"Dana -"
She waved me off, and it struck me that I had never really seen that side of her. "Let me finish. I know my timing is dreadful, but I've been thinking about this for weeks. I guess it's why I didn't come and pick you up on Friday night. Jack, I need space. I really need time to be by myself… I'm going to Europe for a couple of months. I've never done that before. The European thing."
"Oh, yeah, me neither," I said. "Run away from my problems."
"Jack, don't make this any harder than it already is. It is hard for me." Then tears started to run down her cheeks. I couldn't believe that all this was happening. It almost seemed too bad to be true.
"So, Dana," I finally said, "is Volpi going to Europe with you?"
I didn't wait for an answer. I slammed her car door and walked away. I guess we had just broken up.
Chapter 21
I COULDN'T SLEEP THAT NIGHT because I couldn't stop the bad thoughts and images crashing through my head. I finally got up and cleaned the mess from my father's funeral. About five in the morning I went back to bed.
On Sunday I made the hour-and-a-half trip to the BMW dealership in Huntington. I figured Peter got financing directly from the dealer, and I hoped that if I showed up with the bike and told them what had happened, they might offer fair market value.
The only salesman in the place was a burly, ponytailed guy in his mid-thirties, and I watched him expertly direct a retired couple to a full-dress silver Tourer.
"Bags!" said the salesman, introducing himself once he'd loaded up his prospects with brochures. "Although I don't know what I can possibly do for you since you already got the prettiest, baddest, and best engineered form of automotive transportation in the world parked right out front. Believe it or not, I delivered the same sucker to a handsome kid from Montauk not six weeks ago – same midnight blue paint, same custom black Corbin seat."
I explained that it wasn't a coincidence, and Bags extended an arm and squeezed my shoulder. "That's awful. Listen, man, you'll get a lot more for it by putting an ad in the New York Times and selling it yourself."
"All I'm looking to do is pay off the loan," I told him.
Bags's eyes grew wide, and they were large to begin with.
"What loan? You don't owe a dime on that sweetheart."
At his cluttered desk, he pulled out the paperwork from the sale. "Here we go. Peter wrote me a check for nineteen hundred dollars for the ten percent deposit," he said, showing me a copy. "He paid the rest in cash."
Although Bags may have felt that he was delivering good news, he could tell that I didn't see it that way. "Listen, if a dude walks in with the money, I'll sell him a motorcycle. I'd even sell one to a Republican if I was having a bad month," he guffawed.
The check was written on a bank six exits up the Long Island Expressway in Ronkonkoma. I knew where it was. When we were kids my father's truck broke down just outside it, and we spent half the night in a service station there. We loved the name so much, it became family lore.
Ten minutes later I was back in Ronkonkoma for the second time in my life, sitting at the desk of the Bank of New York branch manager, Darcy Hammerman. She'd been expecting to hear from me.
"Peter named you as the sole beneficiary, so the balance is yours. I might as well cut you a check now, unless you want to open an account here in Ronkonkoma. I didn't think so."
She opened a photo-album-sized checkbook and, in her careful banker's hand, filled one out. She stamped for deposit only on the back.
Then she carefully ripped the check out of her book and slid it over to me. It was for $187,646.
I read the six numbers in disbelief. My eyes started to blink. I hadn't felt that bad since, well… the day before. What in hell had Peter done?
Chapter 22
I NEEDED A FRIEND TO TALK TO, and I knew where to find one. I even had an appointment.
Sammy Giamalva was nine when he matter-of-factly told my brother that he was gay. By the time he was eleven, he knew he wanted to cut hair. Probably because of that precocious self-knowledge, Sammy, despite being one of the smartest kids at East Hampton High, was never much of a student.
At fifteen, he dropped out altogether and started working at Kevin Maple's. He spent his first six months sweeping up hair. Then he got promoted to shampooing. Six months later Xavier quit in the middle of an appointment, and Kevin gave Sammy a shot at his own chair. The rest, as they say, is Hamptons hairdressing history.
But Kevin milked him dry, booking him for ten or eleven heads a day, and after a while Sammy's gratitude was replaced by resentment. Three months ago he quit and opened Sammy's Soul Kitchen in his house in Sag Harbor.
Sammy had been cutting Peter's hair for free on Sundays and, in a weak moment at the funeral, offered to grandfather me on the same sweet deal. I made an appointment on the spot, and after driving back from Ronkonkoma, I pulled into his driveway.
Sammy greeted me with a big hug, then led me to an Aeron chair facing a huge gilt mirror.
"So what did you have in mind?" Sammy asked after my rinse.
"At these rates, I'll leave it up to you. Express yourself."
Sammy set to work, falling into an easy four-beat rhythm of snip and move, pause and touch. My hair fell in clumps on the black and white tiles. I let him work in silence for several minutes before I dropped the question whose answer I'd been dreading the whole ride back.
"Was Peter a drug dealer?" I was studying Sammy in the mirror.
He didn't even look up from my coif-in-progress.
"Hell, no. He bought them."
"Well, how the hell could he end up with a new Beemer and one hundred eighty-seven thousand dollars? Can you explain that?"
Sammy stopped cutting. "Jack, just let it go. Nothing good will come from this."
"My brother was murdered. I can't let it go. I thought you wanted to help."
Sammy gently massaged the back of my neck. "All right, Jack. Here's the truth. Peter was the hardest-working boy in show business." He cleared his throat, then spoke softly. He sounded like a father belatedly telling his kid where babies come from. "One way or another, every last one of us out here earns their keep servicing the rich. That's how it is, Jack. Well, Peter serviced them a little more literally than the rest of us."
I was starting to feel a little sick. And scared. I almost got up and left in the middle of the haircut. I loved my brother. But I wondered if I'd ever really known him.
"He got paid for sex? Is this what you're telling me?"
Sammy shrugged. "It wasn't like he had an hourly rate, Jack. But he was doing some of the richest women in the very expensive free world and doing them rather well. I thought you knew. I thought that Peter told you everything. I guess he didn't mention that one of his ladies was your potential mother-in-law, Campion Neubauer. I think another might have been Dana. But, Jack, that was before you two started going out."
Chapter 23
AFTER I LEFT SAMMY'S, I stopped at a bar called Wolfies. It's located in the same beautiful wooded part of East Hampton where Jackson Pollock used to paint and drink and drive into trees.
I ordered a black coffee and a beer and sat at the bar, thinking about my day and what to do next. I finally plucked a wrinkled scrap of paper out of my wallet and called the number on the back.
The crisp voice at the other end belonged to Dr. Jane Davis. I hadn't seen or spoken to her in ten years. But in high school we had become pretty good friends, when to everyone's amazement, this shy National Merit Scholar hooked up with my fisherman pal, Fenton Gidley.
Jane, the class valedictorian, won a full scholarship to SUNY Binghamton, then went on to Harvard Medical School. Through Fenton, I'd learned that she spent the next couple of years doing a residency in Los Angeles and running a trauma unit at an inner-city St. Louis hospital before burning out. She was now the chief pathologist for Long Island Hospital and chief medical examiner of Suffolk County.