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  The Last Refuge

  ( Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery - 1 )

  Chris Knopf

  Sam Acquillo’s at the end of the line. A middle-aged corporate dropout living in his dead parents’ ramshackle cottage in the Hamptons, Sam has abandoned his friends, family and a big-time career to sit on his porch, drink vodka and stare at the Little Peconic Bay. But when the old lady next door ends up floating dead in her bathtub it seems like Sam is the only one who wonders why. Burned-out, busted up and cynical, the ex-engineer, ex-professional boxer, ex-loving father and husband finds himself uncovering secrets no one could have imagined, least of all Sam himself. Meanwhile, a procession of quirky characters intrudes on Sam’s misanthropic ways. A beautiful banker, pot-smoking lawyer, bug-eyed fisherman and gay billionaire join a full complement of cops, thugs and local luminaries in this tale of money and murder.

  From the Trade Paperback edition.

  From Publishers Weekly

  Sam Acquillo, the hero of Knopf's arresting debut (a Book Sense notable selection for May), is the very epitome of the dropout. An ex-corporation man, divorced from his wife and estranged from his daughter, he lives in his parents' run-down cottage in Southampton, Long Island, and seems content to drink himself into oblivion. Then one day he finds the black and swollen body of his elderly neighbor, Regina Broadhurst, who has apparently drowned in her bathtub. Is it an accident or murder? And if it's the latter, will solving the mystery behind Regina's death enable Sam to pick up the pieces of his life and move on? While the promotional copy's likening the book to Camus's The Plague may be a stretch, there's a definite whiff of Elmore Leonard here, particularly in the snappy dialogue and the colorful, oddball characters, including a gay billionaire. Knopf's effortless narrative style and sense of humor bode well for the further adventures of Sam Acquillo.

  For Jacqueline Hood Knopf

  ONE

  MY FATHER BUILT this cottage at the tip of Oak Point on the Little Peconic Bay in the Town of Southampton, Long Island, in the mid-1940s when there was nobody else around to build anything. They were all still at war, most of the young guys anyway, and the older guys were either too poor or too scared of the future—or too damaged by the Depression—to take a chance. But my dad had vision before people called it that, and he bought this nine-tenths of an acre parcel right at the edge of the bay. Waterfront, they call it now. Then it was called stupid and expensive, even though it only cost about $560 a lot.

  The price of this kind of property has gone up a lot since then.

  He built the house himself, a little at a time, without a mortgage. The first year he dug the foundation with a pick and shovel, laid up cinder block and put on the first floor deck. Then he built the rest of the house room by room as he got the money, and the building materials, most of which he scrounged out of local dumps and empty lots and the handful of construction projects that were going on at the time around the city and out on the Island.

  He was too old for the war, but he fought plenty at home. My dad wasn’t a nice guy. He was a real bastard actually, but he treated me okay, most of the time.

  I live in this place now, by myself. I was born about the time my father winterized the cottage, so for all intents and purposes, this is where I grew up. We also had an apartment in the Bronx where he stayed during the week, but my mother and my sister and I lived on the bay year round after he installed the oil furnace. I don’t remember ever being in the Bronx, though he used to tell me about the room I had, and how my sister and I played in the backyard around the crabgrass and sumac trees, until “the Negroes all moved in and scared away the regular people.” That was more or less how he put it, speaking the words with an acid fury. He was an active racist, like all the people of my father’s generation I knew growing up.

  All I remember of my childhood is the restless water and neon sunset sky of the bay. The persistent breeze that could suddenly snap into hysteria and the smell of rotting sea life at low tide. I’m breathing it in now, and sometimes it seems like life’s only durable reference point.

  The cottage is all on one floor, with a corner-to-corner screened-in front porch facing the Little Peconic. It’s the best room in the house, and it’s where I sleep all year round. Beginning about early April, till a little before Christmas, I leave off the storm windows. That was why I could always hear Regina Broadhurst moaning in the night. She slept with her windows open as well, and since her house was right next door, the only thing to stop the noise were the cicadas, the flip-flip of the little bay waves and about five hundred feet of windswept Long Island air.

  When my mother died, I called a local used furniture guy to come over and take everything out of the house. Occasionally I see one of our things for sale in the window of an antiques store, or the thrift shop on Main Street, depending on its perceived value. I got two thousand dollars for the whole thing, which included hauling it away. They had to take a lot of stuff they didn’t want, but that was part of the deal.

  I held on to my dad’s ’67 Pontiac Grand Prix. I keep it running and drive it around the eastern end of the Island. I try to stick to the back roads during the summer season. The big stupid car has a huge engine. Traffic makes it overheat.

  Because it’s so big and improbably shaped, people don’t realize that the ’67 Grand Prix was one of the fastest production cars Detroit ever made. My dad and I retrofitted it with a 4-speed from a GTO, which made it even faster. I let the paint fade into the undercoat, but I patch the rust holes as they surface. It’s something to do.

  My dad never appreciated the car like I did. He really only got a few good years out of it before those guys beat him to death down at the neighborhood bar in the city where he used to hang out.

  After the furniture guy stripped the cottage, I stripped the paint my mother had put over the old varnished knotty pine that covers the walls. She’d done it to get back at my father for getting killed and leaving her alone on a permanent basis, not just during the week. I revarnished it and bought a new couch and a woodstove for the living room. Also a kitchen table and chairs, and a bed for the screened-in porch. I haven’t got around to doing anything else, but the little cottage feels bigger, and even echoes a little, and at least it’s wiped clean of the cluttered, congealed misery of my parents’ lives.

  This all happened about four years ago after I came out here to stay. The place had been empty for a while—my mother spent her last years imploding into herself at a nursing home in Riverhead. My sister saw her more often than I did, even though she had to fly in from Wisconsin. I said I was too busy at the company to break away, but actually I couldn’t stand to see my mother in that place surrounded by all those demented, hollowed-out mummies. Or suffer the reproach I always imagined I saw in the contour of my mother’s set jaw.

  It was also true that the company stole a great deal of my time, including the time I should have had for other things, and other people.

  My mother didn’t like Regina Broadhurst, the woman who lived next door. But she liked everyone else in the neighborhood. They would seem to be all over the place during the week, then they’d evaporate on the weekends when my father came out East to stand in the front yard, fists on hips, glaring at potential trespassers.

  Regina was tough to like, and even tougher when I moved in full time four years ago. By that time she was pushing eighty and hard as a hickory tree. Ropy, and not much of a smiler. Her white hair sprung chaotically from her head in woolly clumps. Her hands, like her knees, were all knobby and twisted up with arthritis, so she’d point at me with her knuckles when she wanted to emphasize a point. Which was often.

  I had trouble escaping her because she was always calling me to come over and fix something. This was a habit s
he got from my father, who would look after all the mechanical systems in the neighborhood, being the only local certified mechanic and bound by some strange force of philanthropy. Regina’s husband had died so long ago he may as well have never existed at all. The house he built, which expressed the same ad hoc attitude as my father’s, was always on the verge of general collapse. She would stand at the edge of the scrubby bed of wildflowers that defined our property line and release a single noun the way you’d send forth a carrier pigeon. Something like “furnace,” and my father would swear at her and go fetch his tools. This was such a routine occurrence that when she did it to me the first time I complied without hesitation.

  Like my father, I swore at her under my breath. Some precedents can only be honored in whole cloth.

  The people who built this neighborhood were all like my father. They worked at jobs that got their clothes dirty, joined unions, bought cheap furniture and put statues of the Madonna inside big tractor tires out on their lawns. Many spoke with accents, or at least their elderly parents did. Their boys played baseball in the street just like in the city. Their daughters were mostly pale and overweight, though a few turned beautiful right before they flew the coop.

  The neighborhood, arrayed randomly on a ragged peninsula made of sand and covered with scrub oak and mountain laurel, was little better than a squalid summertime tenement for the first thirty years it was here. It didn’t help that an old brick manufacturing outfit was on an adjacent shore. Their last serious enterprise was making rubberized life rafts for the Navy during World War II. They finally surrendered about thirty years after the Japanese. After that, property values got a little better, as the houses were winterized, and real estate in general out here went supernova. But even now, in the first year of the new century, a neighborhood like this, in a place like this, is a little like a guy in a cheap suit accidentally invited to a gallery opening.

  I said I slept on the porch, but mostly I’d sit at the table and smoke Camels, drink overpriced vodka and look at the bay. I had a bargain going with Nature. She was supposed to let me do this long enough to get my fill, before shutting down all my internal organs, and I was supposed to worship her greater works, like the saltwater taffy hydrangea at the edge of the lawn, the fishy, smelly flavor of the breeze and the gaudy red-purple sky that shattered into a billion shards as it played across the Little Peconic Bay.

  Late at night, usually after darkness had completely settled in, I’d hear Regina moaning in her sleep. The sound was from the damned, filled with despair. It either expressed the state of her soul, or the lady just made a lot of noise in her sleep. But it wasn’t all that great to listen to, cutting across the black peace of a quiet summer night.

  Happily for me, she’d stop after a little while, and I could go back to my agitation without the external soundtrack.

  If you spend a lot of time alone you can almost forget how to talk. The language may be forming continuously in your mind, but the mechanics can atrophy. That’s why I got a dog, so I could speak out loud without technically talking to myself. The thought of bumping around inside the little cottage talking to God, or inanimate objects, or my dead friends and family, was disturbing. Eddie was a pound dog on the way to getting gassed, so he seemed willing to listen to whatever I wanted to say without complaint, if not entirely devoted attention. Other sentients have cut worse deals.

  The strategy worked most of the time. Though it didn’t entirely stop God or dead friends and family from crowding onto my screened-in porch to hector me with details from my massive ledger of failings and misapprehensions, usually first thing in the morning, with the vodka crackling around my nervous system, jolting me awake, my stomach in flames and my heart pumping up high around my throat.

  Eddie’s principal domain was the half-acre of lawn that separated my house from Regina’s, and the thin stretch of pebbly beach beside the Little Peconic. These he monitored on a regular timetable, nose scanning the turf and tail spread aloft like a mainsail. Occasionally he’d shag tennis balls I hit for him with the three-quarter-sized baseball bat I kept by the side door. It had Harmon Killebrew’s signature branded into the rock-hard oak grain. My father had it stowed in the trunk of the Grand Prix, at the ready for incidents of road rage.

  Most of the balls bounced out toward the beach. Some went over the flower bed into Regina’s yard. He was mostly indifferent to Regina, though he kept one eye on her whenever she was out there hacking away at her raggedy flowers. She spoke to both of us with about the same degree of warmth. Even so, whenever she caught him retrieving a ball she’d scratch his ears. He’d give her a tentative wag, which I admit I never did.

  One afternoon in the fall of 2000 I was out in the drive working on the Grand Prix, which I did whenever the temperature was above freezing and below 850. I was under the car on a wood creeper when I caught a whiff of something. It was strong enough, and strange enough, to stop my work. Then it seemed to disappear, swept away by the clean, dry October air. About twenty minutes later it was there again. Holding the wrench still on the bolt, I stopped turning and took another whiff. There was something primal in the air. It reminded me of a pile of leaves I’d once set on fire that had a dead squirrel hidden inside. Something corrupt, decayed.

  I rolled out from under the car and stood up. Eddie stood in the middle of lawn and twitched his nostrils at the air.

  I went inside and washed my hands, then walked back out to the driveway and grabbed a heavy cotton cloth. I told Eddie to stay in the yard and walked over to Regina’s house. I rang the doorbell, but she didn’t answer. I went around the house and tried to look in the windows, but they were obscured by sheer, lacy blinds. I went to the back door and pounded hard on the casing. Nothing. I yelled for her. Still nothing.

  I wrapped my hand in the wipe cloth and punched out a window in the kitchen door. As I reached in to release the lock I was knocked back by the strange smell, only now it was close by and strong enough to take on mass.

  “Goddammit.”

  I put the cloth up to my mouth and walked around inside her place. She was in the bathtub. Black and swollen, face down in the water.

  Joe Sullivan was almost a generic cop. Big in the gut and across the shoulders, liked to wear sunglasses, carried a Smith on his hip and a chip on his shoulder. His hair was blond and cut short. His shirt was perfectly pressed and his shoes polished into porcelain. He was a Town cop. His beat was the North Sea area of Southampton. He’d been doing it too long, I guessed, from his bored, tight-assed look and his fastidious attention to personal detail.

  I sat in one of my two Adirondack chairs on the front lawn and waited for him to walk over. There were a half-dozen cars over at Regina’s, most of them with bubble-gum machines blinking on top. A few people were gathered whispering at a respectful distance, but events like this are all sort of routine and dismal once you find out it’s only an old lady dead in her bathtub.

  “Sam Acquillo, is it?” Sullivan asked as he dropped down in the other Adirondack.

  “Yup.”

  “I knew your folks. Sort of. Your mom, anyway. Played with a kid down the street. Saw you around once in a while.”

  I nodded.

  He flipped open a little notebook when he saw I wasn’t going to chat. Probably relieved.

  I gave him the statistical details of time and place. We’ve learned it all from TV. He wrote it down with deliberate thoroughness.

  “I guess you can’t live forever,” he said, looking at me.

  “Nobody’s done it yet.”

  Eddie trotted over looking alert and lightfooted. All the people milling around and the blinking lights from the cops and EMTs represented high entertainment value. When he wasn’t patrolling the yard, Eddie was usually more than content to just hang around under my feet. But he was never one to pass up on a party. Sullivan made some sort of squeaking sound with his lips and beckoned him to come closer, which he did, and got his ears scratched for the trouble. Sucking up to law enforcem
ent.

  “Know if she’s got any family?”

  “A nephew in Hampton Bays. Haven’t seen him for a few years. Kind of a meatball. Mows lawns, or something. Saw him here in a crappy red pickup about the time I started fixing up this house. She didn’t like him.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She told me.”

  “Name?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “Tha’s okay. I’ll find him if he’s still around. Have to notify somebody.”

  I was a little distracted watching them roll Regina out in a bag. That was how my mother wanted to go, in her house, but we couldn’t figure out a way to look after her. It was a full-time deal at the end. Her heart and lungs were in perfect shape, but she would take off her clothes and wander around the neighborhood, complaining about the way Harry Truman was running the country.

  My sister brought in a succession of live-in nurses to stay with her, but nobody can watch a demented old lady twenty-four hours a day. It made my sister feel guilty that she couldn’t be there herself, but she had a husband and a pair of dopey kids out in Wisconsin. There was never any suggestion about sending my mother out there, ostensibly because she was determined to stay in the house by the Peconic. Of course, by then, she might as well have been living on the third moon of Jupiter for all she knew about it.

  “Mind if I get back to work?” I asked the cop.

  He wanted to be annoyed by my lack of engagement, but I really wasn’t worth the effort. He stood up and adjusted his belt, sagging under the weight of belly and ordnance.

  “Whatta ya do out here all the time?” he asked me, now more curious than friendly.

  “Fix that piece of shit car, mostly,” I said, truthfully.

  “Early retirement must be nice. I got a lot of time before that.”

  “Didn’t retire,” I told him as I went over to the Grand Prix and rolled myself back under to see if I really needed to replace that front universal, or if it had another few years left in its sloppy mechanical soul.