Short Squeeze (17 page)

Joe pretended to stretch, and as he did, looked over at me standing behind the mirror. His face said, Okay, I asked, she answered. An answer I liked so much I barely paid attention to his other questions, until he got to the last one—how much did the Pontecellos actually have left over after all the deposits and withdrawals?

Autumn put the stacks back together, though now at perpendicular angles so she’d be able to get the outbound wire transfers back into their original slot, then pulled out the largest bound stack.

“This was their regular checking account. If you look here, you’ll see the last check, which was for $163. Leaving a balance of $2,618, which allows them to stay above the minimum to receive free checking.”

Not exactly broke, but close enough.

Joe put his finger on another part of the statement.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Autumn stood up from the table to get a closer look.

“Oh, that’s our Special Savings. That’s where Mrs. Pontecello deposited the inbound wire transfers. It’s connected to their cash account, so it’s easier to wire back out through a single transaction.”

“Am I reading this number right?” he asked, sliding the passel of papers across the table.

“Yes, sir-$6,784,118.53.”

Since there was nobody else to share this moment with, I looked at the stenographer, but she just kept typing things into her laptop.

When Joe finally joined me in the observation room, I said, “You’re going to tell me what else is in there, aren’t you?”

“I might.”

“And what’s in the safe-deposit box.”

“Maybe.”

“And you’re going to tell me what the win/loss statements from the casino say.”

“I could.”

“And you’re going to be as nice to me as you were to Autumn from now on, now that I know you’re capable of niceness.”

“Definitely not. But I will tell you if I learn anything about your accident.”

“My vehicular assault,” I said, pointing as if my finger were simply a prelude for something with more impact.

“That, too.”

I needed to be in three places at once, which was one more than I could usually manage. I deferred the dream of diving into my computer at the office or hanging with Joe Sullivan and all those appetizing bank records and picked the place I most needed to go.

Sandy Kalandro’s office was just like mine in that it was on Montauk Highway, on the second floor of a row of shops. Where it differed was in every other way possible.

The receptionist was better and more professionally dressed
than I’d ever been, and things went up from there. The smell of leather and oiled furniture was almost overpowering. The cream-colored walls and ceilings were so laden with moldings and fancy trim there was almost no room for the Early American landscapes, French beach scenes, and stern portraits of men in curly white wigs. The carpet was a deep green wool, which I imagined also smelled great, but I wasn’t about to drop to my hands and knees to check it out.

Though I could have since I was wearing my sturdy visit-the-cops outfit, which covered every inch of my body except for a little bit of neck and whatever part of my face managed to get through the frizzy hair. The foundation was a khaki pants suit, that I cleverly built on with a turtleneck, scarf, and penny loafers. Whether the runway model for Brooks Brothers Lady Executive Department sitting behind the walnut desk in the office foyer noticed, I’ll never know because I was busy digging another business card out of the crud at the bottom of my purse. When I found it I handed it to her. She held it by the edges, looked at it through the lower half of her glasses, and nodded. She pushed a button on her phone and indicated with a quick toss of her head that I should disappear into one of the massively overstuffed club chairs in the waiting area.

We managed to get through the entire transaction without saying a word to each other, which suited us both.

Kalandro had approached so quietly over the thick pile he startled me when he said, “Of course you’re Ms. Swaitkowski,” as he offered to shake hands.

I jumped up and grabbed his hand.

“I am. And I bet you’re Mr. Kalandro.”

“I am. We have our identities straight. Follow me.”

I followed him across the deep green sward into a conference room decorated in a maritime motif, complete with an actual helm from an
old sailing vessel, with a gigantic oak wheel and a gleaming brass-enclosed compass.

“Oh captain, my captain,” I blurted out.

“First mate, technically. Marty Atkins is our most senior partner.”

“That’s quite a rig. Maybe someday we can take her out for a spin around East Hampton. Check out the legal eddies and currents.”

Kalandro was older than I’d thought he’d be–somewhere in his late sixties. He had a full head of unnaturally dark, wavy hair like Ronald Reagan’s, and a large gut that filled out his light yellow polo shirt. His pants were some kind of light gray silk or rayon, and he wore loafers, though without a place to put a penny.

His face was well tanned from recent months on the golf course or tennis courts or sailing waters. But his skin was lumpy and dotted with dark age spots, a sign of encroaching vulnerability.

“Eunice has signed the necessary documents to confer upon you coadministrator status,” he said without prelude in his basso profundo voice. I could almost feel it through the four inches of lacquer on the walnut conference table.

“I’m familiar with New York State probate,” I said, not adding that my experience was purely personal and drenched in grief, and thus largely lost in the haze of painful memory. “The most important items at this stage are copies of the death certificate. I need a stack of them, since I don’t know what I’ll be encountering as I work through the process.”

He bowed his head in gracious agreement.

“Naturally. I believe for Mrs. Wolsonowicz the important thing is to arrive at a conclusion as expeditiously as possible.”

“We are in violent agreement,” I said, thinking correctly that this was the sort of statement an old windbag like Kalandro would like.

“Capital,” he said, upon which another well-turned-out office automaton glided in with a white legal envelope out of which she
drew the necessary papers and laid them on the table. She held down the thin stack with a glossy black pen that weighed about forty pounds.

The document naming me co-administrator was short and to the point. I signed it and the photocopy first. Then I moved on to the much denser contracts that said my involvement extended exclusively to the matter of the Pontecello estate, and more to the point, stipulated that I would lay no claim to any asset, financial instrument, or property in the possession of Eunice Wolsonowicz. I crossed out “in the possession of” and wrote “belonging to,” then signed that one.

“Same difference, right?” I said to Kalandro, who raised his thick eyebrows but let it stand, probably because I didn’t touch the clause saying I’d be paid solely by the Pontecello estate, and should my fees exceed its liquidateable assets, then basically, tough darts.

That’d be some hefty bill, I thought, but kept it to myself as I got everything signed, back in the big white envelope, and stuffed under my arm.

Kalandro had watched me with the deliberate indifference of a man waiting for a traffic light to turn green. Now he almost came back to life, mustering the energy to hand me a separate sealed envelope on which someone had written “Will.”

“Eunice asked me to secure this after her sister died. You’ll note there are changes since the original was composed, so if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to ask,” he said as an automatic courtesy. I acted deeply grateful.

“That’s very generous of you. I certainly will. Well, actually, I have a couple quick ones right now, if you have a moment.”

He looked at the Big Ben on his wrist.

“A moment.”

“You have looked over the nontangible assets, I presume. Bank accounts, stock portfolios, etc.”

He smiled indulgently. “The police have secured that information
as part of their investigation. However, Mrs. Wolsonowicz was privy to her sister’s financial disposition, which was less robust than one might suspect observing her lifestyle.”

“Sure. You see that out here all the time. But there’s enough to pay me, of course.”

The smile wavered.

“Of course.”

I pretended to think about that.

“So you haven’t talked to the bank yet,” I said.

“They’ll tell us when the accounts are released. It’s the usual routine.”

“But let’s just say things go better than planned and there’s a little bit left over. I’m assuming it reverts to Eunice as the sole surviving heir.”

He shook his head.

“It’s all outlined in the will. There are several charitable institutions listed, notably the East Hampton Library and the dog rescue in Water Mill. These ostensibly receive about twenty percent of the estate. The balance goes to the person specified.”

“Person specified? Sergey thought it all went to charity.”

“Well,” said Kalandro, “perhaps a review of the document will clear up that mystery.”

I could see that we were playing a little game. Let’s see if the dumb girl knows how to read a simple contract, which is all a will actually is. Okay, I thought, I can take the thing out of the envelope and read the answer. My dignity will survive.

And there it was, handwritten, with Betty’s signature indicating this was an alteration from the original, an answer freighted with a much bigger boatload of questions.

My father didn’t go easily. He took his impending death as just another affront, perpetrated by forces indifferent to his personal dignity, not unlike his engineering clients or the clerks at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In addition to magazine articles about women living alone, I never read inspirational tales about people who fight fatal diseases with valiant determination, turning a two-month prognosis into ten bountiful years. Probably because my father turned a ten-year prognosis, at minimum, into two miserable years of abject surrender, nicely embellished by unrelenting self-pity and complaint.

It was a display of heroic proportions, if not exactly heroic.

Given this, it was unsurprising that something like a will, the ultimate recognition of the inevitable, was the last thing he’d think about, much less compose. I should have known this was the case, but, of course, I didn’t, assuming no intelligent, educated adult would be that selfish and uncaring.

I was only in my first year of law school at that point and couldn’t even spell intestate, much less deal with its consequences. But I learned fast, motivated by the prospect of my mother losing thousands of
dollars working through the Kafka-designed theme park called New York State probate, known quaintly around here as Surrogate’s Court.

The period it took me to settle all the legal questions, negotiate the estate taxes of the state and federal governments, and lay the groundwork for the next inevitability was exactly, to the day, how long my mother lived beyond my father’s death.

Having worked side by side with me throughout the process, and too exhausted to celebrate with anything more than a half bottle of week-old Cabernet swiped off the kitchen counter, she thanked me for being the best daughter I knew how to be (not exactly unqualified praise) and went off to bed to die of a massive heart attack.

Real estate was nowhere near as costly in those days as it is now, but neither was law school. So I was able to pay it all off and have a little left over to squander on the transition from frantic, grief-stricken student to frantic, dysfunctional adult. Just to spite my old man’s reckless disregard.

It was that lively concoction of extreme emotion, cold-hearted reality, and sudden loss of childhood that taught me the beauty of the law. Until then, I was doing it just to prove to any doubters that I could. The only real doubter being my father, though his dying did nothing to stem my determination.

I learned it wasn’t just knowing how to gin the system, how to jigger the odds. There was a solid core of brilliance in the law, embedded in thousands of years of experiences far more desperate and ennobling than my own. That everyone had at least a chance, a shot at something akin to justice and fair play. Maybe that’s naïve, but you need something beyond habit to get you up in the morning. At least I do.

Thoughts like these were running wild as I walked out of Sandy Kalandro’s office with my briefcase stuffed with paperwork covered in authorizing signatures. The world was now different. I had the right to play around all I wanted in Sergey and Elizabeth’s most intimate affairs; I was empowered and emboldened, even employed, courtesy
of Eunice’s abiding belief in my client’s impoverishment. Abiding and influential, since Sandy had apparently bought the same line of baloney.

As had I. In fact, that’s all I’d been doing—buying everybody’s bullshit. Or buying into my own assumptions. Whatever I thought I knew, I knew now that it probably wasn’t true. So right when I should have felt only triumph, frustration filled my brain.

“I don’t know anything,” I yelled at myself after climbing into my car.

But that wasn’t true, said another part of me. I knew Sergey Pontecello came to see me, then ended up dead. He was supposed to have died broke, but that wasn’t true. Eunice just thought it was true. Sergey surely knew better. So then why didn’t he pay off the mortgages and tell his imperious sister-in-law to go pound sand?

I couldn’t ask him, I thought with a slight twist in my gut. He couldn’t tell me what he knew or what he didn’t know. Wendy said he was deluded and oblivious. That seemed credible. He hadn’t even looked at their will when his wife died. That took some commitment to obliviousness. If he had, he would have known that Betty had gone in after the fact and earmarked the lion’s share of his little European fortune for his nasty jerk of a nephew, who had nothing but disdain for his apparent benefactors.