by Chris Knopf
“I’m an attorney. I need to ask you a few questions in relation to an important case.”
It was quiet for a moment.
“I can give you the name of my attorney. That is all.”
“I’m defending Franklin Raffini. He’s been accused in another murder. I could use your help.”
Another pause.
“Do you have a pen and paper?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Dinabandhu Pandey is the name,” she said, spelling it out and giving me a phone number and address in Hampton Bays. “You may approach him if you wish. If I don’t see you leaving immediately, I will call the police.”
I looked around the door frame and saw a pinhole camera, just like mine. Damn.
“That went well,” said Harry as we strode in a purposeful, dignified way back to the car.
“The unheralded approach is not foolproof,” I said, a hint of warning in my tone.
“I have only admiration for how successful it usually is. So now what?”
“Dinabandhu Pandey?”
“East Indian. Hindu. Don’t ask me more than that. Names get complicated over there.”
“Let’s go see him. We’re over here anyway.”
“Unheralded?”
“Absolutely.”
It wasn’t much of a trip back east to Hampton Bays, which we’d passed through on the way to Remsenburg. Harry once again used my phone to navigate to the attorney’s office. It was a tiny converted house with a coat of fresh white paint over ancient, poorly-scraped clapboard. There was room in the semi-plowed parking lot for three cars. We took the last two spaces, pulling in next to an ancient white Honda Accord that looked perfectly harmonized with the frozen ground. An enormous maple, subspecies unknown, spread its naked canopy over the entire property.
“What’s the strategy this time?” Harry asked.
“Frontal assault. Lawyer to lawyer. Mano a mano.”
“This mano will be right behind you.”
“I know that, darling,” I said. “This is one of the things we love about you.”
“We? When do I get to meet the other chick?”
“In your dreams.”
We got an entirely different reception from Attorney Pandey. I pushed the buzzer next to the door and it opened soon after.
A dark-skinned guy in a rust-colored shirt, flowered tie, and what must have been gold silk pants answered the door. His top button was undone and tie loosened, and he wasn’t wearing shoes or socks. A strong aroma flowed out of the door with him, and after a second, I realized it was taco sauce.
“Hey, wazzup?” he said. I handed him my business card, which he barely glanced at. “Swaitkowski,” he said, with perfect pronunciation. “Is that Polish?”
“It is. Can we meet with you for a few minutes?”
“Sure. About what?”
There was not a trace of accent in his voice. Friendly welcome and abiding goodwill shone across his face.
“The murder of Donald Pritz and subsequent events,” I said, wanting to cut to the chase.
It didn’t deter him.
“Absolutely, dudes. Entrez-vous,” he said, swinging open his door and ushering us in. “You can call me Pandey. Even I can’t pronounce my first name.”
The place was a shambles. He had an ancient, oaken battleship of a desk, though the workable space amounted to only about ten percent of the surface. Most of the floor was also covered in boxes, loose files, and magazines. The decorative motif was a brainlessly chaotic twentieth-century jumble and the windows hadn’t been cleaned in years. A bulldog slept on a Persian throw rug and hardly budged on our arrival.
My kind of place.
There were two unencumbered club chairs near the desk, which I took for client seating. Harry joined me. Pandey sat behind the desk.
“You’re an enormous guy,” he said to Harry, who’d heard that before. “It must be hard to move around with everything geared to us little people.”
“I’ve traveled every continent, including Antarctica, and yes, it’s hard to get around,” said Harry graciously. “The leg space is the real issue.”
“Try looking like me.” Pandey pointed to his dark face. “I’ve been frisked so many times, my crotch is growing calluses,” he said, enjoying his own joke. We enjoyed it, too.
“We tried to talk to Mrs. Pritz, but she refused in no uncertain terms,” I said. “I’m defending the guy who killed her husband. He’s mixed up in another murder case. Maybe that explains her reluctance.”
He disagreed. “She’s reluctant about everything. Truth be told, she’s a bitch. Can’t stand her. I was Donny’s lawyer. He was my college roommate. I don’t know why she kept me on. Easier, I guess. You want water? I have a bunch of bottles in the fridge.”
He jumped up from his desk and dug three bottles of water out of a small refrigerator in the corner of the room. He poured part of his into the dog’s bowl, which failed to excite the dog. I looked at the degrees hanging on the walls. Undergrad at Princeton; master’s in international affairs, Georgetown; law degree from Stanford. I still couldn’t figure out where the taco smell was coming from.
“Sybil’s actually very good company,” he said, pointing down at the bulldog. “But she needs her beauty rest. Sweetest thing in the world. Hard to believe these guys used to tear the throats out of bulls. So Franco’s in trouble again. What’s it this time?”
I briefed him on the outlines of the case, staying within the bounds of public knowledge. He listened carefully, nodding along the way.
“I read about that. Skimmed it, obviously. Didn’t notice it was Franco. Guy was born under a bad sign.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Bad luck and trouble’s been his only friend,” he said, smiling, waiting for me to pick up on the reference.
“Been down ever since he was ten?” Harry asked, ending the suspense.
“Never knew what he saw in Eliz. Had a perfectly lovely wife of his own and a successful career. Like they’d paved the fast track just for him. I have a guess on the problem Eliz might’ve had with Donny. Not sure it’s shareable.”
He tapped out a snappy beat with a pen on his desk. Then he swiveled his chair to the side and put his feet up on an empty computer stand.
“None of this came out at the trial. Wouldn’t have helped him, so don’t get mad at me. Might’ve hurt. Donny confided in me that he and Eliz had some compatibility issues. You know, of that kind.”
“You’re right. I think their marital problems were a stipulation,” I said. “Hard to exclude it given the overall circumstances.”
“If you roomed with Donny like I did, you’d understand the issue.”
“He was a little guy?” asked Harry, catching on before I did.
Pandey shook his head. “The opposite. A horse would neigh in envy. And he was such a klutzy dweeb. Had a bitch of a time getting a date. I wanted to put an ad in the Daily Princetonian—‘Hey girls, you don’t know what you’re missin’.’ It warped him a bit. Had wicked bad jealousy issues. Just a theory, I’m no psychologist, God knows. Though getting dates was never my problem. It’s the ongoing-relationship bit that eludes me. Are you two an item? You introduced him as your friend,” he said to me.
“We are,” I said.
So maybe I was wrong about Franco. Maybe the only appeal was having right-sized equipment. I forced the images out of my mind.
“I’ve read all the transcripts of the trial,” I said. “Is that how it all went down?”
He shrugged. “Frankly, I didn’t follow it all that closely. I was extremely bummed to lose Donny. Goofbucket that he was, Donny was a really good friend. My only official job was to get Eliz through probate, which was a slam-dunk. Husband to wife, you know Surrogates Court. They save their powder for the generational transfers. That’s where the big tax bucks are.”
“But they did have a fight. With handy cooking implements?”
“Oh yeah. The skewer was part of a barbecue setup
that was just delivered that day. It was supposed to be a surprise birthday present. There’s your irony for you.”
“You don’t seem to hold much animosity for Franco,” I said.
Pandey dropped his feet back to the floor. “I hold animosity toward no one, for starters. Except maybe Eliz, try as I might to suppress it. I’m a Buddhist. Converted from Hinduism when I was at Georgetown studying famine, pestilence, and war. Broke my mother’s heart. Until I got the law degree and started paying her rent. My father died when I was just a kid. He would have killed me, and I’m sort of not kidding. Those traditional people take religion really seriously. So no, I knew better than anyone that Donny was capable of jealous rage. Preceded by paranoid delusions, which in this case weren’t so paranoid after all. Killing him did seem a little extreme, but I’ve never had somebody come at me with a carving knife.”
Sybil chose that moment to rise to her feet and shake herself out, the ripples in the loose folds of her skin starting at the neck and moving to her nonexistent tail. She came over and stuck her massive muzzle between Harry’s legs. He gripped her head with his knees and pet her. She wiggled her butt.
“See what I mean?” said Pandey. “Loves everybody. The ideal Buddhist dog.”
“So Donny pretended to be on a trip so he could catch Eliz in the act?” I asked, hoping he’d say yes, since that was what I’d asserted in court.
“Not exactly. He called me from O’Hare in Chicago, where he was supposed to connect to Seattle. ‘She’s with him right now, Pandey,’ he says to me. ‘Go over there and kick the bastard out of my house.’ And I say, ‘No way, man. I can’t do that. And what makes you think this is happening?’ He said he couldn’t tell me. He just knew. Then he said not to worry, he’d take care of it. The rest you can read in the transcripts.”
“None of this was admitted?”
“I told the prosecutor. I guess he didn’t feel it helped the case. If you came across it during discovery, you also chose to let it go. Not really material to the actual fight, which was the crux of the whole matter.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said. “It was Art Montrose. Same firm. Art’s moved on.”
“Fired, I hope. Did a lousy job for your client. His cross of Mrs. Pritz was pathetic. That’s when I stopped paying attention to the trial. When I started feeling sorry for the guy who killed my best friend.”
Sybil, done with Harry, came to visit me. I scratched the top of her head and tried to gently keep that slobbery muzzle away from my nice new jeans. Pandey leaned up from his chair and gazed lovingly at the bulldog.
“How does she feel about tennis balls?” I asked.
“She’s never retrieved anything in her life. First time I tried she looked at me like, ‘Hey, you want that ball so bad, go get it yourself.’ Just wondering,” he said to me, “what does all this have to do with Franco’s current situation?”
Harry looked at me as if he was wondering the same thing. So that made three of us.
“I don’t know,” I said.
That explanation seemed fine to Pandey. We exchanged names of other lawyers we knew in the area, a professional ritual. We uncovered several common acquaintances, including Sandy Kalandro.
“Kind of a douchebag, we’re agreed?” he said.
“We are, but I’ll deny saying that.”
“Me too. Though a douchebag with impressive connections.”
With that, I relieved Harry of the tedium he was likely experiencing and let Sybil and Pandey get on with their day. Once back in the cold, Harry felt free to repeat the question apparently on his mind.
“Like Pandey said, why all the interest in a case that won’t even be part of Franco’s trial?” he asked.
“I’m not entirely sure, but something’s eating at me,” I said, holding his arm tightly as we walked side by side down a poorly shoveled walkway more suited to single-file. “Though it’s also true that the cops and the ADA both believe Franco’s a serial seducer of married women, whose husbands he subsequently kills. They can’t use it in court, but it’ll dominate their thinking and behavior. I’d like to disrupt that if I can. Am I making sense?”
“You are,” he said convincingly. “You usually do. Eventually.”
I let the “eventually” part slide and climbed into the Volvo. “Okay, handsome. We always do what I want to do. What do you want to do? I don’t care what it is, I’m doing it.”
Even without all the extra padding, it was no small thing to have Harry sitting next to you in your car. When he spoke, you not only heard it, you felt it through the car seat.
“A little surfing off Flying Point?” he asked.
“No freaking way. We’ll die of exposure.”
“Get married.”
“We’ve already tabled that discussion. What else you got?” I asked.
“This open invitation has a lot of restrictions.”
I gripped him by the fluffy fleece and shook with all my strength, to little effect.
“Come on, surprise me with something doable on this planet at this particular time,” I said.
He turned in his seat far enough to almost fully face me, his considerable bulk pressed against the passenger-side door.
“Helicopter ride into New York. Limousine. Box seats at Metropolitan Opera—La Traviata, with dinner, back home in time to catch Leno.”
“Yeah, yeah, big talk, Mr. Logistics.”
* * *
It’s what we ended up doing. And a lot more. It was perfect. I lavished appreciation in every form I could imagine, which he acknowledged. And I thought, What else can any man do to prove his wonderfulness? What is wrong with me?
12
I specialize in exaggerated men. Sam isn’t overly tall, but he’s solid as a Roman statue. You know about Harry. Randall Dodge, my favorite computer geek, the provider of the double-secret, not-remotely-legal search application, wasn’t as tough as Sam or as tall as Harry, but you’d never call him a shrimp. I’m guessing a lick over six three in height, broad-shouldered and lean, but wide, so he could be imposing straight on but almost disappear when turned sideways. He had enough Shinnecock Indian in his blood to earn a spot on the Southampton reservation, but boasted other stuff in the genetic mix, including African American and Irish, which he always enjoyed reminding me, being born Jackie O’Dwyer and happy for it.
His shop was called Good to the Last Byte and was located off the big parking lot behind the main shopping district in Southampton Village. Like me and Dinabandhu Pandey, he was a complete slob, which made us completely compatible.
His main source of revenue was sourcing and supporting digital gear for the confused and inept, serving both the summer hordes and year-rounders, local and imported. But his talents far exceeded that, which I gladly exploited and he gladly let me, in return for free legal assistance at a few critical junctures and bottomless supplies of latte and croissants, or pizza, depending on the time of day.
Just inside the door of his shop was a counter piled high with keyboards, CPUs, monitors, and arcane boxes bristling with ports, knobs, and toggle switches. This barely foreshadowed the staggering jumble beyond, which I accessed through another door after alerting Randall by pushing an enormous red buzzer in the middle of the counter that read WE’RE BIG ON SERVICE. PUSH HERE AND DISCOVER!
Randall wasn’t much on sharing facial cues, but I wanted to believe he looked glad to see me. He pointed to the bag in my hand.
“I hope there’s ham and cheese in one of those croissants,” he said.
“How do you know they’re croissants?”
“The last three times you brought ham and cheese. I’m developing a dependency.”
“Ta-da,” I said, whipping out the desired product. “Though pierogis stuffed with ground beef and cabbage would be more fitting to the matter at hand.”
“I’ve got a table suited to all forms of matter.”
We wound our way down a narrow cavern walled with towering racks crammed full of electronic equipment, m
ost of which was utterly unidentifiable to me, and I think partly to Randall, though he feigned otherwise. The other thing you needed to get used to at Randall’s was the mood lighting, which spawned the type of mood you’d expect from sitting in Stygian darkness relieved only by LCD screens and blinking LEDs.
“What’s it like spending your days and nights on the flight deck of a Klingon warship?” I asked.
“’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.”
“What have you got there?” I asked, pointing at one of the screens that showed an image of his storefront. “Security cam?”
He looked over and shook his head. “Google Earth. It’s a street view of the shop. Hard to believe they went to the trouble of driving around the parking lot. I’ve also got the aerial.”
He slid his chair over to the keyboard and brought up an image of his roof, which he zoomed out of until we could see the whole village. It was dumbfoundingly cool to look at.
“What a world,” I said.
“And this is just what’s publicly available. I can also access a geosynchronous weather satellite that monitors this part of the world in real time. Or go back about a year, if I want. I got access from a buddy of mine from the Navy. Highly unauthorized. Most people know these things exist, but actually seeing it work is pretty spooky. Orwell’s probably spinning in his grave.”
After we finished our croissants he brought up the program and we messed around for a while. First we zoomed down on top of my Volvo, then Randall went outside and ran around the parking lot waving to me. Truly freaky stuff.
Eventually tiring of the fun, Randall came back inside and gave me a look that said, Okay, why are you here again?
“If you wanted to do research in Poland via the Internet, how would you go about doing it?” I asked.
“Learn to speak Polish or get yourself a Pole.”
“I tried to learn Polish as a defense against my in-laws. They used it as a secret code. I’d hear this long string of incomprehensible jabber, with the name ‘Jackie’ in the middle. But I just couldn’t. French is hard enough.”
“Try Algonquin. Almost nobody can talk it, and that’s the easy part. If you’re asking me if there’s some sort of translation program that would let you access Polish sites, there isn’t. You need to find a guy.”
