Ice Cap: A Mystery (Jackie Swaitkowski Mysteries)

by Chris Knopf

  “Okay, so both stupid and out of the loop,” said Sam.

  “Hey,” I said to him, swatting him on the arm with the side barrel of my Glock. “We got our answer. No reason for insults.”

  Now, there was a weird dynamic. Me scolding Sam, my most valued physical and psychological protector, for possibly hurting the feelings of a guy I thought had threatened to kill me. Not just threatened, had convinced me that he was going to do just that. And now that all Ike had done was poke around my office, I was ready to establish a new relationship, make a new friend, maybe exchange Christmas cards.

  Luckily, Sam knew my tendencies.

  “Give me more than that,” he said to Ike. “You’re not that oblivious.”

  All he got from Ike was another baleful look.

  “Yeah? And what are you going to do to me if I don’t? Do you think it can be worse than what Ivor will do if I sell him out? If that’s the case, then you’re an even sicker shit than I thought you were.”

  There comes a time in every negotiation when you have to either push back on your opponent’s position or recognize you have all you are going to get. I felt we’d arrived at the latter position, and was glad Sam felt the same thing.

  “If there’s anything to discuss,” he said to Ike, “we’ll meet with Ivor whenever he wants, at a place of his choosing. Otherwise, I expect me and Jackie to be left alone. Understood?”

  “I capisce the English, motherfucker. I’ll tell him. What he does after that isn’t my concern.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, still playing the reasonable guy to Sam’s hard edge.

  Sam nodded, codifying the agreement. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” he said to Ike.

  Ike grunted and asked if we could get him some ice for his forehead. I said sure, and soon after we left him there, leaning forward, the ice in a ziplock bag pressed to his head, his body deflated, his urge for revenge likely fixed in place.

  11

  It snowed again on our way home from Massapequa. Not an all-out blizzard, just a lousy three inches, which in other years would have caused the governor to deploy the National Guard. Instead, the local weather people delivered the news with grim restraint and the island silently groaned and steeled itself.

  As it turned out, I actually liked what the little storm did for the existing snow cover—glossing over the gritty surface and painting everything with a neat whitewash. My only worry was getting from my car to the back door without sliding on the frictionless surface, made more treacherous by my leather-soled cowboy boots, an equipment choice in desperate need of re-thinking.

  I made it to the door unscathed and waved to Sam that everything was fine. He’d insisted on escorting me to my place, but I wouldn’t let him come into my lair only to turn everything upside down in search of possible threats.

  My security system was state-of-the-art back when it was installed, but I knew there wasn’t a system that couldn’t be breached by someone who knew what they were doing.

  So as I moved from the keypad at the bottom of the stairs up to the hallway and then into my office, where the next keypad was buzzing, waiting for me to punch in the code, I retained that familiar nervy feeling. It would only recede to a barely noticeable level after I looked inside all the closets and behind the shower curtain in the little bathroom attached to the office.

  With that accomplished, I snapped on every security device I owned and got into my robe, tying off the belt and sliding the Glock into one of the pockets. In the other pocket I found an unsmoked joint. I poured a glass of wine to complete the set, then snuggled up in front of my computer, stretched my neck, shook out my hair, and lit up the magic screen.

  I started searching major newspapers for Tad Buczek, but little came up. I reminded myself that Tad might have been a major factor with Pete’s Polish crowd, but he was barely a sidebar to the world at large.

  The local papers had a lot more. I learned that Tad had been at Pete’s funeral party. Not a big revelation. That was such a surreal experience, I wouldn’t swear I was there myself. There were also lengthy reports on Tad’s court battles with his neighbors, with plenty of colorful commentary from all involved. You could summarize it all by saying Tad never tired of pissing people off. But I knew that already.

  I pulled up one of my search programs that specialized in court records. Unless you spent much of your life laboring in the legal trades, you probably wouldn’t know that whenever anything’s adjudicated in court, it becomes public information. It doesn’t have to be a trial. A simple filing with some regulatory body is usually accessible if you know where to look.

  And if that didn’t work for me, there was always my magic software.

  I got most of the way without help. It looked like Tad had followed the appropriate protocol by traveling to Poland to meet up with Zina, spending almost a full month with her before receiving a fiancée visa and bringing her home with him. They were married a month after that.

  Her maiden name was Katarzina Malonowski, and she had lived in Kraków, where she was born thirty-two years ago. Her parents, Godek and Halina, were native-born Poles, both deceased. I tried to search more on the parents, but everything was in Polish, so I backed out of that application and wandered down another hallway.

  The last time Tad had tried to hire me to fight one of his neighborhood battles, I passed him along to another lawyer, a pretentious windbag named Sandy Kalandro, who was nevertheless a capable attorney. More important for Tad, he was politically and socially well connected and might even have known some of the opposition.

  I searched recent filings in area courts and quickly found what I was looking for: Kalandro’s petition to start probate on the Buczek estate, which his buddies at Surrogates Court immediately granted. This meant I could read Tad’s last will and testament in the comfort of my office workstation.

  I scrolled quickly through the antiquated legal language and found the list of assets. When I rolled through the pages and reached the bottom line, I was in for a jolt. Twenty-three million dollars in stocks, bonds, gold, and art. And another fifteen in real estate and general belongings, including a ’65 Maserati Sebring Coupe I never knew he had. Also wisely left alone by the exotic-car thieves. I hoped Freddy knew to take extra measures now that the big watchdog had left the scene.

  I went back into the body of the will to dig out the details. Zina, interestingly, only got a lousy three million, all of it from the investment portfolio. Saline and Freddy were named, and the will specified the estate should continue to fund their positions, including housing and health care, for as long as they wanted them. No mention of Franco Raffini.

  The rest, including the property and everything on it (that last part a dubious accomplishment), was to be distributed among Tad’s sprawling family. I was happy to see a half million earmarked for Paulina. Taxes were likely to take a bite, but no effort was made to reduce that with charitable gifts. Family’s one thing. To hell with widows and orphans.

  Even though Zina was in line for only a small percentage of the estate, the similarities between Franco’s first adventure and this one were way too close to escape the notice of the DA any more than it escaped Ross and Sullivan. In most cases, it’s very difficult for the prosecution to admit prior crimes into evidence. All the judges I knew looked at such things as far too prejudicial. They rarely allowed it, as long as you kept your client off the witness stand and beyond cross-examination. But it was possible they could prove to the judge that the Pritz case contained facts that went to motive, or that the first event aided in the planning of the second (just proving a certain criminal propensity wasn’t enough). However, even if they failed to win that point, it was going to light a rocket under the prosecution, a pattern of two being pattern enough for them.

  Was it enough for me?

  I moved back into Google and searched for Franco Raffini. Remembering Sullivan’s crack about his fencing skills, I dug into his time at Duke, where he was an accomplished student and active parti
cipant in sports and campus activities. He starred in fencing and soccer, though by graduation had focused solely on swordplay, having won the league championship and done well in national university tournaments.

  I had all the court records from Franco’s manslaughter conviction still on my hard drive. For the heck of it, I pulled them up and started digging around. The facts in the case were never in dispute: Franco and his lover are at her house in the belief that her husband was away on business. Franco is cooking for her on the family barbecue when the husband suddenly appears, grabs a carving knife, and tries to stab Franco. He succeeds in cutting Franco’s forearm before Franco pulls a skewer out of a rack on the side of the barbecue and fends off further swipes of the knife, which goes on until Franco manages to impale the guy with the skewer.

  I contended in court that the husband had become suspicious and faked the trip in order to catch his adulterous wife in the act. This helped frame the situation as attempted murder, lending greater justification to Franco’s claim of self-defense. And since he’d already spent a few years in prison, the ADA put up a flimsy fight and the judge found it easy enough to shorten the sentence.

  I’d forgotten their names. The husband was Don Pritz, and his wife Eliz. Like Franco, Don was in the financial business, some sort of a dealmaker, broker, go-between, whatever. I know nothing about any of those things. Although I knew at the time that Don traveled a lot, more than three-quarters of the year, which Franco told me had driven Eliz to seek intimacy outside the marriage. That hadn’t been my issue when I busted Franco out of stir. Now I wondered. Especially since Eliz never showed her face or contacted any of the players when I first took up Franco’s case.

  I looked around Google for more information on Mrs. Pritz, but found nothing. Then on impulse, I drifted into a look at the Pritzes’ family finances, and of course hit a wall of confidentiality. Yet what I love about the Web is there’re so many ways to skin a cat. I went back to the court records from Franco’s first trial. Franco’s lawyer, a guy named Art Montrose, had subpoenaed the Pritz family financials and got part of his wish—current bank accounts and retirement funds. Included were the names of Don’s investment accounts, but no numbers. The same with life insurance. I had the name of their insurance agent and carrier, but no death benefit. There was no indication that Montrose had pushed for more information, which surprised me. He was no longer part of Burton’s firm, which I noted and stored away for later.

  I confirmed that Eliz was still living in their house in Remsenburg, a hamlet on the western edge of the Town of Southampton. I checked on the market value of the house, which was estimated at 3.5 million dollars. This was as far as I could go using entirely legal public search engines, so somewhat reluctantly (and somewhat gleefully) I opened another search application program that was anything but. I got it from a former client, now devoted friend, who used to be in the cyberintelligence business for the U.S. Navy. I had intense mixed feelings about using the program, varying from wretched shame to heart-racing euphoria. It didn’t tell you everything, but it told you a lot. And since my friend had sent me the latest version on a thumb drive dropped into my mailbox, there were now things it could do that I had yet to try.

  As exciting as the results can be, it’s pretty boring to get dragged through the process, so I’ll cut to the chase. I only cracked two out of five investment accounts, each worth a little north of two million dollars apiece at two hedge funds (who could use a little advice on cyber-security) but got nowhere with the banks. Not surprising, given their justifiable bank-vault mentality. With the insurance, I hit pay dirt. They had a mix of term- and whole-life policies Don had taken out when they were first married, while both were in their twenties. These were relatively affordable, though the payouts didn’t amount to much. It was the one he took out only a month before he died that was a bit of a shocker.

  Seven and a half million dollars.

  Hm.

  * * *

  I woke up the next morning knowing what I wanted to do, I just didn’t want to do it by myself. Not that I didn’t like being by myself. I did.

  What I needed now was someone large and fun to have around no matter what the circumstances.

  “Tell me you have cabin fever and are just itching to get outside for a while,” I said to Harry when he picked up the phone.

  “How dangerous a criminal are we going to see?”

  “She’s a rich widow. Don’t know how dangerous.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “You’re on the way. I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes.”

  Harry lived on the fringes of Southampton Village in a converted gas station. This wasn’t apparent from the outside, since it had been a very old gas station and the prior owner had done a nice job on the landscaping and architectural cues, including a fireplace and chimney, to blend it into the surrounding residential neighborhood. He was an artist who specialized in big pieces that he could assemble in the garage bays and extract through the big doors. All of that was still there, partly filled with racks Harry occasionally used in his transport business.

  I parked next to Harry’s Volvo, which looked almost exactly like mine, because I bought mine to allay the envy I felt over his. He greeted me at the door wearing an impressively voluminous down coat with the fur-lined hood pulled up, ski pants, and black goggles.

  “I didn’t know what to expect,” he said.

  “You’ll probably survive the walk to the car,” I told him. “From there we’ll have to rely on the heater.”

  He put the coat in the backseat, revealing the under layer, a fluffy chartreuse fleece with his company’s logo on the breast.

  “They gave it to me as an incentive to buy a bunch of them for my employees. Since I don’t have any employees, I sent my regrets. And kept the fleece.”

  “Where’d you get the coat? Admiral Perry’s closet?”

  “Catchy name. Would go well in these parts,” he said.

  “These parts are a famous summertime retreat where you expect to sweat and develop skin cancer. These times are the issue.”

  “These times are here to stay.”

  “Don’t start,” I told him, pointing a gloved finger.

  “I spend all day communicating with people all over the world. Everyone has weather like they never had before. Floods, fires, blizzards, cyclones, tornadoes—I think you’re allowed to throw in locusts, since there’s an agricultural component. It’s Armageddon.”

  “Whatever happened to Mr. Optimistic Glass-Half-Full-Sunny-Side-of-the-Street Goodlander?”

  “I’m optimistic that we’ll find a solution before we’re devoured by nature. As a matter of fact, climate change will become the great unifier of humanity. All wars will come to an end as our collective genius becomes obsessively focused on bringing carbon emissions down to barely traceable levels. Massive job-creating corporations will rise up as science and technology bend all economic activity toward developing alternative energy sources, and the subsequent wealth will be plowed back into an innovation-based economy. Our children’s children will live in a world of infinitely sustainable energy and world peace.”

  “Don’t start on the kid thing,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of minutes left on that biological clock.”

  “I’m not sure I like children that much. One trip to McDonald’s cures the urge.”

  “Where did you learn to say exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment?” I asked.

  “Years of doing exactly the opposite. There’s a theory of learning that says the more you screw up, the smarter you get.”

  “Then I’m a genius.”

  “Tell me about the widow.”

  I conveyed as much information as I could about the case during the drive from Southampton Village to Remsenburg, which was about twenty minutes away. Harry was like a human tape recorder when it came to the essentials of a narrative, so I knew none of my babbling was a lost effort.

  The only thing I left out was the litt
le episode in the parking lot at the French restaurant. There was no reason to awaken Harry’s hyperprotective impulses, fully dormant now for some time. It would only put a warp in the relationship right when I most needed it to be straight and sure.

  Remsenburg is the westernmost outpost of the Hamptons, although location snobs would likely argue over that distinction. Status debates aside, it’s a serenely beautiful place, almost entirely residential, and adorned with lots of sumptuous and dignified beachside estates. Eliz Pritz lived in one of them.

  Harry navigated to the address with the GPS built into my cell phone. Even so, we had the usual back-and-forth when we got there: You sure this is it? I’m sure. You sure?

  And that was just approach avoidance on my part. I’m always hellfire on approach right up until I reach my destination, then the avoiding kicks in.

  “I’m assuming you didn’t call ahead,” said Harry.

  “Never.”

  “So now you’re wondering if you’ll get a warm reception.”

  “Always arrive unheralded. Forewarned is forearmed.”

  “Which is why we’re sitting here at the end of her driveway,” he said.

  “I’m assessing local conditions. That driveway is covered in snow.”

  Harry leaned closer to the windshield. “Maybe an inch,” he said.

  “Okay. Thanks for that. We’re going in.”

  Her driveway was half the length of Tad’s, but more elegantly landscaped. I wished we were in the warmer months so I could see what was really there. Then again, I wished for a lot of things that were basically impossible.

  The next decision was one I’d often faced. To bring or not to bring Harry with me to the door. On some occasions, the sheer mass of him had caused some unuseful consternation. On the plus side, he was such a distraction that people often let us into their homes before realizing what they were doing.

  I chose the second tack but asked him to stand at the bottom of the stoop while I rang the bell, putting us approximately at the same level.