“I loved Iku. She was a superstar. A shooting star. Robert, Elaine and I had all lived together since our junior year in Florence. We wore each other like comfy old clothes. Too comfy. Iku lit up the world. Our little world. Having her around was the best thing that could have happened to us. Don’t lecture me on what it means to lose her.”
She seemed to be trying to stare me down.
I leaned across the table myself, meeting her halfway. “Fair enough,” I said. “So who killed her?”
She finally took off her black sunglasses, revealing a set of brilliant cobalt blue eyes.
“She loved all of us,” she said. “Why not try the ones she hated? The people she worked with. Clients and colleagues. She loathed them all.”
“Not all of them. Me she merely disliked.”
Zelda had something to say about that, but was interrupted by the shrill twitter of my cell phone. It took a few moments to remember how to answer the thing.
“Hey, Acquillo, good news,” said Jerome Gelb. “I’m leaving my wife. And I owe it all to you. I thought you should know right away.”
“Mazel tov. Though I told you I’d keep Marla to myself.”
“Sure, so you can keep a gun at my head. Not anymore,
“So how’d you get my name?”
“I got a call from Mason Thigpen.”
“How is the little craphead?” I asked.
“Talkative. He told me who you are and what you are.”
“An altruist?”
“A violent sociopath. He called to warn me about you. He said his security team was investigating your activities. They sound like some pretty tough customers.”
“The toughest.”
“But you know what?” he said. “I don’t care. I’m in way too good a mood. Before you know it, I’m going to be a free man. Of course, it’ll cost a fortune.”
“Yeah, but what cost freedom?”
“By the way, I also called Angel Valero to warn him, too. I gave him your name. He was very appreciative.”
“Who’s talkative now?”
“Ah, it’s a great day. I’m going to take some time off to smell the roses. You should think about doing that yourself.”
“All I smell is Hibiscus Paradise,” I said.
“Hey, Acquillo, one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Fuck you,” he shouted, then hung up.
I flicked the phone shut and stuffed it in my pocket.
“Sorry about that,” I said to Zelda.
“It’s hard to imagine the other side of
“It is for me, too, and I was listening to it.”
Zelda looked eager to rid herself and her Hobbit hole of my presence, and I couldn’t blame her. I made it easy by stumbling through the dark toward the front door without being asked. Though there was one question in serious need of answering.
“So did Iku actually have a boyfriend?”
She seemed to enjoy the question. Though now that I could see her eyes it seemed I knew even less about what she was thinking. So her smile might have been genuine, or I might have just thought it was in the dim light of the foyer.
“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think?”
On the way back to North Sea I was jarred again by the ring of my cell phone.
“You want to talk to me?” said a voice so deep I thought it was synthesized.
“Depends on who you are.”
“Angel Valero. You want to talk to me?”
“Yes. I want to talk to you.”
He gave me an address on Dune Drive in Southampton.
“Five o’clock. I’ll be down at the pool,” he said, then hung up.
“Doesn’t anybody say goodbye anymore?” I asked Eddie, but he couldn’t hear me with his head out the window, trolling the breeze for bugs and the streets for miniature French poodles to roust from their coddled complacency.
ELEVEN
I KILLED THE REST OF THE DAY walking around the docks of Sag Harbor looking at sailboats. With the likelihood of my buying one on par with a flight to the rings of Saturn, I’d never narrowed my preferences. Big boats, little boats, racers, cruisers, ketches, sloops, schooners and yawls, it was all the same to me. Equally desirable and equally out of reach.
But a thought struck me one day when I was working in my shop. What if I just built one myself? How hard would that be?
Impossible. Though maybe I could restore some miserable old derelict dredged off the bottom of the sea, or salvaged off the rocks after a hurricane. In that case, I’d need to get a little focus, clarify my priorities. This meant careful research of the type I was doing in Sag Harbor, walking around and looking at boats, with Eddie on a leash to avoid municipal sanctions and spare the resident waterfowl.
The process was easier than I thought it would be. The only boats I really liked were akin to Hodges’s Gulf Star—forty-something-foot, beat-up old live-aboards.
I didn’t want to race, I didn’t want to sail around the world. I wanted to sit with Eddie in the cockpit in a quiet harbor. I wanted to grill off the transom and listen to Miles Davis. And drink my vodka ration and smoke my Camel ration, then sail to another quiet harbor and drink whatever vodka was left over from all the dumb rationing. If I wanted, I could bring Amanda along and she could drink wine. There were any number of other things we could do on a boat if we put our minds to it.
This is a want, I said to myself. I want something. It had been so long since I’d felt that sensation it was hard at first to identify. But there it was. An unrequited yearning for an entirely unnecessary object of desire.
While still in the thrall, I drove Eddie back to Oak Point, where I let him out so he could wait in the backyard for Amanda to get home. Then I headed back toward the ocean.
On the way I called Sullivan, but his phone kicked me into his voice mail again. So I left another message, sticking to the facts, leaving out all speculation, conjecture and phantom sailboats.
Dune Drive was as good as its name, a curvy, two-lane road running parallel to the dunes and the shoreline. Scattered atop the dunes were oceanfront houses built mostly in the late twentieth century, a catalog of architectural triumph and catastrophe. The pampered landscaping had flourished in recent years, making it harder to see the houses, but Angel’s place was easy to spot. You’d probably find it in a magazine or academic text described in terms to inflame the imagination of design students and critics, but to me it was just a three- dimensional rectangle on stilts.
There was a square white gate with an intercom stuck to the gatepost. I pushed the button.
“Mr. Acquillo?” asked an accented voice a few registers above Valero’s.
“Yup.”
As the gates swung in I half expected the guy to say, “Enter ye, if thou darest.”
The cobblestone drive curved around plantings of dune grass and wild roses and formed a large parking area in front of the gleaming white staircase leading to the first floor of the house. Across the parking area, partly filled with the customary Jaguars, Porsches and Mercedes Benzes, was a white picket fence. Farther back were two smaller versions of the main house. Guest house and pool house by my astute reckoning.
