Hard Stop (18 page)

“I saw you coming,” she said. “I don’t usually stand by the door.”

“Zelda Fitzgerald?”

“And who would be asking?”

“Sam Acquillo. I was a friend of Iku Kinjo.”

Her sloped shoulders fell a few degrees forward.

“It’s horrible,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

She leaned against the doorjamb, taking the weight off one long leg. “How did you say you knew Iku?” she asked.

“I didn’t. I knew her from work.”

She stood up straight again and reached for the door.

“Not a client, I hope,” she said, her voice gaining a notch in volume.

“Not Angel, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

“Fucking Angel is how we put it.”

She started to close the door. I put my hand out to stop her.

“I’m the one who found her.”

She let go of the door and leaned back on the jamb, and studied me. At least I think she did. It was hard to tell with her eyes blacked out.

“It’s malarkey, you know,” she said, after a pause.

“What is?” I asked.

“Suicide. Would never happen.”

“That’s what they’re saying?”

“Possible suicide. It was on the news this morning.”

News to me.

“What do you think?” I asked. “If not suicide.”

“I have a kettle boiling. You drink tea?”

“Under duress.”

“Come in anyway. Maybe I can find some coffee.”

She fell back into the house and I followed her. The style of the interior carried through the general motif. I was glad she was leading the way. The woodwork was so dark I could barely see where I was going as we moved through the front hall, which was dominated by a stubby grandfather clock and the stuffed head of a black bear. The ceiling might have been seven feet high, probably less. Zelda almost had to
crouch to get through the doors. In the kitchen things lightened up considerably, helped along by a wall-length window made of maybe fifty individual panes of glass. The kitchen was packed into a tight space, but sparkling clean and organized.

The smell from a thick, blue-grey spice plant, I guessed thyme, filled the air. A fat little tea kettle whistled on the stove, as advertised.

“I used to drink coffee,” said Zelda, “until my father died of cardiac arrest one morning at breakfast. The sight of him sitting there in disbelief sticks with a person.”

She scooped up the kettle and dumped the steaming water into a mug. It smelled great.

“I’m sold,” I said. “Give me one of those.”

“It’s Hibiscus Paradise. Irresistible aroma.”

“Apparently.”

After handing me a mug, she leaned up against the counter and clinked around hers with a spoon. She still wore the black-dot sunglasses. The kimono told about as much as any kimono about the shape underneath. The V at her neck took a pretty severe plunge, but I was trying hard not to look. I was only able to judge the shape of her shoulders, which were wide and angular, like a swimmer’s. The fingers that held the mug were also long and thin.

“I only knew Iku on the job,” I said to her. “I’m glad to know she had friends. Had a life outside.”

Zelda clinked the mug a few more times.

“How did you know she was a friend of mine?”

I picked a
New Yorker
off the counter.

“You get these at Bobby’s house.”

She pursed her lips.

“Quite the long shot,” she said.

“With a name like yours?”

“My great-grandparents owned a place out here two doors down from Gerald and Sara Murphy. My mother married a pretty drunk named Mike Fitzgerald. You can guess the rest.”

She told the tale like she’d told it a thousand times, which she probably had.

“Lucky for you Tallulah Bankhead preferred Atlantic Beach.”

Something like a smirk formed across her narrow lips.

“Funny,” she said. “No, honestly. Very funny. What did you say you did?”

“I didn’t. But I used to be an engineer. Iku advised the company I worked for. How’d you know her?”

“Robert, the dear heart. He brought her home like he’d found a wet puppy by the side of the road. Not exactly wet. Wrecked would be more like it.”

I clinked my own mug a little. Getting into the groove of Zelda’s kitchen.

“Where was home?”

She pointed at me with the handle of her spoon.

“You don’t think it was suicide either, do you? And you’re not an engineer, are you?”

“I am. And I’m not a cop. And no, I don’t think it was suicide.”

“You think somebody killed her,” said Zelda.

“I do.”

“And you are, again?”

“Sam Acquillo.”

“Should I be expecting a call from the police?”

“Probably.”

“I thought so,” she said, half to herself. “From the moment I saw you walking toward the door. You were intense.”

She put her foot up on the rung of a kitchen chair, and in so doing allowed the kimono to part across her leg. It was a
very long, very slender leg that I could follow almost as far as it went. The way she covered up when she noticed me looking made looking feel that much worse.

“I hope you find him quick,” she said, pretending what had happened hadn’t happened. “We can’t have people out there killing our brilliant and beautiful.”

“So where was home? Vedders Pond?”

“You engineers are very persistent,” she said. “Dogged even.”

“If you like dogged, I got some in the car.”

“Yes. That was our place, on the pond. Robert, Elaine and I. Robert has rented it every summer since college to get away from his parents and we chipped in. Others would come and go, and help spread the burden. Like Elaine’s brother this summer, with his unfortunate girlfriend.”

“Sybil Shandy?”

She nodded.

“The hostess at Roger’s,” she said “You probably know her.”

“If I could afford to eat at Roger’s. And Iku?”

“She joined the party this summer.”

“As Bobby’s girlfriend?”

She looked startled. Then she smiled an actual smile.

“Is that what I should tell the cops?” she asked.

“Is it the truth?”

“Does it matter?” she asked.

“Yeah, it matters. Your friend’s dead. Not coming back. It matters how that happened.”

She pushed herself off the kitchen counter and leaned over the table, supporting herself with her palms flat on the cherrywood surface.

“I loved Iku. She was a superstar. A shooting star. Robert, Elaine and I had all lived together since our junior year in Florence. We wore each other like comfy old clothes.
Too comfy. Iku lit up the world. Our little world. Having her around was the best thing that could have happened to us. Don’t lecture me on what it means to lose her.”

She seemed to be trying to stare me down.

I leaned across the table myself, meeting her halfway. “Fair enough,” I said. “So who killed her?”

She finally took off her black sunglasses, revealing a set of brilliant cobalt blue eyes.

“She loved all of us,” she said. “Why not try the ones she hated? The people she worked with. Clients and colleagues. She loathed them all.”

“Not all of them. Me she merely disliked.”

Zelda had something to say about that, but was interrupted by the shrill twitter of my cell phone. It took a few moments to remember how to answer the thing.

“Hey, Acquillo, good news,” said Jerome Gelb. “I’m leaving my wife. And I owe it all to you. I thought you should know right away.”

“Mazel tov. Though I told you I’d keep Marla to myself.”

“Sure, so you can keep a gun at my head. Not anymore,
compadre
.”

“So how’d you get my name?”

“I got a call from Mason Thigpen.”

“How is the little craphead?” I asked.

“Talkative. He told me who you are and what you are.”

“An altruist?”

“A violent sociopath. He called to warn me about you. He said his security team was investigating your activities. They sound like some pretty tough customers.”

“The toughest.”

“But you know what?” he said. “I don’t care. I’m in way too good a mood. Before you know it, I’m going to be a free man. Of course, it’ll cost a fortune.”

“Yeah, but what cost freedom?”

“By the way, I also called Angel Valero to warn him, too. I gave him your name. He was very appreciative.”

“Who’s talkative now?”

“Ah, it’s a great day. I’m going to take some time off to smell the roses. You should think about doing that yourself.”

“All I smell is Hibiscus Paradise,” I said.

“Hey, Acquillo, one more thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Fuck you,” he shouted, then hung up.

I flicked the phone shut and stuffed it in my pocket.

“Sorry about that,” I said to Zelda.

“It’s hard to imagine the other side of
that
conversation.”

“It is for me, too, and I was listening to it.”

Zelda looked eager to rid herself and her Hobbit hole of my presence, and I couldn’t blame her. I made it easy by stumbling through the dark toward the front door without being asked. Though there was one question in serious need of answering.

“So did Iku actually have a boyfriend?”

She seemed to enjoy the question. Though now that I could see her eyes it seemed I knew even less about what she was thinking. So her smile might have been genuine, or I might have just thought it was in the dim light of the foyer.

“I don’t know,” she said. “What do you think?”

On the way back to North Sea I was jarred again by the ring of my cell phone.

“You want to talk to me?” said a voice so deep I thought it was synthesized.

“Depends on who you are.”

“Angel Valero. You want to talk to me?”

“Yes. I want to talk to you.”

He gave me an address on Dune Drive in Southampton.

“Five o’clock. I’ll be down at the pool,” he said, then hung up.

“Doesn’t anybody say goodbye anymore?” I asked Eddie, but he couldn’t hear me with his head out the window, trolling the breeze for bugs and the streets for miniature French poodles to roust from their coddled complacency.

I
KILLED THE REST OF THE DAY
walking around the docks of Sag Harbor looking at sailboats. With the likelihood of my buying one on par with a flight to the rings of Saturn, I’d never narrowed my preferences. Big boats, little boats, racers, cruisers, ketches, sloops, schooners and yawls, it was all the same to me. Equally desirable and equally out of reach.

But a thought struck me one day when I was working in my shop. What if I just built one myself? How hard would that be?

Impossible. Though maybe I could restore some miserable old derelict dredged off the bottom of the sea, or salvaged off the rocks after a hurricane. In that case, I’d need to get a little focus, clarify my priorities. This meant careful research of the type I was doing in Sag Harbor, walking around and looking at boats, with Eddie on a leash to avoid municipal sanctions and spare the resident waterfowl.

The process was easier than I thought it would be. The only boats I really liked were akin to Hodges’s Gulf Star—forty-something-foot, beat-up old live-aboards.

I didn’t want to race, I didn’t want to sail around the world. I wanted to sit with Eddie in the cockpit in a quiet harbor. I wanted to grill off the transom and listen to Miles Davis. And drink my vodka ration and smoke my Camel ration, then sail to another quiet harbor and drink whatever vodka was left over from all the dumb rationing. If I wanted, I could bring Amanda along and she could drink wine. There were any number of other things we could do on a boat if we put our minds to it.

This is a want, I said to myself. I want something. It had been so long since I’d felt that sensation it was hard at first to identify. But there it was. An unrequited yearning for an entirely unnecessary object of desire.

While still in the thrall, I drove Eddie back to Oak Point, where I let him out so he could wait in the backyard for Amanda to get home. Then I headed back toward the ocean.

On the way I called Sullivan, but his phone kicked me into his voice mail again. So I left another message, sticking to the facts, leaving out all speculation, conjecture and phantom sailboats.

Dune Drive was as good as its name, a curvy, two-lane road running parallel to the dunes and the shoreline. Scattered atop the dunes were oceanfront houses built mostly in the late twentieth century, a catalog of architectural triumph and catastrophe. The pampered landscaping had flourished in recent years, making it harder to see the houses, but Angel’s place was easy to spot. You’d probably find it in a magazine or academic text described in terms to inflame the imagination of design students and critics, but to me it was just a three-dimensional rectangle on stilts.

There was a square white gate with an intercom stuck to the gatepost. I pushed the button.

“Mr. Acquillo?” asked an accented voice a few registers above Valero’s.

“Yup.”

As the gates swung in I half expected the guy to say, “Enter ye, if thou darest.”

The cobblestone drive curved around plantings of dune grass and wild roses and formed a large parking area in front of the gleaming white staircase leading to the first floor of the house. Across the parking area, partly filled with the customary Jaguars, Porsches and Mercedes Benzes, was a white picket fence. Farther back were two smaller versions of the main house. Guest house and pool house by my astute reckoning.