Ice Cap (16 page)

“But they did have a fight. With handy cooking implements?”

“Oh yeah. The skewer was part of a barbecue setup that was just delivered that day. It was supposed to be a surprise birthday present. There's your irony for you.”

“You don't seem to hold much animosity for Franco,” I said.

Pandey dropped his feet back to the floor. “I hold animosity toward no one, for starters. Except maybe Eliz, try as I might to suppress it. I'm a Buddhist. Converted from Hinduism when I was at Georgetown studying famine, pestilence, and war. Broke my mother's heart. Until I got the law degree and started paying her rent. My father died when I was just a kid. He would have killed me, and I'm sort of not kidding. Those traditional people take religion really seriously. So no, I knew better than anyone that Donny was capable of jealous rage. Preceded by paranoid delusions, which in this case weren't so paranoid after all. Killing him did seem a little extreme, but I've never had somebody come at me with a carving knife.”

Sybil chose that moment to rise to her feet and shake herself out, the ripples in the loose folds of her skin starting at the neck and moving to her nonexistent tail. She came over and stuck her massive muzzle between Harry's legs. He gripped her head with his knees and pet her. She wiggled her butt.

“See what I mean?” said Pandey. “Loves everybody. The ideal Buddhist dog.”

“So Donny pretended to be on a trip so he could catch Eliz in the act?” I asked, hoping he'd say yes, since that was what I'd asserted in court.

“Not exactly. He called me from O'Hare in Chicago, where he was supposed to connect to Seattle. ‘She's with him right now, Pandey,' he says to me. ‘Go over there and kick the bastard out of my house.' And I say, ‘No way, man. I can't do that. And what makes you think this is happening?' He said he couldn't tell me. He just knew. Then he said not to worry, he'd take care of it. The rest you can read in the transcripts.”

“None of this was admitted?”

“I told the prosecutor. I guess he didn't feel it helped the case. If you came across it during discovery, you also chose to let it go. Not really material to the actual fight, which was the crux of the whole matter.”

“It wasn't me,” I said. “It was Art Montrose. Same firm. Art's moved on.”

“Fired, I hope. Did a lousy job for your client. His cross of Mrs. Pritz was pathetic. That's when I stopped paying attention to the trial. When I started feeling sorry for the guy who killed my best friend.”

Sybil, done with Harry, came to visit me. I scratched the top of her head and tried to gently keep that slobbery muzzle away from my nice new jeans. Pandey leaned up from his chair and gazed lovingly at the bulldog.

“How does she feel about tennis balls?” I asked.

“She's never retrieved anything in her life. First time I tried she looked at me like, ‘Hey, you want that ball so bad, go get it yourself.' Just wondering,” he said to me, “what does all this have to do with Franco's current situation?”

Harry looked at me as if he was wondering the same thing. So that made three of us.

“I don't know,” I said.

That explanation seemed fine to Pandey. We exchanged names of other lawyers we knew in the area, a professional ritual. We uncovered several common acquaintances, including Sandy Kalandro.

“Kind of a douchebag, we're agreed?” he said.

“We are, but I'll deny saying that.”

“Me too. Though a douchebag with impressive connections.”

With that, I relieved Harry of the tedium he was likely experiencing and let Sybil and Pandey get on with their day. Once back in the cold, Harry felt free to repeat the question apparently on his mind.

“Like Pandey said, why all the interest in a case that won't even be part of Franco's trial?” he asked.

“I'm not entirely sure, but something's eating at me,” I said, holding his arm tightly as we walked side by side down a poorly shoveled walkway more suited to single-file. “Though it's also true that the cops and the ADA both believe Franco's a serial seducer of married women, whose husbands he subsequently kills. They can't use it in court, but it'll dominate their thinking and behavior. I'd like to disrupt that if I can. Am I making sense?”

“You are,” he said convincingly. “You usually do. Eventually.”

I let the “eventually” part slide and climbed into the Volvo. “Okay, handsome. We always do what I want to do. What do you want to do? I don't care what it is, I'm doing it.”

Even without all the extra padding, it was no small thing to have Harry sitting next to you in your car. When he spoke, you not only heard it, you felt it through the car seat.

“A little surfing off Flying Point?” he asked.

“No freaking way. We'll die of exposure.”

“Get married.”

“We've already tabled that discussion. What else you got?” I asked.

“This open invitation has a lot of restrictions.”

I gripped him by the fluffy fleece and shook with all my strength, to little effect.

“Come on, surprise me with something doable on this planet at this particular time,” I said.

He turned in his seat far enough to almost fully face me, his considerable bulk pressed against the passenger-side door.

“Helicopter ride into New York. Limousine. Box seats at Metropolitan Opera—
La Traviata,
with dinner, back home in time to catch Leno.”

“Yeah, yeah, big talk, Mr. Logistics.”

*   *   *

It's what we ended up doing. And a lot more. It was perfect. I lavished appreciation in every form I could imagine, which he acknowledged. And I thought, What else can any man do to prove his wonderfulness? What is wrong with me?

 

12

I specialize in exaggerated men. Sam isn't overly tall, but he's solid as a Roman statue. You know about Harry. Randall Dodge, my favorite computer geek, the provider of the double-secret, not-remotely-legal search application, wasn't as tough as Sam or as tall as Harry, but you'd never call him a shrimp. I'm guessing a lick over six three in height, broad-shouldered and lean, but wide, so he could be imposing straight on but almost disappear when turned sideways. He had enough Shinnecock Indian in his blood to earn a spot on the Southampton reservation, but boasted other stuff in the genetic mix, including African American and Irish, which he always enjoyed reminding me, being born Jackie O'Dwyer and happy for it.

His shop was called Good to the Last Byte and was located off the big parking lot behind the main shopping district in Southampton Village. Like me and Dinabandhu Pandey, he was a complete slob, which made us completely compatible.

His main source of revenue was sourcing and supporting digital gear for the confused and inept, serving both the summer hordes and year-rounders, local and imported. But his talents far exceeded that, which I gladly exploited and he gladly let me, in return for free legal assistance at a few critical junctures and bottomless supplies of latte and croissants, or pizza, depending on the time of day.

Just inside the door of his shop was a counter piled high with keyboards, CPUs, monitors, and arcane boxes bristling with ports, knobs, and toggle switches. This barely foreshadowed the staggering jumble beyond, which I accessed through another door after alerting Randall by pushing an enormous red buzzer in the middle of the counter that read
WE'RE BIG ON SERVICE. PUSH HERE AND DISCOVER!

Randall wasn't much on sharing facial cues, but I wanted to believe he looked glad to see me. He pointed to the bag in my hand.

“I hope there's ham and cheese in one of those croissants,” he said.

“How do you know they're croissants?”

“The last three times you brought ham and cheese. I'm developing a dependency.”

“Ta-da,” I said, whipping out the desired product. “Though pierogis stuffed with ground beef and cabbage would be more fitting to the matter at hand.”

“I've got a table suited to all forms of matter.”

We wound our way down a narrow cavern walled with towering racks crammed full of electronic equipment, most of which was utterly unidentifiable to me, and I think partly to Randall, though he feigned otherwise. The other thing you needed to get used to at Randall's was the mood lighting, which spawned the type of mood you'd expect from sitting in Stygian darkness relieved only by LCD screens and blinking LEDs.

“What's it like spending your days and nights on the flight deck of a Klingon warship?” I asked.

“'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

“What have you got there?” I asked, pointing at one of the screens that showed an image of his storefront. “Security cam?”

He looked over and shook his head. “Google Earth. It's a street view of the shop. Hard to believe they went to the trouble of driving around the parking lot. I've also got the aerial.”

He slid his chair over to the keyboard and brought up an image of his roof, which he zoomed out of until we could see the whole village. It was dumbfoundingly cool to look at.

“What a world,” I said.

“And this is just what's publicly available. I can also access a geosynchronous weather satellite that monitors this part of the world in real time. Or go back about a year, if I want. I got access from a buddy of mine from the Navy. Highly unauthorized. Most people know these things exist, but actually seeing it work is pretty spooky. Orwell's probably spinning in his grave.”

After we finished our croissants he brought up the program and we messed around for a while. First we zoomed down on top of my Volvo, then Randall went outside and ran around the parking lot waving to me. Truly freaky stuff.

Eventually tiring of the fun, Randall came back inside and gave me a look that said,
Okay, why are you here again?

“If you wanted to do research in Poland via the Internet, how would you go about doing it?” I asked.

“Learn to speak Polish or get yourself a Pole.”

“I tried to learn Polish as a defense against my in-laws. They used it as a secret code. I'd hear this long string of incomprehensible jabber, with the name ‘Jackie' in the middle. But I just couldn't. French is hard enough.”

“Try Algonquin. Almost nobody can talk it, and that's the easy part. If you're asking me if there's some sort of translation program that would let you access Polish sites, there isn't. You need to find a guy.”

“You know a guy?”

“I do. Only it's a girl.”

“Is there anything you don't know?” I asked.

“You don't have to know. You just have to find.”

Randall's girl turned out to be UB45JK, a long-term partner in a virtual online game called Dystopriots, in which a band of plucky computer hacker/warriors in a postapocalypse America are battling to restore civilization. He was pretty sure she was actually a she, that she had been raised in Poland, immigrating to the U.S. ten years ago for college and never leaving. She lived in the basement of her grandparents' house, where in the country he didn't know (never asked, because it was irrelevant to the virtual experience). He showed me her avatar, which looked like an even more elfin, waiflike version of Zina Buczek, but he reminded me she probably looked nothing like that in real life. He showed me his, a bearded, bald-headed Caucasian dwarf with the handle Gyro.

“Sometimes people pick their opposites,” he said. “Let's see if she's home.”

In a few minutes we were looking at the inside of a destroyed building, roof gone and only three walls still standing. Rubble was everywhere and fires burned in the distance. It was a stereotypical vision of an urban war zone, but compelling anyway because of the startling realism. I commented on that.

“They're getting better at this stuff. It won't be long before you'll be able to jump right in there, or anywhere else you want, and maybe not come back out.”

“Is there a game where a band of plucky gourmands are forced to eat their way through all the restaurants of the Côte d 'Azur?”

Responding to something Randall typed on the keyboard, his dwarf pulled an iPad out of a big holster on his belt and tapped something on the screen. We swept up and turned in the air, gaining a position where we could read over the dwarf's shoulder.

“UB45JK, you in the neighborhood, pretty girl?” it said on the screen.

“I am, big boy. Not sure I can play today,” came the quick reply.

Randall played the keys with lightning speed and perfect accuracy.

“Just have a quick question. I've got a homey here who needs to do some research on Polish sites and only knows about two words of the language.”

“Maybe three,” I said. “Tell her I'm defending a guy charged with murdering a Polish artist / potato farmer, whose widow is from Kraków, and the investigation is carrying me in that direction. Might as well get it all out on the table.”

He did, then we waited while she absorbed the information.

“Cool,” came the response. “Give me her e-mail and I'll get in touch maybe tomorrow when I'm out from under all this work. Need the day job to keep the computers running.”

“You da best, UB45JK. The bee's knees. The straw that stirs the drink.”

After she signed off, I swatted him on the shoulder and said, “Randall, you were so nice to her. I could swear you were flirting.”

With unshakable poker face in place, he said, “You can also be a different kind of person in there if you want.”

*   *   *

It was particularly jarring to emerge from the embracing murk of Randall's shop and out into the shimmering winter whiteness. While not quite overcast, haze filled the sky, dulling colors and eliminating shadows, flattening the world into two dimensions—cold and weary.

I've heard that a person's greatest asset is also their greatest liability. That's sure true about me. I'll put my powers of dogged concentration up against the best of them. The trouble comes when I try to turn them off again.