Two Time

TWENTY

BACK INSIDE THE COTTAGE I was delighted to see it was well past noon, so I bypassed the coffee and filled up a fishing cooler with the fixings of a batch of gin and tonics and hauled it over to Amanda’s recliner. Eddie popped out from one of his summer hiding places beneath the yew bushes and followed along.

“You can have a lounge of your own if you don’t mind dragging it out from behind the house,” said Amanda without looking up from her book. “You could have invited your lawyer friend, too. I wouldn’t mind.”

“Not until you get a third recliner.”

Her bikini was stark white, what there was of it, contrasting brilliantly with her skin, which was deepening toward a test of the term Caucasian. I busied myself setting up the G&Ts and fetching the chaise lounge so I wouldn’t be caught like a dolt just standing there looking at her.

I used to like looking at Abby I never tired of it, actually, long after she tired of me. She wasn’t an artistic girl, but the way she put herself together, the precision and care that went into preserving her body and maneuvering around the consequences of aging, showed an artistry of a sort. Amanda somehow achieved more or less the same thing, without appearing to try.

We spent the early afternoon catching her up, though I left out Ike and Connie as I had with Hodges. I didn’t want her to worry, though more importantly, I was afraid of what she’d think. Maybe another echo from my long marriage. Abby took it for granted that I could protect her from physical threats, yet hated any demonstration of my ability to do so. She saw it as proof of my incorrigible brutality, a matter of breeding, that I was genetically destined to play out the baser impulses of the immigrant class.

Socking our chief corporate counsel hadn’t done much to improve her outlook.

I also needed Amanda to believe that Jackie had turned up all the new information on Jonathan Eldridge on her own. Barely into my first new relationship in years and already the deceptions were piling up.

“You’re not going to say anything to Butch,” said Amanda, suggesting by the question that she didn’t think I should.

“There’ll be plenty of other distractions at the Council Rock. Do we need to prepare for this?”

“I was wondering about the dress code.”

“Come as you are?” I offered.

“In my case, that might prompt revision of the code.”

“Not if Butch is enforcing.”

“He’s harmless enough,” she said.

“If it helps your planning, I’d like to leave a little early so I can stop in on Sullivan.”

“How’s he doing?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m stopping in. Markham told me he was healing but still couldn’t remember anything past the night before. Probably won’t ever at this point.”

“I won’t forget it,” she said, quietly.

“Bummer alert.”

She laughed a sharp little laugh.

“Where did you come from again?” she asked.

“The Land of Thuggery, darling, born and raised.”

—

I found Markham Fairchild seated in front of a computer at the nurses’ station. He didn’t look up but must have seen me in his peripheral vision.

“I be right with you. Just getting a step-by-step lesson in double amputation. You can learn anyt’ing on the Internet.”

I was prepared to believe him when he said he was kidding.

“I was just checking on Jamaica Defense Force, who I’d like to amputate at the neck the way they play dis year. You looking for the officer?”

“Is he awake?”

“Oh yes. Very much on the mend. Go home in a day or two. Get him away from this germ factory we like to call a hospital. Good patient. Much more cooperative than other people we could talk about.”

I’d dropped Amanda off in the Village. I knew Sullivan wouldn’t like somebody he didn’t know very well to see him in this situation, and anyway, she wouldn’t get past the uniform at the door without getting frisked. Luckily I knew the cop already, so I got through with my modesty intact.

Sullivan was sitting up in bed watching the Mets on TV He’d lost weight, too quickly, causing his skin to hang loosely around his neck and jaws. Always pale, a platinum blond who never saw a day at the beach, Sullivan now nearly disappeared into the starched white hospital sheets. But there was nothing lost in the vitality of his eyes, hard as a pair of light-blue marbles.

“What’s the score?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. Not really paying attention.”

“I’ve heard of the Mets. Play for Queens, I think.”

“Don’t like baseball. But it’s better than game shows.”

“How you feel?”

“Like I been bashed over the head and stuck with a knife.”

“That’s an improvement on the last time I was here. You were sure it was a batch of bad baked ziti.”

“Don’t bullshit me. Everybody’s bullshitting me.”

“About what?”

“Who did it.”

He was motionless in the bed, his hands resting atop the covers, palms raised, one holding the remote for the TV You could see the bulge of bandages around his midsection pushing out from the hospital gown. Only his head moved as it followed me across the room to the other bed where I could sit down.

“I don’t know, Joe. Nobody does.”

“More bullshit.”

“I’m not bullshitting. All I have is a theory.”

“Ivor Fleming. The guy we talked about at the diner.”

“Yeah. Ivor Fleming. More specifically, a couple of his goons. But like I said, just a theory. Itd help if you could remember something.”

“Shock, loss of blood to the brain, blow to the head, natural defenses against severe trauma. All that shit wipes out the memory. Erases the disc. Cleans the slate. Nothing’s left. Nada, zilch. I’m sick of explaining this to people. Ross is in here every other day asking me the same stuff. I’m ready to start making shit up just to get him to lay off.”

“Sorry.”

“Like I’d want to blank it all out. Motherfuckers.”

I was happy to see him shut off the T V, a blessed silence, moderated only by the low whir of an air conditioner filling in for the nattering announcers.

“I know you’ve been going over all this with Ross, but the Chief isn’t inclined to keep me in the loop. So you could get me up to speed, or use this time to yell at me some more and I’ll come back tomorrow and try again.”

“Ah, Christ, who’s yelling,” he said, then clammed up.

I just sat there on the bed and waited him out. It’s a trick I learned from a shrink I once had to see in a deal with a prosecutor. Most people hate dead air, so if you make some, they’ll fill it.

Sullivan lasted about five minutes.

“My shift that day is all on record,” he said. “In my case book, and through all the contacts with the dispatcher. All routine stuff. I must have come home at the end of it at about three-thirty in the afternoon. Judy’s still at work then, and I normally either go work out, or play softball, or screw around in the yard, making sure I get back by dinnertime, say six-thirty Though that night she was working late, so I’m not sure about that part. I always change my clothes as soon as I get home, which I did, of course, then I took the Bronco to wherever I took it. For whatever goddamn reason.”

“And no prints, hairs, anything traceable?”

“Oh, you think we shoulda checked for prints? Geez, didn’t think of that.”

I saw something that made me go over and take a closer look at his right hand. He pulled it away and looked at me like I’d tried to give him a kiss.

“Give me the hand,” I said. “Palm down.”

He did it despite himself.

“Interesting. Did Markham say anything about this?”

“What?”

“The abrasion. Been over a week and it’s still healing. Must have been a good shot. Can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

Sullivan took a look himself, rotating his hand under the pale bedside lamp.

“It’s been sore. Though not a big deal given the hole in my gut.”

“You see? You got one in. Probably a couple. They had to club you or you would’ve beat the crap out of them. You were unarmed. Nothing you could’ve done.”

Sullivan looked at his left hand.

“Not much on this one. Little sore, though.”

“You’re too much of a righty I’ve seen the way you use your left. More defensive. Your right’s the big one.”

As we talked the climate in the room took a decided turn for the better. Clouds of humiliation cleared enough to let a little sun peek through. A little sea breeze blew away some of the fear and the unfamiliar shame of vulnerability.

“I bet I remembered to keep my shoulder up,” he said.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

There wasn’t much else he could tell me. It might be that Ross was holding out on him. Though probably not. Ross had a high regard for Sullivan, trusting his basic good sense and honest cop way in the world. So I chatted some more with him about everything but getting stabbed, until the evening shift nurse showed up, which was good timing because now I was having trouble getting him to shut up so I could leave.

I was half out the door and he was about to chug a little white cup full of pain pills when another thought intercepted me.

“Joe, tell me something.”

“What.”

“Why didn’t you have your gun?”

“I never carry it when I’m off duty. Don’t believe in it.”

“But if you were going to do a little off-hours, semi-official thing, like get in your civvies to pay a call on Ivor Fleming, you’d bring your gun.”

“In which case, I’d be wearing my sport jacket that’s cut for the holster, because yeah, sometimes there’s call to wear civvies on duty. I thought about that. Don’t know what it means.”

“Me neither. Just interesting.”

I left him to think for a few minutes before those happy pills knocked out his ability to think and then knocked him out for the night. But he’d keep chewing on it. Maybe it’d help him turn something up. There wasn’t much else I could do. I really didn’t know what I was thinking about any of it, except to think I wasn’t really thinking properly at all. Ever since Jackie told me Jonathan Eldridge had ginned up his credentials I’d slipped my moorings and been carried off by the tide. With a central assumption destroyed, every other assumption looked devious and contorted.

Just thinking about that gave me a slight case of vertigo as I walked out of the hospital into the early evening light, the sun low on the horizon, casting the surrounding neighborhood into a shadowless glow and capping off the treetops with what looked like gold paint against the deepening blue sky. Seemed like the right time for a drink, and luckily, I’d arranged to rendezvous with Amanda at the big bar on Main Street, so my powers of judgment hadn’t completely abandoned me.