Ice Cap (14 page)

“No shit,” he whispered back in my ear.

“Not even close. This guy sounds like an alto in the boys' choir. You could break down doors with that other guy's voice.”

“Okay. Not a problem. Ike was still at your back door. We can stick with that for now.”

“Excuse me,” said Ike. “Can I get in on the conversation?”

“We're talking about you,” said Sam. “You should be honored.”

“Yeah, right. Fuck you again.”

“We want to know why you were at Jackie's back door. And didn't ring the bell. How come?”

“That's Mr. Fleming's business to tell,” said Ike. “We just follow orders.”

“So he sent you there,” I said.

“Oh, she speaks,” said Ike. “I thought she was just the only one of you pussies who could handle a gun.”

“A more respectful tone would be in your interest,” I said to him.

Ike shrugged. “Listen, we work for Mr. Fleming. He tells us to pay a call on somebody, we pay a call. All he wanted was to scope out where you lived, get a bead on you. Soon as we saw the security shit, we backed off. That's it.” He looked at me. “I don't think Mr. Fleming was aware you were friends with Charles Bronson here. Otherwise he might've taken a different approach. I don't know, I'm just saying.”

“Why the interest in Jackie?” asked Sam.

Ike enjoyed saying what he said next. “Oh, so you think Mr. Fleming says to himself, I gotta project I'm thinkin' on, but I better not go ahead with nothin' till I consult with Ike, my most trusted adviser. ‘Yo, Ike, you got time for me to give you a detailed briefing on my personal and professional business plans? If it ain't too inconvenient, of course.'”

“Okay, so both stupid and out of the loop,” said Sam.

“Hey,” I said to him, swatting him on the arm with the side barrel of my Glock. “We got our answer. No reason for insults.”

Now,
there
was a weird dynamic. Me scolding Sam, my most valued physical and psychological protector, for possibly hurting the feelings of a guy I thought had threatened to kill me. Not just threatened, had convinced me that he was going to do just that. And now that all Ike had done was poke around my office, I was ready to establish a new relationship, make a new friend, maybe exchange Christmas cards.

Luckily, Sam knew my tendencies.

“Give me more than that,” he said to Ike. “You're not that oblivious.”

All he got from Ike was another baleful look.

“Yeah? And what are you going to do to me if I don't? Do you think it can be worse than what Ivor will do if I sell him out? If that's the case, then you're an even sicker shit than I thought you were.”

There comes a time in every negotiation when you have to either push back on your opponent's position or recognize you have all you are going to get. I felt we'd arrived at the latter position, and was glad Sam felt the same thing.

“If there's anything to discuss,” he said to Ike, “we'll meet with Ivor whenever he wants, at a place of his choosing. Otherwise, I expect me and Jackie to be left alone. Understood?”

“I capisce the English, motherfucker. I'll tell him. What he does after that isn't my concern.”

“Fair enough,” I said, still playing the reasonable guy to Sam's hard edge.

Sam nodded, codifying the agreement. “That wasn't so hard, was it?” he said to Ike.

Ike grunted and asked if we could get him some ice for his forehead. I said sure, and soon after we left him there, leaning forward, the ice in a ziplock bag pressed to his head, his body deflated, his urge for revenge likely fixed in place.

 

11

It snowed again on our way home from Massapequa. Not an all-out blizzard, just a lousy three inches, which in other years would have caused the governor to deploy the National Guard. Instead, the local weather people delivered the news with grim restraint and the island silently groaned and steeled itself.

As it turned out, I actually liked what the little storm did for the existing snow cover—glossing over the gritty surface and painting everything with a neat whitewash. My only worry was getting from my car to the back door without sliding on the frictionless surface, made more treacherous by my leather-soled cowboy boots, an equipment choice in desperate need of re-thinking.

I made it to the door unscathed and waved to Sam that everything was fine. He'd insisted on escorting me to my place, but I wouldn't let him come into my lair only to turn everything upside down in search of possible threats.

My security system was state-of-the-art back when it was installed, but I knew there wasn't a system that couldn't be breached by someone who knew what they were doing.

So as I moved from the keypad at the bottom of the stairs up to the hallway and then into my office, where the next keypad was buzzing, waiting for me to punch in the code, I retained that familiar nervy feeling. It would only recede to a barely noticeable level after I looked inside all the closets and behind the shower curtain in the little bathroom attached to the office.

With that accomplished, I snapped on every security device I owned and got into my robe, tying off the belt and sliding the Glock into one of the pockets. In the other pocket I found an unsmoked joint. I poured a glass of wine to complete the set, then snuggled up in front of my computer, stretched my neck, shook out my hair, and lit up the magic screen.

I started searching major newspapers for Tad Buczek, but little came up. I reminded myself that Tad might have been a major factor with Pete's Polish crowd, but he was barely a sidebar to the world at large.

The local papers had a lot more. I learned that Tad had been at Pete's funeral party. Not a big revelation. That was such a surreal experience, I wouldn't swear I was there myself. There were also lengthy reports on Tad's court battles with his neighbors, with plenty of colorful commentary from all involved. You could summarize it all by saying Tad never tired of pissing people off. But I knew that already.

I pulled up one of my search programs that specialized in court records. Unless you spent much of your life laboring in the legal trades, you probably wouldn't know that whenever anything's adjudicated in court, it becomes public information. It doesn't have to be a trial. A simple filing with some regulatory body is usually accessible if you know where to look.

And if that didn't work for me, there was always my magic software.

I got most of the way without help. It looked like Tad had followed the appropriate protocol by traveling to Poland to meet up with Zina, spending almost a full month with her before receiving a fiancée visa and bringing her home with him. They were married a month after that.

Her maiden name was Katarzina Malonowski, and she had lived in Kraków, where she was born thirty-two years ago. Her parents, Godek and Halina, were native-born Poles, both deceased. I tried to search more on the parents, but everything was in Polish, so I backed out of that application and wandered down another hallway.

The last time Tad had tried to hire me to fight one of his neighborhood battles, I passed him along to another lawyer, a pretentious windbag named Sandy Kalandro, who was nevertheless a capable attorney. More important for Tad, he was politically and socially well connected and might even have known some of the opposition.

I searched recent filings in area courts and quickly found what I was looking for: Kalandro's petition to start probate on the Buczek estate, which his buddies at Surrogates Court immediately granted. This meant I could read Tad's last will and testament in the comfort of my office workstation.

I scrolled quickly through the antiquated legal language and found the list of assets. When I rolled through the pages and reached the bottom line, I was in for a jolt. Twenty-three million dollars in stocks, bonds, gold, and art. And another fifteen in real estate and general belongings, including a '65 Maserati Sebring Coupe I never knew he had. Also wisely left alone by the exotic-car thieves. I hoped Freddy knew to take extra measures now that the big watchdog had left the scene.

I went back into the body of the will to dig out the details. Zina, interestingly, only got a lousy three million, all of it from the investment portfolio. Saline and Freddy were named, and the will specified the estate should continue to fund their positions, including housing and health care, for as long as they wanted them. No mention of Franco Raffini.

The rest, including the property and everything on it (that last part a dubious accomplishment), was to be distributed among Tad's sprawling family. I was happy to see a half million earmarked for Paulina. Taxes were likely to take a bite, but no effort was made to reduce that with charitable gifts. Family's one thing. To hell with widows and orphans.

Even though Zina was in line for only a small percentage of the estate, the similarities between Franco's first adventure and this one were way too close to escape the notice of the DA any more than it escaped Ross and Sullivan. In most cases, it's very difficult for the prosecution to admit prior crimes into evidence. All the judges I knew looked at such things as far too prejudicial. They rarely allowed it, as long as you kept your client off the witness stand and beyond cross-examination. But it was possible they could prove to the judge that the Pritz case contained facts that went to motive, or that the first event aided in the planning of the second (just proving a certain criminal propensity wasn't enough). However, even if they failed to win that point, it was going to light a rocket under the prosecution, a pattern of two being pattern enough for them.

Was it enough for me?

I moved back into Google and searched for Franco Raffini. Remembering Sullivan's crack about his fencing skills, I dug into his time at Duke, where he was an accomplished student and active participant in sports and campus activities. He starred in fencing and soccer, though by graduation had focused solely on swordplay, having won the league championship and done well in national university tournaments.

I had all the court records from Franco's manslaughter conviction still on my hard drive. For the heck of it, I pulled them up and started digging around. The facts in the case were never in dispute: Franco and his lover are at her house in the belief that her husband was away on business. Franco is cooking for her on the family barbecue when the husband suddenly appears, grabs a carving knife, and tries to stab Franco. He succeeds in cutting Franco's forearm before Franco pulls a skewer out of a rack on the side of the barbecue and fends off further swipes of the knife, which goes on until Franco manages to impale the guy with the skewer.

I contended in court that the husband had become suspicious and faked the trip in order to catch his adulterous wife in the act. This helped frame the situation as attempted murder, lending greater justification to Franco's claim of self-defense. And since he'd already spent a few years in prison, the ADA put up a flimsy fight and the judge found it easy enough to shorten the sentence.

I'd forgotten their names. The husband was Don Pritz, and his wife Eliz. Like Franco, Don was in the financial business, some sort of a dealmaker, broker, go-between, whatever. I know nothing about any of those things. Although I knew at the time that Don traveled a lot, more than three-quarters of the year, which Franco told me had driven Eliz to seek intimacy outside the marriage. That hadn't been my issue when I busted Franco out of stir. Now I wondered. Especially since Eliz never showed her face or contacted any of the players when I first took up Franco's case.

I looked around Google for more information on Mrs. Pritz, but found nothing. Then on impulse, I drifted into a look at the Pritzes' family finances, and of course hit a wall of confidentiality. Yet what I love about the Web is there're so many ways to skin a cat. I went back to the court records from Franco's first trial. Franco's lawyer, a guy named Art Montrose, had subpoenaed the Pritz family financials and got part of his wish—current bank accounts and retirement funds. Included were the names of Don's investment accounts, but no numbers. The same with life insurance. I had the name of their insurance agent and carrier, but no death benefit. There was no indication that Montrose had pushed for more information, which surprised me. He was no longer part of Burton's firm, which I noted and stored away for later.

I confirmed that Eliz was still living in their house in Remsenburg, a hamlet on the western edge of the Town of Southampton. I checked on the market value of the house, which was estimated at 3.5 million dollars. This was as far as I could go using entirely legal public search engines, so somewhat reluctantly (and somewhat gleefully) I opened another search application program that was anything but. I got it from a former client, now devoted friend, who used to be in the cyberintelligence business for the U.S. Navy. I had intense mixed feelings about using the program, varying from wretched shame to heart-racing euphoria. It didn't tell you everything, but it told you a lot. And since my friend had sent me the latest version on a thumb drive dropped into my mailbox, there were now things it could do that I had yet to try.

As exciting as the results can be, it's pretty boring to get dragged through the process, so I'll cut to the chase. I only cracked two out of five investment accounts, each worth a little north of two million dollars apiece at two hedge funds (who could use a little advice on cyber-security) but got nowhere with the banks. Not surprising, given their justifiable bank-vault mentality. With the insurance, I hit pay dirt. They had a mix of term- and whole-life policies Don had taken out when they were first married, while both were in their twenties. These were relatively affordable, though the payouts didn't amount to much. It was the one he took out only a month before he died that was a bit of a shocker.

Seven and a half million dollars.

Hm.

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