store Jason’s cream and preserve the ice. Then I went out to the front porch and took down most of the storm windows to let the cooling breeze from the Little Peconic cleanse some of the must out of the air. I got us both ashtrays and we settled into the hard wicker chairs my mother kept out there to hold stacks of magazines and shopping bags filled with other shopping bags, all of which I’d tossed out at the first opportunity. I turned on a lamp that threw off a meager light. We could still see the moon hanging fat and orange just above the horizon, casting a wedge-shaped wash of light across the Little Peconic Bay.
“Can I ask you something?” said Jason. “You don’t have to answer.”
Though you always have to answer, don’t you.
“What?”
“Why’d you do it? What happened?”
Jason grew up with almost nothing but a set of parents who mandated he stay at the top of his class from kindergarten through the doctoral program in economics at Stanford, which he did, helped along the way by football scholarships and a hundred part-time jobs. Jason was the type of man who worked at remembering his whole life, and kept that perspective within view every day. To him, the thought of destroying a career, and consequently a marriage, and rounding it out by a swirling descent into drunken oblivion, fell below anathema to the depths of abomination.
“It was all gone long before it was over,” I told him.
He drew in the last tolerable mouthful of cigar smoke and shot it above his head at the ceiling.
“Why didn’t you start fixing things before it got to that point?” he asked.
I didn’t have much of an answer for him, even after I tried for a few minutes to dredge one up.
“I was too busy doing the work to look after my job,” I said.
He looked unsatisfied but didn’t press it. We drew down the Dewar’s a little more in comfortable silence. Then, before Jason went to bed I tried to thank him, suddenly feeling the enormity of his kindness bearing down. He waved it away with an easy grin.
“So, this is your plan?” he asked me.
“It wasn’t before you asked me, but I guess it is now. This is the whole plan. Good through tomorrow morning when we eat the cinnamon buns.”
“Good enough for me,” he said, leaving me alone on the porch where I fell asleep and stayed well into the middle of the next morning, when I woke up to find him gone. A sturdy bodhisattva in a dark blue Mercedes, delivering me unto the Little Peconic Bay, a novitiate in the ways of bewildered anguish.
TWENTY-ONE
AFTER MY VISIT with Roberta Camacho I had an escort on the way back to North Sea. It was a plain- wrapper Crown Victoria just like Sullivan’s, only it wasn’t Sullivan. Similar sunglasses, but beyond that Lionel Veckstrom was a whole different kind of cat.
The day had turned surly, with a low cloud cover turning the sky a gray mud. A thin mist covered the pitted windshield of the Grand Prix, slowing me down, mindful of how the big car handled over a slick road surface. Veckstrom slowed with me, maintaining his distance.
I let him tail me as far as Towd Pond, where there was a restaurant I rarely went to, but figured I’d get coffee at the bar. I knew what was coming and I didn’t want the guy at my house. No particular reason, I just didn’t have the hospitality in me. Must have been the crummy weather.
I had a cup of hazelnut in a thick china mug in front of me by the time he made it to the next seat over. It reminded me of my last encounter with Patrick Getty. Maybe I should call him and his boys and we could all have a little get-together.
“Workin’ off another hangover?” he asked me as he sat down.
“Ask my lawyer. Jackie Swaitkowski. But don’t stand too close when you do.”
“Tough broad.”
“Especially when you call her a broad. Listen, hero,” I turned and said to him. “I’ve already done one stupid thing today. I may have more in me, but I’ll pass on talking to you. Provoked or otherwise.”
He shrugged.
“It’s a free country. At least for me. I can sit here and talk to myself and nobody can say much about it. I might even talk a little about how your case is going, if I was feeling like it.”
“It’s going great. Thanks anyway.”
“Bernie Gelman told me you had a mouth. When it wasn’t full of booze.”
“Especially then. Who’s Bernie Gelman?”
“Bridgeport, Connecticut investigator. We worked together in Duchess County in the day.”
I remembered. A short greasy little guy with bad skin and rapidly receding crown of curly black hair. Looked very unhappy at Antoine and Walter Bick’s trial. I could see why, given how he wanted it to turn out.
“That surprises me,” I said, honestly. “I’d expect you to attract a bigger thinker.”
“I said I worked with him. I didn’t say I liked him. I didn’t even know he was in Bridgeport till I started looking into you. I learned a lot of things.”
“I’m a big proponent of life-long learning. Been trying to get through Immanuel Kant. You’re a smart guy, maybe you could help me figure him out.”
“Don’t know Kant. Too busy studying Enrico Ferri and James Q. Wilson. They both have a lot to say about people like you.”
I swiveled around in my stool and faced him, even as the little Jackie Swaitkowski inside my head told me not to.
“Excellent. More free psychoanalysis. Can’t have too much of that.”
Veckstrom was still well-dressed in a white shirt, club tie and raw silk sport coat. His face had a scrubbed and close-shaven look. No blemishes, no hairs sticking out of the wrong places. Not hard to interpret the psychology there. It said: I might have chosen to be a cop because the profession interests me, but don’t think I’m one of them. I live on a higher plane, and there’s no room here for you.
“They never found the punks who killed your father. Hardly tried, is how I heard it. No point. Hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys in those days. Piss you off, did it?”
I pointed my finger at him.
“Come on, Veckstrom. You gotta do better than that. The trauma of a murdered father, his killers gone free, instilling in the young man antisocial tendencies. Manifest in a variety of ways—affiliations with lowlifes, violent and self-destructive behaviors, a wicked bad temper and a pronounced disinterest in regular church attendance.”
“You forgot the repressed lust for revenge. Unfocused, free-floating and easily attached to any person who might represent, symbolically, the unpunished killers. Big guys with big mouths. Nasty arrogant buggers. Swaggering around threatening old men and pretty girls.”
“Criminals,” I said, warming to the topic. “People who’d proven in the past they were also willing and able to break a few social conventions.”
“Very good.”
“Only I didn’t know that about Patrick and his boys at the time. I thought they were just a bunch of drunken builders coming off a hard winter, just like we were. Maybe not with the same style, but the same idea.”
Veckstrom looked like he’d lost track, but tried not to show it.
“You know Patrick Getty had done time,” I said. “You’d have to know that.”
“Of course,” he said, recovering. “Exactly my point.”
“Right. So you know where.”
“Yeah. Hungerford. Medium security. Should have been harder time, in my opinion, but that’s your typical prosecution. Rather cut a deal than deal with the paperwork.”
“Hungerford. Really.”
“Yeah. Pussy time,” he said.
“Pussy prosecutors. Piss you off, don’t they?” I asked him. “Makes you just want to kill somebody, doesn’t it?”
He smiled a humorless smile and waved the bartender over to order his own cup of coffee. I knew the tactic. Buying time.
