story, and I don’t need the money or the job.”
I sat down and took the cigarette I’d given her off the table and lit it. Then I gave her a fresh one.
“You wanna talk about messing up,” she said, waving it at me.
“I was looking for a way to research a news story that’s about ten, maybe fifteen years old. I thought it might be quicker to ask a reporter who was around at the time.”
“That was early on for me, but I was here. What story?”
“Jeff Milhouser and some sort of bank fraud.”
“The victim’s father,” said Roberta.
“He was a Town Trustee back then. I was told he used Town money to collateralize personal loans.”
“Can you wait here?” she asked, then lumbered back inside the building, leaving me alone with my self- recrimination.
She came back ten minutes later with a handful of loose paper.
“Pulled this off the archives,” she said. “Piece of cake. Ain’t computers grand?”
“So they tell me.”
Roberta leafed through the stack till she found something she liked, which she read, then handed over to me. It was a report on Milhouser’s plea bargain, in which he gave up his seat as a Trustee, paid a hundred grand fine and got five years’ probation. The charge was the way Hodges remembered it. Milhouser was trying to start a retail nursery business on County Road 39, but was having trouble raising the capital with his house fully mortgaged and his credit rating in the toilet from a prior bankruptcy. He’d told East End Savings and Loan that the money he used to buy a six-month CD, which collateralized the loan, had come from an inheritance, when in fact it was Town funds. It was a simple plan, in every sense of the word, that came a cropper when accounts payable at Town Hall started bouncing checks before the CD term came due and Milhouser could jockey the funds back where they belonged.
The Town Treasurer at the time, a guy named Zack Horowitz, had authorized the withdrawals based on Milhouser’s suggestion that the Town take advantage of new investment vehicles being offered through some big commercial banks. What made Horowitz think this was a good idea, or why he let one of the Town Trustees handle the theoretical transactions, wasn’t clear from the news story, but the report of the Treasurer’s resignation, shortly after Milhouser’s scheme was uncovered, explained how he probably stayed clear of criminal court himself.
The bank’s position on the matter was more curious. Since the nursery deal fell through before he could close, Milhouser was able to return the loan, so technically, from the bank’s point of view, no harm was done except for some slight misrepresentation on the loan application. Milhouser’s legal trouble was then solely with the Town.
“You remember this?” I asked her.
“Sorry. Vaguely at best. Is it okay to ask you something now?”
“I guess.”
“Why are you interested in this?”
I didn’t know what was worse. Feeling endangered by a boneheaded move or being asked to examine motives I always preferred to leave unexamined.
“I don’t know.”
“No fair.”
“It’s the truth. I don’t know. It just seems interesting to me. A little ripple in the continuum.”
“Of course. One of those.”
I found myself imagining I had an understanding with Roberta Camacho. That was probably what she wanted me to think.
“I’ll tell you when I know myself,” I told her.
“You’ll tell me everything—me and nobody else. When you’re ready. I’ll wait. I’m patient. No deadline pressure. We’re a weekly.”
“So I hear.”
I stood up again, this time like I really meant it.
“Thanks for your help,” I said.
“Don’t thank me till I ask my other question.”
“Yeah?” I asked, unhappily.
“It’s all about jealousy, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where I come from a fistfight in front of a beautiful woman is always about the beautiful woman.”
“It wasn’t a fistfight. And it was about her real-estate development, not her,” I said.
“So not an old boyfriend.”
“Not since high school, if you believe what you hear.”
“Do you?”
She wasn’t taunting me. It was more of a challenge to my reserve. A prod. I wish I could say that it didn’t work, but it did.
“It’s irrelevant.”
“Why do you think that, if you really do?”
“No such luck. But thanks,” I said, and walked away with as clear an intent as I could express without looking like a bigger idiot than I felt.
“For what?”
I could have said “for the serving of humble pie” but she wouldn’t have known what I meant, and she’d still be calling after me. But I would have meant it. For those who live inside their minds the greatest hazard is hubris, an assumed immunity to false perception, an unflinching loyalty to cold logic. It’s the arrogance of reductionism— that every problem can be dissected into its irreducible parts and then reassembled into an entirely coherent solution, its mysteries laid bare. I’d always known this was delusional, a lazy habit of the mind. I’d scolded myself on the matter before, and now had a chance to do it again.
I was consoled, however, by a new line of thinking, a new arrangement of the random information I’d begun to gather up, reshuffle and reconfigure into a freshly conceived potential.
Interesting, I said to myself, with all due humility.
PART FOUR
TWENTY
THE DETOX FACILITY I’d been confined to was in Westport, one of the tonier tanks in the area, courtesy of my ex-wife, who couldn’t bear any ex-husband of hers writhing with the DTs in so sordid a town as Bridgeport.
The first thing I did when I got out was find the nearest bar. I knew just the place, a fern bar on Boston Post Road that had worn into an approximation of a local joint, frequented by a jovial blend of barflies, retired stockbrokers and narcissistic Peter Pans working as underpaid golf pros and crewing on racing yachts up and down the Gold Coast. Better yet, the place was within walking distance of the detox facility, important for a newly released patient without a car.
It was early fall so the weather was okay for a walk. Over the last two weeks I’d been able to work out at the over-equipped, under-utilized gym several hours a day. I thought that was the main reason my headaches had subsided and my reflexes were returning to nearly normal. I still had a little money left over from the conflagration of the divorce and a fresh new debit card to get it when needed. Other than that, all I had were the clothes I was wearing when they admitted me and a cottage out on Long Island that I hadn’t seen in a while.
I was halfway to the bar when a dark blue Mercedes brushed by me and pulled on to the shoulder. I kept walking, hands in my pockets, head down.
The driver’s side door opened and Jason Fligh flowed out in a three-piece pinstriped suit and black silk duster. Big, but still evenly proportioned in middle age, he would have filled all the space in front of me even without the Mercedes.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said.
