by Chris Knopf
Southampton is actually a pretty big place, encompassing as it does villages like Quogue, Water Mill, Bridgehampton, Sagaponack, Hampton Bays, and Southampton Village itself. In a bad winter like this, though, it could really start to feel like a small town. With only two or three degrees of separation between the full-time locals, it was a fine line between intimate and claustrophobic.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “And even if I did, it wouldn’t have changed what I did. It was clearly self-defense.”
“It was a sword fight between a kitchen knife and some barbecue equipment wielded by Franco, a former fencing champion at Duke University. But who’s keeping score?”
I scowled at him.
“Okay,” said Sullivan, taking a coffee mug from Dayna, who’d just returned to the office, “let’s move on to the current situation.”
The first half hour was easy for everybody. Sullivan put on his just-here-to-help-ma’am, regular-guy performance, which Dayna gladly soaked up. He didn’t challenge her on the facts as she knew them, resulting in the same story he’d heard from me. But then, at the end of the interview, after he’d already thanked her and seemed to be headed for the door, he stopped and looked back at her.
“Oh, just one more thing,” he said. “How did Franco seem to you? Was he nervous, jumpy, that sort of thing?”
“Dayna’s not an expert on Franco’s state of mind, Columbo,” I said.
“This isn’t a courtroom,” he said, then added, “Did he look furtive, you know, shifty, like he was hiding something?”
“We’ve already stated that Franco was agitated and concerned,” I said. “You’d be, too, if you’d just found your boss with his head bashed in.”
“That’s right,” said Dayna with an upbeat voice, “agitated and concerned. Though I’d never met the man, so I wouldn’t know what he’s like normally.”
Good answer, I thought.
“And what about Ms. Swaitkowski?” he asked. “What about her state of mind? Was she agitated as well?”
“Hold it right there,” I said.
“You’re not just Franco’s lawyer,” he said. “You’re also a witness. Did you think she and Mr. Raffini showed excessive concern about calling the police?” he asked Dayna. “Did you feel they were worried about certain information being revealed?”
Dayna answered before I had a chance to jump in front of her.
“Ms. Swaitkowski seemed annoyed that Mr. Raffini had yet to call the police and insisted that he do so immediately. She instructed Mr. Raffini to tell the officers arriving on the scene the complete truth and to leave nothing out. She said he could trust you completely, that you were good guys,” she added matter-of-factly.
I just sat there and tossed the ball for Misty, rousing her from her sleep and ignoring Sullivan as he said a second farewell and left Dayna’s office.
7
Crime on the East End is probably no different from most of the country. It’s mostly petty, stupid stuff committed mostly by people in various states of cognitive disrepair. Aside from the occasional flimflam—a con man posing as a European count, say, fleecing both bankers and benefactors—it’s all the usual stuff. Fistfights over parking spots, kleptomania, secret vendettas gone awry, public urination, purloined Pomeranians, et cetera.
The only police matter of genuine local interest that winter, and much more interesting to the cops than anyone else, was a string of exotic car thefts. For the last three winters, person or persons unknown were boosting Porsches, Aston Martins, Bentleys, and expensive collectibles like Packards, Morgans, and Cords from where the wealthy had left them in the garages of their summer homes, unneeded in the city and virtually forgotten until the start of the high season.
This was not a crime wave that engendered an outpouring of public sympathy. Most in town figured the owners were selling the cars to South American drug cartels and claiming the insurance loss. This is the type of loony conspiracy theory indulged in by our locals when discussing the wealthy city people, about whom they knew next to nothing. I knew enough to know city people had far more lucrative and efficient ways of acquiring ill-gotten gains than anything as ridiculous as that.
So unless it was the peak of the season and celebrities were out and about flashing their summer plumage, the Hamptons rarely attracted the interest of the outside media. The last event to make national news was a car bombing in East Hampton, which everyone assumed at the time was an act of international terrorism. It wasn’t, as it turned out. So the interest quickly died down. Except on my part, since I was there when it happened, getting nearly blown up along with the car.
As in most places, however, sensational murders were rare, so despite our off-season obscurity, the death of Tad Buczek prompted a call to my office that morning from The New York Times. I hadn’t heard from these folks since the car bombing, so I didn’t completely believe it at first.
“Come again?” I asked.
“Roger Angstrom, New York Times,” he repeated. “I’m looking for a comment on the Buczek killing. This guy Raffini worked for him, right? Have the police established a motive yet?”
“There is no motive.”
“There isn’t?”
“There’s no motive because Franco didn’t kill him,” I said.
“What makes you say that?”
“I’m his defense attorney. I only defend innocent people. And I don’t comment on active cases.”
“You sort of just did. You said Raffini was innocent.”
“Okay, but that’s as far as I go.”
“I was thinking about driving out there this afternoon. Could you meet with me for a few minutes?”
“Probably not,” I said.
“I’ll have other people’s opinions. You might want a voice if you disagree with what they said.”
“Why are you interested in this?”
“I’m a crime reporter. It’s what they pay me to do. I write about the innocent and the guilty, but I try to be as fair and accurate as I can. Defense attorneys generally like that.”
Why does the fear of being manipulated always cause me to spur the manipulator on to greater effort? It’s like I step out of my body and look back at myself diving for the obvious bait.
“What little I’ve experienced with the press has rarely featured both ‘fair’ and ‘accurate’ in the same story,” I said.
“That’s because you’ve never worked with me.”
“We’d be working together? I thought you just wanted to talk.”
“Fairness and accuracy are hard work. That’s why I need to talk face-to-face. To get it right.”
No way am I doing this, I said to myself while hearing my voice giving Angstrom directions to the Japanese restaurant below my office that often served as a conference room when conferring with people I didn’t trust. The owner, Mr. Sato, took a protective interest in me, which I nurtured and reciprocated with free legal advice for his employees, all of whom he’d brought over from his hometown in Japan. Thus adding a glancing familiarity with immigration law to my scattered résumé.
“Hope you have four-wheel drive,” I said to Angstrom. “We got a whompin’ mess of snow out here.”
“Snow? Really? That’s exciting.”
I said something lame and rushed him off the phone. I’d have plenty of chances later on to make a bigger ass out of myself.
* * *
My plan was to work at my desk for a few hours, catching up on my other cases and pretending not to be worried sick about Franco Raffini. The plan held firm at first, but then I found my attention drifting toward the window, which had a great view of a big windmill across the street. I did that for a while until my eyes were attracted by the security monitor glowing at me from the table next to my desk. It wasn’t a very scintillating video. I could switch from two views of the hallway to the area immediately beyond the outside door, which was a nearly undifferentiated field of white. I continued to look anyway, flicking between the cameras until assured of the
senselessness of the pursuit. Then after going back to work for another half hour, it occurred to me I hadn’t reviewed the recordings made from the security cameras. It was good policy to review and delete the material to date to avoid running out of memory. It was an even better policy when I needed a break from busywork, which was most of the time.
The people who sold me the system wisely included software that let me scan the recordings on my computer at high speed, automatically stopping at any important change in the image. These changes were then assembled into a thumbnail menu that you could sample all at once, drastically reducing review time.
I fired up the program, then went back to my drudgery until a little ping told me the menu was ready to go. I clicked on the icon and the screen filled with fourteen static images labeled by time and date. Twelve of them were me coming and going, one was the FedEx guy dropping an envelope in a box I kept by the outside door, and the other showed the two guys I’d just missed seeing the other day. I checked the time code—they’d come back when I was over at Dayna’s.
It was unmistakable; they were the same guys. And now I had their faces, clear as a bell, looking directly up at the camera. One was substantially shorter than the other. The taller one looked African American, though light-skinned, suggesting mixed heritage. The other was all white, with a round, brutish face, his mouth set in a semipermanent sneer.
I pulled my robe tighter at the throat as if to shield myself from their staring eyes. Then with an unsteady hand I clicked on the static image. The video started with them walking into camera range. They looked from side to side, then at the door, feeling around the trim, but avoiding the doorknob. One of them finally looked up at the little hole that held the camera, pointing at it and saying something to the other guy. He nodded, and they left again.
My breath caught in my throat as the implications settled in. I went back to the still image and downloaded it as a JPEG. I also downloaded the video segment of the two guys and disconnected the laptop to bring along with me before heading across the hall and diving into the shower.
* * *
While I owed my current job as a full-time defense attorney to Burton Lewis, I owed my initial transition out of real-estate law to Sam Acquillo, my first client in a criminal case, who’d hired me on the strength of nothing but deluded trust and a dollar he’d paid me as a retainer two years earlier. We won the case, which had more to do with his complicated brain than my dazzling professional skills, but the equally complicated friendship we’d developed by then was thoroughly cemented, and a new path for me all but decided upon.
I could go to Burton with most questions related to legal niceties, but when it came to a pair of creeps doing threatening things at my back door, Sam was definitely the go-to guy.
Among his less impressive credentials, Sam had been a partially successful professional boxer, earning enough to put himself through MIT, proving a hardheadedness rarely matched in my experience. Though he was now pushing sixty years old, you could do a lot worse than having Sam by your side in a street fight.
He lived in a small house at the tip of a peninsula that stuck out in the Little Peconic Bay in North Sea, an area directly north of Southampton Village. His girlfriend, Amanda, had her own house next door, and “complicated” wouldn’t even begin to describe their relationship. His mutt, Eddie, probably the only being who could live with Sam full time, had been feral for the first two years of his life, and consequently only did what he wanted to do, to everyone’s satisfaction.
I tried calling in advance, but Sam rarely answered his phone, usually absorbed as he was in some woodworking project in his basement shop. Like me, he’d gone through a serious career evolution, moving from the head of R&D at a giant corporation to semi-suicidal beach bum to skilled cabinetmaker. During that time he’d been in and out of trouble with the law, which is where I came in handy, though along the way he’d done a lot to help the cops do their jobs, whether they liked it or not. So, like me, he’d become close friends with Joe Sullivan. Ross Semple, not so much.
When I reached the end of Sam’s driveway, Eddie was there, standing on top of a big heap of plowed snow with the wind off the bay stroking his fur, making him look like Fabio on the cover of a bodice-ripper.
He jumped down and followed me up to Sam’s house, where he led me to the basement hatch. I scratched his head and told him he and Misty could start a guide-dog service for visiting attorneys.
“You could work for tennis balls. I’ll write the contracts.”
No interest, apparently, as he quickly left me, diving back into the snow, through which he swam off toward the bay on a secret mission. I cleared a spot to bang on the hatch door and waited for the usual friendly greeting.
“What the fuck,” said Sam, pushing open the hatch and sticking his head out. “Don’t you ever call first?”
“I would if you’d ever answer. What’re you doing down there, anyway? How come you’re not out skiing?”
I followed him down the steps into his brightly lit, somewhat orderly, dust-covered workspace.
“My ex-wife tried to get me to ski. Until she realized it was a good way to spend time with her boyfriend at his chalet.”
“I take it you found out.”
“I did.”
“What happened to the boyfriend?”
“I don’t know, but the chalet had a bad day.”
He looked at the briefcase that held my laptop.
“There better be a bottle of wine in there and a couple of glasses,” he said.
I looked at my watch. “It’s not even eleven in the morning.”
“Shit, really? Then let’s make some coffee.”
I followed him upstairs to the main part of the house, which boasted the decorative extravagance of a Shinto temple run by a blind monk.
“You should get my mother-in-law in here to doll this place up a bit,” I said. “You’d be amazed at what she can do.”
Eddie barked at the back door, knowing with that sixth sense of his that we were in the kitchen. I let him in so he could fuss over me, as if he hadn’t already. Sam worked at a French press that had processed more coffee than all the presses in Paris and Montreal combined.
“You could get a new one,” I said, pointing to the poor exhausted thing.
“When I need a lifestyle consultant, I’ll call in my daughter. Everyone else gets to shut up and enjoy the ambience.”
After pouring the coffee, Sam gave Eddie a biscuit and we all went out to the winterized screened-in porch that looked out over the Little Peconic Bay. I use the term “winterized” loosely. We went out to a glassed-in icebox that required a raging blaze in the woodstove to be rendered moderately habitable. I was the only one who seemed to care.
“So what’s the problem this time?” he asked when we settled down.
“Why do you always think it’s a problem? Okay, I’ve got a problem. Let me boot this puppy up and you’ll see what I mean.”
Sam stoked the stove as I sat at a small table and worked the laptop. I also gave him an edited briefing on the Buczek case, assuming he knew the rough outlines of the story from the news, which was a mistake.
“Somebody finally killed that son of a bitch?” he said. “There’s a surprise.”
I’d forgotten that Sam ignored the news—local, national, or international. Likely he was holed up in the wood shop the last few days, so no one had a chance to give him the word.
“He was Pete’s uncle. He served me barbecued ribs at family gatherings.”
“He was still a son of a bitch. Big guy with big hands. Would take a lot to put him down.”
“How about a big chunk of ice?”
I told him what Ross had told me. He nodded like he was listening, but I could see unspoken thoughts whirring behind his eyes. Sam lived life with a permanently installed poker face, though by now I could read it better than he thought.
“What’re you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m not thinking. I’m
listening.”
“No, you’re not. You’re thinking.”
“Okay, I’m remembering. Not exactly the same thing. There was talk around the bar that Tad could be a bit dirty.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“You know what I mean. Into things he shouldn’t be into. Illegal things.”
“Like?”
“What’s on your laptop?” he asked.
“Are you evading me?”
“No. I’m trying to remember. I guess the talk was vague. Nothing specific. Just a little dirty.”
He set down his coffee mug and cracked his knuckles, as if that would free up his long-term memory. Eddie looked up at the sound. I watched the laptop as the photo of my unknown visitors filled the screen.
“There’s my problem,” I said, turning the screen toward Sam.
He leaned in my direction and looked hard at the image for a few moments. Then his face morphed into a smile, if you can use the word “smile” about a face that looked more like a granite outcropping. He actually almost laughed as he sat back in his chair.
“Those fucking meatballs. That’s just great,” he said, enjoying a private moment.
“You know those fucking meatballs?”
He nodded.
“I do, after a fashion. They used to work as muscle for Ivor Fleming. Maybe still do. We had some lively times together a few years ago.”
“I think I remember him. Didn’t you have me do some research back when I was stupid enough to do that for you?”
He sat farther back in his chair and closed his eyes, collecting his memories, or thoughts, or both. Then he reminded me that Fleming was a scrap-metal merchant with a big operation up island. He gathered metal from all over the northeast part of the country, squeezed it into solid blocks, then sold them to processors in the U.S. and abroad, mostly China these days like everyone else.
Unlike Buczek, there was nothing vague about the rumors surrounding Fleming. The whole world seemed to know he was dirtier than stink, but even after a series of indictments for money laundering, drug smuggling, prostitution, bribery of a federal official—even dumping toxic waste in protected habitats—nothing had stuck.
