“I hear you, Jason. You’re right. I got to get myself together.”
It was nice to see him light up as he sat back in his seat and flashed an atta-boy gesture.
“That’s right. So tell me, what’s your plan? I’m waiting.”
My plan, I thought. Hm. I’m already fed. It’s still warm enough outside to sleep under a bush without coming down
with hypothermia. I’ve only had two watery drinks in the last two hours after a very long dry spell. That’s it. Another drink.
“How about one more round and I’ll tell you,” I said.
He bought the ploy and I bought the drinks. Thus energized I started to weave a story about how during the day and in the evening while getting ready for insomnia, I’d think about my parents’ cottage on the Little Peconic Bay in Southampton. How it was standing there empty and forlorn, bearing dumb witness to the passing seasons and infinite variation of wind and weather playing across the sky and resonant inland sea. As I went on from there I became lost in my own narrative. When I stopped, Jason was leaning over the table looking mesmerized.
“Lord. If you’re not going there, I am,” he said, after a short silence.
“I thought you were an Upper Peninsula guy.”
“I’m reconsidering.”
Then I said the thing I only meant as a bit of a throwaway. Halfway through I realized that was a mistake.
“So you oughta come see for yourself. Make up your mind.”
He looked at his watch.
“How long’s it take to get there from here? I have an eight o’clock flight out of La Guardia, but I can move it to tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t know. Two, three hours. Not sure what kind of shape the place is in. It’s been sitting empty a couple of years.”
He reached across the table and swatted my shoulder.
“I grew up on the South Side, Sam. Trust me, I’m flexible.”
He jumped up and palmed the check off the table and went to pay it. I polished off the rest of my drink and shrugged off
my reservations. What the hell difference does it make? A comfortable car ride, an uncomfortable night in a dusty, damp old cottage, and go from there.
I slid down in my seat and let it happen.
——
He asked me on the way if I wanted to hear about the company and I said no, which he seemed glad about. Instead he updated me on the baseball season and current events I’d missed while in the tank. He let me smoke, giving himself an excuse to light one of his cigars, so we drove along the highway for some time drowned in wind and noise. The Mercedes was so quiet with the windows up the contrast was startling, but not unwelcome. It was getting harder and harder for me to think of things to say so Jason didn’t have to do all the talking.
In a little more than two hours we were on North Sea Road heading up from Route 27. I hadn’t stayed there since my mother died in a nursing home in Riverhead almost two years earlier. My sister flew in from Wisconsin to handle all the paperwork and formalities. She liked doing that kind of thing so I didn’t interfere. But she couldn’t bring herself to stay at the cottage. So that was my part, to check out the mechanical systems and make sure there was no water or wildlife leaking in. Even though my mother hadn’t been in the house for a while, in my mind it was still the place where she lived. Her presence was woven into all the furniture and decorations, saturating the walls and filling up the open spaces in between.
I felt it all the moment I opened the door. The narrative of her life expressed in texture, smells and dead silence. I told Jason to hang by the back door while I went into the basement
to throw on the power. The lightbulb above the panel popped on, and the well pump chugged to life. The smell of mold was pronounced, but everything looked the way I’d left it. No damage there.
Jason had prudently stopped at a deli on Route 27 to buy coffee and pastries for the next day. And some ice for that night to take advantage of the quart of Dewar’s my mother left under the sink. I turned on the fridge to store Jason’s cream and preserve the ice. Then I went out to the front porch and took down most of the storm windows to let the cooling breeze from the Little Peconic cleanse some of the must out of the air. I got us both ashtrays and we settled into the hard wicker chairs my mother kept out there to hold stacks of magazines and shopping bags filled with other shopping bags, all of which I’d tossed out at the first opportunity. I turned on a lamp that threw off a meager light. We could still see the moon hanging fat and orange just above the horizon, casting a wedge-shaped wash of light across the Little Peconic Bay.
“Can I ask you something?” said Jason. “You don’t have to answer.”
Though you always have to answer, don’t you.
“What?”
“Why’d you do it? What happened?”
Jason grew up with almost nothing but a set of parents who mandated he stay at the top of his class from kindergarten through the doctoral program in economics at Stanford, which he did, helped along the way by football scholarships and a hundred part-time jobs. Jason was the type of man who worked at remembering his whole life, and kept that perspective within view every day. To him, the thought of destroying a career, and consequently a marriage, and rounding it out by a swirling descent into
drunken oblivion, fell below anathema to the depths of abomination.
“It was all gone long before it was over,” I told him.
He drew in the last tolerable mouthful of cigar smoke and shot it above his head at the ceiling.
“Why didn’t you start fixing things before it got to that point?” he asked.
I didn’t have much of an answer for him, even after I tried for a few minutes to dredge one up.
“I was too busy doing the work to look after my job,” I said.
He looked unsatisfied but didn’t press it. We drew down the Dewar’s a little more in comfortable silence. Then, before Jason went to bed I tried to thank him, suddenly feeling the enormity of his kindness bearing down. He waved it away with an easy grin.
“So, this is your plan?” he asked me.
“It wasn’t before you asked me, but I guess it is now. This is the whole plan. Good through tomorrow morning when we eat the cinnamon buns.”
“Good enough for me,” he said, leaving me alone on the porch where I fell asleep and stayed well into the middle of the next morning, when I woke up to find him gone. A sturdy bodhisattva in a dark blue Mercedes, delivering me unto the Little Peconic Bay, a novitiate in the ways of bewildered anguish.
A
FTER MY VISIT
with Roberta Camacho I had an escort on the way back to North Sea. It was a plain-wrapper Crown Victoria just like Sullivan’s, only it wasn’t Sullivan. Similar sunglasses, but beyond that Lionel Veckstrom was a whole different kind of cat.
The day had turned surly, with a low cloud cover turning the sky a gray mud. A thin mist covered the pitted windshield of the Grand Prix, slowing me down, mindful of how the big car handled over a slick road surface. Veckstrom slowed with me, maintaining his distance.
I let him tail me as far as Towd Pond, where there was a restaurant I rarely went to, but figured I’d get coffee at the bar. I knew what was coming and I didn’t want the guy at my house. No particular reason, I just didn’t have the hospitality in me. Must have been the crummy weather.
I had a cup of hazelnut in a thick china mug in front of me by the time he made it to the next seat over. It reminded me
of my last encounter with Patrick Getty. Maybe I should call him and his boys and we could all have a little get-together.
“Workin’ off another hangover?” he asked me as he sat down.
“Ask my lawyer. Jackie Swaitkowski. But don’t stand too close when you do.”
“Tough broad.”
“Especially when you call her a broad. Listen, hero,” I turned and said to him. “I’ve already done one stupid thing today. I may have more in me, but I’ll pass on talking to you. Provoked or otherwise.”
He shrugged.
“It’s a free country. At least for me. I can sit here and talk to myself and nobody can say much about it. I might even talk a little about how your case is going, if I was feeling like it.”
“It’s going great. Thanks anyway.”
“Bernie Gelman told me you had a mouth. When it wasn’t full of booze.”
“Especially then. Who’s Bernie Gelman?”
“Bridgeport, Connecticut investigator. We worked together in Duchess County in the day.”
I remembered. A short greasy little guy with bad skin and rapidly receding crown of curly black hair. Looked very unhappy at Antoine and Walter Bick’s trial. I could see why, given how he wanted it to turn out.
“That surprises me,” I said, honestly. “I’d expect you to attract a bigger thinker.”
“I said I worked with him. I didn’t say I liked him. I didn’t even know he was in Bridgeport till I started looking into you. I learned a lot of things.”
“I’m a big proponent of life-long learning. Been trying to get through Immanuel Kant. You’re a smart guy, maybe you could help me figure him out.”
“Don’t know Kant. Too busy studying Enrico Ferri and James Q. Wilson. They both have a lot to say about people like you.”
I swiveled around in my stool and faced him, even as the little Jackie Swaitkowski inside my head told me not to.
“Excellent. More free psychoanalysis. Can’t have too much of that.”
Veckstrom was still well-dressed in a white shirt, club tie and raw silk sport coat. His face had a scrubbed and close-shaven look. No blemishes, no hairs sticking out of the wrong places. Not hard to interpret the psychology there. It said: I might have chosen to be a cop because the profession interests me, but don’t think I’m one of them. I live on a higher plane, and there’s no room here for you.
“They never found the punks who killed your father. Hardly tried, is how I heard it. No point. Hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in those days. Piss you off, did it?”
I pointed my finger at him.
“Come on, Veckstrom. You gotta do better than that. The trauma of a murdered father, his killers gone free, instilling in the young man antisocial tendencies. Manifest in a variety of ways—affiliations with lowlifes, violent and self-destructive behaviors, a wicked bad temper and a pronounced disinterest in regular church attendance.”
“You forgot the repressed lust for revenge. Unfocused, free-floating and easily attached to any person who might represent, symbolically, the unpunished killers. Big guys with big mouths. Nasty arrogant buggers. Swaggering around threatening old men and pretty girls.”
“Criminals,” I said, warming to the topic. “People who’d proven in the past they were also willing and able to break a few social conventions.”
“Very good.”
“Only I didn’t know that about Patrick and his boys at the time. I thought they were just a bunch of drunken builders coming off a hard winter, just like we were. Maybe not with the same style, but the same idea.”
Veckstrom looked like he’d lost track, but tried not to show it.
“You know Patrick Getty had done time,” I said. “You’d have to know that.”
“Of course,” he said, recovering. “Exactly my point.”
“Right. So you know where.”
“Yeah. Hungerford. Medium security. Should have been harder time, in my opinion, but that’s your typical prosecution. Rather cut a deal than deal with the paperwork.”
“Hungerford. Really.”
“Yeah. Pussy time,” he said.
“Pussy prosecutors. Piss you off, don’t they?” I asked him. “Makes you just want to kill somebody, doesn’t it?”
He smiled a humorless smile and waved the bartender over to order his own cup of coffee. I knew the tactic. Buying time.
“Doesn’t it make you wonder,” I asked, “why an ex-con like Getty isn’t getting looked at? Why am I a better pick than a known felon? Prosecution just going the easy route? More fun to bag an ex-corporate man, better story for papers? Come on, you’re the learned one. No theories?”
“Getty’s prints weren’t all over that stapler.”
“That’s because it didn’t belong to him. It belonged to me. I can show you where I used it to install insulation. Forensics can match the staples. Shoot a few into a barrel of water.”
“Your prints and nobody else’s,” he almost growled at me.
“On the handle? I heard about clear prints on the chrome. What about the orange handle? If you’d spent more time getting your hands dirty you’d know which end of a hammer stapler you swing.”
A breath of doubt tried to gain purchase on his expression, but he held tough.
“The physical evidence is as good as it gets,” he said. “Don’t start putting your hopes there. Never works.”
“I don’t have hopes,” I said. “Gave them up a while ago.”
“Smart decision.”
I stood up and put enough money on the bar to cover both our coffees.
“You’re right. They get in the way. A hope is like an assumption, a theoretical construct. A paradigm. You get too loyal to any of those things and your IQ falls about fifty points,” I said before leaving him there and getting back into the Grand Prix.
I was glad to be close to home. I wanted to pick up Eddie so I could run a few things by him in the car on the way over to Jackie Swaitkowski’s. That always helped me work through my assumptions. Even my theories. And despite what I’d said to Veckstrom, maybe a hope or two.
——
I was irritated to find Jackie with another client. I was forced to pace around the sidewalk and occupy myself looking at artwork and tchotchkes in the shop windows that lined Montauk Highway. Worse for Eddie was succumbing to a leash, but I had to keep a grip on him in case he ran into a Lhasa apso out to prove something.
I tried to interest him in a flock of collectible hunting decoys but only insulted his intelligence. We were both happy to hear Jackie call to us from her second-story window.
“Some people actually make appointments,” she said as we walked up her staircase.
“I’ve tried that. Not as sure as just showing up.”
“You think it’s made all better by bringing the dog?”
“No, but he does.”
I was gratified to see her new office space filling up on schedule. I had to shovel a stack of papers off the couch so Eddie and I would both have room to sit.