Short Squeeze (3 page)

What happens then is nothing, because I’m totally deaf in my left ear. The eardrum and all the cute little bones that make it work are gone.

The night table’s always been on the left, and I can’t seem to muster the energy to move it to the other side, partly because there’s so much junk piled on top I’d need a wrecking crew to move it.

When I realized I wasn’t hearing anything, I rolled all the way onto my stomach, stuck the phone to my right ear, and rolled back again.

“Uh,” I said eloquently into the receiver.

“Hey, Jackie,” said a cheerful male voice. “If you’re doing something I don’t want to hear about, I’ll wait till you finish up.”

“Jesus.”

“He doesn’t want to hear about it, either.”

“Sleeping. I’m trying to sleep.”

“If that’s all, I need you down here right away.”

It was Joe Sullivan. A Southampton Town plainclothesman and
conditional friend. I usually cooperated with him on my criminal cases, when I wasn’t trying not to, which was why the friendship had always remained conditional.

“Where’s here?”

“Sagaponack. Got a stiffy with your name on it.”

“What?” I asked, finally relenting to the inevitable by sitting up and rubbing thwarted sleep out of my eyes.

“Dead guy in the middle of the road. Has your business card in his pocket.”

I held the phone with my shoulder as I stood and dropped my pajama bottoms.

“A little more detail would help,” I said.

“We got a call from a lady in Sagaponack about a guy lying in the street. She thought we might want to know so we could put up protective barriers or something. I was in the neighborhood, so I took the call with Danny Izard. Your card was in the guy’s shirt pocket.”

By then I was all the way out of my pj’s and riffling through the central clothes pile for jeans, a clean shirt, and cowboy boots.

“I mean the guy. What’s he look like?”

“Older guy,” said Sullivan. “Approximately five-eight, dark hair, maybe one-forty, wearing the remains of a two-tone shirt and some kind of silk pants. Pretty chewed up.”

For some reason I’d already heard that description in my head before he said it. It might have been the timing or a legitimate premonition. I don’t know, but it didn’t make it feel any better.

“Aw, Christ. Sergey.”

“Russian?”

“Just give me directions. I’ll need about twenty minutes to get there.”

I grabbed my purse—too elegant a word for the battered feed bag I hauled around—and jumped into my trusty Toyota pickup. Another
legacy of my time with Peter Swaitkowski that I couldn’t seem to part with. I didn’t even like the thing. I’m more of a Volvo station wagon than a Japanese pickup kind of girl. But as long as it refused to die, I couldn’t find a way to part with it.

Sagaponack is a made-up village southeast of Bridgehampton with the dubious distinction of having the highest average property values in America. They didn’t have the highest top end in the Hamptons, but they’d managed to draw the borders in a way that kept people like me from dragging down the mean.

I like driving through there in the daylight. Lots of open space despite the sprawling mansions and towering privet hedges. Most people like me who are born and bred and forever stuck in the Hamptons spend lots of emotional energy fretting over how it’s changed. They don’t seem to realize that everything’s changed everywhere, including places like North Dakota, where everyone’s moved out. Don’t get me wrong, I miss a lot of what used to be here, but I’m not going to ignore some of the good things that have come in. Like clueless clients willing to pay decent money to local real-estate lawyers.

I’m not so crazy about driving in Sagaponack at night. Too easy to make a wrong turn and end up stuck in a cul-de-sac. Though, that night, I just followed the flashing lights illuminating the trees. A few hundred yards out, a pair of cruisers and a few sawhorses established a roadblock. I recognized one of the cops.

“Hey, Danny, waz up?”

He leaned halfway into my window. I leaned back.

“Whatcha doin’ here, Jackie, ambulance chasin’?”

“Christ, that’s insulting, Danny. I don’t chase ambulances.”

“’Course not, Jackie. You race ’em.”

“Sullivan called me. I’m supposed to be here.”

Danny pulled away from my window.

“In that case, Miss Attorney, you oughta go on in.”

“You think? Ambulance chasing. Jesus Christ.”

“Don’t start gettin’ the way you get,” Danny called to me as I accelerated away from him. “Just makin’ fun.”

Yeah, bullshit, I said to myself as I ran through the notchy gears of the old bucket of Japanese bolts.

A car, I said to myself. What would be so wrong with having an actual car? With comfy seats and an automatic transmission. A radio that works and a parking brake that actually stops the thing from rolling down a hill. What would be so wrong with that?

I ran into another blockade a hundred feet down the road and had to go through the same rigmarole.

“It’s a pretty unpleasant scenario over there, miss,” said a cop I didn’t know. “You sure you want to be exposed?”

“Please inform Detective Sullivan that Attorney Swaitkowski is here,” I said, then rolled up my window in his face.

The cop stood there looking through the window for a minute, then knocked on the glass.

“I guess you really want to go in,” he said when I opened the window again. “Go ahead.”

Joe Sullivan was standing in the middle of the street outside a corral of yellow police tape. His back was to me, but I knew it was him by the general shape: round head and bulked-up body without a neck in between. He had his hands on his hips and was staring down at the person lying perpendicular to the solid yellow line, facedown.

I walked up and stood next to him. He kept staring.

“Hey, Joe.”

“Hey, Jackie. Anybody you know?” he asked.

I looked down at Sergey Pontecello. I knew it was him from the shredded remains of the Howard Hughes getup, blackened with filth, not from his face, which was turned away and floating in a pool of blood. I felt something tighten at the top of my throat. I took a deep breath.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but looks like severe assault followed by ejection from a rapidly moving vehicle.”

I knelt down so I could get a better look.

“Did you get his wallet?”

“All he had on him was your card. And this envelope, in his back pocket.”

I looked at the envelope in Joe’s hand.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

“In what?”

I sighed loudly enough to wake the neighbors.

“The envelope. What’s in it?”

“I don’t know.”

“So why don’t you take a look?”

Sullivan glowered at me.

“That’s forensics. We don’t do forensics.”

“Oh,” I said, “you just call it in and wait for the smart people to show up.”

He glared at me and opened the envelope to look inside. After a few moments, he closed his eyes and turned away.

“Christ,” he said, handing it to me. “Help yourself, you’re so gung ho.”

I looked inside and tried to figure out what was in there.

“It’s a nipple,” said Sullivan, tired of waiting.

“Oh my God.”

“Why don’t you just go home now, Jackie. We’ll take it from here.”

I threw up in a big blue hydrangea bush, but I didn’t go home. Going home would have been like running away, something I was never very good at doing.

One of the problems with being a lawyer in small-town America, which is really all the Hamptons are if you live here year-round, is nobody’s sure how to behave around you. The uneducated think you think you’re too smart for them, and the overeducated are afraid a simple conversation could get them sued.

This can lead to being left out of a lot of things. It’s isolating. Not a good thing for a woman who was never particularly artful at connecting with people to begin with. Not just the lover kind, even the regular day-to-day kind.

The other thing that happens, partly because of all the above, is the only people you end up talking to, besides your clients—who you really want to avoid talking to as much as possible—are other lawyers or paralegals or prosecutors, or if you’re lucky, a cop or two or a private investigator. You talk to judges once in a while, but there’s nothing to love about that. In other words, you can get up in the morning a creature of the American legal system, stay that way until you go to bed, and never talk to anybody who isn’t ass-deep in a lawsuit or putting somebody in jail or about to go there themselves.

This leaves you without a lot of friends. In fact, I have only one by the standard definition, and even he’s sort of connected to the law,
though not in the usual way. His name is Sam Acquillo, and I’d either defended him or simply consulted with him on a few criminal entanglements he’d gotten into, all slightly extralegal and definitely ex officio.

The man has learned more about more things than anyone else in the world, but he’s also the most frustrating and difficult person I know. He used to be a big-time corporate whiz, an engineer like my father, but he’d managed to screw that up, along with the rest of his life. He lives in a cute little house, inherited from his parents, at the end of a peninsula that sticks out into the Little Peconic Bay. He has a dog and a beautiful girlfriend named Amanda who lives in the house next door. So no, he’s not that kind of friend.

Since he got up early to hold down his current position as a carpenter, you’d think it’d be too late to call, but this guy isn’t big on sleep. So I thought, What the hell.

“What,” said the voice, or rather the growl, on the other end of the line.

“Nice way to answer the phone.”

“The only way to answer after midnight. Especially when you’re asleep.”

“You’re never asleep.”

“Not with the phone ringing all the time.”

“I was hoping we could chat. I’ve got a situation,” I told him.

“I don’t chat on the phone.”

“Is Amanda there?”

“Just Eddie. He doesn’t chat on the phone, either.”

“I was thinking of coming over.”

“Oh, goody.”

“Be there in twenty minutes. Time to uncork a bottle and put out the nice linen.”

I hung up and concentrated on driving the cranky old pickup over to North Sea, the woodsy area north of Southampton Village that used
to be the only place regular people could afford to live out here, until there was no place regular people could afford to live out here.

I was trying not to think about ignoring Sergey’s call only hours before he ended up dead in the road. I could barely stave off this massive cloud of guilt that was forming over my head. All my law professors would say it’s unprofessional to take these things personally, which was a pretty dumb thing to say. Like you’re not supposed to be a human being with personal feelings.

Of course, there’s also the Irish Catholic thing. We’re supposed to feel guilty about letting the milk curdle.

Eddie was sitting there, waiting for me in the driveway. It was as if Sam had said, “Hey, Eddie, Jackie’s coming over in a few minutes. Do me a favor and give her a nice greeting.”

He wagged his long tail and rubbed all over my legs, then trotted off as if to say, “Job done, got other stuff to do.”

“A sight for sore eyes,” said Sam when I walked in the door. “Literally.”

Somewhere in his mid-fifties, Sam’s one of those guys who looks weather-beaten and sturdy at the same time. You can see he’s had some hard miles, but his handshake tells you turning your fingers into little splinters wouldn’t be that much of a challenge.

He still has most of his hair, kind of a curly battleship gray. He’s actually not bad looking, though time in the boxing ring as a kid and some fun and games later in life had roughened things up a bit.

“Wine for you, vodka for me. Eddie can have what he wants.”

I followed him to a winterized sunporch that faced the Little Peconic Bay. He had two easy chairs, a kitchen table, and a daybed out there—just add a refrigerator and a hot plate and he’d never have to leave.

I started by telling him about the nipple in Sergey’s pocket and worked backward from there. I thought, rightly, that would get his attention and keep it there long enough to get through the whole story.

“What about Eunice?” he asked when I was done.

“I don’t know. Haven’t met her.”

“Hard to know anything till you talk to her.”

“But I know almost nothing about Sergey himself,” I said.

Sam swirled the bottom half of an old chrome art deco tumbler that he’d filled with vodka and ice.

“Do you think hiring you got him killed?” he asked.

Sam has some really good qualities, I keep insisting to people who meet him for the first time, but tact wouldn’t be high on the list.

“Aw, crap, Sam. That’s a big help.”

He might have winced a little.

“You have to think about it. I’m not saying I would. Probably wouldn’t. But you asked. Kind of.”

“I’ll keep thinking about that,” I said. “Meanwhile, I’ll go talk to Eunice. What’re you going to do?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. What’re you going to do?” I asked.

“Go to bed.”

“Then tomorrow you’re going to get Joe Sullivan to tell you who belongs to the nipple.”

He swirled the art deco tumbler again. “Not likely.”

“He’s your friend. You’ve done plenty of favors for him. He’ll do it for you. And I’m your friend who’s done you thousands of favors.”

Sam once saved my life at great risk to his own, the ultimate favor, which he had the good manners not to point out.

“I’ll talk to him,” said Sam, grinning at me for no good reason.

That’s when Eddie came over and put his head in my lap. Sam got you to do that, I said to myself, just to distract me. Then I said to myself, You can’t just tell a dog to do that. He’s a dog. Even if you could, how do you tell him without saying anything? A secret signal? Telepathy?

“Good boy,” said Sam on his way to the kitchen to pour himself another gallon of vodka.

I like to gaze at my face in the mirror. Not out of vanity but relief.