Plum Island

Anyway, Uncle Harry's house is specifically located in the hamlet of Mattituck, which is about a hundred road miles from West 102nd Street where two Hispanic-looking gentlemen had pumped fourteen or fifteen shots at yours truly, accomplishing three hits on a moving target at twenty to thirty feet. Not an impressive showing, but I'm not criticizing or complaining.

Anyway, the Township of Southold comprises most of the North Fork, and contains eight hamlets and one village, named Greenport, and one police force of maybe forty sworn officers, and Sylvester Maxwell is the chief, so there it is.

Max said, "It doesn't hurt to look."

"Sure it does. What if I get subpoenaed to testify out here at some inconvenient time? I'm not getting paid for this."

"Actually, I called the town supervisor and got an okay to hire you, officially, as a consultant. A hundred bucks a day."

"Wow. Sounds like the kind of job I have to save up for."

Max allowed himself a smile. "Hey, it covers your gas and phone. You're not doing anything anyway."

"I'm trying to get the hole in my right lung to close."

"This won't be strenuous."

"How do you know?"

"It's your chance to be a good Southold citizen."

"I'm a New Yorker. I'm not supposed to be a good citizen."

"Hey, did you know the Gordons well? Were they friends?"

"Sort of."

"So? There's your motivation. Come on, John. Get up. Let's go. I'll owe you a favor. Fix a ticket."

In truth, I was bored, and the Gordons were good people… I stood and put down my beer. "I'll take the job at a buck a week to make me official."

"Good. You won't regret it."

"Of course I will." I turned off "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog" and asked Max, "Is there a lot of blood?"

"A little. Head wounds."

"You think I need my flip-flops?"

"Well… some brains and skull blew out the back… "

"Okay." I slipped into my flip-flops, and Max and I walked around the porch to the circular driveway in the front of the house. I got into his unmarked PD, a white Jeep Cherokee with a squawky police radio.

We drove down the long driveway, which was covered with about a hundred years' worth of raw oyster and clam shells because Uncle Harry and everyone before him threw shells on the driveway along with the ash and cinders from the coal furnace to keep the mud and dust down. Anyway, this used to be what's called a bay farm estate, and it's still bayfront, but most of the farm acreage has been sold. The landscape is a little overgrown, and the flora is mostly the kind of stuff they don't use much anymore, such as forsythia, pussy willow, and privet hedges. The house itself is painted cream with green trim and a green roof. It's all pretty charming, really, and maybe I will buy it if the cop docs say I'm through. I should practice coughing up blood.

On the subject of my disability, I have a good shot at a three-quarter, tax-free pension for life. This is the NYPD equivalent of going to Atlantic City, tripping over a tear in the rug at Trump's Castle, and hitting your head on a slot machine in full view of a liability lawyer. Jackpot!

"Did you hear me?"

"What?"

"I said, they were found at 5:45 p.m. by a neighbor-"

"Am I on retainer now?"

"Sure. They were both shot once in the head, and the neighbor found them lying on their patio deck-"

"Max, I'm going to see all this. Tell me about the neighbor."

"Right. His name is Edgar Murphy, an old gent. He heard the Gordons' boat come in about 5:30, and about fifteen minutes later he walks over and finds them murdered. Never heard a shot."

"Hearing aid?"

"No. I asked him. His wife's got okay hearing, too, according to Edgar. So maybe it was a silencer. Maybe they're deafer than they think."

"But they heard the boat. Edgar is sure about the time?"

"Pretty sure. He called us at 5:51 p.m., so that's close."

"Right." I looked at my watch. It was now 7:10 p.m. Max must have had the bright idea to come collect me very soon after he got on the scene. I assumed the Suffolk County homicide guys were there by now. They would have come in from a little town called Yaphank where the county police are headquartered and which is about an hour drive to where the Gordons lived.

Max was going on about this and that, and I tried to get my mind into gear, but it had been about five months since I had to think about things like this. I was tempted to snap, "Just the facts, Max!" but I let him drone on. Also, "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog" kept playing in my head, and it's really a

I looked out the open side window. We were driving along the main east-west road, which is conveniently called Main Road, toward a place called Nassau Point where the Gordons live-or lived. The North Fork is sort of like Cape Cod, a windswept jut of land surrounded on three sides by water and covered with history.

The full-time population is a little thin, about twenty thousand folks, but there are a lot of summer and weekend types, and the new wineries have attracted day-trippers. Put up a winery and you get ten thousand wine-sipping yuppie slime from the nearest urban center. Never fails.

Anyway, we turned south onto Nassau Point, which is a two-mile-long, cleaver-shaped point of land that cuts into the Great Peconic Bay. From my dock to the Gordons' dock is about four miles.

Nassau Point has been a summer place since about the 1920s, and the homes range from simple bungalows to substantial establishments. Albert Einstein summered here, and it was from here in nineteen-thirty-whatever that he wrote his famous "Nassau Point Letter" to Roosevelt urging the president to get moving on the atomic bomb. The rest, as they say, is history.

Interestingly, Nassau Point is still home to a number of scientists; some work at Brookhaven National Laboratory, a secret nuclear something or other about thirty-five miles west of here, and some scientists work on Plum Island, a very top secret biological research site which is so scary it has to be housed on an island. Plum Island is about two miles off the tip of Orient Point, which is the last piece of land on the North Fork-next stop Europe.

Not incidental to all this, Tom and Judy Gordon were biologists who worked on Plum Island, and you can bet that both Sylvester Maxwell and John Corey were thinking about that. I asked Max, "Did you call the Feds?"

He shook his head.

"Why not?"

"Murder is not a federal offense."

"You know what I'm talking about, Max."

Chief Maxwell didn't respond.

CHAPTER 2

We approached the Gordon house nestled on a small lane on the west shore of the point. The house was a 1960s ranch type that had been made over into a 1990s contemporary. The Gordons, from somewhere out in the Midwest, and uncertain about their career paths, were leasing the house with an option to buy, as they once mentioned to me. I think if I worked with the stuff they worked with, I, too, wouldn't make any long-range plans. Hell, I wouldn't even buy green bananas.

I turned my attention to the scene outside the windows of the Jeep. On this pleasant, shady lane, little knots of neighbors and kids on bicycles stood around in the long purple shadows, talking, and looking at the Gordon house. Three Southold police cars were parked in front of the house, as were two unmarked cars. A county forensic van blocked the driveway. It's a good policy not to drive onto or park at a crime scene so as not to destroy evidence, and I was encouraged to see that Max's little rural police force was up to snuff so far.

Also on the street were two TV vans, one from a local Long Island news station, the other an NBC News van.

I noticed, too, a bunch of reporter-types chatting up the neighbors, whipping microphones in front of anyone who opened his mouth. It wasn't quite a media circus yet, but it would be when the rest of the news sharks got on to the Plum Island co