by Chris Knopf
Marcello surprised me. I was expecting a gorgeous Latin, slim and refined. What I got was an ordinary-looking Asian guy, slightly chubby and refined. He wore a spotless white suit and a tie with the most beautiful iridescent colors I’d ever seen.
“Miss, how do you say …?”
“With difficulty,” I said, then pronounced Pete’s last name.
“Ah. Of course.”
“Great tie, by the way. They don’t happen to make that in a scarf?”
He gave a little bow. “A pity, no.”
He looked left and right, then over his shoulder.
“Mr. Lewis told me of your plan,” he said, lowering his voice. “I am honored to assist you, though you realize this is highly improper and must never be discussed. It would mean instant dismissal.”
“I’m totally cool with that, Marcello. I’m an attorney. Discretion is my middle name.”
“So I understand. Mr. Lewis told me I should retain your services to help with a little misunderstanding I’m experiencing with your immigration.”
I slid him my card.
“Absolutely, Mr….?”
“Machado, at your service.”
“The service is all mine,” I said. “So.”
He took a pen out of his breast pocket and clicked the button with a pretty little flourish. Then pulled a small pad out from behind the desk.
“I’ll draw you a map. We’re here. Mrs. Wolsonowicz is here on the east patio having her usual lunch. She used to stay here for a month every summer, but now she just has lunch. The same lunch, every day.” He checked his watch. “She’ll be finished now, which means she’ll be having a double Dewar’s on the rocks while she does the Times crossword.”
I followed Marcello’s map down the hall and through a series of sitting rooms to an outdoor patio covered by a giant green awning. I wormed my way across the patio, pretending to admire the flower arrangements stuck on all the tables.
“Red roses. You gotta stop and smell ’em,” I said, startling some poor old sot when I bent down to give his vase a sniff.
“I’m sure you do,” he said.
Eunice Wolsonowicz’s vase was filled with curly stalks of bamboo. Not much to sniff. I sat across from her.
“Mrs. Wolsonowicz? I’m Jacqueline Swaitkowski.”
She looked up from her crossword.
“What sort of a name is that?”
“Same sort as yours, I guess,” I said to her.
“I like yours better.”
“Thank you. It was my late husband’s.”
“So was mine.”
“I’m really an O’Dwyer.”
“I’m a Hamilton,” said Eunice.
“There you go. Common ground already.”
“Two fools who can’t hold on to a decent name.”
“I’m Sergey Pontecello’s attorney. Or was, anyway.”
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I hope you weren’t friends.”
“We were just starting out. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I’m sorry, too. Though ‘loss’ doesn’t exactly describe it. By the way, Mrs. Swaitkowski, are you a member here? I haven’t seen you.”
I shook my head.
“Nope. Pulled a string.”
“Must have been a very strong one.”
“The strongest.”
“Interesting. Pardon me for asking this, dear, but do you feel it’s entirely appropriate to join me at my table without an invitation?”
“It’s entirely inappropriate. You can tell me to get lost anytime you want. But I’m really hoping you can talk to me for a few minutes about Sergey Pontecello, who, by the way, has just been murdered.”
“That’s what the police are telling me, though I find it hard to believe.”
“Really?”
“Who would bother killing Sergey? Not a bad sort, underneath. My sister never brought home sick puppies or injured birds, but she did have a taste for tin-plated European nobility like Sergey. The surprising thing was she married this one, probably because he came with some independent wealth. Modest, but enough for them to live reasonably well without actually doing much of anything.”
“So if they had money, why the mortgages?” I asked.
“Had money. Past tense.”
“Where’d it go?”
“I thought you were his lawyer. Surely you discussed this with him,” she said, neatly cutting off that line of inquiry. While I thought about how to get back on track, she said, “I think you’re getting the wrong idea, Miss Swaitkowski. Despite myself, I liked the little prig. Somewhat full of himself but harmless.”
“He thought you were trying to heave him out of his house,” I said.
“Sergey was terribly upset with me, and I can’t blame him. It wasn’t his fault that he lost his house.”
“I looked up the tax records. Sergey and your sister are still listed as owners of the property,” I said.
She smiled a kindly smile.
“A formality, dear. I was trying to break it to him gently.”
“You’re holding paper on the place. That’s also in the records. Was Sergey aware of that?”
“Awareness wasn’t the man’s strong suit.”
“So with your sister dead, you’re reclaiming the place,” I said.
“One doesn’t reclaim that which one already owns. It’s our family home. It belongs to my family.”
“You and the kids? Don’t they live around here somewhere?”
Something moved across her face, but it went by too fast to interpret. She covered the moment by seeming to discover there was a half inch of scotch left in her glass.
“I have all the information with my attorneys. Including my sister’s will. You should probably speak with them,” she said.
“Sure. Who are they?” I asked.
“Atkins Connors and Kalandro in East Hampton. Ask for Sandy Kalandro. I’m sorry about Sergey, I truly am. But I shouldn’t discuss this any further. You’re an attorney. You understand.”
She looked at her watch.
“This may seem silly to you,” she said, “but I now only have fifteen minutes to finish my crossword. Doable, but difficult.”
“Not silly at all. Routines are important,” I said, as if I thought that were true.
She smiled at me with the type of forced smile that would stick there until I got out of her hair. I was far from done with her, but I had to be happy with what I had.
“Thanks for your time. Sorry to bother you,” I said, jumping up from the table. “Just one thing.”
“Yes?”
“Did you really lock him out of the bathroom? All he wanted to do was brush his teeth.”
She leaned back in her chair and lost the smile.
“Mrs. Swaitkowski, please, sit down.”
I did.
“Before I committed myself to humanitarianism, I taught anthropology at the University of Arizona,” she said. “Before that I earned my Ph.D. in organizational psychology, focusing on corporate power structures.”
No shit, I said to myself, but acted as if I knew that already.
“There is nothing known of the intricacies and convolutions of human behavior that I haven’t studied in fine detail,” she said. “From the jungles of New Guinea to the City of London I have literally seen it all. I cannot be intimidated, manipulated, or charmed. I am sorry for what happened to Sergey Pontecello, but it was only the final, though surely the most dire, misfortune to befall him. I will not feel guilt or remorse or suffer the insult of recrimination.”
“That’s fine with me,” I said. “I’m a lot simpler than you. I hardly know anything about human behavior, least of all my own. I just want to know one single, solitary thing.”
She leaned across the table and moved her ice water out of my reach.
“And that would be?”
“Shouldn’t be hard for you to guess.”
Superiority flowed at me from across the table. If I hadn’t been holding on to my chair, I�
��d have washed away.
“You want to know who killed Sergey Pontecello. If, in fact, he was.”
I gave her the thumbs-up.
“I do.”
Then I got up and walked back through the patio as if I did it every day. Right after I knock back a couple bottles of beer and read all the funny papers.
As I drove away from the Gracefield, I felt my mood tilting toward the dreary. It wasn’t Eunice so much. It was the accumulation of strife. I’m no braver than the next person, but I’m usually late to realize I’m in any kind of physical danger. Blood and broken bones I can take in stride, but dead bodies make me want to puke or pass out. Or both.
Seeing that ridiculous old guy mashed up on the road wasn’t even all of it. It was the way I’d treated him when he was still alive. Not poorly, exactly. But dismissively. That’s what I did. I dismissed him.
I knew why. It was a bad habit of mine, which made me feel that much worse. Whenever I get a client who’s got a little money or wants to act like they do, I have this reflex reaction. Like, you got all this money, what do you need me for?
But then I think about Burton Lewis, who’s the best person I know. And a lot of my wealthy clients turn out to be great people. Just like some working folk can be completely unscrupulous, evil assholes.
It’s prejudice, pure and simple. And I know where I got it from. My old man. He always had a bug up his ass about people he suspected of putting on airs. Financial or otherwise. I don’t know if it was an Irish thing or a class thing or what. The funny part is he had a good education, and did fine with his business. We were well-off compared to a lot of people, and he didn’t mind spending a little money on the house and cars and things such as new TVs and stereo components.
My father had been born poor, so maybe that was it. The hardscrabble stuck to him. And some of it shook off on me.
5
As soon as I got back to the office, I lit a joint and stuck my face in the computer.
In about twenty minutes I found Fuzzy, Eunice and Antonin’s adopted son, whom they’d named Oscar, which is why they shouldn’t have been surprised that he picked up a nickname. I was an open-minded kid, but even I would have given shit to a boy named Oscar.
I not only found Fuzzy, but I also found his personal Web site, blog, and a half dozen other sites where he starred as a frequent responder under the name FuzzMan. A powerful creepiness factor became apparent after reading only a few entries of his vitriolic commentary. It was a rotten stew of dystopian survivalism, goth anarchist fantasies, and early-twentieth-century bigotry. This sort of ugly rant and rave isn’t hard to find within the blogosphere, but even by that standard, Fuzzy was a standout. I kept going deeper into prior postings, and was charmed to find headings like “100 Ways to Serve Boiled Nun,” “Hey Terrorists, Call Me When You Want to Nuke New York,” and, my favorite, “What Do You Call 5,000 Lawyers at the Bottom of the Ocean? A Good Start.”
I’m not hip to all the nuances of cyberspeak, but from what I read, there was nothing warm and fuzzy about Fuzzy.
I’d also nailed down his address, so the logical thing was to take a ride Up Island and pay him a visit. And maybe bring along a little company. Actually, not so little.
My cell phone had a record of the number. I pushed the send button.
“Ya’ello.”
“Hey, Harry.”
“You’re canceling.”
“Why’d you say that?”
“Because I disappeared for two years and you can’t get over it.”
“I’m curious about where you went and why, but that’s not why I’m calling.”
“Okay.”
“Do you have a car?”
“I do,” he said. “I have a Volvo station wagon.”
Most excellent. A real car. A safe, roomy, comfortable car. With shock absorbers and power windows.
“What’re you doing tomorrow?” I asked.
“Distributing mainframes.”
Harry moved stuff around for a living. Big stuff, like full-scale manufacturing facilities prefabbed in Japan and assembled in Massachusetts. Or lots of stuff, such as forty thousand cots, ten thousand tents, a lakeful of water, and enough food to feed thousands of earthquake survivors for a year. This is how he explained logistics. Or rather, rhapsodized about it. Harry loved his work.
“How would you feel about shipping me to Atapougue and back?”
“We call that custom handling.”
“No handling, buster. Just lively and engaging conversation.”
“Still have the old truck?” he asked.
“I might.”
“Should I be feeling used?”
“Yes. But appreciated. How does nine sound?”
I first saw Harry at the Memorial Day parade in Southampton. Or more precisely, the middle of his back, which was completely blocking my view. I reached up and tapped on his shoulder and he almost knocked me over when he turned around. At a little over six foot eight, with the wingspan of a condor, a bald head, and black wraparound sunglasses, he looked like an alien sent down to monitor the ritual customs of us pathetic little earthlings.
Until he blasted me with a smile that somehow conveyed the totality of his big-sky, earnest, mirthful—though slightly obsessive-compulsive–self.
Six months later we moved in together. Six months after that, I was putting his toothbrush, silk dental floss, extra-hypoallergenic sweater, special imported teas, and They Might Be Giants CDs in a box for him to pick up off my doorstep. I thought almost immediately that was a mistake. Mine, not his. But I didn’t know I’d have to wait two years to properly calibrate how bad a mistake it might have been.
“Nine is fine. Though I’ll have to stop along the way and jump on the wireless. IBM will want to know where their computers are.”
“Of course, hell yeah. Plenty of time for that. You’re still a mensch, Harry. You can’t help it.”
“You’re still a commotion,” he said.
“And you mean that fondly. Don’t answer. See you at nine.”
I might’ve been using him. But I also wanted to see him. I thought a ride in the car in the daylight might be a better way to catch up and reorient than a dark restaurant where I had to chitchat and chew at the same time.
Plus, as I thought about it, having him along to meet the nasty FuzzMan in the flesh wasn’t such a bad idea. You can rent cars, but it’s pretty tough to dig up six-foot-eight aliens whose shoulders are too wide to fit through a normal door but could still fit into his army fatigues. At least the last time I saw him.
I worked until after midnight to catch up and then get ahead of my regular client load. The people who were actually paying me to do things for them, boring things on the whole, but usually not to them.
So I slept late, and when nine in the morning came around, I wasn’t exactly ready to go. I was mostly wet, with a towel on my head and a bathrobe sticking to my skin, when I answered the door. But there he was.
“Hey, Harry,” I said, straining my neck to look him in his sparkly blue eyes.
He’d still be able to fit into his field jacket, that was obvious. And that bald pate still shone like a glazed vase. And when he lifted me off the floor and kissed me on the forehead, he still switched on that little electric switch. Damn him.
He set me on my feet and stepped back a bit. I felt around my robe to make sure everything was still contained like it was supposed to be.
“Hi, Jackie. Looks like you’re ahead of schedule. For you.”
Harry was born with a clock in his head. It was so accurate I sometimes thought his head was a clock. And it mattered to him, being on time. Sticking to schedules. Executing exactly what you planned to execute before you launched your day.
I understood none of these things.
“My alarm went off at the wrong time,” I lied by reflex.
“You have the worst luck with alarms. Coffee?”
I cleared a spot for him on one of the couches and made a pot of so-called fr
esh ground bought at a supermarket a month before. Then I attacked my wet hair with the industrial-strength hair dryer my hairdresser had bought for me, probably breaking a solemn covenant that could banish him forever from Fire Island.
When I got back to the living room, mostly dressed and ready to go, Harry was sitting with his mile-long legs nestled in a pile of magazines on the coffee table, reading a lingerie catalog I didn’t know I had.
“Playboy’s got nothing on this stuff,” he said.
“You look great, Harry,” I told him honestly. “I’m glad you called.”
He lit up a half-powered version of the Big Grin.
“Me, too, Jackie. Let’s roll.”
I spent the first half hour in the car messing around with stuff on the dashboard, adjusting my seat with little buttons that offered infinite variation, programming the radio to something beyond AM news and indie rock, setting the climate control to precise temperature and humidity, and testing the ability of the windows to suck out cigarette smoke.
“I’m thinking of getting one of these,” I said. “Just checking it out.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “My eight-year-old niece does the same thing.”
I sat back and concentrated on looking at the Long Island scenery. We were going through the Pine Barrens, a lot of which had burned in a big fire in the 1990s. A carpet of new growth had formed, but it looked so new and the stalks of sizzled pines so forlorn. I said as much to Harry.
“The sandy soil provides limited nourishment,” he said. “Trees grow more slowly, and can only reach a certain size. It’s like a bonsai forest.”
“And now it’s all burnt up. How sad,” I said.
“Why sad? The trees don’t think they’re deprived. They’re still alive, growing fresh new branches up from the root system. The carbon freed from the fire enriches the soil, and the burned-off canopy lets in lots of light, diversifying the undergrowth. Critters love it in there. It might look like a wasteland, but in fact it’s ten times more biologically vibrant than a mature forest.”
