“You better think about what you’re doing, Horowitz,” said Milhouser.
“It’s all I
can
think about.”
“Then you’re stupid.”
Zack ignored him.
“They were punching at each other and trying to grab each other’s clothing. Getty was also kicking at Robbie’s legs. Robbie was trying to wrestle him. He was bigger, but Getty was hitting him very hard. I’m making it sound like a long drawn-out thing, but I think it only lasted a few seconds. Almost before I knew it, Robbie was on the floor. Dead.”
Patrick picked his head off the floor and tried to twist around to look at Zack.
“Wait a minute. Uh-uh,” he said.
Milhouser stood up again.
“Shut up,” he said to Patrick.
“No, you shut the fuck up,” he said back.
Patrick looked like he was trying to stand. I put my foot on his back and shoved him back down, but kept my eyes glued on Zack, trying to keep him and the universe motionless for just another moment.
“Tell him,” Patrick yelled at Zack.
Zack looked at me. I shook my head.
“Tell him,” Patrick yelled at Milhouser. Milhouser also shook his head and looked down at the floor.
“You fuck,” Patrick said into the floor. “I had the situation under control. But this fuck,” he strained to look at Milhouser, “has to get in the act. With a fucking hammer stapler. Hits the guy right on the head. I can still hear it.”
I nodded to Zack.
“That’s correct,” he said to Jackie. “I witnessed it. Jeff Milhouser came up behind Robbie and struck hard once. Robbie leaned down and tried to cover his head, and Jeff hit
him again. And again, and even after he’d fallen to the floor, he hit him again. His own son. His own flesh and blood.”
Milhouser still stared at the floor.
“No flesh and blood of mine,” he said. “Just a big, stupid greaseball. I should have known he’d get stuck on another greaseball. Must be the inferior genes.”
Then as if suddenly alert to the situation, he looked at Jackie.
“I’m not admitting a thing.”
He pointed at me.
“It was his stapler,” he yelled.
“But you didn’t know that at the time,” I said to him. “It was in a box Getty took from the insulation subs. Amanda used the same guys. She borrowed my stapler and they walked off with it. Just happened to be the first thing that came to hand. Jeff here had the sense to wipe down the handle. Dumb luck for both of us, my prints were on the rest of it.
“By the way,” I added, “the box is now in the trunk of my car. I’m guessing Jeff had to paw through it to get at that stapler.”
Jackie asked me to toss her the cell phone.
“Can I call him now?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Who’s ‘him’?” Milhouser demanded.
“Joe Sullivan. Southampton Town detective,” said Jackie, punching in the number. “He’ll want to get these statements while they’re nice and fresh.”
“Aw, Christ,” said Milhouser, like he’d just spilled a cup of coffee in his lap.
We all listened to Jackie talk to Sullivan. Milhouser made a few attempts to stride out of there, but Jackie just snapped her fingers at him without looking up from the phone and he went back to sitting on the sawhorses.
In the subsequent silence, I remembered one more thing to ask Zack.
“How’d you get the drawing to the DEC?”
He smiled a tired smile.
“While the two of them were yelling at each other over Robbie’s body. I ran like hell. Getty even chased after me, but I have a sports car and he has a big pickup truck. Milhouser had a threatening message at my office waiting for me. But that was unnecessary. We were back where we were at East End Savings. Everybody had hooks in everybody else. Mutually assured destruction.”
Of course I knew about the BMW. Zack had roared by me on Bay Edge Drive that night while I was jogging. He was on his way to Robbie’s house. When I got there his car was in the driveway parked next to a pair of pickups. I’d gone that way on a hunch that somebody’d be there. Maybe I could prove they’d torched Amanda’s house while the act was still fresh. But seeing all the cars, I didn’t like the odds. I was afraid to get into it. Afraid for my head. So I ran on by, and headed south up to Noyac Road.
If I’d stopped maybe I’d be the one dead and Robbie would have had the murder charge. Or maybe I could have saved him and myself in the bargain. I’m not big on that kind of speculation, but it was something I thought I’d have to live with for a while before I’d know how I felt about it.
I felt a little bad about lying to everybody about being there, and worse about the old lady who ID’d me, but I hadn’t seen any good in admitting the truth, and probably never would.
“So as soon as I could, I drove the drawing up to Albany,” said Zack, “and after extracting a promise of anonymity, ostensibly to protect my ‘source,’ I handed it over to the State’s
Attorney. At least I got one thing off my conscience. I’m glad they didn’t find anything. It makes it that much better.”
I wanted to say his conscience seemed okay with letting me hang for something I didn’t do, but I had to keep him on my side. There was still a long legal road ahead.
——
While we waited for Sullivan, Jackie advised them all on what she’d do if she were them, free of charge. By the time the big cop walked into the sunroom with Will Ervin and another uniform, Patrick was on his feet and the incriminating two-by-four back outside.
Milhouser still looked indignant, even bewildered. I wondered if he’d convinced himself of his own innocence, the same brain that had reacted with murderous rage now settling into a soothing state of denial.
I’d have to ask Rosaline.
Sullivan decided the best thing was to bring everybody to the hospital so they could check out Patrick’s arm, then take statements there or head over to the HQ in Hampton Bays. He called ahead to Ross while Ervin and the other cops led Zack, Patrick and Milhouser out to their cruisers.
Jackie said we’d be right behind. But when I got outside I plopped down on the muddy ground, then lay back, spread my arms and legs, and looked up at the starry sky through the spring leaves. Jackie squatted next to me.
“You all right?”
“I think so,” I said. I took a deep gulp of air into my lungs and closed my eyes.
“Don’t ever do that to me again,” said Jackie.
“What?”
“Put me in a state of abject terror for weeks, thinking I’m
going to make a mistake that puts my friend in jail for the rest of his life, then hide information from me, which I explicitly asked you not to do, goddammit.”
“I wasn’t sure. Honestly. There was another thread I had to tie off.”
“How long have you known it was Milhouser?”
“About fifteen minutes,” I said.
“Get out of here.”
I sat up and looked at her.
“It was obvious one of them had burned down Amanda’s project. But I never believed it was Robbie. Not given the way he was looking at Amanda that night at the restaurant. Despite all the bluster, there was something different in his eyes. The hope of forgiveness.”
“For what?”
“Robbie had a lot of natural bully in him, but his stepfather’s ridicule and brutality fueled the flames. The only parent he had and all he ever got was contempt. I knew that old bastard was the pivot point the day we went to see him. He said all the right things about his boy, but his eyes, like Robbie’s, said something different. It wasn’t grief, it was triumph. That and the booties.”
“Huh?”
“He has a floor-finishing business. Between coats of urethane floor guys’ll wear booties so they don’t mar the fresh finish. Same thing the arsonists wore when they torched Amanda’s house. A job in every way intended to send a signal. That takes the mind of a planner, a schemer, and someone unburdened by conscience. People have written Jeff Milhouser off as a basic screw-up, but he’s worse than that. He’s a basic sociopath. I thought his history might give up something I could use to trace back to Robbie’s death. And it did, in the form of Zack Horowitz.”
“How the hell did Roy get in the act?”
“I never understood why he put the brakes on developing Amanda’s property after the Town ordered an extensive environmental study. He said it was because of the notification requirements, which was legitimate enough, since all that attention could have blown the scam. But those cellars made the study itself the real worry. He didn’t even share the information with his partner Bob Sobol, who was an engineer. He’d have known they could be filled with hazardous waste. Roy’s another all-star schemer. He had the presence of mind to keep that drawing to himself, and then put it someplace safe—with Zack Horowitz—where it could be deployed at some future date.”
“I still don’t get it.”
I leaned up on my elbow.
“That’s because you’re a good person. You don’t think like they do. Roy has had plenty of time to nurse his bitterness. Jeff Milhouser was the perfect outside partner. Roy’s natural ally. And Patrick the ideal go-between. Roy thought he could manipulate his way back into Amanda’s project, sort of a silent partner, pick up a piece of the action. Wouldn’t that be a kick. But if all he managed was to wreak a little havoc and revenge on me and Amanda, that’d be fine.”
Jackie was quiet for a moment.
“Don’t get mad at me,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“When I ask you something.”
“Okay,” I said, lying flat on the ground again.
“You don’t ever wonder about Amanda?”
“All the time.”
“And?”
“A priest once told me faith was believing in something
even when—especially when—all the evidence pointed in the opposite direction.”
“You know what that makes you?”
“A recovering empiricist?”
“I could list a few more things,” she said, standing and holding out her hand so she could pull me to my feet. Then we put Robbie’s monument at our backs and followed Sullivan over to the hospital, where Markham determined Patrick’s arm was just badly bruised. But he wanted to keep him there overnight for observation.
“Anyt’ing of yours you want to get X-rayed while you’re here?” Markham asked me and Sullivan.
A desk sergeant Ross sent over from headquarters was there to record everybody’s statements, helped along by Jackie’s notes and testimony. I was glad to hear all the stories come out like I wanted them to.
After that they let me head back to the tip of Oak Point where I had a case of wine, a bottle of vodka and a dog waiting for me, along with a life filled with equal measures of hope, faith and exasperation.
Y
OU’D THINK A FACE
as big as Markham’s would be easier to read, especially when you’re sitting just across a desk from him. On top of the desk were open files and huge envelopes out of which he slipped X-rays and other gray-scale images. He had a phone up to his ear, held there with his shoulder so he could use both hands to hold the images up to the light.
On the other end of the line was the neurologist who took all the pictures. I don’t know what his side of the conversation sounded like, but Markham wasn’t saying anything that made any sense to me at all. If it hadn’t been for the occasional verb or preposition linking the technical terms, I’d think he was speaking Greek.
I’d already sat through two other calls he’d made to specialists who’d also reviewed the data. None of that made any sense to me either.
“Well, Mr. Ah-quillo,” he said after ending the call and jotting down a few notes in one of the files, “you got all dat, right?”
“Sure. Clear as a bell.”
He gathered the stuff off the desk and led me over to a row of light boxes mounted to the wall, where he took me through a tour of my skull, moving from angle to angle, from MRI to X-ray and back again. He also used anatomical drawings, cutaways also rendered from several different angles. It was pretty interesting, and would have been more so if it hadn’t been my brain at the center of the discussion.
When he finished the lecture he said, “Dis is usually when we ask the patient if he has anybody he can talk to about the situation.”
“I actually do, believe it or not.”
“Since dat’s about all you can do, I suggest you do it the next chance you get. Don’t go keepin’ dis to yourself.”
“That’s the plan. Honest, Doc. What do I owe you?”
He put out his giant paw to shake hands.
“My new bookcase is already filled up,” he said. “Got space for another just like it.”
It was hardly a fair trade, but that’s what he wanted to do and I couldn’t talk him out of it. I got him to agree to tell me if he ever needed help with anything. He shook my hand again and strode away, heading back to his trauma ward, eager to sort through other matters of life and death.
I called Amanda from the nurses’ station and told her to meet me at Hodges’s boat where it was docked at Hawks Pond. I’d asked him the day before if he’d loan it to me for the afternoon. I knew I’d have something to talk to Amanda about and wanted to be somewhere other than Oak Point. The occasion called for a different setting, equally sublime, but distinctive.
She arrived as I finished preparing to launch, dock lines untied, engine warming up, fenders stowed. She wore a
broad-rimmed straw hat, yellow shorts, white top and high-heeled sandals like any sailor would. The beach basket in her hand was filled with wine and tasty things wrapped in tissue and foil.
We followed the channel markers across the pond and then out into the Little Peconic. The breeze was out of the southwest, where it would mostly stay until late August. It warmed the air and rustled the trees, and provided just enough gusto to move Hodges’s heavy cruiser at a stately pace. I was glad for that, not wanting to wrestle with anything more challenging than a corkscrew.
Amanda leaned back against the coaming and dabbed sun-tan lotion on her face and knees and gave me an update on her projects. We debated over which property to tackle next, deciding on a house between the current rehabs on Jacob’s Neck with a lease about to run out.
I had a fresh backlog of architectural details to make for Frank—gates, benches, built-ins and custom trim that would keep me busy in my shop well into the summer.