like it filled up half the room. There was an IV in my arm. I looked down at it.

“Get it out.”

When I spoke my tongue lit up like a firecracker. I felt a big lump on the side when I moved it around my mouth.

“Can’ do dat now,” he looked down at my chart, “Mr. A-cquillo. You need what’s in dere I’m sure.”

I shook my head.

“No painkillers.”

“You don’ know what you’re askin’.”

I nodded as furiously as my head would let me. Panic began to bubble up in my throat.

“Rather have the pain.”

Some people are afraid of snakes. Or airplanes. With me it’s drugs. Especially painkillers.

“Get it out.” I shook the tube. The Jamaican’s powerful hand clamped down on my arm. He studied me carefully. Warmth flowed from his hand.

“Don’ do dat, now. You’re my responsibility.”

I stared at him. His face softened.

“I go get the attending. But you gotta stay still and not do anyt’ing loony, you know?”

“What time is it?”

He looked at his watch.

“’Bout five-tirty.”

“I gotta get out of here.”

A broad smile lit his face as he shook his head.

“Oh no, Mr. Acquillo, you don’ go anywhere till we say. You got a concussion der prob’ly.”

“I left a dog in my car.”

He shook his head again.

“No, ladies brung the car wit’ the dog. He’s at the vet’s ’round the corner. Good place. He’s all set. We do dis all the time.”

“He’s gonna hate that. I got to get outta here.”

“I go talk to attending, he come in here and explain your situation.”

I couldn’t seem to keep my head up off the pillow, so I set it back down.

“Okay.”

“Okay, but you gotta not try to take off on me.”

I nodded.

“You promise me, or I’ll tie you down,” he said.

I nodded.

“Sorry. Not your fault,” I told him.

He let go of my arm and patted it. I lay there when he left and took stock. I was conscious. I knew I was in a hospital—I assumed it was Southampton. I could move my head and all my limbs and digits. I could see, though the outlines were a little fuzzy. I could open and shut my mouth, despite that wad of something on the side of my tongue. It made it difficult to probe around the inside of my mouth, but it felt like I had all my teeth—both the real and the gold ones I got because of Rene Ruiz.

I was in an area contained by rolling room dividers and white curtains. There was a window open nearby and wind from the Atlantic was busting in and flipping through a newspaper on the table next to my bed. No flowers. No get-well cards. No worried-looking relatives.

Aside from a hernia I fixed a long time ago, I wasn’t very experienced with hospitals. I don’t like them. I don’t like giving myself to somebody else to look after. Plus, it’s wicked hard to get a vodka on the rocks or a pack of cigarettes out of anybody.

The attending doctor was a skinny little guy with shiny skin and hair like balls of single-ought steel wool. He looked me right in the eyes and shook my hand.

“Hey, welcome to the conscious. How’d you sleep?”

“Hard to say.”

He read the chart and nervously clicked a retractable ballpoint pen.

“Markham tells me you tried to go AWOL.”

“Don’t want the IV. Don’t like painkillers.”

“Prefer the pain?”

“Yeah.”

“What the hell for?”

“That stuff makes me dopey.”

“Some consider that a nice side benefit.”

“Please. Get it out.”

He spun the bag around and looked at the label.

“Well, we got a lot of important stuff in here— like an anticoagulant. Don’t want you pulling a stroke on us. You do realize you’ve had a traumatic blow to the head?”

“Two.”

“Pardon?”

“Two traumatic blows to the head. Plus one to the gut and a kick in the teeth.”

“That reminds me,” said the doctor, pulling open my jaw and looking into my mouth. “You left a piece of your tongue back there at the Playhouse.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Not a big one. Otherwise, you’re in pretty good shape. Just a slight concussion and a gash. No bone damage.”

“Hard head.”

He reset his heavy horn-rimmed glasses on his nose and looked at my chart again. I wondered if it recorded my manifold sins and omissions. He looked up at me again as if struck with a new thought.

“These things can be cumulative. Going by your face you’ve been through this before. You made it this far without brain damage, but I wouldn’t push your luck.”

“Wasn’t my idea.”

“Okay. None of my business.”

“Guy suckered me. Hit like a bastard.”

Markham came into the room.

“Hey, dat’s more like it. Actin’ civil with the attending.”

“So it was definitely an assault,” said the doctor. “The police were curious.”

“Who told them?”

“We told them. We always tell them when there’s a fight. They’ll want to talk to you.”

“If you call a Town cop named Joe Sullivan you’d be doing me a favor. He knows me.”

“I could do that.”

“After all the trouble you give us we supposed to be doin’ you favors?” said Markham.

I looked up at him.

“I could’ve used you the other night.”

“Yeah? Who say I’m on your side?”

“We put about five stitches in your head,” said the doctor, “where you probably caught a towel dispenser or stall divider. Your tongue’ll just have to grow back on its own. Other than that, we’ll keep an eye on you for another four hours, then throw you out of here.”

“The curse of the managed care,” said Markham.

“Don’t start,” said the doc.

I wiggled the IV.

“Do me a favor and unplug this thing. I’ll sign whatever you want.”

They were both looking at me. Markham looked bemused.

“He don’ want any additives. Give him the heebie-jeebies.”

The doc shrugged.

“Okay. Your body.”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

It took about an hour for a nurse to come and unhook the IV. After that I fell asleep and dreamed of flying fists and frightening confrontations with slobbering demons and polar bears. Mangled corpses of old, white-haired people stacked up like cordwood. The constant look of disgust on Abby’s face, and other nightmarish images. This is why I don’t like having clear liquids pumped into my veins from little plastic bags. It never goes well.

The headache woke me up. I pushed the button for a nurse and got Markham instead. He looked happy.

“Havin’ second thoughts?” he asked me.

“Hurts too much to think.”

“Ha. Don’ go blamin’ me.”

“You on one of those eighty-hour shifts?”

When he spread his arms they seemed to swallow the entire room.

“Someone got to keep de place in business.”

He checked my pulse out of reflex. He pulled a pen-sized examination light out of his front pocket and clicked it on. His lips pursed when he shot it in my eyes.

“Not too bad, considerin’.”

“That’s a comfort.”

He clicked off the light and stood straight, still frowning with concentration.

“You got any beef with aspirin?” he asked me.

“Works on a hangover.”

“It’ll help.”

He scribbled on my chart and yelled to a passing nurse. She went off for the aspirin.

“Say, Doc.”

He looked up from my chart.

“Were you here when they brought me in?”

“Sure. I got you from the ER.”

“How’d I get here?”

“Some nice ladies drive you, I t’ink. Don’t really know. Der were some cops, but we shoo dem away.”

“Two or three ladies?”

He shrugged and shook his massive head.

“I only saw two. Dark-haired skinny one and a blond-haired bigger one. Gave me her card. Couldn’t tell if she want to sell me a house or jump down my pants,” he said cheerfully.

“She’s in real estate. It’s more or less the same thing.”

“I can ask the folks in the ER, but they don’ usually see nothing but the patient. Takes some concentration, that job.”

“That’s okay. Just wondering.”

“I could ask.”

“Nah. Just curious.”

He tucked his pen back in his pocket and patted the area around my head bandage. His enormous hands moved with a practiced ease. He seemed content with the job they’d done.

“Headache’s not the only noise you got in der, Mr. Acquillo. I can see that.”

“Probably what’s keeping me awake.”

“I can fix ’at. Offer’s still open.”

“Aspirin’s looking pretty good.”

“We’ll get the dressing changed in a little while. You want anyt’ing, ask for me.”

“Could be a big order.”

He gave my forearm a quick squeeze, leaving the full strength of his grip in reserve. Enough to crack walnuts.

“That’s why you call me. I’m big enough to do it.”

I actually slept again for another hour before Sullivan woke me up. He was in civilian clothes—jeans and cotton shirt, with a nylon jacket. He stood over me and shook his head.

“You should have told me,” he said.

“What?”

“You were out. We didn’t know how bad you were hurt. I didn’t know who to call or how to find out, so just for the hell of it I checked the priors database. Found a bunch of charges in Stamford and White Plains.”

“No convictions.”

“Reformed, eh?”

“I got suckered. I didn’t even see him.”

“That was my other question.”

“Hit me from behind. Twice.”

“People at the club thought it might be some big guy with a pinky ring. Was in the head the same time as you, only nobody saw anything.”

“It was full of people.”

“The door was shut.”

I shook my head. It hurt my tongue to talk.

“Don’t remember a big guy, looked Italian, maybe?” Sullivan asked again, “Black hair? Black clothes?”

“Black boots. That was the view from the floor.”

“Any idea why?”

“No.”

“No conspiracy theory?”

“Just some asshole I must’ve pissed off without knowing it. I’m good at that.”

“Cop in Stamford said you were a pro fighter.”

“Long time ago. Not much of a career. Trust me.”

“I don’t exactly, Mr. Acquillo.”

I started to wish I’d taken Markham up on his painkillers. I laid back and closed my eyes.

“I can understand that.”

“You ever find out who did this, you have to tell me. Even if you don’t want to press charges. I need to know who around here’s capable of assault, for whatever reason.”

“I will. If I figure it out, I’ll tell you.”

“Nothing you’d want to be workin’ out on your own.”

“Not interested in that. Can’t anyway. Doctor’s orders. One more shot to the head and I’m a drooler.”

Sullivan left me with a look that was equal parts warning and concern. I didn’t think he believed me, which wasn’t a surprise. I wouldn’t have either. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the beefy cop. In fact, he was growing on me. I just wanted to keep the bear to myself for a while. He was too important to let go.

A nurse came in to give me the aspirin. She delivered it in a little paper cup. She asked me if I needed anything else.

“A cigarette.”

“You’ll be released in about a half-hour,” she said sweetly, patting my arm. “You want the TV?”

“Talk about a killer.”

“Pick your poison.”

I was signing myself out and getting my car keys at the cashiers near the ER entrance when Amanda showed up. She stood back a few feet and waited for me to finish up, then followed me outside where we sat on the teak benches next to the orderlies catching morning cigarettes. I bummed one and smiled at Amanda.

“See what happens when I try to dance.”

“I’m so sorry.”

She leaned over to get a better look at the bandage stuck to the side of my head. She put her hands up to her mouth.

“It’s not that bad. They showed me in the mirror.”

“I was so frightened. What happened?”

“You don’t know?”

“They said you were in a fight.”

“Not exactly. All the fighting was done by the other guy. I never saw it coming.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess you didn’t hear anything, any buzz around the bar? You didn’t hear a name?”

“No, there was just talk about a fight. I don’t think anyone saw the other fellow very well. He must have left very quickly. One of the bartenders got you into your car. Robin and Laura drove you here. They said you woke up for a second, then passed out again before you got to the hospital. There was a lot of blood. Eddie was really upset.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I’m so sorry I didn’t go with you. I’m so ashamed.”

“Don’t start apologizing, for Christ’s sake.”

She smiled.

“It would have been hard to explain bloody clothes to Roy. But I checked on you this morning. I know a girl on the third floor. She asked around and they said you were fine. You don’t look fine.”

“Just a little hole in my head. Match the one on the other side.”

“I was having such a good time.”

“Sorry I messed it up.”

“Now you’re apologizing. No fair.”

I looked around at our exposed position in front of the big ER double doors.

“We probably shouldn’t be sitting here.”

“I know. I just couldn’t stand wondering.”

“I gotta go get Eddie. He’ll think he’s back in stir.”

Amanda was sitting on the edge of the bench, all clenched up. She looked pale and tired. I frowned at her.

“Amanda.”

“Sam.”

“You do this a lot?”

She looked down at her hands, clasped and held tightly between her knees.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yeah you do. You’re married.”

“Oh, that.”

“I don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do this. Never did.”

She tightened up even more.

“I see.”

“No you don’t.”

“You don’t want to see me.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

I leaned around to catch her eye, but she wouldn’t look at me.

“I told Sullivan that I didn’t know who slugged me. But I do. At least, I know what he looks like.”

Now she looked at me.

“Then why didn’t you say?”

“You remember the day we met at the beach? Do you remember a guy in a long coat hanging around our cars when we left?”

“I don’t know. I suppose not.”

“Roy know any big Italian guys, say about six-two, two hundred plus pounds?”

Her eyes shifted away again. But right before it did her face changed. It turned into something complicated.

“Impossible.”

“You could make a case.”

“If it was Roy, I’d be the one in the bandages, not you. You, at least, can fight back.”

Then she stood up and did what she was getting good at doing. Walking away from me. I got up and followed her across the street to the parking lot. When she got in the gray Audi, I got in the passenger seat.

“Okay, I’m a dope,” I said.

“No, you’re not. I’m a fool.”

It was still early in the morning, but it didn’t look like it was going to be much of a day. The sky looked uniformly gray through the red leaves of the maple trees that shaded the hospital parking lot. My head was a little wobbly on my neck and my limbs were fitted with lead weights. I wanted to go home and lay down on the porch, but for some reason I wasn’t ready to go.

“Thanks for coming to see me.”

She started the ignition and rested her forehead on the steering wheel. I reached over and pulled her thick auburn hair back off her face. Her eyes were closed. Her cheekbones were flushed red, deepening the copper and olive tones of her skin, filling her face with color where before she’d been sallow and pale.

I leaned over and kissed her neck right below the little freshwater pearl earring that dangled from her right ear. Her skin was very smooth and her neck strong. It smelled like a blend of hope, dread and calamity. She turned her head, still resting on the steering wheel, her face softening back toward normal.

“Just remember I tried to tell you things and you didn’t want to hear,” she said, before leaning across my lap and opening the door.

“About big Italian guys?”

“Things. Just things.”

I got out of the car and watched her drive away. I found the Grand Prix parked up on a grassy mound at the back of the lot. There was blood all over the back seat. I got an old blanket from the trunk to cover it up. I thought I might have to throw up before I could drive away, but after sitting down with my legs out the door for a few minutes, I recovered.

Eddie almost pulled me off my feet in his desperation to get out of the vet’s and into the Grand Prix. He sniffed at my head, but was good enough not to say I told you so.

No one greeted us at the cottage. No notes, no mail. I pushed my way through the door, sampled the salty, dry wood smells and swam in the deep comfort of familiar surroundings. I banged a big cast iron fry pan down on the burner, crumbled in some ground meat and filled another huge pot with water. When it started to boil I tossed in a handful of spaghetti and made myself a tall Absolut from out of the freezer. The clear liquid burned the wound on the side of my tongue and warmed up my extremities. The woodstove did the rest once I got it cranked up with choice, bone-dry split red oak. I changed into my oldest blue jeans and a thirty-year-old sweatshirt. I put some early Thelonious Monk on the CD player and slopped some sauce from the Italian place in the Village on the pasta. I could only chew on one side of my mouth, but it was worth it. I went out on the porch to watch the clear skies paint the Little Peconic a metal-flecked, pale gray-blue. The angled October sun tipped each little wave with reflective silver that winked at me like the sequins of an evening gown. The pink hydrangea were beginning to brown at the ends of their leggy pale-green stalks. But the lawn still looked like a deep forest pool.

And I wasn’t dead.

After we ate, Eddie and I both slept the rest of the day. Too exhausted to feel any more fear, too hardened to thank whoever might be responsible for yet another reprieve, deserved or not.

Three days later I finally got Regina Broadhurst put in the ground. The funeral home was owned by an oversized Greek guy named Andre Pappanasta. He had thick curly black hair and a beard and a voice that came out of somewhere inside his chest. He smiled and laughed a lot, mostly because he never went near his funeral business, preferring to work the counter at one of the five or six pizza joints he owned around the Island. You only talked to him when you made arrangements, which he’d do between phone orders for large pepperoni pizzas and baked stuffed zitti.

The day was brand new, sunny, and the air reasonably clear. My tongue was still sore and my lower ribs ached, but my head had healed enough to leave off the bandage. With a little work my hair covered the wound. The funeral guys were composed and friendly and the priest was bored, but efficient. Half a dozen old cranes from the Senior Center, Roy and Amanda Battiston, Jimmy Maddox and I made up the congregation. We gathered in a viewing room decorated in the calm civility of thick, peach-colored carpet and semi-gloss paint.

Amanda was dressed in a plain navy blue suit and light blue blouse. When she and Roy met me in the parking lot she squeezed my hand. Her freshly showered smell engulfed my brain, but I kept a safe distance. Roy was scrubbed pink and somber in a charcoal-gray suit. He carried about fifty pounds more than he needed, but it looked like it had settled there permanently. His receding hair was combed straight back. His handshake was warm and dry. Before letting go he added another hand. That drew us into closer proximity than I would have chosen on my own. I could smell the same soap as Amanda’s.

“We want to thank you for letting us know about this,” he said to me. “Regina was a good friend of Amanda’s mother.”

She nodded in agreement.

“She didn’t know too many people.”

“We lost Amanda’s mother last year. It’s very difficult,” he said, looking at her gravely.

“Sorry about the short notice.”

He waved off the comment.

“Not at all. We completely understand.”

One of the ushers herded us out of the waiting room and into another room that looked about the same except for the coffin and some funereal flower arrangements. Jimmy Maddox was hanging back, like he’d rather stay in the waiting room, but I gripped him by the shoulder and said, “Come on, man.”

I had trouble concentrating on what the priest was saying. They always had that effect on me. As soon as I see vestments and big silver candelabras my mind starts roaming all over the place. I got that from my mother. She hated organized religion, even though every Sunday she’d drag me and my sister to the Polish church in the Village. When I was about ten, she just stopped, never saying why. I never asked, afraid a show of interest would start her up again. So I was left with the memory of singsong Latin monotones and my mother fidgeting and snorting away in the pew. Great job of indoctrination.

The priest said something about the mortal remains of the dead, giving me an unwanted image of old Regina carved up on the autopsy table.

A rumble of low voices came from the back of the room. It was Barbara Filmore. She was wearing a suit made of car upholstery, accented by a black feather thing wrapped around her throat. A veiled hat sat on the top of her hairdo and her glasses low on her nose. The bulge of her midriff drew attention to her thin legs, conjuring the image of an overdressed waterfowl.

She had a bald-headed, roundish guy with a salt and pepper mustache for an escort. He looked bored but attentive. He had those pale beige patent leather shoes and matching belt sets you see in Florida, but rarely around this part of the East End. He wore a light blue guayabera shirt and wrinkle-free beige pants made of some long-chain polymer. I guessed him to be about ten years older than me.

They disturbed the calm of the room for a few minutes before settling down. The priest sent up a few more requests for the Almighty to look after Regina in the hereafter. I prayed for the whole thing to be over.

A pair of Pappanasta’s boys came in and hauled her out of there after the priest finally wrapped up his bit. They looked well-dressed and professional, like IRS agents or the guys I used to work with from Accounting & Finance. They seemed to be old pals of the priest’s—probably got together a lot after a gig.

Nobody in the room was crying, which I deeply appreciated. Sunlight did nice things with all the flowers I’d ordered up for the occasion. They looked fresh and expensive, which didn’t surprise me. Andy always used quality toppings on his pizzas. A matter of principle.

The congregation was forced to talk to each other after the priest said hello, handed out a few banalities, then made a run for it. Probably had a seat warming up for him somewhere. Roy and Jimmy Maddox were stuck with the old folks. I was with Amanda, Barbara Filmore and her date.

“We’ve had quite the schedule at the Center lately, Mr. Acquillo,” said Barbara. “I expected a visit.”

“Been pretty tied up.”

“Oh,” she said, as if suddenly remembering there was a guy standing next to her, “this is Bob Sobol. This is Sam Acquillo.”

“How’re you doin’?” he said absently, looking past my shoulder at the sun and fresh air blowing in from an open door. His grip hurt, which surprised me a little.

“Bob is thinking about buying property out here. He’s staying with me. Maybe you could tell him what you know about the area, investment-wise—you’ve owned out here for some time, haven’t you?”

“I inherited.”

Bob didn’t seem to care either way.

“Bob also has retirement to consider, so it has to be livable,” said Barbara, leadingly. She looked at Bob for a little help.

“I like the area,” said Bob, finally relenting. There was a touch of the Bronx in his accent, the one I knew as a kid.

“I know some good real-estate people I can refer you to,” said Amanda.

The two of them stared at her till she put out her hand.

“I’m Amanda Battiston. Regina was a friend of my mother’s.”

“Is that Mrs. Battiston?” Bob asked her, looking at her left hand.

“It is,” she said brightly.

On cue, Roy came up behind her and stuck his out as well.

“Roy Battiston,” he said.

“My mother was Julia Anselma,” said Amanda. Barbara perked up.

“Of course, I’m very sorry.” She turned toward Bob. “Amanda’s mother was a regular at the Center. She also passed away recently.”

Barbara placed a blocking shoulder in front of Bob so he couldn’t move closer to Amanda. He didn’t seem to notice, or care.

“That’d be nice of you, Mrs. Battiston. I haven’t found an agent I like.”

“These folks are very likable. At least to me.”

“Long’s they’re good,” said Bob.

“Yes, they’re good, too. Good and likable.”

Bob pursed his mouth and acted convinced.

“Maybe you could show me where some of the better areas are, Mrs. Battiston. You must know your way around pretty good, being a native.”

“Most people out here aren’t natives.”

“But I guessed maybe you were.”

“I didn’t know it showed.”

He shrugged as a type of sympathy for her shortcomings.

“How about financing?” he asked. “I could use some tips there, too.”

Roy dove right in.

“Absolutely, Bob. Come see me at Harbor Trust. Always there to help.”

I started looking around for Jimmy Maddox. Maybe the two of us could go find a piece of heavy equipment to play with.

“But surely you could help me find a place, Mrs. Battiston,” said Bob.

“Amanda. I can point you in the right direction,” she said sprightly.

“Should I get a pencil?”

Barbara Filmore’s smile stayed put as her mood took a right turn.

“I’m sure Amanda has plenty to do already.”

“Actually, I do, but I promise to keep my eyes and ears open.”

Bob gave a curt little nod that reminded me of Claude Rains. I thought he was going to click his heels together.

“You must be so busy looking after your mother’s things,” said Barbara, putting a little meat on Amanda’s excuse. “I’ve been through it myself, so I know.” She hooked her oversized pocketbook on her shoulder and slid the other hand through Bob’s arm. He didn’t put up much of a fight when she tugged him gently toward the door.

“I’m so sorry about your mother. And Regina, of course. Two friends, so close together.”

“They weren’t all that close,” said Amanda, spoiling the mannerly mood.

“Well, it’s all part of life,” said the other woman, backing the two of them through the door. I was happy to let them go.

When the ushers finally cleared the room, I followed Amanda and Roy out to the parking lot. I let them get a little ahead of me. Amanda walked with her back straight and her shoulders level, with a fluid, feminine roll to her hips. It made me want to follow her out to Montauk and back. But she stopped and turned around, held Roy’s arm and waited for me to catch up.

“Thanks again, Sam,” said Roy.

Amanda pulled off a pair of old-fashioned black kid leather gloves a fingertip at a time. When they were off, she opened and shut her fists as if restoring circulation.

“I think Bob wants a native guide,” I said to both of them.

“Ick,” said Amanda.

“He seemed all right,” said Roy, looking at me for confirmation.

“Could be some business for you.”

“That’s what we’re here for.”

Amanda looked around the parking lot, presumably for her car.

“We’re going to get a little breakfast,” she said. “Care to join us?”

“Yeah,” said Roy before I could answer, “Sip and Soda. Best waffles in town.”

He looked genuinely excited.

“Sorry,” I told them, “got to wrap up here. Some other time.”

“You sure?” asked Roy, face bright and eager as a Midwestern regional sales manager. “I always order Amanda the blueberry Belgian waffle with a side of bacon. Don’t I? It’s her favorite.”

Amanda cocked her head at me, her face neutral.

“That’s a lot of trust to put in a person. Ordering your breakfast,” I said to her.

“Some people you just trust with certain things,” she said.

Roy looked at her.

“Some people you trust with everything,” he said, then looked at me. “I keep telling her that.”

He smiled with the sort of self-effacing beneficence you like to see in priests. I smiled back.

“I’ll take a rain check. You guys go ahead.”

They drove away in Roy’s Audi—bigger and darker than Amanda’s—leaving me alone with the hard light of autumn trying to bust out from the cloud cover and the rest of the afternoon to torture myself with conflicting urges and pointless self-analysis.

The little Aztec lady at the coffee place on the corner didn’t know Arnold Lombard Co. Neither did the tough woman from Brooklyn with the pretty skin and chipped tooth who ran the cash register. Luckily, a gang of gnarly old regulars, who hung around in the afternoon doing crosswords and lying about their investment portfolios, did.

“Used to be across the street there where what’s-his-name opened his real-estate office.”

“Sinitar.”

“Yeah. Joey Sinitar and his brother. Builder’s kids. Don’t know if they actually sell any real estate.”

All the guys smiled as if they had the inside scoop on the Sinitar boys.

“Lombard’s dead.”

One of the guys shook his head.

“Ain’t dead.”

“Somebody told me he was dead.”

“Come as a big surprise to Arnie.”

“You know him?” I asked him.

The old man had dry silvery eyes and the complexion of roughed-in stucco.

“More or less. Kind of a stiff. Sold real estate and life insurance. Mostly to locals. Drove a Lincoln Continental, ’bout the size’a the Queen Mary.”

“Had a daughter.”

“Yeah. Looked like him. All nose. No sense of humor.”

“Know where he lives?” I asked.

They all looked at each other, seeing who wanted to field the question.

“Florida,” one of them finally said.

The guy in the know shook his head again. I waited.

“Ain’t in Florida.”

“What’re you, his biographer?” said one of his buddies.

“Well?” I asked.

“Lives with his daughter. Nobody’d marry the poor thing.”

“Nose like a masthead.”

“More like a banana.”

“In town?”

“Village. Over near the hospital.”

“Got a place in Florida, but never goes there.”

“Hah.”

“But he’s definitely not dead.”

“How do you know?”

The guy in the know let it all sit there for a few seconds to build suspense.

“I saw him yesterday at the pharmacy.”

“What’re you doing in there, Charlie? Buyin’ Ex-Lax?”

“Trojans.”

They all grinned into their coffees. I thanked Charlie and paid for their next round of Hazelnut. The Brooklyn woman thought the largesse ridiculous, but she wasn’t a sensitive girl.

I pulled the street address to Arnold Lombard’s house out of a disheveled phone book shoved under the payphone at the back of the coffee shop. It was an easy walk over toward the hospital, so I walked.

It was a single story, asbestos-shingle bungalow painted white with black trim and leggy, dejected-looking shrubbery. In front of a tiny single-car garage was a boxy, early sixties Lincoln Continental covered with a tan canvas tarp.

Green algae was growing up from the bottom of the wooden storm door. There was no doorbell, so I knocked. I picked the blue-plastic-wrapped New York Times up off the driveway so I could give it to whoever opened the door.

It was a woman with a hatchet-shaped nose thrust forward like an angry remark. On either side were gentle, watery blue eyes. Her dark brown hair hung in a loose perm past her thin neck and tumbled down around wiry shoulders. She wore a ragged baby blue tank top, bra-less, baggy, dark blue sweatpants and dancing slippers. I guessed her to be around forty-five. The smell of too much time spent indoors spilled out around her, warming up the autumn air.

She looked at me in a tired, kind way.

“Yes?”

I stuck out my hand. She took it without hesitation.

“I’m Sam Acquillo. Here’s your Times.”

“How nice,” she said.

“Is this where Arnold Lombard lives?”

“What can I help you with?”

“It’s kind of a long story. Is he in?”

She stood a little straighter.

“Now that would depend entirely on your story, Mister … Acquillo. Italian is it?”

“Italo-Canuck is the way my father put it.”

“We’re Jewish.”

I didn’t know where to go from there, but she was patient with me. She put a hand on her hip and leaned on the door jam. I tried not to look at her chest.

“Your interest in Mr. Lombard?”

“I’m trying to work out some tricky ownership issues on a piece of property up in North Sea. Your father’s name was all over the documents, so I thought maybe he could help clear it up.”

“Real-estate matter.”

“That’s pretty much what it is, yeah.”

She shrugged and walked away from the door. I took that as an invitation and followed her in. Time inside the house was stalled in midcentury. Glossy white trim paint covered lumpy woodwork. The wallpaper was covered with baronial garden parties and foxhunts. Pipe tobacco and unwashed wool mingled with kitchen grease and sachet.

Arnold was sitting in the living room in an overstuffed easy chair. His hands gripped the armrests like he was preparing for takeoff. He was much older than I thought he’d be, well over ninety. His clothes were clean, but ancient and threadbare. There were pipes arrayed around a freestanding ashtray, but no ashes. A dusting of white hair covered his long, bone-hard skull. His daughter had come by the nose honestly.

“Daddy?”

He looked up at her.

“This gentleman has a real-estate matter to discuss.”

He frowned with the effort to understand.

“A real-estate matter,” she repeated. He looked over at me.

“Then what’s he doing here?”

“I thought maybe you could answer some questions for me about a property up in North Sea.”

“I’m retired.”

“This was a property you handled back in the seventies.”

He looked down and shook his head.

“I don’t know if I can remember all that.”

His daughter massaged his shoulder and smiled sweetly.

“Oh, sure you can Daddy. You know about every piece of property on the East End.”

He raised his thin eyebrows in a type of smile.

“That’s true. Your mother says I’m nothing but a head full of topographicals.”

“That’s what she always said,” said his daughter, correcting the tense.

She swung around and dropped into a love seat and patted the space next to her. I sat down and pulled out the file from the Town records. She drew her legs up so the soft soles of the dancing slippers applied a slight pressure to my right thigh.

I handed him a copy of the rental agreement his firm had drawn up for Bay Side Holdings. He took it with one hand and, with some difficulty, dug his glasses out from under his wool cardigan. His daughter let him struggle on his own. Patience hung in the air.

When the tiny silver wire rims were finally perched on that mighty outcropping it made him look like a sorcerer in a Disney movie.

“Oh yes, well, we did a lot of these. Certainly.”

I let him read for a while.

“Hm, hm,” he said, and handed it back to me.

“Yes, we managed all the Bay Side leaseholds. Had the exclusive.”

He sat back, satisfied.

His daughter had her chin cupped in her hand with an index finger braced against her nose. She closed her eyes, shook her head and smiled that beatific smile.

“That’s fine, Daddy, but I think he’s looking for a little more detail,” she said.

Arnold thought about it. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling.

“Well, as I recall, that outfit owned a fair number of these parcels up there in North Sea, some of which had houses built on them. They were concerned they’d be vandalized if left unoccupied. We were charged with keeping them filled with the best possible people—considering the location, mind you, which was not ideal.”

Class paranoia washed over me.

“That outfit was Bay Side Holdings.”

“Well, certainly, Bay Side were the people who engaged the services of the firm. However, they were the agents for the actual owners. This was made clear to me from the start. I don’t recall their names, precisely, but I believe we could discover that in our files.” He looked over at his daughter for confirmation.

“I’m sure we could dig something out, Daddy.”

He swung his gaze back to me as something else occurred to him.

“I do have a theory about Bay Side, however.”

“Do you.”

“Yes. But,” he pointed at me with a bent knuckle the way Regina always did, “it would likely be a sensitive matter. The firm’s standing depends on discretion.”

His daughter looked over at me. I kept my eyes on Arnold.

“You shouldn’t tell me anything that would betray a confidence, Mr. Lombard.”

“I don’t believe in that.”

“I can’t promise I won’t use information you give me in dealing with this—it’s an estate settlement, by the way—but I’ll keep your name out of it.”

“You’re an attorney?” his daughter asked.

“Estate administrator.”

I didn’t think Arnold understood the distinction, but I was more concerned about his daughter. I wanted her to like me.

“Well,” he looked up at the ceiling again as if his thoughts were written out up there, “I always felt that Bay Side was a captive. You’re familiar with the term?”

“You mean the owner of the property was their only client. They were owned by the owners.”

“Yes, something like that. I’m not suggesting there was any impropriety, just that Bay Side was a dummy. You know, a front. Perfectly legal, of course. Commercial interests often structure real-estate management as a separate enterprise—a subsidiary.”

“Daddy started in corporate real estate. In the city,” she said, looking at him.

“What gave you this idea, if you don’t mind me asking.”

“Well, I’ve done quite a bit of this sort of thing, sir. You get to know how things are. Patterns and rhythms. A feeling, really. Ask Rosaline.”

She puffed out a little breath.

“He thinks I’m psychic because I predict the weather. Hasn’t caught on to the Weather Channel yet.”

Humor lit his eyes to spite his deadpan face.

“I know perfectly well how to locate the Weather Channel. I only mean that we often discuss the mysteries of intuition.”

She shrugged at me again. I think she did a lot of shrugging.

“I’m a big supporter of intuition myself, folks,” I said. “No need to explain further.”

“Would you like some tea? Caffeinated or Red Zinger,” she said, now that we’d bumped the conversation up a notch.

“Sure. A little Zinger’d be good.”

“Daddy?”

He made an ambiguous gesture with his mottled hands. She seemed to know what it meant.

“I’ll help,” I said, and followed her into the kitchen.

All the appliances were stainless steel Hotpoints from the mid-fifties. The linoleum on the counter was covered with colorful little boomerangs. We had the same thing in our house when I was growing up. The association was oddly appealing.

“Are there files?” I asked her.

She looked surprised.

“Why of course. Why wouldn’t there be?”

“Uh.”

“You think I’m just humoring him?”

“Sorry. I guess I was.”

“There’s nothing wrong with his mind, Mr. Acquillo. He’s just old.”

“I can see that.”

She brushed past me and put a full kettle on the stove. “He was almost fifty when I was born,” she said, apropos of something that wasn’t apparent to me.

“Can I take a look at the stuff relating to this property?” I wrote out Regina’s address on a memo pad.

She took it out of my hand and studied it.

“Sure, but you’ll have to do the digging. We don’t have much of a research staff.”

“The files are here?”

“In the basement. My father is loathe to discard such things.”

“I have a feeling he’d know right where to find it.”

“A minute ago you thought he was off his rocker.” It was my turn to shrug.

“And now you’d like him to find what you need.”

I did, of course. She looked at the memo pad again.

“I do have other things to do,” she said, studying the slip of paper as if it held the secret meaning of my mind. She handed it back to me, then opened the old Hotpoint dishwasher and got out mugs for the tea. The way she bent over the dishwasher made it hard to avoid noticing she was female. I kept my eyes on the mug while she poured the tea.

“Do you have any children?” she asked me.

“I have a daughter living in the City.”

“Did she go to school in Southampton?”

“No, Connecticut. Why?”

“I work at the high school. Thought maybe I knew your kids. That’s usually how I get a fix on people.”

“She got out sometimes in the summer.”

“With you and your wife.”

“Yeah. Now ex.”

“Oh. But your daughter still comes out.”

“No. She exed herself as well.”

“Sorry. Certainly not forever.”

I had a hard time not looking into those sad, patient eyes.

“Yeah. Hope not forever.”

“I have an ex, too. No kids.” I thought about the old crows back at the coffee place.

“Happens.”

“All too often. Mostly miss all that regular sex. You?”

I laughed. “Not regular enough to miss.”

“There you go,” she said, resonating again to some private frequency. “What happened to your face?”

I guess women with big noses and pretty blue eyes get to pry into anything they want.

“A rock-hard Filipino middle heavyweight named Rene Ruiz got me to look over my shoulder for a second. Caught me when I turned back.”

She nodded. “Boxer.”

“We called ourselves fighters. ‘Boxer’ seems kinda refined. Too removed from the actual endeavor.”

“Which was to beat the hell out of each other?”

“Basically.”

I resisted the urge to touch the right side of my head where my hair covered the stitches. I knew she’d make me explain.

“You only fight Filipinos, or did a few demons creep into the ring?”

“I’m too tough for demons,” I said, showing her I’d learned to duck from Rene Ruiz.

She took a slow sip of her tea, looking up at me over the rim.

“Yes, I’m sure you believe that.”

“What do you teach?”

“I’m the school psychologist. What did you study?”

“Avoidance. Graduate level.”

She toasted me with her mug and drifted back out of the kitchen. I followed her toward the living room, but she made a right turn before getting there and went down a narrow basement stairway. I followed her. The basement was filled with musty wet air and exhausted clutter. The file storage, about twenty Bankers Boxes, was in a corner lit by a pair of hundred-watt utility lamps.

Everything was organized by date, and then coded by account numbers and some other designation I didn’t understand. It was very tidy and clearly labeled, but the scale was daunting.

“Sure your dad isn’t looking for something to kill the time?”

“Long as the air down here doesn’t kill him first.”

“Not as fast as an easy chair.”

“Leveraging my concern for my father to facilitate your project?”

“Yeah, something like that. A little leverage is good for an old guy—taken in moderation.”

I got her to laugh an honest little laugh. She stuck an index finger into my sternum and gave it a shove.

“What was your name, again?”

“Sam.”

“Rosaline.” She put out her hand.

I gave her mine, then had a little trouble getting it back again.

“When I get a chance I’ll look through the files. See what I can find.”

“I appreciate it.”

“I know you do, because you should. Let’s go have another cup of tea.”

She flicked off the big lights and we swam back out of the dead time that had settled under the house like a stagnant pool.

Sonny’s Gym was wet with ambition. Lots of tough, mostly stupid young guys and older guys who hadn’t wakened to the realities. They strutted or lumbered around scratching their nuts and looking nervous or fierce depending on their confidence. All wanted to prove something, to make their time on earth count, at least within the arc of their circumscribed lives. All I wanted to do was maintain a decent heart rate, hold down the fat and maybe hone whatever reflexes I had left. And at this point, maybe regain some of what I lost since getting my ass kicked.

The soggy sweat smell was worse than usual, in contrast with the scrubbed luminescence outside. I wrinkled my face at the towel guy, but his sense of smell had dimmed long ago. His nose had a big black mole with a hair about the size of a three-penny nail growing out of the middle. He sat on a short stool with his inflated midsection pouring over the top of his shiny polyester pants. He moved in a steady one-eighty swing from counter to hamper, handing out towels the size of cocktail napkins and with the delicacy of medium-grade sandpaper. I was impressed that Ronny knew to hire an authentic towel guy, just like they had back in the City. Maybe they had to. Maybe towel guys have a union that sets the standard. Maybe I’ve spent too many years hanging out in boxing gyms.

“Smells like a beer fart in this place,” I told him.

The towel guy ignored me, looking past my shoulder at the fix on reality he’d established out there in middle space.

I went into the locker room and pulled all my stuff out of the old canvas duffel bag that once belonged to my father. That shrink I had to see told me I started boxing because my father was beaten to death. He thought this was a brilliant insight. I said, yeah, I started boxing because my old man was beaten to death. Wouldn’t you?

When I was younger, I was mostly afraid my father would be the one doing the beating. Which never happened, that I remember, but he sure threatened a lot, and yelled a lot, and came close a few times. All out of sheer meanness. What I remember mostly was the back of his hand, raised in sudden threat. I think, under those circumstances, you either get some confidence or you wrap yourself up in fear and let your insides die an early death. I don’t know. Maybe I should get another shrink to explain it to me.

Whatever the motivation, I was there at Sonny’s trying not to understand how I felt. About anything except my sore ribs. I started with some stretching, did the rope, did the light bag, then did a little on the big bag. I got so absorbed in everything I didn’t notice Sullivan standing there again, like he seemed to do whenever I worked the big bag. I stopped and held it still with both gloves.

“Hey.”

“You ready for that?” he asked.

“I’m okay.”

“Memory getting better?”

“About the guy?”

“Yeah. About the guy.”

I shook my head.

“Not yet, but it could improve with time.”

“I’m sure.”

I did a few more patterns, but it’s hard to talk and whack a big leather bag full of sand at the same time.

“I got Regina buried,” I said.

“Andre told me. What about the estate stuff?”

“No big deal. Waiting for some information.”

He stood silently with his arms crossed. Irritated.

“I’m waiting, too,” he said.

“For what?”

He uncrossed his arms and gestured with both hands the way you do when guiding a car into a parking space.

“Cough it up. What are you thinking?”

“You think I’m full of crap.”

“I do. I still want you to talk to me.”

I went back to the bag. But it’s no easier to think than to talk when thus engaged. So I gave in.

“Joe, you like to drink?”

“Off duty.”

“Let’s go get a drink.”

“Long as you’re buyin’.”

Sullivan was familiar with the Pequot. Like everybody else around town he’d done some time as a kid crewing on the charter fishing boats that ran out of Pequot Harbor. Mostly the job was to schlep stuff on and off board, clean the catch and kiss the customer’s ass. Dotty set us up with beers and menus, then left us alone.

“Ever heard of Bay Side Holdings?” I asked him.

He shook his head.

“Own a lot of property in North Sea. Maybe other places, too. Don’t know.”

“What about ’em?”

“Own Regina’s house.”

“Really. Shit bad luck for Jimmy.”

“Yeah. But he knew about it. Knew his aunt was a renter. Only I don’t think she paid any rent.”

“That I doubt.”

“Doesn’t make sense. But there’re no bank records. No cancelled checks.”

“Ask Bay Side Whatever.”

“Bay Side Holdings. I did. I mean, I went to their business address, which turns out to be a house in Sag Harbor, owned by this guy Milton Hornsby, who’s the only name I have connected to Bay Side, and he won’t talk to me. Sent me to his lawyer.”

“Who said?”

“Haven’t seen her yet. Called her. Left messages. Thinking of going over there.”

“Where?”

“Bridgehampton. It’s Jacqueline Swaitkowski.”

“Yikes.”

He looked amused.

“So I heard.”

“Fucking whack job.”

“Why’d a guy like Hornsby hire her?”

“Fucking brilliant whack job. And connected. Husband was Peter Swaitkowski. Potato field money. Political. Master of the Universe till he stuck his Porsche in an oak tree.”

“I remember that.”

“Went to high school with her. Jackie O’Dwyer. Summa Come Loudly.”

“A friend of mine, another lawyer, said I can’t compel Hornsby to talk to me. But why wouldn’t he? It’s his goddam house.”

“He’s Bay Side Holdings?”

“I don’t know that either. My friend’s finding out.”

“Who’s your friend?”

“Burton Lewis.”

“Rich fuck. Rich fag fuck.”

“Friend of mine.”

“I didn’t know you ran in them circles.”

“My ex-wife’s circles. But Burt’s okay.”

“He’s asshole buddies with Chief Semple,” he said, then caught himself. “Not literally. Lewis is a sure mark for Semple’s fundraising. They’d mixed it up a bunch of years ago over this black kid we busted up in Flanders. He was going down till Lewis stuck his nose in it. Could have been bad for the Town, since apparently the kid’d been tuned up a little, and probably wasn’t actually guilty of the crime. But then, you know, everybody gets in a room and backs are gettin’ scratched, and dicks are gettin’ jerked, and before you know it the kid’s out, the Town’s clear, Semple’s smilin’ and your buddy Burton Lewis is payin’ for open bars and fireworks.”

“Doesn’t sound like the worst deal.”

“I guess.”

Sullivan wasn’t going to press it. He also wasn’t going to give up his local allegiance, his bigotry against all things Manhattan.

“So that’s where it’s at. Besides Burton, I’m gathering up what I can on Bay Side from real-estate records. The Surrogate’s Court still has to have a hearing on making me administrator, but I can keep going. Should be a slam dunk unless Jimmy Maddox wants to make trouble, which I don’t think’ll happen.”

Sullivan drank some more of his beer and looked around the inside of the Pequot. The midday regulars were hunkered around the bar trying to hold coherent conversations with Dotty. Hodges was in the back rustling up Fish of the Day for the guys coming off boats that’d been out since four in the morning. Sullivan looked like he wanted to say something.

“What.”

“It bothers me,” he said.

“What bothers you.”

“I’m responsible for the safety and well-being of all the people and property inside about a five-square-mile chunk of Long Island. You’re put in charge of something like that, and everybody has to pretend that it’s actually possible to do the job. But it’s really not, at least not the way everybody wants you to. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just you gotta act out this fantasy that we’re all some kind of superman. But that’s okay. I do the job anyway, my way, as best I can. Only my way makes it hard to buy into the bullshit. I can’t help havin’ a mind of my own.”

“What’s your mind telling you?”

“Nobody gives a shit about dead old ladies. And I don’t even blame ’em. There’s so much shit going on all the time, there’s so little money to ever get it all done. Out here you got homegrown idiots stealing shit and selling drugs, and shootin’ each other, you got all kinds of crazy evil shit coming out of the City, especially during the season. You got all these people along the water who act like they own the world, because, basically, some of ’em do. Then there’s the people in the court system you have to keep happy. You got County people, State people, fucking Feds if you think about it, all doing nothin’ but figurin’ out ways to make your job harder. The last thing any of ’em wants you to do for Christ’s sake is say, ‘I know this is what you think happened, but it ain’t that way, it happened like this.’ That’d mean paperwork. Time away from other shit that’s already more than they can handle. That’d mean somebody’d have to say, oh, I guess I fucked up a little bit on that one.”

It was too bad, but Hodges picked that moment to come over and say hi. Sullivan stood up and shook his hand. They ran through a bunch of names looking for connections, which wasn’t hard. Sullivan dredged up some nice things to say about Hodges’s joint. Hodges pledged admiration and support for all boys and girls in law enforcement. All of which was fine, but I wanted to find out where Sullivan was heading. Which I couldn’t do until much later, back out in the parking lot.

As soon as we were outside I said, “So, Joe, what were you saying in there?”

He dug around inside his jeans pocket for the keys to his old Bronco.

“Broadhurst might’ve been a lousy old bitch, but she was my lousy old bitch. My beat, my neighborhood. I don’t care if you’re full of crap. Until I can prove to myself one hundred percent that you’re full of crap, I’m interested in this. Let me know what you’re doing.”

He walked over to his truck, carrying the extra weight around his middle with obstinate dignity. I went home to feed the dog and nurse my wounds.

There were little clouds of gray-blue mist rising up from the harvested potato fields when I drove out Scuttle Hole Road on the way to Jackie Swaitkowski’s place in Bridgehampton. It was mid-morning and you could see the clear sky above waiting for the sun to dry out the air. Despite the mist, everything looked sharp and scrubbed clean, even through the Grand Prix’s pitted windshield. Ribbons of fresh white fencing separated cropland from pasture, where dressage horses grazed and tried to look indifferent to their status. Huge piles of postmodern architecture and partially submerged potato barns broke up the slow curves of the landscape. To the north were short hills covered by forests of red oak and scruffy pine. Jackie was somewhere up in there, if I’d read my map right. Her answering service said she’d be there all morning. The woman I spoke to said not to bother with an appointment.

“Go ahead up there. I know her, she won’t mind.”

“Really.”

“She’s bored. She’s been stuck on this brief for a bunch of people trying to run this poor guy off his gas station. They say it’s a blight on the neighborhood.”

“Not if you need gas.”

“People are so touchy about property values.”

“Because they’re so valuable?”

“That’s the thing. Everything’s so expensive. Hey, got another call. Say hi to Jackie. Tell her not to work too hard.”

I called for an appointment anyway. The answering service was right. Jackie Swaitkowski longed for distractions.

“Sure, come on over. Ring the bell,” she said before I’d given much of an explanation.

Once in the woods, the atmosphere changed abruptly. Enclosed by tall oaks, the air was cool and the light was splattered patternless across the ground and up the sides of thick tree trunks. The iridescent red and orange fall foliage betrayed the deep green of scrub pines and hemlocks and wild mountain laurel. A few more weeks and all the leaves would be on the ground and the forest would give in to the gray gloom of winter.

Jackie’s house was the kind of flimsy, unadorned wooden box real-estate people called a Contemporary. It was built into the side of a hill at the end of a long dirt drive. Jackie, or whoever owned the place, wasn’t much of a landscaper. A rusty Toyota pickup with oversized tires and welded metal racks was in front of the garage.

Next to the front door were two buttons—one labeled “Jackie Swaitkowski, attorney-at-law.” The other said “Jackie Swaitkowski, Private Citizen.” I rang the lawyer.

She had a long, thick crop of strawberry-blond hair and a lot of freckles splashed across a reddish tan complexion. Her face was wide open and pretty, and could have been used to promote Irish tourism. She had a nice figure stuffed into a yellow cotton jersey dress and flip-flops on her feet. Maybe thirty-two, maybe more. It was getting harder for me to tell.

“Hi.”

“Attorney Swaitkowski?”

“Jackie.”

“Sam Acquillo.”

“Like the saint?”

“That’d be Aquinas.”

“Right. Missed that catechism.” She walked away from the door and invited me in with an exaggerated wave of her arm. I followed her into a sloppy, cheerful living room furnished with two dirty white couches and a coffee table made from a gigantic slab of cross-cut timber. It was buried under heaps of magazines and catalogs. She walked across the table and dropped down cross-legged into one of the couches. I took the other.

Hardly seated, she bounced up again and asked if I wanted anything, like coffee or tea. I said coffee and she disappeared for a few minutes to rustle some up.

While I waited, I looked around at the overflowing bookcases and poster art plastered on every scrap of wall space. There were probably thousands of books and CDs, but no TV. On a side table was a stack of used dinner plates and there was a roach in the ashtray.

“I’m actually kind of glad to be getting away from this god-awful case,” she said as she came back in with two mismatched mugs.

“So I hear.”

She huffed.

“That’s Judy, she’s such a pain. We talk all the time, of course. She should be paying me, I’m so entertaining.”

She climbed back into the couch, slumped down and put her feet up on the coffee table. Her legs were pinky brown and freckled like her face. They’d seen a lot of beach time. She held the mug with two hands and blew the steam off the top.

We talked about Southampton past and present and tried to find common ground. It was the kind of conversation you have on a barstool or at a checkout counter. With a little prompting, she talked enough to hold up both our ends.

“Always practiced out here?” I asked her.

“What, does it show? Yeah, of course. Born, raised and so on. Except for law school. Even married a Polish potato boy. He’s dead,” she said quickly, before I could comment. “Sold the farm, then bought the farm, so to speak. Stuck that cute little car about halfway up the side of a great big oak tree. Right out here on Brick Kiln Road. Perfect, huh?”

“Sorry.”

She set down the coffee and sat back, throwing her arms across the back of the couch. “Hey, what am I doing here telling you my life’s story.”

“I got you started.”

“That’s right, you did.”

She looked me over a little more carefully.

“You gonna tell me what happened?”

“To what?”

“Your head.”

“Oh.”

I reached up to feel the wound. I’d actually forgotten it was there. Maybe those cumulative effects had begun to accumulate.

“I didn’t know it still showed.”

“I’m observant. So what happened?”

“I ran into a wrecking ball.”

“Really?”

“Just felt like one.”

“Which means none of your business.”

“Means it’s a long story.”

“It sort of suits your face.”

“That’s what they said at the hospital.”

Her attention suddenly became unmoored and started to drift away. She looked out the window for a while, then around at the disarray in the living room as if unsure how it got that way.

“Okay,” she said, looking back at me, “what can I do you out of?”

“I was wondering if you could tell me anything about Bay Side Holdings. Milton Hornsby.”

The air inside the room dropped about ten degrees.

“Who did you say you were with?”

“I didn’t. I’m the administrator of an estate. Regina Broadhurst. According to the real-estate and tax records, she was living in a house owned by Bay Side Holdings. I went over to Sag Harbor to tell Milton Hornsby and he basically threw me off his property. Your name was on some documents submitted to the Town appeals board. So here I am.”

“Do you have any identification?”

I got out my wallet and tossed her my driver’s license. I also tossed her a death certificate and the Surrogate’s Court paper naming me administrator.

“Are you an attorney?” she asked, looking up from the court papers.

“Industrial designer. And the old lady’s next door neighbor.”

She got up from the couch to hand back my license and the Surrogate’s Court document. She left the death certificate on the table. She scooped up her coffee mug and took a sip, standing over me.

“You’re aware of attorney-client privilege,” she said.

“Yeah, of course. I’m only here because Hornsby won’t talk to me. All I want is to give him back his house. After I clear up whatever might be hanging, and get her stuff out of there. That’s all.”

“Industrial designer?”

“That’s what I did. I’m an engineer.”

“What you did?”

“Don’t do it anymore.”

Somebody threw another switch in her head and she tossed herself back into the couch, sprawling out across the entire length. She put her forearm up to her head.

“I was sane until those assholes drove me crazy. Honest, Doc.”

“Define crazy.”

She looked over at me from her swoon.

“You shrinks are all alike. All talk and no cure.”

I drank some of my coffee. It was just a little more viscous than the transmission fluid I used in the Grand Prix. I sat back, therapist style.

“Maybe if we started with your childhood.”

“Nah, too depressing. Anyway, I was fine until I got handed that dumb case.”

“I could use some help on this. If it doesn’t violate attorney-asshole privilege.”

Jackie hooted.

“Where’d you get the act?”

“MIT. Comedy’s part of the curriculum. Everyone knows that.”

“My dad was an engineer.”

“I knew you’d drag your childhood into this.”

She rolled over on her side and flipped off her flip-flops. She let her hand fall to the coffee table so she could fiddle with a bunch of rose-colored glass grapes.

“I guess I’m not much of a lawyer,” she said, much in the way people do when they want you to disagree with them.

“You’re probably great when you feel like it.”

That was the right tack.

“Hey, affirmation. I like that. Yeah, I’m actually pretty good at the job itself. I’m just really bad at being a person. Really fucks up the career.”

That sounded like me. Maybe Jackie and I should start a club.

“This is getting awfully heavy for people who just met each other,” she said, abruptly launching herself off the couch. “Let’s find another venue. All I gotta do is see a couch and I start baring my soul. You oughta see me in a furniture store. It’s like Pavlovian.”

I followed her out to a glassed-in porch that had been converted to office space. There was Masonite paneling below the windows and indoor-outdoor carpet on the floor. It smelled like a greenhouse. She dropped into an expensive-looking ergonomic desk chair, spun around once and put her bare feet up on the desk. I cleared a space for myself on a long wooden bench.

“Bay Side Holdings, is that where we’re at?” she asked.

“Trying, anyway.”

“Okay,” she said, “I can tell you I was young and stupid. Stupider, anyway. I was hired by the lead, Milton Hornsby, who’s general counsel for Bay Side Holdings, as you know. He wanted me to come in as consulting on a big zoning appeals case. Hornsby paired me up with this city guy named Hunter Johnson, believe it or not. He was like incredibly gorgeous, intelligent, rich, witty and handsome. Did I mention athletic and a good cook?”

“And an asshole?”

“Not at first. No, not ever, really. It’s not like they did anything, it’s more like what they didn’t do. Which was actually try to get the funky job done. When you’re going for a variance and you hit a little resistance, you’re like supposed to at least try to make your case. I mean, that’s the way you play the game. The appeals board’s not just gonna jump down off their freaking platform and give you a great big hug and say, hey, you want to change a whole bunch of setbacks? Excellent! We’ve been here sitting around on our asses just waiting for something like this to happen. I mean, hel-lo. I told them how to play the course. I mean, I do know how to play. I do know how to deal with Southampton zoning issues. My God, I used to babysit for the planning chair’s kids. One of the guys on the appeals board has been hitting on me since high school. I know this shit, inside and out.”

“I didn’t know Hornsby was a lawyer. He didn’t tell me. So I guess he failed to take your counsel.”

“Yeah, I guess. They wanted to completely reconfigure a whole slew of properties over in North Sea. Here, it’s in here somewhere. I’ll show you. Though I shouldn’t.”

She spun around again and pulled open a deep legal-sized drawer. She curled her feet around the base of the chair to keep from falling into the file cabinet.

It was a copy of the aerial map I’d pulled from the Town records. Each lot was outlined with white ink over the black-and-white photographic image. They were all numbered, though several, about a dozen, were marked with a yellow highlighter. Only this one had a transparent overlay, which showed an alternate configuration of the lots. Through various combinations and border adjustments, my neighborhood had become an entirely different animal. Maybe twelve properties were converted to five, all bordering the bay or the deep harbor inlet that formed the east coast of Oak Point. The largest of these was at the center of the plan, marked “common area.” Which put it right in the middle of the WB site. A similar reformation was repeated opposite WB’s other shore on Jacob’s Neck. The entire development was enclosed by a green line labeled “privet.” A hedge. The way it was roughed in, the hedge ran down the middle of my side yard. And there was a question mark, also in yellow marker, right on top of my roof.

“This ain’t some third rate pre-existing, non-conforming, switch-a-couple-things-around-all-approved-thank-you-very-much-have-a-nice-day kinda shit here. This is big-time surveys and wetlands hearings and bulldozers. You’d think a little due diligence mighta been in order.”

While she talked I noticed my heart had contracted down to the size of a cherry tomato. My sore tongue started to throb. Jackie was poking the map with her right index finger and ranting about something or other.

“Due diligence?”

“Well, we hardly got near any actual hearings. Just a lotta backroom chats with all my dear friends on the appeals board, and with the building inspector and some County schlubs. All we ended up with was a list of things we’d have to do if we wanted to pursue. My point being, why go this far and at the first sign of any real tussle, fold up faster’n an origami master on amphetamines? Nobody thought to check this stuff out beforehand?”

She moved away from me and sat back in her desk chair. She slumped down and put her feet up on the desk. Jackie made an art of repose, however briefly maintained.

“Sorry,” she said, “it just still pisses me off.” She gnawed on the cuticle of her right thumb, stopping occasionally to check the results. “It was a big project and I coulda used the damn work. Not the damn money so much, but the complexity. And the credentials. And the trips to the City for lunch meetings with Mr. Johnson, who, forgive me for saying, was a major piece of ass. We don’t get enough of that around here. Not loose anyway.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Though I guess not really loose enough. Not if you count all the floppsies and moppsies draped all over him day and night. Including some other guy’s wife, which can irritate the hell out of a person.”

“Especially her husband.”

“He’s a drip. She’s a babe. Happens all the time out here. Probably not to you.”

She looked me over.

“You don’t look the type. Too craggy.” She held up her left hand and wiggled her fingers. “No ring?”

“Divorced.”

“Kids?”

“A daughter.”

“My age?”

“A little younger.”

“That’s how I like my men. Sorry.”

She grabbed a clump of her reddish blond hair and held it up to the light, looking for split ends.

“That makes me sound so ageist,” she said.

“Huh?”

“Ageist. Like sexist.”

“Oh.”

She was suddenly back up on her feet.

“So, what else can I do for you? Legally.”

“Who’s Bay Side Holdings?”

She frowned in thought.

“The guys who own all the land. Investors, I guess. I never met any of them. Hornsby was the man.”

“‘All the land.’ Where’d they get ‘all the land’?”

“I don’t know. Groups of guys are always buying up hunks of land. That’s what they do.”

She picked an ashtray off her desk and rooted around until she came up with a half-spent joint. She waved it in the air.

“What do we have here,” she said.

I demurred.

“You go ahead. I’m all set.”

She lurched over to a desk drawer and got out some matches. I waited while she lit the joint and took most of it down with the first drag. She talked as she exhaled.

“What else.”

I had to think about that for second.

“My dad looked after Regina. She didn’t have anybody else. He’s dead, she’s dead. I’m just trying to wrap it up.”

“A philanthropist.”

“I’m still curious.”

“About what?”

“Why didn’t Regina pay rent?”

“She didn’t?”

“You didn’t know that?”

“No. I mean, why would I? I was focused on revising an original plot plan. We never talked about the people living in the houses.”

Then she switched to a singsong lampoon of sensitivity.

“Not that I didn’t care …”

I sensed it was time to wrap this up. I tidied up my file and made motions to leave.

“You could give me Hunter Johnson’s address and phone number, if it’s okay. I might want to talk to him.”

She went back into her file cabinet. She whipped out a letter.

“Voilà,” she said. Then, “This is from Mr. Doll-face himself.” She pulled it back against her chest. “Why would you want to talk to him?”

“Curious, like I said.”

She handed me the letter.

“Keep it. I got more.”

“Thanks.”

“Can I borrow this?” I held up the map of Oak Point.

She wagged her head as if to shake out the right answer.

“Sure. Why the hell not. Can’t hurt. Just don’t lose it. The case might come back.”

“I’ll make a copy and send back the original.”

“No problem.”

“Thanks.”

“Fagetaboutit.”

She was smiling at me through the tumbled mass of strawberry-blond hair, but I felt her attention starting to dissipate again.

“I guess I’ll let you get back to your case.”

“Thanks a bunch,” she said, and walked out of the room.

I slipped the map and letter into my file and followed her back through the house to the front door. She held it open and leaned her whole body against the jam. We shook hands.

“Good luck with whatever you’re doing,” she said, “which, by the way, is more than you’re telling me.”

I smiled at her.

“Says who?”

“I gave you my freaking map, for Pete’s sakes.”

“You did. I appreciate that.”

“So?”

I pulled out my wallet and gave her a dollar.

“What’s this?”

“A retainer. To assure confidentiality. Attorney-client privilege.”

She held up the dollar bill.

“Never hold up in court.”

I left her watching me from the doorway of her house, pausing for a moment’s reflection before rocketing back into the chaotic Brownian motion of her life. A vision of my daughter threatened to sneak into the receding picture in my rearview mirror, but I distracted myself with thoughts of an army of bulldozers and backhoes led by the profane Jimmy Maddox, crashing over Oak Point like the Blitzkrieg, leveling hedgerows and laying waste to the last refuge on earth.