Cop Job (6 page)

“Why do you always take the side of my least-sentimental nature?”

“I’m uncomfortable with finer emotions.”

Oksana came back with a bottle of water for each of us. Moments later Edith Madison walked in. I stood up because my mother taught me to stand when women approached. Any woman, though Edith probably thought it was an honor reserved for her. I shook her dry, spidery hand.

Edith was still in her sixties, though barely. Her white hair was stacked up on her head in a tangled mess and her clothes, though likely expensive, were on extended duty. Her skin was the fair kind that wrinkled easily, though not enough to hide a bone structure chiseled out of New Hampshire granite.

“Counselor, Mr. Acquillo,” she said, shaking our hands.

“Mrs. Madison, nice to see you again,” said Jackie.

“I’m sure,” said Edith. “How is Burton?”

She was referring to Burton Lewis, the founder of Jackie’s pro bono law practice. Not only a philanthropist, Burton was a certified billionaire and notable among the prominent in the city and on Long Island. The kind of guy people like Edith Madison paid attention to. He was also a close friend of mine, which was notable for me, since like Jackie, I didn’t have a lot of close friends.

“He’s great as always,” said Jackie. “I’ll extend your regards.”

“Do so. It’s been a long time.”

I often wondered if Edith and Burton belonged to a covert society of old-money WASPs who secretly ran the country. A sort of Ivy League illuminati. Alfie had asserted that view, and maybe he was right, though his other theory, that the elves of Rivendell were in on the operation, undermined his credibility.

“So what’s up?” I asked, just to get things moving.

Edith and Oksana looked like it pained them to cast their eyes my way.

“We’re in possession of certain information,” said Edith, “the origins of which must remain confidential.”

She waited for me to say sure, I can keep a secret.

“Certainly,” said Jackie for both of us.

“You understand, the consequences of betraying this trust would be severe,” said Edith, pointing her bony finger at me.

“We understand,” said Jackie.

We’d already said we’d keep our mouths shut, I thought. You think a threat will make that promise easier to keep?

“This is extremely difficult,” said Edith. “And I’ve chosen this course of action with great reluctance. I’ve been convinced by a treasured advisor that it’s the best of many disagreeable options.”

Yeah, yeah, I thought. Get on with it.

“If you want to tell us something, Mrs. Madison, I think you should go ahead and do it. Or not,” I said. “Till I know what you’re talking about, it’s all a bunch of blather.”

“You need to take this seriously,” she said, sticking her finger at me again, as if that would improve my mood.

“He will, Mrs. Madison,” said Jackie. “I’ll make sure of it.”

That didn’t seem to reassure her, though after a big cleansing breath, she pressed on.

“How well do you know Ross Semple?” she asked.

As much as anyone, I thought. I’d known him to say hello and banter back and forth in bad Latin since we were at Southampton High School together. A habit we took up again when he moved back from the city to run Southampton Town police. Though I didn’t really know him, not in a real way. I shared that with Edith.

“We have it on excellent authority that a criminal enterprise has developed within the Town of Southampton Police Force,” she said. “Mr. Aldergreen was not the only confidential informant to be murdered in recent weeks. In fact there were three. Our information suggests police collusion, or at least passivity.”

Okay, I thought. That’s something.

“Why eliminate your own CIs?” Jackie asked.

“Snitches are information hubs,” said Oksana. “Not just one-way conduits into the cops. They knew too much.”

“We’re in a difficult position,” said Edith. “Ross spent five years at Internal Affairs in the Bronx. His former partner now runs the state unit, the only organization qualified to handle an undercover investigation, but he refuses to help us, citing conflict of interest. If he worked for me, I’d fire him. But he doesn’t.”

She sat back in her chair and waited for us to absorb the implications.

“You want us to investigate the cops?” said Jackie, losing some of her professional reserve.

Edith still looked pained.

“Not exactly. Very competent assets have been deployed. But it would be very useful to have you both as confidential informants yourselves.”

Jackie opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“How do you know we won’t spill it all to Ross?” I asked. “He’s a friend of ours, sort of.”

Oksana dropped a fat manila folder in front of Jackie.

“This is the file we have on Mr. Acquillo. Read through it if you would, Jackie,” said Edith, “then explain his chances in open court.”

Jackie handed back the envelope.

“Not necessary. We get it,” she said.

Edith nodded. Oksana just sat there like an exquisite figurine, both present and detached.

“You won’t believe this,” said Edith, “but I have some respect for your investigative skills. As an elected official of the State of New York, I’m obligated to uphold official legal process, but privately, I can say you two have had some impressive success. I know I’m taking a big risk even having these conversations, but the matter of police corruption is so serious, and problematic, that I’m willing to suspend my better judgment.”

“That’s okay with me,” I told her, before Jackie had a chance to either cement the deal or leap like an Amazon warrior up on her high horse. “I like Ross fine, despite it all, and Sullivan really is a friend, but we’ll play by your rules. For now, anyway.”

“That’s reassuring,” said Oksana.

I shrugged.

“We’ll take you at your word. Until there’s a reason we shouldn’t,” I said.

Edith pointed at me again with no attempt to blunt the gesture. I felt like telling her, keep it up and I’ll bite it off.

“That’s the sort of impertinence I find so annoying,” she said.

“I’ll take annoyance. I’ve had worse from scarier people,” I said.

Edith retreated back into her chair, the look of unresolved conflict in her eyes.

“Impossible,” said Oksana.

“Agreed,” said Jackie.

“Who are the other dead CIs?” I asked.

“Not sure we should share that,” said Edith.

“Then the deal’s off.”

“Why?” Edith asked, looking startled.

“We’ll find out anyway on our own, but it’ll eat up time. We’ve got to know at least as much as you do. It’s stupid not to tell us.”

Oksana tapped the fat manila folder, probably unconsciously.

“If you want to stick any of that shit on me, go ahead and try,” I said. “If I do this, I do it for my own reasons. And I do it my way.”

“Our way,” said Jackie.

“Right,” I said, though I didn’t exactly know what she meant.

Edith sighed and looked over at Oksana.

“Can you get the file?” she asked. Oksana got up and left the room, expressionless and unhurried. “We don’t know what the police could be covering up. We assume it’s one of the usual suspects—drugs, prostitution, shakedowns, even larceny. Given traditional patterns, it’s unlikely that the participants extend beyond a small, tightly knit group. But we don’t know that. Ross is such a competent chief, it’s hard to imagine such a thing going on under his nose without his knowledge. Makes no sense.”

“Less sense than Ross Semple corrupting his office?” Jackie asked.

Edith took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.

“You think you know people,” she said, leaving the sentence hanging in the air.

Oksana showed up with another manila folder, which she said contained a copy of everything they had. Jackie stuffed it into her giant purse.

“Please keep that confidential,” said Oksana to Jackie, drawing a look I’d seen before. I knew what it meant, but I doubt the same was true for Oksana. “There’s also a link with a password into our CI database. Good background information.”

“I hope we aren’t making a terrible mistake,” said Edith, with a lot of sincerity.

“You shouldn’t say stuff like that,” I said, standing up. “You made a decision, stick with it. No second guessing.”

“You can stop lecturing me,” she said.

“Maybe you need it,” I said, and walked out of there with Jackie and her emotions, all mixed up as usual, flowing along in my wake.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

T
he only thing I did the next day was the job I was actually paid to do—building architectural details in the basement woodshop of my cottage. I’d blundered into this work by doing finish carpentry for my friend Frank Entwhistle, who realized I could handle his fine woodworking chores at a far lower cost than he paid factory shops, with better quality, at only twice the time to completion that others promised but never delivered. This last discrepancy was allayed by an easy compliance on my part. I built whatever he asked me to build, which I reckoned was the job of a craftsman—not lecturing people who paid for the stuff on the idiocy of their requests. As much as I wanted to.

The way I saw it, this being the Hamptons, idiotic requests were more or less standard operating procedure.

The problem was one of an expanding universe. People living in three-million-dollar, eight-hundred-square-foot apartments could suddenly have a four-thousand-square-foot house for the same money. With no idea how to fill up all that space.

Ignorance rarely being a deterrent, these city dwellers were highly inventive in their dopey requests for interior appointments, and their architects more than happy to collect big fees for placing a single phone call to someone willing to accept the challenge, in my case Frank Entwhistle, who placed a call to me, who always said yes, and we all won.

A seamless and efficient transfer of wealth from the financial sector to the architects of their materialistic dreams, to the builders who translated architectural dreams into houses that wouldn’t fall down, and lastly to me, the master of the finishing touch.

A
LLISON CALLED
me when I was about to rip a five-quarter piece of antique mahogany retrieved from a pile of wreckage behind an abandoned nightclub and hotel. The place was shut down two decades before when a club goer shot a bouncer. The victim’s fellow bouncers responded by beating the gunman into a near vegetative state before bothering to call an ambulance, resulting in the original guy bleeding out on the dance floor.

The resulting blizzard of lawsuits and political hyperventilation overwhelmed the owners of the club, a pair of gay millionaires from Czechoslovakia, prompting them to simply close the doors and move back to Europe, where they still were as far as anyone knew.

Various vandals and enterprising salvagers had plundered the interior of what had once been a Victorian mansion, not realizing that the most valuable wood was locked up inside doors, windows, and architectural details covered in layers of paint, ripped out, and left outside to rot.

I had a separate section of my shop devoted to rough cleaning the stuff, the centerpiece of which was a cast iron planer about the same vintage as the quarried wood. With chipped blades and a DB rating comparable to a jet engine, it was a miracle I heard the phone ring.

“Doing anything?” Allison asked.

“Shaving off lead paint. You?”

“Nathan’s quitting sales and going to work for a start-up.”

“What are they starting?”

“I’m not sure. Half his pay is in equity.”

“Getting in on the ground floor,” I said.

“The other half won’t cover his rent, so he wants to move in with me.”

“Isn’t this the kind of job you wanted him to take?”

“It is. I didn’t realize the pay part,” she said.

“Meet the Law of Unintended Consequences.”

“I hate that,” she said.

“So what’re you going to do?”

“I was hoping you’d give me an idea.”

“Try it for six months. And get a dog.”

“To protect me from Nathan?”

“To have a friend, after you kick Nathan out of the apartment.”

I let her run through another half-dozen speculative scenarios, filling in all possible permutations of each, until her options and my forbearance were both depleted. But it made her feel better, which I guess was the purpose of the call in the first place.

“I can’t tell if you like Nathan or not,” she said, as a parting thought.

“Me neither. Let’s see how he does with the dog.”

L
ATER THAT
night, it was Jackie’s turn. She called me when Eddie and I were rotting on the sun porch, him gnawing on a dinosaur bone, and me admiring the way the moon sketched flickering white lines across the blackness of the Little Peconic Bay. In other words, the two of us were thoroughly engaged in our favorite pastimes.

So it was a little annoying to see Jackie’s name pop up on the cell phone’s little screen.

“What.”

“What’s wrong with hello? Or, wow, Jackie! It’s
so
great to
hear
from you!”

“I guess if it was.”

“You love hearing from me,” she said.

“Not at eleven o’clock at night, when most responsible people are either drunk or trying to get there.”

“I read through all the files from Dame Edith and the White Witch. Do you want to hear what I found out?”

“You don’t fancy Oksana? She seems kind of cuddly to me.”

“If you like cuddling scorpions. Do you want to know what I learned or not?”

“I do.”

I could hear wine pouring over the sound of her perennial sighs.

“Okay, Joey Wentworth. Son of Manhattan rich people, high school dropout after eleventh grade (idiot), skinny, pimples, white skin, heroin habit (even bigger idiot), dishwasher at Jacques and Valencia’s for two years.”

According to Jackie, he was slowly getting turned by the Southampton cops, specifically by the other Town detective, Lionel Veckstrom, whom Jackie and I generally referred to as “Prick Cop.”

Few appreciate that the East End of Suffolk County, the farther reaches of which encompass the Hamptons, is essentially an island. A big swath of pine barren separates the East End from the rest of Long Island, and the Shinnecock Canal assures that the only way in or out is over a pair of bridges, unless you want to flee by way of the ferries to the North Fork, which run at the speed of number ten motor oil.