Ice Cap (4 page)

Burton huffed with scorn.

“What seems to be the state's difficulty? I've been on the snowblower since daybreak. The drive and pathways are now perfectly clear.”

That the driveway leading to Burton's mansion in Southampton was about half the length of the Long Island Expressway gave his case some credence. Burton liked to do this sort of work himself, despite an extensive and eager domestic staff, which was another reason why the guy held such a persistent grip on my affections.

“I'll tell you what I know when I know it,” I said to him, then hung up and went back to my focus of the moment—staring in the bathroom mirror at an odd little red splotch on my cheek, arbitrating between what could have been one of my ridiculous freckles, late-life acne, or some sort of fatal carcinoma.

According to the calendar, I was about to bump up against a birthday that would put me within spitting distance of forty, a milestone I was ashamed to admit felt a bit daunting. This had led to heightened vigilance over signs of impending decrepitude. Both my parents had died relatively young, within a few months of each other, so that might have been one factor. Or the only factor. Or maybe I was just a coward.

I was in my apartment in Water Mill, a subsection of Southampton you crossed through on the way to Bridgehampton and other eastern reaches of the South Fork. I used to live in a house my late husband had built not far from there, but after being attacked and nearly raped and killed there one night, living alone in the woods had lost its allure.

Across the hall from the apartment was my office, giving me one of the shorter commutes in the Hamptons, a distance often traversed in bathrobe and slippers, as it was that day. My apartment and office encompassed the entire second floor of a building that housed a Japanese restaurant and shabby little art gallery on the first. It was my empire, my province, my paradise on earth.

I made a cup of coffee and barely had time to boot up my computer when the cell phone played the first instrumental stanzas of “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” I picked it up.

“So you're obviously alive,” said Harry Goodlander. “I'm glad.”

Harry was my boyfriend, a word I never felt comfortable hearing inside my head, much less passing my lips. Not because I didn't care for Harry, but I could never think of him as a boy, or a friend, in the traditional sense of the term. Of course we were friends, but of the abiding, confusing, gut-wrenching type that transcends the banality of the standard definition.

And if you saw Harry, you'd agree no standard definition could ever quite apply.

“I'm glad, too,” I said. “Were there doubts?”

“I called a few times last night. When you didn't answer, I figured you were either stoned silly or frozen under a snowdrift.”

“That's so sweet. So you called the authorities?”

“Actually, I went back to the Knicks game,” he said. “They won—a bigger miracle than your apparent survival.”

“As it turns out, I was already with the authorities. The cops, to be specific. Want to hear about it?”

He did, and I spared no detail in the telling of the tale. Patience with my excesses, in all their forms, including a tendency to go on and on about something well beyond the necessary, was Harry's most appreciated quality. Okay, second most appreciated.

“Sorry about your uncle,” he said. “Pete's uncle. Terrible thing.”

“Thanks. Though I can't say I liked him that much, which I hope doesn't bring all kinds of bad karma down on my head.”

“I don't think that's how karma works. Not that I'm an expert. Can I bring you breakfast? The government is letting us out of our houses. Just in time to avoid a constitutional crisis.”

“I'm in the mood for things hot, sweet, and slippery. Cardiologically impure. I'll work it off in the spring,” I told him.

“On it.”

I went back to my computer, or rather my worst addiction. Plagued as I've been my whole life by an uncontrollable curiosity about all things large, small, and in between, the allure of that silvery machine has proven nearly, maybe totally, irresistible. To me, modern computers are, in fact, intravenous tubes you jack directly into the arterial throb of global information. The World Wide Web is not so much a vast repository of fact and opinion but a living organism, a seething, voracious creature ever expanding toward the infinite.

And for me, pure joy.

*   *   *

Thus lost as I usually was in the digital chase of the moment, I didn't immediately notice the chime that warned someone was at the outside door. I probably assumed it was Harry, so by the time I looked at the monitor connected to a security camera mounted above the door, the person had just begun to turn away. I tried to follow him with the camera, moveable by a little joystick, but all I saw was another man, shorter and rounder than the first one, though equally bundled against the cold weather. They hadn't rung the bell but had merely walked inside the field of a motion detector, which triggered the chime. And now they were moving away, back toward the parking lot and out of my electronic field of vision.

I once shared the top floor with a bunch of grumpy surveyors, so when I took full possession of the space, this kind of thing happened a lot. But not in recent months. I was tempted to run downstairs in my robe to see if I could catch a better look, but something held me in my seat. Maybe Burton's remark about impulse control.

Almost by reflex, I switched on the digital recorder that captured feeds from the security cameras—one outside, and two in the hallway facing the apartment and inner office doors. The recorder was good for a week before I had to clean out the hard drive.

I crossed the room to a keypad that controlled the alarm system and punched in the activation code. Then I threw the massive deadbolt on my office door.

Safe, but now afflicted with a type of vague apprehension that always made me feel slightly ill. A warning light had flicked on inside my head, so, real or imagined, the rest of my physiology quickly followed.

“Dammit.”

*   *   *

Harry set off the next chime. I knew immediately it was him by the sight of his charmingly bald skull filling the security monitor. At about six foot eight and then some, he nearly reached the height of the hidden camera. He also had a key, which he was using to get through the door. I shut off the alarm, threw back the deadbolt, and waited for him to reach the top of the stairs.

“Wow. An official greeting,” he said. “Complete with formal wear.”

“This is all we wear in these parts, mister.”

When we were inside the office, I switched the alarm back on and turned the deadbolt, causing Harry to arch an eyebrow.

“Paranoid, are we?”

I told him about my two near visitors.

“Probably nothing,” I said, “but you'd be the first to tell me to take normal precautions.”

“Where's the Glock?” he asked, referring to my trusty semiautomatic.

“Where it usually is,” I said, flicking my eyes toward the spot and winking, as if there were others in the room we needed to trick. “So, what's in the bag? Some form of enticement?”

“I hope so. Ham-and-cheese omelets, bacon strips, and two gooey cinnamon buns. Artery clogging, as specified.”

“Good. Let's eat.”

Harry was a freelance logistics expert, specializing in the sourcing, procuring, and transporting of the daunting and improbable. If you had something odd to ship—say, an orangutan from Sumatra to Tallahassee, or very big, like a full-scale reproduction of the Trojan Horse, Harry was your man. So if I'd ordered a breakfast of torofugu and gingersnap cookies, he'd definitely deliver.

Harry and I had been an on-and-off-again thing some years before, and now we seemed to be fairly securely on, for which I credit him, both for his persistence and the willingness to adapt to me without asking for a whole lot of adaptation in return. Unless you count my willingness to have him be whatever he wanted to be. Not just willing, but eager, since his Harry-ness was what appealed to me from the beginning. Why mess with that?

My Jackie-ness had been the issue, now tentatively resolved. Although, like most neurotic, ambivalence-ridden females of my time, my emotional fingers were never completely uncrossed.

After breakfast, spent in luxurious avoidance of all things responsible, personal, or professional, Harry generously helped me take a shower, which was fun for both of us, then left me to go about the rest of the day, the morning now exhausted but well spent.

*   *   *

The snow had not only stopped, the sun was ablaze and the sky without a cloud. The cold, however, bit even deeper, stuck as it was in single digits, unusual for our part of the world. I feared for the tulips and daffodils, buddleia and miscanthus that grew along the back of my building, though I'd been told by a native Vermonter not to worry if there was plenty of snow cover, which remarkably enough served as insulation. Who knew?

I'd arranged to meet up with Franco Raffini at a diner on Montauk Highway a few miles south of Southampton Town Police headquarters. This was a tradition of mine when escorting my clients to visits with the cops, events I mostly strove to avoid, though with a case like Franco's, not so easy to do. By every definition, he was a material witness if they chose to anoint him one, and could thus become quickly embraced by their tender mercies whether I liked it or not.

The diner was the perfect place to hash out the ground rules—the most important of which was to keep your damn mouth shut unless I gave you permission to speak. You'd be surprised how many people found this impossible to do.

“What am I going to say?” I asked Franco over two cups of coffee, a turkey sandwich for him, and a yogurt for me, fooling him into thinking I ate like a bird.

“To keep my damn mouth shut unless you give me permission to speak. Even though I'm Italian, a race of bigmouths.”

“Italians aren't a race, and I never said that. You gotta lose this ethnic persecution thing. The governor's Italian, for God's sake. Like his father, also governor. Sometimes I think all of Nassau County is Italian, per capita the richest county in the country. For an oppressed people, you're doing pretty well.”

“You're right. Sorry. It's transference. My father oppressed me, so I blame it on you Anglos.”

“Don't call me an Anglo unless you're spoilin' for a fight,” I said. “I'm Irish. We know a thing or two about oppression.”

Now that he was out from under his snow gear, I could see his face, which was still long, poorly shaven, and somewhat morose. Undoubtedly, he'd had a far more bright-eyed and chipper demeanor back in his investment banker days, when he had a prestigious job on Wall Street, a summer house in Hampton Bays, a stunning wife, and two kids. Losing all that—including most of his liquid assets in the subsequent divorce—and doing three years in prison had brought on predictably corrosive effects. Still, I imagined I could see glimpses of a prior Franco occasionally peek through, an intimation of the crafty intelligence and drive that had earned him the opportunity to execute such a precipitous fall from grace.

“This would also be an excellent time to tell me the truth about last night,” I said. “All of it.”

This was the other reason I liked prepping my clients at the diner. There was something about delivering harsh words in a public place that undermined their natural defenses.

I saw Franco's eyes shift toward the door, as if contemplating escape.

“I told you already,” he said.

“You haven't met Joe Sullivan,” I said. “He knows people are bullshitting before they do. Anyway, it's insulting to think you can't open up to me. I trusted you enough to get you sprung out of Sanger. You're supposed to trust me back.”

He'd been about to take a bite of his sandwich when I said that. He pulled it away from his mouth. His sad eyes grew sadder. “I trust you, Jackie. If it was just about me, it'd be different.”

He tried again to make a little progress with his sandwich, but this time I took it away from him and dropped it back on the plate.

“I knew it. Dammit, Franco, you're not supposed to hold out on me. I'm your lawyer. I'll protect your confidences.”

He looked unconvinced. “No. You won't give them up. You'll browbeat me into giving them up myself. I don't look forward to that. Some people don't know how to let up.”

When he said that, I noticed I was halfway out of my seat and nearly stretched across the table. I sat back and straightened my clothes, brushing lint off the shoulders of my jacket in a caricature of regained composure.

“Okay,” I said. “I promise I won't do that.”

“What?”

“That thing I do. That not-letting-up thing.” He wasn't the first to point out this tendency, so maybe I was a little sensitive about it. “I'll respect your boundaries. And there's always attorney-client privilege. If I reveal stuff without your okay, you can get me disbarred. Not that I would.”

One of the least appealing features of Franco's bedraggled face was that crummy little mustache and goatee, composed of wiry, black, thinly distributed hair that, combined with a pair of bulging, closely set eyes, gave the general aspect of a small nocturnal mammal. A sick one at that.

“You're gonna be unhappy with me,” he said dolefully.

“I'll only be unhappy if you keep trying to squirm out from under this.”

He snatched his sandwich off the plate and sat as far back in the booth as he could, clear of my reach. He took a bite that was too big to talk through, so I had to wait.

“So, you have to keep this to yourself if I ask you to, as, like, my lawyer,” he said.

“Absolutely,” I said, even though that wasn't quite true.

He rubbed his scraggly facial hair and shut his eyes tight, the outward expression of an agonizing internal debate.