Two Time (7 page)

“They say this ll take a few more weeks to get right. You gotta heal between surgeries. I feel like I been storing my face in a Veg-O-Matic,” she said, slumping deeper into the floppy, marshmallow cushions.

Jackie was one of those people who threw more energy out into the world than the atmosphere was able to absorb. It caused her to ping-pong around through life. You thought you knew where she was heading, and then suddenly, zing, she’d be off in some other direction.

“Hodges said he saw you in Town. Steppin’ out.”

“At the grocery store. First time. I like Hodges, but he always looks at my tits when he talks to me.”

“He sent me around to check on you.”

“Not necessary. I’m a brick.”

“So, you’re okay.”

She stopped picking at her bandage and started picking at her shirtfront.

“No, I’m not. I’m all fucked up.”

“So let’s unfuck you up.”

“How’re you going to do that?”

“By getting you out of the house.”

“I’ve been to the grocery store.”

“No, like out and around.”

“Not like this. The stares.”

“Let’s fix that.”

“Oh, sure.”

I took her into the master bathroom and sat her on the john. I studied the bandage for a while, then went through her closet and vanity for supplies.

“You gotta talk to the doctor,” she said.

“What do they know about it?”

She saw me with her big hair-trimming scissors in my hand.

“Jesus, Sam, what the hell are you doing?”

“Just stay still.”

First I cut a line from the knit of her brow to the back of her head, right above the little dent everybody has at the back of their heads. Then I cut away most of the helmet. I had her hold the important part of the bandage against the wound while I reconfigured the chin strap into a single piece over the right side, secured below by a gauze choker. The net result freed her mass of hair so that it covered most of the damage and exposed the uninjured, though black and blue, side of her face. I tied things off with some yarn that I could string through her hair, and fooled around with her coif until she almost looked normal, for a girl with a stoved-in face.

I made her stand in front of the mirror.

“How did you do that?”

“I’m a design engineer. The doc took a more expedient, less cosmetic approach. This’ll work just as well.”

“It still looks pretty bad.”

“Way less bad. Got anything to drink in this house?”

It took about a hour for her to shower, shave her legs and put an inch of makeup on her face, but eventually I got her out of the house. She hadn’t worked around to thanking me
yet, but at least she’d stopped sighing and moaning. By the time we were in the Grand Prix it was late morning. The sun was all the way out and the sky all the way blue. The air was dry and clean, so I kept the windows rolled down to air things out. The wind tossed around some empty coffee cups and messed up Jackie’s hair a little, but she didn’t seem to mind. Liberation.

This time of year I never drove on Montauk Highway, the main artery on this part of the Island. It was filled day and night with summer people. But you had most of the secondary routes to yourself because the summer people were mostly from Manhattan, and were afraid to deviate from established routes. They’d all seen
Deliverance
.

Hodges once told me the East End of Long Island had a different kind of light from the rest of the country. He’d learned this in the 1950s from one of the artists who’d set up shop out in Springs, then a homey little enclave in east East Hampton. He compared it to the light of Florence—bright on a sunny day, but with all the edges burnished off, as if filtered through a diffusion screen. Hodges told me it was caused by the way the big river of weather coming out of Pennsylvania and North Jersey would clip the Boroughs, then push up over Long Island Sound into Connecticut, leaving the East End in its wake, covered by a thinned-out trail of cloud cover. I don’t think any of this was scientifically valid, but I knew he was right about the way the light looked because I saw how it composed shadows and drenched the leaves and potato fields with an oversaturated blue-green and cast dollops of chiaroscuro under the spreading boughs of red oak and silvery elm. As you moved from forest to fields, the landscape was recast and the light embraced the whole, claiming the separateness of this narrow, peninsular world.

I decided we’d go to Riverhead by way of Shelter Island, the chunk of wooded landmass caught between the jaws of the North and South Forks. It was less direct as the crow flies, but you got to catch little ferries on and off the island. There was usually a nice breeze and some sea spray over each of the narrow channels and I thought Jackie could use the extra oxygen.

“How’s work?” I asked her after we’d been underway a while.

“S’okay I handed off most of my cases. No client complaints.”

“Except for me.”

“No, you’re a keeper. Especially since you never ask me to do anything.”

The South Ferry was doing a brisk business. The guys directing the boarding cars sandwiched the Grand Prix between a Land Rover and a tradesman’s step van. Jackie and I squeezed out into the air so we could stand by the gunwale and watch the cormorants dive-bomb into the chop. Jackie’s hair unfurled against the wind. I held her around the waist so I could give her an occasional squeeze.

“You never ask me to do anything and you never tell me anything,” she said.

“It’s the law. Discovery is part of the process.”

She was quiet the rest of the way to Riverhead, so I just smoked and listened to afternoon jazz on WLIU and thought about how to gang cut the rest of the rafters for my addition. Jackie’s mood still threatened to breed gloom within the capacious cabin of the Grand Prix, but the light that continued to flow down through the abundant Shelter Island foliage was undaunted and unrestrained.

J
ONATHAN
E
LDRIDGE’S OFFICE
was on the second floor of a two-story building cobbed on to the end of a row of storefronts on Main Street in Riverhead. Downtown extended a few blocks in either direction, and was decorated by the retail iconography of mid-twentieth-century America. In other words, it was thoroughly beat up and godforsaken. We parked in the back and walked up a rear outdoor stairway to the separate entrance.

“It’s open,” a woman yelled from inside after we pushed the buzzer.

Eldridge hadn’t overextended himself on office appointments. It was basically a single room carved up by waist-high cubicle dividers into a loose arrangement of workstations, each with at least one computer terminal and keyboard. Sitting at a command post at the center of the room was a young woman identified by an enormous nameplate mounted to the front of her desk. It said she was Alena
Zapata, Jonathan Eldridge’s assistant, though the visual evidence was less persuasive.

Her hair was a rooster shock of brilliant magenta, or maybe a light purple, depending on the way the light hit it. The color confusion was exacerbated by her brilliant red lipstick and the pale, bluefish tint of her complexion. She had a huge mole on her gaunt right cheek, what I thought was a Marilyn Monroe beauty mark, but discovered later was a tiny tattoo of Eve Ensler.

Jackie had already staggered back a few steps as the overall effect hit her, so when the purple-haired woman said, “Holy cow, what happened to you?” I couldn’t see her reaction.

“Are you Alena?” I asked.

“At’s what the sign says.”

She crammed a rounded O into the word “sign.”

“I’m Sam, this is Jackie. Did the Southampton police tell you we were coming?”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. I got an open door policy. Sit down where you want.”

I dug a pair of chairs out of the other workstations and sat us in front of her desk.

“So, what can I do you for? Sorry about the reaction,” she said to Jackie, without taking a breath. “It was, like, a shock and all.”

“Shocks all around.”

“I know you’ve already told the police everything,” I said, jumping in, “so I hope you don’t mind going over the same stuff.”

She shook her purple plume.

“Nah, not at all. What else I gotta do? I’m all caught up here. You want coffee or something? I don’t get a lotta company. The FedEx guy, the mail guy. The deli downstairs delivers. You had lunch? It’s cheap.”

“We’re all set. Coffee sounds great. Black for me. A little milk for Jackie.”

Standing, she had to be about five-ten, excluding heels. She poured the coffee from a slimy old Krups coffeemaker, but it wasn’t bad if you had a wide tolerance.

“So, it was just you and Jonathan?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, stirring in Jackie’s milk, “when he was here, which wasn’t all that much. Maybe a third of the time. He was always outta town.”

“Doing fieldwork.”

“Yeah, that’s what he called it. Are you a cop?”

“An investigator,” I said, and then immediately felt deceptive and asinine. “Kind of. Just a friend of a cop who asked for some help.”

“Just a co-victim of a vicious, wanton act of murderous cruelty,” said Jackie.

“Yeah, don’t I know it. Co-victim?”

“We were the only survivors,” said Jackie. “That’s where, like, the face came from. It was, like, blown up and shit.”

I shifted in my chair so I could take Jackie’s hand. I gave it a hard squeeze.

“Wow. That’s intense,” said Alena.

“How was Jonathan to work for? Good boss?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. A peach. I really did like the guy. He was very good to me. Very generous and polite. It sorta made up for being, like, in solitary confinement all the time.”

“So, you handle the administrative stuff”

“I got a broker’s license, buddy. Series 7. I handled whatever Jonathan wanted me to handle.”

“You just dissed her, Sam.”

“Sorry Did you buy and sell? I thought Jonathan was strictly analysis.”

“Well, yeah, sort of,” said Alena, a little defensively, “but
we did trades, too. I cleared them through a broker in the City. We’re full service. Coulda traded a lot more, if Jonathan wanted to. He liked the straight fee approach. Percent on assets. Said it was less stress. He didn’t like stress.”

She shook her head, remembering.

“Was he tense a lot?” I asked.

“No, never. That’s the point. He used to say that people ought to ascertain their personal level of stress tolerance, then engineer their whole lives around staying right there, right below what they can take. It was a theory of his. Only, he could afford to live pretty good and stay clear of his personal best, stress-wise. To stay that calm I’d have to, like, not work and lie around in bed all day, and eventually starve, which can be pretty stressful in its own right.”

Alena sat back in her office chair, which gave into a partial recline. She tapped her nails on the armrests.

“You mind if I smoke?” she asked us, looking at Jackie, who was already smoldering a bit herself. I pulled out my lighter and lit her cigarette and one for myself.

“Jonathan never woulda let me smoke in here in a million years. I suppose I still shouldn’t, in honor and all, but there’s not much else to do.”

“When do you leave?”

“End of the week. I got a gig in the City. No biggie. It was time for me to head out anyway. This is just a really shitty way to terminate employment.”

It was stuffy in the office, even with a window AC unit running on high. The smoke didn’t help. The ceiling was drop-acoustic panels and fluorescent lights. The carpet a smudged beige, indifferently vacuumed. Only the PCs looked new and alert, at the ready. Plugged directly into Jonathan’s lifeblood, the hemorrhage of information available off the Web. If it wasn’t for the communal impulse wired into
most people’s genes, maybe everyone would run their careers like Jonathan’s. Separate, but jacked-in. Efficient, lucrative and stress free.

“So, no ideas?” asked Jackie, hackles still firmly in place.

“Beg pardon?”

“About the bombing. Your boss. The sweetheart.”

“Not my sweetheart, sweetheart. Strictly business. Anyway, I called him a peach. Not a sweetheart. Not that there’s a difference, semantically speaking.”

Alena glowered at Jackie over the top of her CRT. The situation took me back to running a huge corporate enterprise, where so much precious time was wasted mediating a particular flavor of institutional conflict my friend Jason Fligh, the president of the University of Chicago, privately characterized as bitch shit.

“You’re a smart young woman,” I said to Alena, bracing for Jackie’s snort. “You probably have a theory on what happened to Jonathan. Few knew him better. Nobody better, if you’re talking about his business.”

Alena pulled her eyes off Jackie and refocused on me. Approvingly, as if to say, now we all know who the sensitive one is in
this
team. Erroneously. She sat back and touched the outer crust of her purple hair.

“To me, the business here is basically research. We research companies people might want to invest in. We sell opinions. That’s really what this is all about. Opinions, not proclamations. Jonathan wasn’t a theater critic, he just told people what he could figure out about a company. That’s it. Sure, I bet some of the companies weren’t too happy about what he said, but that was their fault. And mostly, I think, the companies should all feel okay about him, because he was such a straight shooter. He told it like it was, which most of the time was pretty good for those guys. Frankly, I think he
was overall pretty optimistic, and if you look at his record, you know, how these companies ended up performing, it was pretty much the way he had it scored. Where’s the beef in that?”

I was sitting there feeling some sort of odd warmth for Alenas simple loyalty and frank appraisal of her boss when Jackie went and spoiled the mood.

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“Bullshit,” she repeated. “Jonathan Eldridge was a financial adviser of the first rank. Specializing in high tech, the most volatile and capricious market segment. Billions of dollars could be made or lost through decisions based on his analysis. You talk about it like he ran a local beauty pageant.”