“I’m an industrial designer. No arrest powers.”
She pulled another joint out of the ashtray, then tossed it back.
“Enough of that shit. Makes me all weepy.”
We sat quietly for a little while. Talked out. I tried to listen to the
“I’d really like to talk to Milton Hornsby,” I said to her.
“Not a very talkative guy.”
“Tell him I think I know why he won’t talk to me. At this point, I’m keeping it to myself. Which is not going to last forever. If he’s interested in getting a little ahead of things, he’ll sit down with me. With you present if he wants. It’s up to him.”
“Officially I’m fired. What’s my interest in this?”
“I got your name from the public record. You’re just facilitating communications.”
“I guess you won’t tell me what’s really going on. After I spill my guts and violate every canon in the book.”
“Probably better if you didn’t know beforehand.”
“Because I’m a dumb local?”
“We’re all dumb locals. That’s the problem.”
Drove down from Bridgehampton and out to the shore. I meandered through the new developments carved out of the potato fields and joined the parade of vans and pickup trucks that constituted most of the traffic between weekends. At Mecox Bay I turned north again and got on Montauk Highway until I cleared the water, then dropped back down Flying Point Road toward the sea.
I stopped off at the Town’s beach access. This close to the ocean the sea air dispersed the sunlight, deepening all the colors and setting snares for unsuspecting painters and sentimentalists. The wild roses that lined the parking lot were still enjoying the last cool autumn days before winter; they would stay green and semi-floral well into December. Sand, blown over the dunes, formed a grainy skim-coat over the black asphalt, empty now since early fall. In the spring, maintenance crews would sweep it all up again and renew the illusion that you could halt nature’s irresistible advance.
I continued to follow the coast until I was all the way out on Dune Road in Southampton Village, where giant shingle-style mansions and architectural fantasies stood like devotional monuments before the sea. To my right, the sun dropping toward the Shinnecock Bay was airbrushing the underside of the clouds a soft reddish yellow. In the morning, people who lived on Dune Road could walk to the other side of their houses and watch the sun rise over the ocean. All for an admission price that started around twenty million dollars. When my father first started digging the foundation hole for his cottage, nobody but reclusive eccentrics wanted to live out in the dunes. It was a wilderness where locals like us camped and had family barbecues and risked our lives bodysurfing in storm-swept seas. Now it was the realization of billionaires’ dreams.
I recalled what Amanda’s friend Robin said as she distractedly searched the Playhouse for someone to break her heart. “What do you get when there’s more demand than supply, and the demanders have more money than God and all His angels put together?”
I added to the list of things I knew one thing I knew so well I’d completely forgotten it. People made huge fortunes somewhere else so they could bring them out here. And there was only so much here to go around.
This time I didn’t have a newspaper to give Rosaline when she answered the door. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her clothing was in the same loose, deconstructed style I’d seen her in before. Comfort designed for the long haul. I held my hands up.
“No offering.”
“I think we’re past that,” she said quietly. “Come on in.”
Arnold was in his seat in the living room, asleep. Rosaline put her finger to her lips and led me into a graceful study across the hall. It was walled with overstuffed bookshelves and furnished in early-twentieth-century oak. A pair of brown leather chairs were placed side by side in the middle of the room, each with an ottoman and reading lamp.
“My parents’ inner sanctum.”
“Readers.”
“Never owned a TV.”
“My kind of people.”
“Good. I share the genes. What can I get you?”
“I’m intruding again.”
“You are.” She checked her watch. “Close to cocktail hour. Forces me to offer you a drink.”
“Vodka on the rocks. No fruit.”
“Coming up.”
I sat in the chair and rested my manila folder on my lap. It felt better to have a prop, more official.
“Did the information I gave you do any good?” she asked, coming back with my drink and a large red wine.
“Yeah. Helped a lot.”
“But you want more.”
“After I thank you again for what you did. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Though I’m not sure if you’re the one to ask about this other stuff.”
“Ask.”
“I was thinking about what you said about the Internet.”
She looked a little uneasy.
“I was nosy.”
“Not what you said, but the fact of it. You’re probably a good surfer.”
“What, with all the time I have on my hands?”
“That’s right. You need to tie up that busy brain.”
“Is that what you do?”
“I don’t own a computer. I’ve never seen a website that wasn’t a print out. People did that stuff for me.”
“Mr. Big Shot.”
“I had a PC, but I used it to access technical data from the central servers.”
“So what do you want from me?”
I took a sip of the vodka.
“Nosy work.”
“For pay?”
“For the hell of it.”
We were both jarred by the sound of Arnold calling from the other room.
“Who’s there?” he yelled.
Rosaline put a calming hand over her heart.
“Can usually sleep through an atom bomb.”
She got up and waved to me to come along. Arnold was trying hard to make out who I was. He wasn’t wearing his glasses.
“Sam Acquillo, Daddy. You remember he came to visit last week.”
Arnold put out his hand to shake.
“Sorry to bother you again, sir. I was asking your daughter for a favor.”
“Sure, go ahead,” he said. “I do it all the time.”
He liked to tease her. She liked it, too, only not as much.
“We’re drinking, Daddy. Care to join?”
