“I’m just gonna get back to enjoying this glass of iced tea, if you want the truth.”
“We do, actually, Jeff,” I said. “The truth is exactly what we want.”
“Thanks for talking to us,” said Jackie, standing and pulling me up on my feet. “I know it’s hard hearing it from us, but we’re sorry for your loss. And we hope eventually justice will be served.”
“In a pig’s eye,” he said, almost cheerfully. “But thanks anyway.”
We’d almost gone beyond earshot when we heard him call us back. Jackie sighed, but let me retrace our steps. He still sat at the table, but now more relaxed, with his legs crossed.
“Do me a favor when you see that Battiston woman,” he said to me.
“Amanda Anselma. She’s divorced from Roy Battiston.”
“Whatever. Just tell her the offer’s still open. It’s not too late.”
“What offer?” I asked.
“She’ll know.”
“I want to know. Tell me.”
That made him smile. A smile without humor, all teeth and no eyes.
“You don’t matter, Sammy. Just tell the girl the offer’s still sittin’, but the clock she’s a-tickin’.”
I heard Jackie take in a big breath through her nose. She stuck her hand through my arm and got a grip on my bicep, then pulled me around and drove me out from the back of building and into the Grand Prix. We rode in silence to the coffee place where she’d left her Toyota pickup. Before she got out of the car I asked her.
“Thoughts?”
“I’m over my head again, Sam. Where I always am when I get within ten blocks of you, feeling like people are laughing at all these punch lines and I’m just sitting there thinking, ‘What the hell’s so funny about that?’”
“What did you think of Jeff Milhouser?”
“It’s not him I’m worried about.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s you. You’re no different than any other dumb lunk all tangled up with a smart woman. Let me rephrase that, a very smart man, made dumb in the presence of a very smart woman.”
She snapped open the door and started to step out when I grabbed a wad of her jacket and pulled her back into the car. “What does that mean?”
She kissed the tips of her fingers, then used them to tap the hand that held her. I let her go.
“Ask your girlfriend,” she said, then sped across the seat, opened the door and disappeared into the crowds of preseason pedestrians out testing the weather and searching for paradise.
I drove back to Little Plains Road so I could look at the ocean again and mete out a few more unanswerable questions.
Like why my father had asked Milhouser if he needed a kid to work at the station during the busy summer months, a fact I’d forgotten until Milhouser dredged up the recollection. And how well they knew each other. There were only a
few gas stations in town in those days, all of which did repairs, a necessity of the times. Milhouser’s was at the intersection of County Road 39 and a connector leading up to North Sea, a logical stop for my father on the way home.
I never saw them speak to each other. I only remembered the day my father told me to go over there and apply for a job. That was when Milhouser told me my father said I was handy with cars. Last year Ross Semple told me my father bragged to his father that I was a tough fighter. He hadn’t said these things to me, and never would. In fact, he never said anything to me I could remotely construe as a compliment, or even a criticism, right up to the day he died, beaten to death by a couple of punks in a men’s room at the back of a bar in the Bronx.
Consequently, I never really knew what he thought of me. Maybe now that he’d been dead for a few decades I’d start to get new information. I just had to keep my ears open and listen for echoes from across the divide.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
Burton called me on his cell phone. It was early enough to catch me en route to the outdoor shower with a big mug of cinnamon hazelnut in my shower-safe New York Yankees mug. Eddie had been asleep on the braided rug, but the phone startled him into action. Which amounted to a stiff, yawning stagger into the kitchen. He looked at the coffee like he’d consider giving it a shot.
“Forget it, you’d be up all day.”
Then I picked up the phone.
“Yeah.”
“What an eloquent salutation,” said Burton.
“Social niceties don’t start around here until after nine.”
“Niceties being a relative concept.”
“I guess you got the message.”
“Yes. Very interesting. I’m on the Long Island Expressway and expect to be at the house in less than an hour. What say we meet there? Isabella will arrange for breakfast.”
“Fine with me. Just tell her to keep the vitriol out of my eggs.”
“Certainly. Niceties are standard at the Lewis residence.”
The weather looked eager to repeat the performance of the day before. Most of the morning mist had burned off and the bay was etched with wavelets that were barely ripples. The breeze was decidedly south-southwest, mild and kindly. The maples along the back of the property were freshly regaled in light-green baby leaves, and the lawn—a refined blend of native grasses and invasive flora—expressed an exuberance that it seemed uncivil to restrain with anything as pitiless as a lawn mower. At least not this early in the season.
Eddie followed me out on the lawn, where he stopped and shook himself out. Then he trotted on, crossing the end of Oak Point Road and disappearing into the wetlands where he usually went in the mornings for purposes unknown. It might have been a way to vary his diet, or maybe it was just a dog’s version of the morning paper. Catching up on events of the night before.
I saw something move out of the corner of my eye and turned to see Amanda waving from her side door. I held up my mug and motioned her to join me, which she did, resplendent in a terry-cloth bathrobe, a headband holding back her unbrushed hair.
“Burton called from the highway,” I said, handing her a filled mug and leading her to the Adirondacks at the edge of the breakwater. “He wants us to come see him when he gets here, in about an hour.”
The rising sun warmed our necks and threw our shadows down over the breakwater and across the pebble beach. Even with the light air there were two or three sailboats plying the shallows off the south shore of the North Fork. Serious
sailors impatient for a change of season, happy just to be out there feeling the glare of the sun off the water and sniffing at the nascent south-southwesterly. Hodges might have been one of them, having endured the battering winter firmly tied to the dock aboard his old Gulf Star. He’d been known to take an occasional winter sail, feeling his way past the unmarked shoals just to demonstrate to himself that it was smarter to stay hunkered down in the teak-lined warmth of the cabin and wait for spring like everybody else.
Amanda cupped her coffee with two hands, her long slender fingers, with freshly polished nails, linking gracefully as if in prayer.
“I have to apologize again,” she said.
“Oh, hell.”
“I know you hate apologies.”
“They’re a waste of breath,” I told her.
“I feel like I can’t continue with you unless I can have recurring and ongoing forgiveness.”
“You do. Glad that’s settled.”
“It’s not only what I’ve done. It’s how I’ve been.”
“You got reasons to be a little edgy.”
“You think I’m edgy?” I laughed.
“Don’t try that trap on me, Miss Anselma. I used to be married. Learned all the tricks.”
“Edgy would be nice. I was thinking I’ve been hysterical and neurotic.”
“Yeah. With an edge.”
“And paranoid. I’m definitely getting paranoid.”
“What, just because somebody burns down your house and your development project’s sounding like a Superfund site?”
“Not funny.”
“No, the funny part is the anonymous tipster whose information was convincing enough to get the DEC to get a TRO out of a sympathetic judge. PDQ.”
“So you’re saying I should be paranoid?”
“No. Paranoia’s delusional. You should be suspicious.”
“Big downgrade from paranoia.”
“Burton will ask you how much you knew, if anything, about those cellars,” I said. “Don’t get offended. He has to ask.”
“What do you think? About how much I knew?”
“You didn’t know anything. Otherwise, you’d have checked them out well before the phase-one inspection. To do otherwise would be both foolish and immoral.”
“Qualities I could tack on to edgy and paranoid.”
“Don’t forget,” I said, “I didn’t know they were there, either. And we’ve been over that place pretty thoroughly.”
“Thank you. I’d forgotten that.”
“But if it’ll help, I’ll cop to it. What’s a little environmental racket on top of a murder charge?”
“That’s so sweet.”
“My first nicety of the day.”
I’d seen the original drawings of the WB facility, but never a cellar elevation. They had the same identification box in the lower-left corner as the ones Ned showed us. I didn’t remember the exact date they were drawn, but it was sometime in the early twentieth century. I’d never forget such a thing, even with my degraded frontal lobes. If nothing else, I’d remember they were built with stone and not the prevailing brick of the complex. Stone wasn’t used much on sandy Long Island, and certainly not for large industrial construction. As far as I knew, all the WB buildings were built on thick, raised slabs, better to stand up to heavy equipment and avoid water infiltration. They were, after all, adjacent to a lagoon.
“Have you accepted my apology yet?” she asked. “I’ve lost the thread.”
“I accept whatever it is you want me to accept. Unconditionally, and in perpetuity, so we don’t have to keep going through this.”
“Does that preclude occasional pleas for reassurance?”
“Yup. You’re all set, for life. Imagine the time saving.”
With bold concepts like this, you wonder why my relationships with women were often less than entirely successful.
For the sake of efficiency I convinced her to take her shower with me in the outdoor stall, which turned out to be a fun idea for everybody. It meant that we were an hour later than I’d promised Burton, but he assured us Isabella didn’t mind watching her homemade Belgian waffles and cheese omelets cooling on the serving trolley. Our guilt was soothed by the fact that Burton and Hayden had already downed two platefuls, along with a bowl of fresh fruit and half a carafe of café noir.
They were sitting on a slate patio beneath a pergola laden with emerging clematis and wisteria. Hayden was in a white-and-blue-striped tennis outfit last worn by Jay Gatsby and Burton was in a state of exhaustion. Since he could never talk specifically about his work, the only polite thing to say was, “So, workin’ hard?”
“Indeed,” he said, telling us he’d been up all night preparing a bankruptcy filing that was big enough to affect global financial markets when it was announced later that day. “You won’t be surprised to know there are weighty tax implications surrounding the implosion of a large corporation— rather like a pack of jackals feeding on a staggering herbivore. Get it while you can.”
“I feel that way about the waffles,” I told him.
Amanda and I did our best to catch up with the breakfast
routine while Burton and Hayden picked their teeth and debated the merits, or even the technical feasibility, of a fixed tax code versus our current system of intricate variability. A system Burton admitted was beautifully designed to enrich those capable of navigating and optimizing ambiguities and approximations. People like Burton himself.
“Or you could take my approach,” I said. “Maintain a tax status well south of the poverty line.”
“Ingenious,” said Hayden.
“Only if his friends keep feeding him breakfast,” said Amanda.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t able to speak with you straight away, Amanda,” said Burton. “I think I have the gist, but let’s hear the details. I hope you don’t mind if Hayden sits in. He’s quite the legal scholar.”
“I knew nothing about underground cellars or anything like that until those two guys from the DEC pulled out their maps,” said Amanda.
“I told her to say that so you didn’t have to ask,” I said.
“This is what they’re accusing you of?” he asked.
“Not directly. By implication.”
We told him everything we could think of about the DEC guys as well as Amanda’s successful phase-one environmental study.
“You were wise to conclude that meeting,” said Burton. “These sorts of administrative actions have very few built-in protections.”
“Kafka lives on,” said Hayden.
“I’m telling the truth,” said Amanda. “I swear to God.”
“We’ll draw up a letter to the commissioner expressing your eagerness to cooperate fully in the field investigation,” said Burton. “Not as good for the soul as swearing to God, but more legally persuasive.”
“Anything,” she said.
“At least it undermines any claim that you resisted their investigation,” said Hayden. “Should they charge you with anything.”
“Kafka would do the same thing,” I said.
“We shouldn’t delay further,” said Burton. “Hayden, if you would, bring Amanda to the office and write something up for her. Isabella can notarize it. She loves to get out the stamp,” he said to me.
“Really.”
“Anything you need to tell me?” Burton asked, once Hayden and Amanda were beyond earshot.
“There’s something fucked up going on.”
“Put that in layman’s terms.”
“I don’t know exactly,” I said.
“Is Amanda telling the truth?” he asked.
“Define truth.”
“So you’re not sure.”
“I’m not sure of anything,” I admitted.
“But you have theories.”
“None that make any sense.”
“The DEC doesn’t pursue these things without cause. Deterrence depends on credibility.”
“I want a closer look at that drawing.”
“Right now Amanda needs to cooperate as fully as possible,” said Burton.
“Can I borrow your cell phone?” I asked.
“Certainly. Phone service comes with breakfast.”
I fished Dan’s number out of my wallet. He didn’t answer at the motel so I called his cell.
“Mr. Acquillo, nice to hear from you.”