back of your car.”
“Me, too,” I said, “and I’m certain there is one. They didn’t just ram into me, they tried to shoot me.”
“I don’t know if that’s so strange, Sam,” said Ross. “I can think of a lot of people who’d like to shoot you. Sometimes I want to shoot you myself.”
“Ever heard of
“Cerberus? The ugly dog guarding the gates of hell?” he asked. “Christ, has that damn thing got loose again?”
Jackie rolled her eyes up at the ceiling.
“Honestly, Ross.”
“What else did he tell you?”
“That pretty soon America will have out-sourced our entire civilization. But we knew that already.”
“The Chinese can have my job any time they want it,” said Ross. “They can figure out how to deal with Venezuelan hit men.”
“So you know they were Venezuelan,” I said.
“Geez, Sam, let’s try something different this time. Why don’t you tell me everything you know and I’ll tell you everything I know, so we both end up knowing the same things?”
I tried again to remember everything I felt okay telling him, which was most of it. He returned the favor by telling me he was the Chief of Police investigating a homicide and didn’t tell God what he knew until the case was cleared and the perp had died in prison or gone to the electric chair. Which sounds like a one-sided standoff, but I was good at reading between Ross Semple’s tortured lines. He liked having me out there poking around this one, especially since he was reasonably sure I hadn’t done it myself, which wasn’t often the case. And maybe he’d get lucky and catch the next guy who came after me, which could uncork the whole mess. Better bait than a red herring any day.
So after tossing out a few more softballs, he let us leave without even strong-arming Jackie into running an ad in the Police Ball program guide.
“Don’t get too comfy,” said Jackie, as we scooped up Amanda and walked out to the parking lot. “You’re not done with this yet.”
“Not until I fix my car,” I said.
“Oh, heavens. Why would you do that?” said Jackie.
“It’s my car.”
“It’s not a car, dear. It’s a battleship,” said Amanda.
“So far on the winning side of the battle. When do you think the cops’ll give it back?” I asked Jackie. “I’m a little worried about the frame. Be a bitch to find a straightener big enough.”
I let Jackie give me the usual warnings, remonstrances and pleas for sanity before she left in her pickup and we jumped into ours, the official vehicle of the East End’s local populace.
Amanda took the driver’s seat and started the engine.
“Where to, boss?” she said.
“Oak Point.”
“I know the place,” she said.
“Proceed briskly, but keep an eye on the rearview.”
“As unfunny as that is, at least you’re beginning to take this seriously.”
“St. Francis?” she asked.
“Winston Churchill. A hedonist more to my taste.”
“Indomitable?”
“Unrepentant.”
Eddie had everything under control when we got back. He greeted me first, but fussed more over Amanda. I attributed that to her lavish distribution of Big Dog biscuits and crostini slathered with Fromage d’Affinois.
I tried to use the rest of the day to build lawn ornamentation for Frank Entwhistle, but my mind stubbornly refused to concentrate on the task. Instead, I sat at my drawing table and allowed discontinuous images of Iku Kinjo, George Donovan and dead Venezuelans to crowd into the under-equipped, overlit little workspace.
This was apparently a time-consuming enterprise, because I was surprised to get a call from Amanda telling me it was already well past cocktail hour and we were still without food or drink.
I took a shower, and then in accordance with our usual division of labor, I stirred gin and Tom Collins mix into an icy tumbler and Amanda filled a bowl with yellow grapes. We lugged it all out to the edge of the breakwater, along with sweatshirts and flannel blankets, embracing the cooling season on its own terms.
“So what are you thinking now?” asked Amanda. “You must be thinking something.”
“I need to spend more time on the computer.”
“You don’t have a computer,” she said.
“Not working on it. Finding it.”
“Iku’s.”
“Sullivan’s scouring Vedders Pond. Worth doing, but it could be in a landfill somewhere, gone forever.”
“Unless the killer kept it,” she said.
“That’s what Bobby Dobson said.”
She asked what I thought the computer would tell me. I said I didn’t know, but probably a lot. It was a vast repository of data, ready to give up its secrets if you knew where, and how, to look. I talked about patterns and rhythms, but also how anomalies stand out against a background of consistencies, speed bumps on the smooth road surface. I told her you can read stress in even the most innocuous exchange, if you look for it. That you have to read the voice, not just interpret the words.
“Sounds like voodoo.”
“More like jazz,” I said.
“Okay.”
“Human language isn’t just the notes, it’s how they’re put together and played. Listen to a little early Coltrane before you boot up.”
“You learned this at MIT?”
“First semester, freshman year.”
From there we transitioned onto more productive topics, like the price of lumber and the relative merits of Tom Collins mix over standard tonic water and lime. Thus agreeably occupied, we burned up the early evening, which was relatively warm, and slipped into solid night, which wasn’t.
“I’m cold,” said Amanda.
“Cold, of course. Explains the shaking.”
We each suffered an overflowing armload of grape stems, glassware and dog biscuits, and made our unbalanced way across the broad lawn. Eddie, always overjoyed to head for the next thing, whatever it was, bounded toward my cottage, thinking that was our destination.
Partway there he broke into a full run, barking furiously.
We both stopped and looked into the blacked-out space between us and the cottage, made more so by the dim glow of the light above the front door.
Eddie’s bark went up another register.
I dropped the stuff I was holding and grabbed Amanda’s arm, causing her to drop her own load. I bent over and ran, pulling her along, at least for a few seconds before she started to run in earnest. I held on to her hand, and she dragged me across the last few yards of lawn to the small porch on the side of the cottage. We slid between a pair of bushy yews and dropped to the ground.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“No idea.”
“Maybe it’s nothing. We’re just being jumpy,” she said.
“He never barks like that.”
“He doesn’t.”
