Ice Cap: A Mystery (Jackie Swaitkowski Mysteries)

by Chris Knopf

  “What is he shipping and handling?” I asked.

  He sat back. “Don’t know. Working on that. Could be anything or everything. I don’t believe it’s nothing.”

  “As a matter of faith,” I said.

  “That’s right. And I’m an atheist.”

  “Not me. Agnostic all the way. Hedging my bets.”

  He liked that, and showed it by grinning and making me clink glasses.

  “You are utterly charming,” he said, his voice pitched down a notch or two. “That’s a professional and personal opinion. The more I learn about you, the more impressed I am. I know it’s unprofessional of me, but I’m feeling seduced by my subject.”

  “Metaphorically,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  I looked at him a little closer, in the forgiving dim light of the restaurant. His hands looked a little less delicate and his frame more robust. And the face, which stopped me midstride when I first saw it, was getting even better. Something started stirring down below, even though I told it not to.

  “Where do you stay when you come out here?” I asked him. “It’s not exactly B&B season.”

  “We have a travel department at the Times. They find secure lodging for reporters in Afghanistan and Somalia. The Hamptons off season are only slightly more challenging.”

  “You’re charming yourself. Is that something you learn in the reporter trade? Flatter your victims out of their information?” I asked.

  “Sometimes. You do the same thing when you have to. And thanks for what I think was a compliment.”

  “So what’s going on here?” I asked.

  He looked theatrically confused. “Nothing. I’m trying to do a story on you and you’re resisting me. Which only makes me try harder. And I think we could have something on a personal level if you’d stop pretending we couldn’t, though don’t wait too long. Once I start writing the story, I have to follow it where it goes.”

  I’d already downed two white wines on automatic delivery. When the third one came, I sent it back to be replaced by a vodka on the rocks. Angstrom ordered a scotch and soda, responding to the escalation.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “You’re not only abstruse, you’re principled.” I felt the outer surface of his calf, so barely perceptible it could have been his aura, brushing against my leg.

  “You know about Harry,” I said. “What about you? I don’t have a dossier to pore over.”

  He smiled a warm, self-deprecating kind of smile, something I rarely saw among the men I knew. Sam and Sullivan were too hard-assed to consider such a thing, Randall too devoid of affect, Harry too ironic. I liked the change of pace.

  “Not much to tell. Succession of women disenchanted by the long hours, occasional risk to life and limb, and low pay. Did I mention obsessive preoccupation with appalling subject matter? I didn’t blame them. Still don’t.”

  “I know the tune to that song,” I said.

  “I know you do,” he said, looking at me with those drill-through-your-skull eyes.

  Then I felt more than an involuntary pressure against my leg.

  “So you won’t tell me where you’re staying,” I said.

  He told me. A motel on the eastern edge of Southampton Village, about ten minutes from my apartment.

  “Unless I stayed with you,” he said. “In which case I’m only about two minutes away. Or less, depending on how things go.”

  I held up my vodka.

  “Things aren’t going there,” I said, “but I will finish this drink with you. And I’ll pick up the tab as a thank-you for the information.”

  He clinked my glass and sat back in his chair, but kept the leg thing going. I gently moved mine away.

  “I finally have a source willing to share a lot of information on you,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Ross Semple, the chief of police.”

  “You’re kidding. He hates me.”

  “He admires you tremendously. Had nothing but praise and appreciation. The detective, Joe Sullivan, didn’t add much, but he confirmed everything the chief told me. They think a lot of you.”

  I remembered the same conversation with my mother. I told her my father saw me as an annoyance at best, and she said I should hear him brag about me to his friends. And to this day, I think, Yes, I should have heard him, because I still don’t believe it.

  20

  After that last drink Angstrom and I shook hands and he left for his motel, and I went back upstairs. I went directly to the office and brought my laptop over to the sofa to maximize the comfort factor. The paper bag with Randall’s hard drive was sitting on my desk, but it seemed way too technically intimidating to tackle at that point. So I started to wander down more familiar paths, beginning with the standard search engines.

  It was relatively easy to track Saline to Kings County Technical College, still very much an ag school back when she was there. True to form, she was nearly invisible, with no record of extracurricular activities or sports. What I needed was her official transcript, which should be confidential, and thus inaccessible by traditional means. I tried that route anyway, halfheartedly, then resorted to Randall’s not-so-traditional application, which also didn’t quite work. However, I was able to get into her personal file, which some enterprising archivist in the college’s administrative office had diligently converted to a digital format.

  Included was a recommendation letter to the medical schools she was applying to. According to the recommender, any postgraduate program would be greatly enhanced by her presence. A perfect 4.0 grade point average being the least of her credentials, all academic. Apparently, early in her college career she’d migrated from general agriculture into its underpinnings, settling on dual majors in organic chemistry and microbiology.

  I considered people who excelled in fields like that to be denizens of an alien planet. For me, English was the only possible major, since at least I knew the language and had already read a few of the crucial texts in high school. Science and math were subjects to flee from, screaming.

  There were other awards and commendations, certificates declaring mastery of various arcane specialties. Then came the other stuff, this not so bright and shiny. Several notes from the school’s medical office expressed concern for her health. Poor eating habits were cited. I read anorexia between the lines. Other notes recorded conditions described as exhaustion or malaise. I wondered about this love in officialdom for euphemism. Just say it. The girl was probably depressed and riddled with anxiety. Within each notation was Saline’s urgent request that no word of this be communicated to her parents. The writer of the notes expressed openly his or her dilemma—respecting Saline’s privacy and upholding the school’s right to loco parentis—yet believing her interests might be better served by contacting Mom and Dad.

  Maybe if they had, what happened a few years later wouldn’t have happened, I thought. Or would have happened earlier.

  Saline did graduate, and was accepted into New Amsterdam Medical School. And that’s where the Kings County trail ended. So I followed her into the city, where I ran smack into a brick wall. As a medical institution, New Amsterdam had things like HIPAA rules requiring much more rigorous security. Randall could probably sneak in, but I didn’t want to put him in any more danger than I already had.

  So I jumped back into the land of the legal and drove my search engine around Manhattan for a few hours. To sop up the vodka and white wine, I made a ham sandwich on white toast with butter, my favorite breakfast—comfort food courtesy of my mother, whose culinary repertoire was limited, but always delivered with brio. I think this celebration of food that people not derived from the British Isles would find bland at best was what my family practiced in lieu of actually learning to cook.

  I clicked around the Web while I ate and tried to keep toast crumbs from falling on the keyboard and jamming up the keys. So without hardly realizing it, I wandered onto a neighborhood newspaper that covered the Upper East Side. It had gone th
rough the familiar transition from print to both print and online and now exclusively online. Right on the home page, a little window declared proudly that the paper’s archives, covering all forty years of publication, were now available with a click of the button.

  I clicked. At the upper right of the first page was a search box. I typed in “Saline Swaitkowski” and was startled by an immediate hit. I sat up a little in my chair and went to the article.

  A much younger, though far more bedraggled and haunted Saline was being escorted by a female police officer toward the open door of a patrol car, with a headline that read POLICE INVESTIGATE PREMATURE DEATH. The copy read “The Carnegie Hill Chronicle has learned from the NYPD that Joseph C. Vargo, a second-year medical student at New Amsterdam Medical School, has died from an apparent heart attack in his apartment on Eighty-ninth Street, between Lexington and Third Avenue. His death was reported by his girlfriend, fellow student Saline Swaitkowski, who called 911 when he failed to wake up yesterday morning. No cause of death has been determined, though according to Miss Swaitkowski, Mr. Vargo had complained of chest pains, and recently completed a series of tests. Officials at New Amsterdam expressed their deepest sympathy to Mr. Vargo’s family, and have granted Miss Swaitkowski an unconditional leave of absence.”

  I went back to the Chronicle’s search box and typed in “Joseph Vargo.” There were two more hits. One described his father traveling up to New York to retrieve his dead son, the other reporting the results of the autopsy.

  “The tragedy of Joseph Vargo has been made so by the discovery that headache medication was the cause of his sudden death last Tuesday. Mr. Vargo, a victim of chronic migraine headaches, was also suffering from a rare form of angina that can occur in people in their twenties and thirties. The potent migraine medicine he was taking was specifically prohibited for people with this type of heart condition, especially at the high dosages he’d apparently administered to himself.”

  The law school I went to, as a matter of policy, denied the existence of human emotion. In the classrooms and discussion groups in student lounges and faculty receptions, it was all about the clinical application of ascendant ideals over the vulgar preoccupations of flesh-and-blood people actually consumed by the situations thrust upon them. It wasn’t until I left those hallowed, insular, and arrogant halls that I appreciated the mission my scattered mind had set upon, and woke every morning glad for it.

  What I learned was that the laws we examined and memorized, and the principles upon which English Common Law was based, which in turn spawned our American legal system, accounted for the unpredictability and innately selfish nature of our species. They started with the assumption that emotions drive behavior, what John Maynard Keynes called the animal spirits. It was the academics and clinicians who tried to turn legal theory into soulless, rational calculation.

  Consequently, most legal practitioners hadn’t the faintest clue what to do with a person like Saline. And their professional equivalents in medicine knew even less. So it was no surprise that the institutions, the mighty system itself, spit her out, as if performing tissue rejection on a foreign body.

  For that alone, I grieved for the young Saline, yet another brilliant soul with the curse of differentness, and though my sanity was rarely in doubt, I recognized the plight, identified with the sad conclusions.

  * * *

  Burton called me the next morning, waking me out of a deep sleep, where I was dreaming that Tad’s gloomy house had turned into crystalline ice, like the ice palace in Doctor Zhivago, and Zina was Julie Christie in a pink velour jumpsuit and white fur hat. I was interrogating her again, but she was speaking Polish, or Russian, and though trying to be honest with me, I couldn’t understand a word she said.

  I grunted into the phone.

  “There’s a cheerful hello,” he said.

  “First word of the day. Sorry.”

  “I’m here in your parking lot. Permission to come upstairs?”

  “You’re kidding,” I grunted.

  “I’m not.”

  There’s a dilemma. Keep your boss waiting versus greet your boss looking like a corpse with a bad hangover. My soggy brain arrived at a strategy—focus on the hair and face, and stick with a sweatsuit for expedience. And thus I had him up in the office in about five minutes.

  “I don’t know how people can work out in the morning,” he said as we climbed the stairs. “Though I admire it.”

  “Personal discipline,” I said. “In all things. Coffee?”

  I cleared a space for him on the sofa and started a pot of my best.

  “So what brings you here?” I called from the kitchenette.

  “I come bearing gifts.”

  “That’s so sweet.”

  When I got back to the office area I saw him pulling a file folder out of a FedEx box.

  “Another case?” I asked.

  “Your current case. The private chat-room conversations of Tadzio Buczek and Katarzina Malonowski.”

  “No sir.”

  “Yes ma’am. The result of a subpoena signed and expedited by the Honorable District Judge Claire Freyberg, to whom we now owe a large favor. Probably have to paint her house or something.”

  “Seriously?”

  He blanched. “Of course not.”

  “No, I mean you got the transcript.”

  “We did. Natrafić.czat.net was unhappy about it, but I had a chat with their lawyer, and here we are.” He handed it to me. “I’ve barely looked at the text; it’s nearly all in English. Will save us the translation time. Nice coffee.”

  I apologized for the absence of crumpets and jelly, something you’d have delivered to you at Burton’s on a cart. He graciously claimed no interest in such things.

  “Since I’m here and all, why not brief me on the case?” he asked.

  I’d known Burton long enough to know this wasn’t a subtle way of checking up on me, but rather an honest interest in staying informed, mostly to lend advice and possible assistance. As with other fine men, he knew instinctively that the greater the trust he held in you, the harder you’d work to earn it.

  So I went through everything that had happened—the sit-down with Ivor Fleming, chasing down Zina’s true identity, uncovering Saline’s past, and the shootout with Yogi and Boo Boo, along with a discourse on their employers back in Brooklyn. I also showed him the stills of the two goons from my security video. I left out Roger Angstrom of The New York Times, for unknown reasons, but floated the theory first put forth by Sam that Ivor Fleming had avoided further prosecution by finding a safer form of illegal activity. He took it all in, then gently probed for conclusions that I didn’t have. To distract him from more probing, I talked about the side trip into the Don Pritz case, including the conversations with Dinabandhu Pandey and also Art Montrose, whose standing with Burton I was eager to repair.

  “Interesting,” he said. “I wouldn’t have known.”

  “That’s why I’m telling you. Good intentions aside, I think Montrose was wrong. He might have used the best strategy to save Franco from a worse fate, but I don’t think Franco was guilty of anything but gullibility. I think it was all a setup by Eliz Pritz. On her part, the perfect crime.”

  I ran through the logic of my argument. He then shot it full of holes, in a polite way.

  “I know I can’t prove anything,” I said, “but I don’t have to. The only relevance to me is the restoration of faith.”

  “In Franco’s innocence.”

  “The word ‘innocent’ may not quite apply, but he isn’t guilty as charged. I can’t prove that, either, but I believe it to be true, and that’s all that matters.”

  “They won’t all be innocent,” he said.

  “Most aren’t. That’s why it’s so important to save the ones that are. It’s the point of it all.”

  He got up to go. I thanked him for the transcripts and for everything else that was good about my life and would have gone on from there if he hadn’t put his finger to my lips, w
hich gave me a chance to get the brakes on my brain before it drove off the road, which it can do under certain circumstances. So then he left me feeling even more blessedly grateful.

  Before tackling the file, I took a shower and downed some coffee, feeling like the impending task called for an alert and unimpeded mind. That was the right choice. A less agile intellect would have assumed the transcripts were of an intimate tête-à-tête between two lonely singles and taken longer to realize it was anything but.

  Zina: This to acknowledge receipt. Require dates for specific requests per order #3567vsl.

  Tad: Received order on 5/11. Will need two more weeks to confirm supply. Are stateside agents coordinating with other feeder units? Understand need to know, but should avoid unnecessary duplication.

  Zina: Understood. Will streamline order. G thanks you for continual quality production.

  Tad: T thanks him for quality deposits in accounts.

  Page after page of the transcripts was more of the same. Routine business transactions, clothed in euphemism and insider code, though the language was far more banal than exotic. I began to jot down patterns, trying to get a sense of what they were writing about. After a while it began to emerge. Tad was a supplier of something, a source. He identified himself as a feeder, and there were other unknown but noncompetitive feeders operating in other territories. Zina was a buyer, though not the end of the trail. People beyond her were defining demand, which flowed through Zina by way of someone named “G.” Between Tad and Zina were other links in the chain, identified only as “stateside agents.”

  As a person who had spent countless hours entirely absorbed in complex narratives of Harry’s involving the movement of things like endangered animals, two-ton automated machine tools, two-thousand-dollar boxes of saffron, and the occasional single envelope containing a promissory note for a half billion dollars, I knew what I was looking at.