Ice Cap: A Mystery (Jackie Swaitkowski Mysteries)

by Chris Knopf

  Sam said most of this happened years ago, and either Ivor had gotten smarter or more honest, because even when Sam had dealt with him, his profile had slipped well below the horizon.

  “So how did it turn out between you and him?” I asked. “I forget.”

  “We agreed to stay out of each other’s way. Which until now has been the case.”

  “Until now?”

  “Ike and Connie paying you a visit is inconsistent with the agreement, however tacit.”

  “Ike and Connie? Sounds like a lovely couple.”

  “Ike’s the skinny one, Connie’s the other. Not as tough as they think they are, but tough enough.”

  I didn’t know whether to feel terrorized that a known gangster’s thugs had been at my back door or relieved that my own personal thug knew who they were. I decided to feel a little of both.

  “This can’t be good,” I said. “What does Tad Buczek or Franco Raffini have to do with a shady scrap-metal baron?”

  “Correlation doesn’t always equal causation,” said Sam—the kind of thing he said a lot, which could be annoying. “What else have you been working on?”

  I hadn’t thought of that, leaping automatically to the most pressing case at hand. I went through the other things on my plate, but none seemed likely to attract the interest of a guy like Ivor Fleming.

  “So what do I do?” I asked.

  “Keep your security system running and the Glock close at hand. When you have a minute, we’ll go pay a call on Ivor. See what’s what.”

  A wave of comforting warmth washed through me. I walked a fine line with Sam. I knew he’d do almost anything I asked him to do, but if I asked too often, I’d lose his respect. Worse, I’d lose respect for myself. On the other hand, there were debts between us, an unspoken sense of reciprocity that would make disengagement feel like a violation. Like I said, complicated relationships are my specialty.

  I accepted the offer without a lot of fanfare and went back out to the kitchen to pour another cup of coffee. Eddie followed me in the hope of getting another biscuit, a hope well founded. As I drank the coffee I looked out at the snow heaped around Sam’s backyard and was struck by the oddness of it all, the state we’d been thrust into by such a surprising display of enraged nature, something almost not of this earth.

  I tried to shake the feeling that the world had changed on me when I wasn’t looking and I would only know the true significance right at the moment it would be too late to do anything about it.

  8

  As it turned out, Franco’s bail became a nonissue. He didn’t get any. The ADA charged him with premeditated second-degree murder, which made it easy to convince the judge that no amount of bail money warranted the risk posed to public safety by releasing a wanton killer like Franco Raffini.

  I wouldn’t say my counterargument was feeble, exactly—merely hopeless. I was glad Franco took it as well as he did.

  “Not your fault, Jackie,” he said as we sat together in a conference room at the Suffolk County Jail. He looked lost inside his orange jumpsuit, almost collapsed into himself with despondency. “I did it to myself.”

  “You haven’t helped yourself, that’s a cinch,” I said. He slumped even farther in his seat, a portrait of pure misery. “But we can start to fix that. From here on out, we can make things better.”

  He looked up at me without raising his head. “How we gonna do that?”

  “Why were your fingerprints on that big chunk of ice?” I asked.

  “It was sitting there next to Tad’s head. I just tossed it to get it out of the way. I tossed a bunch of ice out of the way.”

  “You told me you had your gloves on the whole time.”

  “I had to take the right glove off to check Tad’s pulse, right here on his neck.” He demonstrated on himself. “That’s an easy thing to forget.”

  “What else did you forget?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m not trying to forget anything.”

  My experience told me that people didn’t have to try very hard to forget things they didn’t want to remember, but I put that aside.

  “Tell me about Zina,” I said. “How did she and Tad get along?”

  He winced at her name, but it also seemed to open him up a little.

  “Just because everybody thinks something is true doesn’t mean it isn’t,” he said. “Sometimes the obvious is the obvious.”

  “Zina and Tad weren’t exactly lovebirds,” I suggested.

  “To be honest with you, I don’t know how he felt about her. I just knew how she felt about him. Which wasn’t that great. Come on, just look at her, then look at Tad. The man was a big ugly bull.”

  “He mistreated her,” I said, a question in the form of a statement.

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Franco. “I never heard him say anything unpleasant to her, much less smack her around or anything. It was just the way he was in the world. Intense, busy all the time, in a way just this side of crazy. Zina’s nothing like that. She’s subtle, and likes things calm and steady. And she’s kind of refined.” He looked slightly embarrassed, as if caught betraying his own romantic illusions. “Ah, hell, I don’t know what I’m saying. It just didn’t make sense, the two of them, that’s all.”

  “A number of people saw Zina’s motives as purely mercenary,” I said. “That she was only in it for the money, and the American citizenship.”

  He frowned. “Of course they’d say that. And I wouldn’t blame her if it was true. But I never heard her say marrying Tad was just a scam to get into the country.”

  “She said there was nothing for her. That she had nowhere to hide. What’s that about?”

  He rubbed his goatee and sighed. “I don’t know, except she always seemed a little lost and alone. Resigned, maybe? I tried to get more out of her, but to be completely honest with you, not that I haven’t been honest in this particular conversation, we didn’t speak that much about anything. It wasn’t what you’d call a speaking kind of relationship. I tried, you know, to make something more out of the situation, to get to know her better, but that wasn’t what she had in mind.”

  I struggled with the image of Franco Raffini as the beautiful Katarzina’s boy toy—to be felt but not heard—but that was what it sounded like.

  “Everybody can get lonely, Jackie,” he said. “Doesn’t mean they always want to become your soul mate.”

  I allowed how that could be true without copping to any experience in the matter. The thought of Harry leaped involuntarily to mind. Soul mate? I shoved the thought back in its hole.

  “If Zina didn’t marry Tad out of expedience, why did she marry him? It doesn’t sound like she liked him, much less loved him.”

  Franco took some time before answering the question. It wasn’t evasion; he seemed to be working hard on the answer. Then he gave up.

  “I don’t know. Honest, Jackie. I don’t know. There’s something really distant about Zina. I never got the feeling she was completely there—more that she was mostly somewhere else. ‘Distracted’ is maybe a better word? She didn’t try to hide it, at least from me. This is going to sound really strange, but I think one of the reasons she liked me was I never pressed her on anything. That’s why we didn’t talk that much. When the most obvious thing about her is off the table—that most of her mind is off on some other planet—there’s not much left to discuss. I don’t think I’m making any sense. Sorry.”

  Quite the contrary, I thought. I bet he had it nailed perfectly. That was Franco’s secret with women. He had the one quality we all crave over every other. He could sense the subterranean frequencies, the subtle undercurrents of mood and state of mind. In a word, he was sensitive.

  Then another swarm of unwanted feelings about Harry surged into my mind. Harry had a similar gift. He’d learned from the tumultuous and infinitely variable nature of our early relationship how to calibrate the exact amount of air I needed between us at any given time, and had somehow accepted that I was the one who s
et the shift in parameters, however capricious and unpredictable.

  This made Harry a man of inestimable tolerance and generosity. But was that the same as Franco’s sensitivity? And if not, so what?

  “I get what you’re saying, Franco,” I told him. “I really do.”

  “You do?”

  “Who knows what’s going on with Zina, and you likely did her a kindness that some may condemn, but that doesn’t make it less kind.”

  “So you don’t think I’m just a depraved, philandering monster?”

  “I don’t. I think you’re a good man who’d be well advised to restrict his romantic entanglements to single women going forward.”

  Something approximating a lift in spirits showed on his face.

  “Going forward,” he said. “There’s a nice thought.”

  * * *

  When I was back outside, the sky had managed to transition all the way from deep, limitless blue to surly gray, and the wind had died down, yet it felt colder in a way that defied respite. I shuddered, literally, and climbed stiff-limbed into the Volvo and made my forlorn way back down from Riverhead to the hoped-for refuge of my littered and congested yet warm and brightly lit office.

  * * *

  I’d barely begun to feel the soothing effects of my office when the phone rang. It was Mr. Sato from the restaurant below. He said there was a fellow from the newspapers who claimed he’d scheduled a meeting with me. Should he make the man comfortable or have Naoki-san, his three-hundred-pound sous-chef, escort him to the door?

  “Shit, I forgot about him,” I said. “Apologize for me and tell him I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “I’ll tell him fifteen minutes. You don’t want to look too eager. Besides, it’ll tempt him to have a little more tuna tataki.”

  Any advice for me to show some restraint was usually apropos. I used the time well, getting back out of my recently donned bathrobe and figuring out how to dress for the press. I decided lawyerly. The guy’s from the city; he’ll be used to gray suits and conservative heels, silk blouse—light blue, buttoned to the throat. This took all the allotted fifteen minutes and then some, so by the time Mr. Sato guided me to the bar, Angstrom had already had two platefuls of sashimi and robota-grilled tsukune—duck and scallops wrapped in bacon.

  I extended my hand and waited for him to drop his chopsticks and mop up his face with a white napkin.

  He almost looked flustered, as if I’d caught him doing something untoward like stealing from the dessert tray or peeking at a girlie magazine.

  “Ms. Swaitkowski,” he said, sticking out his hand. “Roger Angstrom.”

  “You can call me Jackie, especially since you can’t pronounce Swaitkowski.”

  “Thanks for the correction. Do you want to grab a table?”

  “The bar’s fine,” I said, climbing up on the high stool and not mentioning that I’d spent a fair amount of quality time on that very stool. “You obviously managed the roads.”

  “You’re right. You got a whompin’ lot of snow out here. What the hell happened?”

  “It’s the beginning of the apocalypse. But I’m ready. All stocked up with fresh drinking water, cabernet, and eyeliner. Just the essentials,” I said, and immediately regretted it. Why am I joking with this person who I actually fear is planning to make a fool out of me?

  When he smiled, big creases formed in his cheeks, too grand to be dimples but with the same effect. His hair was curly, not unlike Sam’s, but in a looser weave and more fitting to his age, which I guessed to be early thirties. His teeth, also well exposed by the smile, looked too straight to be real. He was only slightly taller than me and thin—even his down vest and bulky flannel shirt expressed a pervasive slightness and delicacy. On his nose perched a pair of silver wire-rim glasses, round, like John Lennon’s.

  “I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me,” he said, gently bringing things back to the appropriate level.

  “I’m not sure what we have to talk about. I can’t discuss anything about the case or the police investigation that isn’t already in the public record.”

  He held up a small recorder in his right hand and a little notebook in his left, and looked at me inquiringly. Without hesitation, I pointed at the notebook.

  “Got it. Had to ask,” he said.

  “Indeed.”

  “I understand the limits of your discretion in regards to an active case, but I’m also interested in some of your prior involvements. In particular the Windsong bombing, where you were seriously injured.”

  Ah, I thought, Roger’s been digging around the archives. Which these days means doing a Google search of all the names connected to Tad Buczek’s murder. His own paper would have the richest repository of information on yours truly as a result of the Windsong thing. The strategy was clear. Get me talking on safe ground, then slide me unexpectedly into forbidden territory. Nice try, Roger, I’m hip to you wily reporters.

  “That’s hardly breaking news. The case was firmly closed years ago.”

  “I’m not thinking about the case. I’m thinking about you. What about being terribly hurt in a car bombing motivated you to leave a comfortable practice in real-estate law and become a crusader for criminal justice? For the defense, no less. Why not join the District Attorney’s Office, or the Attorney General’s? Why jump immediately to the dark side?”

  Oh no, I thought. Not that.

  “I’d argue your characterization of criminal defense as the dark side,” I said. “There’s darkness in the justice system, no doubt, but it’s not reserved for one side or the other. There’s plenty to go around.”

  He started writing in his notebook. Oh crap, I thought. What am I doing?

  “Listen, Mr. Angstrom,” I said. “If you’re thinking of writing a story about me, you’ve made a sadly misguided decision. First off, I’m so constrained by confidentiality, even regarding past cases, that there’s precious little information you can glean, even if I wanted to provide it, which I don’t. I won’t cooperate at all. I’d rather stick a hot poker in my eye than show up in the newspapers. And that’s off the record. The hot-poker part.”

  “After reading about your injuries from the car bombing,” he said, “I was, frankly, braced for some disfigurement. Scarring, at least. And here I am looking at you, and actually, there’s nothing of the sort. You’re really quite attractive.”

  I checked my watch and saw that it was a little past three, outside the time zone for scotch on the rocks, but well within white wine territory. So I ordered some. Angstrom responded with a vodka martini, asked for both shaken and stirred. I waited until both glasses were on the bar.

  Here’s the thing. The plastic surgeons on the Upper East Side of Manhattan who put my face back together did a stellar job. So stellar that I look better than I had before, despite the freckles, which for some reason they felt worth preserving. That doesn’t mean I think I look good in a general sense. My nose is too small, my blue eyes too pale. My hair’s an unruly mess on the best of days. Okay, figure not so bad, though it’s getting harder to keep it that way. So when men say I’m attractive, my automatic thought is, What are you trying to get from me?

  “What are you trying to get from me?” I asked.

  He drew back into his stool.

  “What do you mean?”

  He looked genuinely taken aback, which gave me pause. So I tried a different angle.

  “I spend a lot of time with police detectives and prosecutors. It may not surprise you that they use a variety of tactics such as misdirection, empathy, emotional bonding, even flattery, to extract information from people who might be a little reluctant to give it up. I’m guessing guys in your business do approximately the same thing. So, let’s skip all the manipulation and cut to the chase. Tell me what you want.”

  He lit me up with another of those dimpled grins.

  “I want to write a story about you. I think you’re really interesting. And I think you’re a lovely woman. Sorry if that sounds ma
nipulative. It’s really what I think.”

  I’d already checked to see if he wore a wedding ring. He didn’t. So all I had to do was smile back at him as I climbed off my bar stool.

  “I’m sorry, too. But I can’t do this.”

  The weather had decided to change again while I was in the restaurant. The gloomy gray sky had turned blue again, and the breeze was coming in off the ocean, so it was both noticeably warmer and seasoned with a light touch of salt. The surrounding snow was a blinding white under the hard light of the sun, low in the sky and threatening to turn into an azure sunset. I had to put on my sunglasses for the short trip from the front door of Mr. Sato’s place to the rear of the building and the door that led up to my fortress, a place where I could convince myself I was safely locked away from all intrusion, from the outside world and my own impulsive and benighted heart.

  9

  As soon as night had thoroughly fallen, my crisp, professional outfit propelled me out of the office, down the stairs, and into the Volvo, which I drove east down Montauk Highway.

  Too lazy to change, too uncomfortable to just hang around in a tight skirt and pantyhose, too unsettled to spend more time by myself, I followed the urge to escape into what I thought was a sheltering anonymity.

  I knew a place. It was a tiny French restaurant run by a real Frenchman who honored the Gallic custom of treating paying customers with haughty disregard (mostly an unfair stereotype—when actually in France I’ve rarely had a rude moment). The restaurant was in Amagansett, the last village on the South Fork before reaching the terminus in Montauk. I’d been there only once before, hoping to practice my language skills, and instead got into a duel in which I said something in French and the owner either corrected my pronunciation—favoring Parisian inflections—or answered me in English.

  This time I merely sought a dark place where I’d fit in dressed as I was, far from familiar surroundings, where I could waste some money on overpriced, underproportioned tasty food and pretend I was in a foreign country where there was no danger of anyone wanting to strike up a conversation.