Ice Cap: A Mystery (Jackie Swaitkowski Mysteries)

by Chris Knopf

  I disagreed. “That some may find this a nice setup doesn’t devalue the quality of the complaint.”

  She brightened at that. “That sounded so nice. I want to learn to speak like you. Do they teach you that in legal school?”

  “I was an English major in college. And it helps to be born here. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t improve your language skills. With your resources you could hire a private tutor. Or just go back to school.”

  “I have a college degree. In economics. That surprises you?”

  It did, but I wasn’t going to let it show.

  “Not at all. Explains why Franco said you were so bored. And lonely.”

  Technically, I’d just violated my client’s confidence, but she’d served up too good an opening to pass up. Franco wouldn’t be the only one who could make the same observation. It was only a teeny little violation to ascribe it to him.

  “He tell you that?” she asked, I thought warmly.

  “So, did you and Franco talk much?”

  Her expression stayed close to neutral, but she didn’t answer right away. She did, however, rub the top of her thigh again as if flattening invisible creases in her synthetic pants. I tried not to read too much into it.

  “A little. Franco is a very intelligent man with a fine education. Only, you wouldn’t know that. He keep a low profile.”

  “Okay, Zina, I have to ask this if we’re going to talk about Franco.” As if she was the one who brought him up. “Do you think he could have killed Tad?”

  She shook her head very slowly, though without hesitation.

  “No reason. He was grateful for the job. And Tad was not a bad boss. You can ask Freddy. He’s worked for Tad for twenty years. Tough, but fair. They always knew where they stood.”

  “Sometimes the reason’s not so obvious.”

  “I thought you were on his side?” she said with a hint of levity. “No, no reason. I think he almost liked Tad. They got drunk together a few times. Freddy can’t. He’s triple-A.”

  “Two A’s. Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  This would have been an appropriate time to bring up her affair with Franco, but I was afraid that might shut down the conversation. It would have to come out eventually, since the cops had the same story. I just didn’t want her to associate the disclosure with me if I could avoid it. Not when I wanted her to keep talking.

  “The night Tad was killed, you said there was no place for you. Nowhere to hide.”

  She stiffened, not unlike the way she had that night, and looked away from me, toward one of the big living-room windows.

  “It was just silly talk,” she said. “I was unhappy in Kraków. I never thought I belong there. And now I don’t belong here, either. It means nothing.”

  I still considered myself a newcomer to the legal game, even though I’d been at it for almost fifteen years. But that was long enough to know that when a client or witness says something means nothing, it usually means something.

  I was still loath to push her beyond her limits, but not all of me was on the side of restraint. So I just said it.

  “If you’re sure Franco didn’t kill Tad, who did?” I asked.

  She didn’t like the question, but took little time to answer.

  “The whole world knows Tad had many enemies. This is what happens when a man enjoys making other people angry. The more enemies he could get, the happier he was. He told me that himself.”

  “Would you share that in court?” I asked.

  That one slowed her down, but she finally said, “You just tell the truth, right?”

  I said that was right, though I spared her the details of cross-examination. That could also come in due time.

  I heard the sound of clattering dinnerware coming from the hall Zina had just been down. It was a tea cart, transporting wine bottles and glasses and a tray filled with biszkopty and paluszki, the Polish equivalent of finger food. It was pushed by a tall woman with long, poorly attended, wavy brown hair. She had large hands at the end of long arms, an effect reinforced by her sloping posture. She wore a blue cotton dress—not quite a uniform, but leaning that way. Slim on the whole, she had a little potbelly that seemed to match her slouch.

  Obviously Saline, but as with Freddy, I wasn’t sure if I remembered her.

  Zina ignored her until she’d wheeled the cart up to the coffee table and disgorged some of the load. When she offered me a glass of wine, I demurred but introduced myself.

  “I’m Jackie Swaitkowski,” I said, holding out my hand. She took it.

  “I know. Peter’s wife. I’m Saline Lumsden,” she said, casting a sidelong glance at Zina. “We talked a long time ago. You don’t remember.”

  I could see echoes of Pete’s father drifting around her face. Even a bit of Pete himself, which was a little unnerving.

  “His widow, technically,” I said with a weak smile.

  “Sure. I knew that. I liked Pete.”

  “Everybody liked Pete.”

  “Thank you, Saline,” said Zina. “Everything looks very good.”

  It was a tidy balance between acknowledgement and dismissal. Saline kept her attention on me as she took a few more things off the cart. With no coffee in sight, I accepted a cup of black tea that looked, in fact, black.

  “I thought Pete made the right choice with you, no matter what anybody said.”

  There was a statement to make you feel good and bad in equal measure. I chose to lean toward the good.

  “Thanks, Saline. We had a few really good years.”

  She looked over at Zina again, knowing she’d overspent her stay. Zina looked away, and quickly after that Saline dragged the noisy cart back down the hallway. I gave in to the allure of the paluszki, though likely reheated. When Pete was around, I’d totally fallen in love with the buttery, mashed-potato-like stuff.

  “Twenty years is a long time to work for anybody,” I said. “Was Saline here the whole time?”

  “Saline was here first. Freddy come a few years after that. I think of them as built into the house. Like they been here since the farm grew out of the ground. It’s not up to me, no matter what I think.”

  “Though you own it all now,” I said. “It’s entirely up to you.”

  She dropped her head back on the couch and slid her right hand across the upper part of her chest, as if bracing against imminent emotional threats.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “It’s all so strange.”

  I drank some of the tea. It was thick and bitter.

  “I’m sorry, Zina. I know what it’s like to have a dead husband. It’s so damn permanent.”

  She uncurled herself from the couch, stood up, and stretched in fully natural feline fashion, then settled back down, feet on the floor.

  “If he’s going to leave you, maybe this is the best way,” she said. “At least no one else can have him.”

  She didn’t exactly tell me the interview was over, but the climate in the living room took on a seasonal chill. I put down the tea and thanked her for talking to me, which she acknowledged with a lazy wave of her hand, and left.

  6

  When I got back outside, it was still a brilliant, frigid day. I was glad to get what I could from Zina, though the conversation left me feeling more than a little disquieted. I looked around for Freddy but didn’t see him. There were tire tracks in the snow leading away from the house down an extension of the driveway that connected to another, smaller, house, where Franco, Saline, and Freddy all lived, if my recollections from family gatherings were correct. I was tempted to go that way, but after the talk with Zina, I didn’t feel up to it.

  Instead, I drove back toward the road, stopping at the big pergola. The area off the driveway that Dayna had plowed was only slightly covered in new snow, so I pulled in and put the running Volvo in park. I got out and retraced the lumpy, well-trod path under the pergola and over to the picnic table. The area looked larger and the table smaller in the daylight. The only telltale sign o
f the night’s events was a balled-up wad of yellow police tape. I put it in my pocket and followed the path up the grade to Hamburger Hill.

  I tried to read the snowed-over disturbances in the snow, but it was too chaotic. I guessed right on where Franco found the body, brushing aside the top layer to reveal the bloody ice underneath. But I could only imagine where the CSIs found the big chunk of ice. I looked at the tracks that led into the scene from the opposite direction, where Franco had first approached, and then went back again to get the blue tarp. I tried to count the footsteps as I had that night, but realized after all the new rain and snow, it was now nearly impossible.

  Hamburger Hill also loomed larger in the harsh sunlight. I looked up and saw two of the lateral members of the sprinkler mobile, one to either side of the scene. The heat of the sun on the burnished metal had apparently melted off any snow that might have collected. So I could see they were basically long, crumpled pipes with boxes at the ends where the water sprayed out.

  Not what you’d call a stunning work of art, but I’d seen uglier things in the Guggenheim Museum.

  Even under ideal circumstances, crime scenes rarely tell you exactly what happened, as good as the CSIs are these days. But I always felt that science wasn’t the only way to communicate with these places. It was probably all spooky imaginings based on what had happened there, yet I usually had the sense that if you just tried to listen, it would tell you something.

  So I stood there until the arctic breeze began to burn off my nose, but nothing spoke to me except to say I was acting like an idiot.

  It was only when I was getting into my car that a message arrived, not from spectral sources but my own brain.

  “Dammit, Franco, what are you not telling me?”

  * * *

  When I got back to my office, there was a message on my answering machine from Dayna Red.

  “Somebody named Detective Sullivan wants to talk to me,” her message said. “What do I do? I’m supposed to call him back before the end of the day.”

  She left her cell-phone number, which I immediately called. When I reached her, she told me she had yet to call Sullivan back.

  “Not without talking to you,” she said. “Not like you’re my lawyer or anything, I just don’t want to mess this up.”

  “You did exactly the right thing, Dayna. And I really appreciate it. They’ve arrested Franco. The arraignment’s tomorrow. It’s only a preliminary hearing, but they can do some real damage even before the indictment is passed up.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jackie, but it sounds interesting.”

  “The point is they’ll want to get your statement before tomorrow, hoping it helps the ADA go for some crazy high bail number. My firm can handle almost anything, though I’ll need the okay from my boss. Whatever happens, it’ll be way above my authorization level.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Call him back and set a time to meet at your place. I’ll be there a half hour ahead and we’ll go from there.”

  “A half hour?”

  “That’s when he’ll actually show up. I know the guy. Don’t worry, he’s okay despite what it might look like. Just tell the truth about what you witnessed, as best you can. I’m only there to keep my eye on things. I like the guy, but sometimes police investigators can practice selective listening.”

  We decided on a time and she gave me directions to her place, easily identified by a sign on one of the main roads through Sagaponack, an incorporated village inside the Town of Southampton, and by some measures the wealthiest zip code in the United States.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said, reading my mind. “You’ll see when you get here.”

  * * *

  By this time nearly all the roads in the area had been plowed, at least enough to allow one car through at a time. You could tell by the haphazard performance of some of the crews how unfamiliar they were with big snowfalls. It was made worse by continuing cold temperatures, which restrained the usual melt-off. On my way over to Dayna’s I felt lost inside deep white valleys, peppered as they were with sand and gravel, making me fear for the Volvo’s side panels should I slip or slide.

  Harry blamed it all on global warming, and I made him explain how too much warmth caused the Hamptons to get too cold, but the explanation became so confusing I made him stop.

  “By that reckoning, if they cool things down too much, we could turn into Ecuador,” I said.

  “Not necessarily,” said Harry.

  “Okay. Stop.”

  As promised, a tidy little engraved sign at the end of Dayna’s driveway announced SPECIALTY HARDWOODS. SALVAGED AND PLANTATION GROWN ONLY. It was a long driveway, thoroughly plowed, past a field to the right and a stand of naked oaks, maples, and dogwood to the left. As she’d told me, the house and a barn where she stored and prepped her products were toward the back behind the woods. Both the house and barn were painted a deep, rich red. Scattered throughout the setting were mature maples, oaks, and one towering evergreen that turned out to be a cryptomaria, some sort of gargantuan cedar from Japan. Gates, fences, and pergolas like Tad Buczek’s testified to various garden areas currently buried beyond recognition in deep snow.

  A black-and-white border collie met me at my car door.

  “Well, hello there,” I said to the dog. “Are you the official greeter?”

  The collie let me pet her head, then turned and ran toward the barn, stopping after about twenty yards to look back at me. When she saw me following, she ran on. I had yet to reach a side door at the end of the path when the collie ran back again to make sure the dumb human hadn’t gotten lost.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I said.

  The door opened and Dayna stepped out.

  “Good girl, Misty, you brought me another one,” she said. “You probably didn’t know I cooked up people in the barn,” she said to me. “This wood thing is just a front.”

  “Wait’ll you get a hold of Joe Sullivan. Feed you for the whole winter.”

  Inside the barn was nothing but wood. The structure itself was hand-hewn chestnut post and beam, as was the floor. The planks between the posts were wide-board hemlock, all original from the eighteenth century. Dayna told me the outside was sheathed in another layer of new western cedar, stained red.

  Along every wall were racks filled with thick slabs of wood in various stages of refinement. In the middle of the floor were massive olive drab machines used for cutting, planing, and joining the planks. These dated back to the thirties and forties, Dayna said, when her husband’s grandfather first started in the lumber business.

  “Jeffrey’s dad bought all the spare parts he could get when they stopped making these things,” said Dayna, brushing dust off a pair of coveralls. Unlike the ones she wore the other night, these were bright red and made of lighter-weight material. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and under the golden incandescent light inside the barn, her face looked younger, her bright blue eyes kindly and vaguely amused. “Otherwise, I’d never be able to keep them going. Better than new, of course. A lot heavier and truer once they’re set up. That’s the hard part.”

  “Jeffrey’s your husband?” I asked.

  “Yup. He inherited all this.”

  “Cool. Does he work here, too?”

  She smiled at me like women do when they’re about to fill you in on their husbands, boyfriends, or lovers—current and ex.

  “Jeffrey doesn’t work,” she said. “His only job is surfing, at present somewhere on the north coast of Oahu.”

  “Interesting gig.”

  “Five years ago he sold Southampton the development rights to the farm and announced he was going to travel around the world and surf for the rest of his life. I could come along if I wanted, though he couldn’t guarantee he’d stay faithful, what with all the surfer chicks hanging around all the time.”

  “Sure. What’s a man to do?” I said.

  “To his credit, he agreed to stay married so
I could still live here. The town has to wait till we’re both dead before they get the place, which I’m responsible for keeping up, so it works out for everybody.”

  “Except you’re out a husband,” I said, as much of a question as a statement.

  “Like I said, works out for everybody,” said Dayna, her blue eyes somehow catching a glint of light from the surrounding ruddy glow.

  We retired to her office, where I gave Dayna my five-minute briefing on “How to Talk to Cops” (look them in the eye; keep your answers short, to the point, and unwavering; always tell the truth, unless you can’t, in which case shut up and don’t lie). During all this Misty had me lobbing her a sawdust-encrusted tennis ball, which she caught in her mouth despite the close quarters, only to bring it right back and drop it in my lap for a repeat performance.

  “Does she ever get tired of this?” I asked Dayna.

  “What do you think?”

  Sullivan showed up soon after that. He was wearing camouflage pants tucked into paratrooper boots and a black sweater. A black baseball hat covered his blond crew cut, completing the look of a Special Forces commando recently returned from behind enemy lines. I resisted the urge to salute.

  He introduced himself to Dayna, then ruffled the fur on Misty’s head before ordering her in a calm, firm voice to go lie down, which she instantly did. Dayna looked impressed. She offered coffee and we accepted.

  After she left the office, Sullivan said, “Nice to see you.”

  “I’m sure,” I said. “And no, I won’t go lie down in the corner.”

  He took off his hat, scratched his head, and put it back on again.

  “That thing yesterday that Ross had me do,” he said. “I told him, never again.”

  “Understood.”

  “He’s really got a bug up his butt about this one.”

  “Ross was born with a bug up his butt,” I said.

  “Ross takes everything that happens in Southampton personally. You know that. He read the case files and thinks you did a disservice getting Franco an early release.”