me the moment I pulled into the driveway.
“He’s not here,” she said, before I had the window halfway down.
“But will be here, soon? Or never again?”
“You could call ahead like normal people.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “Normal people drop in.”
“I don’t have instructions.”
“Goddammit, Isabella.”
“He’s at the Schooner,” she said. “For the afternoon. I don’t think he wants to be interrupted.”
“From a pool game?”
“He need to concentrate.”
“What’s he playing for, controlling rights to Morgan Stanley?”
The Schooner was a bar and grill in the woods above Bridgehampton. It was one huge open room encompassing the first floor of a small hotel built by a Hungarian immigrant who’d never been to the Catskills, but imagined his creation as a southern outpost of the Borscht Belt. Surrounding the main building were clusters of bungalows, stone grills with picnic tables, a game room for playing bridge or canasta and a clubhouse with a stage where they used to heckle stand-up comics and dance the bunny-hop. The Schooner was the only commercial survivor in the complex, though even that was difficult to fathom given the persistent scarcity of paying clientele. It did have four rock-solid old pool tables, however, and an authentically dank, retrograde ambience particularly suited to eight-ball and beer. And compared to the Pequot, it was like a night at The Palm.
Burton was a lawyer by trade. He’d started out as a criminal attorney dispensing free representation out of a storefront in the City, but then found himself attracted to the subtle intricacies of corporate tax law, leading him to join, and eventually manage, the law firm his grandfather had formed as a captive guardian of his global banking business. Burton never completely abandoned criminal defense—his caseload was often on par with the two or three full-time associates staffing the storefront operation—but still managed to grow the corporate practice into a small army of lawyers packed into a nineteenth-century building he owned down on Wall Street.
There were about ten people in the Schooner, maybe two percent of capacity. Burton was working the front table, playing a guy in an ochre Oxford-cloth shirt with a polo player on the chest and a pair of wide-wale corduroys decorated with embroidered pheasants. The guy had a tight mat of kinky black hair framing a forehead that towered above a pair of bifocals in slender black frames. He was a lot shorter than Burton, small boned with a little bowlingball gut. His lips were thin and pale, as if pursing them too tightly had permanently drained away all the blood.
Burton twisted the tip of his cue stick into a little block of blue chalk as he watched me approach.
“Sam,” he said. “Just in time to spoil my concentration.”
“That’s what Isabella said would happen.”
“Performance anxiety.”
Burton was an ectomorphic somatotype, slender approaching gaunt, with long limbs and loose joints that facilitated graceful, elegant movements. His outfit looked like it came from a vintage clothing store specializing in early-twentieth-century Ivy League toff. He was in his late forties, yet his hair was still thick and naturally brown and cut long enough to fall into his face when he leaned down to take aim at the cue ball.
I scanned the table and saw one eight ball and a single solid nearly camouflaged by a knot of stripes.
“You finish up, I’ll freshen the drinks,” I said, looking flagrantly at Burton’s opponent.
“Oh, sorry,” said Burton, standing up again. “This is Hayden Grayson. Budding legal pundit. Hayden, Sam Acquillo.”
“Way past punditry myself,” I said, putting out my hand.
Hayden’s grip was smooth-skinned but firm. A professional handshake.
“Though not beyond puns,” said Burton.
“Burton said you might show up anytime,” said Hayden. “This is my first trip to the Hamptons. It’s very beautiful.”
I looked around the inside of the Schooner.
“You oughta see the rest of the place. So what am I buying you guys?”
Burton ordered a Baileys on the rocks and his date an Amstel Light, neither of which I thought the Schooner had ever heard of, but they managed to rustle them up. After my first day in court I felt entitled to a double Absolut, which they didn’t have, so I told them to throw a lot of ice and lemon into a tall glass of Smirnoff.
When I got back to the table Hayden was racking up the balls. His movements were spare and exacting. After settling the rack, he pulled it away with a little flourish. Burton handed me a cue.
“Care to break?”
“No, no. Your table.”
His break sank a stripe and a solid in the two opposing corner pockets, though most of the balls stayed packed together like a small herd of frightened sheep.
“So who’s ahead in this tournament?” I asked them.
“You have to ask?” said Hayden. “Burton, of course.”
I was overjoyed to see the bartender light a cigarette. Some genius had apparently outlawed smoking in bars in New York. Fortunately, Schooner management hadn’t gotten word, isolated as it was in the northern frontier of Bridgehampton. I dug out my pack of Camels.
“Hayden writes for and edits
“I don’t read anything with words I can’t pronounce,” I said.
“It sounds much more grand than it is,” said Hayden, taking a tentative sip of his light beer. “Really just the driest of the dry.”
“Unless you’re a head case in trouble with the law,” I said.
“Which is particularly germane to Sam’s appearance on the scene,” said Burton, standing abruptly, scowling at the orange ball, which stared back, barely threatened much less propelled by his efforts. “If I’m not mistaken.”
“I teed that up for you,” I told him.
“That’s golf, Sam. We’re playing eight-ball.”
I lucked into sinking three of my stripes before relinquishing the table. Hayden seemed unimpressed, though he felt compelled to say “nice” after each shot. I think anticipating the next “nice” cost me a fourth.
“Ms. Swaitkowski has kept me thoroughly briefed,” said Burton, as he studied the disposition of the balls. “And I had a long chat with Ross Semple. He’s being uncharacteristically obdurate.”
“Blood in the water,” I said.
“Something like that.”
“Thanks for bailing me out. Jackie thought I’d fight you on that, but I’m really glad you did it.”
Burton looked over and smiled at me.
“Good for you, Sam. Genuine appreciation, honestly expressed.”
Hayden tried to look like he was happy studying the Schooner’s interior decor. It felt like bad form to leave him out of the conversation.
“I got charged with murder,” I told him. “Burton’s been helping me out. All just a big misunderstanding. How long you guys been hanging together?”
Hayden deferred to Burton by glancing in his direction.
“Oh, off and on for some time now,” said Burton. “Hayden’s been complaining about the miseries of winter in the City and I thought a recuperative stay in the Hamptons would be just the ticket,” he added, right before muffing his next shot.
“None of the pool establishments we’ve played in town quite rise to the level of the Schooner. That I concede,” said Hayden, tilting his beer in a toast to our environs.
I cleared out the rest of my stripes, but was left with an impossible shot on the eight ball. All I could do was avoid dropping the cue ball in the pocket, which I did anyway, leaving Burton in excellent position to even the game.
“So there’s a fair amount of physical evidence—shoe prints, lethal staplers, that sort of thing,” said Burton.
