by Chris Knopf
“There’s a guy waving at me,” she said.
“Stop there.”
She actually drove a little past him so he was at my passenger-side door when I stopped. I rolled down the window.
“So Franco, what up?”
I assumed it was Franco based on the prominent nose and thin black mustache and goatee, which were the only identifying features. The rest was a snow-covered wool coat and baseball cap. When he greeted me, in his Italian-inflected English, more a lilt than an accent, I was sure it was him.
I got out of the car and stumbled around to the other side. Dayna approached and asked if I was all right. I introduced the two of them and they peeled off their gloves to shake hands. Franco gave a neat little bow.
“Jackie, I need to show you something. Ms. Red, you better wait here, if you don’t mind.”
“I’d rather come,” she said.
“She can come,” I told him, not knowing exactly why. I had nothing to fear from Franco, but you quickly grow connected to people, even strangers, who deliver you through dire circumstances. I wanted her nearby.
“Suit yourself,” he said, turning and then tromping under Tad’s giant pergola through the deep snow, guided by a bright flashlight made less so by the tiny snowflakes that streamed down through the woody vines and open beams of the structure above. I cursed the lack of a hat.
It wasn’t a long walk, blessedly, as I quickly grew weary of the trudge, a misery compounded by the slippery soles of my cowboy boots. We were at the far end of the pergola, in an area that was partially covered by a hard roof, under which Tad had a wooden table for al fresco dining. On top of the table was a long white mound, at the fringes of which I could see the edge of a blue tarp. Franco waited for us to come up to him, then took a piece of the tarp in his gloved hand.
“Uh-oh,” Dayna said under her breath.
“You wanted to come,” Franco said to her, then flipped the tarp over the mound, sending the covering snow flying into the air, where some of it was blown back and hit me in the face. I wiped my eyes and followed Franco’s flashlight as it outlined the prone figure of a large man, finally stopping at the red-and-gray mash that used to be the defiant and hard-headed skull of Tadzio Buczek.
2
“I know, I know,” said Franco. “I shouldn’t have moved the body.”
“You moved the body?”
“I know I shouldn’t’ve. He was out there in the middle of the field. I had to get him somewhere out of the snow, it was coming down so fast. I dragged him on the tarp.”
“Whoa, back up,” I said.
Franco’s body quaked from the cold. He lifted one foot, then the other, swaying side to side.
“I’m about to die here myself,” he said. “Been out in this crap for hours.”
“I have blankets in the truck,” said Dayna.
“Get ’em, if you don’t mind,” I told her. She turned and left.
When she was out of earshot, I said, “Give it to me. All of it, and straight down the middle. This is no time to bob and weave.”
I’d inherited Franco, born in Milan and educated at Duke University, as a client when I took over the East End branch of Burton Lewis’s pro bono law firm, which specialized in defending the poor, disenfranchised, and occasionally innocent. I’d been on the job about a year, after Burton saved me from my old real-estate practice, which was already succumbing to an unplanned and financially disastrous slide into criminal law. Now that Burton, one of the Hamptons’ certified billionaires, was paying me, I could afford to give in and complete the transition, for better or worse.
Franco had been convicted of manslaughter and was doing time up at Sanger Penitentiary. After reviewing the case, I was able to knock off almost half the original sentence, which led to an early release. This made Franco a very grateful man, and even more so when I got him a job with Tad as a general handyman, the felony conviction having put a slight dent in his banking résumé.
This probably encouraged him to think I’d be willing to do anything for him, including driving my blessed Volvo through blinding snow, subzero temperatures, and gale-force winds.
Franco shoved his hands even deeper into his pockets and looked up at the pergola, gathering his thoughts.
“Zina called me from the house, telling me Tad had gone out to check on the main woodshed,” he said. “It’s got a pretty flat roof, something we built last fall, not expecting this kind of ridiculous snow. Roofs are collapsing all over the place, so this was a logical thing to do. Only, a ten-minute checkup turned into an hour and a half, which was a little out of the ordinary, even for Tad.”
“And you said you’d go look?”
“Sure, absolutely. Our shack is closer to the woodshed than the main house, so no prob. And you don’t say no to Zina.”
Zina was Katarzina, Tad’s wife. Or, like most people thought of her, his mail-order bride, having arrived from Poland only two years before. With high cheekbones, slanted eyes, and a coarse shock of nearly blond hair, Zina was a legitimate beauty, thirty years younger and a hundred pounds lighter than her homely American husband.
“So you found him,” I said, throwing the tarp back over.
“On the way to the shed. At the base of Hamburger Hill. I stepped on him and fell right on my face. I thought it was a hay bale or something. Lucky I took the trouble to look back. It just about stopped my heart, seeing him there. Probably why I lost my mind and dragged him over here. Fuck, it’s cold.”
“Dayna’s bringing blankets. So what did you do after you brought him here?” I asked.
He looked disappointed in me.
“Called you, what do you think? As soon as I realized my massive stupidity. They’re gonna hang me for this, aren’t they? Convicted felon. Killer of men. Stupid Dago puts the gun in the hands of people who’d be just as happy to shoot him.”
He hung his head in abject remorse, although a little more theatrically than served his purpose.
“Hey, stop talking like that,” I said. “Nobody’s persecuting Italians.”
He nodded, again a bit too contritely.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. And way too paranoid.”
“Stupid Dago … with a degree in economics. Jeez.”
I studied him, with meager result. The weather was too stormy, it was too dark, and he was too buried inside his clothing to get a reliable read off his face. I liked Franco, mostly, and trusted him, somewhat, so I’d have to go with that for the time being.
“Did you touch anything with your bare hands?” I asked him.
He put both gloved hands in front of his face and shook his head. “No. Never. Had gloves on the whole time. Too cold not to.”
I dug my phone out of its holster and held it up to him.
“I’m calling Southampton Town Police. Anything else you want to say before I do?” I asked.
I looked at him without speaking for a few moments, in case there was something else in there yearning to come out, but it didn’t happen.
“‘Or forever hold your peace’?” said Franco. “I’ve heard you say that before.”
“I still mean it.”
“No. That’s all there is.”
I didn’t completely believe him, but I called anyway, knowing that clients come and go, and although I was both morally and legally bound to put their interests first, I had another constituency to care for: the local police, without whose trust and goodwill I’d be out of business faster than a snowflake dissolves on the tip of your tongue.
Not surprisingly, I had Detective Joe Sullivan’s cell phone on speed dial.
“This can’t be good,” said Sullivan, answering the phone.
“That’s nice. Just assume the worst. Okay, it’s not good.” Dayna showed up with a flashlight of her own and a stack of blankets, one for each of us. From what I could see of Franco’s face, he looked grateful. “I have a DB laid out on a picnic table. Tad Buczek. Big-time trauma to the head.”
I told him where to find m
e and the body. I didn’t mention the others. That could come later.
“Crazy Polack.”
“Watch it.”
“Sorry. I meant that respectfully. Most of my friends are crazy Polacks. We’ve only got the four-wheel units out. Stay on the line while I get one over there, then I’ll come back and you can tell me what happened.”
Like I knew what really happened. I held the phone away from my mouth.
“You sure no one saw you discover the body or move it here,” I asked Franco one more time. “No other witnesses?”
“I’m telling you, no.”
“And Zina doesn’t know.”
“No. I only called you,” said Franco with a shiver that was probably not entirely from the cold.
“Maybe we should wait in the truck,” said Dayna.
I shook my head. “Cops like simple stories. ‘We met up with Franco, we came here, we waited.’ But there’s no reason for you to suffer. You’ve done a lot already.”
She shook her head this time. “This is more interesting than sitting around watching the snow fall.”
Sullivan came back on the line and I briefed him as thoroughly as I could, with all the information I had at hand. Given where we were at that point, there was nothing to hide, no client confidences to defend. I knew Franco’s decision to call me before calling the cops wasn’t going to sit well, however.
When Sullivan was done grilling me, I asked him what I should do next.
“Stay put, exactly where you are.”
And so we stood, silently, each doing his or her little improvised dance, trying in vain to generate a little body heat. Dayna cupped her gloved hands in front of her mouth, her steamy breath slipping through her fingers only to be whisked away by the wind. The only person there who was indifferent to the weather was Tad Buczek, now just a long, inert mass whose presence I nevertheless felt. I remembered my late husband, Pete Swaitkowski, introducing me to his uncle Tad, who was a big man all over, with enormous workman’s hands. He didn’t have much of a chin, and his eyelids hung nearly at half mast, conveying the cartoonish cliché of a classic doofus. Except Tad was anything but. In fact, the ongoing battle with his rich and presumably sophisticated neighbors had earned him a reputation as a crafty and unpredictable adversary, and thus a near folk hero within the Polish community. Only a near hero, because he also had a reputation as a ball breaker with a hair-trigger temper. Rumors of crazed and brutal brawls had for years been part of family legend, events Pete could never quite confirm or deny.
None of which lessened the sad shock I felt closing in around my heart as I stood in the dubious shelter of the pergola and contemplated the ruins under the white-flecked sheet of blue plastic.
* * *
Danny Izard was Sullivan’s patrol officer of choice whenever the call came from Jackie Swaitkowski. This was fine with me, because I liked Danny Izard and he liked me—a bond reinforced by a few occasions where he’d likely saved my life. Accomplishments he refused to take credit for or regard as anything particularly special.
We saw blinking blue and white lights out on the driveway. Then the jittery approach of a pair of flashlights carried by two people dressed in heavy black clothes and hats with earflaps pulled down and snapped beneath the chin.
“Hey, Jackie, what’re you doin’ out here?” said Danny. “You must really like the snow.”
“What snow?”
“What do we got?”
I pulled back the tarp and Danny and the other cop, a stubby hedgehog of a woman named Judy Rensler, scanned the body with their flashlights, just as we had done not that long before. Nothing had changed.
Judy immediately started taking photos with a battered digital Nikon. The stinging brilliance of the flash caused me to turn my eyes away from the body.
“It’s Tad Buczek,” I said to Danny. “Franco Raffini here found him at the base of one of Tad’s homemade hills and dragged him here,” I said, getting the worst of it out in the open right away.
“Why’d you do that?” asked Danny, an edge in his voice. He stuck the flashlight in Franco’s face.
“I don’t know. The storm, I guess. It’s not that far from here, where I found him. Want to go take a look?”
He turned and started to walk up the grade behind us, but I stopped him.
“What about the CSIs?” I asked Danny.
“On their way. As best they can.”
“I can plow the drive again,” said Dayna.
Danny looked over at her. “Excuse me, ma’am, you are?”
“Dayna Red,” I said. “She and her pickup got me over here.”
“Okay, sure,” said Danny. “Thank you very much.”
After Dayna left, the rest of us walked along a path of footsteps in the snow, now nearly refilled and barely defined enough to follow to a spot at the base of a huge circular mound with gently curved sides that Tad called Hamburger Hill. On top of the hill Tad had built a huge metallic mobile. In the summer, it was driven by water pumped up and out from the sculpture’s extremities, so it looked like a giant sprinkler hallucinated by Salvador Dalí. Now it stood motionless, covered in a thin layer of snow.
Franco brought us up to where he claimed to have stumbled over the body. You could see where a lot of snow had been disturbed, even though the edges were softened by the added accumulation. There were faint depressions in the pattern of footprints leading up to the spot from the opposite direction, which supported Franco’s story pretty thoroughly.
After Judy took some more pictures, she let Franco walk around the crime scene and act out how events unfolded. Danny and I both took notes in little notebooks using regular pens, stopping every few minutes to brush the snow off the pages, which in my case smeared the blue ink.
“So you went back to your living quarters to get a tarp,” said Danny, counting the footprints with the beam of his flashlight.
Franco nodded. “All our equipment’s in a barn next to the shack where Freddy and I live. Freddy’s the other hand. I knew the tarp was the only way I could drag a guy as big as Tad. I almost asked Freddy to help me, but I’m glad I didn’t. It’s a little downhill from here to the pergola, so I made it on my own. Barely. Tad’s a lot of dead weight. Sorry, didn’t mean it like that.”
Danny gently brushed away the lightest snow from the spot Franco had designated. Underneath were chunks of red ice and snow. Danny pointed to where he wanted Judy to take some more pictures. Then he fished a roll of yellow tape out of his pocket and tore off a piece. He stuck it to the ground with a pen, using the butt end of his semiautomatic as a hammer.
“The CSIs will be screaming over this one,” Danny said.
“Can’t blame the weather on you,” I said.
“They blame everything on everybody.”
After that, we walked back down to the pergola and out to the driveway in time to meet a pair of white vans—one from the chief medical examiner’s office, the other from the county forensics unit who shared quarters with the ME up in Riverhead. Dayna Red had cleared the way for them and was facing the unmolested snow that covered the way to the main house. Without discussing it, we all knew it was time to go see Katarzina and break the news.
* * *
When Tad was still a potato farmer, he tore down the original family farmhouse and built what I think was intended to be a Californian hacienda. It was only one story, but it stretched across a considerable chunk of real estate. The wide, gently sloping hip roofs added to the low-slung effect. Underneath were both enclosed rooms and open spaces, divided by large panes of fixed glass. By that description, it should have been an architectural delight, but Tad had managed to imbue the place with a kind of shabby gloom. Having lived as a bachelor for most of his life, it was an atmosphere entirely of his own making that two years of Zina’s influence had only begun to dispel.
I followed Danny and Judy across a broad covered patio that led to the front door. Franco and I followed a few steps back. Dayna was happy this time to wait in t
he truck. When Danny rang the doorbell, a light flashed on above our heads, then another in the living room visible through narrow side windows.
There was a click at the door, which then abruptly swung wide open. It startled me, as I was expecting something a little more tentative. Zina Buczek stood in the doorframe, her sharp features exaggerated by the light above and the effect of a pair of barrettes that pulled her hair back and stretched her forehead. She stood silently, staring at the cops and waiting, braced for what was to come.
Danny had done this before and, being a person of essential decency, spoke the words with just the right tone and pitch. Zina stood motionless, but her cat eyes began to widen and flicker back and forth from cop to cop.
“What is this you’re saying?” she asked, her accent thick with Polish inflection. Danny was forced to repeat the whole thing.
“No, it is not true,” she said, her shoulders now sagging as she reached back to the door handle for support. Judy stepped forward and took Zina’s arm.
“Sorry, ma’am,” she said. “Let me help you back inside.”
Danny followed after telling us to wait on the patio. I knew it was the right call, but the brief blast of warm air from the house had left me even more disappointed by the relentless cold.
A few minutes later, Danny stuck his head out.
“She wants to talk to Franco,” he said.
“Not without me,” I said.
The door closed again. Franco stared at the ground, keeping his comments restricted to wordless mumbling. A minute later, Danny let us in.
The twin sensations brought on by the heat and incandescent light nearly gave me vertigo. The air on my face was drier but somehow heavier than the chilly stuff outside. It soothed my burning cheeks. Franco snatched off his hat and scratched at his curly hair as if relieving a long-denied itch. We stood on dark gray tile that extended into the living room, the snow melting off our boots and blending into puddles already formed on the floor. Directly in front of us was a pair of sofas facing each other, separated by a dingy area rug. Zina and Judy sat on one of the sofas and Danny stood a respectful distance to one side. He wrote in his book. Judy held both Zina’s hands in hers. Zina looked up at us as we came forward. Her fine-skinned face was paler than usual, but her eyes were clear and dry. I realized in the better light that she was wearing pajamas made of a heavy gray flannel that I’d mistaken for a sweatsuit.
