Authors: Chris Knopf
I admitted he didn’t.
“No. I inferred.”
“Well, you can stick your inferring up your ass. That’s bullshit.”
“Inferences. I think that’s what you meant to say,” I said.
He dropped his right shoulder and took a step toward me, his face shifting from seething rage to something a lot more businesslike. I knew what was coming.
So I sat down on a bench and put my gloves over my ears.
“What the hell are you doing,” he said.
“Protecting my head. It’s the only one I have.”
“Chicken shit.”
“Fear is sometimes a useful thing,” I said. “Do you know it’s physiologically akin to anger? The old fight-flight.”
“Crazy fucker.”
I took my gloves away.
“You get the same basic adrenal response,” I said. “Good for clubbing a predator to death with a stone ax or running like hell. In either case, the things you need the least are your higher-level cognitive functions. So they essentially switch off so your animal brain can take over and do its job. In other words, nothing makes you stupider than fear and anger.”
His own cognitive functions were grappling pretty hard with some of these concepts, which at least caused him to hesitate long enough for a couple of my unofficial boxing students to wander into that part of the gym. Neither one of them would be much use against Gardella, but there were plenty more where they came from.
I pointed that out, causing his hesitation to turn toward uncertainty.
“I’m not going to fight you, Bennie. I’m not that angry, or afraid.”
I waved over the two kids. Gardella took a step back.
“Hey, Lewis,” I said to the bigger one. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
He looked disturbed by the question.
“Shit no, Sam. You be more of a smart motherfucker.”
His friend agreed.
“That’s right,” he said. “Sam’s in possession of some serious knowledge.”
“The rest of your posse here?” I asked him.
Lewis gestured toward the far end of the gym.
“Five, six of ’em if they can get they asses out of the locker room.”
“Do any of them think I’m stupid?” I asked him.
Lewis got even more upset.
“Nobody thinkin’ you do stupid shit, Sam. Exceptin’ that dumb ass ride of yours.”
“I think that settles it,” I said to Bennie, and pushed past him on the way to the locker room. I could hear the two kids saying things like, “Maybe that old fucker gez got hit too many times,” but I didn’t much care, still in possession of all my higher-level cognitive functions, to say nothing of my serious knowledge.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
WO
I
drove directly to Southampton Town Police HQ to save Ross the trouble of demanding my presence. Orlovsky was back at her post behind the glassed-in desk, so that saved me the need to be nice to the new adjutant. She was thinner and darker, as if she’d tried to bake off her sorrow in the sun. She showed little affect as I approached the window.
“Tell him I’m here,” I said, and sat down to wait. She made the call then, a moment later, buzzed me in. I walked back to Ross’s office.
Sergeant Lausanne looked up as I passed her desk without saying anything. Her face was still sprightly, though the effervescence had lost some of its froth.
I didn’t bother to knock. Ross was in his chair, seat pulled back and feet on top of a pile of papers. Cigarette smoke clogged the room.
“Ronny called me,” he said. “So spare me the commentary.”
“What the hell is going on, Ross? You bring this head case out here from Up Island to help you investigate your own police force and he thinks he’s on a crusade to defend it from me. I’m getting the feeling he’s got a point. Something’s very fucked up around here.”
He took his feet off the desk with some effort to avoid spilling the papers off onto the floor, with partial success. He lit a fresh cigarette with the half-smoked one still in his mouth.
“It’s interesting how so many people in and out of the police department think I have some sort of control over Bennie Gardella,” he said.
“You don’t?”
“I didn’t bring him out here. I just requested an administrative officer to clean up the mess we’ve made out of our paperwork. I want to go digital. Stick everything in the computer. A false hope, some may say, but we need to keep up with the times.”
He gathered up the remainder of his footrest and dropped it on the floor.
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I’m sending Bennie back to Nassau County. They need to give me somebody who actually
wants
to sit in front of a computer screen all day. Lucille’s pretty good, but she can’t do it all herself.”
“You really didn’t bring him out here.”
“I really didn’t. I’m the one who pulled him out of undercover, before he got so buggy that the bad guys shot him out of sheer self-preservation. I’m the one who sent him into rehab as a condition of his continued employment in law enforcement, though I almost regretted that he took us up on it. I was hoping I’d seen the last of him when I took the job out here.”
I couldn’t tell if it was all the smoke in the air or my state of anxious confusion that made me want to leap across the desk and grab the pack of Winstons out of his shirt pocket and stuff the whole thing in my mouth.
“You like reminding me that you owe no explanation for anything you do,” I said, “but at this point, it would sure help.”
He leaned forward and put both elbows on the desk so he could use his hands to roughly illustrate his narrative.
“Do you know how they find new subatomic particles?” he asked. “They first have to theorize their existence. What makes a good theory? Things are happening that make no sense. Even in the weird world of quantum mechanics, reality has to operate within certain constructs, even if they’re only explainable mathematically.”
I told him they mentioned something about that in physics class at MIT.
“Really? I barely got past Aristotle,” he said. “Anyway whenever there’s anomalous behavior by various forces and objects in the universe, scientists start thinking, well, if this thing is doing this, and that thing is doing that, ergo, there must be some unseen agent, whether made of energy or mass, that causes these things to happen.”
“Alfie might have suggested the Nazgûl.”
“Trouble is, theorists can’t just say, ‘there’s this thing we’ve never seen nor heard from that is causing all this nutty behavior by all these other things.’ They have to prove its existence. So what do they do?”
“Break for lunch?”
“They call in the experimental boys, the ones with the colliders, the particle accelerators, who basically smash things together until the thing they’re looking for zings out of the ether.”
“Which one are you?” I asked him. “Theorist or collider?”
He seemed pleased with the question.
“I tend to the empirical, the demonstrable truth. But when it comes to collisions, no one’s better than you, Sam. I admit it.”
“Not sure if I should say thanks.”
“What’s more, you’re good on the theoretical side. It’s no wonder your company let you run R&D. You were a double threat. Until you fucked it up, of course.”
I learned from the professor who taught Zen at MIT the importance the masters put in humility. A lesson Ross seemed particularly suited to reinforce.
“You’re the one who told Gardella I was out to screw the Southampton Town Police,” I said. “At the same time you had me out there chasing the snitch killers.”
“God, that’d be devious.”
“You wanted to smash some things together to see what popped up.”
“Some metaphors are a little too close to home,” he said.
“So what did you learn?”
“Inconclusive, though I don’t think you’re done colliding.”
There wasn’t a lot of lightness in the way he said that, and I took it accurately as a dismissal. I wanted to stay in that sulfurous atmosphere as long as it took to wrench more information out of the chief’s byzantine mind, but I knew I had all I was going to get. I also understood, as exasperating as the situation was, that Ross had told me the truth.
Just not the whole truth, so help me God.
O
N THE
way back to Oak Point I called Jackie before she had a chance to call and accuse me of holding out on her. I made her listen to the whole story, despite several attempts to interrupt me. When I got it all out, she said, “Oksana called. Edith wants to see us ASAP.”
“Really.”
“She was very insistent.”
“You don’t refuse a Snow Queen.”
“I’m heading over to pick you up. Please don’t disappear on me.”
I moved a little faster to beat her to the cottage so I had time to check on Allison and crew, but not to fill anyone in on the latest events. It was just as well. They had plenty of their own concerns to worry about.
I even took a few moments to empty out my mailbox, which I usually let fill up until the mail carrier couldn’t close the little door. There was never anything good in there, so I didn’t feel the urgency. This time there was the usual stack of bills, junk mail, and useless catalogs, and one big manila envelope.
There was no return address, but the postmark was New York City, New York. Inside was a single piece of 8½" × 11" paper, a photocopy of an invoice prepared by the office of Jules Weinberg, DVM. A vet bill.
I folded up the paper and stuck it in the rear pocket of my blue jeans.
E
DITH AND
Oksana were waiting in a conference room featuring a level of discomfort and sterility unachievable by all but the Civil Service. Neither of the women offered to shake hands, though Edith did say, “Thank you for coming on such short notice.”
“Certainly,” said Jackie, whatever that meant.
Edith seemed to shrink under the burden of what she had to say, maybe because she had to say it to members of such a tiresome social class.
“I had a lengthy conversation with Deputy Inspector Joshua Gilliam,” she said. Oh boy, I thought. “He detailed the conversation he had with you. I found it disturbing, to say the least.”
“Was this at the opera or the bridge table?” I asked.
“You were under explicit instructions to keep our,” she paused, “arrangement, entirely confidential. I couldn’t be more disappointed.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” I said.
“It’s worse than that,” said Oksana, the stare of her pale blue eyes through their wintry eyelashes enough to freeze the air.
“The allegation you made regarding my husband,” said Edith. “How loathsome.”
“Wait a minute, Mrs. Madison,” said Jackie. “It was in the service of your request of us that we were consulting with Mr. Gilliam. And he, in fact, provided some valuable information, along with an offer to help in any way he could. I’m offended, frankly, that he felt compelled to report this to you. Secondly, there were no allegations made. It was a free-flowing conversation in which many thoughts were raised, some entirely speculative and raised merely to salt the discussion. I’m not privy to what the deputy inspector told you, but I assure you, the only thing loathsome here is your insult to our integrity and good intention.”
Edith waited to hear if there was more, then said, “My.”
Oksana said, “We order you to cease and desist any and all activities relating to police behavior in the matter of the confidential informant homicides, or any other police action, from this moment forward. Any violation of this order will be treated as an obstruction of justice, and interference in a police investigation, and will result in a recommendation that charges be brought by the appropriate legal authorities.”
Jackie actually guffawed, which surprised them but I took as a good sign.
“What, you’re giving us a formal, official order to stop performing an
in
formal, inappropriate, and entirely extralegal duty?” she asked. “I’d like to see the statutes underlying that legal logic.”
Neither of them seemed to have such a thing handy, so they took another tack.
“You’re right,” said Oksana, while Edith listened mutely. It was getting more obvious why the Snow Queen sat at Edith’s right arm. “There was no formal agreement between us. No record even of our conversation. So any such characterization on your part we deny. It is the Office of the District Attorney’s word against yours. An accused felon and his unpaid attorney.”
“I actually paid her a dollar,” I said.
Edith sat back in her chair and rapped the tabletop with a bony knuckle. It got our attention.
“I knew this was a terrible idea,” she said. “Trusted advisor or not.”
Then she stood up and for the second time that day I was dismissed. I told myself to get better at seeing it coming so I could walk out before the dismissers got the chance.
Oksana stood as well and so we were marched out of the conference room. On the way to the exit, Oksana asked to speak to me in private. Jackie’s face, already scarlet, got even redder. I followed Oksana into another bland, windowless room. She shut the door behind us.
“If you aren’t actually working for this office, however informally, it will make it easier,” she said.
“To do what?”
“See you.”
Perplexity morphed into something more like bewilderment. I’d chalked up that coziness on the park bench to the self-delusion of deepening middle age. This time I clarified.
“You mean, like in, man and woman?”
“Of course that’s what I mean,” she said. “You’re an attractive man. And still quite vibrant, proven by all three assault charges you’ve managed to avoid.”
“I already have somebody.”
“I don’t see any rings on any fingers.”
She moved in closer, as before, close enough for me to appreciate a complexion like fresh-fallen snow and a natural aroma you’d bottle under the label “Unfair Advantage.”
I stepped back, but not that far.
“Okay, Oksana, sure. Pick a time and place. Somewhere in the city where we’ll get lost in the crowd.”
Her smile was wry, mixed with touches of triumph and eager anticipation.
“I told you surprising things can happen,” she said. “If you have an imagination. Apparently you do.”