no big deal.”
“What’re you talking about? That’s probably not even legal. Even if I wanted to do it, which I don’t.”
“You don’t care if the people who busted up Jackie’s face just get away with it? You said you were curious.”
“Sullivan, you’re the cop here. This is your job. I’m a private citizen. What’s the problem with talking to his wife, anyway?”
I raised my voice so he could hear me as he walked away, heading toward the Little Peconic. “Aw, Christ,” I said to myself, before getting up to follow him.
Eddie and I caught up with him at the edge of my backyard. Beyond that was about thirty feet of polished beach pebbles, and after that, the blue-green Little Peconic Bay. A thrity-eight-foot Catalina was sliding by just outside the green buoy that marked the Oak Point channel. By reflex I checked the tide. It was low. If he’d passed inside the buoy his keel would have dug a nice furrow in the sea bottom.
“What,” I said.
“Forget about it.”
Eddie hopped down off the breakwater that defined the line between my yard and the beach. He liked to keep tabs on things at water’s edge, ever watchful for maritime threats, like beach balls and lobster buoys.
“What do you think Ross would say if he knew I was interviewing your witnesses?”
“She’s not a witness. She’s just his wife. You find out what you find out, I’ll just go back and ask the same questions, and that’s it. Never stopped you before.”
“That was different. I had an interest in that.”
“You don’t got an interest in this? You got your ass tattooed with glass, your ears blown out and your friend’s walkin’ around with half a face. Not to mention all the dead people.” Sullivan’s voice had started to move up a notch in volume, but he caught himself.
“Anyway” he said. “You’re a nosy bastard, everybody knows that. There’s no statute that says you can’t pay a call on somebody. It’s a free country.”
“Interfering with an ongoing investigation.”
“What interfering? You’re just talking to her.”
“I don’t get it, Joe. What’s the hang-up?”
Sullivan found a small rock in the grass and tossed it across the beach and into the bay.
“Two years is all I got,” he said.
“Two years?”
“Of college. Two years at the community college. Studied beer mostly.”
“We had that at MIT.”
“Exactly my point. You went to MIT. You been around, you did some things. You got the education. The problem with those boys in East Hampton is they don’t even know what questions to ask. Fuckin’ PhDs, financial analysts, all that shit, it’s like, you know, inhibiting.”
“Not for you.”
He put a meaty fist up on his hip just behind the black leather holster that held his .38.
“That’s right. I’ll talk to anybody. But I need an angle,” he said. “Something they haven’t thought of yet. Something to chase down. You might come up with it, you might not. Plus, I’ll owe you a favor. That’s got to have some appeal.”
I made him look me in the face.
“I can’t afford to go messing with anything more controversial than breathing Southampton air. The Chief frowns every time he sees me.”
“That’s just Ross. He’s suspicious of his own mother. Assuming he’s got one.”
“His mother wasn’t a murder suspect.”
“That case is closed,” said Sullivan. “Over and done.”
“I need to keep my head down.”
“Right,” he said, “and I need you to go talk to this lady and tell me what you find out.”
He turned away from the bay and slapped my shoulder as he walked by on the way back to his car.
“This is entirely fucked up,” I called to him.
“Just let me know how it goes.”
“I don’t even know who she is.”
He turned around and walked backward as he spoke.
“I left the name and address on your kitchen table. And phone number. And a list of questions. And a summary of the case I got from East Hampton. Burn it all when you can. Ross finds out I gave it to you he’ll can me in half a New York minute.”
After he left, I went up the ladder to set the two rafters that formed the addition’s south gable. First I measured the dimensions with my lucky twenty-five-inch tape. Then I recut the angles at both the ridge and the top plate to suit the measurements instead of the math I’d been using before. The rafters fit perfectly. I checked it all with the framing square, then re-checked all the elevations with the transit. For added insurance, I scabbed a few Techo gussets at the joints and tacked the sixteen-foot two-by supports to the floor deck.
Then I went inside and got another beer, which I drank out at the edge of my lawn, waiting for the first signs of sunset to form over the top of the North Fork and looking for errant sailors and windsurfers to come crashing into my private coast, and yet again mess up the layout of a life that always worked better by eye than formal calculations.
THREE
I’D MOVED OUT HERE after an act of self-immolation cleared out the preceding thirty years of my life. My parents were dead, leaving me the cottage where I’d been raised. It stood at the tip of Oak Point, a scrubby peninsula that juts fearlessly into the Little Peconic Bay on the northwest border of the Town of Southampton, Long Island. My father was an old-school mechanic, so it wasn’t surprising that his cottage expressed the character and refinement of a
I don’t know why I started building anyway. Probably some newfound professional enthusiasm. Every kid who grew up on the East End of Long Island worked in construction at least part of the time. The booms and busts would parallel the fortunes of Wall Street, though I could always get some kind of work, even in the slow times. The weather never stopped chewing up all the big wooden houses over in the estate section. And there were always a lot of rich people who were richer than everybody else, no matter what the economy was doing, and most of them had a house out here. I worked for them—or rather, I worked for the carpenters and contractors who lived off the trade.
I liked to work for a guy named Frank Entwhistle, who’d hired me thirty-five years before. His son, Frank Junior, now ran the crews. He needed a finish carpenter and cabinetmaker. Not an easy hire, now that most of the tradesmen, and for that matter waitresses, store clerks and bartenders, came from up island.
The only affordable housing locally was held like family heirlooms, and passed along to anyone bound to the dream of lost possibilities. I’d grown up with these people, and I recognized them around Town, going in and out of the hardware store or in the checkout line at the food market, but I didn’t know most of them anymore.
I worked for Frank more or less when I felt like it, and occasionally helped maintain his fleet of pickups and light-duty earthmovers.
Luckily he hadn’t asked me to set any ridge plates.
The cottage my father built had a big screened-in porch that faced the water, a living room of sorts with an oversized woodstove, a kitchen, a bathroom and two ten-by-ten bedrooms. I lived out on the porch most of the year so I could keep an eye on the Little Peconic Bay. After five years, it was still there, so the vigilance must be paying
