Short Squeeze (32 page)

I had a pretty sticky moral dilemma on my hands. Wendy telling Fuzzy about the accident was a triggering event, but she had nothing to do with the extortion that had followed. She didn’t kill poor Edna.

Then I thought about it from Slim’s point of view. That for him, the driver of the car suffered enough just knowing what they’d done. He was right about that. It knocked Betty sober. That and the threat of ruin at the hands of her sadistic bastard child.

Though even in that situation, I could see Betty coming out on top. She was feeding Fuzzy a lot of money, but nothing like she could have, given the loans from her sister and the bank, plus her existing funds, now converted into handy liquidity. On top of that, she’d been on a tear at the casino, pumping even more into the kitty.

If I’d been a gambling woman like Betty, I might have bet she was up to something. One final caper.

When I got to the house, Ray Zander’s truck was parked on the front lawn. The line for the hoisting device that fed from the spool on the back of his truck ran up the front of the house and disappeared over the roof.

I walked around to the back of the house and found Ray dangling in front of a window on the second floor, applying a tan compound dug out of a small pail to a section of the window trim.

“Hey, Ray,” I called. “What’re you doing up there?”

He looked down.

“Just filling in some cleaned-out rot with this epoxy. Been workin’ on these windows all summer. Whenever I get the chance.”

“Is Eunice home?” I asked.

“Think she is.”

I was disappointed by the answer. So much so that I almost walked back to the Volvo and drove away, so little did I look forward to the impending conversation.

As I thanked Ray and turned to walk back to the front door, I looked down. There was a toothbrush on the ground between a pair of low-cut yews, half buried in mulch. I squatted down and picked it up.

I looked at it for a moment, then looked up at the side of the house.

“Hey, Ray, you ever been inside?”

He looked back down.

“Sure. Lots of times.”

“What’s behind those windows?”

He used a foot to push himself away from the house and looked from side to side.

“Well, there’s a bedroom here, here, and here. And in the middle—this window here, actually—is the big bathroom.”

To emphasize the point, he slapped another wad of epoxy into a hole.

I looked down at the toothbrush, then back up at the window and said, “No,” too softly, I thought, for him to hear.

“Yeah, it is. The main bathroom for the floor. There’re some sinks and johns off the bedrooms, but if you want a shower, you walk down the hall.”

I thanked him and went back to the front of the house and rang the doorbell. A year later, Eunice answered the door.

“Don’t you ever call ahead?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but I’m busy.”

I hoped my body language showed my concern for her demanding schedule. “Of course. I just thought, as a courtesy to you, you’d want to know that your son Oscar’s been arrested on a host of charges, including extortion and conspiracy to commit murder. To murder me, actually, which is a little creepy, though nothing you have to worry about. Well, okay. See you.”

I turned and headed back to the Volvo.

“Miss Swaitkowski,” she said, as if burdened by world-weariness. “Please come back.”

I turned again, but kept walking backward.

“You got things to do,” I said. “Not a problem. We’ll catch up some other time. Oh, and he was blackmailing your sister, who killed somebody in a hit-and-run.”

“Miss Swaitkowski,” she nearly yelled as I headed briskly toward the car. “Please come back.”

I stopped and turned.

“Ms. Ms. Swaitkowski.”

“Please.”

I shrugged and did as she asked. She let me into the little sitting room we’d used earlier, the receiving area for irritating intruders bearing
bad news. I sat down earlier, she had a chance to offer me a seat. She listened attentively while I ran through the story as coherently as I could. It was the first time I’d had to lay out the whole deal, so the narrative was a little choppy, but the key facts were intact.

I finished by telling her I was sure Betty was planning her escape from the devil’s dilemma—having to choose between a vehicular manslaughter charge and Fuzzy’s extortion. Sacrifice the house but take most of the value out of her sister’s hide, add to the other cash, and reformulate their lives somewhere else, somewhere outside Fuzzy’s clutches and the long arm of the law.

Eunice took the news better than I thought she might. The absence of throwable objects might have helped. She was either toughening up or slipping into a state of resignation. Either way, she was at least a little nicer.

“Ms. Swaitkowski, do you honestly believe Elizabeth would be that wicked?”

“ ‘Guess’ is a better word. She might’ve been working in that direction, but we’ll probably never know. I haven’t come across plane tickets or rental agreements with Argentine haciendas. It just explains the other facts and fits with Betty’s style.”

“Betty’s style?” she said. “What style would that be? You have no idea what it was like growing up with her. She was not only more clever, she was prettier and much more fun to be around. My role was the good girl. The serious girl who studied hard and acted like a grown-up. My parents depended on it.”

“Raising the child she conceived with your husband was a remarkable act of generosity,” I said.

The expression on her face continued to sag.

“Antonin made it clear from the beginning that fidelity would never be a feature of our marriage. I was willing to accept that, though I couldn’t have imagined one of his lovers would be my own sister.” She
looked at me, hoping maybe for some kind of sympathy, which I didn’t know right then how to deliver. “Oscar might have turned out differently if someone else had taken him, someone outside the family. I’ll never know.”

It wasn’t for me to comment on that, so I didn’t. There was something I was much more interested in discussing, now that I had her in a weakened state.

“Mrs. Wolsonowicz, the night Sergey was killed, he called me complaining that you’d locked him out of the bathroom. Do you remember?”

She looked like she didn’t at first, then nodded her head.

“Yes, that’s right. He had a perfectly good bathroom of his own. I had the smaller bedroom and consequently felt entitled to the better bath. All I did was lock the door and put the old key on my dresser. He thought I was actually in the bathroom, and was creating a ridiculous scene. I didn’t want to dignify his behavior with a response, so I merely sat in my room and waited for him to withdraw, which he did.”

“And that was it?”

“No, actually an hour later he became positively enraged over something. He pounded on the bathroom door again, and then on my bedroom door. I never thought of Sergey as much of a man, but I admit I was becoming concerned. He sounded like a maniac.”

“Do you remember anything he said? Even if it didn’t make sense.”

“Not specifically. The gist was I wasn’t going to force him out of his house no matter how much I tried to”—she searched the air for the recollection of his words—“frighten him, disgust him, intimidate him. I do remember wondering what he could have meant by those things. I was never anything but civil to Sergey, despite his own fulminations. I certainly hadn’t tried to frighten the poor man away. Though I suppose that might have been easily done.”

I stood up and walked a few paces around the room, unable to control the sudden gush of energy flooding my nerves.

“After he stopped pounding on the doors, Mrs. Wolsonowicz, what happened?”

She struggled to recall an evening she likely preferred to forget.

“This is going to sound strange, but I actually thought I heard him bellowing at me from outside my window. I know that’s impossible, but that’s what I thought at the time. There were a few other sounds, and I was about to go look, but when they stopped, I went back to my book.”

Since I was already on my feet, I kept walking—out of the room, through the front door, and around to the back of the house. Ray was still up there, scraping and filling in holes. A section of roof shingle, where the rope connected to the boson’s chair passed over the ridge of the house, was torn away. I walked back to the other side and got a better look at the yew directly behind the truck. A large piece of the bush was turning brown. I picked up the top branches and saw where many of the lower branches were split and broken away. Some had been tied up in an attempt to keep some shape to the bush.

I went around to the front of the truck and saw for the first time that he’d installed two slabs of heavy timber in place of the bumper. It was freshly sanded and varnished,

I went back to Zander and called up to him.

“Come on down, Ray. We need to talk.”

“I can hear you okay.”

“Come on down.”

He put the handle of the putty knife in his pocket and dug the remote control out of his pocket. He kept his eyes toward the ground as he made his descent. I stepped back to give him plenty of room.

“Do me a favor and get out of that thing for a second, would you?” I asked him.

It made him unhappy, but he did as I asked.

I examined the boson’s chair, which was actually a webbing made from extremely heavy canvas to which equally heavy nylon lines were attached. Originally off-white, it was now a soiled beige with various
stains and scars. A large section, comprising most of the lower strap that gripped the operator’s butt, had been patched with new-looking material.

I dropped it to the ground and walked over to Zander and shoved him in the chest with both hands, with as much force as my increasingly hysterical nervous system would allow. It knocked him back a few steps, but he stayed on his feet.

“Hey, lady. What the Christ?” he said.

“What did you do, Ray?” I yelled at him. “Did you go on a bender that night, what, in the woods over there, or in one of the outbuildings? Alone, huh? So none of your boys could take away your keys?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

I took my phone out of my pocket and hit one of the speed dials. Zander watched, heated and confused.

“Joe,” I said when he answered. “I’m talking to Ray Zander at the Wolsonowicz place. Send somebody quick. If anything happens to me, it’s him.” Then I flipped the phone shut.

“When did you realize you hadn’t reeled in the hoist?” I asked. “The next morning? Or along the way?”

He took a step toward me. I stepped back.

“I want to think you blacked out like usual,” I said, “so you didn’t remember stopping the truck when you noticed it was handling funny. Getting out and seeing the line, following it back in the dark to where Sergey was lying in the road torn to shreds. I want to think he was dead by then and that you didn’t steal his last chance at survival.”

He looked like a man trying to make a quick decision, weighing the options. He wasn’t tall, but his arms were ropy and his hands coarse and gnarled from years of hard, dirty work. I wouldn’t be much of a challenge, and this time there were no handy giants waiting in the wings. He took a step toward me.

“Hurting me isn’t going to change anything,” I said. “Just make it worse for you. What’ll help is telling me what happened.” I checked my
watch. “You got maybe five minutes, tops, before the patrol car gets here. Onetime offer.”

“You gonna defend me?”

“Hell no.”

“Then I got nothing to lose,” he said, moving a little closer, his face a blank wall.

I scolded myself again for improperly managing timing and conditions when confronting desperate drunks and criminals.

“Use your head, Ray. You heard me call the cops.”

What I wanted to say is, if you lay a hand on me, my friends will run you down like a dog, and if you aren’t dead when they’re done with you, you’ll wish you were.

“Okay,” I said, instead. “I’ll defend you.”

He stopped his advance.

“You mean it?”

I nodded enthusiastically. “What you heard me just say is legally binding. It’s canonized in English Common Law. If I violate it, it’d be like violating the Universal Code of Legal Ethics. I’d be instantly disbarred.”

He liked the sound of that.

“That’s like it should be,” he said.

“So now you can tell me in complete confidence what happened. Tell me everything.”

Remorse crept back into his expression.

“I don’t know, exactly. Like you said, I didn’t see anything until the next day, with the chair all torn up and bloody at the end of the line. Wasn’t till the news of Mr. Pontecello got out that it crossed my mind. But nobody said anything, so I figured lay low and it’ll blow over. Then you show up over here asking all kinds of crap. Later on, when I seen your Toyota go by, I thought I’d just follow you for a while, but then something took over me. I been drinkin’ a little, of course. Wouldn’t’ve hit you otherwise, I swear. I’m not like that.”

“What are you like, Ray? Do you even know yourself?”

He looked over my shoulder, suddenly even more crestfallen. A Southampton Town Police patrol car, lights flashing, streaked across the lawn. Ray watched with wide eyes, as if expecting to be run over where he stood. The car stopped instead and Danny Izard jumped out, his right hand snapping open the safety strap on his holster. I told him I was okay but to keep an eye on Zander until Joe Sullivan arrived. I told him he’d just confessed to killing Sergey Pontecello and trying to kill me, which wasn’t technically what he’d done, but there wasn’t time for a nuanced explanation.

Not that I had much to worry about. As soon as he was approached, Zander stood with his hands out in front of him, waiting to be cuffed.

After Danny Izard ran through Miranda, I said, “All that stuff about the Universal Code of Ethics? Pure bullshit. Get your own goddamn lawyer.”

Sullivan flew in a few minutes after that. I ran through the chain of events as I saw them. I gave him the toothbrush and showed him where I thought Riverhead would find the physical evidence to support the case. Partway through the process, Eunice appeared, standing at a distance, her arms wrapped in a knit shawl against the cooling breeze, watching intently. After I was done with Sullivan, I could have filled her in, but I didn’t feel like it.