First I cut a line from the knit of her brow to the back of her head, right above the little dent everybody has at the back of their heads. Then I cut away most of the helmet. I had her hold the important part of the bandage against the wound while I reconfigured the chin strap into a single piece over the right side, secured below by a gauze choker. The net result freed her mass of hair so that it covered most of the damage and exposed the uninjured, though black and blue, side of her face. I tied things off with some yarn that I could string through her hair, and fooled around with her coif until she almost looked normal, for a girl with a stoved-in face.
I made her stand in front of the mirror.
“How did you do that?”
“I’m a design engineer. The doc took a more expedient, less cosmetic approach. This’ll work just as well.”
“It still looks pretty bad.”
“Way less bad. Got anything to drink in this house?”
It took about a hour for her to shower, shave her legs and put an inch of makeup on her face, but eventually I got her out of the house. She hadn’t worked around to thanking me yet, but at least she’d stopped sighing and moaning. By the time we were in the Grand Prix it was late morning. The sun was all the way out and the sky all the way blue. The air was dry and clean, so I kept the windows rolled down to air things out. The wind tossed around some empty coffee cups and messed up Jackie’s hair a little, but she didn’t seem to mind. Liberation.
This time of year I never drove on Montauk Highway, the main artery on this part of the Island. It was filled day and night with summer people. But you had most of the secondary routes to yourself because the summer people were mostly from Manhattan, and were afraid to deviate from established routes. They’d all seen
Hodges once told me the East End of Long Island had a different kind of light from the rest of the country. He’d learned this in the 1950s from one of the artists who’d set up shop out in Springs, then a homey little enclave in east East Hampton. He compared it to the light of Florence—bright on a sunny day, but with all the edges burnished off, as if filtered through a diffusion screen. Hodges told me it was caused by the way the big river of weather coming out of Pennsylvania and North Jersey would clip the Boroughs, then push up over Long Island Sound into Connecticut, leaving the East End in its wake, covered by a thinned-out trail of cloud cover. I don’t think any of this was scientifically valid, but I knew he was right about the way the light looked because I saw how it composed shadows and drenched the leaves and potato fields with an oversaturated blue-green and cast dollops of chiaroscuro under the spreading boughs of red oak and silvery elm. As you moved from forest to fields, the landscape was recast and the light embraced the whole, claiming the separateness of this narrow, peninsular world.
I decided we’d go to Riverhead by way of Shelter Island, the chunk of wooded landmass caught between the jaws of the North and South Forks. It was less direct as the crow flies, but you got to catch little ferries on and off the island. There was usually a nice breeze and some sea spray over each of the narrow channels and I thought Jackie could use the extra oxygen.
“How’s work?” I asked her after we’d been underway a while.
“S’okay I handed off most of my cases. No client complaints.”
“Except for me.”
“No, you’re a keeper. Especially since you never ask me to do anything.”
The South Ferry was doing a brisk business. The guys directing the boarding cars sandwiched the Grand Prix between a Land Rover and a tradesman’s step van. Jackie and I squeezed out into the air so we could stand by the gunwale and watch the cormorants dive-bomb into the chop. Jackie’s hair unfurled against the wind. I held her around the waist so I could give her an occasional squeeze.
“You never ask me to do anything and you never tell me anything,” she said.
“It’s the law. Discovery is part of the process.”
She was quiet the rest of the way to Riverhead, so I just smoked and listened to afternoon jazz on WLIU and thought about how to gang cut the rest of the rafters for my addition. Jackie’s mood still threatened to breed gloom within the capacious cabin of the Grand Prix, but the light that continued to flow down through the abundant Shelter Island foliage was undaunted and unrestrained.
SIX
JONATHAN ELDRIDGE’S OFFICE was on the second floor of a two-story building cobbed on to the end of a row of storefronts on Main Street in Riverhead. Downtown extended a few blocks in either direction, and was decorated by the retail iconography of mid-twentieth-century America. In other words, it was thoroughly beat up and godforsaken. We parked in the back and walked up a rear outdoor stairway to the separate entrance.
“It’s open,” a woman yelled from inside after we pushed the buzzer.
Eldridge hadn’t overextended himself on office appointments. It was basically a single room carved up by waist-high cubicle dividers into a loose arrangement of workstations, each with at least one computer terminal and keyboard. Sitting at a command post at the center of the room was a young woman identified by an enormous nameplate mounted to the front of her desk. It said she was Alena Zapata, Jonathan Eldridge’s assistant, though the visual evidence was less persuasive.
Her hair was a rooster shock of brilliant magenta, or maybe a light purple, depending on the way the light hit it. The color confusion was exacerbated by her brilliant red lipstick and the pale, bluefish tint of her complexion. She had a huge mole on her gaunt right cheek, what I thought was a Marilyn Monroe beauty mark, but discovered later was a tiny tattoo of Eve Ensler.
Jackie had already staggered back a few steps as the overall effect hit her, so when the purple-haired woman said, “Holy cow, what happened to you?” I couldn’t see her reaction.
“Are you Alena?” I asked.
“At’s what the sign says.”
She crammed a rounded O into the word “sign.”
“I’m Sam, this is Jackie. Did the Southampton police tell you we were coming?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. I got an open door policy. Sit down where you want.”
I dug a pair of chairs out of the other workstations and sat us in front of her desk.
“So, what can I do you for? Sorry about the reaction,” she said to Jackie, without taking a breath. “It was, like, a shock and all.”
“Shocks all around.”
“I know you’ve already told the police everything,” I said, jumping in, “so I hope you don’t mind going over the same stuff.”
She shook her purple plume.
“Nah, not at all. What else I gotta do? I’m all caught up here. You want coffee or something? I don’t get a lotta company. The FedEx guy, the mail guy. The deli downstairs delivers. You had lunch? It’s cheap.”
“We’re all set. Coffee sounds great. Black for me. A little milk for Jackie.”
Standing, she had to be about five-ten, excluding heels. She poured the coffee from a slimy old Krups coffeemaker, but it wasn’t bad if you had a wide tolerance.
“So, it was just you and Jonathan?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, stirring in Jackie’s milk, “when he was here, which wasn’t all that much. Maybe a third of the time. He was always outta town.”
“Doing fieldwork.”
“Yeah, that’s what he called it. Are you a cop?”
“An investigator,” I said, and then immediately felt deceptive and asinine. “Kind of. Just a friend of a cop who asked for some help.”
“Just a co-victim of a vicious, wanton act of murderous cruelty,” said Jackie.
“Yeah, don’t I know it. Co-victim?”
“We were the only survivors,” said Jackie. “That’s where, like, the face came from. It was, like, blown up and shit.”
