Authors: Chris Knopf
“Oh, me?” I said, and then dove in with both feet.
This took us through a full tray of goodies and most of the white wine. Along the way we studied the Pontecellos’ tax returns, which Harry gladly volunteered to copy and send overnight to Eunice and Sandy Kalandro, browsed through the materials manifest, and generally had a swell time, leading to an uncontrollable affection for my host starting in my heart and heading south.
As a result dinner was postponed for a few hours, though not all appetites are indulged in the same way.
“I’m glad I came back,” said Harry when he finally had a chance to say anything.
“I am, too.”
“You are?”
“Yes. Let’s leave it at that for now, okay?” I said.
“Absolutely. A great baseline.”
“What does that mean?”
“A starting point. A foundation upon which to build.”
“Okay. The first part of the building needs to be steak, asparagus, and salad, if my memory of your refrigerator is what I think it is.”
After dinner I went through the manifest more carefully, checking it against the actual belongings. I was half braced the whole time for what I might find, but for better or worse, it was just stuff—the accumulated detritus of long and decidedly idiosyncratic lives.
It eventually got to that awkward time of the evening where a person has to decide to stay or go. These are not minor decisions for those of us in complicated, unresolved situations. I opted to stay, with a proviso.
“I’d like you to come with me tomorrow to see Fuzzy again. Now that you’ve been introduced and formed a bond.”
“You’re afraid of him,” he said.
“If I wanted a thug I’d ask Sam. I need a tagalong I want to spend the day with, who also showed remarkable diplomatic skills the last time. You can entertain me in the car with tales of logistical derring-do.”
As I faded off to sleep that night, I almost got into another debate with myself over whether I was using Harry, taking advantage of his tireless good nature, or if I thought I needed to create artificial conflicts to distract me from confronting the real possibility that I felt something for the towering mensch.
I’m sure this sort of thing causes 90 percent of the insomnia suffered by women between the ages of eleven and eighty-five. I decided to put a stop to it right there and willed myself into a troubled sleep filled with anxious dreams and unresolved quandaries.
It was a repeat of the last time. Harry drove his Volvo, and I did my best to provide coffee service and onboard entertainment. I was glad to be going against the crush of traffic coming in every weekday morning
from less expensive habitats to the west, tradesman and service people heading for jobs in the Hamptons. While not a development alarmist like other natives, it did make me wonder where it was all going to end. Maybe when the cliff dwellers of Manhattan realized they weren’t coming out to the country anymore, with small towns and unpretentious, happy people like Potato Pete, but rather to a gilded suburb, where everyone had signed on to the fantasy that their expectations and anxieties could be left back in the City.
The transition to the Up Island sprawl had blurred in recent years. But in my child’s mind, I could still tell when I entered that other world, the Western territories, entangled with stop-and-go highways, shopping malls, and hysterical neon enticements. That trackless terrain of frenetic enterprise and vast, anonymous neighborhoods, like Fuzzy’s.
As a general strategy, arriving unannounced at people’s homes had the advantage of surprise, but was worthless if the subject wasn’t there in the first place. So the hour-long trip from Southampton could have been for naught. And it almost was.
Just as we were heading down the street to Fuzzy’s subterranean abode, we saw him pull away in his old Datsun. Following was not that big a challenge. All we had to do was keep track of the billows coming out of the tailpipe. “Follow that smog,” I said to Harry.
We wound our way through the mazelike housing development and out to the strip. Traffic was heavy, which made following Fuzzy even easier. He made two or three turns, then pulled into the parking lot of a shabby row of storefronts with a liquor store, a Laundromat, and a pizza parlor.
When Fuzzy went inside, Harry asked me what the plan was.
“I don’t have one.”
“Okay. What if you did?” he asked.
“Is that one of those Zen logic puzzles?”
“Sometimes it’s good to know what you’re going to do a few seconds before you actually do it.”
“Sure, if you want to spoil the spontaneity,” I said, jumping out of the car.
We found Fuzzy in a remote corner of the restaurant with his face in a BlackBerry, punching at the tiny keys as if he were trying to stick a hole in the device.
We waited for a break in the action, but when it didn’t come, Harry reached out a long arm and tapped Fuzzy on the shoulder, making him jump like somebody’d stuck a firecracker down his pants.
“Holy crap, freak me out.”
“Sorry,” said Harry.
A crowd was forming around the counter where you ordered your pizza. Waitresses were milling around, dropping off people’s meals and filling trays with dirty dishes. Teenagers were playing video games and trying to attract one another’s attention in the bad-mannered way teenagers like to do. It wasn’t the environment I’d have chosen to discuss the sensitive things I was about to discuss. On the other hand, Fuzzy looked perfectly at home. In his natural habitat.
“What was your name again?” he asked when we sat down.
I reintroduced myself and Harry.
“Oh, yeah. Uncle Sergey’s lawyer. I didn’t know you could work this hard for dead people.”
“You can for their estate,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”
Fuzzy smirked at the thought, something I’d gotten used to. “ ‘Estate’ is a big word for a lot of nothing,” he said.
“You should know I’ve been appointed a coadministrator of that estate. Your mother and myself. How’re you getting along with her these days?” I asked straight-out, not knowing how else to ask.
“I told you. I don’t talk to her. But before you start jumping all over me, she’s not my real mother. I’m adopted, something she never tires of reminding me.”
Right at that moment, for no apparent reason, he sneezed, with a violent shake of his head. He wiped his nose with the sleeve of his shirt.
“Fucking allergies,” he said.
“I know these are personal questions,” I said, “but they’re germane to me being here.”
“I thought germane was some feminazi chick.”
“You’re thinking of Germaine Greer,” said Harry. “ ‘Feminazi’ would be an unfair characterization. Germane means pertinent. Relevant.”
“Okay, so what?”
“You’re the sole heir to your aunt and uncle’s estate,” I said. “After donations, taxes, and legal fees—meaning me—you get all the rest. House, investments, personal effects. And a 1967 Chrysler 300, if I can find out where it is.”
For the first time Fuzzy looked less than completely dismissive. Not exactly impressed but curious.
“No shit. How about that.”
“Your mother was named as the original administrator, but now that we share that role things could get sticky. However, my legal duty is clear. I have a fiduciary responsibility both to Betty and Sergey and to you, as the estate’s beneficiary. In other words, Fuzzy, I’m technically working for you.”
“No shit.”
“And in that capacity, my first bit of advice is to use a handkerchief when you sneeze. Surrogate’s Court likes a certain decorum on the heir’s part. I also need to know why there’s a conflict between you and your mother. That could have an impact on probating this thing, even without the complication of Sergey’s murder.”
I could see Fuzzy’s bitterness etched directly into the contours of his face. As he sat there at the sticky Formica table—insolent, disheveled, and poorly bathed—I saw in his intelligent blue eyes a fury so boundless and primal it made me sit back in my seat and send thanks to whatever impulse had caused me to invite Harry along, exploitation be damned.
“I don’t have anything to say to Eunice,” Fuzzy said, his voice flat and hollow. “She should be happy that’s as far as it goes.”
Harry had been holding back from the conversation until then, but he started catching the vibe and pulled his chair closer to Fuzzy and me. I put my elbows on the table and leaned forward.
“Fuzzy, do you know why Betty and Sergey made you their sole heir?”
Fuzzy’s eyes narrowed.
“Do you cross-examine witnesses in court, you know, like they do on
Law and Order?
Jack McCoy circling like a shark, setting up the poor schmuck, then pouncing on him, making him confess everything, like a complete fucking idiot, when all he had to do was sit there and take the Fifth or lie like a bastard and nothing would’ve happened? That’s why I hate those shows.”
“That’s why I love those shows,” I said. “But I’m not trying to trap you in anything. I’m trying to help you.”
“Then quit asking questions you already know the answers to. I don’t think you’re stupid; don’t treat me like I am.”
I sat back again.
“Okay. But it would be better if you just said it, because I can’t,” I said, thinking of how I’d explain accessing confidential hospital records. “Just remember, I’ve got your financial future in my hands. If you’re going to get into a fight with Eunice Wolsonowicz, you might weigh the value of having her coadministrator, a lawyer by the way, on your side.”
I gave him a look that said, “Your move, buster.”
He looked over at Harry.
“You know, she doesn’t need to always bring you along,” he said. “Just because I disgust women doesn’t mean I’m dangerous.”
I didn’t dignify his comment with a response. I let the silence—what there was of it in the din of the restaurant—build between us.
“Since you obviously already know,” Fuzzy said, in a singsong voice more defensive than defiant, “my father fucked his wife’s sister. I’m the result. Whoopsy doodles. Trouble is, no way is Betty going
to raise a kid. She’s a single girl running around Europe, fucking barons and dipshits like Sergey. So she says to Eunice, Here’s the deal. I tell the world Tony is the cock-swinging son of a bitch you know he is, or you can take this kid and raise him. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall during
that
conversation? Anyway, everybody bought into the deal. Only problem is, nobody bothered to tell me.”
He shouted the last sentence, half raised out of his seat.
“But they did eventually,” I said as quietly as I could.
He sat back in his chair and into his slouching, disdainful indifference. He shook his head.
“Betty told me. But only when she was forced into it,” he said. “So what’s this got to do with the estate shit? What’s the germane part?”
“Eunice was pretty upset when she found out what her sister’s estate is actually worth,” I said. “She might decide to contest the will. I have to decide what my part in this is going to be, and that depends on knowing the facts. Right now, I can tell you honestly, I don’t want much to do with any of you people. All I want to know is who killed Sergey Pontecello, who might have been a dipshit, but who wanted to be my client and I let him down.”
Obviously, Fuzzy heard only the first part of that speech.
“What do you mean, what the estate was really worth?”
“You’re rich, pal,” said Harry. “Get used to it. Your mother might’ve ditched you, but give her credit for trying to make good on it in the only way she could.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Fuzzy. “How rich?”
So I told him. After all, he was my client, sort of.
“Millions. More than one, less than ten. Somewhere in the middle.”
Fuzzy burst out laughing, on cue, like a stand-up comic or a trained actor.
“Ah, that’s so great,” he said. “That fucking brilliant, conniving, selfish bitch, it’s no wonder she was my mother.”
And then he kept laughing until it was clear he really meant it, as if
the act of laughter was so alien to him he didn’t quite know what to do with it.
And, God preserve me, it became so infectious Harry started to smile, and before I knew it, both of us were laughing, too. Right there amidst the lunatic clamor and chaos of the pizza parlor, only one of us knowing what was so funny, but all of us enjoying the moment on its own terms, just for the hell of it.
When sobriety returned, I told Fuzzy what he needed to do in the lead up to entering Surrogate’s Court, including getting a copy of his birth certificate. I also told him that if Eunice got aggressive he’d have to find his own lawyer. A good laugh aside, I wasn’t about to spend the next few years with Fuzzy litigating a complex legal issue I had next to no experience litigating.
That done, I was ready to get out of that irritating place and head back to Harry’s converted gas station in Southampton. As we got up to go, Fuzzy had a request of his own.
“Hey, uh, you could do me a favor on the whole mother thing,” he said. “Eunice doesn’t like to talk about it. Neither does Wendy. I don’t care that much about Eunice, but with Wendy, it’s like, you know, really bad.”
I reassured him.
“I’m a lawyer, Fuzzy. I don’t share a client’s information with myself without prior authorization,” I said, and even though that really wasn’t true, I liked the way it came out.
I slept in my own bed that night. For some of the night. Then I pretended to sleep for the rest, until the first pale signs of daylight woke up the birds, which made lying there seem that much more futile.
After showering and getting dressed, I killed time until seven-thirty, then drove over to the estate section in Southampton where I thought Sam might be working. I’d noticed trucks belonging to Frank Enwhistle, one of Sam’s favorite contractors, lining the street. I called it right. Parked with the trucks was a late 1960s Grand Prix, another popular construction vehicle.
It was a cool, hazy morning, but Sam wore only a white T-shirt, warmed as he was from wrestling with a big triangular hunk of fancy molding above the front door.
“It’s a pediment. We have the ancient Greeks to blame,” he said through gritted teeth as he tried to keep a level steady with one hand and tap a slender finish nail with the other.