“I never ask,” he told me. “What you say one way or the other will have no bearing on how I approach the case. Utterly immaterial.”
“Not to me.”
He walked over with his cue stick in his left hand and put his right hand on my shoulder.
“Remember, I’d rather you clubbed that man to death than lie to me.”
I’d never felt anything but good feelings toward Burton since I met him, and didn’t feel any differently then. But I wasn’t going to let that one sit where it lay.
“No way, Burt,” I told him. “I didn’t club him and I’m not lying. My innocence has to be a matter of fact, a firm assumption upon which everything is based.”
The gangly introvert smiled at me warmly and gave my shoulder a squeeze.
“Very well, Sam. So it’ll be.”
He exchanged an uninterpretable look with Hayden before going back to the game, which he won, along with the next two. He declared himself the eight-ball champion and suggested we go to three-way straight pool. By then it was dark outside, and with enough vodka inside me to sharpen my faculties and weaken my better nature, I ran the table my first time up.
Hayden looked at me with a suspicious eye.
“What do you call that?” he asked.
“Killer pool, baby,” I told him.
PART TWO
EIGHT
AFTER LEAVING MY WIFE ABBY and my job running a corporate R&D operation I lived in hotel rooms around Connecticut and the northern exurbs of New York. I paid for them with my corporate credit card, which no one at the company, inexplicably, had thought to shut off. Given my mental clarity in those days, this was an important convenience. All I needed to sustain my existence was to reach into the first inside sleeve of my wallet.
I also conserved energy by going from room to room without bothering to bring along my clothes. This resulted in frequent trips to discount stores where I was delighted to find good quality underwear at very reasonable prices. It was at one of these cavernous emporia that I discovered cheap polyester tote bags, an excellent solution to the challenge of transporting my ever-renewed wardrobe of Levi’s and cotton T-shirts.
During all my years of marriage to Abby I almost never walked into a retail outlet of any kind, unless you included the deli in White Plains where I bought coffee and a copy of
For my job I’d spend a fair amount of time in Bombay, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and the fetid alleys of Cairo, but I never felt more alien than I did walking under the blue-green fluorescent lights of those retail monstrosities.
I eventually misplaced my company car, which they’d also failed to retrieve. It was a silver four-door imported luxury sedan that vanished one night somewhere in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I really liked that car. It was fast and quiet and comfortable. It had a cupholder big enough for a large Diet Coke, which you could fill up partway with bourbon, plus an ashtray and a startlingly loud stereo. I’d occasionally launch the day lying naked on my bed in the hotel room, smoking cigarettes and watching pay-as-you-go movies on the TV, and then suddenly find myself driving the car through the leafy, curvaceous countryside of northern Fairfield County. Usually dressed.
If you head north of Fairfield, past Danbury, you find yourself in Litchfield County, a Manhattanite preserve thick with white Congregational churches and twentieth-century novelists.
One day I managed to wander my way straight through Connecticut and into Massachusetts, where I was met by a big welcome sign at the border. I’d lived a lot of years in Massachusetts, so I took the welcome for what it was worth and drove on anyway. I went as straight north as the twisted two-lane roads would allow, aided by the car’s electronic compass with a read-out built into the rearview mirror.
It was a warm, soft summer day following several days of rain. The dominant oaks and maples were laden with billows of dark green leaves. Radio reception filtered out everything but NPR stations playing Mozart or Oscar Peterson or vaguely condescending commentary on issues of the day I regrettably knew nothing about. The roads were filled with pickups and Volvo station wagons plastered with political and social declarations. I envied the unabashed conviction.
Things got a lot hillier when I hit the northwest corner of the Commonwealth. The Berkshires gave way to the foothills of the Green Mountains, which you ascend on narrow switchback roads that follow trout streams and old Indian trails through verdant tunnels made of hemlock and southern pine. Eventually I crested the ridge of a mountain and repeated the experience on a downward plane. Not long after that I was in Vermont.
Somewhere south of Bennington I hit Route 7 and headed north. I was relieved to be driving in a somewhat straight line, going up and over an endless succession of hills, past open fields with huge green mounds in the distance and through strange little villages of eighteenth-century inns, trailer homes and factory outlets.
Nearly hypnotized by the experience, I almost missed the sign for Route 125 East. I spun the front tires of my car over the pitted macadam as I made a hard turn and plunged into another narrow, deep wooded passage. Along the way I stopped for gas at a two-pump station outside Bread Loaf. I talked the sallow young woman behind the greasy glass-topped counter into filling my big paper cup with ice, over which I poured a couple fingers of bourbon and a fresh Coca-Cola.
From there it was an easy run over to Route 100 and then up to Warren where I owned a time-share that I’d never seen. Abby was the one who liked to ski, a pursuit that for me was never more than a theoretical construct. I understood the principle, something about sliding down snow-covered hills in frigid temperatures and periodically breaking your leg. It worked better for me as a vacation from my wife, who for over ten years would spend the bulk of her winter weekends and an occasional full week on the slopes.
I remembered the address from writing countless monthly checks to a place called Fox Run Borders, LLC, which always struck me as inherently contradictory. Even so, it took a lot of asking around town before I found someone to give me directions.
“Oh shoo-wa, that’s over thea towa’d the skiin’,” a red-nosed old guy in a black T-shirt and Red Sox cap told me. “Near Suga’bush. The place ya’re talkin’ about is up inna woods. Exclusive. Fulla New Yawkas.”
It was easier to find than he led me to believe, probably because of a sign on the road featuring a fox who was neither running, nor looking entirely secure within his borders. More ambivalent, which was how I was feeling.
The development looked like any suburban enclave you’d find down on the flatlands. Little two-story colonial houses with narrow clapboard siding stained a uniform blue-gray, scattered around a simulated town green in the middle of which they were building an octagonal gazebo. Encircling the observable area were tall, mature trees, but the landscape within looked freshly cultivated.
I slowly cruised along the gently curved streets, searching for number 35G. There was little danger of bumping into Abby. Her lawyer had told me she’d be away for a few weeks, that she’d left some papers for me to sign related to some proceeding he wanted me to attend, all of which as usual I ignored.
After searching most of the neighborhood I found 35G. A woman, probably in her late seventies, wearing oversized canvas gloves and a broad-brimmed hat was out on the lawn fussing with a huge, unruly bottlebrush buckeye.
“Excuse me,” I called to her through the open car window, “are you staying here?”
“Not me. I just thought this bush needed some trimming,” she said, without looking in my direction. “Of course I’m staying here,” she added, punctuating the statement with a deft snip of her pruning shears.
“Do you know Abby Acquillo?” I asked.
