Hard Stop (22 page)

“Pulled strings?” I asked her, quietly.

“Threw money.”

Before the blonde had a chance to pass us off to the choirboys I asked her if she was Sylvia Shandy.

It took her aback.

“I am,” she said, with an up-speak lilt suggesting she might not be Sylvia Shandy if that was the safer answer.

I put out my hand, which she shook with the same reservations.

“I’m Sam Acquillo. This is Amanda Anselma. I was a friend of Iku Kinjo.”

She dropped my hand like it last held Iku’s corpse.

“Jesus what an awful thing,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Sylvia was either a bottle blonde or a champion tanner. Even in the low light her coloring looked mismatched, though she herself looked pretty good. Small proportionate features, large wide-set brown eyes with lashes you could comb your hair with. Her fingers were long and slender, ringless, with fingernails painted a pearlized white.

“Do you get a break?” I asked. “I’d like to talk a little about Iku.”

She shook her wrist until a watch attached to a loose silver chain worked its way into view.

“Maybe in an hour,” she said. “Though I don’t know what I can tell you. I hardly knew the girl.”

“I know,” I said. “If you could just give me a few minutes.”

She smiled an artificial smile.

“Maybe a minute.” She stood back as the waiters passed out menus. “Most people start with the coquilles, but I’m big on the ceviche. Roger says it tastes like a Jamaican sunrise.”

As we watched Sylvia vamp through the patio tables back into the restaurant, Amanda asked, “Do you put that dress on or have it applied?”

“Let’s get one and find out.”

With nothing else to do, we focused on ordering food and explaining to the waiters why a chunk of fruit has no more business in a glass of vodka than a Jamaican sunrise in Vladivostok. The menu looked like it was hand-lettered, which must have been hard work, because they gave up before adding in the prices. It was nominally in English, though I only recognized about half the words.

“My mother told me never eat anything I can’t pronounce,” said Amanda.

“Probably saved you from a diet of ceviche and coquilles St. Jacques.”

The lighting out on the lawn, mostly from strings of little pin lights draped around tree limbs and stretched overhead, made everybody look better than they deserved, which meant Amanda looked ridiculously great. Her bountiful auburn hair, parted in the middle, cascaded over her shoulders and the liquid satin of her dark blue dress.

“What,” she said, catching me staring.

“You look ridiculously great.”

“Even if I’m not blonde and shrink-wrapped in polyester?”

“Even if you were,” I said. “You can’t help it.”

“I think we’re talking ‘eyes of the beholder.’”

“The beholding comes later. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

By mutual consent, we launched into a game called “blissful ignorance.” The object was to talk only about things we knew nothing about, which meant we couldn’t talk about our work, our past, our social, economic or political views or how many games the Yankees were out of first place. This is harder than you think, but virtually guarantees the avoidance of painful, emotionally challenging conversation. Since both parties are blissfully ignorant of the subject at hand, you spend a lot of time speculating on things, like how often Buddhist monks wash their robes or the chemical composition of Neptune’s atmosphere.

Post-game fact-checking was entirely permissible, though I never did. “The basic geopolitical unit of local Texas government has got to be the county. The place is too damn big to organize around municipalities,” I offered up.

“Is that why it’s legal to shoot people in broad daylight, provided it’s a fair fight?”

Thus contentedly engaged, we were slightly disappointed when Sylvia catwalked back across the patio to our table.

“Hey, guys,” she said. “I gotta few. Can I sit?”

Amanda waved her into an empty seat.

“Before you get all interested in what I have to say you should know a guy just came in who actually knew Iku, like intimately.”

“Really,” I said. “Big guy?”

“Yeah. Angel Valero. Ya know him?”

“Intimately.”

“Love your hair, by the way,” Sylvia said to Amanda. “I could manage the color, but it’s hard to get thick outta Clairol.”

“Did Angel ever visit Iku?”

“Hell no. She made us swear we wouldn’t tell anybody she was there. She just talked about him all the time. Called him the Evil Troll. Or just plain Fucking Angel Valero. Can’t support that opinion one way or the other. Not the friendliest guy in the world, but he’s a good tipper.”

“So what did you think of Iku?” I asked.

She looked like she was calibrating the politics of her answer.

“Work bitch. Not like a bitch bitch, but a fiend for the job. You know what I mean. The City’s crawling with them. Stress bunnies, Carl calls ’em. So wired up they can’t stop hopping around. Not my cup of tea, to be honest with you. Who doesn’t like money, but really, what’s the point?”

“Any talk about why she started staying at the house full time? Any kind of trouble?”

“Was it a personal crisis?” Amanda asked.

Sylvia nodded immediately.

“Exactly. She was going through some kind of personal crisis. You read about it all the time. Your symptoms are,” she ticked off on her fingers, “lots of crying, usually locked up in the bedroom, extra drinking and not only at night, playing your favorite depressing songs at a high volume and less care with regular hygiene, though that girl always looked great no matter how fucked up she might have felt, as annoying as that is.”

“What was the problem?” I asked. “Boyfriend or job?”

She looked at me as if I’d just drooled down the front of my silk shirt.

“It always has to be about guys?” she asked, insulted on behalf of the sisterhood. “Okay, it was probably about a guy,
but I told you, I hardly knew the girl, so I wouldn’t know. Angel might, like I said.”

“Not Robert Dobson? He’s not the guy, is he?”

This was amusing to her.

“Bobby? You’re joking, right? I’d’ve pegged him for a fruitcake if I hadn’t heard him and Elaine thumpin’ and gruntin’ every morning, waking me up after an hour of sleep.”

I called a waiter over to order another Absolut on the rocks. I always found an empty glass distracting and wanted my full attention on Sylvia.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Elaine was, is, Bobby’s girlfriend. Not Iku.”

“Duh.”

“Bobby didn’t know Iku from Princeton?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

“So who introduced her to the rental?”

Sylvia looked around the outdoor seating area, then back at us.

“Ms. Hot Pants, who do you think?”

I must have looked confused.

“Elaine, Carl’s sister,” she said.

“I’m not getting this,” I admitted.

She shook her wrist, catching the wayward watch with her other hand.

“Sorry. Gotta run. Stephan is probably pissed about me leaving him with the floor.”

“Iku just showed up one day with Elaine?” I asked, trying to keep a grip on Sylvia’s attention.

She shook her head.

“One night. The two of them drunker’n shit. They got to the house right after Carl and I got off. Lots of falling down and giggling and all that shit that looks so lame and stupid to people who aren’t so lucky as to be drunk. Bobby was
already in bed, but Zelda was there, pissed off as all hell. Freak job that she is. I’m sorry, that was mean. You can’t blame the girl. Nobody likes getting rousted by a pair of drunks. She really let Elaine have it. Called her a total tramp. I really got to go.”

She abruptly stood up from her seat, smoothing the fabric of her dress back down the tops of her thighs.

“Thanks for talking,” I said.

“Not a problem.”

“One thing, real quick. Did Iku have a computer?”

She looked incredulous.

“Are you kidding me? Lived on her laptop. That’s another thing I don’t understand. Why you don’t go blind after a while.”

Amanda and I watched again as she wound through the tables and back into the elegant old building.

“When I was a kid we had other ways of going blind,” I said.

“The march of progress.”

We spent the rest of the evening pretending to be nourished by the teaspoon-sized portions of unpronounceable but admittedly tasty food. The staggering cost was partly explained by the effort put into arranging things on the plate. Much of this involved a form of construction, using a wad of mashed potatoes, for example, to support a golf ball–sized scoop of tenderloin sprinkled with inedible green twigs. At the Pequot, you got a lot more food on a plate half the size. In fact, you routinely ate most of your meal as it spilled onto the vinyl placemats.

Yet I can honestly say that Roger’s did a better job on the salads. The foundation greens resembled nothing I’d seen before, but I liked the way they stood up to the tangy salad dressing and digestible flowers, and the colorless, chopped-up stems of who-knows-what. The salads at the Pequot, by
comparison, were solid slabs of exhausted iceberg lettuce floating in a vinegar soup, though most of the Pequot’s customers were too captivated by the ambience to notice.

The dessert choices showed up on a big platter. I was glad because this meant I didn’t have to ask for a French-English dictionary to make a decision. All the choices were out there in plain view.

After Amanda picked something, I asked if they had ice cream.

“Yes, sir. Pine sorbet and chocolate raspberry truffle. Handmade.”

“Bring me some anyway. One scoop each, with a foot or two in between.”

“You’re a craftsman,” said Amanda. “Ever make ice cream by hand?”

“If it involves a table saw, I’ll give it a try.”

We ordered a few cognacs to help us over the final throes of the meal. Amanda asked for the check, but I’d already slipped a wad of bills to the waiter. She had a lot more money than I did, but I had an archaic, dug-in notion that self-respect meant paying your own way. I’d let her pick up the next tab at the Pequot.

On the way out we passed Angel Valero’s table. I can’t say he was happy to see me. He looked around the restaurant in protest over its failure to properly exclude.

I was pleased to see that the powder dabbed on his cheek had barely disguised a yellow and purple bruise. But I was more distracted by his dinner companion.

“Hey, Jerome. Where’s Marla?”

Gelb half stood, but Angel reached out, and without taking his eyes off me, touched his forearm. Gelb sat back in his chair.

I was about to ask Valero how the soprano lessons were coming, but a better part of me took possession.

“You’re like a bad penny, Acquillo,” said Gelb. “Always turning up and spoiling my mood.”

“I thought your mood was unassailable.”

“That’s because you’d rather talk than think, pal,” said Valero.

“And what should I be thinking about?” I asked.

“Who to put in your will,” said Gelb, which drew a sharp look from Valero.

I had Amanda gripped lightly by the elbow and could feel her tense up.

“I miss the happy Gelb,” I said. “Had a better sense of humor.”

“You just don’t know what’s funny.”

This put Amanda over the brink. She pulled my hand off her elbow and took me by the sleeve, dragging me through the restaurant and out to the parking lot.

“You keep frightening me,” she said,

“Me?”

“You talk about sharing, but all you do is withhold. And you think I don’t notice.”

We ran into Sylvia again before making it out the front door. She blessed us with her ersatz smile.

“How was everything?” she asked, deeply interested.

“Everything was the most,” said Amanda.

“Don’t you know,” said Sylvia, pleased, I think.

On the way back to Oak Point we cracked the windows just enough to let a little wind into the car. Amanda slid down in the seat, kicked off her shoes and allowed the hem of her dress to float on the breeze. I commented on the result, keen on changing the direction of the conversation.

“Fashion is becoming painful,” she said.

“You get out of practice hanging around construction sites.”

“I should try hostessing.”

“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.”

“
Boulettes de boeuf à l’Acquíllo
. An acquired taste.”

“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.