“This is where they found Robbie,” said Jackie. “Right in the middle of the room, which I guess is here.”
She stood looking down at the freshly laid hardwood floor.
“They took a lot of photographs,” she said hopefully
“Was it one whack, or a bunch of whacks?” I asked her. She looked up again.
“More than one. Several. More than necessary.”
“Assuming the killer knew the necessary number.”
“Right.”
“Front of the head, back of the head, side?” I asked.
“Back. All in the back.”
“Which way was he lying?”
“I don’t remember. It’s in the photographs.”
I walked over to the window and looked at the Little Peconic. With the sun’s arc getting higher with the changing seasons, the water more clearly reflected the blue sky. Seasonal navigational aids—red and green buoys and flags—were back in place outside Hawk and Towd Ponds. Across the bay off the North Fork a sliver of white sail, heeled hard against the persistent northwesterly, moved slowly across a background of gray trees and a blur of waterfront development.
“Let’s get some air,” I said, walking out a set of French doors onto the muddy plain surrounding the construction site.
“Dog prints in the mud,” I said. “I know the culprit.”
“Good. They only took casts of the human’s.”
We walked down to the beach.
“Not much sand,” said Jackie.
“Yeah. Only a little up above the waterline. The rest is pebbles. No footprints there.”
“The stapler must have been thrown from here,” she said.
“But why into the grass? There’s only about twenty yards of pebble beach between here and the shoreline. If you’re going to ditch a murder weapon, why not just toss it in the water?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It’s your tool, your fingerprints.”
“Now who’s being nihilistic?”
Jackie walked up next to me and put her arm through mine. She laid her head on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Sam. I’m not up to this. I want to be, but this is so way over my head. We need Burton to get you a lawyer who knows what they’re doing.”
I used my arm like a nutcracker to give hers a little squeeze.
“If Shakespeare’s out, so is self-doubt.”
“I want to do it for you, Sam. God knows why. But it’s your actual life at issue here, something I can’t seem to make you understand.”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but I used to have a job,” I whispered into her ball of frizzy hair. “Before they made me manage everything, I was a troubleshooter. When trying to diagnose a systems failure I’d waste a lot of time with engineers obsessing over current conditions, rehashing what we already knew over and over and over. This would come close to destroying what little sanity I had.”
“And your point,” said Jackie into my suit jacket.
“You’re worrying about the wrong things. I want you to represent me because you already know me. And I know you. And trust you, more than you trust yourself. Burton will look after the technical stuff. He trusts you, too. Neither of us care about your experience in criminal law. We care about your brain. It’s a good one.”
After a few minutes she nodded. An abrupt, decisive little nod. I let her go and she followed me back through the house.
We maneuvered around various tradesmen, who politely shifted to the side, and Patrick, who didn’t. I kept Jackie between us knowing her finger was mightier than a fist. Though she’d been known to bring both into play. Patrick stared at me, transmitting his eagerness to rip me from limb to limb. I’d had a lot of practice with stares like that, professionally and otherwise, so it didn’t bother me. I was more concerned about his long reach and ropey arms. Even an amateur can do a lot of damage, any of which I could ill afford.
We made it out alive and I drove her back to my cottage where she’d left her Toyota pickup. The vagaries of the sand road kept her preoccupied and mostly silent, so I was able to send her on her way with a minimum of commentary. I was happy about that. After a while all that white noise gets tiring.
Eddie greeted me with his normal routine—walking up my pant leg so I could scratch his head. After some of that, I took him and my blind allegiance to foolhardy decisions into the cottage to fill up my aluminum tumbler, which I brought out to the screened-in porch, sealed off against encroaching common sense, and drank until absorbed into the black forgiving night.
——
Around three in the morning I got dressed in a fresh set of jogging clothes. It took a while to lace up a new pair of sneakers. My treasured Sauconys, broken-in to the point of disintegration, were in an evidence bag with the rest of the stuff at the Suffolk County police lab. Eddie, cued by the outfit, sat and waited, though none too enthusiastically. He led the way to the side door, where we met the predawn chill of early spring on the Little Peconic.
I led us to the start of the sand road that paralleled the coast. It was still dark, though a pale glow to the east showed the sun threatening to break through the horizon. Most of the houses along the way were still blacked out, but a few had a light on here and there, tradesmen getting ready for the seven-thirty start time or commuters contemplating distant journeys Up Island. Twenty minutes into the run I turned onto Bay Edge Drive and came up to Robbie’s project. Without breaking stride, I jogged up to the house. There were two battered step vans parked on the lawn.
I tried the van doors, which were locked. Then I tried the doors to the house, which were also locked, uncharacteristically. So I kicked out a basement window and shimmied inside. The smell of partially cured concrete mingled with that of fresh-sawn fir and composite beams from the first floor structure overhead. I opened the basement hatch and whistled for Eddie, who streaked across the yard and shot down the hole as if pursued by avenging waterfowl. The two of us trotted upstairs.
I’d brought a flashlight, which I used to light my way from room to room. Though a masterpiece of misguided strategies, the house was stumbling toward completion. Tile covered the foyer floor and light fixtures were being installed in ceilings and over kitchen countertops.
I carefully examined every room, then moved back down to the basement, where I shot the little Maglite into all the dark corners. Then I went back up through the basement hatch to where the step vans were parked on the muddy front lawn. I was wearing a pair of cowhide work gloves, which protected my hands when I punched out the glass in the driver’s side door of the first van. The back was jammed with crap—chop boxes, collapsible work stands, table saws, battered plastic and metal tool chests, milk cartons stuffed with cans filled with sheetrock screws and random bits of hardware, tool belts and salvaged plumbing and electrical parts—the generic flotsam and jetsam of the average construction site. I looked, but didn’t find what I wanted.
That’s because it was in the other van under piles of pink fiberglass. A white cardboard box. I stuffed it under my arm and left the van, whistling again for Eddie, who was out on the beach scouring for detritus more to his liking—horseshoe crabs and gobs of putrid seaweed salad.
Under a decent moon and propelled by a lopsided inter-species competition, we made it back to the cottage while it was still dark. I brewed a huge pot of Viennese cinnamon coffee, made with freshly ground beans imported from the corner place in the Village, and a mess of eggs and tasty protein to fortify myself against the upcoming round of peril and deception.
SEVEN
BURTON LEWIS lives a block in from the ocean in a huge house built on the foundation of the one his grandfather built, which was built on the one his great-grandfather built before that. The house has a beautiful white gate you can enter only by getting past Isabella, the middle-aged
