Ice Cap: A Mystery (Jackie Swaitkowski Mysteries)

by Chris Knopf

  He squeezed his eyes even tighter and rolled his head like a blind piano player.

  “He was looking for Zina,” he said with a burst of exhaled breath, as if he’d saved it up to help force the admission.

  I allowed a few moments for him to recover.

  “How do you know that?” I finally said.

  “He called me on my cell. Asking if I’d seen her, then saying he was heading out to look. By then it was snowing like a bastard, and her car was still in the garage, so he figured she had to be out there on the grounds. I said I’d help him search. He told me to stay put, but to keep my cell on. He’d call me after securing the woodshed, and if she hadn’t turned up by then, we’d plan a search. That was the last I heard from him.”

  He looked out the dirty window at a small mountain of winter grime piled there by the successive labors of snowblowers, shovels, and plows. He shook his head haphazardly, like people do when they’re listening to an unwanted internal monologue.

  Then he looked right at me, the odor of ill-concealed deception hanging over him.

  “You knew where she was,” I said, suddenly seeing the truth, at least the part of the truth advertised by his tormented eyes.

  He lurched back as if I’d taken a swing at him. “How can you say that?” he asked.

  “Come on, Franco. If I can see it, Joe Sullivan can see it. You know what that means.”

  Detectives and other skilled interrogators will tell you it takes a nearly superhuman grip on self-control to keep a secret. It isn’t that people are so driven to tell the truth. In fact, lying is so much a natural part of day-to-day existence, it’s a wonder there’s any truth spoken in the world at all. But an interrogation isn’t a day-to-day thing. It’s a mental pressure chamber, so concentrated and relentless that the secret eventually strains to reveal itself, begs to be free just to escape the agonizing scrutiny.

  Franco had been there before. He didn’t want to go back.

  “Dammit, Franco, you knew where to find her, didn’t you.”

  His buggy eyes opened even further, until the whites surrounded his dark irises.

  “I did. All I had to do was look over at her lying in my bed. Sheet pulled up to her throat, finger at her lips, warning me not to say anything that might give us away. And that I didn’t do. I swear it.”

  4

  Even when operating on different sides of a perennial contest, you get to know and befriend people, especially if you’re contending a lot over a long period of time. I felt that way about Detective Joe Sullivan, a buzz-cut blond with a body like a slab of marbled beef and a social conscience as finely tuned as it was thoroughly disguised.

  I first met Joe when he was a beat cop patrolling North Sea—the scrub-oak-littered and formerly semi-squalid outer suburb of Southampton Village—and I was still a sloppy, overly compensated real-estate attorney. As things evolved, we got more and more enmeshed in the same cases, the same shared experiences, until it became a matter of routine, and along with that, a settled sense of mutual respect, if not out-and-out affection.

  Sullivan’s boss, on the other hand, was a whole different kettle of fish. Mutant fish, to stretch the analogy. When you first met Ross Semple, the chief of police, you immediately thought the guy was in the wrong job. What the right job would be was hard to tell. Maybe college professor or actuary or master of black ops for the CIA.

  Learning that he was widely considered one of the best in his ill-suited profession never quite shook that initial impression.

  So I had the usual mixed feelings when Sullivan said Ross wanted to meet with me after we chatted with Franco.

  “You and I will chat,” I said. “Franco will listen.”

  “Sure thing, Jackie,” he said, leading us along a familiar path through the squad room to a drab little conference room in the back. Sullivan chose it to stress the informality of the occasion, bypassing the official interrogation room with its one-way mirror and hard metal furniture. “What can I get you—water, coffee?”

  “We’re all set,” I said. “This won’t take long.”

  Joe went through the pretense of making us comfortable by holding our chairs and bringing in an unasked-for tray with glasses and a pitcher of water. If there’d been a stereo, we’d be listening to a little light jazz.

  “Heck of a winter we’re having,” he said to Franco as he sat at the table. “Must keep you busy over at Tad’s.”

  Franco gave a tight little smile, his lips literally sealed.

  “For the record, Mr. Raffini is here voluntarily to assist in the police investigation of Mr. Buczek’s death,” I said.

  “And we appreciate that, Mr. Raffini. We do.”

  From there, I gave a description of the night based on all the facts and events I understood the police to already know, in chronological order. Sullivan took notes, nodding along with the story. He asked Franco a few questions, most of which I answered for him, such as did he hear or see anything out of the ordinary before coming across the body in the snow.

  Franco shook his head and looked over at me.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “Nothing,” he told Sullivan. “There was just a lot of snow and wind, could hardly see or hear anything else.”

  “Did you call out his name when you were searching for him?”

  I gave him another go-ahead nod.

  “I wasn’t searching. I was heading over to the woodshed where Zina said Tad had gone to check things out. I figured I’d find him there shoveling the roof or propping up the walls. It wasn’t like Tad to walk away from a job until he was satisfied it was done. Even in a big storm.”

  Sullivan continued to write down notes, a lot of notes. I wondered if they said “All work and no play makes Tad a dull boy.”

  “How was your relationship with Tad?” he finally asked. “You guys get along?”

  “They got along fine,” I said. “That’s not what we’re here to discuss.”

  “Understood. How about Mrs. Buczek?” he said. “How’d you get along with her?”

  Franco sat as still as a statue.

  I stood up. “Okay, Detective. It’s been fun. Gotta run.”

  “Sit down, Jackie. You and I need to talk a little. Franco can wait for you in the lobby. Unless you don’t want to hear what I have to say.”

  Not much chance of that, I thought. So I sent a slightly rattled Franco out of the room and tried to look indifferent.

  “What?” I said.

  “You know he’s been boinking the Polish missus,” said Sullivan, not even looking up from his notepad.

  “Who told you that?”

  He looked at me indulgently. “Your boy’s been down this road before. Diddling some guy’s wife. Then the guy ends up dead.”

  “Totally inadmissible,” I said.

  “Not if the ADA can help it.”

  “Never happen.”

  “Why’d he move the body?” he asked.

  “He panicked.”

  “Over what?” he asked.

  “Like you said. He’s been down this road before. He thought he’d be implicated.”

  “He’s implicated anyway. So why move the body? Nobody does that for no reason.”

  “Does this mean he’s being charged?” I asked.

  “I’m waiting on forensics. The ADA wants more tangibles, but we’re dealing with the world’s lousiest crime scene. It’ll take too long.”

  By the ADA, he meant the assistant district attorney, the underling who actually did all the work in the District Attorney’s Office. I didn’t know what the DA actually did herself. I just knew she terrified me.

  “Franco’s not a flight risk,” I said.

  “The hell he isn’t. What does he have to lose?”

  “He doesn’t want to go back to prison.”

  “It’s looking bad, Jackie. As bad as these things get. Second-degree premeditated is the best you’re gonna get unless we started talking plea. And we can start talking anytime you want. Every hour t
hat goes by, the deal gets worse for you.”

  Sullivan was not an easy read, an important professional advantage. But it didn’t take an intuitive genius to figure out where this was going.

  “You’re not waiting on forensics. You knew all along you were charging him.”

  It was a crappy thing to do and he knew it.

  “The murder of a prominent local guy, even a nutbag like Tad, is serious business,” he said. “Ross does not want to lose control of this one.”

  “The ends justify the means.”

  “Unless you can tell me something I don’t know that would change my mind, Franco’s about to get his rights read. I didn’t have to give you this chance,” he added, maybe a bit defensively.

  I frantically ran through the facts and suppositions of the case, hoping the added pressure would squeeze out an important insight, but all it did was confirm what Sullivan was saying. Things were as bad as they could get.

  “I want copies of all the crime-scene photos and forensics reports,” I said.

  “Done.”

  “Let me talk to him,” I said. “One more time.”

  Sullivan left the room for a few moments, then came back with Franco, who was escorted by a uniformed officer. They closed the door and left us alone.

  “What’s going on, Jackie? They’re all looking at me out there.”

  “They’re gonna arrest you, Franco. For killing Tad Buczek.”

  His face fell so far I thought it would slide off his head and onto the floor.

  “Oh God, no.”

  “There’s so much circumstantial evidence, they don’t think they need forensics. They’re more afraid of you taking off than rushing into a botched case.”

  “You knew about this?” he asked, his dejection suddenly replaced by a flash of brilliant anger.

  I fought to keep my voice calmer than I felt. “I didn’t. I would never do such a thing. It would be stupid, immoral, and completely unethical. They fooled me, too. I’m sorry.”

  I don’t know if he believed me, but he looked like he wanted to. At that point, I was all he had. The loss would be too great.

  “I can’t make bail,” he said.

  “I’ll work on that. Right now, you really, really need to tell me everything you know. Or saw, or did. Anything that could influence how they write up the charge. And make it quick. We don’t have much time.”

  “I know I didn’t do it—does that count for anything?”

  I didn’t answer that. I just waited for him to run through whatever calculations were going on inside his head. It didn’t take long.

  “Tell them I’ll go willingly,” he said. “The world hates me anyway. Just throw me in a hole and leave me there till I die. You’ll all be better for it.”

  I sat with him while they read him his rights. He only looked at me during the part of Miranda where it says you have the right to an attorney. The look said, Fat load of good that did me. I kept my composure, for his sake, and to deny the regular cops the sight of me blowing my top. It wasn’t until they led him away in handcuffs that Ross Semple showed up, wearing his customary striped polyester shirt, conflicting tie, and bottle-bottom glasses. I waited until the door shut behind him.

  “Fuck you, Ross. You suck.”

  “Detective Sullivan had no choice. It was a direct order from me. He almost quit over it. He’s a good cop.”

  “Unlike you.”

  He held a manila folder under his arm and a lit Winston in his right hand. As far as anyone knew, Ross was the only public official on Long Island who still felt free to smoke in the office. It wasn’t that he hadn’t read the memo. No one had the guts to send it to him in the first place.

  “Raffini’s the guiltiest man in the world, and you know it.”

  “No, I don’t. And neither do you. All you have is circumstantial. With that blizzard, that’s bloody all you’ll get.”

  This seemed to amuse Ross, a response that nearly moved me from merely irate to irredeemably enraged.

  “Interesting choice of words. You did notice all the blood at the scene.”

  “Of course.”

  “But you didn’t notice all of it.”

  He offered me one of his cigarettes. I refused dismissively, despite the sudden surge of yearning.

  “It was dark and a little stormy,” I said. “Though you could see some blood under the top layer of snow.”

  “And ice.”

  “Ice? I guess so,” I said. “All I saw was bloody snow.”

  “As you say, the conditions were lamentable. You would have had to dig deeper into the drift to discover the bloody ice. The bigger chunks.”

  “I didn’t see any chunks. Where are we going with this?” I asked.

  Even my angry mind knew to pay attention when Ross was taking you on a little mental journey. The destination could be perilous.

  “We haven’t found the murder weapon, but we have something you might call the pre-murder weapon,” he said.

  “I don’t follow,” I said. “Maybe you could just tell me without the twenty-questions game.”

  “What fun is that? With all the blood, you wouldn’t know that the blow to the top of the head wasn’t what killed him. And it didn’t take an ME to see the lethal wound once it was washed off.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It was a big damn hole, right beneath the occipital bone, where the spine and brain stem converge. There are marks on the back of the neck that could be from a boot, but too vague to confirm. But the hole itself took some precision.”

  “With what?”

  “We don’t know. We’re more encouraged by what struck the original blow to the head. It was tossed about twenty feet from the scene. An eagle-eyed CSI saw a suspicious-looking depression, like a filled-in footprint, though off by itself.” He took a last draw off his cigarette and dropped the butt in one of the water glasses. “Did you know you can get fingerprints off an ice cube?”

  “No.”

  “Conditions have to be perfect. It has to be very cold. The ice can only be held for the briefest of moments. Just long enough for the oils in the fingers to leave an impression but not so long that the person’s body heat melts the little ridges beyond recognition. The next trick is to keep the ice frozen hard enough to dust and pull the prints. Who would have thought to bring frozen nitrogen in a big cooler into a snowstorm? Why, the wizards at the Suffolk County forensics lab. People here call them the creep geeks. Little do they know.”

  Ross would know, I thought. Terms like “creep” and “geek” would be very familiar to him.

  “I bet you’re eager to get to the point,” I said. “Lord knows I am.”

  He lit another cigarette, which he held by the tip and tried to make little smoke circles with. I’d seen him try this before. It hadn’t worked then, either.

  “It was a piece of ice, the biggest and heaviest at the scene,” he said. “One half covered in blood. The other, remarkably, showing three good-sized partials. Enough to make a conclusive identification.”

  “Hence the arrest,” I said, not wanting him to drag it out any more than he already had.

  “That’s right. Your amorous Latin. Franklin Delano Raffini.”

  5

  I know I had a reason for marrying Pete Swaitkowski, I just can’t remember what it was. Probably because I’m attributing a far more sophisticated motivation than existed at the time, an invention retroactively imposed in the years following his death.

  There’s a simpler explanation. He was a very handsome, kindly, and cheerful guy with a lot of money earned the same way Tad Buczek earned his: the conversion of potato plants into postmodern vacation homes. And he was the first to identify certain buttons of mine, which he pushed with effortless ease.

  His windfall came the year he graduated from college. The day after receiving his share of the family farm, the largest on the East End, he sold it. From then on he devoted his short, happy life to unencumbered bliss. Not in the chemical sense—h
e barely sniffed a drink, much less a spoon of cocaine, and his only sexual excess I’m pretty sure was with me (if he had any energy left after that, more power to him). His abiding state of delight was the natural kind, born of his good nature and, frankly, a mind unfettered by the demands of serious introspection.

  The only outsized indulgence he had, made possible by unearned wealth, was a top-of-the-line Porsche Carrera Roadster, which of course killed him when he drove it into a giant oak tree at 120 miles an hour.

  Though I’d always felt welcomed and accepted by his family, made up of his two parents, half a dozen siblings, and nearly countless aunts, uncles, and cousins, we hadn’t been married long enough for me to have been completely absorbed into the tribe. Soon after the funeral, I drifted away, and those relationships became confined to saying hi on the street or catching up for five minutes in the aisle of the grocery store.

  So I had some trepidation when I looked up his mother’s address, his father having passed away a few years before. She was the best choice anyway, being the former Paulina Buczek, Tad’s sister. The last I knew, she was living in a town house condominium in Southampton Village.

  She was still there. I had her phone number as well, but thought it better to just ring the doorbell. I’d learned long ago it’s far more difficult to put a person off when they’re standing on your doorstep than when you’re merely a voice at the end of the telephone line.

  That theory was sorely tested by Paulina.

  “Well, Jackie O’Dwyer,” she said to me, peering into my face through thick, square-framed glasses, her mouth set in an uncommitted straight line. “Fancy that.”

  “I’m awful sorry about Tad. I was there the night they found him.”

  She looked more or less as I’d last seen her. Her hair was a different color, nothing found in nature—a sort of mahogany red leaning toward magenta. It was stacked on the top of her head, held in place by invisible, unnatural means of support. Her jaw still had its hard angles, though the rest of her had bulked up considerably. Her hands, thicker than most men’s, still proudly testified to the brutal labors of her early potato farmer’s life.

  “So they tell me,” she said. “You were there with the fellow that killed him,” she added with something less than condemnation, but not much.