Cop Job by Chris Knopf

I’d blundered into this work by doing finish carpentry for my friend Frank Entwhistle, who realized I could handle his fine woodworking chores at a far lower cost than he paid factory shops, with better quality, at only twice the time to completion that others promised but never delivered. This last discrepancy was allayed by an easy compliance on my part. I built whatever he asked me to build, which I reckoned was the job of a craftsman—not lecturing people who paid for the stuff on the idiocy of their requests. As much as I wanted to.
    The way I saw it, this being the Hamptons, idiotic requests were more or less standard operating procedure.
    The problem was one of an expanding universe. People living in three-million-dollar, eight-hundred-square-foot apartments could suddenly have a four-thousand-square-foot house for the same money. With no idea how to fill up all that space.
    Ignorance rarely being a deterrent, these city dwellers were highly inventive in their dopey requests for interior appointments, and their architects more than happy to collect big fees for placing a single phone call to someone willing to accept the challenge, in my case Frank Entwhistle, who placed a call to me, who always said yes, and we all won.
    A seamless and efficient transfer of wealth from the financial sector to the architects of their materialistic dreams, to the builders who translated architectural dreams into houses that wouldn’t fall down, and lastly to me, the master of the finishing touch.
    A LLISON CALLED me when I was about to rip a five-quarter piece of antique mahogany retrieved from a pile of wreckage behind an abandoned nightclub and hotel. The place was shut down two decades before when a club goer shot a bouncer. The victim’s fellow bouncers responded by beating the gunman into a near vegetative state before bothering to call an ambulance, resulting in the original guy bleeding out on the dance floor.
    The resulting blizzard of lawsuits and political hyperventilation overwhelmed the owners of the club, a pair of gay millionaires from Czechoslovakia, prompting them to simply close the doors and move back to Europe, where they still were as far as anyone knew.
    Various vandals and enterprising salvagers had plundered the interior of what had once been a Victorian mansion, not realizing that the most valuable wood was locked up inside doors, windows, and architectural details covered in layers of paint, ripped out, and left outside to rot.
    I had a separate section of my shop devoted to rough cleaning the stuff, the centerpiece of which was a cast iron planer about the same vintage as the quarried wood. With chipped blades and a DB rating comparable to a jet engine, it was a miracle I heard the phone ring.
    “Doing anything?” Allison asked.
    “Shaving off lead paint. You?”
    “Nathan’s quitting sales and going to work for a start-up.”
    “What are they starting?”
    “I’m not sure. Half his pay is in equity.”
    “Getting in on the ground floor,” I said.
    “The other half won’t cover his rent, so he wants to move in with me.”
    “Isn’t this the kind of job you wanted him to take?”
    “It is. I didn’t realize the pay part,” she said.
    “Meet the Law of Unintended Consequences.”
    “I hate that,” she said.
    “So what’re you going to do?”
    “I was hoping you’d give me an idea.”
    “Try it for six months. And get a dog.”
    “To protect me from Nathan?”
    “To have a friend, after you kick Nathan out of the apartment.”
    I let her run through another half-dozen speculative scenarios, filling in all possible permutations of each, until her options and my forbearance were both depleted. But it made her feel better, which I guess was the purpose of the call in the first place.
    “I can’t tell if you like Nathan or not,” she said, as a parting thought.
    “Me neither. Let’s see how he does with the dog.”
    L ATER THAT night, it was Jackie’s turn. She called me when Eddie