“With all the dust stirred up when you left the company, I wasn’t able to express to you what I truly felt,” he said.
I held up my hand to ward him off. This wasn’t part of the deal.
“You don’t have to. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Yes it does. I’m sorry about what happened. I know it was partly my fault. I didn’t realize all the implications at the time. If I had, I might have chosen a different course.”
I could feel two balls of something forming somewhere around my midsection. One fury, the other regret, leavened with a strange, brainless kind of concern for George Donovan. Loathsome emotions all.
There were things I could have said to him at that moment, but none of them sounded right in my head, so I kept my mouth shut and just left, with Donovan watching me go—pale, thin and alone in his silent house, his stone and mortar fortress home.
I half expected to be pulled over by the Connecticut State Police on the way down the Merritt Parkway, George Donovan having had a sudden change of heart. But I made it all the way to the border without incident.
From there I went into the City and booked myself into a hotel I used to stay at when I had an early meeting at Con Globe headquarters on Seventh Avenue. It was a stubby little place sandwiched between high-rises, a real City hotel with Italian doormen, Nigerian desk clerks and twelve-inch baseboards groaning under two inches of off- white paint. The radiators rattled and the carpets smelled of cigars and the elevator still had a guy working the sloppy brass controller, sitting on a milk crate, his belly stuffed inside a pair of grey polyester pants, his nails chipped and yellow, his breath a dank, sweet tribute to cheap liquor.
I slept until the sun came up, then I called Joe Sullivan on his cell phone. He was at the twenty-four-hour diner in Hampton Bays having breakfast with Ackerman.
“What did you do with him all night?” I asked.
“I took him over to Hodges’s boat and cuffed him to a handhold inside the quarter berth. I took the salon. The wind was up and the boat rocked like a cradle. We slept like babies.”
“I need you to let him go.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
I told him about my discussion with George Donovan, including everything about his involvement with the missing Iku Kinjo, and his attempt at extorting my help in finding her, but leaving out the preceding B&E. No sense further straining his already strained sense of propriety. Instead, I worked on persuading him that Ackerman posed little threat to the community.
“He’s not a criminal, just criminally stupid,” I said. “Anyway, you like it when I owe you a favor.”
That tipped the scales. Sullivan kept me on the line while he told Ackerman he could go, as long as he left behind his gun and a promise to stay clear of Eastern Suffolk County for the next twenty years. I didn’t hear Ackerman’s reply, but I guess he’d agree to anything to get out from under Sullivan’s baleful glare.
After I hung up I called Amanda and told her everything that had happened. Every detail I could remember. She almost seemed convinced that I was being fully candid and forthcoming. Which I was, almost. I diverted her by asking about the morning walk she took with Eddie and what she was making for breakfast. She didn’t fall for it.
“Can I ask you to take care of yourself, even if I don’t believe you truly will?” she asked.
“I will. In fact, I’m going back to bed for a few hours. Try to catch up on my sleep.”
Which I did, with surprising success. Then I showered, shaved and put on jeans and a black T-shirt under the blue blazer. And black shitkickers. City garb. Then I called Allison, waking her up.
“Time to get up, honey. It’s the crack of eleven-thirty,” I said.
She said something like “mumph-umph” and coughed into the phone.
“Hold that thought,” I said. “I’ll be there in a half hour with coffee and bagels.”
“You can’t get here that fast,” she squeaked out.
“I can if I’m only thirty blocks away.”
Allison had a studio up on the West Side where she lived and designed on her own computer after recognizing she couldn’t manage a regular full-time job. She didn’t want it and full-time employers didn’t want her. Luckily, graphic arts was the kind of thing you could do as a freelancer and still do pretty well.
I visited her place whenever I could. I always fed her lunch, which would take about the time needed to catch up and stay clear of the big emotional bear traps that would open in front of us if we lingered too long in one place.
But that was fine. Compared to where we used to be, this was paradise.
I was always glad to see her. I’d be glad to see anyone for whom I feel blind, unconditional love and devotion. Even when she met me on the sidewalk outside her apartment, red-eyed, with her dirty blonde hair looking like her mother’s did when I first saw her walking across Kenmore Square, clutching her books to her chest as if expecting someone to leap out of a manhole and snatch them out of her arms.
“I can’t let you see the place right now,” she said, grabbing my arm and moving me down the sidewalk. “I’ve been cranking on this big crappy job all week and there’s crappy stuff all over everywhere. And no, there’s no boy in there.”
“If there was I could get him to clean up the place.”
She pulled me along quietly before asking the usual questions.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m great,” I said. She looked suspicious. “Honestly. Everything’s great.”
“Everything’s always great. You sure there’s nothing you need to tell me?”
“Such trust.”
She trusted me enough to stop asking, though she didn’t look entirely convinced. I couldn’t blame her.
She brightened considerably after her first cup of coffee. I listened attentively while she told me about her big job. I held eye contact and asked questions to help propel the narrative and demonstrate how well I was listening. These were things I’d learned from my friend Rosaline Arnold, a psychologist. Things that hadn’t come naturally to me when Allison was growing up, when she really needed them. But Rosaline had convinced me that late was better than never, and based on how things were going with Allison, she was right.
When I thought it was safe to take the floor, I told her that Amanda and I were getting along reasonably well. Better than ever. I told her before she had a chance to ask, voluntarily sharing intimate emotional information. Something else I’d been taught by Rosaline. Both the content and delivery were pleasing to Allison. She adored Amanda, and the feelings were returned. This was a total, joyful mystery to me. Maybe some day Rosaline could explain it all.
When we were back on the sidewalk she actually hugged me for the first time since I’d left her mother.
“If you mess this up with Amanda I’ll knock you on the head,” she said into my shirtfront before letting me go, and without another look headed back to her messy apartment and big crappy job.
Eisler, Johnson occupied the top fifth of a glassy skyscraper on Madison Avenue. I breezed past the airtight security in the building’s lobby and took the elevator, which opened directly into a starkly appointed reception area—all sharp-edged metal furniture, pale grey walls and Pop Art.
The receptionist was a reedy little guy with a shaved head and a complexion that matched the decor. Eisler, Johnson must have hired a first-rate interior designer. I walked up to him and asked for Iku Kinjo. What I got back was a blank stare. I asked for her again.
“She’s not here,” he said.
“When will she be back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then please call someone who does.”
“Do you have an appointment?” he asked, still looking colorless and blank.
“Yes. And I expect someone here to honor it.”
“Can I have a name?”
“Burton Lewis. Lewis and Shanley.”
Dropping Burton’s name always had a predictable effect. He was a big deal in the City, running a gigantic law