Ice Cap: A Mystery (Jackie Swaitkowski Mysteries)

by Chris Knopf

Harry slid, too, but stayed on his feet, rotating around so he faced toward the other man, who was trying to wriggle to his feet. He might have made it, but I got there first and jumped on his back. Freddy went back down and I went with him, gripping the hood of his heavy down coat and pulling it backward, which had a decided choking effect.

  I let go when Harry got back to us. He grabbed me by the shoulder and helped me scramble off Freddy’s back. We watched Freddy struggle to his feet. Harry reached out and grabbed a wad of Freddy’s coat at the neck, holding him at arm’s length, which in Harry’s case was pretty long. Freddy looked at Harry’s other hand, which was pulled back in a fist the size of a fruit basket, and dropped his arms in defeat, the ongoing snow speckling his round face and thinning gray hair.

  “Please don’t,” he said.

  “You can let him go,” I told Harry. He looked over and saw the Glock in my hand. He released his grip on Freddy and stood back.

  “You’re not going to kill me,” said Freddy, somewhat hopefully.

  “No, but I might shoot you in the foot. How do you think that would feel?”

  Dayna walked up. “Jesus, man,” she said. “What kind of a nutcase are you?”

  “You can’t go up there,” Freddy said to me. “It’s private.”

  “It’s not up to you.”

  “Zina doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  “We’re going,” I said. “With or without you.”

  “We are,” said Harry in his most convincing basso profundo.

  I held the gun on Freddy while Dayna and Harry moved his truck, yielding just enough room for her to slip by. When they reached the place where Freddy and I were standing, I said to him, “Here’s the deal. If you make us search for the door, and we don’t find it within an hour or two, I’ll give up and call the police. Then there’s nothing I can do for you. If you show me where to go, I’ll help you.”

  “What are you talkin’ about? What door?” he said.

  I shook out my still of the satellite video and gave it to Harry to show him. He stared at it for a while, then looked up at me through his slitty little pig eyes.

  “This ain’t legal,” he said.

  “Get with it, Freddy. It’s a new world out there. There’s no hiding anything anymore.”

  He just stood there in sullen refusal. With Harry’s help, I got him to sit in the back of Dayna’s truck with me as we drove to the spot I’d picked out to make the turn toward Hamburger Hill. Dayna plowed out an entrance, then pushed into the drifts. She made slow but steady progress, though Freddy and I got jostled around a bit.

  “Offer’s still open,” I said as we came up to the hill and started to follow its contours around to the left. He continued to look at me, his florid face pinched in anger, but at the moment I was ready to pick a spot, he pointed at the hill.

  “It’s there,” he said.

  I tapped on the rear window. Dayna stopped and looked back at me and I showed her where to go. We drove up to the base of the hill and everyone got out and grabbed a snow shovel and followed Freddy as he tramped up to the very foot of the mound. We watched him burrow by hand into the snow, tossing some aside and digging out a small hole. Then he stopped and, after securing his footing, pulled back, bringing a large piece of the hill with him.

  He was holding the corner of a canvas, painted in a classic camouflage pattern, off of which heavy chunks of ice and snow slid to the ground. Harry got next to him and helped shake off the rest. Behind the canvas was a gray metal door in a sturdy frame that jutted out from the brown and green foliage covering the side of the hill. Freddy opened his coat, unclipped a heavily laden key ring from his belt, and held it up.

  “Like to see you get through that door without this,” he said with evident pride.

  “We appreciate it,” said Harry, taking the key and using it to open and push in the door. He gripped Freddy as I had by the hood and motioned him to go first. Dayna and I followed them out of the blowing snow and into absolute darkness.

  Luckily, this only lasted a moment. Harry had found the switch, which he threw with one hand while still holding Freddy with the other.

  “Wow,” said Dayna, astonished, and her being a woman not so easily impressed.

  23

  My first thought was “Welcome to Lucifer’s Foreign Auto Repair and Body Shop.” The room was huge, with steel joists more than thirty feet overhead, and I-beam posts strategically placed to carry the load. Along the wall to the right was a lineup of exotic cars—Ferraris, Bentleys, ancient Porsches and Maseratis, midcentury Corvettes and Shelby Cobras, MG Midgets and a Lotus Elan. I was nearly blinded by the profusion of shapes and colors, so unlike the cookie-cutter bodies and monotone silvers, whites, and blacks that filled modern parking lots.

  It was like a Concours d’Elegance with corrugated walls instead of red velvet providing the backdrop.

  In the center of the room, spaced beneath overhead racks with pneumatically driven tools—drills, reciprocating saws, and impact wrenches—were partially disemboweled versions of the same, their engine parts and body molding neatly stored in rolling steel bins. In the aisles between each workstation were block-and-tackle mechanisms hung from tracks mounted to the ceiling for transporting the bins to another set of work tables at the other end of the room.

  It was, to coin a phrase, a disassembly line.

  To the left was an entirely different matter. The wall was lined floor to ceiling with industrial-strength metal racks filled with all manner of mangled junk. Twisted pieces of car body in a variety of colors, balls of crushed appliances, rusted cables, conduit in every possible diameter, and electric motors of every possible size by the hundreds.

  Parked against the same wall was a white box van. Twenty feet to the rear of the van was a tall door held shut by a big hydraulic piston.

  “Now we know why nobody boosted Tad’s Maserati,” I said. “He was doing the boosting.”

  It made me smile, I couldn’t help it. Madman Tad might have been criminal, but was he really mad? Angry, yes, but also one who delighted in angering others, specifically the well-fed and self-important who’d moved into his old neighborhood, who turned his farm country into a riot of architectural excess and pretension. It was as if his life’s work was to unsettle theirs with his brutish behavior, terraforming, and crazy art, and finally, stealing their toys, chopping them up and selling the pieces.

  “For how long?” I asked Freddy.

  “Six, seven years,” he said in a low voice, as if hoping the authorities wouldn’t hear him.

  “Where does everything go from here?” Harry asked.

  Freddy shook his head. “No way, José,” he said. “I want to make it out of jail alive.”

  “We’ll talk about that. Give me a dollar,” I said to him. He was naturally confused, but did as I asked. “Okay,” I said, stuffing the bill in my coat pocket, “I’m now your lawyer. Don’t say a word to anybody, especially the cops, about any of this without me present. Nobody touch anything,” I added to the others as we followed Freddy on a brief tour around the shop.

  He described the process, most of which was self-evident, of shipping in the cars, gutting the engine compartments, and stripping out the interiors, then the more difficult job of carving up the bodies without damaging delicate sheet metal.

  “Any make it out of here intact?” Harry asked.

  “Oh, sure,” said Freddy. “You always got your special orders.” He took us over to a whiteboard where they’d kept track of the process and degree of required deconstruction. “See here? ‘Seven series BMW, 2009, full drive train plus rear axle.’ Don’t ask me any more about the ordering. Tad handled all that. I just broke down the cars and helped with the loading and unloading.”

  “And stealing?” I asked.

  He leaned toward me. “That, too,” he whispered in my ear.

  “Very impressive,” said Harry, who was standing nearby looking at a large control panel covered in gray metal boxes, switches, round
meters, and LED readouts.

  “Don’t touch any of that,” said Freddy with some urgency. “You never know what’ll start up around this place.”

  That piqued another thought. I pointed toward the ceiling. “Like the big sprinkler?” I asked.

  That made him uncomfortable.

  “Might be,” he said. “That was Tad’s thing, too.”

  I was beginning to feel a little time pressure. Joe Sullivan wouldn’t expect me to call something like this in immediately, especially if I had a client involved, but he would expect a defensible “as soon as possible.”

  I took out my phone.

  “Anything else you want to tell me?” I asked Freddy.

  He shook his head.

  I was about to push the speed dial when I thought of something. “What about Franco? What was his part?”

  “Didn’t have one,” he said with a grin. “Dope never knew nuthin’.”

  “What about Saline?”

  He shook his head vehemently. “Absolutely no. No, no, no. She’s gonna kill me when she finds out. Probably divorce my ass.”

  While we waited for Sullivan, Dayna plowed a path from the side door into Hamburger Hill all the way to the road. Harry walked around with his hands in his pockets and amused himself looking at all the nice cars, auto parts, and industrial equipment. I spent the time trying to get Freddy to give up more information, which he stubbornly refused to do.

  And so a new attorney-client relationship started out like most of them did: the client surly and tight-lipped, the attorney filled with hope, professional fervor, profound skepticism, and disbelief.

  * * *

  After Sullivan showed up, read Freddy his rights, and bundled him into the back of the marked SUV, we drove down to the main house to talk to Zina and Saline. Rarely had such a startling revelation—that there was a massive exotic-car disassembly operation hidden under an artificial mountain—been met with such passivity, bordering on indifference. Saline said something like “I knew those boys were up to no good,” and asked to talk to Freddy. Joe told her she could come by after they’d had a chance to question him, with his new lawyer present, of course.

  Zina made some odd promise about returning all the cars to their rightful owners, as if that would be up to her. Sullivan told her there’d be plenty of time to sort that out, and to please stay available until further notice.

  On the way to his ancient Bronco, which I planned to ride in to HQ, I said to Sullivan, “So you’ll be back for a visit.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  Dayna took Harry home after Joe promised he’d get me there before the roads became completely impassable.

  “If it’s too bad to drive, she can sleep in a cell,” Sullivan said. “Be a good lesson for her.”

  “A lesson on what?” I asked.

  When we were alone in Sullivan’s truck, he said, “Okay, Counselor, what’s your theory?”

  “Without incriminating my client?”

  “Of course.”

  As it turned out, I had one, though it took some care to give voice to the concept.

  “Remember all the crap the neighbors would give Tad whenever he did anything? It’s not surprising he’d hide his studio away from the prying eyes of building inspectors and zoning authorities. So it’s logical that Hamburger Hill would be his first creation. I don’t know how he got started in the chop-shop business, but I’m willing to bet he got to know Ivor Fleming when he was building out Metal Madness. Those sculptures are immense, involving a lot of metal in all sorts of configurations. Fleming’s legitimate business, General Resource Recovery, is really the only place on Long Island where he could get what he needed.”

  “We’ve heard from snitches for years that Tad was mixed up in the rackets. Never cars or car parts. More like warehouse robberies, hijacking semis, or transporting untaxed cigarettes. Garden variety mob stuff. Why, I don’t know. He had plenty of money. Was never charged with anything, much less convicted, so we’ll never know.”

  But I knew. It was just plain old orneriness. It wasn’t the money, it was the sport, the adrenaline rush, the knowledge that you were sticking it to a society you felt never accepted you, even though you’d never given them a chance.

  “Tad designed and built the whole operation, what Harry calls the supply chain,” I said. “He’d harvest the cars from the East End, and probably other parts of Long Island and maybe Connecticut, bring them here, chop them up, and ship the results to Ivor’s facility. Ivor packs up the parts inside containers, completely encased in scrap metal and impervious to inspection. Not that inspections were much of a danger in the port he shipped through in Brooklyn—a favorite export facility for the Russian and Polish mafias.”

  “Old friends of Tad’s.”

  “Exactly. As were the guys on the receiving end in Europe.”

  I told him about Tad and Zina’s chats on nat.net. I wasn’t positive whether the information would help or hinder my defense of Franco Raffini, but it just felt unwise to keep it from Sullivan. I had to have a little faith in my instincts.

  “So you think the same people followed her over here and killed Tad?” he said.

  “It’s a really good possibility. Like Franco once said to me, just because you think something is true doesn’t mean it isn’t. It’s Occam’s razor. The most obvious answer is almost always the right one.”

  “Don’t know about that. I’m a Gillette man myself.”

  “Zina herself could be in real danger. It’ll actually be good for her to have the property crawling with cops for a while. From what I’ve read, the feuds inside these Eastern European crime outfits can make Capone-Moran look like a love fest.”

  “You’re still gonna have to prove it to the ADA,” he said. “She’s really liking Franco for this thing.”

  I knew that. But now my hopes, ever eternal, had yet again sprung some new life. I had a path, a way to go. I could fill in my version of Sam’s boxes and arrows and connect them all. I just had to do the work.

  “And you should watch yourself as well,” he said. “I don’t think those people hold our cops and lawyers in the same high esteem as our homegrown punks.”

  “No worries there. I’ve got reverse guardian angels.”

  “Whatever the hell that means,” said Sullivan. He leaned into the windshield and used the back of his wrist to help the defroster clear off a layer of frost. “Man, this weather sucks. If I wanted to live at the North Pole, I would’ve moved there.”

  * * *

  Ross Semple was at HQ to greet us like an indulgent grandparent on Christmas morning. He was so elated over the chop-shop bust, for a second I thought he was going to wrap me in a bear hug. I sent out a very loud vibe that this was not an impulse worth succumbing to.

  We sat around and chitchatted while Freddy was photographed and fingerprinted, then we all retired to the big interrogation room with the one-way mirror and recording equipment. One of the most intimidating places on earth, something that hadn’t escaped Freddy’s notice. Like Franco before him, he’d already taken on the look of a desperate and doomed man.

  By prior agreement, I let Joe Sullivan run the interrogation as long as the questioning followed the path to Ivor Fleming, and with luck, beyond. Freddy’s obdurate posture in the chop shop notwithstanding, after an hour of Sullivan’s verbal pummeling, combined with offers of lenience in return for cooperation, he’d spilled the whole plate of beans. The eventual prosecution of Ivor Fleming had a new lease on life, and the thought of controlling the bust from Southampton had Ross Semple in soaring delight.

  After that, I followed Sullivan into Ross’s office, where we called the ADA and set a bail hearing for the next day. I shared with Ross what I’d told Joe on the way over, and he offered up a few suggestions of his own on how to proceed with my investigation. Everyone was full of cordiality and goodwill. It was like we were all part of the same family. None of this cops-and-lawyers stuff. I noted that out loud.

  “We love you, Jackie
,” said Ross, offering me a cigarette, which I refused. “Making you happy is really all we live for.”

  Right at that moment, it was almost possible to believe that.

  * * *

  As promised, Sullivan got me to Harry’s, though it took nearly an hour to travel what normally took about fifteen minutes from the north end of Hampton Bays to the Village of Southampton. Part of this was due to frequent stops along the way to pull motorists out of snowbanks and deliver others to safe havens like the fire station or the diner on Montauk Highway. It’s what you get when you hitch a ride with a dyed-in-the-wool cop.

  Along the way, I got to hear more about his new life as a nearly divorced person.

  “Did you know you could watch a game on TV while simultaneously consuming an adult beverage without having to hear that you are wasting your life and all prospects of financial success?” he asked.

  “I didn’t.”

  “It’s true. And if you happen to come home late, you haven’t necessarily ruined a perfectly good meal, because it’s where?”

  “In the freezer?”

  “Exactly. Amazing, huh?”

  Harry seemed very glad to see me, though he always did. Despite the ongoing storm, I was glad Sullivan hung around long enough to have a beer and chat it up with us, giving everyone a chance to enjoy the day’s remarkable events. And even more for the chance to extend some social warmth to the big towheaded cop, my affection for whom I’d felt defenseless against since I saw him at Tad’s climbing out of that rusty Bronco.

  After Sullivan left, the jolly spirit was sustained, and Harry and I found ourselves in the living room sitting in the dark, the outside lit to the hilt by floodlights in the trees and under the eaves, allowing us to watch the snow pile up as a sublime and absorbing act of beneficent nature, not the rampaging fury it actually was.

  24

  I didn’t get back to my office until the middle of the next day, forced by a minor client emergency to retrieve a paper file containing information inaccessible by my sleek silver laptop, as barbaric as that sounds.

  My client, a nervous Brazilian with a green card who’d started as a cleaning lady in Southampton and now sat on a fortune in oceanfront real estate in São Paulo, was afraid of computers. The trip to my office wasn’t that big a deal since the road crews, still smarting from their perceived slow response to the last storm, had cleared the roads at a frenzied pace. The sky was now a bright blue, the wind but a gentle breeze, and the snow a friendly thing that wrapped the Hamptons in a downy white blanket. Since everyone had been cowed by hysterical news reports into staying inside until April, the roads were relatively clear, and I made the trip in nearly normal time.