Short Squeeze

by Chris Knopf

  “Be nice to Harry, Joe. He rescued me. More important, I’m dating him.”

  He snorted and walked me back to where we’d left Harry and Danny Izard.

  “Take her to the hospital,” he said to Harry. “Then both of you get to the HQ as soon as possible so we can take your statements.”

  On my way out an ashen-looking Alden Winthrop tried to engage me in conversation, but I cut him off more curtly than I wanted to. It might have been my eagerness to flee the scene, or maybe I was afraid I’d tell him what I thought of his child-rearing skills. I’ve never had to rear a child, so that was probably unfair, but he wasn’t the one holding an ice bag to his face.

  Markham was tied up with Denny Winthrop, so one of the other trauma docs looked me over. She was a tight little woman with short hair and a clipped, professional manner. She did a thorough job, I’m sure, but I wasn’t used to being examined at Southampton Hospital by anyone so small.

  Neither of us thought any good would come from making me stay the night, so she wrote out a prescription for painkillers and shooed me out of there. Harry followed me to my house. He wanted to, and I didn’t think it right to discourage him after what had happened. Further soul-searching over the loss of personal identity would have to wait another day.

  “I know you have things to do,” he said. “Just get me a beer and I’ll stand at the ready. Or maybe sit.”

  I got beer for both of us, and after stripping down and pulling on my kimono, dragged him out to the porch. He stood patiently while I shoveled out a space for the two of us to sit at the HP.

  A few minutes later I used Denny’s user name and password to log in to his e-mail provider. I found the instant message icon, clicked open the box, and wrote to Fuzzy:

  “Got a plan for the Big C.”

  Fuzzy came right back.

  “I told you to get it the fuck out of there.”

  “Chill. I moved it to another shed. Can’t complete the plan till it’s dark out.”

  “They have another shed?” asked Harry.

  “They do now,” I said.

  “What plan?” Fuzzy wrote.

  “Journey to the bottom of fucking Wood Pond,” I wrote.

  Fuzzy didn’t write back right away. I felt my heart clench in my chest. I’d read a lamentable amount of their correspondence on the blog sites and thought I knew their style of discourse. But IM was different. They could use a whole different approach when it was just the two of them. A shorthand I wouldn’t know. The longer this went, the more likely Fuzzy would smell a rat.

  I held my breath.

  “Don’t get wet,” he finally wrote back.

  I started breathing again and wrote, “I could use a ride. Long walk back from North Sea.”

  “Not in the contract, RipMan. FuzzMan never strays far from the crib.”

  “No honor among jerks,” said Harry.

  “10-4,” I wrote.

  I knew I should log off while I was ahead, but I hadn’t learned anything new. As I wondered how I was going to keep up the RipMan act and simultaneously tease out information, Fuzzy wrote, “What about the perdues?”

  Oh, hell, I thought. Just what I feared. A question I couldn’t answer.

  “What about ’em?” I wrote imaginatively.

  “The frozen cutlets. Secure?”

  “Is Denny supposed to buy him dinner?” Harry asked.

  “Secure, per contract,” I wrote, not knowing what else to do.

  I had another nervous wait.

  “Seek out and destroy. Too much heat.”

  This time Fuzzy had to wait because I didn’t know what to write back. I looked at Harry for inspiration. He shook his head.

  “Acknowledge,” Fuzzy wrote. I imagined him yelling the word at the computer.

  “Acknowledged,” I sent back as quickly as I could.

  “Don’t need anymore. Chuck the whole batch in the fryolator.”

  “I’m starting to get hungry,” said Harry, and that’s when it hit me.

  “I’ve got a cure for that,” I said as I typed in “On the case, posthaste.”

  Then I clicked out of the box and called Sullivan on my cell phone, which I’d slipped into the pocket of the kimono.

  A second later, he came on the line.

  “I’m at the hospital with the punk perp,” he said. “Cell phone’s not allowed. I’ll have to call you back.”

  “Who’s at the scene?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who’s at the funeral home?”

  “Danny’s waiting for flatbeds to haul the vehicles up to Riverhead. I got to call you back. The nurses are looking very unhappy.”

  “Call him right now and tell him to bring along Denny’s freezer,” I said, the words tumbling out.

  “Sure, boss. Now remind me how you like your coffee. I’ll bring some right over.”

  I groaned loud enough for him to hear.

  “Joe, listen. You are the best cop on the East End. I respect you. I admire you. I will gladly grovel even more later on, but please, could you just call Danny, then call me right back?” I said, then hit the end call button.

  Harry looked puzzled.

  “Sullivan’s going to call me back in about one minute,” I said. “I can explain after that. I think.”

  “I was just in that freezer,” he said. “Nothing there but a bunch of Tupperware and frozen burger patties.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t use them as ice packs,” I said.

  The phone rang.

  “Mission accomplished,” said Sullivan when I answered the phone. “Awaiting further orders.”

  “Are you somewhere you can talk on the cell?” I asked.

  “I’m outside with a crowd of health professionals. I’m the only one not smoking a cigarette.”

  “Do you have your casebook?” I asked, though I knew he did. He probably took it with him into the shower.

  “I do.”

  “Good. Here’s what I think,” I said. “Oscar Wolsonowicz, a.k.a. Fuzzy or FuzzMan, has some sort of financial hold over Alden Winthrop the fourth, a.k.a Denny, a.k.a. RipMan. I’m guessing it’s related to day trading, which is what Fuzzy does when he’s not polluting the Internet with his vile opinions.”

  “That’s the price we pay for freedom of speech,” said Sullivan.

  “Denny was the one who rammed me on Brick Kiln Road. With his Ford pickup. I’m sure the front end’s been done over pretty thoroughly, if the condition of the other vehicle is any indication. I think Fuzzy ordered him to make the hit after Harry and I paid Fuzzy a visit. I must have thoroughly spooked him. Why, you might ask.”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “That relates to the contents of Denny’s freezer. And the old Chrysler 300. I could tell you my theory, or we could let forensics do their thing and take it from there. If I’m wrong, I haven’t wasted your time.”

  I’d saved the instant message exchanges between the FuzzMan and myself as Denny Winthrop. I copied the file and sent it to Joe’s e-mail address.

  “Look for me next time you’re on your computer,” I said to Sullivan. “If I’m right about the Chrysler and what’s in the freezer, it’ll make sense. If I’m wrong, you can mock me and never trust another thing I say for the rest of our natural lives.”

  “I might do that anyway. By the way, the kid’s checking out fine, maybe a minor concussion and a broken nose. He’s screaming lawsuit.”

  “Happy to litigate that one. My suggestion, and it’s only a suggestion, is to hold him until Riverhead can thoroughly check out the goods. I’m phoning in a favor with Vendetti to speed the process.”

  “What does he owe you for?”

  “Listening to his poetry.”

  Sullivan called back a few minutes later and confirmed what I’d thought about the contents of the freezer. He passed along Danny Izard’s personal thanks for almost making him lose his lunch.

  He also told me we could wait a day to give our statements, since forensics woul
d be busy nailing various things down. So I took a shower. It was only late afternoon, but I needed something to wake me up and calm me down at the same time. And a place to think without distractions beyond noticing even more grout had worked out from between the tiles and that sections of the shower wall were bulging in unpromising ways. Pete had built the bathroom himself, all the carpentry and tiling, on his first try. Doing your own construction was expected of the men in his family. It didn’t matter how much money there was from selling the potato farm, you didn’t pay people to do things God gave you two hands to do yourself. That was where the concept broke down for Pete. The only thing he was worse at than skilled craftsmanship was skilled reasoning. Though he did tell a good joke and was never mean to children or pets.

  I eventually decided what I wanted to do next but didn’t think I was up to the technical challenge. I needed to call on Randall Dodge. I dialed the number and was unsurprised to hear he was on the job, getting ready for a long night’s work. Harry looked like he’d much rather stay put, whip up dinner, and recuperate from the wild day. I had to break it to him that the wild day was still in progress, and we had to go.

  In addition to being an interesting racial mix, with brown skin, green eyes, and high cheekbones, Randall was also sort of tall, though when I saw him standing next to Harry, he’d shrunk a lot. I made them both sit down so I could have a conversation without wrenching my neck.

  “So, Randall, how hard is it to hack into E-Spree and download all the historical information from a specific individual’s account?”

  “Impossible,” he said in his silky, softly modulated voice.

  “Come on, how long would it take you?”

  “Forever.”

  “You’re disappointing me.”

  “All the big online services have state-of-the-art security encryptions,” he said. “Especially a brokerage operation like E-Spree. They mess up on that stuff, the liability exposure would sink the ship.”

  “Okay, but what if you wanted to break into an account, what would you do?”

  “Guess,” he said.

  “Guess?”

  “Go to the log-on page and try to guess the user name and password,” he said.

  “That sounds impossible.”

  “It is, but you asked me what I would do.”

  “Okay, let’s try it.”

  It took only a few seconds to find the log-on page on the E-Spree Web site. Randall looked up at me.

  “You could have up to five chances, but maybe only three,” he said. “Do not try to force it. Free our mind.”

  “Yes, master. User name is cap F-u-z-z, no space, cap M-a-n.”

  He typed it in.

  “We won’t know if that’s right till we put in a password.”

  “Denny thought he was the Dragon like his kickboxer hero. Fuzzy must be the Grand Warlord,” I said.

  “Too many letters. We need between six and ten.”

  “Then plain warlord.”

  He tried it, and the password came up invalid, but not the user name.

  “Gwarlord,” said Harry, spelling it out.

  No-go, but the log-in box was still giving us a chance.

  “Could be only one try left,” said Randall. “My humble suggestion is you abandon the warlord theme.”

  “That should have been it,” said Harry. “If he’s not the Grand Warlord, what is he?”

  “He shorts stocks,” I said. “He missed Betty’s funeral because he was afraid one of his plays was going to shoot up, catching him in a short squeeze.” Then I nearly shouted, “Shirt seller. Why the hell did I read that into his license plate? It’s Short seller. S-H-R-T-S-L-R. Write it in,” I said to Randall.

  The screen went to gray-white. I waited for alarms to go off, sirens coming down the street, the door to Randall’s shop busted in. Cops in flack jackets yelling “Freeze!”

  “Welcome, Oscar Wolsonowicz,” it said at the top of the screen.

  Everyone whooped at the same time.

  “Shirt seller, for Pete’s sake,” I said.

  It took a lot longer to figure out how to navigate the account. It was what Randall called “application rich.” I called it confusing.

  I deferred to Harry at this point, as he was the only one in the room who’d actually done any day trading. I stared at the screen while he toured Fuzzy’s account history. Randall watched, mesmerized. I fidgeted.

  “What if Fuzzy decides to log in?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Randall. “The account might allow multiple visitors, or it might say he’s already logged in and shut him out,” said Randall.

  “Hear that, Harry? Keep ‘er movin’.”

  “How do I print?” he asked Randall.

  Randall reached across the keyboard and a second later a bank of printers was buzzing and clicking and paper covered in data was squirting into paper trays.

  “We’ll have to live with monthly reports for now,” said Harry. “The backup would be printing forever. I’m also copying the stuff we print to a separate folder that we can save electronically.”

  My heart sank when I saw the printouts. They were crammed with numbers and stock codes and long, ragged columns and all that other junk I’ve spent a lifetime trying not to know anything about.

  “Do you know what any of this shit means?” I asked Harry.

  “Sort of.”

  With Randall’s help, he kept every printer in the shop busy for about twenty minutes. I stacked and collated.

  “I think that’s all that’s practical,” Harry said eventually. “If I go to another level of detail, you’ll need a truck full of office paper.”

  “Kill it,” I said. “I can’t take this anymore.”

  Before Harry quit the site he copied all the reports to an external hard drive. Then the three of us organized and bundled up the printed records. It took another two hours, but it was fun working between the Twin Towers of Southampton Geekdom.

  Randall pulled out several banker’s boxes, which we filled nearly to capacity. I was seriously daunted.

  “A two months’ analysis is not what I want,” I said.

  “We don’t need two months. Give me two hours in my office”—Harry looked at me—“alone, and undistracted.”

  “When have I ever been a distraction?” I asked.

  22

  The next day I convinced myself of two things. One, I no longer had to fear being killed because Denny Winthrop was the sole threat, and he was in jail. Two, I’d been pushing myself mercilessly for days and if I didn’t take a break, I’d die of a seizure or something.

  Now my only job was staying out of Harry’s way, so I took Geordie the bartender’s advice and went to sit on the beach. On the way I bought a bathing suit, beach towel, and sunscreen, all on postseason sale, commencing the process of mind-clearing therapy. I also bought a bottle of white wine with two glasses in a gift pack, a pack of cigarettes, a small bottle of mouthwash, a tub of fruit salad, and a book of quotes by Saint Teresa of Avila. And a sweat suit, in case it was too cold to sit on the beach.

  Buoyed by anticipation, I felt relaxed all the way to the beach and through the first glass of wine. Then I started to feel edgy and restless, my mind running in circles. A law professor once said that in the absence of evidence, all you can do is process your ignorance. So don’t waste mental energy drawing conclusions when a simple fact could render moot not just the answer but the question itself.

  I looked at Teresa’s book and saw she had some interesting things to say on a variety of subjects, though not enough to keep my brain from wandering around the life and death of Sergey Pontecello. Increasingly, it looked like the life part existed entirely in the shadow of his wife. It was her family’s house; she handled all the family’s finances and kept herself busy as a librarian, as well as managing various intrigues and chicaneries. Sergey looked more and more like a cipher, not just ineffectual but, as Wendy said, oblivious. His independent wealth supported the marriage. It was rela
tively humble as fortunes go, but adequate, allowing them to assume at least some of the requisite trappings. Like a 1967 Chrysler 300.

  Contrary to Betty’s smoke screen, a chunk of that wealth had survived. Their original investments had been sold and the money transferred into a cash account, which still amounted to a few million.

  At the same time, a new revenue flow developed from two sources—a fifty-thousand-dollar home-equity line, and the credit line from Eunice. Some of this money was dispersed. Nearly all those dispersals went to their E-Spree account.

  No. They went to an account. We didn’t know whose.

  I jumped off the blanket as if I’d been bitten by a green fly. My cell phone was in the car, and I was about to run for it when, strangely, better judgment took hold. Bugging Harry with this now would only slow him down. Waiting another hour and a half wouldn’t change the answer to my question. It would be there when I got back.

  I just had to relax and casually kill the time. Easy.

  Instead of running to the car, I ran into the ocean, another one of Geordie’s prescriptions, if I remembered it right. It was a little late in the year to be doing this, though the water was much warmer at the end of September than at the end of May, and I’d been swimming in cold water since I was five years old.

  I wasn’t the only one with the idea. Two little kids were sloshing around in the surf while a Spanish nanny in a white uniform watched from ankle depth. She occasionally tossed out instructions in Spanish, which the Anglo-looking kids seemed to readily understand. Probably part of their preparatory training, strategically calibrated to the times.

  I dolphined through the waves and swam out to flatter water beyond the break. I looked back at the nearly empty beach and the grassy dunes, behind which gigantic houses in a variety of architectural motifs—from plain gray boxes to gable-laden, postmodern shingled mansions—stood in arrogant defiance of undefeatable nature.

  I’m not only a great swimmer, I float like a cork. Maybe that’s why I’m a great swimmer. If I keep my head back as far as I can without getting water in my nose and stay fully relaxed and control my breathing, my whole body will bob on the surface like it was made out of Styrofoam. This was a good project to work on that afternoon, encouraging a Zenlike absence of striving, since the key to successful floating was letting go of one’s natural desire to kick one’s feet or flutter one’s hands.