by Chris Knopf
For Harry, the glass is half full if there is a molecule of water vapor floating nearby. When we were together it got to be a private game show of mine: Guess the Bright Side! starring Harry Goodlander. I blamed it on his being an air force brat, growing up around can-do guys whose ultimate aspiration was to fly faster, farther, and more recklessly than the other guy or die trying–falling to a fiery death singing “America the Beautiful” and/or whooping loudly.
“So, what’re we doing?” he asked as we crossed into the strip-development paradise of western Suffolk County. “Or is that client confidential?”
I filled him in on every detail I could remember about the case with no effort to protect confidences, client or otherwise. I even told him how I felt about Fuzzy Wolsonowicz, leaving out my own wimp factor. I might’ve been more secure having him along, but I wasn’t about to reinforce stereotypes. Even with an enlightened guy like Harry.
I’m terrible at finding my way when I’m driving, but I’m a homing pigeon if I can read a map in the passenger’s seat. There wasn’t much else to look at in that part of Long Island anyway. Dirty white, gray, and beige buildings, mostly grimy and shopworn, gaudy neon, and potholed streets. Tiny ranch houses with vans and pickups filling the driveways, a few with all four tires.
When we got to the address I’d pulled off the Internet, I had a crisis of confidence. Mostly because we didn’t see a house. There was just a two-foot-high rectangular slab covered in weathered tar paper, a Porta Potty, a rusted-out Datsun coupe with vanity plates that read SHRTSLR—shirt seller?—and a pickup that made mine look like a new Range Rover. And a mailbox with Fuzzy’s street number and the word OW.
I jumped out of the car and Harry followed me, unfolding his lanky limbs like a praying mantis.
“OW,” I read. “Oscar Wolsonowicz?”
Harry looked at the slab. He walked over and leaned down for a closer look. Without standing up, he waved me over.
“Look for a door,” he said.
We circumnavigated the slab from opposite directions, meeting on the other side at a metal Bilco hatch, painted black, with a sign that said LOSE HOPE ALL YE WHO PASS THROUGH HERE.
Harry pounded on the hatch door.
“What the fuck!” yelled a trebly, electronic voice a few seconds later.
We looked around and Harry spotted a speaker next to the hatch. Seeing no way to reply, he pounded on the door again.
We waited almost a minute, then heard the sound of the latch being pulled back, followed by the hatch door opening, groaning on its raw hinges.
A square-headed pale white guy with slippery black hair, a thin beard, and thick, plastic-rimmed glasses poked out. Unhappily.
“What. The. Fuck,” he said.
I squatted down to get on his level.
“Mr. Wolsonowicz? I’m Jacqueline Swaitkowski. An attorney and officer of the court.”
I handed him my card. He took it like it was a free ticket to next Sunday’s Declare Your Sins for Jesus tent revival.
“Yeah? And?” he asked.
“Your uncle, Sergey Pontecello, has died. There are issues relating to his estate I need to discuss with you.”
His nascent sneer grew into the real thing.
“Who the fuck cares,” he said, reaching to pull the door back down. He got partway there before Harry caught the edge of the door and pulled it back up.
“Ah, come on, fella,” said Harry. “She just wants to talk to you for a minute. Why not give it a chance?”
Fuzzy looked up at him, which from that perspective was a very long look.
“What do you want me to say? I don’t know anything about him. Married to my mom’s sister. Hardly ever talked to me. What did he die of?”
“They found him on the road,” I said.
He smirked again.
“There’s a news flash. Drove like a drunk old lady.”
He looked at Harry again, who was wearing a white band-collar shirt, a gold earring, and a pair of round wire-rim glasses through which gleamed ice blue eyes. Before going bald at about twenty-five, Harry’d been a platinum blond. So now, at about forty-five, his eyelashes and eyebrows were snow-white, making him look almost hairless. This took some getting used to, though if you looked at him long enough, you’d notice he was actually sort of cute.
“You a lawyer, too?” Fuzzy asked him.
“Strictly transport.”
“You said estate. There’s money involved?” Fuzzy asked me.
“Like the man said, we just want to talk. Can’t hurt. Might do you some good.”
Fuzzy clenched his eyes together and shoved his shoulders up against his neck like kids do when their mothers tell them to eat all the green stuff off their plates. Then he popped open his eyes and threw up his hands.
“Okay, what the fuck,” he said, walking back down the steps.
We followed.
Fuzzy’s place was more or less what you’d expect. Dark, damp, dirty, and crammed with junk. Electronic junk—beige, black, and gray boxes covered in buttons and dials and flickering lights. Every kind of monitor, from the old green screens stacked three at a time to gigantic flat LCDs hanging on the walls. The furniture was basic couch. Big couch, little couch, convertible couch, leather, velour, Herculon, and unidentifiable synthetic couch.
The walls were a charming concrete. No paint, no wallpaper, no art, no decoration at all. There was mood lighting—depression being the mood encouraged by little task lights with opaque metal shades scattered around the ceiling.
I liked the refrigerator in the middle of the room. Always kept you close to cold cuts and beer. He had a fan blowing on the refrigerator’s coils, and every shallow window had an air conditioner struggling to hold the temperature at about sixty.
“What happened to the house?” Harry asked, pointing at the ceiling.
“Burned down.”
“Bummer,” I said.
He shrugged. “Nothing says you have to build it back again.”
“Except for a few dozen state, county, and municipal statutes,” I said.
“She’s a real-estate lawyer,” said Harry.
“I thought this was about Sergey’s estate?”
“Mind if we sit?”
I asked. He shrugged again.
“I don’t care. Grab a couch,” he said as he plunked himself down on an office chair in front of a computer screen, a big one, on which some sort of online game was running. I picked a leather couch. Less likely to hide things that bite.
Fuzzy noticed me looking at the big screen. He spun around and rested his hands on the keyboard.
“I’m in the process of scouring the Free Earth Quadrant of alien hostiles,” he said.
“Really.”
As a presumed resident of the Free Earth Quadrant, I was grateful for his success. Harry bent down to take a look at the monitor.
“You made it all the way to level twelve. Impressive. I’ve never gotten past ten.”
Fuzzy scoffed.
“Twenty-two is my personal best, making me one of three Grand Warlords in North America. There’s only one son of a bitch in the entire world who’s made it all the way to level twenty-five, and he’s like a Tibetan monk or some shit.”
“So, anyway,” I said, “we’re here to talk about something important.”
“Like this isn’t. Just a stupid video game. Kid stuff. You try it sometime. NASA scientists’ll tell you getting to level twenty is statistically impossible.”
Harry nodded. “He’s right. Grand Warlords aren’t minted every day.”
“Oscar,” I said.
“Fuzzy,” said Fuzzy.
“Fuzzy. I need to tell you something about your Uncle Sergey.”
“He wasn’t my blood uncle. I just called him Sergey. Or sometimes Dipshit.”
“He didn’t just die. He was murdered.”
Fuzzy shook his head as if trying to shake a thought out of his brain. Despite the twitchy reaction, there was little surprise behind his eye
s. “You’re shittin’ me.”
“I’m afraid not. The police think somebody beat him up, then threw him out of their car. Tough way to go.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said sarcastically. “Even for a miserable little prick like Sergey.”
“No disrespecting the dead. It’ll come back at you.”
“Legal advice?”
“Spiritual,” I said.
“So now you’re a priest?” he asked.
His voice had moved up a notch in register.
“Any idea who did it?” I asked.
He jumped out of his chair. “So now you’re a cop? What the hell is this?”
“Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Wolsonowicz,” said Harry, his voice a lot calmer. “We are.”
Fuzzy didn’t seem to have a firm grip on his movements. As if coordinating thoughts, feelings, and facial expressions wasn’t the automatic thing it should have been. I had trouble fixing his age, especially with his potbelly pushing out from under an untucked Pepto Bismol–colored shirt, and his black peg-legged jeans and white Velcroed sneakers. But I figured early thirties.
He sat down.
“So what do you do for a living?” I said, looking around the basement. “Looks like something with computers.”
“You think? Yeah, something with computers. Everything with computers. Nothing matters but computers.”
I felt myself about to leap down his throat, but Harry slipped in front of me.
“Boy, you got that right,” he said. “I live on the darn things. Used to just help my business, now it is my business.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Fuzzy, warming to the hint of empathy.
“Harry’s logistics on computers,” I said. “I’m legal on computers. And you’re what again, Fuzzy?”
“Everything you can do. Hardware, software, rants, blogs, columns. And trading, of course.”
“Trading?”
“Day trading. The WWF of capitalism. Raw and rude. Trench warfare in the battle of chumps, champs, and suckers. The haves and have-nots. The insiders and outsiders. Kill or be killed. Pure play roulette made out to look like some sort of legitimate commercial enterprise, a rational exchange of wealth based on sound and sacred economic principles. Bullshit. It’s a blood sport.”
Here was the FuzzMan I’d come to know. He finally sounded like he wrote, though a toned-down version.
Harry grinned and pointed at Fuzzy.
“Now, that’s a rant. You are a writer, for sure,” he said.
I probably should have let Harry’s diplomacy soften him up a little more, but I’m not a terribly patient person.
“So who do you think did it?” I asked.
Fuzzy looked confused.
“Did what?”
“Killed old Sergey.”
He did another of those head shakes. I expected to see something fly out of his hair.
“I haven’t seen him in years. I was supposed to go to some service when they planted Aunt Betty, but I was all tangled up in shorts—selling short, not in my own shorts—and couldn’t let my eyes off the screen. In the time it takes you to hit a key, a stock can shoot up ten percent.”
“I thought that was good.”
“Not when you’re caught in a short squeeze,” he said. “When you short a stock, you bet on it going down. Going up is very, very bad.”
I wanted to comment on his priorities, but I was trying to take Harry’s sympathetic, nonjudgmental lead.
“So no guesses. On Sergey,” I said.
“Not even a wild-ass guess,” said Fuzzy. “What do you think the cops are going to ask? Same thing?”
“What cops?”
“They called yesterday,” he said. “Asked me about Sergey but didn’t say anything about any murder.”
I didn’t tell Fuzzy to get ready for the hostile, suspicious, and highly judgmental approach of Joe Sullivan. Let him learn that for himself.
“So you heard about all this from the cops? Your mother didn’t tell you?” I said.
Fuzzy stared at me, his face a mask.
“My mother?”
“Eunice didn’t tell you about Sergey?”
His whole face turned into a snarl.
“For her to tell me something, I’d have to talk to her. I don’t talk to her, so no, she didn’t tell me. All I know is what the cops told me, which was the old freak was dead.”
“How come you don’t talk to your mother?” I asked.
He looked at Harry as if to say, “Could you do something with this broad?”
“How come?” I asked again.
“Tell me again why I’m talking to you?” he said.
“’Cause I politely asked?”
“That’s polite?”
“Advice on manners, from you. That’s a good one,” I said.
“I invited you into my home.”
“Is that what this is?” I asked, looking around.
I could hear a low rumble of disapproval coming from Harry, but I was done with diplomacy. It can only take you so far.
“What the hell was so bad about Sergey?” I asked. “Or for that matter, your Aunt Betty? You couldn’t tear yourself away from your damn computer long enough to go to her funeral? Why so heartless?”
“You can’t call me names in my own house,” said Fuzzy.
“This isn’t a house, it’s a crypt. And if you don’t like my questions, wait’ll the cops come to call. All I can do is be rude. They can decide you’re a material witness and have you locked up in a place that makes this dump feel like the Waldorf.”
Fuzzy jumped out of his moldy chair and pointed his finger at me. A tiny trace of white foam actually formed at the corner of his mouth, but before he could find the right words, I asked again, “Why didn’t you go to Aunt Betty’s funeral? What did she ever do?”
“Nothing,” he spat out. “That’s what she did. Absolutely nothing.” Then he sat back in his chair and crossed his arms, thoroughly hunkered down. “Get out of here,” he said.
I was ready to give it another push, but when I looked over at Harry it was clear he really wanted me to back off and climb out of that creepy basement. So reluctantly, I tore myself away and let the sleazy geek get back to everything you can do with computers, no matter the death and dying going on around him.
“Sorry,” I said when we were back in the car.
“Not a very pleasant fellow,” said Harry.
“You tried to work around that. I probably should have let you.”
I struggled to get my breathing under control. What would have helped was a cigarette or something more intoxicating, but I’d put Harry through enough for the day. So instead I sat quietly, which I was grateful he let me do for about an hour. Then he ventured a conversation.
“At least you learned something, right?”
“I learned Fuzzy was the crud I thought he was. I don’t know what else.”
He let that sit until we were almost back in Southampton, when he said, “So, not a little bit curious?”
“Beg pardon?”
“About the last two years of my life. That’s not like you. I expected to be thoroughly grilled by now.”
He was right. For some reason, I’d shied from asking. Not that I wasn’t aching with curiosity, suspicion, and a few other selfish and illaudable feelings.
“I assumed you were in a coma. Though you look way too good for that,” I said.
“If you don’t want to know, that’s okay,” he said.
“You think I’m that easily manipulated? Okay, so tell me.”
So on the way back to the East End he told me what he’d been doing, which was more or less the same thing he always did—move stuff around the planet. He frequently did big projects for military and government agencies, but he was just as happy moving little things as big things. Such as shipping Fabergé eggs to Mongolia or fresh internal organs for transplant in Tierra del Fuego.
He’d recruited a twenty-member family of Indonesian sailors to run a convoy of barge
s across the Indian Ocean to South Africa, where they were refused entry and had to continue on to the Mediterranean, where they loaded the freight on lorries in Marseilles and snuck into Rotterdam pretending to be British NGOs brought in by the Dutch government to provide cultural sensitivity training.
That’s the kind of thing he does. And he told the truth when he said computers were now his business. All he needed was a laptop and a cell phone and he could run the whole show. Which meant he could live anywhere they had broadband and decent cell service. Which they have in Southampton.
“So this is where I’ve decided to stay,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I won’t have to travel occasionally, but you won’t find a better home base.”
“I haven’t looked for one,” I told him, “but I believe you. I want to believe you. Because I’m here for good, for better or worse.”
“So we’re both here. Hm.”
“Yeah, hm. Let’s discuss this later on,” I said, and then returned the conversation to his recent adventures, where I wanted it. Not because I wasn’t thinking what he was thinking. I just wasn’t ready to think it.
I don’t like the gym. I find exercise sweaty and uncomfortable. And boring. That’s my biggest problem with physical fitness. I can get bored in the middle of a roller-coaster ride. After a week peddling a bicycle that doesn’t go anywhere, I find my sanity starts to erode.
The only cure is a frequent change in scenery. I’ve been on every machine in the gym, taken every aerobics class, invented some of my own swim strokes, and even signed up for interpretive dance after a week of yoga where all we did was stretch and clear our minds. I’m pretty limber already, and the only way to clear my mind is to do a full lobotomy.
I stuck with the dance class longer than usual. It was the interpretive part that worked for me. It was impossible for the instructor to tell anyone their interpretations stank. Plus, since I don’t mind making an ass out of myself, it turned out to be the right choice.
It was close to ten o’clock when I left the gym. I was sure about that because I liked to catch the start of the ten o’clock cop shows. I’ve heard people say they hate seeing dramatized versions of their jobs. Too close to home. In my case, there’s nothing about these shows that has anything to do with the actual thing. The shows are so much more interesting and sexy. Everybody looks great, they all live in million-dollar apartments and work out of space-age offices lit by blue fluorescents and courtrooms with carved molding and twelve-foot-high windows. What’s wrong with watching that?
