The Extinction Event (2 page)

“Damn!” she said.

Jean backed out of the bathroom to avoid cutting her bare feet on the broken glass on the floor.

Reaching over, Milhet snagged his pants and, from a pocket, took out another bindle of coke.

“You want me to run out to the shop,” Jean asked, “get a Pyrex?”

“Don't we have another glass?” Milhet asked.

He crossed the room, picking up another tumbler, and gave her the glass and the drugs to cook up.

“Keep it more away from the flame,” he said, “so it doesn't crack, okay?”

He embraced Jean from behind and moved his hands over the front of her body.

“You get
me
any hotter,” Jean said dully, “I'll crack.”

2

Jack Slidell's cell phone rang, two old fashioned trills, imitating a bell from a Fifties rotary telephone, a retro touch that pleased Jack. Jack fumbled in the bedsheets. The cell rang again. Jack found the phone under a pillow tossed to the foot of the bed. Answered it.

“Slidell.”

Jack, a muscular sixty, had the body of a laborer and the manner of a gentleman. He got the muscles from working construction in his twenties to put himself through Columbia Law School, where he got his polish. Ever since his divorce when he was in his early fifties, women had begun telling him he reminded them of Sean Connery.

“If only they'd thought that when I was thirty,” Jack used to say before he stopped taking notice.

“Who?” Jack asked the telephone. “What?”

Where
?
When
? thought Jack, who had spent two years before law school as a general assignment reporter on the New York
Daily News
.

“I'll be right there,” he said.

The digital clock on his Bose Wave radio blinked 12:00 red. Jack never set it.

In Jack's bedroom it was always midnight.

3

Outside the Dutch Village Motel, the neon sign fizzed. Rip Van Winkle's left hip boot flickered. Jack drove past the office, where, through the dirty window, he saw the night clerk asleep in a chair in front of a small TV, grainy blue light from the screen pockmarked his face. On the wall behind the night clerk was a calendar with a photo of a girl in a green thong standing next to a tractor tire as tall as she was. On the counter was an iron desk spike, used for paid bills, and on a fraying wire was a button that rang a buzzer in the back of the house, where the clerk often slept in front of a TV.

Jack swung his car behind the office and stopped in front of the detached cabins, which had been built in the early Fifties and hadn't been painted since. He parked in front of Cabin 4, the only unit with a light on inside. The thin drapes were streaked with soot and glowed red from the lightbulb in the room. When Jack turned off the car engine, he heard the sizzling neon sign, the whine of the cicadas in the woods behind the motel, and from across the road, the rattle of corn stalks. Far off, Jack heard a power mower. The air had a trace of the sweet smell of cut grass. The air was heavy with the threat of the storm moving up the East Coast.

Jack knocked on the door and called, “Frank!”

No answer.

He knocked again, called again, “Frank, you in there?”

No answer.

Jack tried the door, which was unlocked. Not a good sign. Jack figured it was stupid to enter, so he entered. The room reeked of something chemical. Burned rubber? Frank sprawled, obviously dead, half off the bed. An OD? In the corner of the room, Jean curled, beaten so badly her body was purple with bruises. Unconscious.

From outside, Jack heard the siren of approaching State Police cars. Their revolving red and white lights flashed through the thin motel curtains. Jack upended the wooden chair—a mistake, Jack thought, leave the scene intact—and sat in it, waiting. On TV, the weatherman stood in front of a blue-screen projection of the hurricane, which was growing. The low pressure plugged Jack's ears. The storm was coming.

The door slammed open. Two cops burst in, guns drawn. Aimed at Jack.

“Easy,” the first cop said to Jack, who, hands in the air, slowly stood, saying, “You know what they say:
Walk careful among the dead, and don't trust the living.
…”

CHAPTER TWO

1

Milhet & Alverez—a law firm in Mycenae, New York, which catered to the Hamptons' refugees who had begun moving into Columbia County—was in an uproar. Secretaries and clerks stood in groups of threes and fours, gossiping and glancing sideways through Jack's office door at Jack, who, rumpled and unshaven after the previous night's misadventures, was cleaning out his desk, packing everything in a brown cardboard banker's box.

Earlier, while the police were questioning Jack, Frank's partner, Tony Alverez, ten years younger than Jack, arrived at the station house on the corner of South Third and Division Street. At five o'clock in the morning, when the cops released Jack, Alverez was waiting, impeccably shaved, wearing his blue shirt with its high white collar, and red suspenders like bloody vertical stripes under his seersucker jacket.

“This is the fourth time in the past two years, I've gotten a late-night call from the police about you,” Alverez told Jack. “Maybe you should take some time off.”

Outside Jack's window, two stories down, on Howard Street, a small crowd milled, faces tilted up, eyes squinting in the sun, hands to foreheads like military salutes, as if they were looking at an eclipse, locals who had heard rumors. The breeze blew one woman's long hair out behind her like living snakes.

“Jack doesn't look so good,” one of the clerks said.

“You don't get a lot of beauty sleep in jail,” another clerk said.

“Obstructing justice, resisting arrest—,” a third clerk started.

“The boss was in trouble,” the first clerk said. “Jack was trying to keep things quiet.”

“Yeah, well,” the second clerk said, “murder is noisy.”

“We don't know Frank was murdered,” the third clerk said.

“Jack should've called EMS,” the first clerk said.

“Jack should've let his machine answer the phone,” the third clerk said.

The second clerk nodded and said, “Someone rings you at three a.m., you know you haven't won the sweepstakes.”

“Remember that time Jack was late for court,” the third clerk said, “and Frank had to bail him out of—”

“Which time?” the second clerk asked. “We talking the assault? Or the disturbing the peace? Or the—”

“The time that bartender said Jack was full of piss and vinegar,” the third clerk said. “And Jack tried to prove him wrong about the vinegar.”

“I thought he'd be disbarred for sure,” the second clerk said.

“What a knucklehead,” the third clerk said.

They all smiled. They liked Jack.

“If the hooker dies,” the first clerk said, lowering his voice, “they hit Jack with manslaughter three, accessory.”

“Is he leaving the firm?” the first clerk asked.

“No,” the second clerk said, “he's cleaning out his desk because they're giving him a free trip to the Virgin Islands.”

Caroline Wonder, one of the firm's new hires, rushed past the gossiping clerks into Jack's office.

“Speaking of virgins…,” the second clerk said, following Caroline with his eyes.

Caroline, twenty-eight years old, was a thoroughbred, a Dutch-Knickerbocker bluestocking with a character as straight and strong as the whalebone reinforcing the corset she would have worn a hundred years ago. Even without the corset, she had a waist you could span with two hands, a face like an ivory cameo, and hair as pale as heated tungsten.

Ever since she started working at Milhet & Alverez, Jack called her Five Spot.

When she asked him why, Jack shrugged.

Caroline didn't trust Jack. She slammed Jack's door behind her.

“When God handed out brains,” she said, “you thought he said
rain
and ran for cover.”

“The woman on the phone,” Jack explained, “said Frank was in trouble.…”

“And Frank asked her to call you? Jack, you know that's an old scam.”

“The boss
was
in trouble.”

“And now he's dead. And you're up the creek. Given your reputation. I'm surprised they didn't shoot first.…”

From a bottom drawer, Jack took a few files, a penknife, an antique silver letter opener, and an old wooden desk nameplate, which Caroline picked up.

“Put it down, Five Spot,” Jack said.

Caroline examined it.

“Hand carved,” she said.

“I said,
put it down
.”

“What is it? Walnut?”

Jack made an unsuccessful grab for it.

“
Jack Slidell, Attorney at Law
,” Caroline read.

Jack grabbed it.

“What's the big deal?” Caroline asked.

“I made it when I was a kid,” Jack said. “Sixth grade. A gag.”

Caroline studied Jack, who dropped the nameplate into the banker's box.

“From the first day I was here,” Caroline said, “you never did like me.”

“I like people who earn what they get.”

“So do I. That's why I'm working here, not in the city, at my uncle's office.”

“I heard when you passed the bar, your uncle dropped Frank a note.”

“That's called a
reference
.”

“That's called a free ride.”

“You always believe rumors, Jack? I heard a rumor, one going around the office. Something about your saying going to bed with me would be like making love to a bicycle.”

“Maybe it was
icicle
?”

“No, it was
bicycle
.”

At the door, Caroline half-turned back to Jack and said, “I'm a twelve-speed.…”

And slammed out.

2

With its red-flocked wallpaper, greasy in spots, couches lining the walls, and crystal lamps, Saul's Grill evoked one of the brothels that populated Mycenae ever since the War of 1812, when all the other whaling ports in the Northeast were blockaded by the British. The walls were covered with pictures of notorious local madams, including a late-nineteenth-century engraving of Kate Church, an early-twentieth-century photogravure of Rae Ann Best, and the faded snapshot of Eleanor Fitzpatrick, called Fizz by everyone in town, who died at ninety-seven in 1976.

Jack sat in a banquette with a law-firm colleague—a former colleague now that Jack was no longer employed by Milhet & Alverez—Robert Flowers.

“She's been in the firm, what … three months?” Jack said. “I've been there five years. And
she's
telling
me
what's good, what's not good for business.”

Robert wasn't paying attention to Jack. He was gazing at a beautiful woman with red hair and long legs.

“Robert,” Jack reached across the table and tapped a finger in front of his friend. “Robert…”

“Why don't I ever date women with seams on the back of their stockings?”

“You're lucky to date women with seams on the back of their legs.”

Robert, who was thirty-one, nearly half Jack's age, had the square jaw and slicked-back hair of a model in a Forties Arrow Collar ad. The old-fashioned aristocratic look of a Berkshire boy, raised over the Massachusetts border in Great Barrington, who prepped at a third-tier school, not Choate or Andover, but Wilbraham Academy, and was educated at Amherst; who, in Mycenae, set himself apart by emphasizing his Congregational roots and, in Great Barrington where he still lived in his ancestral home, a forty-minute commute to Mycenae, played up his New York style. A kind of patroon superciliousness compared to his hometown, Indian-pudding, down-home, Minuteman Massachusetts ways.

Robert set himself apart chronologically, too, wearing old-fashioned clothes: blousy shirts that made him look as if he were one of Paul Revere's Sons of Liberty, large turn-of-the-century bohemian floppy bow ties, and his great-grandfather's moth-eaten frock coats. He could have been a character from one of Washington Irving's tales or, on alternate days, from a story written during Melville's Pittsfield days.

Jack was eating deep-fried scrod—today, as usual, cod—his daily lunch, which daily Robert noted by telling the old joke about the Bostonian in San Francisco who asked a cop where he could get scrod and the cop replied, “That's the first time anyone asked in the pluperfect tense.”

But today Robert missed his cue. He was eating sausage, white
boudin
, and drinking heavily, rye and bitters.

“Jack, getting caught in a motel that charges by the hour with your boss's corpse, an unconscious hooker, and a roomful of drugs … Maybe Caroline's got a point.”

Robert spotted a diner at the next table who was about to fork an oyster into his mouth.

“Don't eat that oyster!” Robert cried.

The diner lowered his fork. Robert leaped to his table and shook the oyster off the fork back into the shell.

“You're not from here…?” Robert asked the stranger.

“I was born here,” the stranger said.

“Then it's time you learn how to do this thing right,” Robert said. “Mycenae's a seaport! Though,” he muttered, “you'd never know it today.” He doused the oyster with Tabasco and raised the shell. “Pepper sauce and no fork. Open your mouth.”

The stranger opened his mouth, into which Robert tilted the oyster. As the stranger, gasping because of the Tabasco, reached for water, Robert sprinkled the hot sauce onto the other eleven oysters.

“You'll get used to it,” Robert said to the stranger, who was gulping water. “See?”

Robert took one of the oysters from the man's plate and swallowed it, then returned to his own table, where he caught the waiter's eye and pointed at his empty whiskey glass.