The Last Refuge (14 page)

“Some outfit named Bay Side Holdings. Here in Sag Harbor. Going there next.” I dropped the slip of paper with their address down in front of him. He picked it up and frowned.

“Must be in a house, or something.”

I took the slip back from him.

“Dutch Wharf Road?”

“All houses. Except at the end where there’s a busted-up old dock building. Used to have a launch ramp, but the water got shoaled over and nobody bothered to dredge. Maybe the Town closed it up. Anyway, nothin’ commercial there now.”

I got Hodges to bring me a ham sandwich which I washed down with a Sam Adams. Eddie took half the fries. Something he wouldn’t touch if I dropped it in his bowl at the cottage. Probably didn’t want to offend Hodges either.

It took a while to find the head of Dutch Wharf Road. It was over on the east side of town where a lot of the roads are narrow and tangled up with the grassy little inlets that ring that part of the bay. Hard to imagine that Sag Harbor was once America’s biggest port, filled with square riggers and awash in whale oil.

It was just like Hodges said. A narrow, leafy street lined with small cottages, all built at different times, but well established and lovingly cared for. I followed the numbers to the end of the street and the abandoned launch ramp. Number 675 was the last house on the right. It fit in with the neighborhood—fresh white brick and white clapboard, with the gable end facing the street. It had a very steep roofline, which was the fashion for small Tudor houses in the twenties and thirties. Looked like something you’d find in the Cotswolds. Ivy covered part of the lawn and grew up the facade. No name on the mailbox. There was a basic, anonymous-looking Nissan in the driveway. No garage.

No answer at the door. I’d given up ringing the bell and was about to leave when I heard a sound coming
from the back of the house. I went around the north side through a thick stand of arborvitae. The backyard was stuffed with trees and shrubs. It looked like they’d been growing there for about a hundred years, which was probably about right. On one tiny patch of grass, illuminated by a spot of sunlight, stood a weathered wheelbarrow filled with sticks and uprooted plant life. A few yards away a guy’s butt stuck out from under an out-of-control forsythia. The butt wore khakis and belonged on a large man. I shuffled my feet a little and cleared my throat as I approached.

“Excuse me.”

The guy backed out from under the forsythia on his hands and knees and stood up. He was over six-three, reasonably slender, but with a very big head. Thin gray hair circled a bald dome. He looked to be somewhere in his seventies, on the high side, and wore very thick glasses through which he squinted at me painfully.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Milton Hornsby.”

He held a bunch of pulled-up weeds in his gloved right hand. In the other hand was a small garden trowel. He looked down as if trying to decide which to discard.

“My name is Sam Acquillo. I have something important to discuss with Mr. Hornsby.”

He held up both hands as if in surrender.

“That would be me.”

I leafed through the manila folder I had under my arm and pulled out Regina’s death certificate, which I held out in front of him. As I talked he dropped
the weeds and trowel on the ground and pulled off his gloves.

“I’m here to notify you of the death of Regina Broadhurst. Died last week. You can see my name here.” I pointed to a line on the death certificate. “I’m also the administrator of the estate.”

I held out that piece of paper with my other hand. He took both to look at more closely. His squint got worse, turning his eyes into thin slits.

“What’s your relation?” he asked, still looking at the paperwork.

“Neighbor.”

“Attorney?”

“Nope. Just a neighbor. Far as we know there’s only one family member, a nephew. That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you. If you knew of any others.”

He was big, but not very healthy looking. He had large, prominent cheekbones, but underneath his cheeks were pitted and sunken in. His khakis and flannel shirt were of good quality, but hadn’t been washed in a while.

“I wondered when this would happen.”

“She was pretty old.”

He smiled at that, like it triggered a private joke.

He handed the papers back to me. I didn’t take them.

“You can keep them. For your records.”

He shook his head.

“I’m not going to talk to you,” he said, flatly, still squinting at me through his bottle-bottom glasses. He dropped the papers on the ground.

“You’re not? Why not?”

“I don’t have to.” He started to wiggle his hands back into his work gloves.

“I don’t know. I think you do. I’m not a lawyer, but …”

“That’s correct. You’re not a lawyer. I don’t know what you are. A neighbor? You’re on my property, I know that. Uninvited. I’d like you to leave.”

He bent down to retrieve the little pile of weeds, brushed passed me and took it over to the wheelbarrow.

I could feel that familiar surge of blood warming up my face. I tried to look relaxed and reasonable, even though I wasn’t very good at that either.

“According to the Town tax records, Regina’s house was owned by Bay Side Holdings, at six-seven-five Dutch Wharf Road,” I looked around, “which I guess is here, with you listed as the responsible party. I’m just telling you because Regina’s dead. You get your house back.”

He seemed to loosen up a little at that. He let go of the wheelbarrow.

“Very well. Consider me notified. You can leave your paperwork in my mailbox. You know the way out.”

Before I could say anything else he walked away from me. Stoop-shouldered, he moved off with his wheelbarrow toward some distant corner of his yard, hidden under the dark shade of oak, pine and arborvitae.

As an amateur boxer I lost almost as many fights as I won, and my brief professional career wasn’t much better. There were things about the sport that drew me, things like the training and bag work. Some of the old trainers fit the stereotype of the battered old pros with gritty voices, filled with the wisdom of the street.
I liked being around a lot of it. The actual boxing part wasn’t as appealing. A lot of the kids I fought were really desperate and half crazy with hopes and fears. There were more white kids than you’d think, and I can’t say race was any kind of obvious factor at the level we fought. Not that I could see, anyway. Everybody was basically poor, street worn and edgy. Most everybody figured I was Puerto Rican till I opened my mouth. Seemed like there were a lot of bantams and feathers, wiry little guys with vicious quick hands and hard little heads you could pound on all day with no effect. As a middleweight, or light heavyweight, I was one of the bigger ones. The few genuine heavyweights were usually fat guys or big, slow dummies without the heart for the physical conditioning needed to really make it in the ring. Occasionally, some guy would show up who was big, strong, fast and eager. You knew it as soon as they got on the gloves. They had the mental part. They were smart enough to know what you had to do, but also what you got if you pulled it off. Go from having nothing to owning the world.

The fights I was able to win were usually on points. I never knocked anybody out, though I put a few into the canvas hard enough to get the decision. After a fight like that one of the trainers shoved my face into the corner of my open locker hard enough to split my lip. I still had my gloves on, and blood was splashing all over everywhere. I shrunk back and got my gloves up near my head to stop the next blow, which didn’t come. He asked me if what he just did pissed me off.

“What the hell was that for?”

“You got to get pissed, you fuckin’ greaseball. It’s the only way you win. You don’t get pissed, you don’t win the fight. That’s the kind of fighter you are. From now on, I want you pissed off all the time.”

I wanted to kill him. Instead I just nodded. Then I sat down on the bench and watched the blood from my lip pool on the floor and listened to the roar in my head. He wanted me to be pissed. If he only knew.

After talking to Milton Hornsby I sat in the Grand Prix for a few minutes to let that old roar subside. In the past I wouldn’t have let him just walk away from me. I don’t know what I would’ve done, but it would have likely gone on a mental list of all the things I wished I could take back.

Eddie was whining at me to open the window. I opened them all and lit a cigarette. I sat back in the old cracked leather bucket seat and closed my eyes. You don’t get pissed, you don’t win the fight. But what if you don’t want the fight in the first place?

“fuckin’ hell, Eddie. I need a lawyer.”

He wasn’t listening. His head was already out the window, taking in the autumn air, looking around for the next thing.

You got to Burton Lewis’s house in the estate section of Southampton Village by driving down a 2,800-foot driveway that shot in a straight line between two twelve-foot-high privet hedges. You drove over polished white pebbles contained by steel curbing that drew the outside edges into perfect parallel lines. At
the entrance was a white wooden gate that pivoted open on huge cast iron hinges bolted to a pair of white posts trimmed out to look like Empire furniture. Fluffy old blue hydrangea flanked the gate and softened the effect of the rectangular call box, perched on a curved black post, where you punched a code to open the gate, or pushed a call button to gain entry. The only clue to the identity of the home was a polite four-by-eight-inch white sign on which the number eighty-five was painted with green paint and circumscribed by a thin green line.

After the initial straight shot, the driveway made an abrupt forty-five degree turn, and if you hadn’t run out of gas by then, you came out from between the privets into an open area defined by an oval turnaround. The interior of the oval was landscaped to look unlandscaped, as if the mammoth shingle-style mansion looming above you was situated there just to take advantage of some perfect act of nature.

Burton’s great-grandfather built the first house on the site before the turn of the century. That was when really wealthy people competed with Versailles and called the results a cottage. In the thirties, taking advantage of a glut of cheap labor, his grandfather tore it down and built an even bigger monstrosity. Burton grew up in that house, and a town house on the Upper East Side and a half-dozen other houses sprinkled around Europe and the Caribbean. His parents delegated Burton’s upbringing, and that of his two sisters, to a team of professionals. Austrian nannies, Swiss ski instructors, Parisian epicures. All three kids suffered from severe parental deprivation, with
mixed results. One of the girls was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and ended up heaving herself off the Reichenbach Falls. The other succumbed to hardcore S&M and died of an overdose hanging upside down in some squalid flop down near Times Square.

Burton took up banking and jurisprudence. Looking like he’d been born in a Brooks Brothers, he took part-time jobs and internships on Wall Street and developed a decent command of international finance before he was out of prep school. He graduated from Columbia in three years, and having grown bored with finance, had earned a law degree from Yale three years after that.

The only conversation he could remember having with his father was when the old man brought him into his study to go over the disposition of the family fortune, with instructions on how to manage it should he die or lose his faculties. Which is exactly what happened about a year after that. Burton was about twenty-three; his father lasted another year before dying insane and leaving Burton, the sole heir, insanely rich.

The first thing he did was tear down his grandfather’s house and build another one. It was still pretty big, but at least it fit the scale of the other houses in the neighborhood, if that’s what you’d call it. It fit Burton okay. He was well over six feet tall, and thin, with a small-featured face made of weathered brown leather. He had a head full of light brown hair that fell over his forehead and a mustache that emboldened a small, thin mouth. His clothes draped over his gaunt frame in the perfect way you see on mannequins. He
often wore a look of puzzled amusement, as if struggling to recollect the punch line of an inappropriate joke. I met him through a mutual friend of Abby’s. She’d pulled him into the circle of acquaintances she maintained as a simulation of genuine friendship. We were all still young, but making enough to live in Manhattan. Burton was splitting his time between defending vagrants out of a grungy storefront office in the East Village and an active tax practice down on the Street.

His pedigree was all that mattered to Abby, but Burton’s stuff ran deeper than that.

When I was growing up, people like Burton Lewis moved through the world inside an invisible protective enclosure. We saw them in the grocery store or stepping between their nice cars and Herb McCarthy’s or the Irving Hotel, but we knew they probably didn’t see us. They were a type of celestial being that God had marooned on earth as a penalty for their vanity and arrogance. I didn’t know enough locals then to know how they felt about the Summer People, but I was never resentful or jealous. Just removed. I kept out of their way and only wondered about their lives when I rode my bike around the estate section and tried to see the big houses hidden by giant stands of hundred-year-old maples and copper beech.