Gin Palace 01 - The Poisoned Rose

a long shot, but it was all I had.
    I had his card but I didn’t want to call. I knew where he lived—that was if he still lived in the same place he was living in when he was one of the three cops who found me flat out and bleeding on the kitchen floor of that unrented house by the canal.
    It was dawn when I reached his house. The rain had stopped and the air seemed cool. But I barely noticed. He lived in a small middle-class home on Moses Lane, off Hill Street. His unmarked cop car was in the driveway as I rode past.
    I parked at the curb one yard down and made my way around back, to his kitchen door. I saw him through the window. He was at his kitchen counter, his back to the door. He was in his uniform and making his lunch. I knocked on the window pane. He turned quickly and saw me. He didn’t move at first, then finally picked up a dishrag, wiping his hands with it as he started toward the door.
    His gun belt was on. I saw the Glock 9mm in his left hand holster.
    He opened the door only partway.
    I said, “I need to talk.”
    “Not here,” Long said abruptly.
    “You know your boss is a criminal, don’t you?
    “Not here, not now.”
    “I need your help.”
    “Not here.”
    “Where then?”
    “Give me a few hours. I’ll pick you up behind the movie theater.”
    “I need to know what’s going on.”
    “You’ll get answers. Just meet me there.”
    “When?”
    “Nine. That’s the earliest I can get there.”
    “You’re not a fan of the Chief. I can tell.”
    “I’ll see you at nine, MacManus.”
    He closed the door on me. My heart was racing. I could barely breathe as I walked back to my car.
    At nine exactly Long pulled in behind the Southampton Cinema in his unmarked car. I could see right off that he was in street clothes. He pulled up beside my LeMans and stopped. I got into the back seat of his car and we drove off.
    “I took a sick day for this,” he said.
    “I need to know what’s going on?”
    “This’ll make twice now I’ve saved your life.”
    “How did the guy who jumped Augie get out of jail?”
    “Just sit tight, okay.”
    “Where are we going?”
    “It’s just five minutes up the street.”
    The car smelled clean, new. I sat back and watched the trees that lined Montauk Highway pass by the rain-streaked window. After a few minutes Long made a left-hand turn, onto Halsey Neck Lane. I looked at his eyes in the rear view mirror.
    We were headed into that part of town I did my best to avoid, that part called “south of the highway.” It was that I’d spent my youth living with my cruel adoptive father, self-absorbed adoptive mother, and their imbalanced son.
    “Where are you taking me?” I said.
    He didn’t answer. We followed Halsey close to where it ended on Meadow Lane, then turned into a driveway, passing through a wrought iron gate attached to two stone columns. I knew where we were going then. I’d been to this home before, long, long ago, when I was boy. But what I didn’t know was why we were here now.
    I hadn’t thought of this place in years, but the estate was just as I remembered. The grounds were lined with twelve-foot hedges, as was the driveway, which curved like a sickle till the hedges ended suddenly and the driveway spilt into a circle at the front of a century-old mansion.
    This house was gray stone and ivy covered, three stories high with white marble pillars at the entrance. It was giant in that way ships are when you see them out of water.
    Long parked the unmarked car halfway around the circle. There was no door handles on the back door. He had to open it from the outside to let me out. Together he and I walked to a front door made of heavy oak. It was framed by intricate scroll work and rose up to a rounded point, like a church door, which was, if I remembered, where it was from. It had been taken, I think, from a ruined church somewhere in Europe at the end of one war or another.
    An old black woman in a gray maid’s uniform answered the door and led us through a marble entrance hall to a dark hallway lined with wood paneling. She looked at me closely before leaving us. At the end of this hallway was a door that led out to the backyard. It was there that a man near my age was waiting for us.
    He was standing under an awning that was extended over a stone patio at the back of the house. The manicured lawn beyond him was tree-lined and sloped gently down to Taylor Creek fifty or so yards away. Across the narrow body of water was the