sharp turn to the left in the freshening breeze and headed straight toward the big gray-green buoy I’d been watching bob around out there for the last fifty years. I hoped he knew it was there. He wouldn’t be the first gentleman sportsman to plaster himself all over its battleship-grade plate steel hull.
“So, Sam, how busy’re you with that thing?” said Sullivan. “You got a deadline or anything?”
“What thing?”
He pointed at the addition.
“That thing. What you’re building.”
“I don’t know. Close it in before winter, maybe.”
“Yeah. You gotta do that.”
“Get the roof on.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Windows, siding.”
“Still have plenty of time to go talk to the guy’s wife,” he said to me, offhand.
“The guy’s wife?”
“The dead guy. The guy that got blown up.”
“I’m talking to his wife?”
“Well, somebody’s got to. They took her testimony, or whatever you call it. But they didn’t get shit out of her. She’s a doctor, but not the medical kind, some kind of PhD. Ed Lotane, the lead guy in East Hampton, told me she was loony, couldn’t go out of the house. Acraphobic or something like that. Afraid of the whole freaking world.”
“Agoraphobic.”
“That’s it. Plus, she’s kind of skinny and sickly, and has abig house, so naturally the cops think she’s got some heavy juice. Even though she only lives in Riverhead, and was married to a local guy, for Christ’s sakes, which shouldn’t bother those yokels in East Hampton. But, for whatever reason, this broad’s statement is about half a paragraph, and made’a nothing.”
“What has this got to do with me?”
“Aw, geez.”
He tossed an imaginary object to the ground and stood up. His blue polyester uniform strained at the midriff, revealing a T-shirt at his belly button. Two shirts and a leather harness. Just the thing for July.
“What’s the big deal?” he asked. “You just go up there and talk to her. I’ll tell you what I need to know. It’s no big deal.”
“What’re you talking about? That’s probably not even legal. Even if I wanted to do it, which I don’t.”
“You don’t care if the people who busted up Jackie’s face just get away with it? You said you were curious.”
“Sullivan, you’re the cop here. This is your job. I’m a private citizen. What’s the problem with talking to his wife, anyway?”
I raised my voice so he could hear me as he walked away, heading toward the Little Peconic. “Aw, Christ,” I said to myself, before getting up to follow him.
Eddie and I caught up with him at the edge of my backyard. Beyond that was about thirty feet of polished beach pebbles, and after that, the blue-green Little Peconic Bay. A thrity-eight-foot Catalina was sliding by just outside the green buoy that marked the Oak Point channel. By reflex I checked the tide. It was low. If he’d passed inside the buoy his keel would have dug a nice furrow in the sea bottom.
“What,” I said.
“Forget about it.”
Eddie hopped down off the breakwater that defined the line between my yard and the beach. He liked to keep tabs on things at water’s edge, ever watchful for maritime threats, like beach balls and lobster buoys.
“What do you think Ross would say if he knew I was interviewing your witnesses?”
“She’s not a witness. She’s just his wife. You find out what you find out, I’ll just go back and ask the same questions, and that’s it. Never stopped you before.”
“That was different. I had an interest in that.”
“You don’t got an interest in this? You got your ass tattooed with glass, your ears blown out and your friend’s walkin’ around with half a face. Not to mention all the dead people.” Sullivan’s voice had started to move up a notch in volume, but he caught himself.
“Anyway” he said. “You’re a nosy bastard, everybody knows that. There’s no statute that says you can’t pay a call on somebody. It’s a free