by Chris Knopf
“Not specifically. The gist was I wasn’t going to force him out of his house no matter how much I tried to”—she searched the air for the recollection of his words—“frighten him, disgust him, intimidate him. I do remember wondering what he could have meant by those things. I was never anything but civil to Sergey, despite his own fulminations. I certainly hadn’t tried to frighten the poor man away. Though I suppose that might have been easily done.”
I stood up and walked a few paces around the room, unable to control the sudden gush of energy flooding my nerves.
“After he stopped pounding on the doors, Mrs. Wolsonowicz, what happened?”
She struggled to recall an evening she likely preferred to forget.
“This is going to sound strange, but I actually thought I heard him bellowing at me from outside my window. I know that’s impossible, but that’s what I thought at the time. There were a few other sounds, and I was about to go look, but when they stopped, I went back to my book.”
Since I was already on my feet, I kept walking—out of the room, through the front door, and around to the back of the house. Ray was still up there, scraping and filling in holes. A section of roof shingle, where the rope connected to the boson’s chair passed over the ridge of the house, was torn away. I walked back to the other side and got a better look at the yew directly behind the truck. A large piece of the bush was turning brown. I picked up the top branches and saw where many of the lower branches were split and broken away. Some had been tied up in an attempt to keep some shape to the bush.
I went around to the front of the truck and saw for the first time that he’d installed two slabs of heavy timber in place of the bumper. It was freshly sanded and varnished,
I went back to Zander and called up to him.
“Come on down, Ray. We need to talk.”
“I can hear you okay.”
“Come on down.”
He put the handle of the putty knife in his pocket and dug the remote control out of his pocket. He kept his eyes toward the ground as he made his descent. I stepped back to give him plenty of room.
“Do me a favor and get out of that thing for a second, would you?” I asked him.
It made him unhappy, but he did as I asked.
I examined the boson’s chair, which was actually a webbing made from extremely heavy canvas to which equally heavy nylon lines were attached. Originally off-white, it was now a soiled beige with various stains and scars. A large section, comprising most of the lower strap that gripped the operator’s butt, had been patched with new-looking material.
I dropped it to the ground and walked over to Zander and shoved him in the chest with both hands, with as much force as my increasingly hysterical nervous system would allow. It knocked him back a few steps, but he stayed on his feet.
“Hey, lady. What the Christ?” he said.
“What did you do, Ray?” I yelled at him. “Did you go on a bender that night, what, in the woods over there, or in one of the outbuildings? Alone, huh? So none of your boys could take away your keys?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
I took my phone out of my pocket and hit one of the speed dials. Zander watched, heated and confused.
“Joe,” I said when he answered. “I’m talking to Ray Zander at the Wolsonowicz place. Send somebody quick. If anything happens to me, it’s him.” Then I flipped the phone shut.
“When did you realize you hadn’t reeled in the hoist?” I asked. “The next morning? Or along the way?”
He took a step toward me. I stepped back.
“I want to think you blacked out like usual,” I said, “so you didn’t remember stopping the truck when you noticed it was handling funny. Getting out and seeing the line, following it back in the dark to where Sergey was lying in the road torn to shreds. I want to think he was dead by then and that you didn’t steal his last chance at survival.”
He looked like a man trying to make a quick decision, weighing the options. He wasn’t tall, but his arms were ropy and his hands coarse and gnarled from years of hard, dirty work. I wouldn’t be much of a challenge, and this time there were no handy giants waiting in the wings. He took a step toward me.
“Hurting me isn’t going to change anything,” I said. “Just make it worse for you. What’ll help is telling me what happened.” I checked my watch. “You got maybe five minutes, tops, before the patrol car gets here. Onetime offer.”
“You gonna defend me?”
“Hell no.”
“Then I got nothing to lose,” he said, moving a little closer, his face a blank wall.
I scolded myself again for improperly managing timing and conditions when confronting desperate drunks and criminals.
“Use your head, Ray. You heard me call the cops.”
What I wanted to say is, if you lay a hand on me, my friends will run you down like a dog, and if you aren’t dead when they’re done with you, you’ll wish you were.
“Okay,” I said, instead. “I’ll defend you.”
He stopped his advance.
“You mean it?”
I nodded enthusiastically. “What you heard me just say is legally binding. It’s canonized in English Common Law. If I violate it, it’d be like violating the Universal Code of Legal Ethics. I’d be instantly disbarred.”
He liked the sound of that.
“That’s like it should be,” he said.
“So now you can tell me in complete confidence what happened. Tell me everything.”
Remorse crept back into his expression.
“I don’t know, exactly. Like you said, I didn’t see anything until the next day, with the chair all torn up and bloody at the end of the line. Wasn’t till the news of Mr. Pontecello got out that it crossed my mind. But nobody said anything, so I figured lay low and it’ll blow over. Then you show up over here asking all kinds of crap. Later on, when I seen your Toyota go by, I thought I’d just follow you for a while, but then something took over me. I been drinkin’ a little, of course. Wouldn’t’ve hit you otherwise, I swear. I’m not like that.”
“What are you like, Ray? Do you even know yourself?”
He looked over my shoulder, suddenly even more crestfallen. A Southampton Town Police patrol car, lights flashing, streaked across the lawn. Ray watched with wide eyes, as if expecting to be run over where he stood. The car stopped instead and Danny Izard jumped out, his right hand snapping open the safety strap on his holster. I told him I was okay but to keep an eye on Zander until Joe Sullivan arrived. I told him he’d just confessed to killing Sergey Pontecello and trying to kill me, which wasn’t technically what he’d done, but there wasn’t time for a nuanced explanation.
Not that I had much to worry about. As soon as he was approached, Zander stood with his hands out in front of him, waiting to be cuffed.
After Danny Izard ran through Miranda, I said, “All that stuff about the Universal Code of Ethics? Pure bullshit. Get your own goddamn lawyer.”
Sullivan flew in a few minutes after that. I ran through the chain of events as I saw them. I gave him the toothbrush and showed him where I thought Riverhead would find the physical evidence to support the case. Partway through the process, Eunice appeared, standing at a distance, her arms wrapped in a knit shawl against the cooling breeze, watching intently. After I was done with Sullivan, I could have filled her in, but I didn’t feel like it.
“All the guy wanted to do was brush his teeth in his own bathroom,” I said to her, but she was too far away to hear.
24
I’m not sure why I wanted to do this, but there I was, floating in the Little Peconic Bay with Harry and Sam. Perhaps because I was the only one in the group who could actually float on her own. They weren’t only lousy swimmers; life jackets were all that kept them from sinking like lead statues.
Thus I had a physical advantage for the first time, a certain leveling of the playing field, psychologically at least.
Sam’s girlf
riend, Amanda, had opted to stay ashore with Eddie and take advantage of the last warm day of the year to preserve her tan, a glorious deep reddish bronze, offset perfectly by a scant white bikini, all of which Harry claimed not to have noticed.
Sam had let me unfold the story of Sergey Pontecello’s final hours in my own way, in fragments, slipped into the general conversation. But out there in the bay, bobbing on the little bay waves, he asked a direct question.
“How much did Sergey know about the blackmail?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Betty kept him encased in a bubble. You want to think she was protecting him, but it was probably just the way she was. By all accounts, they got along fine, but Betty ran everything and kept all her secrets to herself.”
“Like Edna Jackery’s occasional visits, one piece at a time.”
“Finding that nipple pushed Sergey over the edge,” I said. “So to speak.”
“Where did he find it?” Harry asked.
“When I saw him earlier that day, he told me he’d been going through Betty’s unopened mail. It must have been in there with the electric bill and come-ons from credit card companies. The conflict with Eunice was terrible, but the nipple in the envelope was enough to drive him crazy, literally,” I said. “He thought it was her doing. Like I said, crazy.”
“Though sane enough to operate Zander’s invention,” said Sam.
“Ray was wooing him as an investor and had shown him how to use it. Sergey was desperate to confront Eunice, so he rode it to the second floor. What he thought when Zander took off with the thing still hooked to the truck, I can’t imagine.”
“Finally took a little initiative and look where it got him,” said Harry.
I held my breath and sank all the way into the water, committing myself to an hour or two of wet hair. But it was worth it to feel the salubrious properties of the salty bay.
When I surfaced, I sought a cleansing of another kind.
“After Sergey found the nipple in the envelope, he called me,” I told them, “but he couldn’t get through because I turned off the cell phone. If I hadn’t done that, he’d probably still be alive. For some reason, I’ve known this from the beginning—that I was somehow culpable, an accessory to the crime. And it turns out I was right.”
Neither one of them was particularly happy with me for sharing this insight. Harry looked at a loss for words. Sam came to his rescue.
“Crap, Jackie,” he said. “Ray Zander killed Sergey when he decided to kill a bottle of booze. Fuzzy killed him by terrorizing Betty. Eunice helped torment him to death, in a way even colder and more calculating than Fuzzy. And Betty killed him when she killed Edna, kicking off the whole thing. They all made decisions, and took actions, with malice aforethought or callous disregard—something you couldn’t have done because you didn’t know anything. If you’re that desperate to feel guilty, save it for when you actually do something you deserve to feel guilty about. You’ll get the full effect. Trust me on that one.”
With that he started to thrash his way back to shore. Harry cocked his head in that direction, and I nodded. He kissed me, a glancing peck made so by his encumbering life jacket, then followed Sam. I let them get a decent head start, then happily swam after them, not exactly absolved, but close enough.
Chris Knopf is a principal of Mintz & Hoke, a marketing communications agency. Occasional copywriter and cabinet maker, Knopf lives with his wife, Mary Farrell, and their wheaten terrier, Samuel Beckett, in Connecticut and Southampton, Long Island. He is the author of four Sam Acquillo novels. Short Squeeze is the first novel in a new series featuring lawyer Jackie Swaitkowski.
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2010
Copyright © 2010 Chris Knopf
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2010, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Minotaur Books, a division of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Knopf, Chris
Short squeeze / Chris Knopf.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37423-3
I. Title.
PS3611.N66S56 2010a 813′.6 C2009-906708-0
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
About the Author
Copyright