Ice Cap (10 page)

“Somebody finally killed that son of a bitch?” he said. “There's a surprise.”

I'd forgotten that Sam ignored the news—local, national, or international. Likely he was holed up in the wood shop the last few days, so no one had a chance to give him the word.

“He was Pete's uncle. He served me barbecued ribs at family gatherings.”

“He was still a son of a bitch. Big guy with big hands. Would take a lot to put him down.”

“How about a big chunk of ice?”

I told him what Ross had told me. He nodded like he was listening, but I could see unspoken thoughts whirring behind his eyes. Sam lived life with a permanently installed poker face, though by now I could read it better than he thought.

“What're you thinking?” I asked.

“I'm not thinking. I'm listening.”

“No, you're not. You're thinking.”

“Okay, I'm remembering. Not exactly the same thing. There was talk around the bar that Tad could be a bit dirty.”

“Meaning?” I asked.

“You know what I mean. Into things he shouldn't be into. Illegal things.”

“Like?”

“What's on your laptop?” he asked.

“Are you evading me?”

“No. I'm trying to remember. I guess the talk was vague. Nothing specific. Just a little dirty.”

He set down his coffee mug and cracked his knuckles, as if that would free up his long-term memory. Eddie looked up at the sound. I watched the laptop as the photo of my unknown visitors filled the screen.

“There's my problem,” I said, turning the screen toward Sam.

He leaned in my direction and looked hard at the image for a few moments. Then his face morphed into a smile, if you can use the word “smile” about a face that looked more like a granite outcropping. He actually almost laughed as he sat back in his chair.

“Those fucking meatballs. That's just great,” he said, enjoying a private moment.

“You know those fucking meatballs?”

He nodded.

“I do, after a fashion. They used to work as muscle for Ivor Fleming. Maybe still do. We had some lively times together a few years ago.”

“I think I remember him. Didn't you have me do some research back when I was stupid enough to do that for you?”

He sat farther back in his chair and closed his eyes, collecting his memories, or thoughts, or both. Then he reminded me that Fleming was a scrap-metal merchant with a big operation up island. He gathered metal from all over the northeast part of the country, squeezed it into solid blocks, then sold them to processors in the U.S. and abroad, mostly China these days like everyone else.

Unlike Buczek, there was nothing vague about the rumors surrounding Fleming. The whole world seemed to know he was dirtier than stink, but even after a series of indictments for money laundering, drug smuggling, prostitution, bribery of a federal official—even dumping toxic waste in protected habitats—nothing had stuck.

Sam said most of this happened years ago, and either Ivor had gotten smarter or more honest, because even when Sam had dealt with him, his profile had slipped well below the horizon.

“So how did it turn out between you and him?” I asked. “I forget.”

“We agreed to stay out of each other's way. Which until now has been the case.”

“Until now?”

“Ike and Connie paying you a visit is inconsistent with the agreement, however tacit.”

“Ike and Connie? Sounds like a lovely couple.”

“Ike's the skinny one, Connie's the other. Not as tough as they think they are, but tough enough.”

I didn't know whether to feel terrorized that a known gangster's thugs had been at my back door or relieved that my own personal thug knew who they were. I decided to feel a little of both.

“This can't be good,” I said. “What does Tad Buczek or Franco Raffini have to do with a shady scrap-metal baron?”

“Correlation doesn't always equal causation,” said Sam—the kind of thing he said a lot, which could be annoying. “What else have you been working on?”

I hadn't thought of that, leaping automatically to the most pressing case at hand. I went through the other things on my plate, but none seemed likely to attract the interest of a guy like Ivor Fleming.

“So what do I do?” I asked.

“Keep your security system running and the Glock close at hand. When you have a minute, we'll go pay a call on Ivor. See what's what.”

A wave of comforting warmth washed through me. I walked a fine line with Sam. I knew he'd do almost anything I asked him to do, but if I asked too often, I'd lose his respect. Worse, I'd lose respect for myself. On the other hand, there were debts between us, an unspoken sense of reciprocity that would make disengagement feel like a violation. Like I said, complicated relationships are my specialty.

I accepted the offer without a lot of fanfare and went back out to the kitchen to pour another cup of coffee. Eddie followed me in the hope of getting another biscuit, a hope well founded. As I drank the coffee I looked out at the snow heaped around Sam's backyard and was struck by the oddness of it all, the state we'd been thrust into by such a surprising display of enraged nature, something almost not of this earth.

I tried to shake the feeling that the world had changed on me when I wasn't looking and I would only know the true significance right at the moment it would be too late to do anything about it.

 

8

As it turned out, Franco's bail became a nonissue. He didn't get any. The ADA charged him with premeditated second-degree murder, which made it easy to convince the judge that no amount of bail money warranted the risk posed to public safety by releasing a wanton killer like Franco Raffini.

I wouldn't say my counterargument was feeble, exactly—merely hopeless. I was glad Franco took it as well as he did.

“Not your fault, Jackie,” he said as we sat together in a conference room at the Suffolk County Jail. He looked lost inside his orange jumpsuit, almost collapsed into himself with despondency. “I did it to myself.”

“You haven't helped yourself, that's a cinch,” I said. He slumped even farther in his seat, a portrait of pure misery. “But we can start to fix that. From here on out, we can make things better.”

He looked up at me without raising his head. “How we gonna do that?”

“Why were your fingerprints on that big chunk of ice?” I asked.

“It was sitting there next to Tad's head. I just tossed it to get it out of the way. I tossed a bunch of ice out of the way.”

“You told me you had your gloves on the whole time.”

“I had to take the right glove off to check Tad's pulse, right here on his neck.” He demonstrated on himself. “That's an easy thing to forget.”

“What else did you forget?” I asked.

“I don't know. I'm not trying to forget anything.”

My experience told me that people didn't have to try very hard to forget things they didn't want to remember, but I put that aside.

“Tell me about Zina,” I said. “How did she and Tad get along?”

He winced at her name, but it also seemed to open him up a little.

“Just because everybody thinks something is true doesn't mean it isn't,” he said. “Sometimes the obvious is the obvious.”

“Zina and Tad weren't exactly lovebirds,” I suggested.

“To be honest with you, I don't know how he felt about her. I just knew how she felt about him. Which wasn't that great. Come on, just look at her, then look at Tad. The man was a big ugly bull.”

“He mistreated her,” I said, a question in the form of a statement.

“That's not what I mean,” said Franco. “I never heard him say anything unpleasant to her, much less smack her around or anything. It was just the way he was in the world. Intense, busy all the time, in a way just this side of crazy. Zina's nothing like that. She's subtle, and likes things calm and steady. And she's kind of refined.” He looked slightly embarrassed, as if caught betraying his own romantic illusions. “Ah, hell, I don't know what I'm saying. It just didn't make sense, the two of them, that's all.”

“A number of people saw Zina's motives as purely mercenary,” I said. “That she was only in it for the money, and the American citizenship.”

He frowned. “Of course they'd say that. And I wouldn't blame her if it was true. But I never heard her say marrying Tad was just a scam to get into the country.”

“She said there was nothing for her. That she had nowhere to hide. What's that about?”

He rubbed his goatee and sighed. “I don't know, except she always seemed a little lost and alone. Resigned, maybe? I tried to get more out of her, but to be completely honest with you, not that I haven't been honest in this particular conversation, we didn't speak that much about anything. It wasn't what you'd call a speaking kind of relationship. I tried, you know, to make something more out of the situation, to get to know her better, but that wasn't what she had in mind.”

I struggled with the image of Franco Raffini as the beautiful Katarzina's boy toy—to be felt but not heard—but that was what it sounded like.

“Everybody can get lonely, Jackie,” he said. “Doesn't mean they always want to become your soul mate.”

I allowed how that could be true without copping to any experience in the matter. The thought of Harry leaped involuntarily to mind. Soul mate? I shoved the thought back in its hole.

“If Zina didn't marry Tad out of expedience, why did she marry him? It doesn't sound like she liked him, much less loved him.”

Franco took some time before answering the question. It wasn't evasion; he seemed to be working hard on the answer. Then he gave up.

“I don't know. Honest, Jackie. I don't know. There's something really distant about Zina. I never got the feeling she was completely there—more that she was mostly somewhere else. ‘Distracted' is maybe a better word? She didn't try to hide it, at least from me. This is going to sound really strange, but I think one of the reasons she liked me was I never pressed her on anything. That's why we didn't talk that much. When the most obvious thing about her is off the table—that most of her mind is off on some other planet—there's not much left to discuss. I don't think I'm making any sense. Sorry.”

Quite the contrary, I thought. I bet he had it nailed perfectly. That was Franco's secret with women. He had the one quality we all crave over every other. He could sense the subterranean frequencies, the subtle undercurrents of mood and state of mind. In a word, he was sensitive.

Then another swarm of unwanted feelings about Harry surged into my mind. Harry had a similar gift. He'd learned from the tumultuous and infinitely variable nature of our early relationship how to calibrate the exact amount of air I needed between us at any given time, and had somehow accepted that I was the one who set the shift in parameters, however capricious and unpredictable.

This made Harry a man of inestimable tolerance and generosity. But was that the same as Franco's sensitivity? And if not, so what?

“I get what you're saying, Franco,” I told him. “I really do.”

“You do?”

“Who knows what's going on with Zina, and you likely did her a kindness that some may condemn, but that doesn't make it less kind.”

“So you don't think I'm just a depraved, philandering monster?”

“I don't. I think you're a good man who'd be well advised to restrict his romantic entanglements to single women going forward.”

Something approximating a lift in spirits showed on his face.

“Going forward,” he said. “There's a nice thought.”

*   *   *

When I was back outside, the sky had managed to transition all the way from deep, limitless blue to surly gray, and the wind had died down, yet it felt colder in a way that defied respite. I shuddered, literally, and climbed stiff-limbed into the Volvo and made my forlorn way back down from Riverhead to the hoped-for refuge of my littered and congested yet warm and brightly lit office.

*   *   *

I'd barely begun to feel the soothing effects of my office when the phone rang. It was Mr. Sato from the restaurant below. He said there was a fellow from the newspapers who claimed he'd scheduled a meeting with me. Should he make the man comfortable or have Naoki-san, his three-hundred-pound sous-chef, escort him to the door?

“Shit, I forgot about him,” I said. “Apologize for me and tell him I'll be there in five minutes.”

“I'll tell him fifteen minutes. You don't want to look too eager. Besides, it'll tempt him to have a little more tuna tataki.”

Any advice for me to show some restraint was usually apropos. I used the time well, getting back out of my recently donned bathrobe and figuring out how to dress for the press. I decided lawyerly. The guy's from the city; he'll be used to gray suits and conservative heels, silk blouse—light blue, buttoned to the throat. This took all the allotted fifteen minutes and then some, so by the time Mr. Sato guided me to the bar, Angstrom had already had two platefuls of sashimi and robota-grilled tsukune—duck and scallops wrapped in bacon.

I extended my hand and waited for him to drop his chopsticks and mop up his face with a white napkin.

He almost looked flustered, as if I'd caught him doing something untoward like stealing from the dessert tray or peeking at a girlie magazine.

“Ms. Swaitkowski,” he said, sticking out his hand. “Roger Angstrom.”

“You can call me Jackie, especially since you can't pronounce Swaitkowski.”

“Thanks for the correction. Do you want to grab a table?”

“The bar's fine,” I said, climbing up on the high stool and not mentioning that I'd spent a fair amount of quality time on that very stool. “You obviously managed the roads.”