sipping at the Ritz.
“Vodka. Ice. Swizzle stick. Nothing else,” I said to the bartender.
“You want a glass with that?”
“No. Bring it in your hands. I’ll suck it out with a straw.”
Ten years ago this might have escalated into something more serious, but we were both older and a lot smarter, and in no way a lot tougher. So he laughed along with the other jean-jacketed, grey-haired, rosacea- encrusted barflies and went to get my drink.
I opened the envelope and slid the contents out on the bar. I stuck a tiny Maglite in my mouth so I could read the papers under the low, neon-tinted light.
On top was the rental agreement signed by Robert Dobson and the owner, John Churchman. The lease was still in effect. Two years, five thousand a month, utilities, pool maintenance, lawn crew and trash pick-up generously included. From what Robin told me, that was considered quite the bargain, with comparable houses going for sixty K or more for the summer season. She speculated that Churchman discounted the rate to secure the full-time, two-year term. A bird in the hand.
Much more interesting was the police report, a grainy Xerox of a filled-out form. As Robin said, a neighbor’s noise complaint led to a visit by two Southampton Town patrolmen, one of whom wrote that the sound levels coming from the Dobson residence were “excessively voluminous.” An apparent resident, a young woman who identified herself as “Ikoo Kent Jew,” was waiting for them as they came up the front walk. As Robin reported, she immediately complied with the cops’ request to turn down the music, and that was that.
The cop who made out the report remarked on Iku’s willingness to cooperate, despite “The young woman’s obvious state of advanced intoxication as the result of unidentified substances.”
I took a sip of the easily identified substance in front of me on the bar and leafed through the rest of the file. Then I asked the bartender for a pen and wrote down the address of the place on a cocktail napkin.
“What’s ’at?” he asked, when I gave him back his pen. “Writin’ down a poem?”
“Yeah. An ode to drunken Japanese girls.”
“That’d be a haiku,” said the guy sitting next to me. “Japanese don’t go in for a lot of words.”
“This is why I like working behind a bar,” said the bartender. “You learn shit every day.”
“Do you know where this place is?” I asked him, spinning the napkin around so he could read the address.
He frowned at it for a few moments.
“Vedders Pond, right?” he asked the poetry expert sitting next to me. He studied the napkin.
“Yeah, not even a mile from here. Little shit-ass freshwater pond with a half a dozen places, give or take. Can’t build more’n that on the wetlands.”
I knew where he meant. I jogged through that area back when I was motivated to jog more than a few miles from my house. The last time I’d passed through I noticed how the original shacks had been upgraded to suit their new status as waterfront property. Robin and Laura were right to say it was a bargain. Waterfront was liquid gold in the Hamptons. They once proposed an inflated price for a house in the shadow of the Village water tower. When the buyer balked they pointed skyward and said, “Hey, check it out. Water view.”
I decided it was too late and I was too tired to do anything else that night but go home and discuss the day with my dog. And if I got lucky, have a chance to hear Amanda tell me about hers.
I pulled the Grand Prix into its usual parking spot next to the shack at the back of the property, leaving plenty of room for Amanda to zip by in her Audi. Eddie didn’t run up to greet me, but otherwise things were normal. On the other hand, he didn’t always do that, so it was normal enough.
When I got out of my car I looked toward Amanda’s place and was stopped by an unusual shadow pattern on the driveway. I’d been looking in that direction for a few years now, and no matter what my state of sobriety, I knew when it wasn’t like it was supposed to be.
I shut the door of the Grand Prix with conviction and rather than heading toward the cottage, crouched down and ran over to a swayback shed at the back of my property. It was hemmed in by a robust assortment of indigenous foliage, which helped cover a move around to the other side, where I saw a bulbous pale blue minivan, half submerged in the brush, and half gleaming in the light of Amanda’s post lamp.
In another reckless action, however foresworn, I strode up to the driver’s window with my left fist cocked and self-discipline temporarily disarmed.
I looked through the open window and in the dim light saw Marve Judson trying to adjust the radio dial to a more diverting station. “Where’s the dog?” I asked.
He jumped violently in his seat and said something like, “Christ, shit, what dog?”
“The dog that runs around my yard. Where is he?”
“I saw a dog run down the basement hatch a few hours ago,” he said.
With that Eddie ran back out the basement hatch, finally noticing I was there in the driveway. He jumped up on the side of the minivan and tried to get a look inside, excited by the prospect of fresh company.
That’s when the gun came out. Judson must have had it stowed somewhere near the center console. I watched the arch of travel until it was almost level with my head, then grabbed the barrel and snapped the gun and the hand holding it against the window frame. I stuck a few tidy left jabs into Judson’s face until he let go. Then I opened the car door and pulled him out.
I hit him again, then got a better grip on the front of his shirt. I dragged him across the lawn, opened the door, and dumped him on the kitchen floor. I ejected the clip and a round from the chamber of the silver .45 right before Amanda swept festively into the kitchen.
“Oh, my God,” she said, seeing the gun in my hand.
I used the barrel to point at the guy moaning on the floor.
“Again?” she asked.
“Meet Marve Judson,” I said. “I think I’ve told you about him.”
She held up a china plate overflowing with cheese wedges and crudites.
“How does he feel about Fromage d’Affinois?”
“We’ll ask him when he regains his faculties.”
“Your hand is bleeding.”
“Not my blood. Can I open that?” I asked, pointing to the bottle she was holding under her arm.
Eddie stopped for a second to sniff Marve’s head, then followed Amanda out to the screened-in porch, where she dropped off the cheese and came back with the bottle held like a club.
“Just in case,” she said, as she watched me hoist Marve up on his feet. I fed his face into the kitchen sink, rinsing off the blood and half drowning him, until he shook himself and put up a legitimate effort to fight back. I pulled him up and handed him a dish towel.
“What the hell were you thinking?” I asked him.
“I look after my own,” he said, through the soggy towel and his mashed-up face.
“Not too effectively.”
Marve was short and wiry and probably five years younger than me. His hair was as thin as he was, but ambitiously bolstered by the kind of hair dye women chuckle over in the ladies’ room. He was wearing a safari jacket, which would have been a tip-off even without the bad hair job and the steely set of the jaw. He was the kind of guy who might have been redeemed by a self-deprecating, worldly sense of humor, if he’d only had one.
“I think you broke one of my crowns,” he said through the towel.
“One’s better than nothing.”
“You’re supposed to be a degenerate alcoholic.”
“Still working on that.”
I grabbed him again, this time by the shoulder, and pulled him with me through the kitchen and out to the screened-in porch. Amanda followed with a pair of glasses and a cork-screw, though still looking tense and wary.
I sat Marve on the floor and took the stuffed chair, holding Eddie back from the nearly irresistible allure of an accessible, albeit hostile, human being at his own eye level.
I picked my cell phone out of my pocket and flipped it open.
“I don’t know what Honest Boy told you, but I only let one person per year pull a gun on me. The cop on the
