Short Squeeze

by Chris Knopf

  “Into the what?”

  “The retort. The cremator furnace. Who did you say you were representing?” she asked.

  “The estate,” I said, not specifying which estate. “So this hands-on examination, who does that exactly?”

  She smiled at me.

  “I do. My family’s in the funeral business. I grew up helping my father with the embalming.”

  There’s a bonding experience, I thought.

  “But you don’t keep records?”

  “I didn’t say that. I just wouldn’t remember any specific person. We serve hundreds a year.”

  “But you could look it up?” I asked.

  “I could. But I would need the family’s written permission. That is confidential information. Even in death, people have the right to privacy.”

  I folded my arms and studied Sarah Simms like Betty Pontecello would, trying to read the tell.

  “Would it be more or less pleasant for you if I arranged to have a police detective arrive here before the end of the day with a subpoena?”

  “I wouldn’t find that pleasant at all.”

  “Me, neither. I’d much rather wait here while you go check your records. Just give me the gist. I don’t have to look at anything.”

  “Then I’m sure that’ll be fine,” said Sarah, relieved to have a compromise.

  She turned and left the foyer by a different door from the one she used to enter. I sat and waited, my stomach turning into a lead ball as I imagined her looking up Slim Jackery’s phone number and giving him a call. Slim or Alden Winthrop, or Ross Semple.

  She came back after only a few minutes.

  “Mrs. Jackery had been in a terrible car crash,” she said. “She was disfigured nearly beyond recognition. There were no personal effects or medical devices. This is what the computer said; I frankly don’t remember the individual. If you have specific questions, you’re likely to learn more by speaking to the Winthrop people again.”

  “That’s a splendid idea, Ms. Simms. I think I’ll do exactly that.”

  “Mrs. Simms,” she said demurely. “I’m old-fashioned that way.”

  On the way back down to Southampton my cell phone rang. It was Harry.

  “Where we going today?” he asked.

  “You’re a little late for that. It’s already afternoon.”

  “I’ve been catching up on paperwork. You?”

  “I’ve been chasing dead bodies.” I told him about my trip to the regional crematorium and my conversation with Sarah Simms. He drew the same conclusion I did.

  “You have to go to the funeral home again. Not you, exactly. You need to call the police and they need to go to the funeral home.”

  There it was again, that little twitch in the pit of my stomach, the one I started to feel two years ago that eventually grew into a giant ball of distress. I didn’t know what it was then, and I still didn’t know, exactly, but at least now I had a theory.

  For all his wonderful thoughtfulness, his easygoing, jovial nature, his apparent tolerance of my manifold inadequacies, Harry liked to drive the car. Though hardly a control freak, it was in his nature to control. How else could he move massive quantities of complicated stuff all over the globe, orchestrating it all from a computer in a converted garage?

  I’d kept his protective nature at bay after the run-in with the pickup, just barely. It’s not that I didn’t like it. More that I might like it too much, that old fear of losing my sense of self if I got too close to Harry’s gravitational pull. That sense of self might be scattered all over the universe, but at least it belonged to me. All of it. I once gave up pieces of me to the son of a potato farmer and only through tragic intervention got them all back. I couldn’t lose them again.

  “You’re right. Sullivan is mad enough at me already. I’ll see if I can track him down,” I said, though I had no intention of doing so.

  “Then you can come see me,” he said. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “You always do, Harry. That’s one of the things I love about you.”

  “Watch it, Jackie. You almost said you love me.”

  As usual, right at the moment I felt most like running away from him, I felt a wave of warmth and affection flow over me.

  “I do. I love your Harryness.”

  “Okay, I’ll take that.”

  “But I’m not sure about tonight. Let me call you later.”

  “Okay, I’ll take that, too. I’ll be waiting. You know me.”

  “I do,” I said to myself after getting off the phone.

  I was going to head directly to Alden Winthrop’s office in the main house, but since I was closer to Building Two, with its long lineup of garage bays, I decided to stop there first. I knocked on the side door and waited. Nothing happened, so I let myself in and knocked on the next door. Nothing happened again, so I let myself into the main area.

  All the vehicles were there except the pickup. I called Denny’s name a few times without a response. I walked into the corner where he’d set up his living space. It was less of a mess than the last time I was there. The table had been partially wiped clean, and the sheets were pulled up into a loose approximation of a made bed. From closer in, I could see a cubicle created by three movable panels borrowed from the portable ceremony supplies. The panels were covered in posters of a Japanese kickboxer inscrutably named Don Wilson.

  Inside the space was a table with a computer. The computer screen was off, but a green light shone on the CPU under the table. I went over and tapped the space bar, and the screen lit up. A dialog box popped up in the middle, requesting a user name and password. I looked around the garage, holding my breath and listening for sounds of Denny. Hearing nothing, I sat down and stared helplessly at the dialog box. Knowing the statistical odds of the right guess were far greater than the number of tries before the computer’s security system locked it up, I didn’t even try.

  I walked down the row of cars to where the one with the canvas cover was parked. I had to untie a drawstring that tucked the cover under the left rear bumper, which took some effort. The string had been knotted into a hard ball, and I had to kneel on the floor to get both hands engaged in untying it. Two busted nails later, I got it loose.

  I stood up and pulled the cover over the bumper. The license plate had been removed, making the wide slab of chrome look even wider. I walked around to the front of the car and pulled up the cover. The front fenders were also shaped into big slabs, with right angles top and bottom protruding beyond the grill, in which four round headlights were embedded. I didn’t see anything identifying the model until I flipped the cover up over the hood ornament.

  It was a little round piece of chrome, inside of which was the number 300.

  The hand that grabbed a wad of my hair at the back of my head came out of nowhere. In the instant it secured its grip and shoved my head onto the car, I was able to literally turn the other cheek, so the right side of my face smashed down onto the hood, not the left side with all the lovely handiwork by the nice plastic surgeons.

  Still, it hurt like hell. I felt my limbs go weak and start to crumple. Then the hand in my hair yanked me away from the car and I saw Denny Winthrop, his face a mask set in a mindless rage. He shoved me toward the back of the garage, dropped into a boxer’s stance, and looked me over as if he were picking out the perfect spot. I screamed, put my hands up to protect my head, and ran for the side door at the end of the building.

  I almost made it. The door was partway open into the foyer, and I only had a few feet to go when he came out of nowhere again and grabbed another handful of hair.

  I have a lot of hair to grab, which Denny yanked hard enough to pull me right off my feet and back into the garage. I hit the floor shoulders first, then my head whiplashed smack onto the concrete with a sound I heard inside and out.

  I closed my eyes and became Dead Girl, one of my easiest performances. I felt dead, or near it. I watched a swirling kaleidoscope on the backs of my eyelids and scolded my
self yet again for my stupid, reckless curiosity. I could hear Denny breathing as he moved in front of the door and stood over me, deciding what to do next.

  “Fucking lawyers,” he said, almost too quietly for me to hear, especially through the thump thump inside my skull. “Scum-sucking, bottom-feeding, elitist pigs.”

  That last bit sounded closer. I felt the edge of his shoe brush against the outside of my calf. I opened my eyes and got a fix on where he was standing. I wasn’t looking at his face, so I don’t know what he thought was happening, but his reaction time wasn’t up to professional kickboxing standards.

  Mine was. Straight up into his balls.

  As he went down, clutching at his groin, I stumbled to my feet. It took my head a few seconds to catch up with the rest of me, but I kept my balance. Denny was pulling himself off the floor, breathing hard. There was no room to get around him and through the side door, so I turned to make a run for one of the bays, but he dove after me and caught my ankle, and with the help of my forward momentum, caused me to sprawl across the floor. I landed boobs first, which knocked the wind out of me. I gasped for breath as I rolled over onto my back, hoping to get my feet back into the action.

  Denny stood up. He said some other nasty thing, which I couldn’t quite make out, then loped forward, swinging his right leg to get maximum momentum behind the impending kick.

  Then he abruptly stopped and flew backward, his arms and legs thrashing wildly.

  “Excuse me,” said Harry, holding him by the back of the neck. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Denny twisted in Harry’s grip, swinging wildly with his fists. Harry tried to bob his head out of the way, telling Denny to knock it off, but when one of the punches grazed his cheek, Harry pulled back his own basketball-size fist and drove it straight into Denny’s face.

  Harry held Denny’s limp body for a moment, shook him as a terrier would shake a dead rat, then dropped him to the floor. He walked over and knelt next to me.

  “You okay?” he asked. “What happened to your face?”

  I grabbed him by the shirtfront and made him get close enough for me to plant a kiss on his cheek, then used the purchase on his shirt to drag myself to my feet.

  I walked over to Denny and checked to see if he was still breathing, relieved to see him pop open his eyes. I squatted down and grabbed a handful of his own hair. I used it to smack his head on the floor.

  “User name and password,” I yelled at him.

  He looked at me, then over my shoulder at Harry, glowering down from a hundred feet up.

  “Tell me now or you’re all his,” I said.

  “User name RipMan,” he said. “Password dragon. Like Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson.”

  I looked over at the kickboxer posters and thought, Of course.

  I stood up again, a little unsteadily, and told Denny to stay put.

  “Shouldn’t we be calling the police?” Harry asked.

  “Just give me five minutes. If Denny makes a sound, step on his head.”

  I went over to the computer in the makeshift cubicle and logged on. The desktop had a blurry image of Denny surfing down the side of a wave. I searched out the browser icon, clicked on it, then waited an agonizing few seconds for the home page to come up. It was a site that aggregated blogs. I clicked on “My Favorites.” Fuzzy was right at the top.

  I clicked on the link and Fuzzy’s blog jumped onto the screen. I clicked on “Discussion,” and there he was, ranting away as usual.

  I tapped in, “Hey, FuzzMan, it’s Rip. Code red, dude. Make contact like now.”

  “Fuck,” Fuzzy wrote. I waited as long as I could stand it for him to send more, then cleared away all the open pages, revealing the desktop photo with RipMan ripping a wave.

  I found a mailbox icon and clicked on it. I gripped the terminal with both hands, willing the e-mail to show itself. Another dialog box popped up. I prayed Denny was too enamored with his noms de plume to use a different user name and password.

  “We really should call the police,” said Harry.

  I leaned back in the chair and shouted, “Two minutes.”

  Before I could touch the keys again, an instant message box popped into the upper left corner of the screen.

  “What the fuck?” said the message from FuzzMan, the screen name in blue letters.

  “Hot times at the homestead,” I wrote. The IM filled in “RipMan,” in red.

  “Explain.”

  “Two pigs from Shampt were just here talking to the old man,” I wrote.

  The response took about twenty seconds. I couldn’t know if Fuzzy was hesitating or the IM was just finding its way around the world and back to Long Island.

  “Did you lose the clunker?” he finally wrote back.

  “No worries,” I wrote back.

  Fuzzy came back much quicker this time.

  “Lose the fucking clunker.”

  “FuzzMan, Big C’s a righteous ride. She’s spick-and-span.”

  Fuzzy came right back.

  “You don’t watch fucking CSI? You can’t clean up enough. It’s humanly impossible. Lose the fucking car or Rip’s account is gonna seriously shit the bed.”

  I waited a minute, then wrote back.

  “Chill, brother. Consider it done.”

  I thought that might end the exchange, but he came back one more time.

  “And hands off the lawyer bitch,” Fuzzy wrote. “At least until she delivers the bucks. More to fund the RipMan’s fuckups. Can’t whack the hand that feeds you.”

  It took a moment for that to sink in.

  “Oh, Christ,” I said, before typing in “10-4,” and snapping open my cell phone.

  21

  Danny Izard was the first on the scene, followed immediately by Alden Winthrop. Denny was awake again but lying still, breathing shallow breaths and looking disoriented. Alden tried to run to his son, but Danny stopped him.

  “Wait for the paramedics, sir. They know what to do.”

  “What on earth happened?” he asked.

  “The kid fell and hit his head,” I said, cleaving to a shortened version of the available facts.

  Harry was leaning over Denny’s freezer, putting ice cubes in a plastic bag, which he wrapped in a dishtowel. After I had it pressed to my cheek, I said more gently than the words would suggest, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Being a butt-insky,” he said.

  “You’re not butting in when you’re saving my life.”

  “I knew you’d come here on your own. I tried to pretend it didn’t worry me, but I couldn’t concentrate on my work. Sorry.”

  Two more cops showed up, then the paramedics, whom the cops let in through one of the bay doors. They pulled in a gurney loaded down with equipment and started working on Denny. Izard walked over to us after the other cops took Winthrop off his hands.

  “I bet you’ll be explaining this,” he said to me.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “As soon as Joe Sullivan gets here. While we’re waiting, let’s take a walk.”

  I had Danny and Harry follow me down the row of cars to the Chrysler 300.

  “How many of these do you think there are in the Hamptons?” I asked.

  “Man, it’s ugly,” said Harry.

  “But well-maintained and sparkling clean.”

  “Whose is it?” asked Danny.

  “The late Pontecellos’. It’s supposed to be in their garage.”

  “Any idea how it got here?”

  “No, but I have a theory,” I said, shifting the ice bag on my cheek. “Wow, that hurts.”

  “We should take you to the hospital,” said Harry.

  “If I turn white and pass out, do that, will you? In the meantime, I’ve got to talk to Joe Sullivan.”

  Who showed up a few moments later. He strode into the room with his hand resting on the butt of his service revolver, as if expecting to interrupt a full-out firefight. He saw us standing next to the Chrysler.

  “What do we g
ot here?” he asked Danny Izard, who looked over at me. Sullivan frowned and redirected the question.

  “So, Jackie, what do we got here?”

  I pointed at Denny Winthrop, whom the paramedics were locking into a neck brace.

  “You can start with assault with intent to kill. I’m the intended.” I jerked my thumb at Harry. “He’s the witness.”

  “Which one of you subdued the assailant?” he asked, looking up at Harry.

  “We both did,” I said. “While exercising remarkable restraint.”

  “Save it for the civil case, Counselor. What else we got?”

  I pointed at the Chrysler.

  “You can add grand theft auto. This vehicle belonged to Sergey and Elizabeth Pontecello. As coadministrator of their estate, I’m prepared to assert that it was removed unlawfully from their garage, an assertion supported by the fact that young Mr. Winthrop, the person lying on the floor over there, attacked me when I discovered it.”

  Joe pulled out his casebook and started to write things down.

  “Okay, give me a second to record that, then you can make your closing arguments.”

  “The son of a bitch tried to kill me, Joe. And he’s got a pickup, I’m guessing outside somewhere.”

  He looked over his shoulder, trying to divine the truck’s exact location.

  “I’d have forensics go over the pickup and this Chrysler with a fine-tooth comb,” I said. “If they don’t find anything, tell them they suck at forensics and to go back and look again.”

  “They’ll love that.”

  “Remind them me and Carlo Vendetti are like this,” I said, crossing my fingers.

  “I wouldn’t be too eager to advertise that one,” he said.

  Remarkably, another thought found its way into my battered brain. I asked to talk to Sullivan for a second in private.

  “Say, Joe,” I said. “Can you keep Denny off the grid for a little while?”

  We both watched as the paramedics wheeled out the gurney.

  He frowned. “He gets a phone call. The lawyer call.”

  I told him who I didn’t want Denny to contact. Sullivan shrugged. “Like I said, he only gets one call and that’s to his lawyer. Anyway, it’ll take Dr. Fairchild a while to determine if the human colossus over there did any permanent damage.”