Cop Job (23 page)

By default I was stuck with Esther Ferguson, who must have felt odd surrounded by so many people she would have far preferred to avoid. To make it easier for her, I talked about some of the park bench conversations I’d had with Alfie, on subjects both earthbound and surreal. She had similar recollections, and we managed to find some common ground of loss and affection for the troubled vet. She even talked briefly about her brother, how she often wondered if she would have cared for him as much if he hadn’t been mentally ill. It was a surprising admission, which I honored by assuring her she certainly would have.

To everyone’s relief, Father Dent finally came out and herded us into the church. He assigned seating in the pews, breaking up the natural pairings, as if to assure a seamless atmosphere of social unease. This time I drew Lionel Veckstrom and Jackie got Esther.

Dent was not a young man, but he wore his years with a clear eye and ramrod posture. I wasn’t much for organized religion, though Dent’s charm was manifest, made more so for me by a borough accent you could cut with a knife.

Still as soon as he started running through the standard prayers and invocations, my mind did what it always did during church services. Drift off into the clouds. That’s why I didn’t realize Jimmy Watruss was up at the pulpit until he started to speak.

“I asked the Father if I could say a few words and he told me that’s what these things are for, so here goes. I’m not going to tell you that when you serve with other soldiers during wartime, you get to know each other in ways you can never duplicate in any other part of life. You know that already, since you’ve seen the movies and read the books. What you don’t know is that for over a year, Alfie and I spent almost all our time crammed into an armored tin can called a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which is like a cross between a tank and a personnel carrier, if that makes any sense. Alfie was our driver. I handled the weapons, including the 25-millimeter cannon, TOW missile launcher, and M240G machine gun. Which means you get busy when things heat up, and you can’t be worrying about how your driver’s going to perform. I never worried about Alfie. Not in training, or out on the gunnery, or in combat. I trusted him to do his job without thinking twice about it, meaning I could concentrate on doing mine.”

He paused and looked down at the pulpit, closing, then opening, his eyes again and raising his head.

“So whatever you might have thought about Alfie Alder-green, the nut job cripple with the saxophone, the Looney Tunes going on about elves and wizards, that wasn’t the Specialist Alfred P. Aldergreen that I knew in situations I can’t really describe here. I won’t describe here, because I can never do justice to the bravery and sacrifice people like Alfie demonstrated every day in places so distant and different from a town like Southampton, they might as well be on the planet Mars.”

He smiled.

“Maybe that’s where Alfie thought he was. I hope so. It might’ve made it easier to take.”

He almost looked like he wanted to say more, but after a brief hesitation, he thanked Jackie and Father Dent for putting on the memorial service, and promised everyone a night of free drinks back at Mad Martha’s if we wanted to stop by.

“So they did see combat together,” I said to Veckstrom in a soft whisper, since Father Dent was up at the pulpit again wrapping up the ceremonies.

“So what,” he said.

“It’s interesting.”

Veckstrom looked over at me.

“Why interesting?”

“Just interesting,” I said. “I’m interested in lots of things.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m interested that all three snitches knew each other,” I said, in a seeming non sequitur, though he knew what I meant.

“There are often subterranean relationships between people, invisible ties, sometimes quite strong,” he said. “But you know that better than anyone, don’t you, Acquillo?”

“I know a lot, but I don’t know everything,” I said. “If we pooled our knowledge, we’d figure this thing out a lot quicker.”

He looked at me again, through partially hooded eyes.

“That would be a cold day in hell.”

“Okay,” I said with a shrug. “Don’t say I didn’t give you a fair shot.”

“Whatever the hell that means.”

“You’ll know.”

Father Dent was still chanting on about something, but I had to get up at that point and go back out for some fresh air. It wasn’t all Veckstrom’s fault. This usually happened to me whenever I got stuck in a church. I blame it on my mother, who hated pomp and circumstance even more than I, but dragged me to church every Sunday anyway out of some misplaced concern for my everlasting soul.

A
S TEMPTING
as it was, Amanda, Sullivan, and I passed on Jimmy’s offer of free drinks at his restaurant and headed back to Oak Point. Amanda drove with Sullivan so I could stop at Hawk Pond Marina on the way and check in on Paul Hodges, who’d been released from the hospital and was recuperating on his boat. Since my boat, the
Carpe Mañana
, was berthed in the next slip, I got to check in on her as well.

I’d bought the boat from my friend Burton Lewis after he decided it was more of a heavy displacement cruiser than he wanted, having succumbed to the questionable allure of club racing, a pursuit I would never understand. The last thing I wanted to do was compete in a sailboat. For me, the point of sailing was to ghost along under a moderate breeze while avoiding drunken idiots in big powerboats who thought spending about one hundred dollars a minute producing deafening noise and spine-crushing vibration was fun.

She seemed shipshape, so I went next door. Hodges was in the cockpit with his two lazy shih tzus lying all over him. He had a bandage around his head, not unlike Allison’s, and a drink in his hand, which was encouraging. I’d brought along the reserve supply of Absolut from the
Carpe Mañana
. After digging into Hodges’s ice chest and topping off one of his plastic mugs, I made myself at home in his cockpit.

“How’s the head?” I asked.

“Better since the two double bourbons.”

“Shouldn’t mix with the painkillers.”

“They
are
the painkillers.”

“Sorry I got you into this,” I said.

“I’m sorry I fucked it up. Not your fault.”

“You didn’t fuck it up. They got the drop on you.”

“Nah. Wouldn’t have happened ten years ago. I’m too old and too slow.”

“Like I said, I’m sorry I got you into it. Sullivan’s taken over the position. He’s on a leave of absence.”

“So now you want to hope those knuckleheads try again.”

We sat for a few moments in silence, drinking, and relishing the images that notion conjured up.

“We had a memorial service for Alfie Aldergreen today,” I said. “Jackie set it up with Father Dent.”

“I thought the VA was handling that.”

“Just the burial. Though we did get a surprise eulogy from Jimmy Watruss. Showed up in full-dress uniform.”

“Good for him he can still wear it. My uniform pants wouldn’t get past my knees.”

“Turns out he and Alfie were in the same armored vehicle,” I said. “I wonder why I never knew that.”

“Cause you’re a civilian and it’s none of your damn business.”

Hodges had been on a patrol boat on a river in Vietnam, the result of an enlistment in the coast guard that went terribly wrong.

“I guess you’re right,” I said. “Even Alfie kept a tight lip when it came to Iraq. He was more focused on the great sack of the Dwarven City of Khazad-dûm.”

“Guys stuck in a war together are funny about that,” said Hodges. “To this day, I’d give my life for any of my shipmates if it came to that. Provided there weren’t any sledgehammers involved.”

“Stop talking like that or I’ll whack you on the head myself.”

We drank in silence for a bit, then Hodges said, “Somebody bought Joey Wentworth’s picnic boat. I guess it came with rights to the slip.”

“Really. Nice boat.”

“Haven’t seen the new owner. Just hear those twin power plants firing up. Or feel the vibrations, more like it. That thing must go like snot.”

“Joey’s commercial interests required fast transit,” I said, describing Joey’s part in the burgeoning drug flow through the East End.

“Is that how he ended up splattered all over the inside of his pickup?”

“That’s my guess, though nobody’s saying.”

“I’d prefer if the boats around here stuck to hauling fish,” he said.

We honored his sentiment with a few more minutes of calm silence, then I said to him, “You know, Hodges, we pay a lot of money to keep up these big boats, we ought to sail them once in a while.”

He nodded agreement.

“You got that right. Though the only rhumb line I can follow now is from here to the quarter berth.”

“We can take the
Carpe Mañana
,” I said. “If you man the helm, I can screw around with the sails.”

He thought that was a fine idea and we set a date far enough out to assure his helmsman readiness.

“It’ll give me a chance to show you how to sail that thing,” he said.

The shih tzus noticed the arrival of a pair of Canada geese out in the channel and burst in a flurry of black and white fur out of the cockpit and over the cabin top to the bow, where they loudly expressed their disapproval until Hodges yelled at them to shut the hell up.

“You’d think they’d get tired of doing that,” he said.

“Not as long as God keeps making water fowl.”

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

I
called Jackie the next day and proposed a field trip. I even offered to drive. All she had to do was come along and criticize my car.

“Your allegiance to that antediluvian ark is not my fault,” she said.

“At what point does an ark become postdiluvian?”

“Just pick me up. And bring coffee.”

Our destination was the headquarters of the New York National Guard Forty-Third Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

One of the distinctions of a national guard force over the regular army in a hostile theater is all the soldiers come from the same state, often the same towns and cities. That’s why the unofficial name for Jimmy and Alfie’s unit was the Long Island Forty-Third. Likewise, the VA center in Nassau took care of local veterans, so it wasn’t surprising that Jimmy had stumbled over Alfie in the psych ward.

I didn’t exactly have a reason to go there, other than heightened curiosity about their service together in Iraq. I assumed Jimmy had already said whatever he was going to say, so this seemed the next best way to go. I didn’t know if they’d talk to me, which was another reason to bring along Jackie, who was almost as good as Eddie at getting people to open up.

It wasn’t until we were under way that Jackie bothered to look up the address on her smartphone, so we were a little surprised to learn the place was nearly in Queens. I began to wish I’d brought Amanda’s Audi, but at least I’d installed a decent modern radio in the Grand Prix and it had a nice riding quality if you didn’t mind zero communication with the road surface. Also Jackie was never at a loss for words, so all I had to do was listen and offer trenchant commentary for her to dispute.

An hour out, Jackie had a brainstorm and called the headquarters and asked to speak to the public information officer. It turned out they had one, and after a brief delay, he came on. She told him the truth, that she was a defense attorney investigating the murder of a client who’d served in the Long Island Forty-Third in the Iraq War. She gave him Alfie’s name, and we were both relieved to have the guy confirm that Alfie did indeed serve in Iraq, as an E4 specialist trained to operate an M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle. She said she wanted to learn more about his service, and asked if she and her associate could drop by for a chat. He said sure as long as his commanding officer gave the okay. He said he’d get back to us.

“We could’ve called before we left,” she said, after getting off the phone.

“Yeah, but where’s the adventure in that.”

While waiting we distracted ourselves talking about Allison’s unsteady recovery, and Jackie repeated her firm recommendation that we use the plastic surgeons who worked on her after that concussion from the car bomb turned the left side of her face into a sunken soufflé.

“They work on the Upper East Side,” she said. “You see their faces on the street up there every day, and you’d never know it. Which is the point.”

I’d already been in touch with them and told her so. She promised me she’d stop by and talk to Allison at the next opportunity, show off her face, and generally run her through the reconstruction process. I told her I appreciated anything she could do. Then she changed the subject to Alfie, asking me if I had any theories I hadn’t shared, something she often accused me of doing, probably because I often did.

“No,” I said, honestly. “I think the three murders are connected, and that there’s something very funky going on with the Southampton Town Police, which may or may not have anything to do with Alfie’s murder, his message on your answering machine notwithstanding. I think the killers could be from anywhere, though the motive is local. And I have very little real evidence to support any of this.”

She nodded.

“I agree,” she said. “I also think you’ve made yourself a big fat target by agreeing to work with Ross and telling the whole East End that you’re after Alfie’s killer.”

“
We’ve
made ourselves big fat targets.”

“Point taken,” she said.

“Just keep your Glock and that man mountain close at hand.”

“Always do.”

T
HE HEADQUARTERS
for the Long Island Forty-Third wasn’t an attractive building, which you’d expect. It had a low profile and was built with white-painted cinder block, though there were lots of flags and the grounds were neatly trimmed. Which you’d also expect.

We hadn’t heard back from the PR guy, but that wasn’t surprising or much of a deterrent to either of us. I found a big enough parking spot to handle the Grand Prix and we marched through the front doors.

The lobby was guarded by a huge glass case filled with trophies, medals, and other commemorations of the Forty-Third’s storied past. Somewhere behind the case was a receptionist, though it took some time to find him. Jackie leaned over the wide expanse of glass in a vain attempt at invading his space and said we had an appointment with the public information officer. The young soldier looked unsettled, but picked up the phone anyway. After a brief discussion, he told us to make ourselves comfortable in the waiting area, an impossible assignment given the remarkably uncomfortable furniture.