Short Squeeze (9 page)

Wendy’s house was built on a rise, with a driveway that curved more than necessary up to an area in front of a separate two-story garage. The house fit on the wooded lot as if it had grown up from the soil along with the surrounding trees.

Three dogs streaked across the property the moment I pulled into the drive. A big chocolate Lab, a white shepherd, and a midsize gray-and-black mishmash of a thing. They looked more curious than aggressive, but I stayed in the car until I reached the house, where I sat and prayed none of them would jump up on the door to get a better look.

A sharp whistle pulled the dogs away from the car. They ran to the house, then came back down more docilely, followed by a tall, big-boned woman in coveralls. She was somewhere in her thirties, with dark hair afflicted by an excess of kink and wave, like yours truly. Her
eyes were pale blue, her face broad and friendly, her stride strong and direct.

I got out of the car and offered my hand.

“If you can do that for me, you’ll be a miracle worker,” she said, pointing to my face, while reaching out the other hand to shake.

This would have been an unusual greeting for anybody, but more so for a woman who’d recently had her face rebuilt.

“I didn’t think it showed,” I said, unsure of what else to say.

She lingered over our handshake like my dad’s awkward engineer friends would do as a lame form of flirtation.

“Are you kidding me? I love freckles.”

Being the keen-witted, perceptive lawyer that I am, I spotted a miscommunication.

“I’m Jackie Swaitkowski,” I said. “I’m an attorney. I was hoping to talk to you about a case I’m working on.”

“You’re not from the Fabulous Face?” she asked, looking bemused but no less friendly.

“Sorry, no.”

She dropped my hand, looking a little disappointed.

“They’re supposed to come today. I finally got up the nerve to try it out.”

“Try what?”

“A full neck-up makeover. They come to your house. A plus for me, because I don’t have a car.” She used the tips of her fingers to tap around her face. “First they give you a consult, then do things with peels and mud and face creams.”

She looked around her property.

“I spend a lot of time outside,” she said. “After a while I start looking like Jeremiah Johnson.”

“I understand completely,” I said. “For every hour in court I need at least thirty minutes in a bathtub.”

The Lab had been shoving against my legs as I spoke to Wendy,
and I’d been scrunching around the top of his head. The white shepherd decided to get in on the action. The other dog still held back, moving to and fro, low to the ground and looking up at Wendy with nervous eyes.

“You said something about a case,” said Wendy.

“Your uncle’s, Sergey Pontecello. He was a client of mine. Do you mind if we chat for a few minutes?”

She answered by walking over to a picnic table under a gnarly-looking shade tree. I followed her and we sat across from each other. I looked down at the tabletop and noticed purple and orange lumps of organic debris, obviously fallen from the tree above. Considering too late, as usual, the fate of my favorite lime green jeans.

“Because he’s dead?” she said.

I couldn’t tell if the question was rhetorical, so I assumed it wasn’t.

“He died a few days ago.”

She folded her hands and looked down at the table.

“I heard. The police told me.”

“Did they come out?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“I told them everything I could think of on the phone. They said they might call me back, but nothing about seeing me.”

“Odd way to learn about a dead relative, from the police.”

“I never talk to my mother. Did she send you?”

I told her no.

“You don’t seem too busted up about it,” I said.

She raised her shoulders, then settled them back down in a languid shrug.

“Uncle Sergey didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t wish him any harm, but he was just this weird little dude who married my aunt. Who I mostly knew as a crabby old librarian who smoked like a chimney and insulted waitresses. I only saw her about once a year. What did they do, have a funeral or something?”

The gray-and-black dog had followed us, staying close to Wendy’s side. I’d forgotten it was there until it startled me by jumping on the bench and sitting down next to her. She stroked the dog’s back.

“Poaggie always demands a seat at the table.”

“Everyone needs a protector,” I said.

“Do you have one?”

I pondered that.

“If I wanted.”

“We’re not talking about dogs, are we?” she said.

“Not in the literal sense.”

She looked at her hands again, and in the quiet of that moment, I listened to the world surrounding her reclusive corner of Shelter Island. There was a small prop-driven plane overhead and the distant burr of an outboard, the wind messing up the leafy treetops and the faint whirr of airborne pests. Not much else.

“Quiet out here,” I said.

“Oh, yes. That’s the point. Maybe you should tell me what
your
point is.”

She looked over my shoulder, hoping the girl from the Fabulous Face would soon arrive.

“I don’t know if there’s a funeral planned. Nothing’s been announced. It might be because Sergey’s in the forensics morgue in Riverhead, which is where they put murder victims to perform criminal autopsies and sort out custody of the body.”

Wendy looked only mildly interested, as if I’d told her Sergey had croaked on the golf course or died quietly in his sleep.

“Murdered? Ridiculous. Who would possibly want to murder him?” she asked.

She’d folded her arms as if to stop herself from playing with her hands.

“So you think some people are too ridiculous to kill?” I asked.

“I do. Me, for example. I live here alone and hardly ever leave. I
don’t even have a car. That’s one of the things I miss about Aunt Betty. She used to drive me in the morning from the South Ferry to the train station in Southampton, and back again at night. I have to go into the City every August because of this dumb proviso my father put into his will. Didn’t trust his little girl to look after her own money, so he forces me to prove my competence to these grubby old guys who pat me on the knee and take a fat fee out of my inheritance. Other than that, I’ll go for weeks without seeing anyone but a park ranger, usually from about a hundred yards. I was scared to death the first year, but then I realized killers like more of a challenge.”

I wanted to tell her killers weren’t just stupid and evil, they were stupid and lazy and almost always kill people easiest to kill. A challenge was the last thing they wanted. But to what end?

“Why the isolation?” I asked. “It’s pretty here, but it’s got to get lonely.”

“I’m not a people person,” she said. “And I have Bilbo, Poaggie, and Bert. Dog people would understand.”

“Not that I don’t admire you,” I said. “It takes a centered person to live in a place like this. In a week I’d drive myself crazy.”

“Too late for me on that one,” she said, smiling agreeably. “So if my mother didn’t send you, who did?”

“I sent myself. Nobody else seems to care what happened to the funny old guy, except maybe the cops, and they have to. It’s their job.”

Wendy took a piece of half-carved wood out of her left pants pocket, and a Buck knife out of the right. It was a big knife, and she handled it like an old friend. The first pass dropped a long, curled piece of white wood on the table.

“Your brother said he doesn’t talk to your mother, either. What’s up with that?”

She didn’t look up at me but stopped whittling for a moment, then took off another slice.

“I love the way some people talk about the traditional family as the
supreme state of being, the most moral, healthy, and divine association any person could ever have. Do you believe that, Miss … what was your name again?”

“Swaitkowski. Call me Jackie. It’s easier. And no, I don’t believe that.”

“Most of the world’s great tragedies occur within the family. Ever read Sophocles, Ibsen, or O’Neill? Let’s take a gander at Freud to see what he thought of the family unit.”

“What about Fuzzy. Do you talk to him?”

Wendy seemed to wear an impervious outer coating of amiability. It held its strength and resilience no matter where the conversation led.

“You’ve obviously spoken to him yourself,” she said, looking at me over the razor-sharp Buck knife. “What would you think?”

“That you’re not all that close?” I said brilliantly.

She smiled, taking it as a joke.

“I loved my father. He was all the family I ever cared about. When he died, that was that. So I am absolutely of no use to you whatsoever, in whatever you’re doing, which I still don’t quite understand.”

She carved off a bigger piece of wood than she’d probably intended. It flew across the table and fell in my lap. I left it there.

Poaggie had been sitting quietly through all this, his little black eyes trained on a spot somewhere below my chin, which I assumed to be my jugular. But then he jumped up and leaped off the bench. With a look of resigned patience, Wendy told me she probably should get back to her chores.

When I didn’t immediately move, some of her patience slipped away.

“I really have to insist,” she said in a way that reminded me a lot of her mother, Eunice.

I stood and brushed the colorful plant life off my pants. Wendy stood as well, and whistled. Bilbo, Poaggie, and Bert galloped up as if to herd me back to my car. I’m not good at ending things before I’m ready, but even I know diminishing returns when I see them.

The day was starting to wane, the sun closing in on the horizon. Photographers call this the magic hour because the light turns color dense enough to stick your hand into. It does great things for the complexion, and was appropriately kind to Wendy, whose slightly roughened veneer looked more radiantly and gorgeously healthy than weather-beaten.

“Don’t let ’em mess with that face of yours too much,” I told her. “It’s pretty fabulous as it is.”

She didn’t believe me, of course. No woman would entirely. Unless she’s one of those models who spends her young life drenched in adulation and magic-hour light.

Wendy gathered her hair at the back of her neck and pulled it to one side, giving me a look at the fullness of her face.

“That might be true if I had your freckles.”

I didn’t believe her, of course.

After climbing in the car, it took me a moment to find the key and the slot you stuck it in. Then a few moments more to remember I had to put my foot on the brake to make it work. There were a lot of safety features built into the Volvo that my Toyota would snicker at, if that was something old pickups could do. I found the button for the window and let it down. During all this goofing around, Wendy had been writing something on the back of a small piece of paper. She gave it to me through the window. It was her phone number and e-mail address.

“I’d really rather not have people coming to my house uninvited. It’s unsettling when you’re out of the way like this. You understand.”

“Sure,” I said. I gave her my card.

“My e-mail’s on there,” I said. “If you think of anything you want to tell me, feel free.”

She studied the card.

“He wasn’t funny,” she said.

“Huh?”

“You said he was a funny little guy. He wasn’t funny. He was unctuous
and self-important and deluded to the point of being oblivious to everything going on around him. He was never funny.”

She put the card in the top pocket of her shirt and walked back toward her house.

Bert and Bilbo went with her, but Poaggie sat at the edge of the lawn and waited for me to leave.

“Creepy little mutt,” I said, loud enough for his sensitive dog ears to hear, and headed off toward the dying light of the sun, not so magical anymore.

After seeing Wendy Wolsonowicz, I spent the night finishing off half-smoked roaches stashed in various ashtrays around the house, brooding over dysfunctional families, including my own, and pretending not to be spooked by every random sound in the house.

The dope did a lot to take the edge off things, but I thought a little red wine in the mix would work even better. This led, as it sometimes did, to the opposite intended effect. The brooding slowly gave way to abject gloom, of the boozy free-floating variety, though it wasn’t long before I passed out on the couch, too tranquilized to be afraid, too immobilized to care.

When I woke the next day, my mood matched the sky, which was on the darker side of dark gray. I felt around the side table for the telephone, in the process clearing the table of a few catalogs and grabbing a handful of ashes, but eventually found the receiver and dialed a number I hoped my memory had accurately preserved.

“Goodlander GeoTransit,” said Harry as buoyantly as I’d hoped he would. “Goodlander speaking.”

“Say something positive about me,” I croaked, my voice clogged with the evening’s excess. “What am I good at?”

“Trivial Pursuit. The only time we played you basically ran the table.”

“Being good at trivia isn’t what I’m looking for. Something meaningful.”

“You don’t give up on people, no matter how much you might want to, until it’s proven beyond a reasonable doubt that they deserve being given up on. You don’t give up, period. No matter how hopeless the pursuit.”

A gentle warmth flowed into my chest, out to my limbs, and into my dreary, ill-tempered mind.

“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.