wanted to ask you. If you knew of any others.”
He was big, but not very healthy looking. He had large, prominent cheekbones, but underneath his cheeks were pitted and sunken in. His khakis and flannel shirt were of good quality, but hadn’t been washed in a while.
“I wondered when this would happen.”
“She was pretty old.”
He smiled at that, like it triggered a private joke.
He handed the papers back to me. I didn’t take them.
“You can keep them. For your records.”
He shook his head.
“I’m not going to talk to you,” he said, flatly, still squinting at me through his bottle-bottom glasses. He dropped the papers on the ground.
“You’re not? Why not?”
“I don’t have to.” He started to wiggle his hands back into his work gloves.
“I don’t know. I think you do. I’m not a lawyer, but …”
“That’s correct. You’re not a lawyer. I don’t know what you are. A neighbor? You’re on my property, I know that. Uninvited. I’d like you to leave.”
He bent down to retrieve the little pile of weeds, brushed passed me and took it over to the wheelbarrow.
I could feel that familiar surge of blood warming up my face. I tried to look relaxed and reasonable, even though I wasn’t very good at that either.
“According to the Town tax records, Regina’s house was owned by Bay Side Holdings, at six-seven-five Dutch Wharf Road,” I looked around, “which I guess is here, with you listed as the responsible party. I’m just telling you because Regina’s dead. You get your house back.”
He seemed to loosen up a little at that. He let go of the wheelbarrow.
“Very well. Consider me notified. You can leave your paperwork in my mailbox. You know the way out.”
Before I could say anything else he walked away from me. Stoop-shouldered, he moved off with his wheelbarrow toward some distant corner of his yard, hidden under the dark shade of oak, pine and arborvitae.
As an amateur boxer I lost almost as many fights as I won, and my brief professional career wasn’t much better. There were things about the sport that drew me, things like the training and bag work. Some of the old trainers fit the stereotype of the battered old pros with gritty voices, filled with the wisdom of the street. I liked being around a lot of it. The actual boxing part wasn’t as appealing. A lot of the kids I fought were really desperate and half crazy with hopes and fears. There were more white kids than you’d think, and I can’t say race was any kind of obvious factor at the level we fought. Not that I could see, anyway. Everybody was basically poor, street worn and edgy. Most everybody figured I was Puerto Rican till I opened my mouth. Seemed like there were a lot of bantams and feathers, wiry little guys with vicious quick hands and hard little heads you could pound on all day with no effect. As a middleweight, or light heavyweight, I was one of the bigger ones. The few genuine heavyweights were usually fat guys or big, slow dummies without the heart for the physical conditioning needed to really make it in the ring. Occasionally, some guy would show up who was big, strong, fast and eager. You knew it as soon as they got on the gloves. They had the mental part. They were smart enough to know what you had to do, but also what you got if you pulled it off. Go from having nothing to owning the world.
The fights I was able to win were usually on points. I never knocked anybody out, though I put a few into the canvas hard enough to get the decision. After a fight like that one of the trainers shoved my face into the corner of my open locker hard enough to split my lip. I still had my gloves on, and blood was splashing all over everywhere. I shrunk back and got my gloves up near my head to stop the next blow, which didn’t come. He asked me if what he just did pissed me off.
“What the hell was that for?”
“You got to get pissed, you fuckin’ greaseball. It’s the only way you win. You don’t get pissed, you don’t win the fight. That’s the kind of fighter you are. From now on, I want you pissed off all the time.”
I wanted to kill him. Instead I just nodded. Then I sat down on the bench and watched the blood from my lip pool on the floor and listened to the roar in my head. He wanted me to be pissed. If he only knew.
After talking to Milton Hornsby I sat in the Grand Prix for a few minutes to let that old roar subside. In the past I wouldn’t have let him just walk away from me. I don’t know what I would’ve done, but it would have likely gone on a mental list of all the things I wished I could take back.
Eddie was whining at me to open the window. I opened them all and lit a cigarette. I sat back in the old cracked leather bucket seat and closed my eyes. You don’t get pissed, you don’t win the fight. But what if you don’t want the fight in the first place?
“fuckin’ hell, Eddie. I need a lawyer.”
He wasn’t listening. His head was already out the window, taking in the autumn air, looking around for the next thing.
You got to Burton Lewis’s house in the estate section of Southampton Village by driving down a 2,800-foot driveway that shot in a straight line between two twelve-foot-high privet hedges. You drove over polished white pebbles contained by steel curbing that drew the outside edges into perfect parallel lines. At the entrance was a white wooden gate that pivoted open on huge cast iron hinges bolted to a pair of white posts trimmed out to look like Empire furniture. Fluffy old blue hydrangea flanked the gate and softened the effect of the rectangular call box, perched on a curved black post, where you punched a code to open the gate, or pushed a call button to gain entry. The only clue to the identity of the home was a polite four-by-eight-inch white sign on which the number eighty-five was painted with green paint and circumscribed by a thin green line.
After the initial straight shot, the driveway made an abrupt forty-five degree turn, and if you hadn’t run out of gas by then, you came out from between the privets into an open area defined by an oval turnaround. The interior of the oval was landscaped to look unlandscaped, as if the mammoth shingle-style mansion looming above you was situated there just to take advantage of some perfect act of nature.
Burton’s great-grandfather built the first house on the site before the turn of the century. That was when really wealthy people competed with Versailles and called the results a cottage. In the thirties, taking advantage of a glut of cheap labor, his grandfather tore it down and built an even bigger monstrosity. Burton grew up in that house, and a town house on the Upper East Side and a half-dozen other houses sprinkled around Europe and the Caribbean. His parents delegated Burton’s upbringing, and that of his two sisters, to a team of professionals. Austrian nannies, Swiss ski instructors, Parisian epicures. All three kids suffered from severe parental deprivation, with mixed results. One of the girls was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and ended up heaving herself off the Reichenbach Falls. The other succumbed to hardcore S&M and died of an overdose hanging upside down in some squalid flop down near Times Square.
Burton took up banking and jurisprudence. Looking like he’d been born in a Brooks Brothers, he took part-time jobs and internships on Wall Street and developed a decent command of international finance before he was out of prep school. He graduated from Columbia in three years, and having grown bored with finance, had earned a law degree from Yale three years after that.
The only conversation he could remember having with his father was when the old man brought him into his study to go over the disposition of the family fortune, with instructions on how to manage it should he die or lose his faculties. Which is exactly what happened about a year after that. Burton was about twenty-three; his father lasted another year before dying insane and leaving Burton, the sole heir, insanely rich.
The first thing he did was tear down his grandfather’s house and build another one. It was still pretty big, but at least it fit the scale of the other houses in the neighborhood, if that’s what you’d call it. It fit Burton okay. He was well over six feet tall, and thin, with a small-featured face made of weathered brown leather. He had a head full of light brown hair that fell over his forehead and a mustache that emboldened a small, thin mouth. His clothes draped over his gaunt frame in the perfect way you see on mannequins. He often wore a look of puzzled amusement, as if struggling to recollect the punch line of an inappropriate joke. I met him through a mutual friend of Abby’s. She’d pulled him into the circle of acquaintances she maintained as a simulation of genuine friendship. We were all still young, but making enough to live in Manhattan. Burton was splitting his time between defending vagrants out of a grungy storefront office in the East Village and an active tax practice down on the Street.
