Ice Cap (3 page)

I told him where to find me and the body. I didn't mention the others. That could come later.

“Crazy Polack.”

“Watch it.”

“Sorry. I meant that respectfully. Most of my friends are crazy Polacks. We've only got the four-wheel units out. Stay on the line while I get one over there, then I'll come back and you can tell me what happened.”

Like I knew what really happened. I held the phone away from my mouth.

“You sure no one saw you discover the body or move it here,” I asked Franco one more time. “No other witnesses?”

“I'm telling you, no.”

“And Zina doesn't know.”

“No. I only called you,” said Franco with a shiver that was probably not entirely from the cold.

“Maybe we should wait in the truck,” said Dayna.

I shook my head. “Cops like simple stories. ‘We met up with Franco, we came here, we waited.' But there's no reason for you to suffer. You've done a lot already.”

She shook her head this time. “This is more interesting than sitting around watching the snow fall.”

Sullivan came back on the line and I briefed him as thoroughly as I could, with all the information I had at hand. Given where we were at that point, there was nothing to hide, no client confidences to defend. I knew Franco's decision to call me before calling the cops wasn't going to sit well, however.

When Sullivan was done grilling me, I asked him what I should do next.

“Stay put, exactly where you are.”

And so we stood, silently, each doing his or her little improvised dance, trying in vain to generate a little body heat. Dayna cupped her gloved hands in front of her mouth, her steamy breath slipping through her fingers only to be whisked away by the wind. The only person there who was indifferent to the weather was Tad Buczek, now just a long, inert mass whose presence I nevertheless felt. I remembered my late husband, Pete Swaitkowski, introducing me to his uncle Tad, who was a big man all over, with enormous workman's hands. He didn't have much of a chin, and his eyelids hung nearly at half mast, conveying the cartoonish cliché of a classic doofus. Except Tad was anything but. In fact, the ongoing battle with his rich and presumably sophisticated neighbors had earned him a reputation as a crafty and unpredictable adversary, and thus a near folk hero within the Polish community. Only a near hero, because he also had a reputation as a ball breaker with a hair-trigger temper. Rumors of crazed and brutal brawls had for years been part of family legend, events Pete could never quite confirm or deny.

None of which lessened the sad shock I felt closing in around my heart as I stood in the dubious shelter of the pergola and contemplated the ruins under the white-flecked sheet of blue plastic.

*   *   *

Danny Izard was Sullivan's patrol officer of choice whenever the call came from Jackie Swaitkowski. This was fine with me, because I liked Danny Izard and he liked me—a bond reinforced by a few occasions where he'd likely saved my life. Accomplishments he refused to take credit for or regard as anything particularly special.

We saw blinking blue and white lights out on the driveway. Then the jittery approach of a pair of flashlights carried by two people dressed in heavy black clothes and hats with earflaps pulled down and snapped beneath the chin.

“Hey, Jackie, what're you doin' out here?” said Danny. “You must really like the snow.”

“What snow?”

“What do we got?”

I pulled back the tarp and Danny and the other cop, a stubby hedgehog of a woman named Judy Rensler, scanned the body with their flashlights, just as we had done not that long before. Nothing had changed.

Judy immediately started taking photos with a battered digital Nikon. The stinging brilliance of the flash caused me to turn my eyes away from the body.

“It's Tad Buczek,” I said to Danny. “Franco Raffini here found him at the base of one of Tad's homemade hills and dragged him here,” I said, getting the worst of it out in the open right away.

“Why'd you do that?” asked Danny, an edge in his voice. He stuck the flashlight in Franco's face.

“I don't know. The storm, I guess. It's not that far from here, where I found him. Want to go take a look?”

He turned and started to walk up the grade behind us, but I stopped him.

“What about the CSIs?” I asked Danny.

“On their way. As best they can.”

“I can plow the drive again,” said Dayna.

Danny looked over at her. “Excuse me, ma'am, you are?”

“Dayna Red,” I said. “She and her pickup got me over here.”

“Okay, sure,” said Danny. “Thank you very much.”

After Dayna left, the rest of us walked along a path of footsteps in the snow, now nearly refilled and barely defined enough to follow to a spot at the base of a huge circular mound with gently curved sides that Tad called Hamburger Hill. On top of the hill Tad had built a huge metallic mobile. In the summer, it was driven by water pumped up and out from the sculpture's extremities, so it looked like a giant sprinkler hallucinated by Salvador Dalí. Now it stood motionless, covered in a thin layer of snow.

Franco brought us up to where he claimed to have stumbled over the body. You could see where a lot of snow had been disturbed, even though the edges were softened by the added accumulation. There were faint depressions in the pattern of footprints leading up to the spot from the opposite direction, which supported Franco's story pretty thoroughly.

After Judy took some more pictures, she let Franco walk around the crime scene and act out how events unfolded. Danny and I both took notes in little notebooks using regular pens, stopping every few minutes to brush the snow off the pages, which in my case smeared the blue ink.

“So you went back to your living quarters to get a tarp,” said Danny, counting the footprints with the beam of his flashlight.

Franco nodded. “All our equipment's in a barn next to the shack where Freddy and I live. Freddy's the other hand. I knew the tarp was the only way I could drag a guy as big as Tad. I almost asked Freddy to help me, but I'm glad I didn't. It's a little downhill from here to the pergola, so I made it on my own. Barely. Tad's a lot of dead weight. Sorry, didn't mean it like that.”

Danny gently brushed away the lightest snow from the spot Franco had designated. Underneath were chunks of red ice and snow. Danny pointed to where he wanted Judy to take some more pictures. Then he fished a roll of yellow tape out of his pocket and tore off a piece. He stuck it to the ground with a pen, using the butt end of his semiautomatic as a hammer.

“The CSIs will be screaming over this one,” Danny said.

“Can't blame the weather on you,” I said.

“They blame everything on everybody.”

After that, we walked back down to the pergola and out to the driveway in time to meet a pair of white vans—one from the chief medical examiner's office, the other from the county forensics unit who shared quarters with the ME up in Riverhead. Dayna Red had cleared the way for them and was facing the unmolested snow that covered the way to the main house. Without discussing it, we all knew it was time to go see Katarzina and break the news.

*   *   *

When Tad was still a potato farmer, he tore down the original family farmhouse and built what I think was intended to be a Californian hacienda. It was only one story, but it stretched across a considerable chunk of real estate. The wide, gently sloping hip roofs added to the low-slung effect. Underneath were both enclosed rooms and open spaces, divided by large panes of fixed glass. By that description, it should have been an architectural delight, but Tad had managed to imbue the place with a kind of shabby gloom. Having lived as a bachelor for most of his life, it was an atmosphere entirely of his own making that two years of Zina's influence had only begun to dispel.

I followed Danny and Judy across a broad covered patio that led to the front door. Franco and I followed a few steps back. Dayna was happy this time to wait in the truck. When Danny rang the doorbell, a light flashed on above our heads, then another in the living room visible through narrow side windows.

There was a click at the door, which then abruptly swung wide open. It startled me, as I was expecting something a little more tentative. Zina Buczek stood in the doorframe, her sharp features exaggerated by the light above and the effect of a pair of barrettes that pulled her hair back and stretched her forehead. She stood silently, staring at the cops and waiting, braced for what was to come.

Danny had done this before and, being a person of essential decency, spoke the words with just the right tone and pitch. Zina stood motionless, but her cat eyes began to widen and flicker back and forth from cop to cop.

“What is this you're saying?” she asked, her accent thick with Polish inflection. Danny was forced to repeat the whole thing.

“No, it is not true,” she said, her shoulders now sagging as she reached back to the door handle for support. Judy stepped forward and took Zina's arm.

“Sorry, ma'am,” she said. “Let me help you back inside.”

Danny followed after telling us to wait on the patio. I knew it was the right call, but the brief blast of warm air from the house had left me even more disappointed by the relentless cold.

A few minutes later, Danny stuck his head out.

“She wants to talk to Franco,” he said.

“Not without me,” I said.

The door closed again. Franco stared at the ground, keeping his comments restricted to wordless mumbling. A minute later, Danny let us in.

The twin sensations brought on by the heat and incandescent light nearly gave me vertigo. The air on my face was drier but somehow heavier than the chilly stuff outside. It soothed my burning cheeks. Franco snatched off his hat and scratched at his curly hair as if relieving a long-denied itch. We stood on dark gray tile that extended into the living room, the snow melting off our boots and blending into puddles already formed on the floor. Directly in front of us was a pair of sofas facing each other, separated by a dingy area rug. Zina and Judy sat on one of the sofas and Danny stood a respectful distance to one side. He wrote in his book. Judy held both Zina's hands in hers. Zina looked up at us as we came forward. Her fine-skinned face was paler than usual, but her eyes were clear and dry. I realized in the better light that she was wearing pajamas made of a heavy gray flannel that I'd mistaken for a sweatsuit.

Franco started to say he was terribly sorry, but she cut him off. “He was dead when you found him, you are sure,” she said.

Franco held his hat in front of him with both hands and looked up at the ceiling. Danny watched him carefully.

“Yes, Mrs. Buczek. There was no doubt. I'm terribly sorry.”

“You don't tell me right away, but you call Jackie. What does that mean?”

“It means I didn't know what to do. I'm sorry for that, too.”

“You think Franco do this?” she asked Judy.

“No one's been charged, Mrs. Buczek,” she said. “We're not assuming foul play.”

“Foul play?”

“That anyone caused your husband's death. Or if it was an accident. It's too early for that.”

Zina stared off into the middle distance and slowly nodded, as if trying to absorb the information, if not the entire situation. Meanwhile, Judy went through the usual brief: Did Zina have anyone who could stay with her? Anyone she could call? Could they drive her somewhere? Still looking into nothing, Zina shook her head.

“There's nowhere for me now. Nowhere to hide.”

Franco still stood silently, head bowed, hat in hand. The wind blew a spray of snow into a picture window across the room. I looked over and saw the blue lights from the white vans flickering through naked tree limbs and heard the sound of Dayna's plow rumbling up to the house, the truck's high beams briefly striking one of Tad's metal art pieces, this one a type of stork or crane, its long beak pointing back toward the pergola as if aware of, but indifferent to, what lay there.

 

3

Burton Lewis was born with more money than even the most enterprising spender could ever spend. His entire family had died off soon after he graduated from law school, so he'd have a right to question the value of the cosmic trade-off. Though he never did, at least not to me.

Part of his inheritance was a colossal law firm on Wall Street that specialized in what you'd roughly categorize as tax law, but that barely described the actual pursuit: mediating between the wealthiest people on earth and the U.S. government over the price of doing business at the center of the world's biggest economy.

Burton liked the work, despite having started his career in a storefront legal defense practice in the South Bronx, an antecedent to the extensive pro bono enterprise he'd built up across the region and for whom I ran the Eastern Suffolk County franchise.

I liked him, a feeling I concentrated on while avoiding the more intense emotions he could touch in me, which would have been for naught given Burton's orientation. Nevertheless, he liked me, too, which I had a hard time understanding but was devoutly grateful for.

“So, no charges levied against Mr. Raffini,” he said to me over the phone when I called him the morning after the to-do at Tad Buczek's.

“Not yet,” I said, “since there's no direct evidence Franco had any role in the death.”

“It was good of you to drive over there, given the conditions. Though impulse control has never been your strong suit.”

I didn't try to argue that point. Instead, I shared what Zina had said: “There's nowhere for me now. Nowhere to hide.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“You bet. We pressed her to say more, but she clammed up after that. Though it's not enough to slow Sullivan from bringing Franco in for questioning. This afternoon, assuming the roads are clear enough for the governor to lift the travel ban.”