Short Squeeze (13 page)

I tried to remember the night Sergey called me. Was there anything at all strained in the conversation’s tone or content? Given the dither he was in on being denied dental floss, it didn’t seem possible that the nipple had arrived before the call.

“He got it later that night,” I said. “Otherwise, I’d have known.”

Harry nodded.

“Okay, how much time between his last call to you and the call from the cops?”

I had the exact chronology written down somewhere back at my office, but I could get close.

“Between nine thirty and two in the morning. Assume the neighborhood lady found the body about a half hour before that,” I said.

“There’s gotta be a relationship between the nipple and his death,” said Harry. “You don’t have two things like that happen simultaneously without a correlation.”

“Sometimes it’s coincidence,” I said.

“But you don’t know.”

“I don’t know. I have too much ignorance,” I said.

Harry grinned at that. “I didn’t know ignorance had substance. I thought it was just the absence of knowledge. Like cold is the absence of heat.”

I shook my head. I explained that, to me, ignorance was a thing that tends to produce even more ignorance as you process all the things you don’t know until you generate this enormous glob of vile, worthless speculation.

“Ah,” said Harry, “to put this in terms I can understand, as you bring in small parcels of knowledge, it allows you to collapse the cubic footage dedicated to ignorance storage on a geometrically declining scale. This freed-up capacity can be repurposed to accommodate the resulting growth in knowledge stock, though more frequent utilization might actually drive a net gain in total volume requirements.”

“Like the man said, I store, therefore I am.”

I spent the night with Harry on a mattress reinforced by a four-by-eight sheet of birch plywood suspended between two sawhorses in the middle of the room the sculptor used for the final assembly of his creations. You could still smell the residue of arc welders and metal grinders and what I thought, to my pleasure, might have been marijuana. That was one of the issues on which Harry and I parted company, helping to lead to a parting of more material significance.

I smoked an occasional joint; he didn’t. He not only didn’t, but he also hated it, sort of the way religious people hated sin and some nonreligious people hated religion. A hate on the cellular level. Being me, of course, I had a hard time understanding this, assuming there was something bigger and nastier behind this unfettered antipathy, though every effort to ferret that out only made matters worse.

The lingering smell of dope was only one of the reasons I liked that place. The panels in the bank of garage doors were glass, so the whole wall felt like part of the outside, which the owner had generously illuminated, giving an all-night view of huge oak trees covered in ivy and blue-green azaleas and a pair of Volvo station wagons of competing vintage.

The ceilings were high to accommodate cars on lifts, which Harry said were still in the floor but long past operational. The prior resident had built all sorts of shelves and cabinets and workbenches, so the place had the feel of earnest industry, of foolishly euphoric enterprise.

There was a fair amount of euphoria of another type also expressed that night, but that’s a story that’ll have to stay between Harry and me.

The next morning I went directly to the address Slim Jackery had given me. He said he’d only be there till ten. I couldn’t risk the trip to and from Bridgehampton, so I went in the same clothes I’d worn to go out to dinner. It was the Hamptons; nobody would notice.

The place was at the end of a street of big estates, or what looked big until you got to this place. On the western border was a grassy swatch of wetlands along a shallow bay, across which was the Shinnecock Indian Reservation.

The service entrance paralleled a privet hedge on the left, leaving the right side open to the yard. Somewhere over there, snuggled in the embrace of towering, luxuriant birch trees was the main house, a four-story brick testimony to what you can do with your money if you have way too much of it and way too little sense of its genuine worth.

I was almost halfway to where I could see a small gathering of white vans decorated with scenes of exuberant tropical growth, which I thought had to be Rainmakers International, when I spotted something more familiar.

Out in the middle of the colossal lawn was a truck with a sign on the door that said
RAY ZANDER ESTATE MANAGEMENT. SINCE 1984
.

So I took a hard right and drove my Volvo like a Land Rover over to say hi to Ray.

He was on his hands and knees staring down at the grass. He looked up when he heard my door slam. I walked over to him.

“Lost your contacts?” I asked.

“Found some nut grass. Don’t know how the devil got in here, but sure enough there’s more. The stuff is like a horror movie. You can’t kill it. Spreads underground so you take out part of it, another part just pops up and thumbs its nose at you.”

He stood and gazed out on the vast landscape, the implication clear.

“Maybe you can negotiate a peace accord,” I suggested. “Give up a little territory in return for suspended hostilities.”

“You a diplomat?”

“No, but I took arbitration in law school. Do you work a lot with Slim Jackery?”

“Who’s that?”

“Rainmakers International,” I said, pointing at the white vans at the end of the drive.

“Is that his name? That’s a good one. No, but I don’t see any of the irrigators that much. We tend to work when they’re not around and vice versa. There’re no sprinklers for this lawn. They’d need their own reservoir. They just do the shrubs around the house and the vegetable garden, if you can believe that. The guy probably owns a chain of grocery stores and here he’s growin’ his own tomatoes.” Ray bent down and pulled a tuft of nut grass out of the ground. “We can do this all day and it won’t make any difference. Nut grass ain’t even a grass. They eat it over in Africa, use it for medicinal purposes.”

“Maybe we should export it back to them,” I said. “Help the balance of trade. How’re things over at the Pontecellos’?”

“Strictly Wolsonowicz these days. Other’n that, ‘bout the same.”

“Any other ideas on what happened to Sergey?”

He shrugged and looked down at the lawn, as if trying to catch a clump of nut grass sneaking up through the lawn. “Frankly, I do have a thought, but you gotta be careful sayin’ where you heard it.”

“Sure.”

“One of my guys told me he’d seen Sergey and Betty at the casino every time he went over there, which was a lot since the son of a bitch is always broke. They weren’t slot players, neither. All table games, high stakes. Of course, you figure they could afford it, though there’s no limit on what you can lose. If you’re catchin’ my meaning.”

I was. More than he knew.

“You’re wondering if Sergey got himself in trouble with gambling debts, maybe owed somebody dangerous.”

“Not the casino itself. Them Indian casinos are squeaky-clean. But they can only do so much about the side betting. That’s where you get them bad actors. Just a thought.”

My regard for Ray Zander, which hadn’t exactly started on a pinnacle, was rising rapidly.

“Which casino are we talking about?”

He told me. Of course, I’d heard of the place. There were two of them in Connecticut, an easy ferry ride from the North Fork. I’d never been to either, but most people I knew had.

I wanted to see what else Zander had growing in his fertile mind, but I was afraid of missing Slim. So I thanked him and got his cell phone number so I could chase him down for further discussion. He seemed agreeable to that.

“Jawin’ is a lot more interesting than mowing lawns,” he said. “Just hard to get paid for it.”

I left him and drove back over the lawn and down to the end of the drive. The white vans were empty, but I could see several men waist-deep in a row of yews that bordered the west wing of the gigantic brick building. It was hard to think of it as a house, which is probably why I felt okay about invading their private property to mingle with the gardening help.

As I got closer it was easy to pick out Slim, but I called his name just to be sure. He waded out from the yews and came over to me.

Slim was as close to round as a being with arms and legs could be-maybe five foot five on the vertical and about the same on the horizontal. He had a shiny bald head like Harry’s but apparently no neck. Heavy as he was, he was light on his feet, and since he looked like a balloon or a beach ball, you could almost see a stiff wind blowing him up into the sky.

“You the lady that called?” he asked.

“Yes, sir. Jackie Swaitkowski.” I gave him my card. “You know, when I called you about my lawn, I realized I recognized your name. I’m terribly sorry about Edna. I knew her from the Scuba Shack.”

His face showed sudden sorrow and a touch of embarrassment. I felt bad for thrusting this on him, but I was committed.

“Thanks, Ms. Swaitkowski. Still trying to make sense of it.”

“I do a lot of work with the police on things like this,” I said, which
was a truthful statement, however misleading. “Would you mind if we talk about the accident for just a minute?”

He looked more than unsure, but eventually gave in to the full force of my sympathetic, girl-in-need, oh-please-be-kind-to-me look. As if I were the grief-stricken one.

“Sure,” he said. “There’s a table over on the patio. Let’s go sit.”

It was black, wrought-iron, with four chairs, each weighing approximately a half ton. Slim helped me get settled.

He told me he was at a meeting that night with a landscape architect working out an installation for a big new house in the Village. He said he didn’t know why Edna hadn’t called him or their son to come get her, except that it was like her to get a notion in her head and then act on it. In this case, the notion was they’d be mad at her about the car. As if it was her fault it wouldn’t start. He said he’d gotten plenty mad at her over a lot of things but never that.

“Her mind had a funny way of working sometimes,” he said. “So while it didn’t make sense to me that she was walking along County Road in the dark, it didn’t surprise me.”

He went on to say that since she’d died he’d been thinking about how stupid he felt for all the arguments they’d had, and for all the things, formerly mentioned, that pissed him off about her. The more he talked, the more the regret grew in his voice, and the worse I felt about bothering him.

“Are the police any closer to finding out what happened?” I asked as gently as I could.

He shook his head.

“They’ll never catch him now. If they don’t get you within the first forty-eight hours, they probably never will,” he said, which I knew to be true. “I don’t care, frankly. If he’s got any kind of conscience, that’ll take care of the punishment. If he doesn’t, we’ll have to wait for God to handle things. It doesn’t matter to me. Catching him won’t bring her back. And it sure won’t help me or Jeddy get over this. Just
make it all fresh again and give me a name to hate rather than my own vision of some poor, suffering bastard I can even feel a little sorry for.”

I got so wrapped up in thinking about the intricacies of mourning, forgiveness, and revenge that I almost forgot my main reason for coming to see him.

“Ever heard of a guy named Sergey Pontecello?” I asked. “Did you or Edna know him, or anybody named Wolsonowicz?”

He thought about it but shook his head.

“I don’t think so. Funny names. Why do you ask?”

“Sergey was also found dead on the road,” I said. “The cops have found a connection between him and Edna. I can’t say much more without compromising their investigation.”

He blanched.

“Don’t say any more. I don’t want to know.”

No danger of that, I thought to myself. I’ve already dug a deep enough hole for myself.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Jackery. I really am. I’ll leave you alone. I just hope you’ll contact me if you come across anything that relates to these people.” I took my card back from where he had it on the table and wrote down the same information I’d given Brandon Wayne.

“So what about that irrigation system for your place in Bridgehampton?” he asked.

I’d already forgotten the pretense of our meeting. I mentally scrambled, which must have showed.

“You don’t really need it is what you’re trying to say.”

“I don’t,” I said. “Not right now. Maybe if I can grow a little more grass. If that happens, you’ll absolutely be the one I call.”

“I’ll be there,” he said, happy to be back in the world of positive thinking.

“By the way, where’s Edna buried?” I asked when I stood to leave. “I want to pay my respects.”

Slim smiled the first real smile of the conversation.

“You like waterslides? Edna was nuts for them. She was also nuts about the Catskills, where she went as a kid. So I put one and one together and tossed her ashes down the Kaaterskill Falls. Risked my neck doing it, but I didn’t care much about that.”

“That’s nice,” I said, not knowing what else to say, though I meant it. “So you had the funeral up there?”