“Sylvia envy?”
“Just her youth.”
“Wasted as usual,” I said.
I’m practiced at ignoring bitter reality and allowing myself to live in various states of denial. But outright self-delusion has never been my strong suit. Which was too bad, because I really wanted to convince myself that the evening had enriched all of my operating theories.
“You haven’t told me about those men,” said Amanda.
I did the best I could, filling in at least some of the details of my dealings with both of them. It was a heavily censured report, but more than she enjoyed hearing.
“The big guy was Angel Valero. Iku’s client. Former client, I guess, technically.”
“Sylvia mentioned him.”
“She did.”
“He looked like he wanted to mash you up into an Italian meatball.”
“Franco-Italian meatball,” I said. “The kind of thing only Roger Estay would know how to make.”
“
“One of his girlfriends liked me. I liked her, too. But not as much as you,” I added quickly.
“How many girlfriends did he have?” she asked.
“Two I could see. I wasn’t invited into the house.”
“And what about Gelb?”
“He was Iku’s boss at Eisler, Johnson.”
“So they have that in common,” she said.
“At least.”
The rest of the night wasn’t very notable. I know because I got to see most of it. It was one of those nights where I had to settle for lying down as still as possible with my eyes forced shut. Jackie Swaitkowski once said that insomnia was like trying to sleep with a rock band in the bedroom. Only all the noise was in your head.
I finally did the only thing I knew how to do in those situations. I got up and poured a drink and lit a cigarette, promising myself to deduct it from the next day’s budget, and settled in at the table on the screened-in porch. I stared at the Little Peconic Bay with questions roiling my brain. I’d invested a lot of time trying to wring answers from that edgy little body of water, with no success. But I continued to hold out hope until about 7:30 in the morning, when I gave up and called Joe Sullivan.
“If you had Iku Kinjo’s computer, what would you normally look for?” I asked.
“I’d look for the report from forensics. They do all the looking.”
“Can I talk to them?” I asked.
“You can talk to me. I can talk to them.”
“I don’t know what questions to ask.”
“Yeah, you do. You just don’t want to share.”
He was right. It was a bad habit.
“I’d want to know everything she ever wrote relating to Bobby Dobson and Angel Valero. I’d want to see private logs, journals, love letters, confidential memos and photographs. Financial spreadsheets. To-do lists. Shopping lists.”
“That’s all? How come you don’t want to read all her email? Inbox, sent, deleted and saved. What about a full record of her Internet habits? Websites visited. Click-throughs. Searches. Social networking sites. Chat rooms. Blogs read and responded to. Rants. How about iTunes and YouTube downloads? How come you don’t want the whole fucking hard drive?”
“Because I don’t know what any of those things are.”
It got quiet on the other end of the line.
“You might think about catching up with the contemporary world there, MIT,” he said finally.
“You’re right. Though I did get a cell phone. Did you know you can call people from your car or when you’re sitting on the can?”
“People like the victim run their whole lives on the computer, and forensics can get it all. The public thinks they can delete what they want, hide what they write or do online, but they can’t. It’s all available. No secrets. No privacy, and nobody seems to care but the people who make a career whining about it.”
“So where is it?” I asked.
“What?”
“The computer.”
“Stupid,” he said.
“What’s stupid?”
“I am. For not realizing that was an Ethernet connection in the girl’s room. Or asking anybody about it. I oughta know better.”
Sullivan was one of those intelligent people who grew up in a world that assumed otherwise, based entirely on your relatives, your neighborhood, your choice of profession. It used to annoy me, but I’d since developed a tactful way of overcoming his inferiority complex.
“Pretty stupid. But I’ve seen stupider,” I told him.
“Thanks, Sam. That makes it better.”
“So where do you think it is?” I said.
“Vedders Pond. I’ve already called in the divers.”
“That’s where I’d start. But if you find it, there’s a bigger question.”
“What?” he asked.
“Who put it there?”
FOURTEEN
I REMEMBER THOSE SCIENCE CLASS analogies of the sun as a basketball and the earth as a pea. It’s the same for the Hamptons and New York City. We have more room out here, but the City is a whole lot bigger.
To say people in the Hamptons have mixed feelings about the colossus next door would be to understate the matter by an appropriately vast degree. Even for people who work in town and live here when they can. No matter what you want to believe, the Hamptons are an adjunct of the Big City—an appendage. We’re in her orbit, her gravitational pull, and utterly in her thrall.
Which is one of the reasons I like driving into town. To see the big girl in all her arrogant glory. The only question was how I drove—or more precisely, in what.
“You’re thinking of taking the Audi, aren’t you,” said Amanda.
“Why would I think that?” I lied.
“I’ll drive the pickup.”
“Nah. I’ll drive the pickup. If you need to haul a few tons of stuff, you can use the Grand Prix,” I said.
So I ended up in Amanda’s little red truck, with Eddie next to me in the passenger seat, heading into New York City. It was a compromise, admittedly. It wasn’t easy for me to accept help from anyone, least of all my rich girlfriend. But driving the Grand Prix over the lunar landscapes of Manhattan was getting to be a hit-or-miss proposition, and I could do without the added stress.
I’d booked a hotel in Tribeca that allowed dogs. “Pet friendly” is how they put it, which sounded more like a predilection than a policy. The ad in the
I had the rough edges of a plan. I’d drive in before rush hour, settle Eddie into the room, take my daughter out to dinner, then figure out the rest of the plan while testing the legitimacy of the bar’s claim.
I executed everything but the figuring out part.
The best I could do was wake up early enough to walk Eddie, bring him back to the room and haul myself up to the West Side in time to catch Bobby Dobson getting ready for work.
As I pushed the button on the panel outside his building, I was still waiting for a bolt of inspiration.
“Who’s there?” said a male voice over the scratchy intercom.
“It’s Jerome,” I said, my inflection pitched to Westchester by way of Brighton Beach. “We need to talk. Let
