Short Squeeze (6 page)

When I got back to the living room, mostly dressed and ready to go, Harry was sitting with his mile-long legs nestled in a pile of magazines on the coffee table, reading a lingerie catalog I didn’t know I had.

“Playboy’s
got nothing on this stuff,” he said.

“You look great, Harry,” I told him honestly. “I’m glad you called.”

He lit up a half-powered version of the Big Grin.

“Me, too, Jackie. Let’s roll.”

I spent the first half hour in the car messing around with stuff on the dashboard, adjusting my seat with little buttons that offered infinite variation, programming the radio to something beyond AM news and indie rock, setting the climate control to precise temperature and humidity, and testing the ability of the windows to suck out cigarette smoke.

“I’m thinking of getting one of these,” I said. “Just checking it out.”

“That’s okay,” he said. “My eight-year-old niece does the same thing.”

I sat back and concentrated on looking at the Long Island scenery. We were going through the Pine Barrens, a lot of which had burned in a big fire in the 1990s. A carpet of new growth had formed, but it looked so new and the stalks of sizzled pines so forlorn. I said as much to Harry.

“The sandy soil provides limited nourishment,” he said. “Trees grow more slowly, and can only reach a certain size. It’s like a bonsai forest.”

“And now it’s all burnt up. How sad,” I said.

“Why sad? The trees don’t think they’re deprived. They’re still alive, growing fresh new branches up from the root system. The carbon freed from the fire enriches the soil, and the burned-off canopy lets in lots of light, diversifying the undergrowth. Critters love it in there. It might look like a wasteland, but in fact it’s ten times more biologically vibrant than a mature forest.”

For Harry, the glass is half full if there is a molecule of water vapor floating nearby. When we were together it got to be a private game show of mine:
Guess the Bright Side!
starring Harry Goodlander. I blamed it on his being an air force brat, growing up around can-do guys whose ultimate aspiration was to fly faster, farther, and more recklessly than the other guy or die trying–falling to a fiery death singing “America the Beautiful” and/or whooping loudly.

“So, what’re we doing?” he asked as we crossed into the strip-development
paradise of western Suffolk County. “Or is that client confidential?”

I filled him in on every detail I could remember about the case with no effort to protect confidences, client or otherwise. I even told him how I felt about Fuzzy Wolsonowicz, leaving out my own wimp factor. I might’ve been more secure having him along, but I wasn’t about to reinforce stereotypes. Even with an enlightened guy like Harry.

I’m terrible at finding my way when I’m driving, but I’m a homing pigeon if I can read a map in the passenger’s seat. There wasn’t much else to look at in that part of Long Island anyway. Dirty white, gray, and beige buildings, mostly grimy and shopworn, gaudy neon, and potholed streets. Tiny ranch houses with vans and pickups filling the driveways, a few with all four tires.

When we got to the address I’d pulled off the Internet, I had a crisis of confidence. Mostly because we didn’t see a house. There was just a two-foot-high rectangular slab covered in weathered tar paper, a Porta Potty, a rusted-out Datsun coupe with vanity plates that read
SHRTSLR
—shirt seller?—and a pickup that made mine look like a new Range Rover. And a mailbox with Fuzzy’s street number and the word
OW
.

I jumped out of the car and Harry followed me, unfolding his lanky limbs like a praying mantis.

“OW,” I read. “Oscar Wolsonowicz?”

Harry looked at the slab. He walked over and leaned down for a closer look. Without standing up, he waved me over.

“Look for a door,” he said.

We circumnavigated the slab from opposite directions, meeting on the other side at a metal Bilco hatch, painted black, with a sign that said
LOSE HOPE ALL YE WHO PASS THROUGH HERE
.

Harry pounded on the hatch door.

“What the fuck!” yelled a trebly, electronic voice a few seconds later.

We looked around and Harry spotted a speaker next to the hatch. Seeing no way to reply, he pounded on the door again.

We waited almost a minute, then heard the sound of the latch being pulled back, followed by the hatch door opening, groaning on its raw hinges.

A square-headed pale white guy with slippery black hair, a thin beard, and thick, plastic-rimmed glasses poked out. Unhappily.

“What. The. Fuck,” he said.

I squatted down to get on his level.

“Mr. Wolsonowicz? I’m Jacqueline Swaitkowski. An attorney and officer of the court.”

I handed him my card. He took it like it was a free ticket to next Sunday’s Declare Your Sins for Jesus tent revival.

“Yeah? And?” he asked.

“Your uncle, Sergey Pontecello, has died. There are issues relating to his estate I need to discuss with you.”

His nascent sneer grew into the real thing.

“Who the fuck cares,” he said, reaching to pull the door back down. He got partway there before Harry caught the edge of the door and pulled it back up.

“Ah, come on, fella,” said Harry. “She just wants to talk to you for a minute. Why not give it a chance?”

Fuzzy looked up at him, which from that perspective was a very long look.

“What do you want me to say? I don’t know anything about him. Married to my mom’s sister. Hardly ever talked to me. What did he die of?”

“They found him on the road,” I said.

He smirked again.

“There’s a news flash. Drove like a drunk old lady.”

He looked at Harry again, who was wearing a white band-collar shirt, a gold earring, and a pair of round wire-rim glasses through
which gleamed ice blue eyes. Before going bald at about twenty-five, Harry’d been a platinum blond. So now, at about forty-five, his eyelashes and eyebrows were snow-white, making him look almost hairless. This took some getting used to, though if you looked at him long enough, you’d notice he was actually sort of cute.

“You a lawyer, too?” Fuzzy asked him.

“Strictly transport.”

“You said estate. There’s money involved?” Fuzzy asked me.

“Like the man said, we just want to talk. Can’t hurt. Might do you some good.”

Fuzzy clenched his eyes together and shoved his shoulders up against his neck like kids do when their mothers tell them to eat all the green stuff off their plates. Then he popped open his eyes and threw up his hands.

“Okay, what the fuck,” he said, walking back down the steps.

We followed.

Fuzzy’s place was more or less what you’d expect. Dark, damp, dirty, and crammed with junk. Electronic junk—beige, black, and gray boxes covered in buttons and dials and flickering lights. Every kind of monitor, from the old green screens stacked three at a time to gigantic flat LCDs hanging on the walls. The furniture was basic couch. Big couch, little couch, convertible couch, leather, velour, Herculon, and unidentifiable synthetic couch.

The walls were a charming concrete. No paint, no wallpaper, no art, no decoration at all. There was mood lighting—depression being the mood encouraged by little task lights with opaque metal shades scattered around the ceiling.

I liked the refrigerator in the middle of the room. Always kept you close to cold cuts and beer. He had a fan blowing on the refrigerator’s coils, and every shallow window had an air conditioner struggling to hold the temperature at about sixty.

“What happened to the house?” Harry asked, pointing at the ceiling.

“Burned down.”

“Bummer,” I said.

He shrugged. “Nothing says you have to build it back again.”

“Except for a few dozen state, county, and municipal statutes,” I said.

“She’s a real-estate lawyer,” said Harry.

“I thought this was about Sergey’s estate?”

“Mind if we sit?”

I asked. He shrugged again.

“I don’t care. Grab a couch,” he said as he plunked himself down on an office chair in front of a computer screen, a big one, on which some sort of online game was running. I picked a leather couch. Less likely to hide things that bite.

Fuzzy noticed me looking at the big screen. He spun around and rested his hands on the keyboard.

“I’m in the process of scouring the Free Earth Quadrant of alien hostiles,” he said.

“Really.”

As a presumed resident of the Free Earth Quadrant, I was grateful for his success. Harry bent down to take a look at the monitor.

“You made it all the way to level twelve. Impressive. I’ve never gotten past ten.”

Fuzzy scoffed.

“Twenty-two is my personal best, making me one of three Grand Warlords in North America. There’s only one son of a bitch in the entire world who’s made it all the way to level twenty-five, and he’s like a Tibetan monk or some shit.”

“So, anyway,” I said, “we’re here to talk about something important.”

“Like this isn’t. Just a stupid video game. Kid stuff. You try it sometime. NASA scientists’ll tell you getting to level twenty is statistically impossible.”

Harry nodded. “He’s right. Grand Warlords aren’t minted every day.”

“Oscar,” I said.

“Fuzzy,” said Fuzzy.

“Fuzzy. I need to tell you something about your Uncle Sergey.”

“He wasn’t my blood uncle. I just called him Sergey. Or sometimes Dipshit.”

“He didn’t just die. He was murdered.”

Fuzzy shook his head as if trying to shake a thought out of his brain. Despite the twitchy reaction, there was little surprise behind his eyes. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“I’m afraid not. The police think somebody beat him up, then threw him out of their car. Tough way to go.”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said sarcastically. “Even for a miserable little prick like Sergey.”

“No disrespecting the dead. It’ll come back at you.”

“Legal advice?”

“Spiritual,” I said.

“So now you’re a priest?” he asked.

His voice had moved up a notch in register.

“Any idea who did it?” I asked.

He jumped out of his chair. “So now you’re a cop? What the hell is this?”

“Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Wolsonowicz,” said Harry, his voice a lot calmer. “We are.”

Fuzzy didn’t seem to have a firm grip on his movements. As if coordinating thoughts, feelings, and facial expressions wasn’t the automatic thing it should have been. I had trouble fixing his age, especially with his potbelly pushing out from under an untucked Pepto Bismol–colored shirt, and his black peg-legged jeans and white Velcroed sneakers. But I figured early thirties.

He sat down.

“So what do you do for a living?” I said, looking around the basement. “Looks like something with computers.”

“You think? Yeah, something with computers. Everything with computers. Nothing matters but computers.”

I felt myself about to leap down his throat, but Harry slipped in front of me.

“Boy, you got that right,” he said. “I live on the darn things. Used to just help my business, now it
is
my business.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Fuzzy, warming to the hint of empathy.

“Harry’s logistics on computers,” I said. “I’m legal on computers. And you’re what again, Fuzzy?”

“Everything you can do. Hardware, software, rants, blogs, columns. And trading, of course.”

“Trading?”

“Day trading. The WWF of capitalism. Raw and rude. Trench warfare in the battle of chumps, champs, and suckers. The haves and have-nots. The insiders and outsiders. Kill or be killed. Pure play roulette made out to look like some sort of legitimate commercial enterprise, a rational exchange of wealth based on sound and sacred economic principles. Bullshit. It’s a blood sport.”

Here was the FuzzMan I’d come to know. He finally sounded like he wrote, though a toned-down version.

Harry grinned and pointed at Fuzzy.

“Now, that’s a rant. You are a writer, for sure,” he said.

I probably should have let Harry’s diplomacy soften him up a little more, but I’m not a terribly patient person.

“So who do you think did it?” I asked.

Fuzzy looked confused.

“Did what?”

“Killed old Sergey.”

He did another of those head shakes. I expected to see something fly out of his hair.

“I haven’t seen him in years. I was supposed to go to some service when they planted Aunt Betty, but I was all tangled up in shorts—selling short, not in my own shorts—and couldn’t let my eyes off the screen. In the time it takes you to hit a key, a stock can shoot up ten percent.”

“I thought that was good.”

“Not when you’re caught in a short squeeze,” he said. “When you short a stock, you bet on it going down. Going up is very, very bad.”

I wanted to comment on his priorities, but I was trying to take Harry’s sympathetic, nonjudgmental lead.

“So no guesses. On Sergey,” I said.

“Not even a wild-ass guess,” said Fuzzy. “What do you think the cops are going to ask? Same thing?”

“What cops?”

“They called yesterday,” he said. “Asked me about Sergey but didn’t say anything about any murder.”

I didn’t tell Fuzzy to get ready for the hostile, suspicious, and highly judgmental approach of Joe Sullivan. Let him learn that for himself.

“So you heard about all this from the cops? Your mother didn’t tell you?” I said.

Fuzzy stared at me, his face a mask.

“My mother?”

“Eunice didn’t tell you about Sergey?”

His whole face turned into a snarl.

“For her to tell me something, I’d have to talk to her. I don’t talk to her, so no, she didn’t tell me. All I know is what the cops told me, which was the old freak was dead.”

“How come you don’t talk to your mother?” I asked.

He looked at Harry as if to say, “Could you do something with this broad?”

“How come?” I asked again.

“Tell me again why I’m talking to you?” he said.

“’Cause I politely asked?”

“That’s polite?”

“Advice on manners, from you. That’s a good one,” I said.

“I invited you into my home.”

“Is that what this is?” I asked, looking around.