John Abbott - Scimitar

“I understand,” Sonny said.

“They may double the security only because they feel too secure.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“So expect an army...”

“I will.”

“And be happy with a platoon.”

“I’ll be prepared for either,” Sonny said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow morning,” Arthur said.

“At ten,” Sonny said.

“Is there anything I can do for you meanwhile?”

“Yes,” Sonny said.

Elita caught the jitney to Westhampton Beach on Seventieth Street and Lexington Avenue at eleven-fifteen that Thursday morning. She had packed into her mother’s Louis Vuitton bag the lingerie and shoes she’d requested, and she had packed for herself a small duffle containing a pair of blue jeans, four T-shirts, a half-dozen panties, a pair of sandals, and — just in case — a pair of French-heeled shoes and a black cotton shift. She planned to stay at the beach only through the Fourth, returning to the city sometime Sunday.

Her concern for her mother had given way to anger.

A person should know better than to go gallivanting around — an expression her mother was fond of using — without first informing any other person who might be worried about her. When Elita went off to UCLA a year ago, she and her mother made a deal of sorts. If ever one of them planned to be away for a while, even if it was just for a couple of days, she would inform the other, and leave a number where she could be reached. A simple bargain which Elita had, in truth, begun finding too restrictive in recent months, but which had served them both extremely well until then. Until now , actually, when her mother apparently felt it was perfectly okay to break a solemn contract and disappear from the face of the earth without so much as a lah-dee-dah. Just a phone call would have been sufficient. Hi, Elita, I’m off to Phoenix, Arizona, for a few days, here’s where I’ll be. But, no. Silence instead. And anxiety. Or anger. Which was how anxiety usually translated itself, thank you, Professor Jaeger, Psychology 101.

The jitney dropped her off in front of the Quogue Emporium Mall at a bit past one-thirty. She got into a waiting taxi and gave the driver the address on Dune Road. He didn’t want to go into the sand driveway because his tires were either too low, or too inflated, or whatever the hell they were, she couldn’t make any sense at all of what he was saying. Either way, he dropped her off at the top of it, for which discourtesy she tipped him only half a buck. Carrying the bags down the drive, she noticed a car parked at the Hackett house next door, and wondered why Mr. Hackett hadn’t answered the phone all those times she’d called.

Shrugging, she went around the side of the house to the service entrance where her mother always hid the key in a little magnetized box fastened to the rear side of the fill spout for the oil tank. The key was where it usually was. Elita unlocked the kitchen door, put down the bags, blinked into the sunshine streaming through the window over the sink, and yelled, “Mom?”

There was no answer.

“Mom?” she yelled again, and stood stock still, listening.

Where the hell are you? she thought, and then, aloud, she shouted, “Mom? Where the hell are you?”

There was only silence.

In the driveway next door, she heard the car starting.

She went to the window and saw it backing out.

The sun glancing off its windshield made it impossible to see the driver’s face.

Detective-Lieutenant Peter Hogan welcomed the opportunity to get out of the office. He had always thought of himself as an active street cop until he’d been promoted three years ago, and all of a sudden found himself pushing papers around a desk. The murder of one of his best detectives — and incidentally one of his closest friends — gave him the excuse he needed to get out into the field again.

He started the investigation into Al Santorini’s death the way he’d have started any other homicide case. He tried to work it backwards from the time Santorini’s body was discovered in the laundry cart, hoping to learn what had brought him to the Hilton in the first place. The assistant manager who’d talked to Santorini informed Hogan that he’d clocked the call in at one o’clock sharp, and that all the detective had wanted to know was the name of whoever was in room 2312. He’d told him they had a man named Albert Gomez registered in that room, and that he’d checked into the hotel on Thursday, the twenty-fifth of June. That was it. The manager remembered that the call had come at one, because he’d just got back from lunch.

Hogan was trying to piece together a 24–24.

The twenty-four hours preceding a homicide were important because anything the victim had done, anyone the victim had talked to during that time might provide information leading to his killer. The twenty-four hours following a homicide were important in that everything was still fresh during that time. The killer, unless he was more professional than most murderers Hogan had known, would not yet have covered his tracks. The trail would not yet have been obscured. The longer a murder case dragged on, the narrower became the hope of solving it. Al Santorini had been killed on Monday. This was now Thursday. As far as Hogan was concerned, the killer already had a three-day edge.

He went through the Detective Division reports Santorini had filed in triplicate. He’d been investigating two separate murders, the victims both women with British passports, both of them tattooed with some kind of green sword. One of them had lived on the upper west side, the other on the upper east side. East side, west side, all around the town, some fuckin’ city. Santorini had been in contact with someone named Geoffrey Turner at the British Consulate and also with an FBI agent named Michael Grant, downtown at Federal Plaza. Nothing in the files told Hogan where Santorini had been on Monday before he ended up dead at the Hilton.

But the desk sergeant at the Two-Five, where Homicide North had its offices, told Hogan that the last time he’d seen Santorini was around ten-thirty that morning when he’d passed the desk on his way out. He’d said only, “Heading downtown, George,” which was the desk sergeant’s name. He did not say where downtown. Both of the dead ladies lived more or less downtown. Since the Two-Five was located at 120 East 119th Street, Hogan decided to check out the more convenient east-side location first.

He was in the upstairs bedroom — lying on the bed, looking through the newspapers he’d bought in town, hoping to garner more information about the President’s Fourth of July speech — when the doorbell rang, startling him. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, called, “Just a moment, please,” and then went downstairs. Standing just inside the front door, he asked, “Who is it?”

“Mr. Hackett?”

“No, I’m sorry, he’s not here,” Sonny said.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” a woman’s voice said, “but could you please open the door?”

Annoyed, he unlocked the door and opened it.

Elita Randall was standing there.

There was, for each of them standing on either side of that door-jamb, an identical shocking instant of recognition. It was as if they had run into each other again at the base of Victoria Falls or the summit of Kilimanjaro, or for that matter any other unlikely, unforeseen, and totally unexpected location. Here across the open doorway of a house at Westhampton Beach, they stared at each other uncomprehendingly, and wide-eyed, and literally open-mouthed, neither of them able even to breathe a name, each separately stunned into mutual speechlessness.

And then — just as there’d been separate agendas for each of them on the day they visited the Statue of Liberty — there were now separate recoveries and separate wonderings and separate fears and separate hopes and separate plans for the future.