“Be my guest,” he said.
Jackie strode passed him and I followed, giving Patrick a friendly little nod.
The interior of the house was partially sheetrocked, which explained the dust, but far less finished than the outside. Electricians were still pulling cable and a pair of framing carpenters were ripping out a section of wall. A Vietnamese insulation crew, the only guys I recognized, were sitting in the middle of the room with a stack of woolly pink rolls waiting for instructions. A big Sub-Zero refrigerator was half-uncrated in what would become the kitchen. A cluster of copper plumbing protruded from the middle of the floor, promising a center island that I could tell by eyeball the kitchen was too narrow to accommodate.
Jackie led me to the bay side of the house, anchored by a large glass-enclosed room. Not quite a living room, but more than a porch. No plans I could see for a woodstove, daybed or busted-up pine table.
“This is where they found Robbie,” said Jackie. “Right in the middle of the room, which I guess is here.”
She stood looking down at the freshly laid hardwood floor.
“They took a lot of photographs,” she said hopefully
“Was it one whack, or a bunch of whacks?” I asked her. She looked up again.
“More than one. Several. More than necessary.”
“Assuming the killer knew the necessary number.”
“Right.”
“Front of the head, back of the head, side?” I asked.
“Back. All in the back.”
“Which way was he lying?”
“I don’t remember. It’s in the photographs.”
I walked over to the window and looked at the Little Peconic. With the sun’s arc getting higher with the changing seasons, the water more clearly reflected the blue sky. Seasonal navigational aids—red and green buoys and flags—were back in place outside Hawk and Towd Ponds. Across the bay off the North Fork a sliver of white sail, heeled hard against the persistent northwesterly, moved slowly across a background of gray trees and a blur of waterfront development.
“Let’s get some air,” I said, walking out a set of French doors onto the muddy plain surrounding the construction site.
“Dog prints in the mud,” I said. “I know the culprit.”
“Good. They only took casts of the human’s.”
We walked down to the beach.
“Not much sand,” said Jackie.
“Yeah. Only a little up above the waterline. The rest is pebbles. No footprints there.”
“The stapler must have been thrown from here,” she said.
“But why into the grass? There’s only about twenty yards of pebble beach between here and the shoreline. If you’re going to ditch a murder weapon, why not just toss it in the water?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s your tool, your fingerprints.”
“Now who’s being nihilistic?”
Jackie walked up next to me and put her arm through mine. She laid her head on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Sam. I’m not up to this. I want to be, but this is so way over my head. We need Burton to get you a lawyer who knows what they’re doing.”
I used my arm like a nutcracker to give hers a little squeeze.
“If Shakespeare’s out, so is self-doubt.”
“I want to do it for you, Sam. God knows why. But it’s your actual life at issue here, something I can’t seem to make you understand.”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but I used to have a job,” I whispered into her ball of frizzy hair. “Before they made me manage everything, I was a troubleshooter. When trying to diagnose a systems failure I’d waste a lot of time with engineers obsessing over current conditions, rehashing what we already knew over and over and over. This would come close to destroying what little sanity I had.”
“And your point,” said Jackie into my suit jacket.
“You’re worrying about the wrong things. I want you to represent me because you already know me. And I know you. And trust you, more than you trust yourself. Burton will look after the technical stuff. He trusts you, too. Neither of us care about your experience in criminal law. We care about your brain. It’s a good one.”
After a few minutes she nodded. An abrupt, decisive little nod. I let her go and she followed me back through the house.
We maneuvered around various tradesmen, who politely shifted to the side, and Patrick, who didn’t. I kept Jackie between us knowing her finger was mightier than a fist. Though she’d been known to bring both into play. Patrick stared at me, transmitting his eagerness to rip me from limb to limb. I’d had a lot of practice with stares like that, professionally and otherwise, so it didn’t bother me. I was more concerned about his long reach and ropey arms. Even an amateur can do a lot of damage, any of which I could ill afford.
We made it out alive and I drove her back to my cottage where she’d left her Toyota pickup. The vagaries of the sand road kept her preoccupied and mostly silent, so I was able to send her on her way with a minimum of commentary. I was happy about that. After a while all that white noise gets tiring.
Eddie greeted me with his normal routine—walking up my pant leg so I could scratch his head. After some of that, I took him and my blind allegiance to foolhardy decisions into the cottage to fill up my aluminum tumbler, which I brought out to the screened-in porch, sealed off against encroaching common sense, and drank until absorbed into the black forgiving night.
——
Around three in the morning I got dressed in a fresh set of jogging clothes. It took a while to lace up a new pair of sneakers. My treasured Sauconys, broken-in to the point of disintegration, were in an evidence bag with the rest of the stuff at the Suffolk County police lab. Eddie, cued by the outfit, sat and waited, though none too enthusiastically. He led the way to the side door, where we met the predawn chill of early spring on the Little Peconic.
I led us to the start of the sand road that paralleled the coast. It was still dark, though a pale glow to the east showed the sun threatening to break through the horizon. Most of the houses along the way were still blacked out, but a few had a light on here and there, tradesmen getting ready for the seven-thirty start time or commuters contemplating distant journeys Up Island. Twenty minutes into the run I turned onto Bay Edge Drive and came up to Robbie’s project. Without breaking stride, I jogged up to the house. There were two battered step vans parked on the lawn.
I tried the van doors, which were locked. Then I tried the doors to the house, which were also locked, uncharacteristically. So I kicked out a basement window and shimmied inside. The smell of partially cured concrete mingled with that of fresh-sawn fir and composite beams from the first floor structure overhead. I opened the basement hatch and whistled for Eddie, who streaked across the yard and shot down the hole as if pursued by avenging waterfowl. The two of us trotted upstairs.
I’d brought a flashlight, which I used to light my way from room to room. Though a masterpiece of misguided strategies, the house was stumbling toward completion. Tile covered the foyer floor and light fixtures were being installed in ceilings and over kitchen countertops.
I carefully examined every room, then moved back down to the basement, where I shot the little Maglite into all the dark corners. Then I went back up through the basement hatch to where the step vans were parked on the muddy front lawn. I was wearing a pair of cowhide work gloves, which protected my hands when I punched out the glass in the driver’s side door of the first van. The back was jammed with crap—chop boxes, collapsible work stands, table saws, battered plastic and metal tool chests, milk cartons stuffed
with cans filled with sheetrock screws and random bits of hardware, tool belts and salvaged plumbing and electrical parts—the generic flotsam and jetsam of the average construction site. I looked, but didn’t find what I wanted.
That’s because it was in the other van under piles of pink fiberglass. A white cardboard box. I stuffed it under my arm and left the van, whistling again for Eddie, who was out on the beach scouring for detritus more to his liking—horseshoe crabs and gobs of putrid seaweed salad.
Under a decent moon and propelled by a lopsided inter-species competition, we made it back to the cottage while it was still dark. I brewed a huge pot of Viennese cinnamon coffee, made with freshly ground beans imported from the corner place in the Village, and a mess of eggs and tasty protein to fortify myself against the upcoming round of peril and deception.
B
URTON
L
EWIS
lives a block in from the ocean in a huge house built on the foundation of the one his grandfather built, which was built on the one his great-grandfather built before that. The house has a beautiful white gate you can enter only by getting past Isabella, the middle-aged
Cubana
who runs his personal affairs. There’s an intercom stuck out on a curved post so you can call the house without getting out of your car. There is also a closed-circuit TV camera hidden somewhere, as proven by Isabella’s ability to start in on me the moment I pulled into the driveway.
“He’s not here,” she said, before I had the window halfway down.
“But will be here, soon? Or never again?”
“You could call ahead like normal people.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “Normal people drop in.”
“I don’t have instructions.”
“Goddammit, Isabella.”
“He’s at the Schooner,” she said. “For the afternoon. I don’t think he wants to be interrupted.”
“From a pool game?”
“He need to concentrate.”
“What’s he playing for, controlling rights to Morgan Stanley?”
The Schooner was a bar and grill in the woods above Bridgehampton. It was one huge open room encompassing the first floor of a small hotel built by a Hungarian immigrant who’d never been to the Catskills, but imagined his creation as a southern outpost of the Borscht Belt. Surrounding the main building were clusters of bungalows, stone grills with picnic tables, a game room for playing bridge or canasta and a clubhouse with a stage where they used to heckle stand-up comics and dance the bunny-hop. The Schooner was the only commercial survivor in the complex, though even that was difficult to fathom given the persistent scarcity of paying clientele. It did have four rock-solid old pool tables, however, and an authentically dank, retrograde ambience particularly suited to eight-ball and beer. And compared to the Pequot, it was like a night at The Palm.
Burton was a lawyer by trade. He’d started out as a criminal attorney dispensing free representation out of a storefront in the City, but then found himself attracted to the subtle intricacies of corporate tax law, leading him to join, and eventually manage, the law firm his grandfather had formed as a captive guardian of his global banking business. Burton never completely abandoned criminal defense—his caseload was often on par with the two or three full-time associates staffing the storefront operation—but still managed to grow the corporate practice into a small army of lawyers packed into a nineteenth-century building he owned down on Wall Street.
There were about ten people in the Schooner, maybe two percent of capacity. Burton was working the front table, playing a guy in an ochre Oxford-cloth shirt with a polo player on the chest and a pair of wide-wale corduroys decorated with embroidered pheasants. The guy had a tight mat of kinky black hair framing a forehead that towered above a pair of bifocals in slender black frames. He was a lot shorter than Burton, small boned with a little bowlingball gut. His lips were thin and pale, as if pursing them too tightly had permanently drained away all the blood.
Burton twisted the tip of his cue stick into a little block of blue chalk as he watched me approach.
“Sam,” he said. “Just in time to spoil my concentration.”
“That’s what Isabella said would happen.”
“Performance anxiety.”
Burton was an ectomorphic somatotype, slender approaching gaunt, with long limbs and loose joints that facilitated graceful, elegant movements. His outfit looked like it came from a vintage clothing store specializing in early-twentieth-century Ivy League toff. He was in his late forties, yet his hair was still thick and naturally brown and cut long enough to fall into his face when he leaned down to take aim at the cue ball.
I scanned the table and saw one eight ball and a single solid nearly camouflaged by a knot of stripes.
“You finish up, I’ll freshen the drinks,” I said, looking flagrantly at Burton’s opponent.
“Oh, sorry,” said Burton, standing up again. “This is Hayden Grayson. Budding legal pundit. Hayden, Sam Acquillo.”
“Way past punditry myself,” I said, putting out my hand.
Hayden’s grip was smooth-skinned but firm. A professional handshake.
“Though not beyond puns,” said Burton.
“Burton said you might show up anytime,” said Hayden. “This is my first trip to the Hamptons. It’s very beautiful.”
I looked around the inside of the Schooner.
“You oughta see the rest of the place. So what am I buying you guys?”
Burton ordered a Baileys on the rocks and his date an Amstel Light, neither of which I thought the Schooner had ever heard of, but they managed to rustle them up. After my first day in court I felt entitled to a double Absolut, which they didn’t have, so I told them to throw a lot of ice and lemon into a tall glass of Smirnoff.
When I got back to the table Hayden was racking up the balls. His movements were spare and exacting. After settling the rack, he pulled it away with a little flourish. Burton handed me a cue.
“Care to break?”
“No, no. Your table.”
His break sank a stripe and a solid in the two opposing corner pockets, though most of the balls stayed packed together like a small herd of frightened sheep.
“So who’s ahead in this tournament?” I asked them.
“You have to ask?” said Hayden. “Burton, of course.”
I was overjoyed to see the bartender light a cigarette. Some genius had apparently outlawed smoking in bars in New York. Fortunately, Schooner management hadn’t gotten word, isolated as it was in the northern frontier of Bridgehampton. I dug out my pack of Camels.