I managed to steer the talk back into professional sports and away from further commentary on my personal circumstances, legal or pugilistic. When it looked like Burton was starting to nod off, we made a graceful exit. As we walked through the house, I looked back through a window to see Hayden combing his hand through Burton’s hair. Since I’d known him, Burton had resisted getting into a steady commitment. We never talked about it, but I guessed the reasons were economic as well as romantic. He never seemed to suffer for it, though I always wondered if that was just his well-bred self-discipline.
Watching the roll of Amanda’s hips as she walked ahead of me—almost gliding through a series of opulent rooms—I thought, fear and anger aren’t the only things that make you stupid. Something else, also buried deep in the medulla oblongata, the part Markham would call the lizard brain, was even more likely to interfere with judgment and overthrow the rule of common sense. Something neither Burton nor I, despite our arrogant faith in the intellect, would ever be able to control.
——
When we got back to the cottage there was a unmarked patrol car in my driveway. The driver was sitting out in one of the Adirondacks throwing tennis balls into the bay so Eddie would have an excuse to leap like Rin Tin Tin off the breakwater. Amanda wanted to get back to salvaging her demolished house, so I got to take the other chair.
“He ever get tired of this?” Sullivan asked, giving the tennis ball another throw.
“Only when you stop being impressed.”
“I had a long talk with Ross Semple about your case.”
“What’s his mood?”
“Optimistic. But I convinced him to let me back in. You told me he would. You were right.”
“Great.”
“Took a while, so I only just started doing anything.”
“Like cozying up to the suspect’s dog?”
“Like having a little chat with Patrick Getty.”
Eddie ran up to the chairs, dropped the tennis ball and shook out his fur, spraying us with sand and salty bay water.
“Nice,” said Sullivan.
“All part of the experience.”
Sullivan threw the ball into the bay again and Eddie looked at him like, what did you do that for?
“Go get it,” I told him. “Go on.”
Now on a practical mission, he trotted across the lawn to the beach access, skipping the heroics off the breakwater. “Ever wonder what goes on in their brains?” Sullivan asked.
“Not that one. You don’t want to know.”
“Did you know your boy Patrick has a record?”
“No.”
“A few B and E’s early on, worked his way up to larceny. Did five years. Mostly clean after that, though there was one assault charge the accuser later dropped.”
“Too bad. Be good to know who won the fight.”
“Ervin’s been keeping an eye on him as best he can. Can’t exactly afford surveillance.”
“What about his posse?”
“Need to look at their IDs, but I’m guessing the same deal. Have that feel about them.”
“What did you and Patrick chat about?”
“I told him I wanted to get to know each other a little. Got the usual bullshit about a paid-off debt to society, not looking for trouble, yadda yadda. He said you were the one I should keep my eye on. You and your crazy bitches.”
“He’s safe from me. The bitches will have to speak for themselves.”
“Not your kind,” he said to Eddie as he approached with the tennis ball in his mouth.
“So what does this tell us?” I asked him. “Patrick’s an ex-con. Should have figured that out ourselves.”
“Jail time is the difference between big talkers and the genuine product,” said Sullivan. “Much more serious cats. I want them out of my town.”
“Do you think Robbie knew they were cons?” I asked him.
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“All I do is wonder, Joe,” I told him.
I left him in the Adirondacks and went back to the cottage to grab a couple of beers. Besides needing the drink I needed a few minutes alone with my brain, hoping something useful would shake loose and drop out on the lawn. But all I got was more confusing mental clutter. So I decided to concentrate on the beer instead. Something simple I could understand.
“Veckstrom doesn’t want to be my mentor anymore,” said Sullivan when I got back to the breakwater.
“I didn’t know he was.”
“He told me when I first got promoted where to put my files and how to get calling cards printed with my name and the official Southampton Police emblem.”
“Really knows the ropes.”
“He’s actually younger than me, but he’s got a college degree. In criminology, plus two years of law school.”
“That explains the tie.”
“Don’t ask me why he decided to be a cop. Ross thinks he’s smart. I think he’s smart.”
“I think he’s a dickhead.”
“So I hear.”
He hung around long enough to down another beer and give me some inside information on the case without seeming to do so. I appreciated the effort, though there wasn’t much new or alarming. Except the ADA’s prediction that the grand jury would hand up an indictment within the next three weeks.
“If you were planning to share one of those alternatives you were talking about, I wouldn’t wait too much longer,” said Sullivan.
“Say Joe,” I said, struck with a sudden thought, “do you remember when Jeff Milhouser got in trouble for some scam on the Town?”
He was standing. He looked down at me, took off his black baseball hat and scratched the top of his head with the same hand.
“Vaguely,” he said. “It wasn’t anything that concerned me as a beat cop. Too downtown.”
“I’d like to get some of the details.”
“Ross would know. He’s always kept it cozy with the Town board. Why the interest?”
“No particular reason. Probably a waste of time.”
He put his cap back on and nodded.
“Probably is,” he said, and left me there with Eddie and my deepening sense of anxious disorientation. It was a familiar sensation, one I’d often felt on the job when an analysis of a wayward system would start producing strange data, tangles of nonsensical conclusions, incongruities intertwined with further incongruity. I’d actually become nauseated as I tried to force an explanation out of the jumble, knowing it was a doomed strategy, that the failure wasn’t in the analysis, but in the validity of the data itself. The underlying assumptions looked so reliable, yet were somehow hopelessly corrupt.
I remembered a young Swiss process engineer named Edouard Baton weeping into his computer keyboard after the two of us had spent twenty-eight straight hours fruitlessly trying to restart his company’s hydrogen plant.
“How can it be that we always get the wrong answer?” he sobbed.
“There’s nothing wrong with our answers,” I told him as the truth, and the solution, dawned on me. “The problem’s in the question.”
EIGHTEEN
A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER I was standing naked in my kitchen talking to Rosaline Arnold. It was well into
