by Chris Knopf
“You know a guy?”
“I do. Only it’s a girl.”
“Is there anything you don’t know?” I asked.
“You don’t have to know. You just have to find.”
Randall’s girl turned out to be UB45JK, a long-term partner in a virtual online game called Dystopriots, in which a band of plucky computer hacker/warriors in a postapocalypse America are battling to restore civilization. He was pretty sure she was actually a she, that she had been raised in Poland, immigrating to the U.S. ten years ago for college and never leaving. She lived in the basement of her grandparents’ house, where in the country he didn’t know (never asked, because it was irrelevant to the virtual experience). He showed me her avatar, which looked like an even more elfin, waiflike version of Zina Buczek, but he reminded me she probably looked nothing like that in real life. He showed me his, a bearded, bald-headed Caucasian dwarf with the handle Gyro.
“Sometimes people pick their opposites,” he said. “Let’s see if she’s home.”
In a few minutes we were looking at the inside of a destroyed building, roof gone and only three walls still standing. Rubble was everywhere and fires burned in the distance. It was a stereotypical vision of an urban war zone, but compelling anyway because of the startling realism. I commented on that.
“They’re getting better at this stuff. It won’t be long before you’ll be able to jump right in there, or anywhere else you want, and maybe not come back out.”
“Is there a game where a band of plucky gourmands are forced to eat their way through all the restaurants of the Côte d ’Azur?”
Responding to something Randall typed on the keyboard, his dwarf pulled an iPad out of a big holster on his belt and tapped something on the screen. We swept up and turned in the air, gaining a position where we could read over the dwarf’s shoulder.
“UB45JK, you in the neighborhood, pretty girl?” it said on the screen.
“I am, big boy. Not sure I can play today,” came the quick reply.
Randall played the keys with lightning speed and perfect accuracy.
“Just have a quick question. I’ve got a homey here who needs to do some research on Polish sites and only knows about two words of the language.”
“Maybe three,” I said. “Tell her I’m defending a guy charged with murdering a Polish artist / potato farmer, whose widow is from Kraków, and the investigation is carrying me in that direction. Might as well get it all out on the table.”
He did, then we waited while she absorbed the information.
“Cool,” came the response. “Give me her e-mail and I’ll get in touch maybe tomorrow when I’m out from under all this work. Need the day job to keep the computers running.”
“You da best, UB45JK. The bee’s knees. The straw that stirs the drink.”
After she signed off, I swatted him on the shoulder and said, “Randall, you were so nice to her. I could swear you were flirting.”
With unshakable poker face in place, he said, “You can also be a different kind of person in there if you want.”
* * *
It was particularly jarring to emerge from the embracing murk of Randall’s shop and out into the shimmering winter whiteness. While not quite overcast, haze filled the sky, dulling colors and eliminating shadows, flattening the world into two dimensions—cold and weary.
I’ve heard that a person’s greatest asset is also their greatest liability. That’s sure true about me. I’ll put my powers of dogged concentration up against the best of them. The trouble comes when I try to turn them off again.
I think it’s called obsession.
Since I was already in the Village, I decided to get another cup of coffee at the place on the corner and maybe read the paper. Look at other people come and go, uncomfortably and uncustomarily bundled and clenched against the steadily darkening day. Clear my head of all the clamor of the Buczek case. Or at least give it a try.
My favorite table, buried in the farthest corner, to my delight, was available. I used my hat and briefcase to stake my claim, then navigated the chaos at the coffee stand. I snuggled into the spot and was just starting to feel a slight lift in my mood when all was destroyed by Roger Angstrom of The New York Times. He came in the door, picked up a copy of the Post, and instantly spied me staring at him from across the room.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked, approaching with a coffee and bran muffin.
I thought, Are you kidding? You might be absolutely the very last person in the universe that I’d want bothering me at this very moment.
“I guess, sure. Have a seat,” I told him.
“You’re not an easy person to investigate,” he said, sitting down. “Your friends are pretty tight-lipped.”
“I have friends?”
“I started with Sam Acquillo. Well, that was scary. Next time I’m bringing a bodyguard.”
“Bribery works better. Think vodka.”
“He’s a very interesting guy himself. But to borrow a legal analogy, he’s a hostile witness,” he said.
“You have no idea.”
“The Swaitkowskis are friendlier, but no more forthcoming. I feel like Virgil Tibbs—outsider in a hostile town. I thought this was the Hamptons. All blabbermouth New Yorkers.”
“You’re workin’ the wrong side of the street, ace. I could help you with that, but I’m not going to. Rather, I’m going to finish my coffee and do a little work. If you want some excitement around here, there’s a zoning hearing with the board of appeals this week. That’s the real bloodsport on the South Fork. You want drama? Shakespeare would be envious. You don’t believe me, but I’m really not kidding. When five feet of setback, a squabble over adverse possession, and a right of way through the middle of Buffy’s tennis court are in contention, it could mean millions of dollars. And when everyone can afford the best of my colleagues money can buy, and all of them are used to getting their way, the playing field can get pretty bloody.”
He listened to all this with his mouth open, poised to take a big bite out of his bran muffin. When I stopped talking, he did, having missed nothing.
“You’re doing a bad job of convincing me you’re not the story,” he said.
“If you be the paragon of modern reporting, the fourth estate teeters.”
“Was that a paraphrase?”
“Not sure. I was an English major. But only fragments stick in my head. All this talk about Shakespeare.”
“I was an English major, too. You have a boyfriend?”
“I do. More than twice your size. Flies me in helicopters and takes me to La Traviata.”
“Oh, sure. Rich guy.”
“Logistics guy. Even better. No prospect there, either. When you get back to Manhattan, tell me how much warmer it is. I can live vicariously.”
He left before my mood had a chance to fully collapse, and over the next hour, I made a full recovery. I’d switched from coffee to herbal tea, avoiding the onset of caffeine poisoning, and bent all my energy into a game plan for the Buczek case. Sam once tried to teach me how to create a schematic that gathered up all the known details of a case and also defined the unknowns, expressing them both in a tidy timeline and exposing the key voids in the narrative, in descending order.
Being an engineer, he was really good at this. Me? No way.
I’d adopted none of his techniques, though I’d cobbled together my own approach, which I thought captured the same spirit. I called it WTF, and essentially, it was a rambling description of the case, enhanced with other things going on around me that may or may not have any relationship to the situation. Consequently, a detailed analysis of the crime scene might include a lament over Clinique discontinuing Zero Gravity Repairwear Lift Firming Cream (they still have it, I think, so don’t panic).
The most important outcome of this effort was a list of questions, categorized under “Things I wish I knew,” “Things I’d know if I was a better human being,” and “Things I must know or else go back to mortgage clo
sings and septic permits.”
If I’d learned anything, it was to be sure you know what you don’t know. It’s too easy to think you know everything, because then you fill in the blanks of knowledge with supposition and convince yourself that it’s the same as hard fact. I couldn’t afford to do that. There were too many people in my business bent on casting even your hard facts as fantasy, much less your silly guesses.
Before I assigned them categories, I started listing things I didn’t know. What really happened the night Tad was killed? Why did Ivor Fleming send his goons over to my apartment? Who were the other goons at the French restaurant? Was Tad really into criminal activities? And if so, what? What was Zina really doing with him? Why do I care about the Pritz case? Why is that Angstrom dude interested in me? Why can’t I commit to Harry Goodlander?
I wrote down another ten questions of varying importance, then instead of assigning categories, circled the ones I felt needed the most prompt attention. Felt, not necessarily thought. Meaning, the questions that were itching at me the most, not necessarily the most in need of answering.
The question about Eliz Pritz got a circle and a star.
I took out my cell phone and called our office in Nassau County, which had handled Franco’s first case. I asked if they knew how to get in touch with Art Montrose, Franco’s lawyer at the time. They did, and as much as I disliked the idea of talking to another damn lawyer, it was where my strongest impulses led, and as Burton had recently pointed out, there was no controlling those things.
* * *
East Marion was a tiny hamlet near the tip of the North Fork notable to me mostly because there wasn’t a Marion. Or even a West Marion. Just East Marion.
It was also apparently home to Art Montrose, whose exact location was represented by a red dot on my phone’s touch screen. Normally, a journey up to the North Fork felt like a pleasant outing, even when on business. My favorite route, though arguably more time-consuming, involved two short ferry rides on and off Shelter Island, the landmass that sat securely between the North and South forks. Though I didn’t know how it would be in this horrible weather, which was making every trip feel like a Shackleton expedition.
Because of this, I broke a long-standing custom and called ahead to see if Montrose would be home. My contact in our Nassau office said he had an office there, so the odds were good I’d catch him, and I did.
“Yes, I’d heard that Mr. Lewis opened an East Suffolk branch,” Montrose said on the phone in a low, slow voice. “You seemed a surprising choice for the slot.”
Oh, thanks a lot, I thought. And aren’t you the one who blew the Pritz case?
“You may not be aware that I’ve transitioned away from my real-estate practice,” I said. Then I described how I’d spent the first year reviewing back cases and cleaning up messes, not pointing out that several belonged to him, including Franco’s.
“Ah, nicely done,” he said. “I applaud you.”
Bully for you, I thought.
“Before you get too happy, let me brief you on the latest,” I said.
Which I did, sharing just enough of the story to give him adequate context. He listened with little comment.
“A hell of a thing,” he said when I finished. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Is there something I can do to help?”
“You can tell me more about the frying pan. Or more precisely, that rotisserie setup.”
Before he had a chance to demur, I told him I was planning a trip up his way and would love to drop by and discuss things in person. I could tell this was not a thrilling prospect, but I dropped Burton’s name a few times—or, more accurately, used his name and all the influence that implied to bludgeon Montrose into acquiescence. He started to give me directions to his home office, but I told him I already had it locked on my GPS.
“No one can escape the red dot,” I said.
* * *
The first leg of the trip is straight up Noyac Road through North Sea, past Sam’s house, through Noyack itself, then up the fat peninsula called North Haven, home to the more privacy-inclined summer people and herds of deer, the latter of whom were busy stripping the bark off specimen trees and trampling shrubbery, knocking off the snow to get at the evergreen leaves.
As the only way to get on or off Shelter Island, the ferries ran year-round, the stoic young guys who crewed the boats seemingly inured to any and all conditions, be they tempestuous or idyllic perfection. That day was no different. Though the quieter waters along the shore had frozen over solid, the tide-driven channel itself was clear. The water at the docks, defined by several rows of tall piers, was kept liquid by bubblers just below the surface.
They’d already loaded a pair of cars and a big box van when I pulled up to the ramp. They waved me on, and the Volvo crunched over the layer of salt and sand spread on the vehicle deck. When we pulled out into the channel, I got out of my car, as I always did, despite the bitter wind. The sun was still bright, and from the water the wooded coastline, dotted with an occasional private dock leading up to a waterfront home, was a beautiful thing to behold. The ice and snow made it feel even more entrancing, alien not just to our watery world but to the earth itself.
I pulled my Russian fur hat tighter on my head and wrapped my arms around myself, containing the warmth of body and mind within.
There are more than two thousand permanent residents on Shelter Island, and every one of them was indoors when I drove across, following the white box van whose painted sides showed a beach chair and palm tree and asked the question, ISN’T IT TIME TO COOL YOURSELF BY THE POOL?
There were too many answers to that to even start.
The voyage across the north channel was longer, but I held out all the way to Greenport. From there, it was another fifteen minutes to East Marion along Sound Avenue, which was no better plowed than our main roads down south—only far less traveled, the principal traffic heading to the big ferry to Connecticut that left from Orient Point at the bitter end of the North Fork.
Art’s house was technically in an area of East Marion called Oysterponds, a throwback village clustered next to a harbor protected by a natural breakwater from the ocean swells of Gardiners Bay.
Montrose owned one of the older homes, which meant he had a nice water view between similar buildings across the street. I rang the bell.
“Now I remember you,” he said upon opening the door. “You were involved in that nasty subdivision out on Oak Point.”
He was neither tall nor short, but a large belly overflowing a pair of plaid pants, and a matching double chin, made him more imposing than he deserved. His hair was thin and red, fading into gray. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and a blue Oxford cloth shirt that strained at the buttons.
“I was,” I admitted. “Probably what gave me a taste for nasty things. Can I come in?”
He stepped out of the way, then led me through the welcome warmth of the house to his office, which was also comfortably heated, although its small size put me in uneasily close proximity to Art Montrose.
The office decor expressed the standard-issue golf/sailboat/foxhunt motif, as if purchased through a catalog geared specifically to pretentious professionals. There were two colonial-style chairs padded with red leather in front of his desk. I took the one that let me look at the water over his shoulder.
“I had to pull out the file to reacquaint myself with the particulars of the case,” he said, holding up a thick folder. “They do tend to blur.”
“They do. My mission here is to achieve some clarity.” I took my little notebook out of my briefcase and clicked open a ballpoint pen. “I’m just going to ask you some things, in no particular order, okay?”
He nodded solemnly. “Ask away.”
“Did you know that Eliz Pritz was the beneficiary of more than seven million dollars in life insurance benefits?”
“I did. With house, investment accounts, 401(k), and some valuable tangibles, the total estate was a little north of twenty millio
n dollars. But remember, Donald Pritz was a successful investment banker, whose yearly income frequently exceeded a million dollars. His potential lifetime earnings were significant, justifying life insurance coverage at that level.”
He’d given that speech before, though it was likely refreshed by a look at the file.
“So you thought it was irrelevant to Franco’s case.”
“Hardly. I thought it was central.” He sat back in his own red leather chair, which squeaked and took him a little farther back than he wanted, causing a slightly panicked return to upright. “Damn chair’s nearly worn out. Gonna kill me one of these days.”
I must have looked perplexed, which gave Montrose the first opportunity since we met to display some pleasure.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bite.”
“I believe beyond the barest shadow of a doubt that Mr. Pritz was killed for his money.”
That quieted the room for a few moments.
“Is that in your file?” I asked.
“Hell, no. The only thing in the file are the stipulated facts in the case, some documents acquired during discovery, and notes to myself and our office on defense strategy. The real facts, and hence the real story, are all up here.” He pointed to his head. “Where I intended them to stay in perpetuity.”
“You still do?”
“No. Given what I read about your case, I no longer care what happens to Mr. Raffini, and since you’re bound by the same obligations that oblige me, there’s no threat to confidentiality. I’ll tell you anything you want and enjoy the relief to my conscience.”
Now I wasn’t so sure I wanted to hear it. Though as he said, we were still in some ways on the same team, and I felt like I’d never be able to eliminate all the questions circled or uncircled in my notebook without the information he might provide.
“Okay,” I said.
He leaned back again, only more gingerly, and put his hands, with knitted fingers, on top of his prominent belly.
“I felt as if the entire story could be told through the phone records. When you went back three years, you saw the beginning of the relationship between Franco and Mrs. Pritz. The initial calls between her home phone and his cell, at first spaced far apart, increased steadily until they became more than a daily occurrence. Since Mrs. Pritz handled all the household finances, including paying the bills, evidence of this should have been easily concealed. However, Mr. Pritz was a very jealous man. As soon as he began to suspect her of having an affair, the first place he’d look would be the family phone records, which were conveniently in his name. According to Mrs. Pritz, Donald first began confronting her with his suspicions at least three weeks before his death, and yet the calls continued unabated.”
