Ice Cap (6 page)

“No.”

“Conditions have to be perfect. It has to be very cold. The ice can only be held for the briefest of moments. Just long enough for the oils in the fingers to leave an impression but not so long that the person's body heat melts the little ridges beyond recognition. The next trick is to keep the ice frozen hard enough to dust and pull the prints. Who would have thought to bring frozen nitrogen in a big cooler into a snowstorm? Why, the wizards at the Suffolk County forensics lab. People here call them the creep geeks. Little do they know.”

Ross would know, I thought. Terms like “creep” and “geek” would be very familiar to him.

“I bet you're eager to get to the point,” I said. “Lord knows I am.”

He lit another cigarette, which he held by the tip and tried to make little smoke circles with. I'd seen him try this before. It hadn't worked then, either.

“It was a piece of ice, the biggest and heaviest at the scene,” he said. “One half covered in blood. The other, remarkably, showing three good-sized partials. Enough to make a conclusive identification.”

“Hence the arrest,” I said, not wanting him to drag it out any more than he already had.

“That's right. Your amorous Latin. Franklin Delano Raffini.”

 

5

I know I had a reason for marrying Pete Swaitkowski, I just can't remember what it was. Probably because I'm attributing a far more sophisticated motivation than existed at the time, an invention retroactively imposed in the years following his death.

There's a simpler explanation. He was a very handsome, kindly, and cheerful guy with a lot of money earned the same way Tad Buczek earned his: the conversion of potato plants into postmodern vacation homes. And he was the first to identify certain buttons of mine, which he pushed with effortless ease.

His windfall came the year he graduated from college. The day after receiving his share of the family farm, the largest on the East End, he sold it. From then on he devoted his short, happy life to unencumbered bliss. Not in the chemical sense—he barely sniffed a drink, much less a spoon of cocaine, and his only sexual excess I'm pretty sure was with me (if he had any energy left after that, more power to him). His abiding state of delight was the natural kind, born of his good nature and, frankly, a mind unfettered by the demands of serious introspection.

The only outsized indulgence he had, made possible by unearned wealth, was a top-of-the-line Porsche Carrera Roadster, which of course killed him when he drove it into a giant oak tree at 120 miles an hour.

Though I'd always felt welcomed and accepted by his family, made up of his two parents, half a dozen siblings, and nearly countless aunts, uncles, and cousins, we hadn't been married long enough for me to have been completely absorbed into the tribe. Soon after the funeral, I drifted away, and those relationships became confined to saying hi on the street or catching up for five minutes in the aisle of the grocery store.

So I had some trepidation when I looked up his mother's address, his father having passed away a few years before. She was the best choice anyway, being the former Paulina Buczek, Tad's sister. The last I knew, she was living in a town house condominium in Southampton Village.

She was still there. I had her phone number as well, but thought it better to just ring the doorbell. I'd learned long ago it's far more difficult to put a person off when they're standing on your doorstep than when you're merely a voice at the end of the telephone line.

That theory was sorely tested by Paulina.

“Well, Jackie O'Dwyer,” she said to me, peering into my face through thick, square-framed glasses, her mouth set in an uncommitted straight line. “Fancy that.”

“I'm awful sorry about Tad. I was there the night they found him.”

She looked more or less as I'd last seen her. Her hair was a different color, nothing found in nature—a sort of mahogany red leaning toward magenta. It was stacked on the top of her head, held in place by invisible, unnatural means of support. Her jaw still had its hard angles, though the rest of her had bulked up considerably. Her hands, thicker than most men's, still proudly testified to the brutal labors of her early potato farmer's life.

“So they tell me,” she said. “You were there with the fellow that killed him,” she added with something less than condemnation, but not much.

“I'm his lawyer,” I said. “That's why he called me over. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to talk to me, but somebody has to defend Mr. Raffini. At least you know me. You know I'm a fair person.”

“Don't know that anymore, Jackie. Not a big fan of lawyers. Papa called 'em bloodsuckers.”

Great, I thought. Nice to hear.

“Maybe not every single solitary lawyer is sucking blood, Paulina. Some suck wind.”

Her iron face eased a bit. Without even thinking about it, I'd tapped into the basic source of my goodwill with the Swaitkowskis and their kin: my sense of humor—not necessarily the same as theirs, but on a similar frequency.

“Well, I don't know what I can tell you, Jackie. I haven't kept very close tabs on Tad, except what I'd read in the papers.”

“You knew I was there the other night. And that I was representing Franco Raffini. That's pretty intimate knowledge,” I said lightly, to make it sound more like a compliment than an accusation. Which is how she took it.

“I have my ways,” she said.

“Can't we talk a little bit? What can it hurt?”

She stepped away from the door, still reluctant, but letting me in.

I looked around her living room and was glad to see Paulina's approach to interior decor had held firm. For those who think taste and style are entirely subjective, arbitrary judgments, with no absolute right or wrong, I offer Paulina Swaitkowski.

You don't see a lot of shag rugs anymore, so you probably won't remember they often came in a blended array of colors no one wants to ever see again—avocado green, fluorescent orange, mustard gold. Paulina had the entire apartment thus carpeted, which probably served one good purpose—distracting you from the hideous furniture. Could I call it Southern Italian American/Bollywood/'60s Disco a-Go-Go/fifteenth-century baroque chic? That would be the most descriptive, but no one would believe me.

“Place looks great, Paulina. You always did have a flair.”

“It's an instinct, Jackie. You can't teach it.”

She sat in an overstuffed, wood-framed monstrosity of indistinct origin, leaving me to the long, padded bench beneath the Clock. The Clock was mostly brass, and the face itself was only about a foot in diameter, though it represented, I think, the sun, from which radiated long, brass spikes that more than tripled the total circumference. I'd never sat on the bench for fear it would somehow fall off the wall and I'd be impaled by one of the spikes. And now, there I was.

“Still struggling with the hair, I see,” said Paulina.

This is the sort of thing Paulina always felt entitled to say, even with subjects more or less off-limits to my own family. Personally, I'd grown comfortable with (resigned to) that giant reddish-blond ball of fuzz that God had blessed me with in lieu of normal hair. I wanted to tell her that at least the color was the one I was born with, unlike some others in the room.

“Had you been seeing much of Uncle Tad in the last few years?” I asked.

“No,” she said, without hesitation. “Truth be told, I haven't spoken to him since Papa died and he couldn't even trouble himself to come to the funeral. I heard he said, ‘What's the point of missin' the game just to fuss over some dumb bastard who's dead anyway?' Isn't that terrible?”

I had to agree it was. Though it sounded like Tad.

“What about before that? I'm just trying to get an idea of what his life was like.”

“You know as well as I. His life was”—she paused for emphasis—“crazy.” She scowled, at her brother for being the way he was and at me for asking the question. “What he did to the family,” she added, “it's inexcusable.”

“I know he did a lot, but what do you mean exactly?”

“Well,” she said, rolling her eyes around the room as if his manifold offenses were among the banal homilies etched on the plates and painted pieces of wood she'd hung on the walls, “destroying that property with his bulldozers and shovel things, and piling it up with junk. And then actually fighting with the neighbors when they rightfully complained. He made sure that everybody knew what they all thought about us anyway: stupid, primitive Polacks.” Then she added another pejorative referring to a specific minority who might have come into unexpected money, which was too ugly to repeat.

“And then he goes over to Poland and buys himself his own private whore,” she said, leaving the end of the sentence suspended so I could fill in the blanks with the worst possible conclusion.

It was a side of Paulina I knew existed but rarely saw. Though not for nothing, she
was
Tad Buczek's sister.

“So he had a few enemies,” I said.

“A few? I think you could divide up the town in two groups: the people who hated him and the rest who thought he was just a jerk.”

“What about the people who worked for him?”

She sat back in her chair, suddenly reticent. “I wouldn't know about that.”

“I know Franco's pretty new, but what about Freddy and his wife—what's her name again?”

She looked defiant. “You know perfectly well who she is.”

“I do?”

Now she looked both defiant and annoyed. “Don't try your lawyerly tricks on me, young lady. In the eyes of God, I'm still your mother-in-law.”

I was honestly baffled. I hoped it showed.

“I'm sorry, Paulina. I'm not trying to be dense here. I don't think I ever met her. I just knew Freddy's wife looked after the house while Freddy worked on the property. That they went back to the potato days.”

Her face softened down to the merely hard-edged. “I guess you wouldn't have seen her at family gatherings. She never came. Felt ashamed, is what I think.”

“Why ashamed? Not around our family.”

“Her family, too,” said Paulina. “You really don't know. She's your Peter's aunt. Papa's sister. Aunt Saline.”

*   *   *

I spent the rest of the day attending to my other, nearly neglected, clients. Making enough progress to be technically beyond reproach from everything but my conscience. The next morning the Hamptons were back in the freeze locker. It was five below when I woke up and so cold in the apartment I thought my furnace had failed on me. When I jumped online to find a furnace-repair person, I checked the weather report. Then I turned up the thermostat and hot air flowed through the registers. It was almost disappointing to learn that the furnace was fine and it was the world that was malfunctioning.

I got back in bed after going through these shenanigans, now wearing a down vest over my flannel pajamas and, lying flat on my back, I tried to figure out what I was going to do next. The allure of coffee loomed large, but I forced myself to contemplate more ambitious stuff.

One of the games I play with myself is, What would you least like to do right now? I play this because it's often the one thing I ought to do. It was no different this time. The next thing I had to do was pay a call on Zina Buczek, even though I didn't feel like it.

I tried to interpret this reluctance, and couldn't, so quickly stopped trying. It didn't matter, because while lying there in bed, I'd already made up my mind that this was the only reasonable course of action.

*   *   *

At least the sun was out. With a vengeance. How could it be so cold when the world was so bright? I wore a new set of insulated hunting boots that arrived in the mail the day before from L.L.Bean, along with a pair of flannel-lined blue jeans. The steamy clouds generated by my breath looked for all the world like cigarette smoke, a habit I'd almost credibly begun to overcome. So now I could just pretend!

The Volvo turned over unenthusiastically, the engine running as though not all the cylinders were completely in the game. So I let it sit and warm up for a while as I sat huddled in multiple layers of fleece, down, and canvas, feeling fairly miserable.

Traffic on Montauk Highway moved sluggishly, as if everyone felt a little fragile, as if we might shatter if struck by hard objects. The blasting sun was mostly behind me as I headed west, which was a blessing. The announcer on the radio said not to expect much change in the temperature over the next few days, when it would warm up, but likely snow again. If we got more than three inches, we'd break the all-time Long Island record. Good for us.

The plow crews had been honing their skills since the last big storm, and Montauk Highway was now reasonably opened up. The rain had done its part as well in shrinking the mounds and now, with the deep freeze, had encased the world in a glittering crystal glaze.

Once I turned up toward the Seven Ponds area, the effectiveness of the road crews faltered. There were really only one and a half lanes, so each oncoming vehicle presented an opportunity for negotiation. The general ground rules called for the one closest to a driveway or some other indent to pull over and wait. Unless it was a big truck, in which case, size dominated. On a different day, this would have been cause for confrontation, but I was in a malleable mood, subdued by the unforgiving elements.

I eventually reached the Buczek place, guided by the tops of Tad's larger metal sculptures, which were easily seen from some distance shooting above the treetops. The long driveway was only roughly cleared, the most serious effort handled by Dayna Red several days before. I had to stay inside a pair of tracks that barely accommodated the Volvo's wheelbase, sliding a little at the hairpin turn but making it all the way to the house with no further incident.