Short Squeeze

by Chris Knopf

  “Then why did I give up on you?” I said.

  “We don’t know for certain that you did. I’d say you were up in the air, and I left town before you could make up your mind.”

  I made a sound I hoped conveyed approval without commitment and slouched deeper into the overstuffed cushions. I told him he was saving my life, or at least my day.

  “You can save my night tonight,” I told him. “As promised.”

  I dragged myself out of the hole in the couch and into the shower. Soon after, reasonably restored, I made it out the door only a half hour later than the deadline I set for work days, mostly honored in the breach.

  After sitting at a long traffic light, I was about to turn right onto Montauk Highway when I looked to my left at the big bank on the corner. It gave me an idea, so I turned left instead, which offended the guy behind me who’d foolishly believed my right turn signal. I rolled down my window and waved, saying sorry too quietly for him, but loud enough for my conscience.

  Harbor Trust was the biggest bank on the East End. Like every bank these days, it was the product of recurring waves of consolidation, still ongoing. The names on the outside changed, and the buildings got nicer, but the people inside were all pretty much the same people who’d been there all along.

  Along with agents and buyers, banks were part of the holy trinity of real-estate law. A bank was usually indispensible to the process, even though cash deals are more common in the Hamptons than elsewhere. Consequently, I got to know a few bankers.

  One of them was Elvin Graveley, who was neither elfish nor grave. He looked like he’d lost his hair in the first grade, giving him the impetus to wear thick black-framed glasses and grow a hefty paunch, completing the stereotype. He had a nice nose, however, something I rarely noticed on people, though Elvin didn’t give you much else to focus on with pleasure. A nice nose and a ready smile, if you took the trouble to notice.

  I found him at his station, a large mahogany desk at the back of the bank behind a privacy screen made of frosted glass.

  “Hey, Elvin. How’s the money game?” I asked, thrusting out my hand so abruptly, it forced him back in his chair.

  “Hey, blondie, money game’s good. Looking for some?”

  “Sure. How ’bout a few hundred thousand I don’t have to give back.”

  “We can do that. You book the flight to Rio while I start on the paperwork.”

  “Rio’s no good. Can’t speak a word of Portuguese.”

  “Then the deal’s off. Embezzlers only get to fly down to Rio. Bank rules.”

  “Pity. Can I buy you a cup of coffee instead?”

  He peered at me through his thick lenses.

  “You only buy me coffee when you want something from me.”

  I was honestly offended.

  “Not true. I buy you coffee just for the hell of it all the time. It’s only later I think of something I want from you.”

  “I’ll get my jacket.”

  We risked our lives running across Montauk Highway to get to one of those local places overlooked by the cars and trucks heading east in the morning—desperate to escape the traffic and get on the job—and ignored by the counterflow ten hours later, when minds were more focused on beer than caffeine.

  The proprietors had worked hard to reinforce their clandestine status, refusing to post a single sign, unless you counted the local fund-raising posters yellowing in the window. Yet there were always about five or six people in the place whenever I went there with Elvin, and I don’t think they were the same people every time.

  They gave you a wide choice of coffees: regular and decaf, with or without cream and sugar. If you bought two cups up front, at a discounted price, it was a bottomless cup after that. Maybe this kind of merchandising wizardry solved the need for additional promotion.

  The old lady with the jet-black hair who ran the floor set us up with the first of our two coffees, which I insisted she bring sequentially. I also bought a plate of eggs and bacon for Elvin and a bagel for me, which I used as a delivery system for giant wads of Philadelphia Cream Cheese.

  “A full breakfast,” said Elvin. “You must really want something.”

  “It hurts me a little that you think that,” I said sincerely.

  “It shouldn’t. I like it when attractive women buy me off. Just don’t tell my wife.”

  “Okay,” I said, “here’s what I want. The complete bank records for Elizabeth and Sergey Pontecello going back as far as you can. And the contents of their safe-deposit box.”

  We both enjoyed the joke.

  “The dead guy? You know I can’t do that, Jackie. What do you really want?”

  “How close can you get?” I asked.

  “Not close at all. That information is completely confidential. I can’t even look at it unless I’m on official bank business. Especially when it’s all tied up in probate. If I revealed anything without the administrator’s permission I’d get fired. And then prosecuted. And then tarred and feathered. Or maybe that comes first.”

  “The police are going to show up with a subpoena.”

  His curiosity ticked up a notch.

  “That’s different. But not for me to deal with. That’s the manager’s business. How do you know they’re going to show up?”

  “Sergey’s not just a dead guy. He’s a murder victim. The cops need to know his financial situation. It takes them a little while to get the paperwork together, but you can expect them at any minute.”

  “Like I said, the manager’s business.”

  “But he doesn’t actually pull the records and stick them in an envelope. Somebody has to physically do that. Like you.”

  Elvin had that look of incredulity I so often bring out in people.

  “That sure as hell wouldn’t be me. I write mortgages. I hardly know how to get money out of my own account.”

  “I don’t want you to do anything even remotely improper,” I said, clear enough for witnesses to hear.

  “Hm.”

  “I just think if you happened to chat with whoever does pull the records, you might hear something interesting. Nothing improper about a little chitchat.”

  Elvin shook his head.

  “You don’t get how this works, do you? This information is going to be pulled by someone barely a notch above a regular teller. Like a supervisor, somebody who can gather it up without a lot of questions. These people stare at numbers all day long. Unless you ask them to look for something specific, those numbers mean absolutely nothing. The person will go into account files, click on little boxes, download a barrel of data to print out or put on a CD, depending on what the cops want. And that’s that. Nobody looks at anything, and even if they did, it wouldn’t mean anything to them without a frame of reference.”

  “Poo.”

  Elvin took a mouthful of his bacon and eggs. “Unless they had a personal banker,” he said.

  He could see my mood, about to slip into dejection, suddenly revive.

  “I like the sound of that. Personal banker. What’s that?”

  “Our better customers, which means the ones with the most money, are assigned an individual who oversees all their bank business. Mostly moving money in and out, wire transfers, but sometimes managing investments, trusts, even life insurance. It’s called a concierge service, which should give you the idea.”

  “So it includes dry cleaning and tickets to Les Miz.”

  “If there’s enough money in it, probably. If the Pontecellos had a personal banker, he or she would know everything about their account. In intimate detail. And before you get too excited, personal bankers treat client confidentiality like the Air Force treats the nuclear code.”

  I moved off the subject so Elvin could finish his breakfast in peace, easing the possibility of severe heartburn. I worked on eating the cream cheese off the bagel with a fork.

  “You could maybe find out if the Pontecellos had such a person and give me the name. That can’t be so terrible,” I said as I picke
d up the check and grandly folded it around a twenty-dollar bill.

  He grinned at me, I want to think affectionately.

  “I could do that under the guise of innocent curiosity. An unfireable offense, even at a bank. And the same defense will get me past Saint Peter, because in fact, I am a little curious. Though maybe not so innocent.”

  “You’re a devil,” I said, which broadened the grin enough to convince me some affection was involved.

  As soon as I got back in my car I called Joe Sullivan and left a message on his voice mail. By now he’d know I was running out ahead of him on his case. He wouldn’t like that. Actually, he’d hate that. He was very methodical and a little slow off the mark, but I was no more than one step ahead. The only way to stay on this was to feed him information that he might be able to use and at least give the appearance of full and free cooperation.

  Anyway, as the victim of an attack myself, I had an excuse for bugging him. I knew he’d be working it as hard as he could, but it never hurts to keep top of mind.

  His voice mail budgeted about two minutes a call, so it took a few installments to bring him up to where I was that morning, just leaving Harbor Bank.

  “I’m guessing Sergey didn’t have a pot to piss in,” I said into the phone. “His sister-in-law held their house as collateral against a big loan, which might have given her standing to kick him out after all. I’m also guessing he had an account at Harbor Trust, where he might have had a personal banker. They might be broke now, but they used to have money, and that comes with a personal banker. I’m getting his or her name. I think you should maybe drag the poor dweeb into an interrogation room to scare out the nuances, so to speak. And before you start yelling at me about telling you how to do your job, these are just suggestions. Excellent suggestions, I might add. And you could repay me by letting me listen in on the interview. It might actually help, which you know is all I want to do.”

  That’s as far as I got before the voice mail timed out again. The beep almost sounded like it was sick of hearing me talk. It was a wise machine. Another few minutes and I’d have sold past the close, as I often do.

  9

  My office in Water Mill was my new favorite place on earth. First off, it was a real office I have to drive to like an adult, not stagger into wearing my pajamas like I did when I worked out of my house. It has my name on a little aluminum plate screwed to the door above the name of the dour surveyors who share the second floor with me. I had the top spot, which I imagined irked the surveyors, though we never talked about it.

  I’d still managed to infuse the atmosphere with a little of my domestic charm. There were lots of windows to let in fresh air and light up the overstuffed furniture, a coffeemaker, and a tiny refrigerator just big enough to hold white wine and light cream. There were also a few extra things stacked around to complete the homey feel but not enough yet to overwhelm the space completely.

  Sam said it was more like a landfill than an office, though you can’t give too much credence to a guy whose house made a Shinto temple look like cluttered heap.

  I spent most of the day trying to catch up on all the client work I’d let slip while chasing down the Wolsonowicz family and being chased by killer pickups. This is where an Irish Catholic upbringing really shows its worth. There’s no such thing as a casual responsibility with me. Once I tell someone I’m going to do something, it becomes an Obligation. A Sacred Trust. A Covenant Sanctioned by God. The scale of the Obligation is irrelevant. I put the same dedication into dropping your letter in the mailbox as I do into clearing the title on your new million-dollar house. Or keeping your sorry ass out of state penitentiary.

  So I think it’s only fair, given my commitment to managing a person’s legal affairs, that I get a little wiggle room as to when that management actually takes place. Some people invest way too much importance in things like timing and schedules. Sure, you have to get to the station on time, but is that the only train that’ll get you where you want to go?

  I plowed through nearly the whole backlog before the middle of the afternoon, when I gave myself a well-earned pause for nicotine, coffee, and a good stare at the windmill across the street. I’d forwarded both my phones into voice mail, so I also checked for messages. One was from Sam.

  “Call me,” he said, and hung up.

  So I did.

  “Do you know a woman named Edna Jackery?” he said, instead of saying hello.

  “Do you know who you’re talking to?” I asked.

  “Jackie Swaitkowski. Or somebody using her phone.”

  “Who’s Edna Jackery?”

  “The owner of the nipple. The former owner.”

  I’d forgotten about the nipple. Probably pushed it out of my mind. Only so many grim images you can retain at a single time.

  “Wow. How’d you find that out?” I asked.

  “Suffolk County forensics. They had a tissue sample on file.”

  “Isn’t that sort of confidential?”

  “The M.E. is an acquaintance of mine. He owed me a favor. It’s pretty fresh information. Sullivan will get the report tomorrow.”

  “So I’ll act surprised when he tells me.”

  “If he tells you,” said Sam. “The cops don’t usually make a habit of sharing investigative information with civilians.”

  “I’m not a civilian. I’m an officer of the court.”

  “You near your computer?” he asked.

  “I’m looking right at it. I guess that’s near.”

  “See what you can find out about Edna Jackery. The M.E. told me she was a hit-and-run. That’s all I know. I’ll hold.”

  I often thought the only reason Sam cared about me was because I looked up information for him on the Internet. He used to be a big-shot tech-head till he went off the rails and got himself fired. You’d think he’d have his own computer. Maybe he would if I didn’t always do what he wanted. Jackie the Luddite enabler.

  It took a few moments to log on to my favorite browser and go to a site that archived local news. Sam took it all as patiently as ever, which means not at all. I could hear him huffing into the phone.

  “Just hold your horses,” I said. “This doesn’t happen instantaneously.”

  “Then what the hell good is it?”

  I watched the hoped-for information fill the screen.

  “ ‘Edna Jackery,’ ” I read from the news report, “ ‘forty-two and the single mother of a teenage son, was declared dead at Southampton Hospital, where she was taken after suffering multiple injuries after being struck by a hit-and-run vehicle on County Road Thirty-nine on Thursday night. The police are actively investigating and say there is limited information on the series of events leading to the woman’s death.’ ”

  “When was this?” Sam asked.

  “About a year ago,” I said, then kept reading. “ ‘Edna Jackery was an employee of Sydney’s Snack and Scuba Shop, also located on County Road Thirty-nine, where she was a bookkeeper and occasional cashier. She reportedly worked late that night, and police speculate that she decided to walk home after failing to start her 1997 Chevrolet Malibu, which apparently had a dead battery.’ There’s a bunch of other stuff about the survivors, and what a good mother she was, and the memorial service, and the rest of the usual.”

  I looked for more recent articles, but there was only one, which said the police had yet to track down the hit-and-run driver.

  “If Edna Jackery died at Southampton Hospital, Markham would’ve been the one to declare, am I right?” I asked Sam.

  “If he was there, and when isn’t he?”

  “You can ask him what happened to her nipple.”

  “I’m not asking him,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m on my way to the Pequot to eat fish, drink vodka, and crack a new physics text from the library. See if I can bring a little certainty to Werner Heisenberg.”

  “I don’t know how you read stuff like that. It makes my hair hurt.”

  �
��Tell me what you find out,” he said. “I’ll do the same.”

  “Certainly.”

  My new car was still where I parked it. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be, but I was feeling overly protective.

  As predicted, Markham was at the helm of the Southampton Hospital ER. The woman who sat in a little glass booth just inside the double doors, through which I’d recently been wheeled, examined me carefully when I asked to see him, looking for blood or evidence of blunt-force trauma.

  “Dr. Fairchild is on the surgical floor on a consult. How important is this?” she asked.

  “It’s regarding a murder investigation,” I said, hoping that sounded important enough.

  She seemed unhappy about it, but picked up the phone and murmured into it for a few minutes. Then she looked up at me.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Jackie Swaitkowski. He knows me.”

  Still looking at me, she listened and nodded and pointed to the waiting room.

  “Any relation to Pete Swaitkowski?” she asked.

  “Widow.”

  “Oh. Sorry. My sister had a terrible crush on him in high school. I guess you’re the one who caught the fish.”

  “More like a bird,” I said, and went to sit down. I’d had this exchange a few hundred times since Pete and I got married. Nobody could argue with Pete’s looks. Or his gentle, good-natured smile and eagerness to do whatever dopey thing anybody else thought would be fun. He’d walk in a room and all the gay men and heterosexual women would drop dead in love. I finally got used to it when I realized he was oblivious to the whole thing. Probably assumed it happened to everybody.

  Half an hour later, the woman in the booth waved to me and told me to meet Markham in the canteen.

  “I didn’t know you were in the employ of the police,” he said as I approached. He was sitting at a table with a half dozen cups of yogurt, apparently purchased from one of the vending machines.

  “I’m not. The victim was one of my clients.”

  “And one of mine?” he asked.

  “Sergey Pontecello. Found in a bloody heap in the middle of the road.”