by Chris Knopf
“So you guys are staying on,” I said.
She looked vaguely alarmed. “Never heard anything to the contrary,” she said. “Have you?”
I assured her I hadn’t.
“I was just curious,” I said. “Will you need to replace Franco?”
She leered. “The Italian swordsman? Exactly which of his roles do you think need replacing?”
I tried to apply my least worldly expression, eyes wide with curiosity. “I’m sorry, did he have a variety of roles?”
She cast her eyes to the side, leaned closer, and whispered out of the side of her mouth. “I work day and night at the main house and sleep in the staff house. There’s nothing that goes on there that I don’t know about.”
I acted mildly shocked.
“You’re suggesting that Mrs. Buczek and Franco were having some sort of liaison?” I said, also whispering.
She looked side to side. “Not suggesting. Telling. And it’s not a guess. I saw them.”
“In flagrante?”
“Delicto. Tad was away. I thought Zina had gone with him. Apparently not. They didn’t even know I was looking. Too busy. With what, I’ll let you imagine.”
I would have preferred she’d been more specific. My imagination had too hard a time limiting the possibilities on its own.
“Oh my,” I said.
She nodded in that exaggerated way people do as a stand-in for “You know what I mean.”
“How long ago was this going on?”
“Almost since the day the man arrived. I watched her watch him. She immediately started giving him the odd jobs Freddy usually did. Hey girls, gather ’round. I’m your handyman.”
“So, I’m sorry to ask, but does that mean you think Franco had a reason to kill Tad? That he wanted to have Zina all to himself?”
Saline’s pleasure in conspiratorial talk was flagrantly evident. It wasn’t hard to figure out where the cops and Paulina learned of Franco and Zina’s indiscretions.
“What do you think? Isn’t that what he does? Kill off husbands? But I’m not worried,” she said, literally winking at me in a broad, cartoonish way. “I’ve heard you’ve got everything under control. He won’t get away with it.”
This is the kind of thing they don’t prepare you for in law school. Quite the contrary. Most of my professors would have you rear up in moral indignation and declare outrage at that sort of speculation. Instead, I asked, “Did Tad have any idea what was going on?”
She actually said “pshaw.”
“That man never saw anything, never knew anything or suspected anything. If all you think about is yourself, you have no idea what other people are doing. Even if it’s against you. Textbook Narcissistic Personality Disorder,” she added, popping a piece of paluszki in her mouth.
That stopped me in my tracks a bit. I’d begun to realize there was a lot more to the lumbering woman than met the eye.
“I actually know what that means,” I said. “It’s an important thing to know in my line of work. But not many people do.”
She displayed an interesting mix of smugness and resentment. “I’m a trained psychiatric nurse,” she said, leaning even farther into me and using a voice now pitched almost to the inaudible, yet with an odd urgency. “It was the best I could do after leaving medical school. Ran out of money.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You don’t have to do what you’re trained to do,” she said, as if it were a mantra she’d chanted to herself so often it had lost the essence of its meaning. “You can do what you want to do.”
“I agree with that completely,” I lied shamelessly. “Some regrets are entirely misplaced,” I also said, which I actually believed.
She stood straighter, recovering most of her slouching posture.
“Regrets are for fools,” she said. “I’ve never wasted a second on what-ifs. Only what is.”
I acknowledged this was a good philosophy.
“Kind of a short-form Serenity Prayer,” I said.
“Prayer is for fools. Never was a God, never will be.”
This time I looked around, hoping Father Dent wasn’t within hearing range. Not that he couldn’t have handled it. Would probably figure out a way to convert her on the spot. It just seemed discourteous to say things like that in a room full of devout Catholics. I also looked up toward the heavens, hoping that any lightning heading her way would avoid collateral damage.
“Anyway,” I said, eager to shift gears again, “I haven’t had a chance to offer my condolences to you over Tad. It must be hard after all those years.”
She nodded, as if I’d cleverly uncovered a heretofore secret well of pain.
“You have no idea,” she said, back in sotto voce, her stern face, inches from mine, plunging into abject remorse. “The void it’s left. The absolute void.”
I had a million things to ask her, to probe for, but what I heard coming out of my mouth instead was an offer to get her a drink, suddenly really wanting one myself. She took a pass, and even though I was probably blowing a priceless opportunity to record more unguarded commentary, I’d had enough. I had to get away.
* * *
It was far smarter for me to get back to Geordie’s bar than to drink any more at Tad’s send-off. I knew myself well enough to sense my own slow collapse into the kind of overwrought sentimentality I’d surely not want to expose to the Polish throng. He had a gin and tonic waiting for me on the bar before I had a chance to sit down.
“I saw you get out of your car.” He pointed through the big glass doors to where the Volvo was parked. “I could tell.”
“Why can’t I just do my job without putting myself through all this damn emotional turmoil?” I said, sliding up onto the barstool and snatching up the G&T like it was a lifesaving elixir.
“If you didn’t feel anything, luv, you wouldn’t be much good at your job as it is, now, would you?” he said.
Priests and bartenders, I thought. Keep ’em coming.
16
Franco looked even worse than when I last saw him. His Italian face was paler than mine and hung so low it looked like it might slide off the front of his head and pour onto the table.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
“Sure. I’m in some kind of hole for the rest of my life. It’s really nice here in county jail, ’cause I’ve got my own cell. But it’ll be even better when I get to prison and find out who my boyfriend’s going to be.”
“It’s too early to go all defeatist,” I said.
“Okay. I’ll wait till after they convict. Till then, I’m happy as a lark.”
“Fine,” I said, annoyed. “Wallow if you want. I’m not giving up. Unless you want me to. I was related to Tad Buczek. By marriage, but related nonetheless. On that basis, the court would gladly assign you a public defender if you fired me.”
That surprised him. He shook his head. “I don’t care about that,” he said. “I wouldn’t have called if I thought Tad meant enough to you to mess up my case. You wouldn’t anyway. You’re not that kind of person.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Though you might not like me as much after I ask the next question.”
He shrugged. “Ask away.”
“Why do you keep lying about what happened that night?”
His eyes opened in horror, and it looked like he could start crying. “Jesus, Jackie, I’m not lying. Quit sayin’ that.”
“Somebody is. You told me you were in bed with Zina when Tad called to say he couldn’t find her and was going out in the storm to look. But first he was going to check on the woodshed, after which he called you to come help. Why go check on the woodshed by himself and not bring along a hired hand? What, to give you time to wrap up things with his wife?”
“It’s what happened,” he said in a quiet whine.
“Zina told me you called Tad to say you were worried about the shed, and that Tad went out to meet you there to shovel off the roof. After he didn’t return, she got worried and tried t
o reach both of your cell phones, with no success. The police and the ADA have certainly heard the same story, which means she’ll be testifying to it under oath.”
I suppose you can become so despondent there’s no lower emotional rung, yet Franco seemed to find it.
“She’s going to throw me under the bus,” he said. “Big surprise. Don’t they all?”
“Who’s they?”
“You people. Women,” he said.
“Like Eliz did?”
He looked down at his hands.
“I thought we’d already been through that one,” he said.
“We’re only getting started,” I said. “You sure you want to stick to your Zina story?”
“Do you want me to make up a different one? Will that help with the case? I can do that if you want. If you want me to stick to the truth, then that’s the truth.”
“I want you to stick to the truth,” I said, this time my voice lowered for emphasis. “Did you meet Tad at the woodshed?”
“No. I told you. I was on the way when I tripped over him. I cleared a bunch of ice out of the way and checked his pulse. The back of his head was covered in blood. He was dead. The snow was coming down so hard I thought I should get him under cover, which I admit was stupid. So I went back to get a tarp and rolled him onto it and dragged him down the hill to the covered part of the pergola. Then I picked him up, with great difficulty, and put him on the picnic table. Then I covered him with the tarp and called you. End of story.”
I looked at him in silence for a few moments. He didn’t like that, and he showed it by looking at the wall at the other end of the room.
“I reviewed the police photos from that night. The path created by dragging the body was at least five feet wide—more than you’d make by dragging a single body on a tarp in one direction, from Hamburger Hill to the pergola. How would you explain that?”
Franco’s fallen face tightened with concern. For a guy who’d endured dozens of aggressive interrogations, he wasn’t very good at hiding his inner turmoil.
“You drag a body as big as Tad’s down a hill and see if you can keep a straight line,” he said, almost convincingly.
“I’ll do that if necessary,” I said. “Though you know you can’t double the width of the swath without retracing the path. So no. Don’t buy it.”
He went back to looking at his wringing hands. “I couldn’t drag him back up that hill. I’m not that strong.”
“Yes you are,” I said. “You’re a natural athlete. You just act like you’re a pathetic hangdog. It’s a good defensive ploy: Stay nonthreatening.”
“It’s not what happened,” he said with a certain finality. “And I’m not a pathetic hangdog. I’m just a little depressed.”
“A little? You’d drive Mary Poppins to suicide.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
I whipped my little notebook at his face and he caught it with his left hand. I put out my own hand and he gave it back to me.
“Funny,” he said. “Proves nothing.”
“Why didn’t you tell Art Montrose you’d been wiped out in a bad trade? Why did he have to learn on his own?” I asked.
He lurched back as if I’d hit him with a rock.
“He didn’t know that,” he said.
“Of course he did. He knew everything. The whole setup. Baiting Donald with constant phone calls between you and Eliz, credit-card tabs at hotel restaurants, the birthday gift of a rotisserie that her husband had no interest in, that last call to him from your cell phone as he was about to board a plane to Seattle, causing him to rush back to Long Island, perfectly timed to confront you at his house with his wife, and oh, how convenient, a sword!”
Franco slammed his hand down on the table loudly enough to cause the cop sitting outside to look in the door. I told her everything was okay, that we didn’t have to move to where they could monitor us through a one-way mirror. She left reluctantly.
“She told me she loved me,” said Franco.
“Yeah? When was that?”
“Before Donny was killed. After that, she said she couldn’t be near the man who killed her husband. The husband she hated.” He stretched out the word “hated” to attach emphasis. “Okay, I needed a lifeline. I didn’t need what happened. What kind of crazy idiot would go through the shit I went through to get his hands on some rich broad’s money? I know other rich broads who’d look after me just for the asking. Not as pretty as Eliz, but you take what you can get.”
My perception of Franco had whipsawed back and forth so many times during the conversation it was giving me vertigo. I put my head in my hands to try to stabilize things.
“Sorry, Jackie,” he said, misinterpreting. “I didn’t mean to say ‘broad.’ I know that’s disrespectful.”
“What did you think when Eliz dropped you?” I asked, my head still in my hands.
“You know what I thought. I was the one who was set up. But if I try to take her down for it, I’m going down with her. Who’d believe I wasn’t in on it all the way? Obviously not Montrose. Or you, either,” he added with a touch of bitterness.
“You should have told me,” I said. “I can’t trust you if you withhold things from me. What else haven’t you told me?”
He sat a little straighter in his chair and put both hands out on the table, clasped in front.
“That rotisserie was still in the box when I got there that night. She asked me if I could assemble it, that she’d tell Donny she’d hired a guy to get it ready as a surprise. So I did, but she told me not to put the skewers in the rotating thing, that she wanted to clean them first. So fine.”
“They were loose,” I said.
“I didn’t grab the skewer when Donny came at me. She handed it to me. What a putz.”
“Why did you call Donny at the airport?” I asked.
“I didn’t. I’d lost that phone two days before. That was the last call it ever made. You can check the phone records. Look, what difference does all this make, anyway? That’s over with. I’ve got a much bigger problem here.”
Since I was so insistent on his candor, I felt it was only fair to share it back.
“It makes a difference to me,” I said, “if you’re really a killer or not. I know it’s not a distinction that’s relevant to the strict definition of my role, but that’s tough.”
He looked down at his clenched hands. “I’m not a killer, Jackie. I didn’t even really stab Donny Pritz. He practically ran into that skewer. He’d lost his damn mind.”
It might have been a less pure form of faith than Father Dent had in mind, but at that moment I decided the war between my head and heart would need to have a ceasefire and begin to approach the situation as a unified front. And it didn’t matter which part of the team believed which part of the story. My entire being was going to believe what I wanted it to believe, and that would have to be good enough.
* * *
When I returned to the office I forced myself to read the e-mail piling up in my inbox and saw a recent delivery from [email protected]. There was an attachment, which I downloaded and opened right away, seeing the opening line of an article: “The first thing you notice about Attorney Jacqueline Swaitkowski is her restless energy. Even when sitting next to her in a Japanese restaurant, you feel like you’re in the company of a perpetual-motion machine.”
And it went on from there for about five hundred words I couldn’t bear to read.
“Crap,” I said out loud.
I read the e-mail.
“Just a rough first draft,” it said. “I don’t usually do this—the Times would never allow pre-pub review—but I wanted to give you a feel for where I’m going with this.”
“Crap, crap.”
I read through the rest of my e-mail. There was nothing there relating to the Buczek case, which was good, since I could distract myself with work I owed all my other clients who deserved as much attention as Franco Raffini. This took me well into the evening to finish, and I was
about to reward myself for the effort when a ping told me a new e-mail had arrived. It was from Randall Dodge.
“I connected with a source I used to have at Interpol,” he wrote. “He can run a check on Ms. Malonowski if you still want.”
“I definitely still want,” I wrote back. “Haven’t heard from UB, but the more checkers the merrier.”
This was the point in the day when I normally went out to get something to eat, often on my own. I hated to be afraid of the dark, to have my freedom of movement compromised in any way. I decided I couldn’t let it happen. That I couldn’t let those sons of bitches ruin my life.
I was about to shut down the computer and head out when another ping sounded. Almost relieved that I had a reason to delay, I clicked on the e-mail.
It was from Joe Sullivan.
“I got something on your two boys,” it said. “Call when you can.”
I called him as fast as I could get out the cell phone and hit the speed dial.
“That took a long time,” he said.
“I really want to hear what you have to say, but I have a proposal to make.”
“I’m listening,” he said.
I mentioned a restaurant around the corner from the one on Main Street in Southampton Village, more of a locals’ joint that he’d likely favor.
“Meet me there,” I said, “and I’ll buy you dinner.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I do. I’m afraid to go out at night and I owe you a favor. Then you can escort me home and I’ll owe you another one.”
He relented and I left soon after, surviving the walk from the outside door to the car with only an elevated heart rate to the worse. When I got to the place, Joe was standing near the bar inside a pack of men, most wearing baseball caps and heavy work boots, and all drinking beer out of the bottle.
“Who’s the date?” one of them asked when I broke into the circle and Sullivan said hello.
“Not a date,” I said. “Professional meeting. With burgers.”
None of them saw the distinction. I was single, he was by himself, we were having dinner together, so it was a date. Since they all seemed to like the idea, why not. No harm was done.
