In defiance of the warming weather he wore a quilted, blue down vest over a heavy chamois shirt. If he’d had the misfortune of marrying my ex-wife, she’d have told him it was a faux pas to accentuate a stocky figure with dark, puffy clothes.
“I’m about eight hours away from finishing the mantel,” I told him over the top of his computer screen. “I’ll need somebody to come out with a truck to pick it up.”
“That’s great, Sam,” he said, pleased with my progress. “You’re ahead of schedule.”
“After I finish the other stuff, I better lay low for a while. Can’t make any time commitments.”
He looked at me sympathetically.
“Yeah, I guess you got some stuff going on.”
“It’ll be over soon.”
“Sure, Sam. I’ll always have something for you. You know that.”
“Say, Frank. How well did you know Robbie Milhouser?” I asked him.
He didn’t like that I asked the question, but was too polite not to answer.
“Not too well. He’s a few years older. Was. Three years ahead of me in school. Never had much to do with him. Even after he started building houses we didn’t knock into each other very much. He got his crew from Up Island, don’t know much about ’em.”
“Your dad and his are about the same age.”
Frank snorted at that.
“Jeff Milhouser was one of only two people Dad ever said anything bad about. Probably said something like, ‘That fellow is a disappointment.’”
“Who was the other one?”
“Nixon. Had more to say about him.”
“Any reason for the grudge?”
He thought about it.
“They served on the Board of Trustees together for a while. I don’t think there was anything Milhouser wanted to do that Dad agreed with. And I think he stuck us once on a remodeling job we did at his house. Not enough to make it worth going after, but enough to be irritating. We like to be flexible about everything but our receivables. It’s why we’re still around.”
I was there the day Frank disassembled his scaffolding, reloaded a truck with lumber the yard had just dropped in the driveway, and started to peel a big green tarp off the open second story of a house where he’d just stripped off the roof. The owner stood in the muddy yard and hurled threats of dire retribution while Frank calmly referred back to an unpaid pre-bill, including the cost of the tarp. As a band of thunderstorms gathered over the horizon, the guy relented, handing over a check and tearing off in his Mercedes station wagon. Frank had his crew re-secure the house, cashed the check, deducting the cost of the tarp and the labor to reinstall it, then returned the rest of the money and left the job for good.
“So,” I said, “you didn’t know Robbie in high school.”
“Not really. He was in my brother Joey’s class. You’d have to ask him. He’s coming over this weekend. I’ll tell him to call you.”
Joey Entwhistle was a physics professor at Stony Brook. Like Frank, he’d worked for his father every summer through high school and college, then he’d disappeared for about ten years, coming home as the prodigal son, leaving behind a full professorship at Cal Tech and a half dozen published papers on theoretical physics. Another victim of Long Island’s gravitational pull.
“He’d be okay with that?”
“Come on, Sam, nobody thinks you had anything to do with that thing.”
“Nobody but the Town police, the DA’s office, the news media and the entire civilian population of the East End.”
“They just don’t know what a sweetheart you are,” he said, grinning at his deft use of irony.
——
True to his word, Frank delivered his brother Joey to me a few days later. I suggested a lunch meeting at a restaurant on Job’s Lane.
“Feed me burgers and I’ll tell you anything you want,” he said to me over the phone.
Joey was the physical countertype of his brother, slim to the point of scrawny and several inches taller. Yet clearly related, with a more angular version of the same features and hair the same color and composition. He wore a white shirt that had likely never seen a tie and thick, frameless glasses.
“Iced tea’s fine with me,” he said, sitting down with an eye on my vodka and tonic. He checked his watch. “For the moment, anyway.”
“I’m with you. I usually wait till the afternoon to get rid of the tonic.”
I have no facility for small talk with people I barely know, but I forced myself to ask about his family and work at Stony Brook so he could get comfortably through his meal. It was easier than I thought. Joey shared the family penchant for social grace.
“So,” he finally said, to politely get me started, “you wanted to know about Robbie Milhouser.”
“Frank thought you might have known him in high school.”
He wiped his mouth with his napkin, then folded it carefully and placed it on the table. His eyes studied me through the heavy plastic lenses.
“Let me make some assumptions that might focus the discussion,” he said. “You are accused of killing him, which you say you didn’t do. I’m happy to take my family’s word for it that you are, in fact, innocent. However, the forces of justice are now entirely focused on prosecuting you and, consequently, no one’s out there looking for the real killer. So it’s left to you, which if my reading is correct, represents your only hope.”
“That’s right, Joey, something like that,” I said, feeling a little iced over by the stark assessment.
“So what did you think of Robbie Milhouser?” I asked, in the spirit of focusing things.
“An incredible asshole.”
“That’s established.”
“But not without substance or complexity,” said Joey.
“About two hundred and forty pounds worth of substance.”
“Used effectively to brutalize his fellow students.”
“But that’s not what you meant.”
“Ever see him dance?”he asked.
“Only stagger.”
“Danced like Fred Astaire. A natural. What does that tell you?”
“Looks deceive?”
“Indeed. Deception is Nature’s masterwork,” he said.
“Two minutes into the conversation and you’re already pulling a Heisenberg.”
“Frank said you went to MIT. Physics?”
“Mechanical engineering. No room for uncertainty,” I told him.
“How’s your natural history?”
“Took my daughter to the museum to see the dinosaurs.”
“Evolutionary biology’s always been a hobby of mine,” he admitted, sheepishly.
“Never had a hobby. Too busy competing with the fittest.”
“If you ever want to study sociobiological dynamics at their apogee, there’s no better laboratory than the American public high school.”
“Especially if you knew the rats I went to school with.”
“Do you remember how kids with above average intelligence were always targeted for persecution? Usually by a few specific bullies, but with the tacit approval of the school population at large. This used to strike me as a perversion of Darwinian principles. Why would the group attack the most gifted individuals, presumably the most able to generate valuable resources for the community, which in turn would contribute to the group’s survival?”
“Smart kids aren’t necessarily philanthropic?”
“Exactly. Nature considers standouts as much a threat as an asset. Just a theory, of course. Not my field. But as a teenager I instinctively kept my brains to myself, as well as I could. No chess club, no valedictorian addresses.
