by Chris Knopf
“What are you going to tell the Buczek people you lost?”
“My retractable plow-blade stabilizer. Everyone knows you can get by without those things, but it’s sure a nice-to-have,” she said.
“So they exist.”
“Of course not. Where’d be the fun?”
On the way to Tad’s she took me through a condensed version of her life story, which included a lot more than counterculture zest and excess. She and Jeffery had traveled the world for three years, touring every continent and living by their wits and tolerance for discomfort and insecurity. I marvel at stories like this, having spent nearly all my days in Southampton, minus college and law school and those rare weeks in Europe, mostly France. It made me feel stolid and fixed, like a tree stump or the village war memorial.
I shared that with her.
“Nah,” she said. “I’ve barely read a book in twenty years. What the hell do I know?”
On the way there, I partially broke my call-ahead rule by calling to say we were on our way. Saline had answered the phone and I explained to her the situation. She seemed unhappy with the request but gave us the go-ahead.
“I’ll tell Fred. He gets agitated when people wander around the property like it’s the town park,” she said.
“Understand that. We’ll make it quick.”
When we reached the entrance to the compound, Dayna stopped before pulling into the drive.
“So what are we looking for, in reality?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” It was the honest answer. “I just want to take another look. If you put in the effort, places will tell you things.”
“I know some indigenous peoples who could help with that. Consciousness expanding–wise,” said Dayna.
“Let’s see how standard consciousness works first.”
I directed her down the long drive, around the hairpin turn, and over to the cleared space next to the pergola. We got out of the truck, leaving Misty behind, who watched us move away with a stare that could have bored holes in the glass. I led Dayna to the picnic table where Franco had laid out Tad like a side of beef, then up the path to Hamburger Hill, where all the action apparently occurred.
The contours of the disturbed snow and footfalls had become even less defined as the weather continued to erode the snowpack. I’d seen it plenty, yet now would have had a hard time pointing out any important features. The crime scene was evaporating before our eyes.
“What am I missing?” I asked Dayna. “Is it gone forever?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “What was here before?”
“There were a bunch of footprints between here and where the staff has a house and storage barn. That night, I counted them, and they added up to Franco’s claim that he came here, went back to the barn, then returned. This area here, the main crime scene, was too covered in tracks to make anything out, though all the bloody ice, and the chunk heaved over there”—I pointed to a nearly nonexistent depression—“proves Tad was killed here. Franco says he dragged him from here down to the pergola”—I pointed down the hill—“where we saw him on the picnic table.”
“So no footprints from here to the pergola,” said Dayna.
“No. There wouldn’t be any. None had been made, and if they had, dragging Tad down there would have wiped them out.”
I looked down the broad swath of snow flattened by the sliding tarp, weighted by a two-hundred-plus-pound dead body.
Dayna was looking at me like she was reluctant to say something.
“You think there might have been footprints,” I said.
“If Franco found Tad by approaching from this direction,” said Dayna, crossing the crime scene and stalking a few paces toward the staff housing, “how could there be footprints on the other side? Did someone coming from the pergola meet him up here?”
“And why cover them up,” I said, then let myself come back to earth. “Of course, this is all rank speculation. There’s absolutely no physical evidence to support it whatsoever.”
Dayna kept looking around.
“This is definitely not my gig,” she said. “But I think there’s something to this.”
I told her she’d come up with an intriguing insight.
“Brilliant, really,” I said aloud, and then to myself, Even if it’s true, where does that leave us? Any closer to an explanation?
Dayna was clearly pleased by this, but she had the good graces to leave it at that and not try to launch another round of speculation. We poked around a little more, then drifted back to the truck. Misty was glad to see us, spinning around on the bench seat as Dayna unlocked the doors. She had a chance to pee before we took off again, our progress cut off by Fred Lumsden, whose own truck approached from the road. We both stopped and he got out of his truck and walked up to my door.
“Hi, Fred.”
“Saline told me you were looking for something. Find it?”
I shook my head, sadly.
“Nobody’s finding anything till spring, I’m afraid,” I told him.
“Maybe you could describe what it is,” he said to Dayna. “I’ll keep my eye out.”
“That’s good of you,” she said. “But it’s a pretty unusual beast. If you got an e-mail address, I could send you a picture.”
He rummaged around his jacket pockets until he came up with a piece of paper. He wrote down his address and handed it to Dayna.
“Saline and I share the same e-mail,” he said, looking at both of us as if warning not to write anything indiscreet, the world’s least likely possibility.
“Got it,” said Dayna, tossing the card onto her dashboard. “I’ll be in touch.”
And then she drove away, heaving her truck around Fred’s by riding up high on the snowbank, fighting to keep the wheels in sync as they coped with the different angles and surfaces. Fred stood and watched us go, hands at his sides and inner thoughts enclosed within layers of canvas, flannel, and quilted down vest and fur-lined parka.
14
When I got back to my office, there was a bag of cabbage and komatsuna on the stoop and an envelope stuck to my door with a piece of duct tape. I used my teeth to pull off my glove and opened the envelope, handling it by the edges. The note said, “We’re still watching. Signed, your reverse gardian angels.”
I was incredulous.
“That may be, geniuses, but now I’m watching you,” I said out loud, banging in the code, dashing up the stairs and through the next door to the office. I plopped down in front of the monitor and rewound the tape. I booted up the computer and started downloading the last twenty-four hours into the editing program. The little dialog box told me to wait while it transferred the files, which was a mighty task. I jumped up, got out of my coat and hat, and grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, just to burn the time.
Could it be, I asked, that those jerks are even stupider than Fleming’s boys, that they didn’t realize there was a security camera trained on the door? They did spell guardian wrong. That was an encouraging sign.
As I sat back down, the screen filled with about a dozen little windows, segments of the retrieved video that showed any change from the fixed background. Most were me coming and going, the FedEx guy, squirrels hopping through the snow, and Mr. Sato leaving me the bagful of leftover chopped vegetables. And then there were two guys who looked like they’d been hired by a casting agency to play the parts of Ike and Connie, though aside from body type it was a poor match. The Ike character was all Caucasian, with slicked black hair and a pale, uneven complexion. He wore a dark full-length coat that looked like wool. His eyes shifted from side to side while his partner wrote out the note and stuffed it in the envelope, then ripped off a piece of duct tape and clumsily stuck it to the door.
The lousy speller was heavy like Connie, but much taller, with a round head covered in gray buzz-cut hair. Neither looked at the camera peering through its pinhole just above the doorjamb, confirming their oversight.
Professionals plying the crime-and
-punishment trades knew this fundamental fact: Most criminals, especially hired muscle, were pretty stupid. You met the occasional Franco Raffini, or an entrepreneur like Ivor Fleming, or a street kid who could have run Harvard had life’s lottery put him in the right household, but on the whole, they’re mostly dumb as stumps.
I think I was actually whistling with excitement as I selected the clearest shots of their faces and converted the images to JPEGs and saved them to my laptop’s hard drive. I even started singing a little song that went something like, “Gonna getcha, gonna getcha, look out you dumb bastards, we’re gonna getcha now…” but then stopped, disturbed by my lousy singing voice.
I pulled out my cell and called Joe Sullivan.
“You’re ready to start plea bargaining?” he asked when he picked up the phone.
“No. Confessing. Not Franco, me. But I need to do it face-to-face.”
“I thought we had Father Dent for that,” said Sullivan.
“This is more your province.”
“What did you do? How many times do we have to warn you about obstruction? What is it with you, a compulsion?”
“It’s not like that. Just let me get off the phone and come see you.”
He told me to meet him at the diner in Hampton Bays. He hadn’t eaten since the night before, which was a shocking admission for a guy who required about two and a half times the normal person’s food intake to maintain body mass, most of which was solid muscle.
“How come?” I asked.
“Let me get off the phone and I’ll tell you when you get there.”
The trip over to Hampton Bays was uneventful. Though if there had been events, you couldn’t prove it by me. A herd of velociraptors could have run across the street and I wouldn’t have noticed. As it sometimes is, my head was so full of noise a passenger in my car would have needed earplugs.
There was the steady, sonorous voice of Art Montrose, serving up an unrecognizable and thoroughly unwelcome portrait of Franco Raffini. There was Dayna’s peppy enthusiasm, mimicking her dog’s. The unpronounceable Buddhist Dinabandhu Pandey, with his own cheerful take on the sinister, as-yet-unmet Eliz Pritz, at this point just a reedy, clipped electronic monotone. It was all a cacophonous jumble in my mind, fighting for the floor, asserting positions that all seemed insightful and absurd at the same time.
I shook my head, trying to toss out some of the racket, and succeeded only in compromising what little control I’d managed to assert over my rebellious hair. This served a purpose, however, providing a distraction from the obsessive deliberations.
How’s that for managing one’s neurotic psyche?
* * *
Joe was at his usual spot in a booth facing the door, already with a plate of pancakes covered in strawberries and a side of ham. And a cup of coffee. And that was it.
“You’re dieting,” I said, sitting across from him. “Never thought I’d see the day.”
He looked up darkly from his plate. “No appetite,” he said.
Oh no, I thought, looking at him more closely, searching for signs of lethal disease.
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s not what you think.”
“Not what?”
“I’m not sick. Not like that.” He put down his fork and looked out the window. Then he let out an irritated sigh. “My wife threw me out of the house.”
He looked back at me, not exactly defiantly but as if to say, Okay, there, I said it out loud, to you. I shared a very intimate thing, but I’m not asking for sympathy and I refuse to show distress or weakness, so don’t try to make me.
I didn’t. “That sucks,” I said.
“It’s been brewing. Not easy for a woman to live with a guy on the job.”
He meant the cop’s life, the one where you get to work long, odd hours for short money and struggle with all sorts of deviant behavior while entangled in an often rigid and irrational bureaucracy, with little in the way of sympathy from the people you’re paid to protect, except in the abstract. Oh, and you also get to occasionally risk your life. If you endure all this with dedication and commitment, like Sullivan did, the odds were good there’d be someone miserable sharing your life.
“Buddy of mine has a mother-in-law apartment in Southampton Village. It’s over the garage and I get one of the bays. It’s a better neighborhood than I had before, I’ll tell you that. Mostly summer people. Probably terrified to have a cop living among the hoity-toity.”
“So it’s, like, over, or is this a separation? If you don’t mind me asking.”
He shook his head. “I brought it up. You can ask me whatever you want. It’s over. We never had kids, which she also blames on me, so that’s not an issue. She’s got some other guy, which in my experience with domestic situations usually seals the deal. She’s scared to death I’m going to kill the idiot, but I couldn’t give a crap. He’s just a symptom. Having a relationship with my wife will be its own punishment. I’m just as glad.”
“I’m still sorry,” I said. “It’s never cause for celebration, even when ultimately the right thing.”
He bunched up his lips and gave a quick little nod. “You’re right about that, Jackie. I haven’t told anybody else, so if you wouldn’t mind, just let it leak out on its own.”
And then, of course, the worst thing starts to happen. I could feel the pressure as tears tried to force their way into my eye sockets. Not because Sullivan’s wife left him. Because he’d picked me as the first person to tell. We spent so much time locked in professional combat that when we weren’t in temporary periods of uneasy alliance, I’d forget the man’s authentic heart was forthright and true. And at that moment I realized I might be one of a handful who actually understood that, and was thus worthy of his trust.
“Got it, Joe. Lips are sealed,” I said as I stood up, claiming the need for an urgent bathroom run. Once there, I sat on the lowered toilet seat and dabbed my eyes until the moment passed. I pulled myself together, brushed the mop of hair away from my face, and went back to the table.
“So, what’s this confession you’re talking about,” Sullivan said as I sat down.
I asked him to wait until I could boot up my laptop. After a few minutes, I had side-by-side, full-screen portraits of the Ike and Connie impersonators. I spun the computer around.
“Know these guys?” I asked.
He squinted at the images, frowning with concentration. “Not sure,” he said. “Give me the whole thing,” he added, looking up at me.
So I did, starting with the first visit by the real Ike and Connie and including my decision to drive out to the French restaurant and the subsequent conversation with the other two. I told him about visiting Ike, leaving out Sam’s approach to initiating free and frank discussions. I told him I meant to bring him in as soon as I knew it wouldn’t prejudice my client’s case.
He listened through the whole thing without interruption, then when I was finished, he said, “Seems to me this could point the other way. These are the only elements of this case that have no obvious connection to the defendant. And the very fact that you’ve been warned off providing a proper defense would imply other players feel at risk, even if Franco was the one who actually committed the deed.”
“That’s my feeling,” I said with vigor.
“I’d take the threat seriously. It’s a pretty bad violation of the basic rules of engagement.” He meant the unwritten agreement between criminals and law enforcement that cops, judges, and lawyers—prosecutors and defenders alike—were off-limits from threat, much less physical mistreatment. “Sorry you had to go through that,” he said, running his hand along the edge of the computer screen and looking closely again at the images. “We’ll be lookin’ these guys up. Maybe go pay ’em a visit.”
“You’ll let me know, won’t you, Joe? When you find out who they are?”
He smiled with half his face, which made it closer to a smirk.
“I will, but we’ll be having no independent action here. I’ll let you stay
close on this as long as you stay close to me. There’s a lot at stake, including your client’s sorry ass. And your own.”
“I’m sorry for any trouble I’ve ever caused you,” I said.
“Then you can pay for breakfast,” he said, standing up. “Best deal you’ve had in a while.” He put on his coat, a pure white parka with a fringe of fur around the hood, likely surplus from Russia’s Siberian Special Forces unit or something like that. “And you and Sam stay away from Ivor Fleming. We can handle him, too, without the aid of the civilian population.”
“Roger that, chief. So you think there’s a connection between Fleming and the Buczek case?”
“Just stay away from him. You poke at a snake, he’s likely to bite.”
I realized I hadn’t ordered anything, so I got a yogurt and a coffee and used the diner’s wireless connection to browse around on the computer, mostly in search of more cold-weather gear, which incongruously led me to sites with deals on winter vacations in the Caribbean, not that I’d be able to go. I kept looking so I could see photographs of couples cavorting in the surf in evening clothes, splayed on lounge chairs, or sipping a piña colada by the pool, backlit by the crimson setting sun, staring into each other’s eyes in a way no one really does, but it doesn’t matter. We’re all eager to rent the illusion.
* * *
I arrived at the office just as the sun was going down. I rebooted the laptop and had an e-mail message waiting for me from UB45JK.
“Greetings from Dystopriot Land. My stubby friend said you could use a hand with the Polack-ski. Reply if you wish.”
I checked the time. Four thirty. Cocktail hour! I turned up the heat and squirmed out of my clothes, down to the silk longjohns. I poured a chardonnay and lit a cigarette, which I finished by the time I’d reconnected and rebooted the laptop and checked the security camera record and my other e-mail. I poured another wine and clicked the Reply link on UB45JK’s e-mail.
“Hi there, UB (hope you don’t mind the abbreviation), I really would like some help,” I wrote. “I don’t know what time zone you’re in, but I’m in for the night now. Love to hear from you.”
