the graveyard. Day by day I see that my future holds far less than does my past- ever fewer pieces of chocolate cake, clean shirts, fresh newspapers, hot cups of coffee, the milk swirling in a beguiling cloud. Yes, I scare much more easily than before. I freak more easily. I take threats very seriously. I believe, for example, that when an insane black guy with no pants on pulls out a gun and fires it, then that threat is real. When that happens, you run.
Yes, you run and stumble and have people yell at you and you see the pit bull still hanging from the rope, and you hear kids pointing and laughing and saying Mister! Yo! And you stumble whitely out into the cool air of the street and run with no wind and little form as fast and as far as you can before hailing a cab, which is what I did, arriving back at my miserable apartment and high-stepping it up the stairs to my door with great gratitude for the peeling paint and bald carpeting, the half-clogged sink, the soft-sagged bed- my shithole deluxe, the most wonderful place in the world.
And that was where I'd slept not at all, wondering in the dark if I should go to the police. H.J.'s thugsters had kidnapped me and he'd pulled a gun on me, after all. Many beautiful, time-honored laws had been broken. On the other hand, what was my proof, given that I was unharmed? And no doubt H.J. could produce any number of people in his club who'd say that never happened. And then he'd mention his dead Uncle Herschel and that would point any interested policemen toward the question of his body. And that I didn't want.
But was H.J.'s outrage linked to Marceno's complaint? After all, whatever Herschel had been doing with the bulldozer had occurred before he died. And H.J.'s rage stemmed from the fact of Herschel's death on a bulldozer rather than why he was on the bulldozer. By this analysis, the two problems were potentially unconnected. But I was troubled. I was troubled in the way that makes you sit up and turn on the cheap light by your bed and pick at your fingernail, wondering why Mrs. Jones had seemed to dispute the reason why Herschel was on the bulldozer in the first place. Or why H.J., while ranting at me, had said that he or his people were looking for Poppy. Which was interesting. And maybe logical, given that Poppy had called the ambulance upon 'finding' the body of Herschel. But Mrs. Jones had said she'd been pointed toward Jay's building by Poppy. How was this possible? Why would Poppy know the address of Jay's building unless Jay had told him? And why would Jay do that? Poppy was apparently just a longtime farm laborer with damaged hands. Why would he need to know the address of a specific building in downtown Manhattan? And, for that matter, how did H.J. know that the old Rainey farm had even been sold? Well, maybe because the new owner, Marceno, or his workers, had arrived the day before, the morning after the sale. But H.J. didn't seem like the kind of guy to be messing around on an old farmstead. He had a hip-hop club to run. Which meant that someone, probably Mrs. Jones, had told him. But she'd arrived at Jay's building early enough the morning before, around 10 a.m., that it was likely that she'd left the North Fork too early to see the arrival of the new owners, especially if they were driving out from the city at the same time. Which suggested she'd made a subsequent call to H.J. after threatening Jay in front of his building. Yes, that made sense, that was how H.J. had known what I looked like so that his men could follow me. Mrs. Jones, one hundred pounds of righteous determination, had described me to him.
But even if they'd had my photo (a Web search of the back copies of New York City legal publications would probably turn up a cheesy five-year-old black-and-white head shot), how had they known where I'd be? Had they tracked me the previous day from Jay's building to the steak house to my apartment to the Indian restaurant to the school? Doubtful. More likely that they'd been following Jay, then lost himhe had disappeared quickly- seen me come out of the basketball game, recognized me, and then moved in.
Now I came to the rump end of the Long Island Expressway for the second time in thirty-six hours, turning onto the country roads leading to the North Fork, wishing my rental, a beaten delivery van with stenciled letters on the door and Jesus decals on the headlights, had a decent heater. I sipped my coffee and jittered up more tangled questions for myself, feeling driven- not crazy, but into the coldly rational, ultraparanoid part of myself. My old, capable, bastardly law-firm self. I began to see that whatever was going on with Marceno, H.J., Poppy, Mrs. Jones, and Jay constituted, in its entirety, a piece of machinery, call it a gear, that was engaged with another smaller gear, this one sprocketed by Jay, and the building on Reade Street he so badly wanted, a building that housed the business owned by David Cowles, whose daughter, Sally Cowles, apparently so fascinated Jay that he was secretly attending her high school basketball games. Did Jay himself understand these two sets of complications? And where did Allison fit in? Despite her insistence that I help Jay, she'd been pretty vague when describing his real estate deal. The fact that he hadn't explained to me the convoluted purchase of the Reade Street property suggested he was in no hurry for anyone to learn that he'd sought to buy that building and no other. And from Marceno's chronology, it appeared Jay had decided to buy the Reade Street building and then put the acreage up for sale. Looking back now- from whatever miserably chastened perspective I enjoy- I see that the moment Jay disappeared from the basketball bleachers into the Manhattan night marked his acceleration toward his own long- sought imaginings. What he wanted seemed so close that his natural caution had become a burden to him and had been jettisoned. If he had seen me at the game, then he would have suspected why I was seeking him, which meant of course that others sought him, too. And if, on the other hand, he hadn't seen me, he'd nonetheless made a sudden exit, which suggested he felt a vulnerability as he sat watching Sally Cowles run up and down the court. Perhaps he'd sensed he'd overstayed his opportunity. In either case, my relationship to Jay had changed. I was hunting him now.
The single-lane road winding east toward the Atlantic revealed a charming and classically American dreamscape almost too good to be true- three-hundred-year-old saltwater cottages, steepled churches and clapboard farmhouses, silver barns next to ancient, heavy-limbed maples. My glimpse of Jay's dark frozen fields two nights earlier, I realized now, had been insufficient to understand the forces at work on the value of his property. The rolling land was a heart-yanking time warp to a simpler age. People find such authenticity frighteningly attractive, for it lets them forget terrorism and global warming and genetic counseling, lets them forget that time runs in only one direction, at least for those of us still roped to the mast of Western rationalism. Such places conjure a lost psychic era, pre-Nixonian, when Cadillacs looked like rockets and silicone was used only to caulk windows. Back then, when America was the great good place. And people will happily pay for that, they will pay twenty-first century prices. I passed a tractor pulling a wagonload of hay; in the other direction flew three white limousines in sequence, carrying who knows who- corporate executives, pro athletes, movie stars? A few miles farther I swept past two golf courses going in, then half a dozen wineries, each expensively grand structures of shingle and glass centered among precise four-foot-high rows of trellised grapevines that swept backward toward the horizon. In the instances where obsolete farm buildings or modest homes fronted the main road, these were being purchased and demolished. Indeed, the large projects I saw had probably been the result of the consolidation of multiple lots, an expensive and time-consuming way to assemble a land parcel, and typically only done when prices are rising dramatically. But as Jay had said, the prospect of world-class vineyards and wineries within what amounted to a stone's throw of New York City- which, let it be remembered, still holds more wealth than any other city on the globe, even London, even Hong Kong, even Kuwait City- was a surefire bet. Overlay on that proximity various other factors- the cheek-by-jowl development of the Hamptons, the recent local land-use restrictions enacted in an effort to block that very same kind of development, and America's ever-burgeoning retirement-age population- and the surefire bet became a kind of slo-mo bank robbery.
Yet even more proof awaited me when I parked in the quaint town of Southold and found Hallock Properties, one of whose signs, I'd remembered, lay flat in the weeds on Jay's old property. The office's windows were adorned with listings for large pieces of land, complete with aerial photos of woods and field and gorgeous shoreline headlined THE LAST UNCUT JEWEL! and HISTORY DOESN'T REPEAT ITSELF!
I stepped through the agency's door; it was as one might expect, a bustling hive of office cubicles, the walls plastered with house listings. For a moment I mused over the prices. A trailer home on a tenth of an acre? Try $195,000. A clapped-out one-bedroom shack on half an acre? $320,000. Undeveloped mere half-acre oceanfront lots ran $475,000. Two acres of swampy overgrown brush on a brackish inlet? $950,000. A terrific five-bedroom job on the water with gourmet kitchen, 'rocking chair porch,' tennis court, and 'forever views'? At least a million five. Vineyard acreage? Prices started at three million and went to the moon. What had happened to the Hamptons and Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket and Malibu and Pebble Beach and Coral Gables was happening here. It was America, after all; somebody had to be getting rich.
The brokers stood or sat talking into their headsets, consulting files or computer screens, the women attractive and tough, in their thirties and forties, and the few men older and ruined-lookingclutching the floating logs of their careers.
'Help you?' asked a woman who introduced herself as Pamela. Her hair reminded me of a bowl of Frosted
