refrigerators so the cops could pick it up in the morning. I had to endure some more jovial sarcasm, but he said okay. I thanked him for his time, and he did me the honor of letting it go at that.
When we made it out to the sidewalk I called Joe Sullivan, waking him up.
“I think I discovered the brains of the operation,” I said.
I waited while he apologized to his wife and found a quiet place to talk.
“This had better be good,” he said.
I didn’t disappoint him. Except that I’d waited until then to call him. I didn’t offer any sort of defense, and he was too tired to rail at me for more than a few minutes, so I got off the phone in relatively short order.
“So what now?” Amanda asked.
I looked around the hospital parking lot, searching for guidance.
“I know a place a few blocks from here that serves drinks by the glass,” I said, as if assaulted by a revelation.
“How novel,” she said.
“I think it’s gonna catch on. With the right public support.”
The hostess at the big restaurant on Main Street found two stools to pull up to the crowded bar, a courtesy I credited to Amanda’s effective social graces. Between the pumped-up stereo and competing conversational blather, it was almost too noisy to talk. The ubiquitous flat-screen TVs blinked and flashed at the corner of my eye, but the vodka was cold and the light a warm amber glow, making the women look as great as they hoped for and Amanda impossibly beautiful.
“So,” said Amanda, “as you’d say to me, theories?”
“You need to go stay with Burton. Have the biggest guys off your crew pick you up and drop you off. Maybe get a dog. Eddie’ll write up the specs.”
“You’re concerned.”
“I am. I’m not used to this kind of heat. A few meatballs here and there, no problem. But these people, out of my league. I don’t want something to happen to you or Eddie because I didn’t take it seriously.”
“What people?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I need to concentrate, which’ll be hard if I’m constantly worried about you.”
Faced with that kind of indisputable logic, there wasn’t much she could say.
“No way I’m being driven out of my own house. I’ve faced worse than this. Just give me one of those guns you took off Con Globe security. My mother taught me how to shoot,” and more of the same.
I waited it out.
“I’ll call Isabella,” I said. “She’ll get the east wing ready.”
On the stagger back to the car she put both arms around me and squeezed.
“You don’t want me to be horribly murdered,” she said. “But you don’t think I care if the same thing happens to you.”
“It won’t.”
“You don’t know that. I can’t bear another gigantic loss.”
Loss was something Amanda knew a lot about. When I first met her, she’d lost her only child and only parent. Her grief was most of what was left. And I was a fine one to turn to, addled by loss and regret of another sort. Now here we were, in a truce with grave misfortune, which I was threatening for no other reason than the death of my old boss’s girlfriend.
“I’m in it, now,” I said. “The only way out is through.”
A faint breeze, cool and hollow, blew between us, but she squeezed harder and left it at that.
We drove back to Oak Point. While Amanda packed up her things and connected with Isabella, Burton’s major domo, I put a few weeks’ worth of Eddie’s food, Big Dog biscuits, tennis balls, dog bed and the only chew toy he hadn’t chewed to oblivion into a big garbage bag and brought it out to Amanda’s Audi.
“He’ll have to forage locally for rotten logs and bird carcasses.”
“I didn’t tell Isabella about a dog.”
“Better a surprise.”
On the way over Burton called my cell phone. I told him about what I knew, and what I feared. He backed the plan.
“I’ll have Fernando and Jarek join her crew. Both handy with pneumatic nailers and throwing knives.”
The atmosphere inside the Audi was tense and quiet. Eddie sat up in the back seat and panted. Amanda fiddled with her seat belt and sighed.
“You’ll visit,” she said.
“I’ll visit, I’ll call, I’ll write long letters.”
The big white gate that guarded the entrance to Burton’s long driveway opened as we approached. We made the four-hundred-mile drive through the bordering privet hedges in decent time, and were met at the front porch of the main house by Isabella, along with a tall, tattooed ghoul with kinky pink hair and another hard case that looked like Charles Bronson’s anemic, mentally ill younger brother. Part of Burton’s domestic staff, most of whom had stayed on after his defense practice saved them from long jail terms, or worse.
Introductions were made all around, after which we got Amanda and Eddie settled in, and spent a few hours talking things over with Burton. By then it was pretty late, so it was easy for me to slip away and drive back to Oak Point, where I sat up for another few hours and smoked a month’s ration of cigarettes, nursed a single tumbler of Absolut, listened to Etta James and pretended I wasn’t spooked by every little sound in the night.
I was back where I’d started. On Oak Point, alone in the dark.
EIGHTEEN
LATE THE NEXT DAY I heard a sound I’d never heard before. I was in Amanda’s pickup, which I almost ran off the road searching around the dashboard for the source, realizing eventually it was coming from my pocket.
It was my cell phone. A flashing alert told me I had a voice message waiting. I’d retrieved plenty of these before without all the frantic notification. I studied the little screen and saw that the message had been marked urgent. It was from Joe Sullivan.
“The doc was right about the brain,” he said. “Riverhead says it could have come from any slaughterhouse. They’re also working on the photograph of Amanda, but don’t expect much.”
I told him that I’d sent Amanda over to Burton’s, which made him happy. He said Will Ervin would stay close to her during the day. I thanked him.
“You were also right about unknown prints A, B and C,” he said. “Elaine Brooks, Zelda Fitzgerald and John Churchman, owner of the property, in that order. We interviewed Churchman already, doesn’t know nothing about nothing, and why would he? He’s living on his boat, a few slips down from Hodges at Hawk Pond, if you want to waste your own time.”
I was only a few blocks from Hawk Pond, so I turned off North Sea Road and followed the creek that fed the pond that eventually flowed out into the Little Peconic Bay. First I knocked on the weatherboards on Hodges’s old Gulf Star, but he wasn’t home. In the process I stirred up his two shih tzus, whose crazed yapping attracted the annoyed attention of the next-door neighbor, a woman with round, apple-red cheeks and a cloud of white hair.
“Cute dogs, but noisier than sin,” she said, her head poking up out of the companionway of her boat, her hand shielding her eyes against the pure sun of early fall.
“Do you know which of these boats is John Churchman’s?” I asked her.
“Not that one. That’s Paul Hodges.”
“I know. He’s a friend of mine. I’m actually looking for John Churchman.”
She jerked her thumb to the left.
“Three slips down. Sportin’ Life.”
“That’s his boat?”
She shook her head.
“The boat’s name is
“Your husband given to sarcasm?”
