Short Squeeze Page 25

  “Then a year ago August the bill came due,” I said.

  He looked down at the table.

  “Dead bodies are dead bodies,” he said. “It wasn’t that big a deal to me. I’m just not that into the work. It’s boring and messy. And all the fluids stink. But Fuzzy had this thing he wanted me to do, and I said, sure, if he could draw down the tab a little.”

  “He told you to carve parts off Edna Jackery before you took her to the crematorium. Then freeze them and wait for further instructions,” I said. “Soon after, he asked you to start sending the parts, one at a time, to a particular person. No letter, no explanation, just the part. He’d take care of the rest.”

  Denny looked up at me.

  “If he’s already told you that, then you know all I know. He didn’t tell me why I was supposed to do this, and I didn’t ask. It was freaky fun and it saved me a boatload of money, so that was fine with me.”

  “Fun?” said Sullivan.

  Denny almost looked apologetic.

  “I know it looks sick, but Fuzzy’s an extreme dude. It didn’t feel like he was just blackmailing me into doing what he wanted.”

  “He made it seem like a goof on the power elite,” I said, interrupting him. “The lazy rich, the exploiters of the truly righteous. The hopelessly craven upper-class snobs whose greed was destroying the world. Who all deserved to burn in hell anyway. Isn’t that what the FuzzMan said?”

  He looked back down at the table again.

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “So who’d you send the parts to?” asked Sullivan.

  Denny looked at Izzy, who nodded.

  “His own fucking aunt, excuse the French. Betty Pontecello. The one who got all drunked up and took out the snorkel shop lady with her old Chrysler 300.”

  23

  His own fucking mother, I thought to myself.

  Joe Sullivan got out of his chair and left the room. In a few minutes a call would be put through to his counterparts at Atapougue Police Headquarters, and a pair of patrol cars would be dispatched to pick up Oscar Wolsonowicz, a.k.a FuzzMan.

  I was left alone with Izzy Fine and Denny Winthrop.

  “How’s Janette?” I asked Izzy.

  “Quite well, thank you,” he said. “She’s been busy with the Field School fund-raiser. I assume you’ve bought your tickets.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it. Who’s the entertainment this year? Hard to beat Jimmy Buffett.”

  Denny listened to this incredulously, then rolled his eyes—another suspicion confirmed. The power elite were all in this together; the righteous didn’t stand a chance.

  Sullivan came back in the room.

  “We can get this bird back in his cage,” he said to me. “Unless there’s something else you want from him.”

  “One thing,” I said.

  “Have at it.”

  “Was Sergey in the car with Betty when she hit Edna Jackery?” I asked Denny.

  He looked at Izzy and Sullivan, then back at me.

  “Who’s Sergey?”

  “Betty’s husband.”

  He shook his head.

  “Fuzzy never said anything about any Sergey. He just told me to get the car out of their garage in Sagaponack. Said it was hot and needed to go bye-bye. I just couldn’t bring myself to trash the old bomber. Got a four-forty with a giant quad under the hood. The torque’ll tear your head off. Obviously a stupid move on my part.”

  “Son, you’ve invented more stupid moves than most stupid dopes pull off in a lifetime,” said Sullivan, standing up and dragging Denny by the collar to his feet. “Let’s go find a comfortable place for you to write it all down. Maybe you can publish it in True Stupid Crime Stories.”

  I exchanged a few more pleasantries with Izzy, then went back to the visitors’ lounge to rescue Harry, who was busy using his oversize thumbs to write messages on his PDA.

  I was thankful that Alden Winthrop had already left to meet with Izzy and his son. I didn’t know what I could say to him that he’d want to hear.

  I waited until we were in Harry’s car to tell him what had transpired in the interrogation room. Since a lot of it was new information for him, I had to go back a few steps to fill in the whole picture.

  “Okay,” he said, turning the ignition, “where we going now?”

  I looked at my watch. Still plenty of time to get to Shelter Island and back while it was still light, I thought.

  “Home for you,” I said. “I got an errand to run.”

  He nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “You need to do things on your own.”

  “I do. Is that bad?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Doesn’t always work out that great for you.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  “Okay. I’ll just go home and worry,” he said.

  “No, you won’t. You’ll just go home. Keep your cell phone on and a light in the window.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Harry dropped me off at my car and I drove up North Sea Road to the ferry to Shelter Island. I rode across the channel on the South Ferry, standing outside the car to catch the salty breeze and watch the sea birds dive-bomb for fish. Once I reached the other side, I made the trip to Wendy’s in about ten minutes.

  I thought about Bilbo, Poaggie, and Bert. Poaggie was the smallest dog, yet the biggest threat, based entirely on the weirdness factor. Though, for all I knew, Bert and Bilbo were actually trained killers disguised as goofy fur balls.

  I’d promised Wendy that I’d call her if I wanted to see her again, but I’d been through a lot lately and couldn’t muster the necessary remorse over violating the pledge.

  Wendy was in the front yard, digging around one of her flower beds. Her face showed alarm over the approaching car, but it was too late to do anything about that.

  Bilbo, Poaggie, and Bert charged the Volvo en masse.

  “Nice doggies,” I said after rolling down the window. Dogs are impressed by size, I told myself. Try to make yourself look bigger.

  I got out of the car and waded through the barking, sniffing canines, following the path to where Wendy was tending her flower garden. I dropped to my knees to get on her exasperated level.

  “I thought you understood you aren’t supposed to come here without my permission,” she said.

  “I understood. I chose to ignore it. That’s a public street. I’m a free agent. I’m here to talk. You can try calling the cops, but like I’m always telling your family, the cops are friends of mine. They’re going to look closer at you than me.”

  She was wearing a blue work shirt, jeans, and a flowered bandanna. She used the back of her forearm to wipe the sweat and streaks of mud off her brow. In the same hand she held a small garden trowel. I felt like I was in a scene from The Good Earth.

  She looked grim but rose to her feet and led me to the same picnic table we’d sat at the last time.

  “So I suppose the police haven’t decided what happened to Uncle Sergey,” she said.

  “No. But some other interesting tidbits have surfaced along the way. Mostly about your family.”

  She smirked. “Can’t imagine what would be interesting about that.”

  “You told me last time I was here that the family unit was the root of all pathology.”

  “I was just making conversation,” she said, looking back at where she’d just been messing with her flower garden, as if wishing she were still there.

  “You also said Sergey was oblivious. Oblivious to what?”

  She studied me with her brilliant eyes, as clear and hard as blue diamonds.

  “Maybe you already know something,” she said, more inquisitive than defiant.

  “Why did you tell him?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “Fuzzy.”

  “Tell him what?” she asked, her face blank except for her eyes, which had widened just a little.

  I’d smuggled in a pa
ck of cigarettes in the front pocket of my pants, a loose-fitting pair of pleated slacks that were just right for the purpose. I pulled them out and lit one up, just to be sure Wendy understood that she and I were as different from each other as two people could be. She’d charmed me once before; it wasn’t going to happen again.

  “About the accident. About your Aunt Betty hitting that woman on County Road Thirty-nine. You had to know he’d do something ugly with the information.”

  She sat at the table in silence, looking at me, deliberating.

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said finally.

  “Yes, you do. You were in the car a year ago when Betty hit Edna Jackery, the lovable knucklehead who was walking along the road in the dark, and Betty, half bombed as usual, didn’t see her. She was picking you up at the train station, like she did every August. You promised her you’d never tell a soul, yet you told Fuzzy, the one person on earth who would use it as a weapon against her. His own mother. What the hell were you thinking?”

  Bilbo decided that was a good time to come up to me and shove his meaty shoulder into my leg. I reached down to stroke his back and scratch under his ears.

  Wendy took on the mantle of her mother, Eunice, Antonin’s genetic influence disappearing behind a cloud of haughty self-importance.

  “They lied to us, all of them. We always knew Fuzzy was adopted. They just didn’t bother to tell us his parents were Betty and Tony, my aunt and my father. Which means we’re half siblings, but we didn’t know that. Not until Betty caught us one summer at the house in the Hamptons. In bed. Not sleeping, which I hope you’re proud of yourself for making me say.”

  I was hardly proud of myself. I hadn’t expected that at all. It might have been there, hiding out with all the other family secrets, but I hadn’t seen it or ever thought it was a remote possibility.

  “I don’t talk to Fuzzy very often,” she said, folding back into herself. “But I don’t have anyone else in the family to talk to. It was such a shock when Betty hit that woman. She barely understood what had happened. I asked his advice, and he said to just stay quiet about it. That sending Betty to jail wouldn’t bring the woman back. I was a little surprised by that. Fuzzy hated Betty for what she did to him. To us. Made him so crazy with anger he was never the same again. He was such a beautiful boy growing up, so sweet. I know it’s hard to imagine now, but you didn’t know him then.”

  She tried to stifle the tears, but they came anyway, silently rolling down her cheeks. She held her head up, and the set of her mouth showed her determination not to allow any further emotion to follow those traitorous tears.

  With my own emotional state teetering between triumph and shame, I left her where she sat, surrounded by her dogs, otherwise alone in her island exile.

  Someone had to tell Eunice what was going on. I wanted it to be someone other than me, but after leaving Wendy’s, I found myself heading for Sagaponack to get it over with.

  I had a pretty sticky moral dilemma on my hands. Wendy telling Fuzzy about the accident was a triggering event, but she had nothing to do with the extortion that had followed. She didn’t kill poor Edna.

  Then I thought about it from Slim’s point of view. That for him, the driver of the car suffered enough just knowing what they’d done. He was right about that. It knocked Betty sober. That and the threat of ruin at the hands of her sadistic bastard child.

  Though even in that situation, I could see Betty coming out on top. She was feeding Fuzzy a lot of money, but nothing like she could have, given the loans from her sister and the bank, plus her existing funds, now converted into handy liquidity. On top of that, she’d been on a tear at the casino, pumping even more into the kitty.

  If I’d been a gambling woman like Betty, I might have bet she was up to something. One final caper.

  When I got to the house, Ray Zander’s truck was parked on the front lawn. The line for the hoisting device that fed from the spool on the back of his truck ran up the front of the house and disappeared over the roof.

  I walked around to the back of the house and found Ray dangling in front of a window on the second floor, applying a tan compound dug out of a small pail to a section of the window trim.

  “Hey, Ray,” I called. “What’re you doing up there?”

  He looked down.

  “Just filling in some cleaned-out rot with this epoxy. Been workin’ on these windows all summer. Whenever I get the chance.”

  “Is Eunice home?” I asked.

  “Think she is.”

  I was disappointed by the answer. So much so that I almost walked back to the Volvo and drove away, so little did I look forward to the impending conversation.

  As I thanked Ray and turned to walk back to the front door, I looked down. There was a toothbrush on the ground between a pair of low-cut yews, half buried in mulch. I squatted down and picked it up.

  I looked at it for a moment, then looked up at the side of the house.

  “Hey, Ray, you ever been inside?”

  He looked back down.

  “Sure. Lots of times.”

  “What’s behind those windows?”

  He used a foot to push himself away from the house and looked from side to side.

  “Well, there’s a bedroom here, here, and here. And in the middle—this window here, actually—is the big bathroom.”

  To emphasize the point, he slapped another wad of epoxy into a hole.

  I looked down at the toothbrush, then back up at the window and said, “No,” too softly, I thought, for him to hear.

  “Yeah, it is. The main bathroom for the floor. There’re some sinks and johns off the bedrooms, but if you want a shower, you walk down the hall.”

  I thanked him and went back to the front of the house and rang the doorbell. A year later, Eunice answered the door.

  “Don’t you ever call ahead?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I’m busy.”

  I hoped my body language showed my concern for her demanding schedule. “Of course. I just thought, as a courtesy to you, you’d want to know that your son Oscar’s been arrested on a host of charges, including extortion and conspiracy to commit murder. To murder me, actually, which is a little creepy, though nothing you have to worry about. Well, okay. See you.”

  I turned and headed back to the Volvo.

  “Miss Swaitkowski,” she said, as if burdened by world-weariness. “Please come back.”

  I turned again, but kept walking backward.

  “You got things to do,” I said. “Not a problem. We’ll catch up some other time. Oh, and he was blackmailing your sister, who killed somebody in a hit-and-run.”

  “Miss Swaitkowski,” she nearly yelled as I headed briskly toward the car. “Please come back.”

  I stopped and turned.

  “Ms. Ms. Swaitkowski.”

  “Please.”

  I shrugged and did as she asked. She let me into the little sitting room we’d used earlier, the receiving area for irritating intruders bearing bad news. I sat down earlier, she had a chance to offer me a seat. She listened attentively while I ran through the story as coherently as I could. It was the first time I’d had to lay out the whole deal, so the narrative was a little choppy, but the key facts were intact.

  I finished by telling her I was sure Betty was planning her escape from the devil’s dilemma—having to choose between a vehicular manslaughter charge and Fuzzy’s extortion. Sacrifice the house but take most of the value out of her sister’s hide, add to the other cash, and reformulate their lives somewhere else, somewhere outside Fuzzy’s clutches and the long arm of the law.

  Eunice took the news better than I thought she might. The absence of throwable objects might have helped. She was either toughening up or slipping into a state of resignation. Either way, she was at least a little nicer.

  “Ms. Swaitkowski, do you honestly believe Elizabeth would be that wicked?”

  “ ‘Guess’ is a
better word. She might’ve been working in that direction, but we’ll probably never know. I haven’t come across plane tickets or rental agreements with Argentine haciendas. It just explains the other facts and fits with Betty’s style.”

  “Betty’s style?” she said. “What style would that be? You have no idea what it was like growing up with her. She was not only more clever, she was prettier and much more fun to be around. My role was the good girl. The serious girl who studied hard and acted like a grown-up. My parents depended on it.”

  “Raising the child she conceived with your husband was a remarkable act of generosity,” I said.

  The expression on her face continued to sag.

  “Antonin made it clear from the beginning that fidelity would never be a feature of our marriage. I was willing to accept that, though I couldn’t have imagined one of his lovers would be my own sister.” She looked at me, hoping maybe for some kind of sympathy, which I didn’t know right then how to deliver. “Oscar might have turned out differently if someone else had taken him, someone outside the family. I’ll never know.”

  It wasn’t for me to comment on that, so I didn’t. There was something I was much more interested in discussing, now that I had her in a weakened state.

  “Mrs. Wolsonowicz, the night Sergey was killed, he called me complaining that you’d locked him out of the bathroom. Do you remember?”

  She looked like she didn’t at first, then nodded her head.

  “Yes, that’s right. He had a perfectly good bathroom of his own. I had the smaller bedroom and consequently felt entitled to the better bath. All I did was lock the door and put the old key on my dresser. He thought I was actually in the bathroom, and was creating a ridiculous scene. I didn’t want to dignify his behavior with a response, so I merely sat in my room and waited for him to withdraw, which he did.”

  “And that was it?”

  “No, actually an hour later he became positively enraged over something. He pounded on the bathroom door again, and then on my bedroom door. I never thought of Sergey as much of a man, but I admit I was becoming concerned. He sounded like a maniac.”

  “Do you remember anything he said? Even if it didn’t make sense.”