maps, whatever you’ve got.”
“That’s all you need? It’s not in one place. It’ll take some time.”
I wondered what purpose she thought all those records had. Saving them for the Second Coming.
“How long?”
“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t begun to look.”
“Okay. When should I come back?”
“You’re not going to wait? What if I have questions?”
I held my ground.
“All you need to know is that I need copies of everything in this building relating to that address.”
She saw an opening.
“You’ll have to pay for copies.”
“That’s okay.”
“And that will add to the time. You can’t just look at the documents here?”
I looked at the sign on the wall over the counter. It said the Village of Southampton was pleased to promptly provide copies of official documents. Word hadn’t filtered down to the troops.
“They’re not the ones who have to do it,” she said, catching the drift.
“I’ll be happy to go through the files myself, if you’re too busy.”
“We have to do it for you. Can you imagine if people just came in here and went through everything?”
I saw hordes of Long Islanders rampaging through moldy real-estate records.
“Is there anyone else who can help me?”
She snatched the address back out of my hand. “I don’t know why the Town thought this information would be here. Unless it’s in the dated stacks.”
“I don’t know what those are, but I bet that’s where you’ll find what I’m looking for. Let’s see.”
She left me standing at the counter and went off into the tall stands of metal racks. She came back a half- hour later to tell me she needed the rest of the day to do all the copies. I said fine, I’ll be back in the morning. I left her in the glow of her weary indignation and went to the corner place to caffeinate what was left of my good mood.
The fog had risen above the rooftops. Underneath the light was shadowless and diffuse, deepening the color of the red municipal mums tucked around the base of an ancient Village shade tree. I sat on a teak park bench to drink my coffee. The bench had been donated in loving memory of Elizabeth McGill. I thought about the flow of property through successive generations of the dead and their donators. Maybe I should get a bench in honor of Regina Broadhurst. Something hard with a lot of sharp edges, too uncomfortable to spend much time on.
Except for the cottage, all my parents left me was fifty thousand dollars in unpaid nursing home expenses. My sister and I split it. She handed me a check before boarding her plane back to Wisconsin. She told me she was never coming back again. The relief in her voice was deep enough to float an ocean liner. A week later a quitclaim deed to her half of the cottage arrived in the mail—stuck like a bookmark between the pages of a standard King James Bible. I don’t remember the exact psalm that it marked, but it was all about forgiveness. Who in my family was supposed to be forgiving whom, and for what, God only knows.
Joe Sullivan glided by in his police cruiser. He saw me on the bench and pulled into one of the parking slots. I slid my ass over to clear him a spot.
“They’re doin’ it. The coroner,” he said, dropping into the bench. “The autopsy.”
“That’s good.”
“I know a couple people up there. Bunch of ghouls if you ask me. But we need ’em. doin’ me a favor.”
“That was good of you.”
“No biggie. I’ll let you know if there’s anything you should know about.”
I looked over at the side of his face. He was looking across the street at Harbor Trust, Roy and Amanda’s bank.
“Anything at all is what I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”
He looked back at me. Some of the old mix of duty and defiance was sketched across his face. Local guys often have that look. A vague sense of being one of the chosen, born to the South Fork, and yet one of the conquered, bound to the service of a powerful elite— an occupation force who had swept in from the west, taking possession of the land, plundering her gifts.
“We’ll keep you informed,” he said to me.
I felt my face warm despite the cloud cover.
“If there’s ever any reason to look into somebody’s death, you know, if there’s any questions that come up, who does it? I mean, who opens up the case, you?”
“Basically. If there’s any goddam reason to. I go over the situation with my boss, who’ll talk to the Chief, who’ll talk to the DA’s office. They officially tell us to go look a little more. And the day sergeant and administrative lieutenant usually get involved. Then if there’s what you’d call an actual investigation it gets assigned to one of our plainclothesmen.”
“So it’s your call provided three-quarters of the local judicial system say it’s all right, and your role is to hand everything over to other people to do the actual work.”
His rounded jowls turned the color of the Village mums. He slapped his thigh with an open hand as if to drain off the urge to turn it into a fist.
“You can really be a dick sometimes, Mr. Acquillo.”
Anger rose in my throat, but I choked it off. I shook myself like a wet retriever. Shedding heat. I stared at the ground until I knew my voice was level. Sullivan was trying not to breathe too hard. His hands were on his hips, pushing down on the holster belt. I noticed for the first time that he was chewing gum. Probably learned that from the Big Tough Cop Instruction Manual.
“I’m a dick most of the time. Don’t take it personally. It’s this thing with Regina Broadhurst. It’s bugging me.”
“Like how?”
“Are you going to take this seriously?”
He shook his head. Reminded me of a bull shaking off flies.
“I’m trying to.”
“Regina didn’t take baths. She couldn’t get in and out of the bathtub. She always used a walk-in shower.”
“Getting’ dotty. Got confused. Slipped and fell.”
“I knew her. She was clear as a bell. She’d lived with arthritis for a million years. She wouldn’t suddenly forget she had it.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t fall.”
There, I said it. Right in front of God and local law enforcement.
“Oh, come on.”
“I found an industrial strength neoprene plug in the bathroom. It has a series of O-rings to force a tight seal. We had them in the chem lab at work. You’d need something like that to keep the tub full as long as possible. Any fan of long baths will tell you that ordinary bath stoppers are pretty leaky—the water usually runs out in a few hours.”
Sullivan let out a man-sized sigh and sat back on the park bench.
“Doesn’t mean shit. Won’t mean shit to the DA, much less to the Chief. I go to those people talking about a neighbor of a dead old lady who’s worryin’ about a bath plug, they throw me out on my can. We deal with enough crazy shit every day from people we actually have to pay attention to.”
It would be a mistake to underestimate the Southampton Town cops. They covered a big area, and not all of it what you’d expect to find out here. There were some tough little spots filled with hard-case locals and immigrant labor. And the Summer People themselves weren’t all affected fops. Others thought a little money, or the show of money, bought immunity. Especially during the season when the clubs were in full riot. Guys like Sullivan were serious and could handle stuff. But the trouble they knew would tend to come right at them, out in the open where they could see it plain and simple.
“I’m not really asking you to do anything. I’m just talking here.”
