cigarette and passing mine across the table.
“I didn’t know you were expanding,” I said.
“We’re not. But if we were, you’d be on the plaque.”
“It’d say ‘Asshole Numero Uno of Southampton,’” said Veckstrom.
“Bilingual,” said Jackie. “Must be handy with our new population specs.”
“You mean population Spics?” said Veckstrom.
Ross blanched.
“I’m impressed that he thinks that would bother us, because it does. Very perceptive,” I said to Ross. “Pero el todavia es un pedazo de mierda debajo los pies.”
“Speak French and I’ll be impressed,” said Veckstrom.
“Va se faire foutre,” said Jackie.
Veckstrom had been a brilliant detective in Lower Manhattan. He dressed like a dandy, disdained his fellow cops and cracked cases everyone else thought uncrackable. He stayed on the job while going to law school at night, passed the bar, then inexplicably moved out to the Hamptons and went to work for Ross. It was harder to build a legend out here, but he’d tried hard enough by making me his special project. So far unsuccessfully, but then again, he was what he was. Another virtuoso shit who truly hated me.
“I don’t know about the three of you, but I’ve got other things to do today,” said Ross, scrounging around a soft pack of Winstons. “So what say we just get this done without all the parry and thrust.”
“No offense, boss,” said Veckstrom, “but don’t you have to thrust before you can parry?”
Ross’s look took the temperature of the room down about forty degrees. Veckstrom threw up his hands and sat back in his chair.
“So, Sam,” said Ross, lighting another Winston off the one he already had in his mouth. He shook one out for me. I took it and gave it to Jackie. Ross gave me another one and we all lit up.
“Could you people hang on there for a second while I go get an Aqua-Lung?” said Veckstrom.
“So, Sam,” Ross repeated, “what’s going on?”
“I’ve been talking to some of my old friends from Con Globe about getting back in the game. Carpentry’s honest work, but, you know, I used to drive a nice car and have a little leeway between hand and mouth.”
“Or foot in mouth,” said Veckstrom.
“Ross?” said Jackie.
“Shut up,” Ross said without looking at Veckstrom, who shrugged and sat back in his chair.
“Back in the day,” I went on, “there was this very smart young woman who worked with me on a project for my company. We hit it off, professionally. I liked what she did and how she thought, and decided if I was going to try to get back in, I’d do what she did. Consult. Be a pro from Dover.”
“Iku Kinjo,” said Jackie, for the record.
“So I went to see her in the City, but they told me she’d basically gone AWOL. Never showed up for work one day, no word since. But they did tell me if I happened to run into her, have her call, yadda-yadda. This piqued my curiosity, of course. And you know how that goes,” I said to Ross.
“Unfortunately.”
“On a hunch I thought she might be hiding out in the Hamptons, so I started looking around for her. Nothing else to do, why not? Then I got a few leads, tracked down a friend of hers, went to call on him, and here we are.”
I sat back, leaving the hand with the cigarette on the table to flick ashes into the ashtray.
“What a crock,” said Veckstrom to Jackie.
Jackie looked at Ross.
“Do we always have to endure this charade of hostility?” she asked him.
“No charade,” said Veckstrom, convincingly.
“Any time you want, we can settle this outside,” said Jackie.
“I’m not afraid of the old rummy.”
“I’m not talking about him,” she said.
Ross liked that. He smiled and lit new cigarettes for everybody but Veckstrom, who looked half-asphyxiated already.
“Mr. Acquillo and Ms. Swaitkowski are here voluntarily, detective. We’re just havin’ a good old chat.”
Ross liked to affect what he thought was the manner of a pre–
“I know the drill, boys,” I told them. “I’ll be available whenever you want to talk. If I think of anything else, I’ll call. If I learn anything that might help the case, I’ll call. Otherwise, I keep my nose out of it.”
“Huh,” said Ross.
Veckstrom looked skeptical, as did Jackie, which I hoped the other two didn’t notice.
“Okay?” I asked, stubbing out the cigarette and getting out of my chair.
“Just one thing,” said Ross, gravely.
I sat back down again. Jackie studied his face, holding her breath.
“What?”
“Tickets to the Police Ball. You have yours yet?” he asked Jackie.
“Christ, Ross. You know I do.”
“What about him?”
“Put two more on my tab,” said Jackie. “That’s the limit before a charge of official misconduct kicks in.”
We left Ross and Veckstrom in the interrogation room and cruised through the noisy squad room and back out into the intimidation-free air. I took a deep breath.
“Is Veckstrom a dickless prick or what?” Jackie asked.
“I think that question carries an interior contradiction.”
“Does this mean Sullivan’s already off the case?”
Joe and Veckstrom were Southampton’s only plainclothes-men, Sullivan being the junior partner. There was little love lost within the Detectives Unit.
“Nah. Ross always brings in Veckstrom for our little chats. It’s his good cop–dickless cop technique.”
“You need to be careful,” she told me. “Ross doesn’t like it when you lie to him.”
“I’m not lying. I’m just not sharing all the facts. I will when I can.”
“You’re not stopping, are you? How come? You did what Donovan asked you to do.”
She was right. That was the deal I insisted on with Donovan—that all I had to do was find Iku, dead or alive. But that was when she was just a memory of an ambitious young kid, compelling in her intelligence but hardly likeable. And then when Donovan talked about her, the memory turned into an abstraction, almost a fiction, as I tried to put the two of them together in my mind. The photo from Eisler’s annual report reinforced the illusion that she wasn’t quite real, that she was just an artifice conjured by the mind of an aging plutocrat and Randall Dodge’s computer wizardry.
It wasn’t until I saw her dead, now truly and irrevocably lost, that she became real. Lying there in her own blood, still a kid in my eyes, still ambitious and impatient, desperate to get to the next big thing.
I found a dead overachiever, an orphan, a tragic victim, but I still didn’t find her.
“It used to be about money,” I told Jackie. “Now it’s not.”
“What’s wrong with money?”
“Money’s good,” I agreed. “Sometimes.”
“If I heard your tape right, you’ve got some coming from George Donovan.”
“I told him about Iku. He wanted me to call later, but I can’t right now. We need time to figure out what happened.”
“We?”
I tightened her bolotie, then left her outside the station and went back to Oak Point and the Adirondacks on the breakwater at the edge of the lawn. Eddie was glad to be out running around the place again, working out the kinks. I wished Amanda was there to sit with me, but she was busy with her construction projects and had enough on her mind without all this.
