Ice Cap: A Mystery (Jackie Swaitkowski Mysteries)

by Chris Knopf

  He leaned back again, only more gingerly, and put his hands, with knitted fingers, on top of his prominent belly.

  “I felt as if the entire story could be told through the phone records. When you went back three years, you saw the beginning of the relationship between Franco and Mrs. Pritz. The initial calls between her home phone and his cell, at first spaced far apart, increased steadily until they became more than a daily occurrence. Since Mrs. Pritz handled all the household finances, including paying the bills, evidence of this should have been easily concealed. However, Mr. Pritz was a very jealous man. As soon as he began to suspect her of having an affair, the first place he’d look would be the family phone records, which were conveniently in his name. According to Mrs. Pritz, Donald first began confronting her with his suspicions at least three weeks before his death, and yet the calls continued unabated.”

  “She didn’t care if he found out.”

  “Wanted him to. I only met twice with Eliz, but there was nothing about her suggesting naïveté. Quite the opposite. A woman like that would not have unwittingly used a credit card she shared with her husband to buy drinks at the bar in a hotel where on the same night Franco Raffini had rented a room.”

  I knew now where he was driving to. And I really didn’t want him to get there, but it was too late to stop the car.

  “By the way,” he said, “the last call Donald got that night was from a familiar number. Franco’s cell phone. Right at the moment he was at Chicago’s O’Hare about to connect with another flight to the West Coast.”

  “It was a setup,” I said.

  “Very much so. Something about that call alerted him that his wife’s lover was with her at their house. You know the rest.”

  “No, I don’t. Not really.”

  “I think it happened as described by both Mrs. Pritz and Mr. Raffini. Donald came through the doors to the patio, where he picked a large carving knife up off a table near their gas-powered barbecue. Mr. Raffini snatched up a rotisserie skewer, which he used to great advantage in warding off Donald’s attacks, though one swipe of the knife opened up a deep gash in Franco’s forearm. That was when Franco finished Donald off with a lunge straight through the heart. Literally the coup de grâce.”

  He pronounced “grâce” properly, which earned him a few extra points.

  “You said ‘their barbecue.’ I thought it was a birthday present from Eliz.”

  “Not the barbecue, the rotisserie. It’s a separate piece of equipment. Brand-new, delivered just that day. What a coincidence. From what others told me, Donald didn’t even like to grill. That was usually a job for Mrs. Pritz.”

  I thought about what he was saying, tossing the information around in my head like salad in a salad bowl.

  “Okay, even if the moment was contrived to end in Donald’s death, there’s nothing that directly implicates Franco beyond having an affair with Eliz and killing Donald in self-defense. Both of which he freely admitted to from the start.”

  Montrose held up the fat file. “You can look for yourself. I went to see Franco’s firm, just a routine visit. I ended up in a conference room with their CFO and corporate counsel, who both looked like they were about to heave or pass out from the stress. The counsel started by saying they were hoping ‘to get ahead of this.’ I was smart enough not to ask, ‘Ahead of what?’ Then he handed me this”—he shook the file again—“a complete accounting of Franco’s trading history in the months leading up to the murder. Franco’s career as Wall Street wunderkind had recently made an about-face. Rather dramatically, over a huge, unauthorized bet on oil futures that locked in a colossal loss. That’s all it takes, one deal, if it’s bad enough. The firm avoided a run on its assets by keeping everything hush-hush, which included holding on to Franco until they could cover the loss and withstand the bad press. A decent arrangement for both, since Franco had not only bet the firm’s funds, he was so confident in the trade he tossed in his own. All of them. As long as the ADA didn’t specifically subpoena the information, there was no reason for it to come out. And that’s how it went.”

  Damn, damn, damn, I thought.

  “Motive,” I said.

  “In spades. Even the slipshod defense Franco got from me would only result, at worst, in a conviction for negligent manslaughter. I made it such a slam-dunk that the ADA just had to go through the motions, with no good reason to think beyond the obvious. All Franco had to do was cool his heels at Sanger for a few years, a chore you graciously truncated, and then join his co-conspirator in well-funded bliss.”

  “That’s not what happened,” I said.

  “So I noticed halfway through the process. Franco became steadily more dejected as the trial went on, looking around the courtroom whenever we first came in and mumbling things like, ‘Dammit, Eliz, where the hell are you?’ I know from a contact at the county jail that he tried to call her several times, but never got through. So we had a real catch-22 on our hands. I could try leveraging his disappointment into implicating her, but there was no way he could do that without exposing himself to a much more serious charge. So I didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell, and we marched our way in silence to the conclusion of the case.”

  “And you kept all this to yourself.”

  “I did. I sullied my professional reputation with Mr. Lewis, who was very disappointed in my performance, which led to my resignation. Though I did manage to save our client from a charge of intentional second-degree murder, which carries a life sentence.”

  “You should have come clean. Burton’s an honorable man.”

  He sat back up and put his elbows on the desk. “I know. That’s why I kept my mouth shut. All the truth would do was throw him and his worthy pro bono enterprise into the same moral and ethical vortex. Better to take the hit and move on with my life.”

  So who’s honorable now? I asked myself, actually feeling my throat clench a little, like it always does when contemplating noble self-sacrifice. Suddenly Art Montrose became genuinely imposing, his outsized midriff in full relief before the faux-antique desk.

  13

  As further proof that my emotions, and by association, my instincts, were the smartest part of me, I drove on autopilot back toward Southampton. I bypassed the ferry rides, driving west to Riverhead, at the crotch of the forks, and then back east again to Southampton. I didn’t know what the weather was doing at the time, since I hadn’t the wherewithal to notice it.

  It might seem silly to feel crushed over a situation that amounts to the central dilemma of criminal defense—how do you defend a person you know is guilty of the crime? I believed without reservation in the principle that every person deserves the right to a vigorous and thorough defense, if for no other reason than to protect the integrity of the system for the sake of the innocent. It just makes the job a lot harder when they’re not.

  Technically, Franco had confessed to nothing, so in the eyes of the law, presumption of his innocence was still my official obligation. Intellectually, I got that. Emotionally, it was another thing.

  I knew other people on the job—sincere, decent people—who had no trouble accepting the overwhelming odds that their clients had done the deed or worse, and could still give their utmost to the task. Not me. I really, really wanted to believe in my clients. To believe their words, to cleave to their explanations, their perspectives, with unwavering devotion. For me, the effort needed more fuel than a simple, rational calculation could provide. When my heart isn’t in the game, I’m nearly worthless.

  Still driving in a trance, I snapped out of it only when I realized I was parked in front of Harry’s house. The day had nearly petered out by then, and I decided twilight was no time to be operating heavy machinery like a Volvo station wagon. I got out and knocked on his door.

  He looked glad to see me.

  “What do you have that treats existential crises?” I asked.

  He looked at his watch. “Gin and tonics, though they only take effect after four P.M. We’re in luck; that’s
only ten minutes away.”

  “Ten minutes is a respectable head start,” I said, walking through the door.

  He brought me to the living room and sat me down, then went to prepare the drinks. I spent the time wishing I wasn’t alone and watching tiny birds flit around a raised bird feeder through a big pane-glass window. The birds were joined by a squirrel, who had apparently mastered the art of walking upside down on the underside of the platform and maneuvering over the edge, his tail fluttering fast enough at one point to blur and his hind legs running in thin air. But he made it.

  The birds didn’t seem to mind. I asked Harry when he came with the drinks if feeding the squirrels meant a drag on the birdseed supply.

  “I only feed those ambitious and clever enough to reach the platform. That guy’s the acrobat. There’s another one who leaps from a branch all the way over there.” He pointed at a fairly distant maple tree. “I call him Rocky. They’re the only two. I’m trying to breed a super race of squirrels.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Ask them.”

  He dropped down next to me, we toasted, and I slurped down half the drink. I started to tell him about my conversation with Art Montrose but had to stop after a few minutes to cry. Not a big bawling kind of cry, but bad enough to force Harry to wait patiently, his arm around me, his yellow chamois shirt a convenient sponge to sop up all the tears.

  “I bet that felt good,” said Harry when it looked like I was thoroughly finished.

  “It did. You should try it sometime.”

  “I will. Might help get me through the basketball season.”

  I finished off the gin and tonic and handed him the glass.

  “Good preview,” I said. “Now bring me the show.”

  When he got back, I took a gentler sip and renewed my story. Harry listened carefully, with only a few clarifying interjections and the occasional response to one of my rhetorical questions that he never failed to properly answer.

  I often poured out my feelings to Harry, but rarely just to unload all that emotional crap. I also valued his opinion and his logistics-wizard, problem-solving skills. So he knew he had license to probe a little, to challenge my assumptions. Which he did.

  “You haven’t heard Franco’s side of the story and he hasn’t confessed to anything, so it’s still all just supposition,” he said.

  “You’re right. Though it’s supposition with an odor of legitimacy.”

  “Around the Pritz case, sure. Everything hangs neatly together. Not so with the Buczek thing. That’s a sloppy mess. I could think of a thousand ways he could have knocked off Tad Buczek with far less criminal exposure. He put himself directly in the crosshairs with no chance to plead self-defense.”

  “You can’t ignore that Zina is another unhappy wife who could win a fat inheritance,” I said.

  “Well, that gambit didn’t work out so well the last time, did it? Why would Franco try it again with a far less credible scenario? Go to prison for a couple decades, then expect Zina to pay for his golden years? Doesn’t make sense.”

  My heart began to lighten, not entirely from the gin and tonics.

  “Why did he move the body?” I asked.

  “He’s telling the truth. He panicked. Whatever he planned to do with it suddenly seemed more trouble than it was worth.”

  That was still an unsatisfying answer, but it didn’t undermine Harry’s essential thesis. If this was another murder pact between Franco and his married lover, it was a pretty shabby operation. It didn’t fit.

  “Something went wrong,” I said. “There was a better plan, it just went off the rails for some reason. What we’re looking at is the confusing residue of improvised damage control.”

  Harry pondered that.

  “Reasonable scenario,” he said. “You’re so smart.”

  “You’re not supposed to say that. You’re supposed to have a convincing counterargument.”

  “If I did and didn’t mean it, I’d lose all my credibility.”

  I still felt a lot better than I had when we first started to talk, for reasons as obscure to me as those that pushed me to the brink in the first place. But I didn’t fight it. Instead, I got a little more looped and messed around with Harry, and later we went out to dinner, came home, and messed around a little more, which effectively anesthetized me against further questions on the meaning of life, at least until the next day, but I was grateful for the reprieve.

  * * *

  It wasn’t the first time I’d woken up at Harry’s with a bad headache. And no change of clothes. As usual, he was already up and at his workstation, and had breakfast waiting for me in the kitchen. I put on one of his shirts, which translated into fairly modest loungewear, and poured myself a big girl’s cup of coffee. I interrupted his work by asking if I’d said anything stupid in the time before we passed out that I couldn’t quite remember.

  “You said I was the most fabulous Harry Goodlander who ever lived and that you’d love me for all eternity. Was that stupid?”

  “No. I stand by it. Even in broad daylight. How long have you been up?”

  “A few hours. Gave me time to go get you fresh socks and long undies, your cream, toothbrush, and that four-million-watt industrial blower in case you wanted to tackle the hair. You’ve already got the insulated jeans, but I brought a clean shirt and matching sweater.”

  I held his head between both hands, cheek-to-palm. “I’m going to take a shower before the force of my appreciation gives me a heart attack.”

  “That would defeat the purpose.”

  * * *

  After showering and eating, I left fully restored and filled with a renewed sense of mission. My existence had meaning, and my vocation a true purpose on earth. I would not be a punching bag for my capricious emotions or a sap for my conniving brain. Rather, I’d press the whole team into a unified effort to answer every goddamned question in my little notebook, driven by a belief that however many possibilities may present themselves, there can only be one truth in the world.

  It was my job to get as close to that as humanly possible.

  * * *

  I drove over to Sagaponack under pale, overcast skies. I’d gotten used to the narrowed roadways by this time, and played the “You go first, no I’ll go first” game with oncoming traffic almost by reflex. I listened to public radio and let the Volvo find its own way to Dayna Red’s place.

  I’d barely turned into the long driveway when Misty appeared out of nowhere and chased alongside the car all the way to the red barn. I got a nice greeting when I opened the door. Actually, she jumped up into my lap, then into the passenger seat, where she stood and looked out the windshield. I asked her if she wanted to go for a ride, then regretted it when she looked back at me with unrestrained enthusiasm.

  “Maybe later, kid. We’ll have to clear it with your mother.”

  She followed me to the side door of the barn. Dayna answered my knock with a look that said she was almost as glad to see me as Misty was.

  “Hi, there. What a treat,” she said.

  “Not so fast. You haven’t heard why I’m here.”

  “Come in, come in,” she said, waving me through the door. Misty slid along in my wake. “I can’t imagine anything bad. You’re always such fun.”

  We sat in her cozy office, scented with the aroma of sawdust and greased machinery. Misty immediately presented me with her tennis ball but relented without complaint at a single word from Dayna.

  “Maybe you could toss it a few times before you leave,” she said to me. “It’s her raison d’être.”

  “Totally there,” I said. “I’ve been grappling with that myself recently.”

  “Is that why you’re here?”

  “Sort of. I was hoping you could tell a lie for me.”

  “Depends on the lie.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I want to go to the Buczek place, but I’ve already been back once, and I’m afraid if I go again, I’ll get a lot of resistance
. I can force them with a subpoena, but that’s way too heavy-handed at this point and I’d rather not turn Tad’s widow into an enemy.”

  “You said ‘them.’”

  “She’s got two hired hands living there, a married couple—handyman and housekeeper. Longtime employees of Tad’s. I don’t know what they think of Zina, but they have a proprietary air about them.”

  “So what do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “Tell a tiny lie. That you lost something the night you were over there and want to come look for it. What kind of thing, I don’t know, but I bet you can come up with something.”

  Do you know people who sometimes shake their head when they really mean to nod? Dayna was one of those people, sinking my heart before sending it aloft.

  “Absolutely. No problem. Happy to do it. When?”

  “Now?”

  She reached over and slapped me on the knee.

  “Why not? All I got scheduled is ripping about a million board feet of seven-quarter poplar, not even a real hardwood, much less an endangered species. Let’s do it. Can I bring Misty? She’ll stay in the truck.”

  I followed Dayna to the commercial strip on County Road 39, where I left my Volvo in the parking lot of an electrical supply company and joined her and Misty in the truck. The cab smelled like her shop and a little like wet border collie, both of which were pleasing to the nose. Otherwise it was clean and well-kept, distinguishing it from other tradesmen’s trucks I’d climbed into.

  An iPod was jacked into the stereo, playing Alison Krauss.

  “Girl was like a child prodigy, nationally ranked fiddle player,” said Dayna, pointing to the stereo, “and all anyone knows up North is she’s cute and can sing.”

  “Too many of us labor in the shadows rather than be called to greatness.”

  She looked at me. “Damn, that’s good,” she said.

  “Thanks. I was an English major. That’s the kind of thing they teach us to say.”

  “I majored in the hippie arts and the testing of illegal substances. Cured of that now, but sometimes I miss it.”

  Once I get to know you a little better, I thought, we can fix that.