Two Time

FOUR

IT WAS GRAY AGAIN the next morning. Warm, wet air was stuffed in all the enclosed spaces, and my skin stuck to everything it touched.

My car was a ’67 Pontiac Grand Prix with a modified 400-cubic-inch V8 and a four-speed manual transmission that my father and I had installed at great cost to the harmony of our already disharmonious household. A car this old and poorly conceived took a lot of effort to keep running, but replacing it seemed pointless. The body was free of rust or Bondo, though I needed to add a coat of paint over the gray-brown primer. The interior still smelled of leather, or at least I imagined it did. Maybe moldy leather.

That morning I built myself an extra-large mug of Belgian chocolate nut coffee from beans I’d bought at the corner coffee place in the Village. I liked it a little better than French vanilla or caramel classic, my other favorites. I poured it into an enormous insulated travel mug with a New York Yankees logo printed on the side.

I was wearing an off-white linen suit, last cleaned and pressed in the middle of the prior decade. It was still wrinkle-free, but a little musty. I was counting on natural forces to air it out. I put it together with a striped tie and an Egyptian pima cotton shirt that cost my ex-wife Abby a hundred dollars twenty years ago. It felt like liquid silk.

It was too hot to leave Eddie in the car, so I had to lock him up in the house. I felt like a rat, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate if I was worrying about him asphyxiating in the backseat of the car.

I left the radio on for him. Morning jazz on WLIU. Plus a full bowl of fresh water and a few Big Dog biscuits, even though he was officially more of a medium-sized dog. I still felt like a rat.

The linen suit, insulated Yankees mug and I climbed into the car and spun out of the driveway. The Grand Prix was an extreme example of an absurd era of automotive engineering. Heavy as a bulldozer, powered like a jetfighter and roomy as the penthouse suite at the Waldorf Astoria. Strictly mid-twentieth-century technology gone psychotic. A good car for my father. People in the Hamptons just averted their eyes.

I don’t know why my father bought the car in the first place. He didn’t have much money and was hardly much of a sport. I don’t remember ever seeing him laugh out loud, or express a materialistic desire for anything, mechanical or otherwise. He just showed up one day driving the thing. It looked almost new, unsullied and legally registered. My mother was suspicious.

When I was the head of R&D at one of the big hydrocarbon conglomerates, I drove a string of serenely perfect European sedans. They were better cars than the Grand Prix, but none of them had a center console big enough to stow a huge mug of Belgian chocolate nut coffee.

I dug a piece of paper with the directions Sullivan gave me out of my breast pocket and spread it out on the passenger seat. I wouldn’t have to look at it until I was in Riverhead, the tired old mill town at the crotch of the North and South Forks of Eastern Long Island. I knew how to get there, but I didn’t know much about the place. It used to be where local people could shop affordably for things like groceries and Barcaloungers, but strip development up island and general prosperity had eroded that role. Now it was just a little urban barge afloat on an ocean of wealth and aspiration. Not a likely place to lodge a high-tech financial consultant.

To get there, you had to go west from Southampton, cross the Shinnecock Canal and head up Route 24, past an enormous stucco duck and through Flanders, another raggedy old town that looked like it had wandered away from somewhere in rural Alabama. When I hit town the directions sent me up an incongruous four-lane divided highway toward Long Island Sound. As I crossed the river that named the town, I looked east toward Southampton but saw only gray translucence enveloping the Great Peconic Bay.

To either side of me were flat open fields. Huge irrigation machines were spraying geysers over the crops. Banged-up pickup trunks were out there, too, throwing up dusty contrails. Before I turned off the highway I noticed it was a sod farm. But not like the ones in Oklahoma. They were growing instant lawns. Just cut it up, haul it off to Biffy and Foo-Foo’s, roll it out and the automatic sprinklers do the rest. I wondered if they also harvested cappuccino or BMW convertibles somewhere in the area.

In a few more turns I was on her street. It was an arid subdivision, sparsely developed. The curbs and asphalt were fresh, but the common areas were weedy and poorly graded. The lots had all been clear-cut, realtor signs providing the only visual relief. I felt like I’d just toured the United States and ended up on the outskirts of Des Moines. I hoped the Grand Prix didn’t frighten the neighborhood kids.

Her house was a huge white two-story colonial with black shutters, a two-car garage and a professionally manicured lawn, cut to the length of a putting green. I waited a long time for someone to answer the doorbell. I rang it twice to make sure it was working.

The door opened a crack.

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Eldridge?”

“No.”

“Is she home?”

“Who’s this?”

“My name’s Sam Acquillo. I’m here about her husband’s death.”

“She know you?”

“No.”

“You have to call the attorney.”

“I’m with the police.”

It was quiet for a moment.

“You have to call the attorney.”

The door shut softly and latched with a barely audible click. I rang the doorbell again. A few minutes later, the door opened.

“Yes.”

“What’s the attorney’s name?”

“Gabriel Szwit. S-z-w-i-t.”

“Here in Riverhead?”

“In the phone book. That’s why I spelled it.”

The door closed again. I spun on my heel and walked back to the Grand Prix with an air of cool self-possession. I didn’t want the neighbors to see me sweat. That’s okay, Mrs. Big Shot Widow. Just wait. I’ll be back.

I drove to a phone booth on a far corner of a gas station in Flanders and called information. Mr. Szwit was in Southampton Village. I called Sullivan.

“What do you mean call the attorney?”

“That’s what she said, Joe.”

“Well, you don’t gotta do that. You’re the police. All you got to do is say you want to talk to her.”

“I’m not the police, Joe. You’re the police.”

“Jesus Christ. Nothin’s easy.”

“Call Szwit. Have him tell her to expect a guy named Sam Acquillo. Then call me back. I’ll wait here.”

“He might want to be there.”

“Great.”

“No big deal.”

“Don’t take too long. It’s hot.”

The station sold a brand of gasoline I didn’t recognize. A small crowd of young black kids were hanging out front, mumbling to each other and watching a skinny gray dog peel a wad of gum up off the hot tarmac. Their clothes poured down off their bodies and curled around their feet. They drank diet soda from liter bottles and stayed clear of the wiry little white guy manning the full-service pumps. Everyone was smoking cigarettes despite the pervasive gasoline vapors. So I lit a Camel. Solidarity.

The phone rang.

“Go on over. But go slow. The lady’s some kind of dipsoid.”

“What kind of dipsoid?”

“I told you. Some sort of phobiac. Afraid of the outside or some shit.”

“Agoraphobic.”

“Yeah. I think we covered this.”

“Szwit isn’t coming?”

“My wife’s afraid of birds. Scare the shit out of her. We never get to eat on the patio at the Driver’s Seat. She thinks they’re gonna get caught in the umbrellas, panic and dive into her ears.”

“Her ears?”

“Yeah. She thinks birds want to fly in her ears. This has never happened, to my knowledge, to anybody, but this is what she thinks.”

“Otherwise, a pretty normal gal.”

“Outside of marrying me.”

“So he won’t be there.”

“Who?”

“Szwit.”

“He’s on his way.”

“Okay”

“Let me know how it goes.”

The kids had melted off under the late morning sun. I looked for little puddles of denim and nylon. I bought a liter bottle of Fresca and climbed back into the Grand Prix. I was starting to lose whatever enthusiasm I’d stirred up for this whole thing. I thought about my roof rafters and tool belt. I lit another Camel and turned on WLIU to distract the whiny little voice inside my head.

It took even longer to get the door open this time. After I rang the doorbell I caught a little curtain movement from a second floor window. I was getting her attention.

The same woman’s voice came from the crack in the door.

“Yes?”

“My office called Mr. Szwit. My name is Acquillo.”

“Identification.”

Oh, Christ.

I flipped open my wallet and slid my driver’s license behind the yellowy plastic window. I stuck it up to the crack in the door for about half a second.

“Just a moment.”

The door closed again and I waited again. I was starting to get to know the door knocker. It was Colonial, like the house. Plate steel, painted flat black, with scallops cut into the surface to simulate hand forging. The kind of thing my parents wouldn’t even know how to describe.

The door swung all the way open. A short, obese woman peered around the edge and watched me enter the foyer. Her dress was a cotton sack printed with something and cinched up around an area approximating her waist. She wore an apron, stubby heels and an angry black scowl. Warren Sapp would have a tough time knocking her down.

“Wait here,” she said, then heaved herself up the stairs. Alone again.

The foyer was done in shades of off-white. The natural wood banister was the only point of relief. I strolled forward to catch a glimpse of the living room to the right. It featured the same palette, except for the love seat and a pair of high-backed stuffed chairs, which were upholstered in a muted floral pattern. It looked like everything in the house could float away on a stiff breeze. A set of louvered doors blocked the view to the kitchen. I heard voices. Then the fat lady came back downstairs. She waved at the living room.

“Go on, sit in there. Mrs. Eldridge ll be down in a sec.”

I sat on the chair that faced the stairway so I could see her come down. The air-conditioning was set low, maybe sixty-seven degrees. I warmed my hands with my breath. I wanted another cup of coffee. Something really hot in a doubled-up paper cup.

Mrs. Eldridge glided down the stairs and swept across the carpet with a soft, leggy delicacy, and before I had a chance to stand, slid into the opposing high-backed chair, where she perched like an oversized cat, her stocking feet tucked up under her butt, her hands folded prayerfully in her lap. She wore a white cashmere sweater buttoned up to her throat and black cotton slacks. Her hair was too perfectly arranged, as if fresh from the hairdresser. And black. Too black, even for a woman her age, which I guessed to be late thirties. She was like her living room. Not much color, except for the eyes, which were the most brilliant, frigid icy blue I’d ever seen.

“Well,” she said, neither a question nor a statement.

I stood up and leaned over to offer my hand.

“I’m Sam Acquillo. I was there when it happened.”

Her nails, long and perfect like her hair, were painted a deep maroon. A tangle of blue veins crazed across her wrist and the back of her hand. When I shook her hand, bony and cool-dry I was afraid I might crush it like a piece of ceramic, but her grip was blunt and to the point.

“Appolonia Eldridge. I was here.”

I retreated back to my chair.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“You knew Jonathan?”

“No. I was just having a drink. Waiting for a friend.”

“Yes. Of course.”

She looked away, toward the shrouded bay windows, as if the conversation had just concluded. I felt myself disappearing, until she returned her gaze, then I was back in the room.

“The retired engineer. And the young lady lawyer. Jacqueline Swaitkowski. She was badly injured, but you saved her life. And your own.”

“You read the report.”

A suggestion of a smile teased her face.

“You feel I shouldn’t have?”

“No. Of course not. I’d have memorized it by now.”

“You look too young to be retired.”

“Didn’t retire.”

The blocky woman who’d opened the door came plodding into the room holding a silver tray and tea service. Appolonia looked a little startled. The woman thrust the tray under her nose.

“It’s your tea, girl. You haven’t had it yet.”

Appolonia looked at me with mild exasperation.

“Honestly, Belinda.”

Appolonia was forced into the ritual of pouring the tea into a cup, dropping in sugar and squeezing the lemon. It seemed to take about four hours.

“We haven’t offered Mr. Acquillo any tea?” Appolonia asked.

Belinda looked over at me like I’d just broken into the house. I held up my hand.

“I’m all set, thanks.”

“Not a tea drinker, I surmise.”

“Coffee. And vodka. Not usually at the same time.”

Belinda plodded out of the room with the tea tray. The room struggled to regain its state of repose.

“I’m at a bit of a loss,” Appolonia said over the lip of her teacup.

“On why I’m here.”

“Yes.”

“Me, too.”

“So maybe we should start with that,” she said, helpfully.

One of the trainers who helped teach me to box used to say fights were won with the legs, not the fists. Balance and movement put you where you were supposed to be, or kept you away from where you weren’t, like that killing zone between the inside clutch and the full extension of the other guy’s reach. But sometimes, for no reason at all, the canvas felt like it was full of bumps and ridges, and ripples that undulated and shifted and screwed up your balance. Your feet got all tangled up and you lost your sense of where you were supposed to be. I’d been feeling that way ever since I’d driven up Mrs. Eldridge’s street.

“They’re afraid of you.”

She cocked her head and widened those crystal blue eyes.

“Who?”

“The cops. They don’t know how to talk to you. They aren’t used to this kind of thing. They spend ninety percent of their time with dumb hard cases, or routine stuff that’s safe and predictable, and that’s how they like it. This is all way too weird for them.”

“As am I. Way too weird.”

“Not what I meant.”

“Well, you said they were afraid of me. That’s awfully silly, if you think about it.”

“I agree. Any ideas?”

“Ideas?”

“About who killed your husband?”

She smiled at me.

“Ah, this is why they sent you. Your diplomacy.”

“Sorry.”

“What exactly did you retire, or whatever you did, from?”

“R&D. Hydrocarbon processing.”

“Jonathan wanted to be a scientist.” She sipped her tea. “No. No ideas.”

“I know this is hard.”

“It’s all right. How’s your hearing?”

“Most of it came back. Jackie’s not so lucky.”

“Jonathan had to sleep with a sound machine. It was set for crickets and rain. He said the house was too quiet. He had ears like a spaniel.”

That reminded me.

“What was the poodle’s name?”

“Pierre. He’s fine. They fished him out of the water. Belinda knows where he is. I didn’t like him. I’m sorry. Jonathan was the dog person.”

Her dead husband was right. The house was too quiet. No clocks, no creaks. No sound intruding from outside. It was clenched within a white, funereal stillness. A busy little poodle would have been like the sound machine—a little blast of chaos, a connection with the living.

“He wanted to be a scientist, but became an investment adviser,” I said.

“It’s no less intricate than the hard sciences, but the money’s better.”

“He did pretty well?”

“It would appear that way from the proceeds of the will.”

She looked down at her hands.

“Mr. Acquillo.”

“Yeah?”

“Jonathan lived his own life. I knew very little about his business or the people he worked with. We never discussed those sorts of things. Never, not one single, solitary word. We never entertained or traveled together. That would have been impossible. He wanted to leave his job back at the office, and find some relief from it all here. With me. He was gone at least half the time. He traveled all over the country, all over the world, visiting companies his clients might have an interest in. That was one of his specialties, fieldwork. Few advisers ever bother to visit the companies they recommend, but he believed it was the reason for his success. They were technology companies, applied science. So science did find its way into his career. And that, sir, is the sum total of everything I know about Jonathan’s work life.”

“How long have you had it?”

“What?”

“Agoraphobia.”

Her shoulders slumped a little, but she still looked stiffly amused.

“It’s an anxiety disorder. I don’t know if agoraphobia is exactly the right term. And I don’t relish discussing it, I’m afraid.”

“Sorry I’m just thinking it must be difficult.”

“It’s a bitch, Mr. Acquillo. That doesn’t make me one.”

“’Course not.”

“Or some terrifying creature.”

I jerked my head toward the back of the house where we could hear Belinda rattling around.

“You’re not the one I’m afraid of,” I said.

That loosened her up a little, or so I imagined from an almost imperceptible shift in the way she sat in her chair.

“It isn’t much of a life, you know, but it was infinitely better knowing that, at least some of the time, it could be spent with Jonathan. We would sit, right here in this room, and chat. About just about everything. I read the newspaper every day, and watch a little CNN—you have to be careful not to watch too much, it’s habit forming. And I have a group on the computer with whom I converse. And Belinda, she’s out and about a bit. You can keep up very well if you try a little. And, of course, Jonathan lived in the whole world. He knew so much. But then, you know, we didn’t just discuss current affairs. He really wasn’t the big stiff people thought he was. If you knew him as I did. You can’t imagine what it means to me to have him taken away”

“I can. I can imagine, but that’s all. I’ve lost a lot of people, but not like that.”

Her composure began to waver. She put her teacup down on the tray as if the weight of it was suddenly impossible to bear.

“I still can’t quite understand why you’re here.”

I shrugged.

“One of the cops investigating the case asked me to talk to you.”

“Very curious.”

“He’s actually a friend of mine. Since I was there when it happened, he thought maybe you’d be more likely to talk to me.”

“I have nothing to hide. I’ve told them everything.”

“So, no theories.”

“No. And I don’t care.”

“Pardon?”

Having regained her strength, she scooped the teacup off the table. She looked right at me.

“It’s absolutely immaterial to me. He’s gone, and nothing will change that.”

“With all due respect—”

“Please, Mr. Acquillo, understand. There’s nothing I can do about this. I’m here, in this house. Jonathan left me enough to live on—my God, enough for me to live a thousand years. But I’m hardly up to a crusade. I can barely imagine a trip to the grocery store, so how am I to hunt down my husband’s killers? Isn’t that for the police? Foolish me, I always thought that’s what they did. Not send over retired engineers. With all due respect.”

She looked over my shoulder. When I turned around I saw Belinda standing in the foyer.

“I changed my mind,” I told her. “I’ll have some of that tea after all.”

Belinda looked over at Appolonia for permission.

“Please, Belinda,” said Appolonia. “It’s quite good.”

Belinda spun on her heel and left abruptly enough to stir the air.

“She’s really a doll once you know her,” said Mrs. Eldridge.

A few hundred comebacks leapt to mind, but I managed to shove them back down.

“You’d like my friend, too. Joe Sullivan. The cop who asked me to talk to you. He’s new on the case. He’d be here himself, but he thought it’d be too much for you.”

“I’m sturdier than I look, Mr. Acquillo.”

“Sam.”

“Okay Sam.”

“I believe that.”

“Because of your powers of perception?”

“Yeah. Engineers are big on deductive reasoning.”

“I’ve heard that. I studied abnormal psychology. Surprise, surprise.”

“Doctorate.”

“Boston University.”

I pointed to myself.

“MIT. Just across the river. Though I once lived in a BU frat house. In the attic with the mice.”

“This is why your friend thought I’d speak with you? You’d know the secret handshake?”

“Must’ve been tough to go to class.”

“I was better then. But yes. It was.”

“And Jonathan was at Harvard Business School. When you met him.”

“You must have quite a file.”

“Just guessing, based on the dates.”

“That’s right. I trust you aren’t interested in the exact circumstances.”

“Maybe a little. If I’m not prying.”

She smiled and looked toward the window, which was shrouded in tissue-thin, translucent sheers. Her skin was very pale in the diffused light, though you could see tiny wrinkle lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. It was the kind of face that wouldn’t age well. Too undernourished.

“That’s all you’re doing,” she said, then after a bit of a pause, “We met when Jonathan was in a clinical study. Nothing exotic, I can’t even remember the point of the research. I was helping verify the data with follow-up interviews. The sort of statistical drudgery advisers delight in visiting on graduate students. But, luckily, the subjects came to me. At my house. I lived with my parents.” She added, anticipating the question, “I grew up in Boston. Brookline.”

“So did my ex-wife. Newton, actually.”

“Jonathan grew up out here.”

“Me, too.”

“Curious.”

“But irrelevant?” I asked.

“Possibly.”

“Wow. Too subtle for me.”

“I thought you were the subtle one. Subtle enough to talk to the crazy lady.”

“Or crazy enough.”

She saluted me with her cup of tea.

“Touché.”

“Not trying to cross swords, Mrs. Eldridge.”

“Appolonia.”

“Just trying to learn more about your husband.”

“Ever consider there are some things you can never know?”

“Sure.”

“Though you know a lot already, don’t you.”

“Not really.”

“More than you admit.”

“Engineers are trained empiricists. You only know what you see.”

“At least you know how to duck.”

“Learned that from Rene Ruiz.”

“Engineer?”

“Prizefighter.”

“Explains the nose.”

“Courtesy of Rene.”

“So you didn’t duck in time.”

“That’s what I learned from Rene. Timing is everything.”

“Like when you jumped behind the big table.”

“So you got a file of your own.”

“It didn’t say.”

“What?”

“Why you jumped behind the table.”

“To keep from getting blown up.”

“At that point it was just a fire. It didn’t say why you jumped behind the table. No theories?”

“No theories. Certainties.”

“Really?”

“I wouldn’t think you’d want to know.”

“If I’m asking, I want to know. Rest assured.”

I shrugged.

“Oxygen,” I said.

“Now who’s being subtle.”

“You can tell how much oxygen a flame’s getting from its color. And how hot it is. And the balance between the two. The flame inside the car was starved of oxygen, but very hot. All the windows were shut, but the heat was great enough to melt glass, which would suddenly let in a lot of air. That would cause a rapid acceleration of combustion. Rapid enough to be, for all intents and purposes, an explosion. I didn’t know about the C-4. I might’ve tried to get further away.”

“So he went quickly.”

“Yeah. Quick enough.”

She looked away from me, and might have been ready to tear up, but the doorbell rang. Saved.

Belinda let in a short guy with thinning, slicked hair and glasses. He wore a gray suit and held a worn leather briefcase tightly under his arm like he was afraid one of us might try to snatch it. Belinda looked like she was mad at him. For showing up, or not showing up sooner, or on general principle, hard to tell.

He walked right up to me and stuck out his hand.

“Gabriel Szwit.”

“Sam Acquillo.”

He was one of those jumpy, fidgety kinds of guys who gravitate toward professions like accounting and law so they’ll have an official stereotype to justify their social insecurities.

Appolonia also shook his hand and got Belinda to bring him a glass of water. He sat on the sofa facing us with his briefcase held upright in his lap. Maybe he had lead weights in there to keep him anchored to the ground.

“So, can somebody catch me up?”

“Nothing to catch, Gabe,” said Appolonia. “We’re just chatting.”

He looked confused.

“The police said you had some information that might interest Mrs. Eldridge.”

“They did?” I asked.

Gabe looked over at Appolonia for a little help. She looked at me for the same thing.

“An officer Sullivan called and said you wanted to share a piece of information that hadn’t been included in the original report. I agreed to you coming on that basis, though I’d thought Mrs. Eldridge might have waited for me to get here before engaging you in conversation.”

Mrs. Eldridge didn’t seem to notice the reproach.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I guess we were so engaged I lost track.”

“I see,” said Szwit. “Perhaps now that your memory’s been refreshed.”

Appolonia looked over at me, calmly composed, as if I had the next month and a half to cough up the goods. Szwit took the other tack.

“Otherwise,” he said, looking at his watch.

“The phone, of course,” I said, as if relieved by the return of my short-term memory.

“Of course,” said Appolonia. “To be fair, Gabe, Mr. Acquillo mentioned early on that he knew something about the phone.”

Her delivery was so deadpan I couldn’t tell whose leg in the room was being pulled, or even if that was what she was doing. The undercurrents flowing through that silent house were powerful enough to dislodge it from its foundation.

“You know that Jonathan got a call on his cell minutes before the explosion,” I said.

Neither of them nodded, but I pressed on anyway.

“It wasn’t his phone,” I said.

I sat back in my chair and took a sip of my tea, shrugged my shoulders and asked, “Which raises the question, whose was it?”

Szwit shook his head.

“I’m sorry, you’re saying the cell phone on which Jonathan received that last call did not belong to him? How could you possibly have known that? Did you speak with him? That certainly wasn’t in the report.”

It wasn’t in the report because I hadn’t said anything about it when they grilled me. For some reason it just hadn’t registered until that moment sitting in Appolonia’s living room.

“I was watching him,” I said. “Killing time waiting for my friend. I watched him try to answer the call. He pecked at the keys, hunting for the right one. You don’t do that with your own phone.”

“It might have been a new one,” said Appolonia. “I certainly wouldn’t have known,” she added, for Gabe’s benefit, I thought.

“Might’ve been,” I said. “Easy enough to check out.”

“You could ask Alena.”

“Mrs. Eldridge,” said Gabe, “I don’t think this conversation should extend to Ms. Zapata.”

“Don’t you love lawyers?” she asked me. “Is no’ the only word they know?”

“You should meet Jackie Swaitkowski. Full of surprises.”

“I should.”

“This is your piece of vital information?” Szwit asked, simultaneously suggesting it was neither vital nor information.

“Yeah,” I said. “You explain it.”

“Jonathan had trouble answering his cell phone? It means nothing. Everybody struggles with those phones.”

“A guy who ran a multi-million-dollar consultancy through his computer, and spent half his life on the road, couldn’t answer his own cell phone?”

“If it was new,” Appolonia repeated, trying to steer me toward a safe harbor.

“Should be easy enough to find out.”

She looked over at Gabe.

“Any objections?” she asked, as if to say, don’t even try.

“Hell, no. I was just hoping for something more substantial. Something that went somewhere.”

I was hoping the same thing, but at that point I was more concerned with getting out of there before the lawyer, or Belinda, made a leap for my jugular.

“You should talk to Jonathan’s assistant. Alena Zapata,” said Appolonia. “She’s still working for his business, tidying things up. Though not for much longer. I have the number and address.”

She rose with little effort and went to get a piece of paper out of a small fold-down desk. She stood with her weight on one leg while she wrote down the information. I noticed for the first time that she had a little shape around the chest and hips, despite her thin arms and legs. She actually was, or could have been, very attractive, if you like your women in black and white. I wondered if Jonathan liked having her all to himself. She’d always be there whenever he came home. To sit and engage him in witty, sophisticated repartee. Fragile and desperately in need of protection. To be indulged, and coddled. His own alone. No one else to see or hear. A world unto themselves. Refined, yet profoundly isolated. Until it collided with several pounds of high-grade plastic explosive.

She walked over and handed me the slip of paper.

“I do have one thing to tell you, though you’ll find it of no use whatsoever.”

“Sure. Can’t hurt.”

She was now close enough for me to smell her. It was a flower smell, sweet and fresh. Like Easter Sunday. Or something you’d get from Crabtree & Evelyn. She seemed to be unsure about telling me what she wanted to tell me.

“Go ahead.”

She pursed her lips and nodded. She went back and sat down in her yellow chair. The flowers lingered in the air. I waited until she was ready.

“Have you ever looked over at the person you’re closest to, and thought, just for an instant, that you have no idea who they really are?”

“Yes.”

“I never felt that way about Jonathan Eldridge. Some people are just so completely who they are. I don’t believe he knew he would be killed, because I would have certainly known it, too.”

She didn’t expect me to respond, so I didn’t. I just finished my tea, thanked her for her time, shook Gabe’s hand and made for the door, one eye peeled for Belinda. Before I could grab the doorknob, Appolonia called to me.

“Mr. Acquillo.”

I stepped back so I could see her in her high-backed chair.

“Yeah.”

“Jonathan was everything to me. I can’t imagine going on without him. I don’t know why I bother.”

Belinda finally came from wherever she was lurking and made a grab for the door, hoping to propel me out of the house. I held my ground.

“Maybe you’re more curious than you think,” I said to Appolonia. “About how it happened.”

She nodded, a faint, indifferent little nod.

“Perhaps. Some perverted form of curiosity.”

“Hey people have lived for less,” I said, backing out of the door and into the color-drenched heat where I belonged, where I could take a few big gulps of air and re-establish my bearings.

But the day had turned cooler, for no reason I could divine. The weather in the Hamptons is like that. It can fool you all the time. You might think it’s a metaphor for human nature, but that’d be presumptuous. A truly pathetic fallacy. Nature as a whole never did, and never will, care all that much about the contradictions of human behavior. The zigs and zags between philanthropy and betrayal, adoration and deceit.