Cop Job (8 page)

“Seems that way to me, too,” I said. “What’s on your mind?”

“I really meant the compliment.”

“Okay. Thanks. But you’re not here to assess my carpentry skills.”

She continued to study the wood pieces. “If someone gives you the keys to a house, where all but one of the doors inside are supposed to be locked,” she said, without looking up at me, “but you’re, like, really good at jimmying locks, so you do, because, what the hell, you’re already in the house and all, so why waste an opportunity? What’s the moral hazard?”

“I’m supposed to do the breaking and entering on this team,” I said. “You’re supposed to tell me not to and then I do it anyway.”

“I’m speaking metaphorically. It’s not actually a house.”

“I guess that’s good.”

“It’s a database.”

“Maybe not so good. So you had access to a specific file and you hacked your way into other files you weren’t supposed to see?”

“Not me personally. Randall Dodge.”

Randall was a tall, skinny Shinnecock Indian (technically sort of an Indian/African American/Irish gumbo) and former cyber sleuth for the US Navy who ran a computer hardware repair and software training operation out of a storefront in Southampton Village. Jackie and I had taken occasional advantage of his technical skills in return for help with some legal entanglements.

“You had him hack the database,” I said.

“I’d rather not use the word ‘hack.’ Sounds unseemly.”

“No. Sounds illegal. Depending on whom you hacked.”

“I guess I should know that better than you. From a legal perspective.”

“So who’s the victim?” I asked.

She stood there silently, indecision scrunching up her pretty round face. “You’re going to tell me eventually. Stop wasting time and just get it out.”

“The New York State Police?” she said, with enough up-speak to lift a truck.

“Not really.”

“Really.”

I put down the coping saw and sat on a tall stool. I looked at her face for traces of humor, in the hope it was just a bad joke.

“It’s not a joke,” she said, interpreting my look. “Tucked inside all the paper Oksana gave me was a link to the master CI file on the State Police server. I’m guessing there’s a lot more information there than what Oksana gave us. It was password protected, of course, but I thought Randall might find it fun to see if he could crack the code.”

“Fun? How much fun do you think he’ll have in Hungerford State Penitentiary?”

“Randall doesn’t get caught,” she said, though with less conviction than she might have wanted to express.

“Not yet.”

She reached in a pocket of the yellow dress and took out a flash drive. She held it up to the bright light of the shop. “It’s amazing how much stuff you can stick on one of these things.” Then she looked at me. “I don’t suppose you’d want a look.”

I didn’t own a computer. I’d barely touched a keyboard since using the dumb terminal in my office to run technical analyses through a roomful of IBM mainframes. Getting cashiered from my corporate job had more or less killed my interest in digital technology, now preferring information delivered by the printed word or words spoken over the rim of a glass.

“No. I’m not even touching it.”

She wiggled the drive in the air.

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Why take that kind of risk? What were you thinking?” I asked.

“That Edith wants to keep us in a tight little maze. That always makes me want to jump the walls and take a look around.”

“Go ahead and look,” I said, picking up the little coping saw and piece of molding, trying to remember where I’d left off. “I’ll be working on my deniability.”

She put the flash drive on my workbench and backed away.

“I might’ve accidentally dropped that on the floor. How would you know where it came from?” she said, then added, “It’s a download. A copy. They can’t know you’re rummaging around in the attic. Just stay off the web while you rummage.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. Ask Randall.”

I looked at the drive, pausing over my work piece.

“What’re we looking for?” I asked.

“You’ll know it when you see it.”

“You really don’t know.”

“I don’t. I could do this all by myself, but four eyeballs are better than two.”

She left the flash drive on the workbench on her way out. I ignored it for the rest of the day, concentrating as best I could on the cherry china cabinet.

After freshening up in the outside shower, I walked across our common lawn to Amanda’s house—a creamy stucco- and blue-trimmed deal that looked like it’d been airlifted in from Provence. Amanda was out on her patio reading a thick, glossy publication issued by one of the bigger real estate agencies.

“Scouting the competition,” she said, as I loaded up at the wet bar.

“How do you stack up?”

“Well in the running, buddy, if you filter out lovers of bad taste and ostentation.”

“That covers a lot of territory.”

“How was the woodshop?”

“Productive, despite an appearance by Jackie Swaitkowski.”

“More on Alfie Aldergreen?”

“Sort of. Do you know how to work one of these things?” I asked, holding up the flash drive.

“I do. What’s on it?”

“Dossiers on confidential informants, past and present. Illegally obtained.”

“Eek.”

“I’d rather not make you an accomplice after the fact, but I don’t have a computer.”

“I thought being an accomplice was the centerpiece of our relationship?”

“Let’s boot it up.”

We retired to her business office, an airy space with glass-topped furniture and white walls, darkened only by a shelf full of catalogs for building materials and household appliances.

“Jackie said to stay off the Internet when you’re downloading or accessing this information,” I told her as she plugged the flash drive into a CPU on the floor.

“How come?”

“Some sort of security alchemy.”

“That’s comforting.”

After starting the machine and clicking around folders and files, she stood up and offered me the mouse.

“Why don’t you drive the car,” she said.

It took a moment to remember how to use the mouse and navigate the file structures, but I got there. Like riding a bicycle.

“This isn’t so hard,” I said. “What’s everybody talking about?”

“They aren’t.”

The first layer of the file structure was by date. Within that, it was broken out by police jurisdiction, a complicated thing in New York State where geopolitical bureaucracies are configured like a Russian nesting doll—Southampton Village inside Southampton Town, inside Suffolk County, inside New York State. I went into Southampton Town, started on current investigations, and burrowed down from there.

Two hours later, long after she’d wandered away, Amanda came into the office to announce dinner. I must have looked reluctant to move.

“You have to eat, darling. Your fingers need their strength.”

After a tasty, but nearly silent meal—my mind being too cluttered with police procedure and jargon to manage a coherent conversation—I went back to the computer.

I was no stranger to the addictive properties of computer-aided research, but even I was surprised by how seductive it could be to rifle through utterly forbidden information. Another two hours passed before Amanda visited again, this time holding a big glass of vodka.

“I’m trying to knock you out so you’ll abandon your new love and come to bed with me.”

I looked up at her.

“I need another couple hours.”

“Wake me up,” she said, drifting back out of the room.

I could see why CIs could be such a crucial resource. Joey Wentworth, like Lilly Fremouth, was a fountain of insider information on the shipping, handling, and distribution of drugs. At the same time, they were both skilled in what to share and what to withhold. It was simple economics. If a snitch shared too much it reduced the value of the product, and often increased the possibility of getting caught by the snitched-upon. A bad career move.

With Alfie it was hard to tell. Sullivan was terse and to the point in his reports. Tempering with heavy qualifications any of Alfie’s commentary. Unlike Joey and Lilly, who had a focus—heroin and prostitution respectively—Alfie was more generalized. A good example concerned an elegant woman with an indefinable foreign accent who frequented the more expensive boutiques in Southampton Village. Alfie noticed that she looked heavier leaving a shop than she did going in, and always seemed to be carrying the same bags every day. Sullivan worked with a Village cop named Judy Rensler to set up a sting, and sure enough, the woman was a professional shoplifter born and raised in Babylon on Long Island.

Other cases involved an old lady who picked up the wrong pug from where it was tied to a street sign, a team of teenaged pickpockets—a girl and a boy who used the proceeds to buy surfing gear—and a skinny but lovely Latvian hostess at one of the restaurants on Jobs Lane who supplemented her income by giving blowjobs to anyone weighing less than three hundred pounds and in possession of an exotic sports car.

Hardly the stuff that should lead to summary execution.

Veckstrom, on the other hand, wrote like a career journalist with pretensions toward literary fiction. He had a law degree and a wealthy wife whose family’s house on the beach in Southampton had been the original draw to the East End. The guy hated my guts, so it took a little effort to appreciate the intellectual sophistication beneath the arrogant sneer and relentless accusation.

He described his dealings with Joey Wentworth in terms of a psychological dynamic that had more to do with Joey’s relationship with his rich, effeminate father and overbearing, but infantile mother than the kid’s thirst for quick, sleazy profiteering. It was police paperwork in the form of Ibsen and O’Neill, though I admit it had me reading to the end, with Joey splattered all over the inside of his SUV, leaving Veckstrom at a loss over motive or perpetrator.

Not for lack of suspects. Everyone in the underground distribution chain had used his marine delivery services at one time or another, though no one really liked him personally, and he didn’t like any of them.

No wife, no girlfriend—or boyfriend—no group affiliations or notorious feuds, just a low-grade sociopath with a souped-up picnic boat and a penchant for risky business.

Despite the concentrated effort, there was more to read in the snitch files, but it was late, my eyes were sore, and a woman who made me promise to wake her up was quietly sleeping only a few doors away.

B
EFORE
I’
D
brought the Grand Prix to the repair guys to fix the rear window, I’d noticed in the daylight a rosy smear around an area that hadn’t quite busted through. My first thought was bloodstain, a thought that vanished from my consciousness almost as quickly as it arrived.

Until I saw the plastic sour cream container in my shop that held the salvaged piece of glass. I picked it out of the container with a pair of pliers and looked at it under a task light. The stain was still there, now dried a darker red, but unmistakable.

I slipped the shard into a zip loc bag and stuck it in my pocket.

I worked another few hours in the shop, then called Joe Sullivan.

“Say Joe, how close are you with the ME these days?” I asked him when he answered the phone.

“No closer than I have to be.”

“I think the guy who smashed in my rear window left a bloodstain. Do you think he’d run a DNA test for you?”

“I don’t answer ridiculous questions when I’m off duty.”

“They let you off duty?” I asked.

“Ask me tomorrow so I can officially say no.”

“No?”

“We can barely get DNA from a murder weapon these days. They’re backed up, like, fifty years,” he said.

“He’d do it for you.”

“No. But he might do it for Jackie.”

“Really?”

“I can submit it as evidence,” he said, “then she can tickle his tummy or whatever it takes to put it through sometime before the end of the century.”

I shook off the unwanted image before it could take hold.

“Okay. Can I bring it over?”

“I said I was off.”

“I know where you live. I’ll bring coffee.”

“Milk, no sugar,” he said, then hung up.

B
ACK IN
the early twentieth century when regular middle-class neighborhoods were growing up around Southampton Village, it was common practice to put a little free-standing apartment at the back of the lot, often over a garage, to have a place to store surplus relatives, sometimes a maid or gardener, or even rent-paying boarders. Municipal planning had outlawed the practice for new construction, for no good reason, though grandfathered “mother-in-law” apartments and guesthouses endured, instantly hiking the value of any property thus endowed.

Joe Sullivan lived in one behind the home of a friend’s parents, local people thrilled to have such an eminent police presence in their neighborhood. Most of the other locals had sold out long before, converting the Hamptons’s breathtaking real estate inflation into bigger houses in South Carolina and unexpectedly sumptuous retirements.

Though crime in the area was nearly unheard of, the old couple was unnerved by all the summer homes left abandoned nine months out of the year.

The cottage Sullivan rented was a miniature version of the main house, enclosed in mature shrubbery and made no less quaint by the unmarked Ford Crown Victoria parked a few feet from the front door.

I rang the doorbell, waited a few minutes, then rang it again. Sullivan swung open the door, greeting me with a snarl.

“Repeated ringing of a doorbell doesn’t make a person answer any quicker,” he said.

“Now you tell me.”

He was wearing a sweat suit that loudly declared affiliation with the New York Giants. In his hand was a large coffee mug. On his feet were US Army desert-tan combat boots. I wondered where he’d stowed the lightweight .38 that never left his body.

He backed away from the door so I could enter a comfortable living area, unadorned, but clean and well lit, with a pair of plain fabric couches and a flat-screen TV.