My friend and fellow writer Chris Knopf will release his new book,
Ice Cap, in a few days and I thought I'd share chapter one and a review of two. I am sure you'll find them interesting.
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Publishers Weekly,
Ice Cap
Chris Knopf.
Minotaur, $24.99 (304p) ISBN 978-1-250-00517-5
At the start of Knopf’s breezy third Southampton mystery featuring
defense attorney Jackie Swaitkowski (after 2011’s Bad Bird), client Franco
Raffini summons Jackie during a winter storm to the house of Tad Buczek, a
relative of hers by marriage, who’s lying dead under a pergola. That Franco,
previously convicted of manslaughter, admits he messed up the crime scene by
moving the body only adds to Jackie’s doubts about his innocence. When Franco
is arrested and charged with second-degree murder, Jackie is determined to win
the case against her client, despite threats from a couple of toughs for her to
lose it. A familiar cast aids her, including boyfriend Harry Goodlander, Sam
Acquillo (the star of Black Swan and four other mysteries), and computer geek
Randall Dodge. A host of Polish relatives (by marriage) and Tad’s imported
wife, Katarzina, provide comedy and tragedy. Atrocious winter weather, Franco’s
aversion to telling all, and Tad’s deep secrets keep the outcome in doubt.
Whether Jackie or Sam takes the lead, Knopf’s ensemble mysteries are good
entertainment.
Book Review:
ICE CAP by Chris Knopf
Jackie Swaitkowski is an attorney practicing law
in the Hamptons of Long Island. Her client is accused of murdering her
late husband’s uncle … and nobody wants to believe her client’s innocent.
The worst winter on record dumps
endless snow on the Hamptons, which hampers our heroine’s attempts to discover
who really committed the murder. Of course, Jackie’s the only person who
believes Franco Raffinni is innocent and she really has to work at
it. Also hampering her efforts to solve the mystery are members of
her husband’s family and the Polish-American community in which they live, the
victim’s widow, and emissaries of a local mob boss whose visits become
increasingly more threatening and violent.
As a former resident of Long
Island, I found myself skimming over the numerous references to the
Hamptons; however, Jackie’s clever, witty, and entertaining personality MORE
than made up for that minor flaw and I certainly didn’t skim anywhere
else! I laughed out loud numerous times as I read this book in one
sitting. Knopf does an excellent job writing from the perspective of his
female character and I’ll be checking out more of Jackie’s adventures.
You shouldn’t miss this one.
Okay, now for chapter one!
Chapter 1
It would have been the blizzard of
the century if a bigger one hadn’t hit a few weeks later. But for the people of the Hamptons marooned
in the off-off season of mid-January, it was like we’d been plucked from the
end of Long Island and dropped into the arctic circle.
For me, it was another opportunity
to praise my Volvo station wagon, both steadfast and true, no matter how little
maintenance or care I remembered to bestow upon it. That evening the biggest challenge was
identifying the car among the other giant heaps of rapidly building snow in the
parking lot behind my apartment. I was
only out there because I got a call from
one of my clients, Franklin Delano Raffinni – an ex-investment banker who’d
served time for killing his girlfriend’s husband with a rotisserie skewer
before the husband could kill him with a steak knife.
“You gotta get over here, Jackie,”
he said via cell phone, the words barely audible over the wind noise.
“Not the best time,” I said.
“Don’t tell anybody anything till
you get here. I’m serious. You’ll see why.”
Another complicating factor was my
complete lack of personal preparedness.
Snow was hardly unheard of in the Hamptons, but nothing like this. The best I could do was cowboy boots, black
leather gloves that went nearly to the elbow (bought for more heated
circumstances), leotards, jeans, and lots of layers under my orange barn
jacket.
I thought I’d overdone it until I
hit the outside air and felt like the skin on my face was being cryogenically removed. I found the car and dug my way to the
driver’s side door with an old aluminum fry pan. Inside the car somewhere was an ice
scraper. From the driver’s seat, I
climbed into the back and dug the scraper out from under a stack of file
folders, a pair of jumper cables, a box of Kleenex, a bird cage, a beach
umbrella last used five months before, golf clubs never used and other
unrelated items whose origins had been lost in the mists of time.
When I finally finished clearing about two feet of snow off
the car with the fry pan and scraper, another inch or two had already started
to form. The engine had been running,
however, so the defrosters and wipers kept the glass clear. The greater issue was the most fundamental –
could I really drive in this stuff?
Even if snow plows had been as
prevalent in Long Island as they were in Buffalo, there was no way to keep up
with the snowfall. So the only choice
wasn’t driving over, it was driving through.
At least I’d been taught by my father how to handle a
car in the snow. He had his faults, but
denying his daughter instruction in the many things he thought her too stupid
to master on her own was not one of them.
So whenever a snow storm hit the area, however meager the accumulation,
we’d venture forth in one of his ungainly American land yachts for a lesson,
usually delivered in harsh and condescending tones, just to assure that even an
effort to preserve my safety could be remembered with a tinge of hollow
disappointment.
The first trick was to go easy on
the gas pedal, refraining at all times from spinning the wheels, a circumstance
from which my father impressed upon me was virtually impossible to
recover. That day, I thought the whole
thing was impossible, so I was more surprised than triumphant when I felt the car
move forward out of the parking spot, across the lot and out into the
street.
From there it was a short hop to
Montauk Highway, the main east-west thoroughfare that connected a string of
villages that comprised the Hamptons, and thus the only road the authorities
were committed to keeping as clear as possible.
This meant that successive plow passes during the day had formed a small
mountain ridge at the end of my side street.
As my father had taught me, this circumstance called for an opposing
strategy: drop to a lower gear and hit the gas.
I felt it was every bit as unlikely
that I’d be able to smash my way through a wall of snow as it was getting
underway in the first place, which is probably why I didn’t consider the
consequences of success until I found myself in the middle of Montauk Highway,
perpendicular to the flow of traffic and directly in the path of a very large
pickup. I cranked the wheel hard to the
right and kept power to the wheels, allowing me to spin the rear of the car
into the opposite snow bank, just barely avoiding an ugly collision. For its part, the truck swerved a few times,
the edge of the yellow plow whispering past the side of the Volvo, and then
swinging back into the mass of snow that entombed a row of cars along the curbside.
“Idiot,” I said to myself, for a
variety of reasons, including the fact that I was now irrevocably lodged inside
the packed snow.
I looked in my mirror and saw a
woman in heavy coveralls, about the color of my barn jacket, jump out of the truck
and slip-slide toward me through the swirling haze. I rolled down the passenger side mirror and
prepared myself for a well-deserved rebuke.
“Are you alright?” she asked,
looking anxiously through the open window.
Her long brown hair, streaked with grey, was salted with snowflakes, and
her angular, dark face was lit up with concern.
“I should be asking you,” I
said. “I did a really dumb thing.”
“Everybody’s dumb in a
snowstorm. You stuck?”
“Oh, yeah. How would you feel about pulling me out?”
“I’d feel fine about it,” she
said. “Don’t go anywhere till I get
back.”
She jogged back to her truck, jumped
in, did a three-point turn and drove a short way past me. Then she got a chain out of the truck bed and
hooked us up. She gestured for me to roll
down my window again.
“Just help me along with some gentle
acceleration. No stunt driving
necessary.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Dayna Red. I tell people it’s a house paint. Nobody believes me.”
I told her my name and profession –
counsel to the region’s impoverished miscreants, or merely misled, one of whom
had sent me an urgent call, which I felt irresistibly compelled to answer.
“Not in this weather you aren’t,”
she said.
“What if I hired you?” I asked her.
“Plow job?”
“Escort. I need to get over to Seven Ponds in
Southampton.”
She leaned into the car, bringing
some more of the storm with her. A white
dust started to form on the accretion of papers, soda cans and empty cigarette
packs that filled the passenger seat.
“I just came from over there. They haven’t plowed yet.”
I wrote the address on a handy piece
of paper.
“You know where that is?” I asked
her.
She studied the paper.
“Sure. Tad Buczek’s place. Metal Madness.”
Metal wasn’t the only thing mad
about Tad, but it figured largely. Like
my late husband’s family, the honorable Swaitkowskis, Tad’s family had made the
calculation that tens of millions of dollars in hand from real estate
developers was better than bushels of potatoes you had to go to the trouble of
growing, harvesting and selling into a saturated market. Tad’s share of the bounty was substantial,
enough for him to retain fifteen acres of mixed fields and woodlands for
himself, on which he established one of the more irregular local homesteads,
even by the rigorous standards of the Hamptons.
Always a connoisseur of large
agricultural machinery, Tad
harnessed his new wealth to embark on a
major acquisition program, focusing on earth moving equipment, until his
property was littered with backhoes and bulldozers, excavators, dump trucks and
articulated haulers. Zoning disputes
quickly erupted, led by some of Tad’s new neighbors, the wealthy owners of
colonial-style and post modern mini-mansions that rose up out his family’s
former potato farm.
Tad eventually reached a settlement,
that in my former life as a real estate lawyer I helped draft, which required
him to store his earthmover collection within a pair of huge pre-fabbed steel
buildings, designed to enclose things like assembly lines and commercial
aircraft. The deal was sealed when he
sited the buildings within a grove of pine trees deep inside the property, thus
rendering the entire operation essentially invisible.
What his opponents hadn’t figured on
was Tad’s purpose in acquiring the earth moving equipment in the first place,
which wasn’t to simply warehouse a fleet of lumbering machines, but rather to
apply them to the purpose for which they’d been originally engineered.
Moving earth.
The land cleared of the offending
eyesores was soon in the midst of a massive transformation. Out of acres of flat, unobstructed potato
fields grew huge hills, plateaus, pyramids and berms that circled into themselves
like ancient fortifications. Much of
this required massive infusions of fill, which meant a steady procession of
dump trucks importing sand, gravel and rough soil from as far away as North
Jersey.
Another flood of lawsuits resulted,
but there was little the neighbors could do about this one. There was no law or statute prohibiting the
physical alteration of a person’s private land, provided it had no negative
impact on the adjacent environment, water supply or septic systems. Offenses Tad studiously avoided.
Better yet, the work was done in
fairly short order, barely six months, after which Tad set to growing grass and
planting trees and bushes on his freshly terra-formed estate, softening the
edges of the artificial earthen shapes until they took on the character of a
naturally molded landscape, one of such verdant beauty that any complaint
seemed fatuous at best.
The subsequent good will helped Tad
weather the next explosion of outrage.
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“I’ll have to put the plow down when we turn on
David White’s Lane,” said Dayna, after pulling me out of the snow bank and
walking back to my car. She asked for my
cell phone number. “I’ll call you and
we’ll keep the connection open. Keep it
on speaker. Better than a
walkie-talkie.”
The snowfall might have abated some
as the sky above darkened to a deep, sooty grey. But snow still filled the air, blown into a
chaotic frenzy by the increasing wind.
That was one of the costs of living close to the ocean. Whatever lousy weather you could have out
here, the wind always made it that much lousier.
Almost a half hour later we reached
the intersection of Montauk Highway and David White’s Lane. I asked her to give me a few minutes to clean
the ice pack off my wipers and the congealed snow and road grit out of the
grill. It took longer than I hoped,
hampered as I was by icy needles being driven into my face. I knew there were buildings on three corners
of the intersection, but now with night completely settled in, they only looked
like ghostly shapes within the blustery haze.
I made it back into the car thinking it may not ever be safe to emerge
again.
“They’re saying it’s the blizzard of
the century,” said Dayna over my exotic new smart phone, a type that provides
everything short of teleportation. “Could
get three feet, not including drifts.
The governor’s shut down the whole island. Non-essential travel’s forbidden.”
“Sorry if this gets you in trouble.”
“I’m essential, honey. Which means you’re also protected. It’s like diplomatic immunity.”
“I know the cops around here pretty
well,” I said. “Good luck with that
one.”
Even with her heavy four-wheel-drive
truck, knobby tires and snow plow it was slow going. Every so often the load in front of the plow
grew so large she had to increase the angle of the blade and shove it off to
the side. Then we’d back up a little and
take off again, her easing along what she hoped was the road surface, now
completely obliterated by a blanket of deep snow, and me transfixed by the two
red lights on her tailgate and the pale light over the truck’s license plate,
which read “Wood Chick”.
I never would have made it without
her. No way, no how.
“Wood Chick, you’re the aces,” I
told her over the phone, deciphering the vanity license plate, WOODCHIK .
“Now I’m embarrassed.”
“Don’t be,” I said. “I’m just trying to be nice.”
“My own fault for plastering that
name right on my ass. With encouragement
from people I’d be better off ignoring.”
“I know people like that.”
“Tad’s place is getting closer,” she
said. “During the day we’d have a visual
by now.”
She meant we could have seen one of
the towering metal sculptures that comprised the loony installation Tad had
created and named Metal Madness. The
sculptures, mounted atop Tad’s ersatz
mountains, were built of twisted sheets of steel welded into abstract shapes
that thrust high into the sky. And
consequently, the latest cause for neighborhood angst and costly legal
maneuvering, which I was grateful to leave behind, safe within my current
career as a full-time criminal attorney.
Seven Ponds wasn’t even a place
name, it was just a few roads of the same or similar names that criss-crossed a
semi-rural swath north of Southampton Village.
And by my reckoning, there was only one pond named Seven Ponds, which
must have been either an act of clever misdirection, or the imaginative product
of some ancient real estate broker.
These days I’d call the area mixed
use, with farms like Tad’s mostly developed, and the remaining open land,
preserved in land trusts, slowly succumbing to natural re-forestation. The few auto repair shops, roadside markets
and tractor dealers from back in the day had also taken on a disintegrating,
superannuated hue.
Tad’s place was at the northernmost
limit of that area, describable as the foot hills of a little forested ridge
that ran down the spine of the South Fork. This meant that Dayna and I had a
hard fight up a relatively modest grade, with lots of starting and stopping,
punctuated by fruitless spinning of wheels, just as my surly father warned me
against.
“A little less torque might help,” I
said to Dayna over the phone. She
grunted and proceeded slowly, but relentlessly, with or without my advice. I followed in the same spirit.
After what felt like hours, because
it almost was, we finally reached the head of the driveway that led into Tad
Buczek’s place, heralded by the words “Metal Madness” punched out of a slab of
aluminum hung above the entrance.
“At least it’s downhill from here
on,” said Dayna, after making a tentative run at the top of the driveway. “You ready?”
“I’ve waited all my life.”
“I could chain us together again,
which might keep you from getting stuck, or just pick my way along in the hope
you can keep a safe distance and stay under way.”
“That’s what I’ve been doing,” I
said.
“This is different. There’re no road markers. I’ll be driving blind.”
“Unchained sounds more like me,” I
told her.
“Okay. Here we go.”
Dayna dropped the plow and turned
into the driveway. It was the deepest
snow yet encountered, undisturbed by
traffic of any kind. I could see all
four wheels of the pickup throwing up tiny wakes, half-spinning, half digging
in. It wasn’t a slow passage – Dayna
needed the velocity to attack the heavy snow, some in drifts that crested over
the top of the plow.
“Are we headed to the house?” she
asked over the cell phone. “If so, we’ll
have to make a hard left very soon.”
“Let me make another call and I’ll
tell you.”
I hung up and tapped Franco’s number
from the list of recent calls. It rang a
few times before he picked up.
“I see two sets of lights,” he
said. “Is that you?”
“It’s me and a plow. Where are you?”
“In front of the big pergola. Tell the plow not to run me over.”
I hung up and did just that. I told Dayna the pergola was half way between
the upcoming left and the main house.
She said “Roger that,” and slowed down to take the left. I crept up behind, praying I had the
momentum to stay stuck to the slippery road surface and still make the
turn.
We both made it around, and I saw
the lights mounted above the truck’s plow kick up to high beams. I tucked up closer to her rear bumper,
feeling more secure at the slower pace she’d chosen. It was still fast enough to cause the snow to
explode out from the front of the truck and wash into me from either side and
above. My windshield wipers, already
compromised, soon surrendered, and I picked up the phone to tell Dayna I had to
stop when I heard her voice over the speaker.
“There’s a guy waving at me,” she
said.
“Stop there.”
She actually drove a little past him
so he was at my passenger side door when I stopped. I rolled down the window.
“So Franco, what up?”
I assumed it was Franco based on the
prominent nose and thin black moustache and goatee, which were the only
identifying features. The rest was
snow-covered wool coat and baseball cap.
When he greeted me, in his Italian-inflected English, more a lilt than
an accent, I was sure it was him.
I got out of the car, and stumbled
around to the other side. Dayna approached
and asked if I was alright. I introduced
the two of them and they peeled off their gloves to shake hands. Franco gave a neat little bow.
“Jackie, I need to show you
something. Ms. Red, you better wait
here, if you don’t mind.”
“I’d rather come,” she said.
“She can come,” I told him, not
knowing exactly why. I had nothing to
fear from Franco, but you quickly grow connected to people, even strangers, who
deliver you through dire circumstances.
I wanted her nearby.
“Suit yourself,” he said, turning
and then tromping under Tad’s giant pergola through the deep snow, guided by a
bright flashlight, made less so by the tiny snow flakes that streamed down
through the woody vines and open beams of the structure above. I cursed the lack of a hat.
It wasn’t a long walk, blessedly, as
I quickly grew weary of the trudge, a misery compounded by the slippery soles
of my cowboy boots. We were at the far
end of the pergola, in an area that was partially covered by a hard roof under
which Tad had a wooden table for al fresco dining. On top of the table was a long, white mound,
at the fringes of which I could see the edge of a blue tarp. Franco waited for us to come up to him, then
took a piece of the tarp in his gloved hand.
Dayna said “Uh-oh,” under her
breath.
“You wanted to come,” Franco said to
her, then flipped the tarp over the mound, sending the covering snow flying
into the air, where some of it was blown back, hitting me in the face. I wiped my eyes and followed Franco’s
flashlight as it outlined the prone figure of a large man, finally stopping at
the red and grey mash that used to be the defiant and hard-headed skull of
Tadzio Buczek.
Ice Cap becomes available as of June 5. Order it now at your local bookstore!
Michael Haskins
