The Last Refuge (29 page)

It actually wasn’t that hard to find Jackie Swaitkowski’s place in the oak groves above Bridgehampton. You just had to count the driveways down from the big oak tree
with the giant scar halfway up the trunk. I worked my way down the long dirt and gravel driveway and pulled the Grand Prix next to her pickup truck. I grabbed my coffee, tucked my cigarettes in my pocket and rang her time-off bell.

Marijuana smoke,
Nirvana
and Jackie Swaitkowski poured out the front door. A firm grip on the doorknob was the only thing that kept her from being propelled into my arms. I spilled some of my coffee getting out of her way. She jerked up her head and tried to focus on my face.

“Oh.”

“Hi Jackie. Got a minute?”

“Holy shit that door opens easy.”

“Sorry I didn’t call ahead.”

She scooped up a handful of blond mane and tossed it back over her head.

“You didn’t?”

“Can I come in?”

She swung back into the room without letting go of the doorknob, almost closing the door in my face.

“Sure.”

I eased through the opening and followed her into the living room. She was wearing an extra large flannel shirt, blue jean shorts and bare feet. She moved with deliberate care over to the stereo stack and stared for a few moments before finding and turning down the volume. Now it was barely audible, though it made the atmosphere in the house a little less demented.

She spun around and got a bead on where I was standing.

“What can I getcha?”

I held up my cup.

“Brought my own.”

“A roadie?”

“Coffee.”

“Cool.”

She took a few steps and launched herself over the big coffee table, clearing the mountains of papers and catalogs and landing butt down on the couch. It was too difficult a maneuver to have been unrehearsed. I took the land route and came around to sit next to her. She slapped my thigh.

“So, how you been? Still full of bullshit?”

“I guess. How’s your case?”

She slumped deeper into the couch.

“It’s going really well, goddammit.”

“That’s bad.”

“I’ll have to keep working on it. Killed by my own competence.”

She pulled herself back out of the cushions and searched the tabletop with her eyes.

“Ha.”

She found a slender, tightly rolled joint and stuck it in her mouth. When she spoke it jumped up and down between her lips.

“You want a hit?”

I took out a cigarette and a pack of matches.

“I’m fine with this.”

I lit us both up. Jackie consumed about half the joint on the first pull, her eyes and cheeks squeezed tight. The smoky aromas commingled and billowed around us on the couch. I wondered how much sin the atmosphere of a single room could absorb.

“So’s this a social call or you still diggin’ around?” she asked me, once again languidly composed within the depths of her fluffy cushions.

“I was wondering about Milton Hornsby.”

“Def’nately not social.”

“How was he to work with?”

She rolled her eyes.

“I told you, man. A stiff.”

“As a lawyer.”

“Aw, Christ, don’t make me think.”

I sat back into the overstuffed cushions to give her more breathing space.

“Did you know Bay Side Holdings was a WB subsidiary? The old plant sitting on the property?”

She rolled up on her right side and looked at me over the top of a cushion.

“No.”

“No?”

“No I won’t talk about it.”

“You knew all along.”

“Can’t go there.”

“Or at least figured out along the way.”

“You got an imagination,” she said.

“You spin a good story.”

“Works on judges.”

“Not so well on engineers.”

“No imagination?”

“Too analytic.”

“I need a good analyst.”

“So you say.”

“Need my head examined.”

“What’ll they find?”

“Conflicted interests.”

“Caught between the Bar and a hard place?”

She sunk deeper into the couch and draped her long bangs over her face the way my daughter would do when she didn’t want to talk about something or finish all the peas left on her plate.

“You’re not as funny as you used to be.”

“That’s why you’re so pissed at those guys,” I told her, “not because they wouldn’t press the case. Because you thought they weren’t telling you everything you needed to know to do your job. They were holding out on you, treating you like a lesser partner. Like a local.”

“You’re also not as nice.”

“Quite a conflict. On one side, a great case, lots of interesting law, the kind you could take advantage of out here. Lots of money. And a heartthrob for a co-counsel. On the other side, a feeling you’re aiding and abetting the enemy. The City People, with all the money and none of the feeling for the real Southampton. Where you were born and raised and still refuse to leave, even though you’re smart enough and capable enough to have a real career anywhere you want.”

“Time for the fifth.”

“I could get you one.”

“The amendment, dummy.”

“Something about this whole scene really bothered you. But you’re constrained by attorney-client privilege. Though not enough to stop you from giving me that map.”

“You know, I’m either too stoned or not stoned enough to listen to all this.”

She gave my leg a squeeze, then used it to haul herself up on her feet. I gripped her forearm and hauled her back down again.

“You don’t have to tell me anything. Unless you want to.”

After that she seemed happy enough to stay put. I slurped my coffee and lit another Camel. We sat quietly for a little while.

“I never saw them.”

“The clients?”

She nodded. Then shook her head.

“Client. Only spoke to one guy. Never saw him in person. Just talked to him on the phone. Me, Hornsby and Hunter would sit in Hornsby’s office with a speakerphone. Hornsby always made sure he knew we were all in the room. Never even heard his name. When I asked Hunter, ‘Does this guy have a name?,’ he’d say ‘Mr. Client.’ He was nice enough about it, but you know. Mr. Client was a very uptight person. Insistent, or insinuating, or insulting, one of those ‘in’ words. Hunter handled him fine. Whenever the guy handed him some crap, he’d hand it right back. That’s what made me think there were other clients behind the client. I know it sounds terrible, but the real giveaway was the way Mr. Client talked. You know, a little of the ‘dese,’ ‘dem’ and ‘dose.’ I guess that’s snobby of me.”

“A little.”

“And the profanity. Fuck this and fuck that. Like he was trying to sound tough. He did sound tough. And the way he talked about handling the Appeals Board, and the DEP, how to get around this and get around
that, and who do you have to take care of, and whose arm do you have to twist and who’s got the juice with who and all this stuff that had no regard for due process or the spirit behind all these regulatory hurdles, no matter how stupid they might look to these developers. Jesus Christ Almighty.”

She reached over and took my cup out of my hand, downed a gulp and handed it back. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and burped. I wondered how Jackie got to sleep at night with all that noise in her head.

“Of course, they had a lot of hurdles to leap,” she said. “They probably couldn’t believe the regulatory resistance they were getting. All the signs, stated and unstated, that said this project was going to get the full treatment. And that’s no idle threat from a town that’ll fight like rabid badgers over the slightest variance. If they’re in the mood. Mr. Client was nervous as a cat. Until the Town told us the next steps and he pulled the plug.”

“Stopped the project?”

“Cold. Just ended it. I got a check, cutie pie went home. That was it.”

“What did the Town want?”

“Neighborhood Notice. Couple different types. For a normal variance, you only need a four-hundred-foot radius around the property. Send the neighbors a postcard, tell ’em there’s going to be a zoning hearing, if you want to come and raise a stink, here’s your chance. Appeals Board takes these things seriously. Neighbors can make board members miserable.”

“What other kinds of notice?”

“Bay Side pulled the absolute worst kind you can get because of the old factory. It’s a DEP thing—they go out like a mile and send everybody this big questionnaire that just about begs you to come up with environmental reasons to oppose the project. It’s really punitive, frankly, but that’s federal Super Fund shit and nobody screws with that.”

“Bummer.”

“So who gets blamed? The co-counsel. The local. Like I’m supposed to anticipate this kind of thing? I felt so bad.”

“Was Hunter mad at you, too?”

She looked thoughtful. “I guess not. He didn’t ask me out afterwards, like I thought he would, despite it all. But, no. He wasn’t pissed. He said I’d done my job as well as I could.”

I realized she was crying. I should have seen it earlier. It was the kind of insensitivity I’d honed through years of practice. I hauled myself from out of the white couch and went to the bathroom for tissues. I’d done a lot of that, too. Going to get tissues was one of my specialties.

She looked up at me after she blew her nose.

“Is this some investigation? Are you really from the goddam FBI? Are you going to ruin my life?”

“I’m an industrial designer. No arrest powers.”

She pulled another joint out of the ashtray, then tossed it back.

“Enough of that shit. Makes me all weepy.”

We sat quietly for a little while. Talked out. I tried to listen to the
sub rosa
soundtrack coming from the stereo while I looked around the heap of a room,
wondering how you could maintain all that chaos and your sanity at the same time. Maybe that was part of the point. Maybe sanity wasn’t such a great thing to aspire to.

“I’d really like to talk to Milton Hornsby,” I said to her.

“Not a very talkative guy.”

“Tell him I think I know why he won’t talk to me. At this point, I’m keeping it to myself. Which is not going to last forever. If he’s interested in getting a little ahead of things, he’ll sit down with me. With you present if he wants. It’s up to him.”

“Officially I’m fired. What’s my interest in this?”

“I got your name from the public record. You’re just facilitating communications.”

“I guess you won’t tell me what’s really going on. After I spill my guts and violate every canon in the book.”

“Probably better if you didn’t know beforehand.”

“Because I’m a dumb local?”

“We’re all dumb locals. That’s the problem.”

Drove down from Bridgehampton and out to the shore. I meandered through the new developments carved out of the potato fields and joined the parade of vans and pickup trucks that constituted most of the traffic between weekends. At Mecox Bay I turned north again and got on Montauk Highway until I cleared the water, then dropped back down Flying Point Road toward the sea.

I stopped off at the Town’s beach access. This close to the ocean the sea air dispersed the sunlight, deepening all the colors and setting snares for unsuspecting painters and sentimentalists. The wild roses that lined the parking lot were still enjoying the last cool autumn days before winter; they would stay green and semi-floral well into December. Sand, blown over the dunes, formed a grainy skim-coat over the black asphalt, empty now since early fall. In the spring, maintenance crews would sweep it all up again and renew the illusion that you could halt nature’s irresistible advance.

I continued to follow the coast until I was all the way out on Dune Road in Southampton Village, where giant shingle-style mansions and architectural fantasies stood like devotional monuments before the sea. To my right, the sun dropping toward the Shinnecock Bay was airbrushing the underside of the clouds a soft reddish yellow. In the morning, people who lived on Dune Road could walk to the other side of their houses and watch the sun rise over the ocean. All for an admission price that started around twenty million dollars. When my father first started digging the foundation hole for his cottage, nobody but reclusive eccentrics wanted to live out in the dunes. It was a wilderness where locals like us camped and had family barbecues and risked our lives bodysurfing in storm-swept seas. Now it was the realization of billionaires’ dreams.

I recalled what Amanda’s friend Robin said as she distractedly searched the Playhouse for someone to break her heart. “What do you get when there’s more
demand than supply, and the demanders have more money than God and all His angels put together?”

I added to the list of things I knew one thing I knew so well I’d completely forgotten it. People made huge fortunes somewhere else so they could bring them out here. And there was only so much here to go around.