“He’s going to meet us for lunch,” she said, snapping her cell phone closed. “He said his boss doesn’t like civilians in the office unless they’re in the interrogation rooms.”
“I’ll pay. Haven’t filed a 1040 in a few years. Least I can do for my country.”
“Tax shelters?”
“Yeah, the ultimate. No income. Not enough to pay taxes, anyway.”
Now that we were back to civil discourse, she reopened our favorite subject.
“Are you going to give me an opinion?”
“On tax policy?”
“On Lillian Eldridge.”
“She’s nuts.”
“That’s the kind of sensitivity I was hoping for.”
“Depersonalization disorder. Marked by loss, distortion or fragmentation of the identity. Pretty rare, hard to diagnose, harder to treat, wreaks hell on people and their families. Probably, maybe, triggered in the susceptible by some traumatic event. Usually in childhood or adolescence, but not exclusively.”
“You knew that?”
“I just thought about Psych 101 before going to sleep last night.”
“Come on.”
“Maryanne told me. At least something that sounded like that.”
“How traumatic an event?”
“Usually natural disasters, war, sexual abuse—though trauma is in the mind of the traumatized. Kids kill themselves over being cut from the cheerleading squad.”
“The divorce. Lost her husband and one of her kids in one fell swoop.”
“Would all be in her medical records. Good luck with that. Make the FBI look like a bunch of blabbermouths. And I don’t think Maryanne would be into a game of hot and cold.”
I made a turn off a four-lane boulevard that ran through what I thought was an overdeveloped retail district, only to plunge into a six-lane version of the same thing that stretched before me in a straight line all the way to the horizon. Maybe beyond. Maybe it was endless, and they’d managed to warp space-time into an infinite series of branded restaurants, home centers, bathroom fixture emporiums, dry cleaners, banks, hardware stores, self- storage units, gas stations and single-story asbestos-shingled houses with low-pitch roofs and bright red pickup trucks, decorated with scrub oak and cedars planted along chainlink fences by the random hand of the wind.
I reminded myself that inside the grids drawn by these monstrous Gomorrahs were large tracks of blessed Long Island landscape filled with serene homes settled within verdant gardens, in which kind and intelligent people raised joyful children and lived lives of thoughtfulness and reflection. Who barely noticed the vulgarity through which they traveled on the way to meaningful vocations, as doctors, engineers, professors of abnormal psychology.
“Don’t underestimate me,” said Jackie.
“Only an opinion. What’s yours?”
“She’s nuts. But not crazy. Or stupid. I think she’s happy being where she is. Getting cared for, fussed over even, finding safe haven from a world that didn’t work out the way she wanted. Three squares a day and all the drugs her liver can withstand. What the hell. Doesn’t sound that bad.”
“Maryanne thought she was lonely.”
“Lillian might be lonely. The woman we talked to is all set.”
“And what else?” I asked her, rhetorically. “The big news.”
“It looks like Butch is the only one who paid either of them any attention. I thought he was the family brat and Jonathan Mr. Responsible.”
“So did Sam,” I said. “Dashiell is not surprised.”
“Well, have him tell Sam to find a place where I can pee and fix up my face. I want to do it before we get there.”
Agent Ig’s invisible gray Ford was parked in a corner of a nearly empty parking lot surrounding a franchise restaurant called something like The Olde Mill Tavern, the name written out in eighteenth-century script in ten- foot-high neon letters, just like they did in the time of Alexander Hamilton. The facade was mostly made of fieldstone, marred only by the random placement of actual barrelheads, protruding from the walls as if they’d been shot there by a cannon.
Web met us in the foyer. He kissed Jackie and shook my hand with both of his, which I took to be an outpouring of nearly untamable emotion.
“Hey Web. What’s up?”
“I’ve secured us a table in the back so we can have a little privacy,” he said. It occurred to me that the Olde Mill Tavern chain must be a big front for the FBI. Put them all over the country. Pick a decor all the troops could agree on. Place to have meetings, have a little lunch and stay camouflaged. Probably turned a profit. Helped defray Bureau expenses for things like plain gray Fords and in-ear communication devices.
“Awfully nice to see you both.”
Jackie let him hold her arm so she could glide across the floor from the foyer to the far end of the main room. There might have been a hundred tables there, at which only a handful of people were eating. It was after one. All the early birds had flown the coop. Webster Ig’s white shirt looked like it just came out of the laundry box, the sleeves billowing and buttoned tight at the wrists. I always wondered how certain guys could pull that off. If I didn’t roll up my sleeves the second I took off my jacket I’d start to sweat and lose concentration.
“How’s the Pequot?” he asked us when we settled in our seats. “Mr. Hodges is quite the chef.”
“Hasn’t killed anybody yet. Far as we know,” I told him.
“I’ve tried to describe his special whitefish.”
“Indescribable is fair enough.”
He nodded enthusiastically. It occurred to me that for a stitched-up guy like Web, confined most days within a parched office cubicle, relieved only by forays into the shop-worn municipal grime of courtrooms and record repositories, spending long hours on the phone or with US Attorneys, or more likely their legal assistants, a simple lunch with a lavish oddball like Jackie Swaitkowski must seem like an epic adventure. Jackie, meanwhile, had managed to transform herself into a softer, sweeter and more accommodating version of the woman I’d been driving around all day. Made me ponder whatever Darwinian imperative underlies the aphorism that opposites attract. But only until I was attracted by the specials of the day.
“So,” said Jackie, after her plain chicken and deviled egg salad arrived, “aren’t you going to ask us how the investigation is going?”
“I would if I hadn’t already urged, actually begged, you to abandon it,” said Web. “And if even saying the name Jonathan Eldridge out loud wouldn’t cost me my job and any future employment with the federal government.”
“Are you completely off the case?” she asked. “You can tell us that, can’t you.”
“I can tell you my name and that I live in an apartment with a cat. And that’s about it.”
“Okay,” she said, content to focus on her salad.
“Say, Web, this is not about the case, but just a general question,” I said to him, probably unconvincingly “Does the government actually keep gigantic databases on everybody, some kind of central Big Brother thing like everybody thinks they do?”
“No. Sorry to disappoint you. And all the conspiracy theorists out there. Fact is, I think they would if they could. There’s just too much in the way. Inter-agency rivalries, mostly. Some of which were put there intentionally as a protection against a real Big Brother taking root. That’ll probably change now, given the situation, but it’ll be a long time coming, right or wrong.”
“That’s all irrelevant,” said Jackie to me, trying to delicately shove an uncut piece of lettuce in her mouth. “I can find anything you want on the Internet.”
“Anything?”
“Yeah. I can’t help it if you’ve been living in a cave for the last five years. Tell me what you want to know, about anything, anywhere. I can dig it out.”
“Jackie’s maybe exaggerating a little, but you’d be surprised.”
If he only knew.
“Let me ask you something else,” I said to Web. “When everybody can find out anything they want about
