Bitter Truth

1

En Route to Belize City, Belize

I SUPPOSE EVERY HUNDRED million dollars has its own sordid story and the hundred million I am chasing is no exception.

I am on a TACA International flight to Belize in search of my fortune. Underneath the seat in front of me lies my briefcase and in my briefcase lies all I need, officially, to pick my fortune up and take it home with me. I lift the briefcase onto my lap and open it, carefully pulling out the file folder, and from that folder, with even more care, pulling out the document inside. I like the feel of the smooth copy paper in my hands. I read it covetously, holding it so the nun sitting next to me can’t steal a peek. Its text is as short and as evocative as the purest haiku. “Default judgment is awarded in favor of the plaintiff in the amount of one hundred million dollars.” The document is signed by the judge and stamped in red ink and certified by the Prothonotary of the Court of Common Pleas of the City of Philadelphia and legal in every state of the union and those countries with the appropriate treaties with the United States, a group in which, fortunately, Belize is included. One hundred million dollars, the price of two lives plus punitive damages. I bring the paper to my nose and smell it. I can detect the sweet scent of mint, no, not peppermint, government. One hundred million dollars, of which my fee, as the attorney, is a third.

Think hard on that for a moment; I do, constantly. If I find what I’m hunting it would be like winning the lotto every month for a year. It would be like Ed McMahon coming to my door with his grand prize check not once, not twice, but three times, and I would get it all at once instead of over thirty years. It would be enough money to run for president if I were ever so deranged. Well, maybe not that much, but it is still a hell of a lot of money. And I want it, desperately, passionately, with all my heart and soul. Those who whine that there is no meaning left in American life are blind, for there is fame and there is fortune and, frankly, you can take fame and cram it down your throats. Me, I’ll take the money.

For almost a year I’ve been in search of the assets against which my default judgment will be collected. I’ve traced them through the Cayman Islands to a bank in Luxembourg to a bank in Switzerland, through Liberia and Beirut and back through the Cayman Islands, from where payments had been wired, repeatedly, to an account at the Belize Bank. From the Belize Bank the funds were immediately withdrawn, in cash. Unlike all the other transfers of funds, the transfers to Belize were neither hidden within the entwining vines of larger transactions nor mathematically encrypted. The owner of the money has grown complacent in his overconfidence or he is sending me an invitation and either way I am heading to Belize, flying down to follow the money until it leads me directly to him. He is a vicious man, violent, deceptive, greedy beyond belief. He has killed without the least hesitation, killed for the basest of reasons. His hands drip with blood and I have no grounds to believe he will not kill again. When I think on his crimes I find it amazing how the possibility of so much money can twist one to act beyond all rationality. I am flying down to Belize to find this man in his tropical asylum so I can serve the judgment personally and start the collection proceedings that will at long last make me rich.

In a voice equally apathetic in Spanish and English we are told that we are beginning our approach to Belize City. I return the document to the briefcase, twist the case’s lock, stow it back beneath the seat in front of me. Outside the window I see the teal blue of the Caribbean and then a ragged line of scabrous slicks of land, spread atop the water like foul oil, and then the jungle, green and thick and foreign. Clots of treetops are spotted dark by clouds. For not the first time I feel a doubt rise about my mission. If I were going to Pittsburgh or Bern or Luxembourg City I’d feel more confident, but Belize is a wild, untamed place, a country of hurricanes and rain forests and great Mayan ruins. Anything can happen in Belize.

The nun sitting next to me, habited in white with a black veil and canvas sneakers, puts down her Danielle Steel and smiles reassuringly.

“Have you been to our country before?” she asks with a British accent.

“No,” I say.

“It is quite beautiful,” she says. “The people are wonderful.” She winks. “Keep a hand on your wallet in Belize City, yes? But you will love it, I’m sure. Business or pleasure?”

“Business.”

“Of course, I could tell by your suit. It’s a bit hot for that. You’ll be visiting the barrier reef too, I suppose, they all do, but there’s more to Belize than fish. While you are here you must see our rain forests. They are glorious. And the rivers too. You brought insect repellent, I expect.”

“I didn’t, actually. The bugs are bad?”

“Oh my, yes. The mosquito, well, you know, I’m sure, of the mosquito. The malaria pills they have now work wonders. And the welts from the botlass fly last for days but are not really harmful. Ticks of course and scorpions, but the worst is the beefworm. It is the larva of the botfly and it is carried by the mosquito. It comes in with the bite and lives within your flesh while it grows, grabbing hold of your skin with pincers and burrowing in. Nasty little parasite, that. The whole area blows up and is quite painful, there is a burning sensation, but you mustn’t pull it, oh no. Then you will definitely get an infection. Instead you must cover the area with glue and tape and suffocate it. The worm squirms underneath for awhile before it dies and that is considered painful by some, but the next morning you can just squeeze the carcass out like toothpaste from a tube.”

I am lost in the possibilities when the plane tilts up, passes low over a wide jungle river, and slams into the runway. “Welcome to the Philip Goldson International Airport,” says the voice over the intercom. “The airport temperature is ninety-three and humidity is eighty-five percent. Enjoy your stay in Belize.”

We depart onto the tarmac. It is oppressively hot, the Central American sun is brutal. I feel its pressure all over my body. The air is tropically thick and in its humidity my suit jacket immediately weighs down with sweat. There is something on my face. I am confused for a moment before I realize it is an insect and frantically swipe it away. We are herded in a line toward customs. To our left is the terminal building, brown as rust, a relic from the fifties, to our right is a camouflaged military transport, being loaded with something large I can’t identify. A black helicopter circles overhead. Soldiers rush by in a jeep. Sweat drips from my temples and down my neck. I shuck off my jacket, but already my shirt is soaked. I brush a mosquito from my wrist but not before it bites me. I can almost feel something wiggling beneath the skin.

After we hand our passports over for inspection and pick up our bags we are sent in lines to wait for the dog. I sit on my suitcase and pick at the amoebic blob swelling on my wrist. A German shepherd appears, mangy and fierce. He is straining at his leash. He sniffs first one suitcase, then another, then a backpack. The dog comes up to me and shoves his nose into my crotch. Two policemen laugh.

Even inside the terminal it is hot and the sunlight rushing through the windows is fierce and I feel something dangerous beyond the mosquitoes in the swelter about me. I wonder what the hell I am doing in Belize but then I feel the weight of my briefcase in my hand and remember about the hundred million dollars and its story, a story of betrayal and revenge, of intrigue and sex and revelation, a story of murder and a story of redemption and a story of money most of all. Suddenly I know exactly what I am doing here and why.

2

IT STARTED FOR ME with a routine job in the saddest little room in all of Philadelphia. Crowded with cops and shirt-sleeved lawyers and court clerks and boxes of files, a dusty clothes rack, a computer monitor with plastic wood trim and vacuum tubes like something out of Popular Mechanics circa 1954, it was a room heavy with the air of an exhausted bureaucracy. I was sitting alone on the lawyers’ bench inside that room, waiting for them to drag my client from the holding cells in the basement. My job that morning was to get him out on a reasonable bail and, considering what he was being charged with, that wasn’t going to be easy.

I was in the Roundhouse, Philadelphia Police Headquarters, a circular building constructed in the sixties, all flowing lines, every office a corner office, an architectural marvel bright with egalitarian promise. But the Roundhouse had turned old before its time, worn down by too much misery, too much crime. At the grand entrance on Race Street there was a statue of a cop holding a young boy aloft in his arms, a promise of all the good works envisioned to flow through those doors, except that the entrance on Race Street was now barred and visitors were required to enter through the rear. In through that back entrance, to the right, past the gun permit window, past the bail clerk, through the battered brown doors and up the steps to the benches where a weary public could watch, through a wall of thick Plexiglas, the goings on in the Roundhouse’s very own Municipal Court.

“Sit down, ma’am,” shouted the bailiff to a young woman who had walked through those doors and was now standing among the benches behind the Plexiglas wall. She was young, thin, a waif with short hair bleached yellow and a black leather jacket. She was either family or friend of one of the defendants, or maybe just whiling away her day, looking for a morning’s entertainment. If so, it was bound to be a bit wan. “You can’t stand in the back,” shouted the bailiff, “you have to sit down,” and so she sat.

The defendants were brought into the room in batches of twenty, linked wrist to wrist by steel, and placed in a holding cell, with its own Plexiglas view. You could see them in there, through the Plexiglas, waiting with sullen expectation for their brief time before the bar.

“Sit down, sir,” called out the bailiff in what was a steady refrain. “You can’t stand back there,” and another onlooker dropped onto one of the benches.

“Hakeem Trell,” announced the clerk and a young man sauntered a few steps to the large table before the bench that dominated the room.

“Hakeem Trell,” said Bail Commissioner Pauling, reading from his file, “also known as Roger Pettibone, also known as Skip Dong.” At this last alias Commissioner Pauling looked over the frames of his half-glasses at the young man standing arrogantly before him. There was about Hakeem Trell a.k.a. Roger Pettibone a.k.a. Skip Dong the defiant annoyance of a high school student facing nothing more serious than an afternoon’s detention. Where was the anxiety as he faced imprisonment, the trembling fear at the rent in his future? What had we done to these children? My client wasn’t in the batch they had just brought up and so I was forced to sit impatiently as Commissioner Pauling preliminarily arraigned Hakeem Trell and then Luis Rodriguez and then Anthony O’Neill and then Jason Lawton and then and then and then, one after another, young kids almost all, mainly minority, primarily poor, or at least dressing that way, all taking it in with a practiced air of hostility. Spend enough time in the Roundhouse’s Municipal Court and you begin to feel what it is to be an occupying power.

“Sirs, please sit down, you can’t stand back there,” shouted the bailiff and two men in the gallery arranged themselves on one of the forward benches, sitting right in front of the young blonde woman, who shifted to a different bench to maintain her view of the proceedings.

I recognized both of the men. I had been expecting them to show, or at least some men like them. One was huge, wearing a shiny warm-up suit, his face permanently cast with the heavy lidded expression of a weightlifter contemplating a difficult squat thrust. I had seen him around, he had grunted at me once. The other was short, thin, looking like a talent scout for a cemetery. He had the face and oily gray hair of a mortician, wearing the same black suit a mortician might wear, clutching a neat little briefcase in his lap. This slick’s name was Earl Dante, a minor mob figure I had met a time or two before. His base of operations was a pawnshop, neatly named the Seventh Circle Pawn, on Two Street, south of Washington, just beyond the Mummers Museum, where he made his piranha loans at three points a week and sent out his gap-toothed collectors to muscle in his payments. Dante nodded at me and I contracted the sides of my mouth into an imitation of a smile, hoping no one noticed, before turning back to the goings on in the court.

Commissioner Pauling was staring at me. His gaze drifted up to alight on the mortiferous face of Earl Dante before returning back to my own. I gave a little shrug. The clerk called the next name on his sheet.

In the break between batches, Commissioner Pauling strolled off to what constituted his chambers in the Roundhouse, no desk of course, or bookshelves filled with West reporters, but a hook for his robe and a sink and an industrial-sized roll of paper to keep his chamberpot clean. I stepped up to the impeccably dressed clerk still at the bench.

“Nice tie, Henry,” I said.

“I can’t say the same for yours, Mr. Carl,” said Henry, shuffling through his files, not deigning to even check out my outfit. “But then I guess you don’t got much selection when you buying ties at Woolworth’s.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “I’m here for Cressi. Peter Cressi. Some sort of gun problem.”

Henry looked through his papers and started nodding. “Yeah, I’d guess trying to buy a hundred and seventy-nine illegally modified automatic assault weapons, three grenade launchers, and a flamethrower from an undercover cop would constitute some sort of gun problem.”

“He’s a collector.”

“Uh huh,” said Henry, drawing out his disbelief.

“No, really.”

“You don’t gots to lie to me, Mr. Carl. You don’t see me wearing robes, do you? Your Cressi will be in the next batch. I know what you want, uh huh. I’ll get you out of here soon as I can.”

“You’re a good man, Henry.”

“Don’t be telling me, be telling my wife.”

They brought up the next batch of prisoners, twenty cuffed wrist to wrist, led into the little holding cell behind the bench upon which I uneasily sat. In the middle of the group was Peter Cressi, tall, curly hair flowing long and black behind his ears, broad shoulders, unbelievably handsome. His blue silk shirt, black pants, pointed shiny boots were in stark contrast to the baggy shin-high jeans and hightop sneakers of his new compatriots. As he shuffled through the room he smiled casually at me, as casually as if seeing a neighbor across the street, and I smiled back. Cressi’s gaze drifted up to the benches in the gallery, behind the Plexiglas. When it fell onto Dante’s stern face Cressi’s features twisted into some sort of fearful reverence.

I didn’t like Cressi, actually. There was something ugly and arrogant about him, something uneasy. He was one of those guys who sort of danced while he spoke, as if his bladder was always full to bursting, but you sensed it wasn’t his bladder acting up, it was a little organ of evil urging him to go forth and do bad. I didn’t like Cressi, but getting the likes of Peter Cressi out of the troubles their little organs of evil got them into was how I now made my living.

I never planned to be a criminal defense attorney, I never planned a lot of things that had happened to my life, like the Soviets never planned for Chernobyl to glow through the long Ukrainian night, but criminal law was what I practiced now. I represented in the American legal system a group of men whose allegiance was not to God and country but to family, not to their natural-born families but to a family with ties that bound so tightly they cut into the flesh. It was a family grown fat and wealthy through selling drugs, pimping women, infiltrating trade unions, and extorting great sums from legitimate industry, from scamming what could be scammed, from loan sharking, from outright thievery, from violence and mayhem and murder. It was the criminal family headed by Enrico Raffaello. I didn’t like the work and I didn’t like the clients and I didn’t like myself while I did the work for the clients. I wanted out, but Enrico Raffaello had once done me the favor of saving my life and so I didn’t have much choice anymore.

“All right,” said Pauling, back on the bench from his visit to his chambers. “Let’s get started.”

There were three prisoners in the column of seats beside where I sat, ready to be called to the bar, and the Commissioner was already looking at the first, a young boy with a smirk on his face, when Henry called out Peter Cressi’s name.

“Come on up, son,” said Pauling to the boy. Henry whispered in the Commissioner’s ear. Pauling closed his eyes with exasperation. “Bring out Mr. Cressi,” he said.

I stood and slid to the table.

“I assume you’re here to represent this miscreant, Mr. Carl,” said Pauling as they brought Cressi out from the holding cell.

“This alleged miscreant, yes sir.”

When Cressi stood by my side I gave him a stern look of reprobation. He snickered back and did his little dance.

“Mr. Cressi,” said Commissioner Pauling, interrupting our charming little moment, “you are hereby charged with one hundred and eighty-three counts of the illegal purchase of firearms in violation of the Pennsylvania Penal Code. You are also charged with conspiracy to commit those offenses. Now I’m going to read you the factual basis for those charges, so you listen up.” The commissioner took hold of the police report and started reading. I knew what had happened, I had heard all of it that morning when I was woken by a call to my apartment informing me of Cressi’s arrest. The arrest must have been something, Cressi with a Ryder truck, driving out to a warehouse in the Northeast to find waiting for him not the crates of rifles and weapons he had expected but instead a squadron of SWAT cops, guns pointed straight at Peter’s handsome face. The cops had been expecting an army, I guess, not just some wiseguy with a rented truck.

“Your Honor, with regard to bail,” I said, “Mr. Cressi is a lifelong resident of the city, living at home with his elderly mother, who is dependent on his care.” This was one of those lawyer lies. I knew Cressi’s mother, she was a spry fifty-year-old bingo fiend, but Peter did make sure she took her hypertension medication every morning. “Mr. Cressi has no intention of fleeing and, as this is not in any way a violent crime, poses no threat to the community. We ask that he be allowed to sign his own bail.”

“What was he going to do with those guns, counselor? Aerate his lawn?”

“Mr. Cressi is a collector,” I said. I saw Henry shaking in his seat as he fought to stifle his laughter.

“What about the flame-thrower?”

“Would you believe Mr. Cressi was having a problem with roaches?”

The commissioner didn’t so much as crack a smile, which was a bad sign. “These weapons are illegal contraband, not allowed to be owned by anyone, even so-called collectors.”

“We have a constitutional argument on that, your honor.”

“Spare me the Second Amendment, counselor, please. Your client was buying enough guns to wage a war. Three hundred and sixty-six thousand, ten percent cash,” said the Commissioner with a quick pound of his gavel.

“Your Honor, I believe that’s terribly excessive.”

“Two thousand per weapon seems fair to me. I think Mr. Cressi should spend some time in jail. That’s all, next case.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said, fighting to keep all sarcasm out of my voice. I turned to Earl Dante, sitting patiently on the gallery bench behind the Plexiglas, and nodded at him.

Dante gave a look of resigned exasperation, like he would give to a mechanic who has just explained that his car needed an expensive new water pump. Then the loan shark, followed by the hulk in his workout suit, stood and headed out the gallery’s doors, taking his briefcase to the waiting bail clerk. As my gaze followed them out I noticed the thin blonde woman in the leather jacket staring at Cressi and me with something more than idle curiosity.

I turned and gave Cressi a complicated series of instructions. “Keep your mouth shut till you’re bailed out, Peter. You got that?”

“What you think, I’m an idiot here?”

“I’m not the one buying guns from cops. Just do as I say and then meet me at my office tomorrow morning so we can figure out where to go from here. And be sure to bring my usual retainer.”

“I always do.”

“I’ll give you that, Peter.” I looked back up to the blonde woman who was still watching us. “You know her?” I asked with a flick of my head to the gallery.

He looked up. “Nah, she’s not my type, a scrag like that.”

“Then if you don’t know her and I don’t know her, why’s she staring?”

He smiled. “When you look and dress like I do, you know, you get used to it.”

“That must be it,” I said. “I bet you’ll look even more dashing in your orange jumpsuit.”

Just then a bailiff grabbed Cressi’s arm and started leading him back to the holding cell.

“See if you can stay out of trouble until tomorrow morning,” I said to him as the Commissioner read out another in his endless list of names.

But Cressi was wrong about in whom the blonde was interested. She was waiting outside the Roundhouse for me. “Mr. Carl?”

“That’s right.”

“Your office said I could find you here.”

“And here I am,” I said with a tight smile. It was not a moment poised with promise, her standing before me just then. She was in her mid-twenties, small, her bleached hair hacked to ear’s length, as if with a cleaver. Black lipstick, black nail polish, mascara globbed around her eyes like a cry for help. Under her black leather was a blue work shirt, originally the property of some stiff named Lenny, and a thrift-shop-quality pleated skirt. She had five earrings in her right ear and her left nostril was pierced and she looked like one of those impoverished art students who hang outside the Chinese buy-it-by-the-pound buffet on Chestnut Street. A small black handbag hung low from her shoulder. On the bare ankle above one of her black platform shoes was the tattoo of a rose, and that I noticed it there meant I was checking her out, like men invariably check out every woman they ever meet. Not bad, actually. Cressi was right, she was scrawny, and her face was pinched with apprehension, but there was something there, maybe just youth, but something.

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

She looked around. “Can we, like, talk somewhere?”

“You can walk me to the subway,” I said as I headed south to Market Street. I wasn’t all that interested in what she had to say. From the look of her I had her figured. She had fished my name out of the Yellow Pages and found I was a criminal attorney and wanted me now to help get her boyfriend out of the stir. Of course he was innocent and wrongfully convicted and of course the trial had been a sham and of course she couldn’t pay me right off but if I could only help out from the goodness of my heart she would promise to pay me later. About once a week I got just such a call from a desperate relative or girlfriend trolling for lawyers through the phone book. And what I told each of them I would end up telling her: that nobody does anything from the goodness of his heart and I was no different.

She watched me go and then ran to catch up, doing a hop skip in her platform shoes to keep pace with my stride. “I need your help, Mr. Carl.”

“My docket’s full right now.”

“I’m in serious trouble.”

“All my clients are in serious trouble.”

“But I’m not like all your clients.”

“That’s right, my clients have all paid me a retainer for my services. They have bought my loyalty and attention with their cash. Will you be able to pay me a retainer, Ms…?”

“Shaw. Caroline Shaw. How much?”

“Five thousand for a routine criminal matter.”

“This is not routine, I am certain.”

“Well in that case it might be more.”

“I can pay,” she said. “That’s not a problem.”

I stopped at that. I was expecting an excuse, a promise, a plea, I was not expecting to hear that payment was not a problem. I stopped and turned and took a closer look. Even though she dressed like a waif she held herself regally, her shoulders back, her head high, which was a trick, really, in those ridiculous platform shoes. The eyes within those raccoon bands of mascara were blue and sharply in focus, the eyes of a law student or an accomplished liar. And she spoke better then I would have expected from the outfit. “What do you want me to do for you, Ms. Shaw?”

“I want you to find out who killed my sister.”

That was new. I tilted my head. “I thought you said you were in trouble?”

“I think I might be next.”

“Well that is a problem, and I wish you well. But you should be going to the police. It’s their job to investigate murders and protect citizens, my job is to get the murderers off. Good day, Ms. Shaw,” I said as I turned and started again to walk south to the subway.

“I told you I’d be willing to pay,” she said as she skipped and hopped again to stay with me, her shoes clopping on the cement walk. “Doesn’t that matter?”

“That matters a heap,” I said as I kept walking, “but signing a check is one thing, having the check clear is entirely another.”

“But it will,” she said. “And I need your help. I’m scared.”

“Go to the police.”

“So you’re not going to help me?” Her voice had turned pathetic and after it came out she stopped walking beside me. It wasn’t tough to keep going, no tougher than passing a homeless beggar without dropping a quarter in her cup. We learn to just walk on in the city, but even as I walked on I could still hear her. “I don’t know what I’m going to do if you don’t help me. I think whoever killed her is going to kill me next. I’m desperate, Mr. Carl. I carry this but I’m still scared all the time.”

I stopped again and, with a feeling of dread, I turned around. She was holding an automatic pistol pointed at my heart.

“Won’t you help me, Mr. Carl? Please? You don’t know how desperate I am.”

The gun had a black dull finish, rakish lines, it was small-bore, sure, but its bore was still large enough to kill a generation’s best hope in a hotel ballroom, not to mention a small-time criminal attorney who was nobody’s best hope for anything.

I’ll say this for her, she knew how to grab my attention.

3

“PUT THE GUN AWAY,” I said in my sharpest voice.

“I didn’t mean, oh God no, I…” Her hand wavered and the barrel drooped as if the gun had gone limp.

“Put the gun away,” I said again, and it wasn’t as brave as it sounds because the only other options were to run, exposing my back to the.22 slug, or pissing my pants, which no matter how intense the immediate relief makes really an awful mess. And after I told her to put the gun away, told her twice for emphasis, she did just as I said, stuck it right back in her handbag, all of which was unbelievably gratifying for me in a superhero sort of way.

Until she started crying.

“Oh no, now don’t do that,” I said, “no no don’t no.”

I stepped toward her as she collapsed in a sitting position to the sidewalk, crying, the thick mascara around her eyes running in lines down her cheek, her nose reddening. She wiped her face with a black leather sleeve, smearing everything.

“Don’t cry, please please, it will be all right. We’ll go somewhere, we’ll talk, just please please stop crying, please.”

I couldn’t leave her there after that, sitting on the ground like she was, crying black tears that splattered on the cement. In a different era I would have offered to buy her a good stiff drink, but this wasn’t a different era, so what I offered to buy her instead was a cappuccino. She let me drag her to a coffee shop a few blocks east. It was a beat little place with old stuffed couches and chairs, a few rickety tables, its back walls filled with shelves of musty used paperbacks. I was drinking a black coffee, decaf actually, since the sight of her gun aimed at my heart had given me enough of a start for the morning. Caroline was sitting across from me at one of the tables, her arms crossed, in front of her the cappuccino, pale, frothy, sprinkled with cinnamon, and completely untouched. Her eyes now were red and smeared and sad. There were a few others in the joint, young and mangy in their slacker outfits, greasy hair and flannel shirts, sandals. Caroline looked right at home. In my blue suit I felt like a narc.

“Do you have a license for that gun?” I asked.

“I suppose I need one, don’t I?”

I nodded and took a sip from my mug. “Take some sound legal advice and throw the gun away. I should turn you in, actually, for your own good, though I won’t. It goes against my…”

“You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” she said, interrupting me mid-sentence, and before I could answer she was already rummaging again in that little black handbag. I must admit I didn’t like seeing her hand back inside that bag, but all she brought out this time was a pack of Camel Lights. She managed to light her cigarette with her arms still crossed.

I looked her over again and guessed to myself that she was a clerk in a video store, or a part-time student at Philadelphia Community College, or maybe both. “What is it you do, Caroline?”

“I’m between things at the moment,” she said, leaning forward, looking for something on the table. Finding nothing, she tossed her spent match atop the brown sprinkled foam of her cappuccino. I had just spent $2.50 for her liquid ashtray. I assumed she would have preferred the drink. “Last month I was a photographer. Next month maybe I’ll take up tap dancing.”

“An unwavering commitment to caprice, I see.”

She laughed a laugh so full of rue I felt like I was watching Betty Davis tilt her head back, stretch her white neck. “Exactly. I aspire to live my life like a character in a sitcom, every week a new and perky adventure.”

“What’s the title of this episode?”

“Into the Maw, or maybe Into the Mall, because after this I need to go to the Gallery and buy some tampons. Why were you in that stupid little courtroom this morning?”

I took another sip of coffee. “One of my clients attempted to buy one hundred and seventy-nine automatic rifles, three grenade launchers, and a flamethrower from an undercover cop.”

“Is he in the mob, this client of yours?”

“There is no mob. It is a figment of the press’s imagination.”

“Then what was he going to do with all those guns?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“I had heard you were a mob lawyer. It’s true, isn’t it?”

I made an effort to stare at her without blinking as I let the comment slide off me like a glob of phlegm.

Yes, a majority of my clients just happened to be junior associates of Mr. Raffaello, like I said, but I was no house counsel, no mob lawyer. At least not technically. I merely handled their cases after they allegedly committed their alleged crimes, nothing more. And though my clients never flipped, never ratted out the organization that fed them since they were pups, that sustained them, that took care of their families and their futures, though my clients never informed on the family, the decision not to inform was made well before they ever stepped into my office. And was I really representing these men, or was I instead enforcing the promises made to all citizens in the Constitution of the United States? Wasn’t I among the noblest defenders of those sacred rights for which our forefathers fought and died? Who among us was doing more to protect liberty, to ensure justice? Who among us was doing more to safeguard the American way of life?

Do I sound defensive?

I was about to explain it all to her but it bored even me by then so all I said was, “I do criminal law. I don’t get involved in…”

“What’s that?” she shouted as she leaped to kneeling on her seat. “What is it? What?”

I stared for a moment into her anxious face, filled with a true terror, before I looked under the table at where her legs had been only an instant before. A cat, brown and ruffled, was rubbing its back on the legs of her chair. It looked quite contented as it rubbed.

“It’s just a cat,” I said.

“Get rid of it.”

“It’s just a cat,” I repeated.

“I hate them, miserable ungrateful little manipulators, with their claws and their teeth and their fur-licking tongues. They eat human flesh, do you know that? It’s one of their favorite things. Faint near a cat and it’ll chew your face off.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Get rid of it, please please please.”

I reached under the table and the cat scurried away from my grasp. I stood up and went after it, herding it to the back of the coffee shop where, behind the bookshelves, was an open bathroom door. When the cat slipped into the bathroom I closed the door behind it.

“What was that all about?” I asked Caroline when I returned to the table.

“I don’t like cats,” she said as she fiddled with her cigarette.

“I don’t especially like cats either, but I don’t jump on my seat and go ballistic when I see one.”

“I have a little problem with them, that’s all.”

“With cats?”

“I’m afraid of cats. I’m not the only one. It has a name. Ailurophobia. So what? We’re all afraid of something.”

I thought on that a bit. She was right of course, we were all afraid of something, and in the scheme of things being afraid of cats was not the worst of fears. My great fear in this life didn’t have a name that I knew of. I was afraid of remaining exactly who I was, and that phobia instilled a shiver of fear into every one of my days. Something as simple as a fear of cats would have been a blessing.

“All right, Caroline,” I said. “Tell me about your sister.”

She took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled in a long white stream. “Well, for one thing, she was murdered.”

“Have the police found the killer?”

She reached for her pack of Camel Lights even though the cigarette she had was still lit. “Jackie was hanging from the end of a rope in her apartment. They’ve concluded that she hung herself.”

“The police said that?”

“That’s right. The coroner and some troglodyte detective named McDeiss. They closed the case, said it was a suicide. But she didn’t.”

“Hang herself?”

“She wouldn’t.”

“Detective McDeiss ruled it a suicide?”

She sighed. “You don’t believe me either.”

“No, actually,” I said. “I’ve had a few run-ins with McDeiss but he’s a pretty good cop. If he said it was a suicide, it’s a fair bet your sister killed herself. You may not have thought she was suicidal, that’s perfectly natural, but…”

“Of course she was suicidal,” she said, interrupting me once again. “Jackie read Sylvia Plath as if her poetry were some sort of a road map through adolescence. One of her favorite lines was from a poem called ‘Lady Lazarus.’ ‘Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.’ ”

“Then I don’t understand your problem.”

“Jackie talked of suicide as naturally as others talked of the weather, but she said she’d never hang herself. She was disgusted by the idea of dangling there, aware of the pain, turning as the rope tightened and creaked, the pressure on your neck, on your backbone, hanging there until they cut you down.”

“What would have been her way?”

“Pills. Darvon. Two thousand milligrams is fatal. She always had six thousand on hand. Jackie used to joke that she wanted to be prepared if ever a really terrific suicidal urge came along. Besides, in her last couple years she almost seemed happy. It was like she was actually finding the peacefulness she once thought was only for her in death through this New Age church she had joined, finding it through meditation. She had even gotten herself engaged, to an idiot, yes, but still engaged.”

“So let’s say she was murdered. What do you want me to do about it?”

“Find out who did it.”

“I’m just a lawyer,” I said. “What you’re looking for is a private investigator. Now I have one that I use who is terrific. His name is Morris Kapustin and he’s a bit unorthodox, but if anyone can help he can. I can set…”

“I don’t want him, I want you.”

“Why me?”

“What exactly do mob lawyers do, anyway, eat in Italian restaurants and plot?”

“Why me, Caroline?” I stared at her and waited.

She lit her new cigarette from the still-glowing butt of her old one and then crushed the old against the edge of the mug. “Do you think I smoke too much? Everybody thinks I smoke too much. I used to be cool, now it’s like I’m a leper. Old ladies stop me in the street and lecture.”

I just stared at her and waited some more and after all the waiting she took a deep drag from her cigarette, exhaled, and said:

“I think a bookie named Jimmy Vigs killed her.”

So that was it, why she had chased me, insignificant me, down the street and pulled a gun and collapsed to the cement in black tears, all of which was perfectly designed to gain my attention, if not my sympathy. I knew Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky, sure I did. I had represented him on his last bookmaking charge and gotten him an acquittal too, when I denied he was a gambler, denied it was his ledger that the cops had found, denied it was his handwriting in the ledger despite what the experts said because wink-wink what do experts know, denied the notes in the ledger referred to bets on football games, denied the units mentioned in the ledger notes referred to dollar amounts, and then, after all those sweet denials, I had opened my arms and said with my best boys-will-be-boys voice, “And where’s the harm?” It helped that the jury was all men, after I had booted all the women, and that the trial was held in the spring, smack in the middle of March madness, when every one of those men had money in an NCAA pool. So, yes, I knew Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky.

“He’s a sometime client, as you obviously know,” I said, “so I really don’t want to hear anymore. But what I can tell you about Jim Dubinsky is that he’s not a killer. I’ve known him for…”

“Then you can clear him.”

“Will you stop interrupting me? It’s rude and annoying.”

She tilted her head at me and smiled, as if provoking me was her intent.

“I don’t need to clear Jimmy,” I said. “He’s not a suspect since the cops ruled your sister’s death a suicide.”

“I suspect him and I have a gun.”

I pursed my lips. “And you’ll kill him if I don’t take the case, is that it?”

“I’m a desperate woman, Mr. Carl,” she said, and there was just the right touch of husky fear in her voice, as if she had prepared the line in advance, repeated it to the mirror over and over until she got it just right.

“Let me guess, just a wild hunch of mine, but before you started playing around with f-stops and film speeds, did you happen to take a stab at acting?”

She smiled. “For a few years, yes. I was actually starring in a film until the financing was pulled.”

“And that point the gun, ‘Oh-my-God,’ collapse into a sobbing heap on the sidewalk thing, that was just part of an act?”

Her smile broadened and there was something sly and inviting in it. “I need your help.”

“You made the right decision giving up on the dramatics.” I thought for a moment that it might be entertaining to see her go up against Jimmy Vigs with her pop gun, but then thought better of it. And I did like that smile of hers, at least enough to listen. “All right, Caroline, tell me why you think my friend Jimmy killed your sister.”

She sighed and inhaled and sprayed a cloud of smoke into the air above my face. “It’s my brother Eddie,” she said. “He has a gambling problem. He bets too much and he loses too often. From what I understand, he is into this Jimmy Vigs person for a lot of money, too much money. There were threatening calls, there were late-night visits, Eddie’s car was vandalized. One of Eddie’s arms was broken, in a fall, he said, but no one believed him. Then Jackie died, in what seemed like a suicide but which I know wasn’t, and suddenly the threats stopped, the visits were finished, and Eddie’s repaired and repainted car maintained its pristine condition. The bookie must have been paid off. If this Jimmy Vigs person had killed Eddie he would have lost everything, but he killed Jackie and that must have scared Eddie into digging up the money and paying. But I heard he’s betting again, raising his debt even farther. And if your Jimmy Vigs needs to scare Eddie again I’m the one he’ll go after next.”

I listened to her, nodding all the while, not believing a word of it. If Jimmy was stiffed he’d threaten, sure, who wouldn’t, and maybe break a leg or two, which could be quite painful when done correctly, but that was as far as it would go. Unless, maybe, we were talking big big bucks, but it didn’t seem likely that Jim would let it get that high with someone like this girl’s brother.

“So what I want,” she said, “is for you to find out who killed her and get them to stay away from me. I thought with your connections to this Jimmy Vigs and the mob it would be easy for you.”

“I bet you did,” I said. “But what if it wasn’t Jimmy Vigs?”

“He did it.”

“Most victims are killed by someone they know. If she was murdered, maybe it was by a lover or a family member?”

“My family had nothing to do with it,” she said sharply.

“Jimmy Dubinsky is not a murderer. The mere fact that your brother owed him money is…”

“Then what about this?” she said while she reached into her handbag.

“You did it again, dammit. And I wish you wouldn’t keep putting your hand in there.”

“Frightened?” She smiled as she pulled out a plastic sandwich bag and dangled it before me.

I took the bag from her and examined it. Inside was a piece of cellophane, a candy wrapper, one end twisted, the other opened and the word “Tosca’s” printed on one side. When I saw the printing my throat closed on me.

“I found this lying on her bathroom floor, behind the toilet, when I was cleaning out her apartment,” she said.

“So she had been to Tosca’s. So what?”

“Jackie was an obsessive cleaner. She wouldn’t have just left this lying about. The cops missed it, I guess they don’t do toilets, but Jackie surely wouldn’t have left it there. And tomato sauce was too acidic for her stomach. She never ate Italian food.”

“Then someone else, maybe.”

“Exactly. I asked around and Tosca’s seems to be some sort of mob hangout.”

“So they say.”

“I think she was murdered, Mr. Carl, and that the murderer had been to Tosca’s and left this and I think you’re the one who can find out for me.”

I looked at the wrapper and then at Caroline and then back at the wrapper. Maybe I had underestimated the viciousness of Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky, and maybe one of my clients, in collecting for my other client, had left this little calling card from Tosca’s at the murder scene.

“And if I find out who did it,” I said, “then what?”

“I just want them to leave me alone. If you find out who did it, could you get them to leave me alone?”

“Maybe,” I said. “What about the cops?”

“That will be up to you,” she said.

I didn’t like the idea of this waif rummaging through Tosca’s looking for trouble and I figured Enrico Raffaello wouldn’t like it much either. If I took the retainer and proved to her, somehow, that her sister actually killed herself, I could save everyone, especially Caroline, a lot of trouble. I took another look at the wrapper in that plastic bag, wondered whose fingerprints might still be found there, and then stuffed it into my jacket pocket where it could do no harm.

“I’ll need a retainer of ten thousand dollars,” I said.

She smiled, not with gratitude but with victory, as if she knew all along I’d take the case. “I thought it was five thousand.”

“I charge one eighty-five an hour plus expenses.”

“That seems very high.”

“That’s my price. And you have to promise to throw that gun away.”

She pressed her lips together and thought about it for a moment. “But I want to keep the gun,” she said, with a slight pout in her voice. “It keeps me warm.”

“Buy a dog.”

She thought some more and then reached into her handbag once again and this time what she pulled out was a checkbook, opening it with the practiced air you see in well-dressed women at grocery stores. “Who should I make it out to?”

“Derringer and Carl,” I said. “Ten thousand dollars.”

“I remember the amount,” she said with a laugh as she wrote.

“Is this going to clear?”

She ripped the check from her book and handed it to me. “I hope so.”

“Hopes have never paid my rent. When it clears I’ll start to work.” I looked the check over. It was drawn on the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. “Nice bank,” I said.

“They gave me a toaster.”

“And you’ll get rid of the gun?”

“I’ll get rid of the gun.”

So that was that. I took her number and stuffed the check into my pocket and left her there with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I had been retained, sort of, assuming the check cleared, to investigate the mysterious death of Jacqueline Shaw. I had expected it would be a simple case of checking the files and finding a suicide. I didn’t know then, couldn’t possibly have known, all the crimes and all the hells through which that investigation would lead. But just then, with that check in my hand, I wasn’t thinking so much about poor Jacqueline Shaw hanging by her neck from a rope, but instead about Caroline, her sister, and the slyness of her smile.

I took the subway back to Sixteenth Street and walked the rest of the way to my office on Twenty-first. Up the stairs, past the lists of names, through the hallway with all the other offices with which we shared our space, to the three doorways in the rear.

“Any messages, Ellie?” I asked my secretary. She was a young blonde woman with freckles, our most loyal employee as she was our only employee.

She handed me a pile of slips. “Nothing exciting.”

“Is there ever?” I said as I nodded sadly and went into my scuff of an office. Marked white walls, files piled in lilting towers, dead flowers drooping like desiccated corpses from a glass vase atop my big brown filing cabinet. Through the single window was a sad view of the decrepit alleyway below. I unlocked the file cabinet and dropped the plastic bag with the Tosca’s candy wrapper inside into a file marked “Recent Court Decisions.” I closed the drawer and pushed in the cabinet lock and sat at my desk, staring at all the work I needed to do, transcripts to review, briefs to write, discovery to discover. Instead of getting down to work I took the check out of my pocket. Ten thousand dollars. Caroline Shaw. First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. That was a pretty fancy banking address for a punkette with a post in her nose. I stood and strolled into my partner’s office.

She was at her desk, chewing, a pen in one hand and a carrot in the other. Gray-and-white-streaked copies of case opinions, paragraphs highlighted in fluorescent pink, were scattered across her desktop and she stared up at me as if I were a rude interruption.

“What’s up, doc?” Beth Derringer said.

“Want to go for a ride?”

“Sure,” she said as she snapped a chunk of carrot with her teeth. “What for?”

“Credit check.”

4

“WHERE ARE WE OFF TO?” asked Beth, sitting in the passenger seat of my little Mazda as I negotiated the wilds of the Schuylkill Expressway.

Short and sharp-faced, with glossy black hair ct even and fierce, Elizabeth Derringer had been my partner since we both fell out of law school, all except for one short period a few years back when I lost my way in a case, choosing money over honor, and she felt compelled to resign. That was very much like Beth, to pretend that integrity counted for more than cash, and of all the people I ever met in my life who pretended just that same thing, and there have been far too many, she was the best at pulling it off. Beth was smarter than me, wiser than me, a better lawyer all around, but she had an annoying tendency to pursue causes rather then currency, representing cripples thrown off SSI disability rolls, secretaries whose nipples had been tweaked by Neanderthal superiors, deadbeats looking to stave off foreclosure of the family homestead. It was my criminal work that kept us solvent, but I liked to think that Beth’s unprofitable good deeds justified my profitable descent into the mire with my bad boy clients. In today’s predatory legal world I would have been well advised to jettison her income drag, except I never would. I knew I could trust Beth more deeply than I could trust anyone else in this world, which was not a bad recipe, actually, for a partner and which explained why I hitched my shingle to hers but not why she hitched hers to mine. That I still hadn’t figured out.

“I found us a new client,” I said. “I want to see if the retainer check clears.”

“You smell like a chimney.”

“This new client is a bit nervous.”

“Why don’t you just have Morris do a background check for you?” she said, referring to Morris Kapustin, our usual private detective.

“This isn’t big enough yet to bring in Morris.”

A brown Chevette cut in front of me on the expressway and I slammed my horn. The guy in the Chevette swung around into a different lane and slowed to give me the finger. I gestured back. He shouted something and I shouted something and we jawed at each other for a few moments, neither hearing a word of what the other was yelling, before he sped away.

“So tell me about the new client. Who is he?”

“She is Caroline Shaw. Her sister, one Jacqueline Shaw, killed herself, apparently. Caroline doesn’t believe it was a suicide. She suspects one of my clients and wants me to investigate. I’m certain it’s nothing more than what it looks like but I figure I can keep her out of trouble if I can convince her. My clients don’t like being accused of murder.”

“That’s rather noble of you.”

“She gave us a ten-thousand-dollar retainer.”

“I should have figured.”

“Even nobility has a price. You know what knight-hoods go for these days?”

A maroon van started sliding out of its lane, inching closer and closer to the side of my car. I pressed my horn and accelerated away from the van, braking just in time to avoid a Cadillac, before veering into the center lane.

“It’s not the sort of thing you usually take up, Victor. I didn’t know you had an investigator’s license.”

“She paid us a ten-thousand-dollar retainer, Beth. If the check clears, I’ll buy a belted raincoat and turn into Philip Marlowe.”

The First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line was a surprising choice for Caroline Shaw’s checking account. It was a stately white-shoe bank with three discreet offices and a huge estates department to handle the peculiar bequests of the wealthy dead. The bank’s jumbo mortgage rates were surprisingly low, the rich watched every penny with a rapaciousness that would stun, but the bank’s credit checks were vicious, kicking out all but those with the littlest need for the institution’s money. It catered to the very wealthy suburban crowd who didn’t want to deal with the hoi polloi when they dug their paws into their piles of gold and laughed. The bank didn’t discriminate against the not very rich, of course, but keep just a few hundred dollars in a checking account at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line and the fees would wipe out your principal in a breathtakingly short time. Keep a few hundred thousand and your Yves St. Laurent designer checks were complimentary. Wood-paneled offices, tellers in Brooks Brothers suits, personal banking, ads in The Wall Street Journal proclaiming the soundness of their investment advice for portfolios of two million dollars or more. Sorry, no, they didn’t cash welfare checks at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line and the glass door was always locked so that they could bar your entry until they gave you the once-over, as if they were selling diamond tiaras.

Even though I was in a suit, and Beth was in a nice print dress, we had to knock twice and smile gamely before we heard the buzz.

“Yes, can I help you?” said a somberly dressed young man with a thin smile who greeted us as soon as we stepped inside. I guessed he was some sort of a concierge, there to take the rich old ladies’ coats and escort them to the tapestry chairs arranged before willing and obsequious personal bankers.

“We need to cash a check,” I said.

“Do either of you have an account here?”

I looked around at the portraits of old bankers tacked onto the dark walnut of the walls, gray-haired men in their frock coats staring solemnly down at me with disapproval. Even if I was a Rothschild I don’t think I would have felt comfortable in that bank and, believe me, I was no Rothschild.

“No,” I said. “No account.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t cash checks for those without accounts here.” He whispered so as not to embarrass us, which was very considerate of him, considering. “There is a Core States Bank branch down the road a bit, I’m sure they could be of assistance.”

“We’re being sloughed off,” said Beth.

“It’s policy, ma’am,” said the concierge. “I’m sorry.”

“I’ve been sloughed off by worse places than this,” I said. “But still…”

The concierge stepped to the side and opened the door graciously for us to leave. “I hope we can be of service another time.”

“But the check I wanted to cash,” I said in a loud voice, “was drawn on this very bank.” And then I raised my voice even louder, not in anger, my tone still kindly, but the voice high enough and the syllables distinct enough so that I could have been heard in the rear of the balcony, had there been one. “You don’t mean to say that you won’t honor a check drawn on this bank?”

Heads reared, a personal banker stood, an old lady turned slowly to look at me and grabbed tightly to her purse. The concierge put a hand on my forearm, his face registering as much shock as if I had started babbling in Yiddish right there in that gilded tomb of a bank building.

Before he could say anything else a wonderfully dressed older man with nervous hands and razored gray hair was at his side.

“Thank you, James,” the older man said, his pale blue eyes fixed on my brown ones. “I’ll take it from here.” The young concierge bowed and backed away. “Follow me, please.”

We walked in a column to a desk in the middle of the bank’s dark-carpeted main room and were seated on the tapestry seats of claw-and-ball chairs. Atop the desk was a bronze name plate that read: “Mr. Jeffries.” “Now,” said the impeccably dressed Jeffries with an impeccably false smile, “you said you wished to cash a check drawn on an account at this bank?”

I reached into my jacket pocket and Jeffries flinched ever so slightly. Not the main man in this bank, I figured, if he was flinching from so minimally an imagined threat. From my jacket I pulled out Caroline Shaw’s check, unfolded it, read it once again, and handed it over.

Jeffries’s eyes rose in surprise when he examined the check. “And you’re Mr. Carl?”

“The very same. Is the check any good?”

There was a computer on his desk and I expected him to make a quick review of the account balance, of which I hoped to grab a peek, but that’s not what he did. What he did instead was to simply say, “I’ll need identification.”

I dug for my wallet and pulled out my driver’s license.

“And a credit card.”

I pulled that out, too. “So the check is good?”

He examined my license and MasterCard. “If you’ll just endorse the check, Mr. Carl.”

I signed the back. He compared my signature to the license and the credit card, making some notations beneath my signature on the check.

“And how would you like this paid, Mr. Carl, cash or cashier’s check?”

“Cash.”

“Are hundreds satisfactory?”

“Perfectly.”

“One moment, please,” and then with my license and credit card and check he stood and turned and walked out of the room to somewhere in the rear of the building.

“Your Miss Shaw seems to be known in this bank,” said Beth.

“Yes, either she has a substantial account or she is a known forger and the police will be out presently.”

“Which do you expect?”

“Oh the police,” I said. “I have found it is always safest to expect the worst. Anything else is mere accident.”

It took a good long time, far too long a time. I waited, first patiently, then impatiently, and then angrily. I was about to stand and make another scene when Jeffries finally returned. Behind him came another man, about my age, handsome enough and tall enough and blond enough so that he seemed as much a part of the bank as the paneling on the walls and the portraits in their gilded frames. I wondered to which eating club at Princeton he had belonged.

As Jeffries sat back down at the desk and fiddled with the paperwork, the blond man stood behind him looking over his shoulder. Jeffries took out an envelope and extracted a thick wad of bills, hundred-dollar bills. Slowly he began to count.

“I didn’t know cashing a check was such a production,” I said.

The blond man lifted his head and smiled at me. It was a warm, generous smile and completely ungenuine. “We’ll have this for you in just a moment, Mr. Carl,” he said. “By the way, what kind of business are you in?”

“This and that,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

“Our loan department is always on the lookout for clients. We handle the accounts for many lawyers. I was just hoping our business loan department could be of help to your firm.”

So that was why they spent so much time in the back, they were checking me out, and he wanted me to know it, too. “I believe our line of credit is presently sufficient,” I said. “Miss Derringer is the partner in charge of finances. How are we doing with our loans, Beth?”

“I’m still under my MasterCard limit,” said Beth.

“Now you’re bragging,” I said.

“It helps if you pay more than the minimum each month, Victor.”

“Well then, with Beth under her limit, we’re sitting pretty for the next month at least.”

“How good for you,” said the blond man.

Jeffries finished counting the bills. He neatened the pile, tapping it gently first on one side, then another, and proceeded to count it again. There was about Jeffries, as he counted the bills with the blond man behind him, the tense air of a blackjack dealer with the pit boss looking over his shoulder. They were taking quite a bit of care, the two of them, for ten thousand dollars, a pittance to a bank that considered anything under a million small change.

“What type of law is it that you two practice?” asked the blond man.

“Oh this and that,” I said.

“No specialty?”

“Not really. We take pretty much whatever comes in the door.”

“Do you do any banking work? Sometimes we have work our primary counsel can’t handle due to conflicts.”

“Is that a fact? And who exactly is your primary counsel?”

“Talbott, Kittredge & Chase.”

“Of course it is,” I said. Talbott, Kittredge & Chase was the richest, most prestigious, most powerful firm in the city.

“Oh, so they would know of you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very well.”

“Then maybe we can do some business after all.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. They had checked me out all right, and it was interesting as hell that they were so interested, but their scouting report was old. I might have gone for the bait one time or another, given much to garner the business of an old and revered client like the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line, but not anymore. “You see, we once sued Talbott, Kittredge & Chase and won a large settlement. They hate me there, in fact a memo has been circulated to have their lawyers harass me at every turn, so I don’t think they’d agree to your giving me any work.”

“Well of course,” said the blond man, “it’s our choice really.”

“Thank you for the offer,” I said, “but no. We don’t really represent banks.”

“It’s sort of a moral quirk of ours,” said Beth. “They’re so big and rich and unkind.”

“We sue them, of course,” I said. “That’s always good for a laugh or two, but we don’t represent them. We sometimes represent murderers and tax cheats and crack mothers who have deserted their babies, but we will only sink so low. Are you finished counting, Jeffries, or do you think Ben Franklin will start to smile if you keep tickling him like that?”

“Give Mr. Carl his money,” said the blond man.

Jeffries put the bills back in the envelope and handed it to me. “Thank you for banking with us, sir.”

“My pleasure,” I said as I tapped the envelope to my forehead in a salute. “I’m a little surprised though at how much interest you both seem to take in Miss Shaw’s affairs. She must be someone very special.”

“We take a keen interest in all of our clients’ affairs,” said the blond man.

“How wonderfully Orwellian. Is there anything about Miss Shaw’s situation we should know?”

The blond man stared at me for a moment. “No. Nothing at all. I hope we can be of further service sometime, Mr. Carl.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said, certain he never wanted to hear from me again.

James, the young concierge, was waiting at the door for us after we left the desk. As soon as we came near he swung the glass door open. “Good day,” he said with a nod and a smile.

Beth was already through when I stopped in the door frame. Without turning around, I said, “Thank you, James. By the way, that man standing behind Mr. Jeffries, staring at me with a peculiar distaste right now. Who is he?”

“Oh, that’s Mr. Harrington. He is in the trust and estates department,” said James.

“With a face like that I bet he’s got a load of old lady clients.”

“No sir, just the one keeps him busy enough.”

“One?” I turned around in surprise. As I had expected, Harrington was still staring bullets at me.

“The Reddmans, sir. He manages the entire Reddman estate.”

“Of the Reddman Pickle Reddmans?”

“Exactly, sir,” said James as he urged me out the entranceway.

“The Reddmans,” I said. “Imagine that.”

“Thank you for banking at First Mercantile,” said James, just before I heard the click of the glass door’s lock behind me.

5

DRIVING BACK INTO TOWN on the Schuylkill Expressway I wasn’t fighting my way through the left lanes. I stayed, instead, in the safe slow right and let the buzz of the aggressive traffic slide by. When a white convertible elbowed into my lane, inches from my bumper, as it sped to pass a truck in the center, I didn’t so much as tap my horn. I was too busy thinking. One woman was dead, from suicide or murder, I wasn’t sure yet which, another was paying me ten thousand dollars to find out, and now, most surprisingly, they both seemed to be Reddmans.

We all know Reddman Foods, we’ve been consuming its pressure-flavored pickles since we were kids – sweet pickles, sour pickles, kosher dill pickles, fine pickled gherkins. The green and red pickle jar with the founder’s stern picture above the name is an icon and the Reddman Pickle has taken its place in the pantheon of American products, alongside Heinz Ketchup and Kellogg’s cereal and the Ford motor car and Campbell ’s soup. The brand names become trademarks, so we forget that there are families behind the names, families whose wealth grows ever more obscene whenever we throw ketchup on the burger, shake out a bowl of cereal, buy ourselves a fragrant new automobile. Or snap a garlic pickle between our teeth. And like Henry Ford and Henry John Heinz and Andrew Carnegie, Claudius Reddman was one of the great men of America ’s industrial past, earning his fortune in business and his reputation in philanthropy. The Reddman Library at the University of Pennsylvania. The Reddman Wing of the Philadelphia Art Museum. The Reddman Foundation with its prestigious and lucrative Claudius Reddman grants for the most accomplished artists and writers and scholars.

So, it was a Reddman who had pointed a gun at me and then begged me for help, an heir to the great pickle fortune. Why hadn’t she told me? Why had she wanted me to think her only a poverty-struck little liar? Well, maybe she was a little liar, but a liar with money was something else again. And I did like that smile.

“What would you do if you were suddenly stinkingly rich?” I asked Beth.

“I don’t know, it never crossed my mind.”

“Liar,” I said. “Of course it crossed your mind. It crosses every American mind. It is our joint national fantasy, the communal American wishing for a fortune that is the very engine of our economic growth.”

“Well, when the lottery was at sixty-six million I admit I bought a ticket.”

“Only one?”

“All right, ten.”

“And what would you have done with all that money?”

“I sort of fantasized about starting a foundation to help public interest law organizations.”

“That’s noble and pathetic, both.”

“And I thought a Porsche would be nice.”

“Better,” I said. “You’d look good in a Porsche.”

“I think so, yes. What about you, Victor? You’ve thought about this, I suppose.”

“Some.” A radical understatement. Whole afternoons had been plundered in my fervent imaginings of great wealth acquired and spent.

“So what would you do?”

“The first thing I’d do,” I said, “is quit.”

“You’d leave the firm?”

“I’d leave the law, I’d leave the city, I’d leave my life. I’d cocoon somewhere hot and thick with coconuts and return as something else completely. I always thought I’d like to paint.”

“I didn’t know you had any talent.”

“I have none whatsoever,” I said cheerfully. “But isn’t that the point? If I had talent I’d be a slave to it, concerned about producing my oh so important work. Thankfully, I am completely talentless. Maybe I’d go to Long Island and wear Gap khakis and throw paint on canvas like Jackson Pollock and drink like a fish every afternoon.”

“You don’t drink well.”

“You’re right, and I’ve never been to Long Island, but the image is nice. And did I mention the Ferrari? I’d like an F355 Spider in candy-apple red. I hear the babes, they love the Ferrari. Oh hell, who knows, I’d probably be miserable even so, but at least I wouldn’t be a lawyer.”

“Do you really hate it that much?”

“You see the law as a noble pursuit, as a way to right wrongs. I see it as a somewhat distasteful job that I’m shackled to by my monthly credit card bills. And if I don’t get out, and soon,” I said, without a hint of humor in my voice, “it’s going to kill me.”

The car in front of me flashed its rear red lights and the car beside me slowed and I braked to a stop and soon we were just sitting there, all of us, hundreds and hundreds of us, parked in the largest parking lot in the city. The Schuylkill did this every now and then, just stopped, for no apparent reason, as if the King of Commuting, in his headquarters in King of Prussia, simply flicked a switch and turned the highway off. We sat quietly for a few minutes before the horns began. Is there anything so futile in a traffic jam as a horn? Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were in such a hurry, in that case maybe I’ll just ram the car in front of me.

“I’d like to travel,” said Beth. “That’s what I would do if I suddenly had too much money.”

She had been thinking about it the whole time we had been stuck and that surprised me. For me to mull over all I would do with all the money I wanted was as natural as breathing, but it was not so natural for Beth. Generally she evinced great satisfaction with her life as it was. This was my first indication ever that her satisfaction was waning.

“I never saw the point of traveling,” I said. “There’s only so many museums you can rush through, so many old churches, until you’re sick of it all.”

“I’m not talking for just a week to see some museums,” said Beth. “I’m talking about taking a few years off and seeing the world.” I turned and looked at her. She was staring forward, as if from the prow of a swift ocean liner instead of through the windshield of a car stalled in traffic. “I always thought, as a girl, that there was something out there waiting for me and my purpose in life was to go out and find it. If there is a disappointment in my life it’s that I haven’t even really searched. I feel like I’ve been tromping around looking for it in Philadelphia only because the light is better here, when all along I know it’s someplace else.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It’s stupid, but it’s what I’d like to do. And even if it’s here in Philadelphia after all, maybe I need to spend time away, shucking off all my old habits and old ways of seeing and learn to look at everything new again, so I can find it. A couple of years in a foreign land is supposed to sharpen your vision.”

“At LensCrafters they’ll do it for you in less than an hour.”

“A safari in Africa. A jungle cruise up the Amazon. A month on a houseboat in India. Nepal. Sometimes I look at a map of Nepal and get chills. Katmandu.”

“What kind of toilets do they have in Katmandu? I won’t do any of that squatting stuff.”

“So if we were suddenly rich, Victor, I think what I’d do is go to Katmandu.”

The traffic started to crawl forward. First a foot at a time, then a few feet, then we began a twenty-mile-per-hour jog into the heart of the city. Beth was thinking about Katmandu, I suppose, while I thought about my Gap khakis and my Ferrari. And about Caroline Shaw.

Back in the office I sat at the quiet of my desk and ignored the message slips handed me by Ellie. I thought of things, thought of my neediness and my deprivations and how much I wanted out. I wanted out so desperately it hurt as bad as a lost love. I had to get out, for reasons that haunted half the lawyers in the country and for darker, more sinister reasons that Beth could never know. Everything was against my ever leaving, sure, except for how fiercely I wanted out. I sat and daydreamed about winning the lottery and dripping paint on canvases in the Hamptons with a gin and tonic in my hand and then I stopped daydreaming and thought about the Reddmans.

Guys like me, we don’t often brush shoulders with that much money and to accidentally rub up against it, like I did in that bank, does something ugly to us. It’s like seeing the most beautiful woman in the world walk by, a woman who makes you ache just to look at her, and knowing that she’ll never even glance in your direction, which slips the ache in even deeper. I thought about the Reddmans and all they were born to and I ached. More than anything in this world, I wish I had been born rich. It would have made up for everything. I’d still be ugly, sure, but I’d be rich and ugly. I’d still be weak and dim and tongue-tied with women, but I’d be rich enough for them not to care. I’d no longer be a social misfit, I’d be eccentric. And most of all, I’d no longer be what I was, I’d be something different. I thought about it all and let the pain of my impoverishment wash over me and then I started making calls.

“I don’t have time to chitchat,” said Detective McDeiss over the phone, after I had tracked him down to the Criminal Justice Building. “You need something from me, you can go through the D.A.”

“It’s not about an active prosecution,” I said. “The case I want to talk about is old and closed. Jacqueline Shaw.”

There was a pause and a deep breath. “The heiress.”

“I like that word, don’t you?”

“Yeah, well, this one hung herself. What could there possibly be left to talk about?”

“I don’t know. I just want to get some background. I’m representing the sister.”

“Good for you, Carl. It’s a step up I guess from your usual low-class grease-bucket clientele. How did you ever hook onto her?”

“She chased me down the street with a gun.”

“Tell me about it, you slimeball.”

“You free for lunch tomorrow?”

“To talk about Jacqueline Shaw?”

“Exactly. My treat.”

“Your treat, huh?” There was a pause while McDeiss reprioritized his day. “You eat Chinese, Carl?”

“I’m Jewish, aren’t I?” I said.

“All right then, one o’clock,” and he tossed out an address before hanging up. I knew that McDeiss wanted nothing to do with me, disdain dripped thick as oil from his voice, but in the last few years I had learned something about cops and one of the things I had learned was that there was not a cop on the force who would turn down a free lunch, even if it was just a $4.25 luncheon special at some Chinatown dive with fried rice and an egg roll soggy with grease.

Except the address he tossed out was not to some Chinatown dive, it was to Susanna Foo, the fanciest, priciest Chinese restaurant in the city.

6

PETER CRESSI HAD A DARK, Elvisine look that just sort of melted women. He told me so in his own modest way, but he was right. Take the way our secretary, Ellie, reacted after he walked by whenever he walked by. She stared at him as he strutted past, her eyes popping, her mouth agape, and then, when the door was closed, she let out a sort of helpless giggle. He was a tomato for sure, Cressi, Big Boy or beefsteak, one of them, and from my dealings with him I knew him to be just about as smart. He was actually a little brighter than he looked, but then again he’d have to be.

“How’s it hanging wit’ you, Vic?” he said to me as he sat indolently in the chair across from my desk. “Low?” His dark eyes were partly brooding, partly blank, as if he were angry at something he couldn’t quite remember. His lemon tie, delicious and bright against his black shirt, was tied with entirely too much care.

“It’s not hanging so terrifically, Pete,” I said, shaking my head at him. “Next time you buy an arsenal, try not to purchase it from an undercover cop.”

Peter gave me a wink and looked off to the side, bobbing his head up and down as he chuckled at some private little joke. Cressi chuckled a lot, little he-he-he’s coming through his Elvis lips. “Who knew?”

“Good answer. That’s exactly what we’ll tell the jury.”

That chuckle again. “Just say I’m a collector.”

I opened the file and scanned the police report. “One hundred and seventy-nine Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatics with folding fiberglass stocks and two hundred kits for illegally modifying said firearms for fully automatic performance.”

“That’s what you should tell them I was collecting.”

“Also three grenade launchers and a flamethrower. A flamethrower, Peter. Jesus. What the hell did you need a flamethrower for?”

“A weenie roast?”

“That’s what your trial is going to be unless you sharpen up and get serious. You were also trying to buy twenty thousand rounds of ammunition.”

“Me and the guys, like we sometimes target shoot out in the woods.”

“What woods are we talking about here, Peter? They got any woods in South Philly I don’t know about? Like there’s a block just south of Washington they forgot to put a row of crappy houses on, it just slipped their minds?”

“Now you being funny, Vic.” His head bobbing, the he-he-he’s coming like an underpowered lawn mower. “Upstate, I’m talking. You know, bottles and cans. Maybe next time you want I should ask you along? It’s good to keep in training, if you know what I mean. And every now and then a stray bird it lands like a douche bag on the target and then, what do you think, bam, it’s just feathers floating.”

“Seriously, Pete. Why the guns?”

His eyes darkened. “I’m being serious as a fucking heart attack.”

He looked at me and I looked at him and I knew his look was fiercer than mine so I dropped my gaze back to the file. The guys I represented were nice guys generally, respectful, funny, guys to hang around and drink beer with, nice guys except that by and large they were killers. I must admit it didn’t take much to be fiercer than me, but still my clients scared me. Which made my current position even more tenuous and doubtful. But still I had a job to do.

“It says here,” I said, looking through the file, “that the undercover cop you were buying the weapons from, this Detective Scarpatti, made tapes of certain of your conversations.” I looked back up at Cressi, hoping to see something. “Anything we should be worried about?”

“What, you shitting me? Of course we should be worried. They probably got me on tape making the whole deal with that scum-sucking slob.”

“I assumed that. What I mean is any surprises, any talk about what you were going to do with the weapons? Any plots against a government building in Oklahoma or specific crimes planned which might cause us any problems? We’re not looking at additional conspiracy charges, are we?”

“No, no way. Just the deal.”

“How much money are we talking about?”

“In general or specific terms do you want?”

“Always be specific, Pete.”

“Ninety-five thou, eight hundred and ten. Scarpatti figured it out with a calculator, the fat bastard. I had more than that when they busted me, you know, for incidentals. He told me cash only.”

“No Visa card I guess.”

“I’m already over my limit.”

“Guys like you and me, Pete, it’s congenital.”

He chuckled and bobbed and said, “What’s that, dirty or something?”

I picked up another piece of paper from the file. It was just a copy of a subpoena, but I wanted to have something to look at so the question would seem offhand. “Where’d you get the cash?”

“You know, just lying around.” He-he-he.

I dropped the subpoena and looked up and put on my most annoyed look. I kind of squinted and twisted my lips and pretended I had just eaten a lemon. Then I waited a bit for his chuckling to die down, which, surprisingly, it did. “Maybe you are confused,” I said. “Maybe you are color blind. The guy in the blue suit, black shoes, red tie, that’s the prosecutor. He wants to put your butt in jail for a decade. My suit is blue and my shoes are black, sure, but look at my tie. It’s green.”

“Where’d you get that tie anyway, Woolworth’s?”

“Why not?”

“You know, Vic, your whole sense of style is in the toilet. Who shines your suits, anyway? And then you got them shoes. You should let me set you up with something new. I know a guy what got some flash suits might change your whole look. You might even get laid, do you some good. They’s a little warm is all, but you being a lawyer, what do you care, right?”

“Something wrong with my shoes?”

His sneer lengthened.

“What I’m trying to say is that I’m not the prosecutor here, I’m your lawyer. I’m here to help you. Everything we say in this room is confidential, you know that, it’s privileged, and no subpoena on earth can drag it out of me. But I can’t defend you properly unless I know the truth.”

“I’m not sure what you want I should tell you here, Vic. I thought you lawyers didn’t want to know the truth, that it limited what you could do, stopped you from bobbing here and weaving there, turned you from a Muhammad Ali, who was always dancing and sliding, to a Chuckie Wepner, from up there in Bayonne, getting hit like a speed bag, bam-bam-bam, and whose face was a bloody slice of sausage after round two. I thought the gig was that you would get the truth from me once you, like, knew what the best truth it was to tell.”

He was right, of course, which made everything a little more difficult. Cressi was an idiot, actually, except in the three things in which he had the most experience, screwing, shooting, and the criminal justice system. “It’s different,” I told him, “when there’s an undercover cop with tapes. When there’s an undercover cop with tapes I need to know everything or we’re liable to get blasted at trial. So I’m asking you again, and I want you to tell me. Where did you get the money?”

Cressi looked at me for a while, head tilted like a dog that was trying to figure out exactly what he was looking at. Then he shrugged. “I boosted six Mercedes off a lot. Just came in with a carrier I borrowed from a buddy what knew nothing about it, waived around some paperwork, and just took them. Drove them right to Delaware. Some Arab sheik and his sons right now they’re probably riding around in circles in the desert, smiling like retards.”

“You touch base with Raffaello on that deal?”

“You working for him or you working for me?”

“I’m working for you,” I said quickly, “but if you’re crossing him I have to know. I’m not going to create a defense for you that gets you out of trouble with the law but gets you dead when you hit the street. I’m trying to watch your back and your front, but you’ve got to level with me.”

Cressi turned his head and started bobbing, but there was no chuckle now. “We gave Raffaello his fifteen percent, sure, soon as the deal was done. It went through Dante, his new number two.”

“I thought Calvi was number two?”

“No, no more. There was a shake-up. Calvi’s in Florida. For good. Things change. Now it’s Dante.”

“Dante? I didn’t even know he was made.”

“Sure he was, under Little Nicky,” said Cressi, referring to the boss before the boss before Enrico Raffaello.

“Dante,” I repeated, shaking my head. Dante was the loan shark who bailed out Cressi yesterday morning. I had thought him strictly small time, just another street hood paying into the mob because he couldn’t count on the police to protect his illegal sharking operation, nothing more. He had moved up fast, Dante. Well, moving and lasting were two different things. I had liked Calvi, an irascible old buzzard with a sense of humor, a vicious smile, and a taste for thick, foul cigars that smelled of burning tires and rancid rum. I had liked Calvi, but he apparently hadn’t lasted and I didn’t expect Dante to last either.

“What about the guns?” I asked. “Did you touch base there too?”

“Nah, it was just kind of a hustle for a while. I didn’t think the guy could deliver, so I was going to play it out and see. I had a buyer, but I wasn’t sure of the seller.”

“Who was the buyer?”

“This group of wackos up in Allentown. Aryan bullshit, shaved heads and ratty trailers and target practice getting ready for the holy race war.”

“Who set it up?”

“I did.”

“Who else?”

“It was my gig, like, completely. Met this broad who took me to one of the meetings. Tits like cantaloupes, you know ripe ones like you get on Ninth Street. She talked about a retreat and I thought it was going to be hot. I thought an orgy or something. Turned out to be this militia-Nazi-bullshit-crap. I drilled her anyway. Then this tall, weird-looking geek started talking about guns and we set it up.”

“Just you? You were solo on this?”

“That’s what I said.”

He looked away and bobbed and his Adam’s apple bobbed too.

“All right,” I said. “That’s all for now. We have your preliminary hearing next week. We’re scheduled for ten, you get here nine-thirty and we’ll walk over together.”

“You don’t want to prepare me or nothing?”

“You’re going to sit next to me and not say a word and when I am done you’re going to leave with me. You think we need more preparation?”

“I think I can handle that.”

“I think maybe you can too. Tell me one thing more, Pete. You know Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky?”

“The bookie, sure. I done some favors for him.”

“You ever known him to whack someone who stiffs him?”

“Who, Jimmy? Nah, he’s a sweetheart. He cuts them off is all. Besides, you know, you can’t clip nobody without the boss’s approval. That’s like bottom line.”

“And he doesn’t approve much.”

“Are you kidding, you got to go to New York nowadays to get any kind of good experience. Up there it still rocks.”

“Thanks, that’s what I figured,” I said as I walked him out of my office into the hallway. Beth just happened to be at Ellie’s desk, talking about something oh-so-important as Peter walked by. They were both polite enough to hold their giggles until he was out of earshot.

“You too, huh, Beth?” I said, looking through a stack of mail on Ellie’s desk. “Well forget it, ladies. He likes women with cantaloupe breasts and empty minds.”

“Don’t you all?” said Beth.

“Come to think of it,” I said. “I’m going to step out for a cup of coffee. I’ll be right back. Anyone want anything?”

“Diet Coke,” said Beth. I nodded.

Down the hallway, past the accountant’s office and the architect’s office and the design firm that shared our office space, out the door, down the stairs, out to Twenty-first Street. I walked a few blocks to the Wawa convenience store and bought a cup of coffee in blue cardboard and a Diet Coke, which I stuck in my pocket. Out on the street, with my coffee in my hand, I looked both ways. Nothing. I walked a few more blocks and turned around. Nothing. Then I found a phone booth and put the coffee on the aluminum shelf. I dropped in a quarter and dialed and waited for the ringing to end.

“Tosca’s,” said a voice.

“Let me talk to table nine,” I said.

“One’a moment. I see if it available.”

About a minute later I heard a familiar voice, older and softer, peppered with an Old World accent. “Table nine,” it said.

“He says he got the money by stealing six cars off a Mercedes-Benz lot. He said he got you your share through Dante.”

“Go on.”

“He says he was going to resell the guns to some white supremacist group out in Allentown for a big profit.”

“You believe him?”

“He says he was on his own. I don’t think he whacks off on his own.”

“I don’t think so neither. He ever had a bright idea it’d be beginner’s luck. You find out who he was with.”

“And then we’re even and I’m through, right?”

“It’s so hard to quantify human relationships, don’t you think?”

“I hate this.”

“Life is hard.”

There was a firm click. I stood in the phone booth and tried to take a sip of the coffee but my hand was shaking so much it spilled on my pants. I cursed loudly and shook my pants leg and wondered at how I had made such a mess of everything.

7

“IT’S THE ASIAN RADISH that makes this dish truly memorable,” said Detective McDeiss as he skillfully manipulated the bamboo chopsticks with his thick fingers. On the little plate before him, tastefully garnished, were two tiny cakes, lightly fried. Hundred Corner Crab Cakes with Daikon Radish and Tomato Pineapple Salsa ($10.00). “The Asian radish is subtler than your basic American radish, with a sweet and mild flavor when cooked, like a delicate turnip. The pineapple salsa is a nice touch, though a little harsh for my preference, but it’s the radish that adds that touch of excitement to the fresh crab. I detect a hint of ginger too, which is entirely appropriate.”

“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” I said.

“Oh, I am. It’s not too often I get to eat at so fine an establishment. More wine?”

“No thank you,” I said. “But please, help yourself.” The last was a bit gratuitous, as the detective was already pouring himself another glass from the bottle. Pouilly Fuissé 1983 ($48.00).

“Normally, of course, I wouldn’t drink at lunch, but being as the trial was recessed for the day and I’m off shift, I figure, why not?”

“Why not indeed?”

McDeiss was a big man, tall and broad, with the stomach of a football lineman ten years gone from the game. He dressed rather badly, a garish jacket over a short-sleeve shirt, a wide tie with indifferent stripes choking his thick neck. His bulbous face held a closed arrogant expression that seemed to refute any possibility of an inner life but the thick lines in his forehead rose with a cultured joy as he tasted his crab, his lips tightened, his shoulders seemed to sway with a swooning delight. Just my luck, I figured, offering to buy lunch for the only five star gourmand on the force. Susanna Foo was elegantly decorated with fresh flowers and mirrors and gold-flocked wallpaper; no Formica tables, no cheap plastic chopsticks, everything first class, including the prices, which made me flinch as I saw the wine drain down his substantial gullet. Even though I fully intended to bill Caroline for expenses, I was still fronting our lunch money.

“We were talking about Jacqueline Shaw,” I said. “Your investigation.”

He finished the last of his crab cakes, closed his eyes in appreciation, and reached again for his wineglass. “Very good. Very very good. Next time, maybe we’ll try Le Bec-Fin together. They have an excellent price-fixed lunch. Do you like opera, Carl?”

“Does Tommy count?”

“Sorry, no. Too bad that. We could have such a nice evening, just you and me. Dinner at the Striped Bass and then orchestra seats to Rigoletto.”

“You’re pushing it, McDeiss.”

“Am I? Jacqueline Shaw. Hung herself in the living room of her apartment at the south end of Rittenhouse Square. Quite a place, if a bit overly baroque in decoration for my palate. Everything seemed to be in order. It was very neat, no clothes lying around, as if she was expecting guests to show up at her hanging. She had been depressed, she had tried it before.”

“How?”

“Too many pills once. Slit her wrists in the bathtub when she was a teen. She was a statistic waiting to be rung up, that’s all. Ahh, here’s my salad.” Fresh Water Chestnut and Baby Arugula Salad with Dry Shrimp Vinaigrette ($8.00). “Oh my goodness, Carl, this dressing is delicious. Want a taste?”

He thrust at me a forkful of greens thick with the vinaigrette.

I shook my head. “Do you think the mother arugula gets upset when the farmer takes her babies?”

McDeiss didn’t answer, he simply turned the fork on himself. As he chewed, the lines in his forehead rose again.

“Who found her?” I asked.

“The boyfriend,” said McDeiss. “They were living together, apparently engaged. Came home from work and found her hanging from the chandelier. He left her up there and called us. A lot of times they cut them down before they call. He just let her hang.”

“Was there a doorman? A guest register?”

“We checked out all the names in and out that day. Everything routine. Her neighbor, a strange player named Peckworth, said he saw a UPS guy in her hallway that day, which got us wondering, because no one had signed in, but then he came back and said he was confused about the day. We checked it out. She had received a package two days before. Not that this Peckworth could have been any kind of a witness anyway. He’s a real treat. Once that was cleared up there was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing suspicious.”

“Did she leave a note?”

He shook his head. “Often they don’t.”

“Find anything suspicious in the apartment?”

“Not a thing.”

“Candy wrappers or trash that didn’t belong?”

“Not a thing. Why? You got something?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. The lady had a history of depression, history of drug abuse and alcohol abuse, years of failed therapies, and she was getting involved in some hippie dippy New Age chanting thing out in Mount Airy.”

“That’s the place for it,” I said.

“It all fits.”

“What about the motive?” I softened my voice. “She’s a Reddman, right?”

“Absolutely,” said McDeiss. “A direct heir as a matter of fact. Her great-grandfather was the pickle king, what was his name, Claudius Reddman? The guy on all the jars. Well, the daughter of this Reddman, she married a Shaw, from the Shaw Brothers department stores, and their son is the sole heir for the entire fortune. This Jacqueline was his daughter. There are three other siblings. The whole thing is going to be divided among them.”

I leaned forward. I tried to sound insouciant, but I couldn’t pull it off. “How much is the estate worth?”

“I couldn’t get an exact figure, only estimates,” said McDeiss. “Not much after all these years. Only about half a billion dollars.”

Three heirs left, half a billion dollars. That put Caroline Shaw’s expected worth at something like one hundred and sixty-six million dollars. I reached for my water glass and tried to take a drink, but my hand shook so badly water started slopping over the glass’s edge and I was forced to put it back down.

“So if it wasn’t a suicide,” I suggested, “money could have been a motive.”

“With that much money it’s the first thing we think about.”

“Who benefited from her death?”

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Oh come on, McDeiss.”

“It’s privileged. I can’t talk about it, that’s been made very clear to me. There was a hefty insurance policy and her inheritance was all tied up in a trust. Both were controlled by some bank out in the burbs.”

“First Mercantile of the Main Line, I’ll bet.”

“You got it.”

“By some snot name of Harrington, right?”

“You got it. But the information he gave me about the insurance and the trust was privileged, so you’ll have to go to him.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Look, let me warn you, there was political heat on this investigation. Heat to clean it up quickly. I’ve always been one to clean up my cases, check them off and go onto the next. It’s not like there’s not enough work. But still I was getting the push from the guys downtown. So when the coroner came back calling it a suicide that was enough for me. Case closed.”

“But even with all the heat, you’re talking to me.”

“A good meal, Carl, is worth any indignity,” but after he made his little joke he kept looking at me and something sharp emerged from the fleshy bulbs of his face.

“And you think something stinks, don’t you?” I said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? Not for the baby arugula. Where’d the heat come from? Who called you off?”

He shrugged and finished his salad, poured another glass of wine, drank from it, holding the stem of the glass daintily in his sausage fingers. “The word on the Reddmans,” he said rather mysteriously, “is that it is a family dark with secrets.”

“Society types?”

“Not at all. Best I could tell they’ve been shunned completely, like lepers. All that money and not even in the Social Register. From what I could figure, you and I, we’d be more welcome in certain social circles than the Reddmans.”

“A Jew and an African-American?”

“Well maybe not you.” He laughed broadly at that and then leaned forward and twisted his voice down to a whisper. “The Reddman house is one strange place, Carl, more a huge stone tomb than anything else, with tilting spires and wild, overrun gardens. Veritas, it’s called. Don’t you love it when they name their houses?”

“Veritas? A bit presumptuous, wouldn’t you say?”

“And they pronounce it wrong.”

“You speak Latin?”

His broad shoulders shrugged. “My mother had this thing about a classical education.”

“My mother thinks classical means an olive in her gin.”

“Well, this Veritas was cold as an Eskimo’s hell,” said McDeiss. “As soon as I got there and started asking questions I could feel the freeze descend. The dead girl’s father, the grandson of the pickle king, the word on him is he’s demented. They lock him up in some upstairs room in that mansion. I had some questions for him but they wouldn’t let me up to see him, they physically barred me from going up the stairs, can you believe that? Then, just when I was about to force my way through to get to his room, a call came in from the Roundhouse. The family, through our friend Harrington, had let it be known that they wanted the case closed and suddenly the heat came down from City Hall. See, Carl, money like that, it is its own power, you understand? Money like that, it wants something, it gets it. I never got a chance to see the old man. My lieutenant told me to check off the case and move on.”

“And so you checked.”

“It was a classic suicide. We’d seen it all before a hundred times. There wasn’t much I could do.”

“No matter how much it stunk. I need you to get me the file.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“I’ll subpoena it.”

“I can’t control what you do.”

“How about the building register for the day of the death?”

He looked down at his salad and speared a lone water chestnut. “There’s nothing there, but okay. And be sure to talk to the boyfriend, Grimes.”

“You think maybe he…”

“All I think is you’ll find him interesting. He lives in that luxury high-rise on Walnut, west of Rittenhouse. You know it?”

I nodded. “By the way, you find any Darvon in her medicine cabinet?”

He looked up from his salad. “Enough to keep a football team mellow.”

“Ever wonder why she didn’t just take the pills?”

Before McDeiss could answer the waiter came and whisked away his plate, with only the remnants of the dry shrimp vinaigrette staining the porcelain. In front of me the waiter placed the restaurant’s cheapest entree, Kung Pao Chicken-Very Spicy ($10.00), thick with roasted peanuts. In front of McDeiss he placed one of the specialties of the house, Sweeter Than Honey Venison with Caramelized Pear, Sun-Dried Tomato and Hot Pepper ($20.00). McDeiss picked off a chunk of venison with his chopsticks, swilled it in the garnish, and popped it into his mouth. He chewed slowly, carefully, mashing the meat with Pritikin determination, his shoulders shaking with joy.

While McDeiss chewed and shook, I considered. Through his patina of certainty as to the suicide I had detected something totally unexpected: doubt. For the first time I wondered seriously whether Caroline Shaw might have been right about her sister’s death and it wasn’t just that McDeiss had doubts that got me to wondering. There was money at stake here, huge pots of money, enough to twist the soul of anyone who got too close. Money has its own gravitational pull, stronger than anything Newton imagined, and what it drew, along with fast cars and slim-hipped women, was the worst of anyone who fell within its orbit. Just the amount of money involved was enough to get me thinking, and what I was thinking, suddenly, was of Caroline Shaw and that manipulative little smile of hers. And there was something else too, something that cut its way through the heat of the Kung Pao and slid into the lower depths of my consciousness. Just at that moment I couldn’t shake the strange suspicion that somehow a part of all that Reddman money could rightfully belong to me.

McDeiss had told me I should talk to the boyfriend, this Grimes fellow, and so I would. I could picture him now, handsome, suave, a fortune-hunting rogue in the grandest tradition, who had plucked Jacqueline out of a crowd and was ready to grab his piece of her inheritance. He must be a bitter boy, this Grimes, bitter at the chance for wealth that had been snatched right out of his pocket. I liked the bitter boys, I knew what made them tick, admired their drive, their passions. I had been a bitter boy once myself, before my own calamitous failures transformed my bitterness into something weaker and more pathetic, into deep-seated cynicism and a desperate desire to flee. But though I was no longer bitter, I still knew its language and could still play the part. I figured I’d have no trouble getting Grimes to spill his guts to me, bitter boy to bitter boy.

8

I SAT DOWN AT THE BAR of the Irish Pub with a weary sigh and ordered a beer. As the bartender drew a pint from the keg I reached into my wallet and dropped two twenties onto the bar. I drank the beer while the bartender was still at the register making my change, drank it like I was suffering a profound thirst. I slapped the glass onto the bar and waved to the bartender for another. Generally I didn’t drink much anymore because of my drinking problem. The problem was that when I drank too much I threw up. But that night I had already spent hours searching and asking questions and looking here and there, and now that I had found what I was looking for I was determined to do some drinking.

“You ever feel like the whole world is fixed against you?” I said to the bartender when he brought my second beer.

It was a busy night at the Irish Pub and the bartender didn’t have time to listen. He gave a little laugh and moved on.

“You don’t need to tell me,” said the fellow sitting next to me, the remnants of a scotch in his hand.

“Every time I get close,” I said, “the bastards yank it away like it was one of those joke dollar bills tied to a string.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” said the man. With a quick tilt of his wrist he drank the last of his scotch.

The Irish Pub was a young bar, women dressed in jeans and high heels, men in Polo shirts, boys and girls together, meeting one another, shouting lies in each other’s ears. On weekends there was a line outside, but this wasn’t a weekend and I wasn’t there to find a date and neither, I could tell, was the man next to me. He was tall and dark, in a gaudily bright short-sleeve shirt and tan pants. His features were all of movie-star strength and quality, his nose was straight and thin, his chin jutting, his eyes deep and black, but the package went together with a peculiar weakness. He should have been the handsomest man in the world, but he wasn’t. And the bartender refilled his glass without even asking.

“What’s your line?” I asked, while still looking straight ahead, the way strangers at a bar talk to one another.

“I’m a dentist,” he said.

I turned my head, looked him up and down, and turned it back again. “I thought you had to have more hair on your forearms to be a dentist.”

He didn’t laugh, he just took a sip from his scotch and swirled it around his mouth.

“I was that close today, dammit,” I said. “And then it happened like it always happens. It was a car accident, right? A pretty ugly one, too, some old lady in her Beemer just runs the red and bam, slams into my guy’s van. Lacerations from the flying glass, multiple contusions, a neck thing, you know, the works. I send him to my doctor and it’s all set, he can’t work, can’t walk or exercise, he’s stuck in a chair on his porch, wracked with pain, his life tragically ruined. Beautiful, no?”

“You’re a lawyer,” said the man as flatly as if he were telling me my fly was unzipped.

“And it set up so sweet,” I said. “Workman’s comp from the employer and then, wham, big bucks compensatory from the old lady and her insurance company. The insurance was maxed out at three hundred thou but we were going for more, much more, punitives because the old lady was half blind and should never have been out on the road, was a collision waiting to happen. She’s a widow, some Wayne witch, rich as sin, so collection’s a breeze. And I got a thirty-three-and-a-third percent contingency fee agreement in my bank vault, if you know what I mean. I had picked out my Mercedes already, maroon with tan leather seats. SL class.”

“The convertible,” said the man, nodding.

“Absolutely. Oh, so beautiful that car, just thinking about it gives me a hard-on.”

I finished my beer and pushed the mug to the edge of the bar and let my head drop. When the bartender came I asked for a shot to go with my refill. I waited till the drinks came and then sucked the top off my beer and waited some more.

“So what happened?” said the man, finally.

I sat there quietly for a moment and then with a quick snatch downed the shot and chased it. “We show up at mandatory arbitration and I give our case, right? Fault’s not even at issue. And my guy’s sitting there, shaking with palsy in a wheelchair, his neck chafed to bleeding from the brace, most pathetic thing you ever saw. I figured they’d offer at least a mil before we even got to telling our story. Then the old lady’s fancy lawyer brings out the videotape.”

I took another swallow of beer and shook my head.

“My guy playing golf over at Valley Forge, neck brace and all. Schmuck couldn’t keep off the links. He gave up work, sex with the wife, playing with the kids, everything, but he couldn’t keep off the links. They brought in his scorecard too. Broke ninety, neck brace and all. I took forty thou and ran. So close to the big score and then, as quick as a two-foot putt, it’s gone.”

“You don’t need to tell me,” said the man next to me.

“Don’t even try. What do you know about it, a dentist. You got it made. Everyone’s got teeth.”

He took a long swallow from his scotch and then another, draining it. “You’re such a loser, you don’t even know.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You want to hear something? You want to hear the saddest story in the world?”

“Not really,” I said. “I got my own problems.”

“Shut up and buy me a drink and I’ll tell you something that will make your skin crawl.”

I turned to look at him and he was staring at me with a ferocity that was frightening. I shrugged and waved for the bartender and ordered two scotch on the rocks for him and two beers for me. Then I let Grimes tell me his story.

9

HE FIRST SAW HER AT A PLACE on Sixteenth Street, a dark, aggressively hip bar with a depressed jukebox and serious drinkers. She was sitting alone, dressed in black, not like an artiste, more like a mourner. She was sort of pretty, but not really thin enough, not really young enough, and he wouldn’t have given her a second look except that there was about this woman in black an aura of sadness that bespoke need. Need was about right, he figured, since he was looking for an effortless piece and need often translated into willing cession. He sat down beside her and bought her a drink. Her name, she said, was Jacqueline Shaw.

“She was drinking Martinis,” said Grimes, “which I thought was sexy in a dissolute sort of way.”

“Is this going to be just another lost girl story?” I asked. “Because if that’s all…”

“Shut up and listen,” said Grimes. “You might just learn something.”

After the second drink she started talking about her spiritual quest, how she was seeking a wider understanding of life than that allowed by the five basic senses. He smiled at her revelations, not out of any true interest, but only because he knew that spiritual yearning and sexual freedom were often deliciously entwined. She talked about the voices of the soul and the spirits that speak within each of us and how we need to learn to hear like a child once again to discern what the voices are whispering to us about the ineffable. She spoke of the connectedness of all things and how each of us, in our myriad of guises, was merely a manifestation of the whole. She said she had found her spiritual guide, a woman named Oleanna. Two more drinks and she and Grimes were walking side by side west, toward Rittenhouse Square. She had a place in one of those old apartment buildings on the south side of the park and was taking him there to show him her collection of spiritual artifacts, in which he had feigned interest.

“Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing,” I said.

“And it was something, too,” said Grimes, “but that’s not what really grabbed my interest.”

“No?”

“It was that place, man, that place.”

Her apartment was unbelievably spacious, baronial in size and furnishings, with everything outsized and thick, huge couches, huge wing chairs, a grand piano. There were tapestries everywhere, on the walls, draped over tables, and chandeliers dripping glass, and carpets thick as fairway rough piled one atop the other. Plants in sculpted pots were everywhere, plants with wide veined leaves and plants with bright tiny flowers and hairy phallic plants thick with thorns. It was otherworldly, that place. She put on this music which drifted out from behind the furnishings, a magical white mix of wind harps and fish flutes, drone tubes and moon lutes and water bells. And then in the center of the main room, atop hand-woven Persian rugs in deep blue, beside a fire, she showed him her crystals and sacred beads and fetishes imported from Africa, a man with a lion’s head, a pregnant woman with hooves and beard, a child with a hyena’s grin. She lit a stick of incense and a candle and then another candle and then twenty candles more and with the fire and totems surrounding them they made love and it was as though the power of those tiny statues and the beads and the crystals were funneled by the music, the incense, the flame, right through her body and she collapsed again and again beneath him on the carpet. And he felt the power too, but the power he felt was not of the fire or of the stones or of the fetishes, it was the power of all the wealth in that magical room, the utter power of money.

“Suddenly,” said Grimes, “I developed a deep belief in the healing power of crystals.”

He went with her the next week to a meeting of her spiritual group. They met in what they called the Haven, which was really the basement of some rat trap in Mount Airy. Everybody was dressed in robes, orange or green, and sat on the floor. There was enough potpourri scattered to make Martha Stewart choke and they chanted and meditated and told each other of painful moments in their lives and their efforts to transcend their physical selves. He noticed that the church members bustled about Jackie like she was a source of some sort. Extra time was devoted to her, extra efforts taken to make her comfortable. “Do you need a pad, Jackie?” “Can we get you something to drink, Jackie?” “Would you like an extra dose of aroma therapy, Jackie?” A woman came out at the end of the meeting and sat on a high-backed regal chair, a beautiful woman in flowing white robes. Jacqueline was taken to sit directly at her feet. This woman was Oleanna, and as she sat on that chair she fell into a trance and strange noises emerged from her throat, noises which bent Jackie double with rapture. Grimes didn’t understand it, thought it part con, part insane, but he couldn’t help noticing how the members all buzzed about Jacqueline like bees about the queen. The next morning he hired an investigator to check her out discreetly.

Three months later, in a private ceremony in her apartment, with the music and the fetishes and the candles, with a pile of crystals between their kneeling, naked bodies, he asked her to marry him and she said yes. By that time the investigator had told him who her great-grandfather was and the approximate amount of the fortune she was scheduled to inherit.

“I’m not going to tell you what corporation they started or anything,” said Grimes.

“Would I know it?” I asked.

“Of course you would, everyone does. You’ve been eating its stuff forever. And her share of the fortune alone was over a hundred million. Do you know how many zeros that is? Eight zeros. That’s enough to buy a baseball team, that’s enough to buy the Eagles. And she said yes.”

“Jesus, you hit the big time.”

“Bigger than you’ll ever see, Mack, that’s for sure.”

With their future settled, Jackie took him one afternoon to meet her family in the ancestral mansion deep in the Main Line, a place they called Veritas. The house was a strange gothic castle, high on a grassy hill, surrounded by acres of woods and strange, desolate gardens. Inside it was a dank mausoleum, cold and humid, decorated much like Jacqueline’s apartment only on a larger, more decrepit scale. One brother never rose from his chair, wearing a creepy smoking jacket, almost too drunk to talk. His wife flitted about him like a hyperactive moth, refreshing his drink, fluffing his pillow. Another brother, thin and nervous, was in a den glued to his computer screen, watching the prices of the family’s vast holdings rise and fall and rise again on the nation’s stock exchanges. The sister was a sarcastic little bitch in black leather who laughed in his face when he told her he was a dentist and who cut Grimes with a series of scathing comments. The mother was overseas somewhere, vacationing alone, and the father stayed in his private upstairs chamber, never stepping down to meet his daughter’s fiancé.

“It felt like I was visiting the Munsters,” said Grimes. “And that was before Jacqueline took me to meet her Grammy, the daughter of the man who had founded the family fortune.”

Grandmother Shaw was hunched over in a chair, her wrinkled face tilted as if one half were made of wax and had been pressed too close to a flame. Her hands were bony and long, the rasp of her breathing sliced the silence in the room. The eye on the melted half of her face was closed; from the other a pale, cataractal blue peered out. She stared at him like he was a disease as Jacqueline made the introductions. Then, with a withering smile, the grandmother insisted on taking Grimes for a little walk around the gardens.

They were alone, the two of them, except for the old gardener who held onto her arm as she walked. It was the height of the summer now and the gardens were a riot of colors and scents. She showed him her rhododendron, her hyacinths, with spikes of red flowers, her blood-red chrysanthemums. Thick yellow bees burrowed for pollen, rubbing their setaceous bodies over the open blooms in a silent ecstasy. She led him through an arch cut into a high wall of spinous hedges. Here the hedgerows were trimmed into some sort of a maze, flowers fronting tall walls of barberry bristling with thorns, barberry hiding paths of primrose and blue lobelia that spun around in circles, leading to still more barberry. She asked him about himself as they walked, listening without comment. Her cane was gnarled. The old gardener, holding her arm as he walked beside her, was silent beneath his wide straw hat. They wove slowly past bunches of phlox and violet sage, past peals of bellshaped digitalis, alongside spiny rows of purple globe thistle.

“You some sort of gardener?” I asked Grimes.

“Everyone needs a hobby, what of it?”

“Just asking is all.”

They walked in a seemingly directionless path in that maze until they found themselves in the center of a very formal space scribed by tall circular hedges, edged with astilbe and gay-feather and gaudy red hollyhock on tall, reedy spires. In the center of the space was an oval of rich, dark earth, out of which bloomed bunches of gorgeous violet irises above a sea of pale yellow jewelweed. At one end of the oval was a statue of a naked woman reaching up to the heavens, her delicate bare feet resting on a huge marble base, studded with pillars, encrusted with brass medallions, the word “SHAW” engraved deep into the stone. Across the oval garden from the statue was a marble bench, situated under a white wooden arch infested with giant orange trumpet flowers, their stamens red as tongues. The gardener deposited the old woman on the bench and she bade Grimes to sit beside her with two pats of the marble. As they sat together the gardener took out a pair of shears and began to trim the foliage behind them with shivery little clips of the blades.

“This is our favorite place in all the world,” rasped Grandmother Shaw.

“It is beautiful,” said Grimes.

“We come here every day, no matter the weather. We feel all the power of the land in this place. We used to come here as children, too, but it has developed more meaning for us as we’ve grown older and more doddering. Mr. Shaw’s ashes are in an urn beneath the statue of Aphrodite. More treasures are buried in this earth, keepsakes, mementos of a better time. Everything of value we place here. We come every day and think of him and them and replenish ourselves with all the power in this dark, rich earth.”

“Your husband must have been quite a man,” he said.

“He was, yes,” she said. “In the last days of his life he had become intensely spiritual in a way open only to the scathed. You intend to marry our Jacqueline.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We take our marriage vows very seriously in this family. When we promise to marry it is for forever.”

“I love Jacqueline very much. Forever is too short a time to be with her.”

“We are sure you felt that for your present wife too,” she said.

She was referring, of course, to Grimes’s wife of seven years, mother of his two children, keeper of his house, rememberer of his family’s birthdays and anniversaries, planner of the family vacations, his wife, about whom he hadn’t yet gotten around to telling Jacqueline. They had been childhood sweethearts, he and his wife, had dated all through high school, her parents had put him through dental school by mortgaging their house. It had been the shock of her life when he moved out to live with Jacqueline Shaw.

“That marriage was a mistake. I didn’t know what love was until I met your granddaughter.”

“Yes, great wealth has that effect on people. Your private investigator did tell you the value of our family’s holdings, didn’t he?”

“I love Jacqueline,” he said, rising from the bench with evident indignation. “And if you’re implying that my intentions are…”

“Sit down, Mr. Grimes,” she said, staring up at him with that opaque blue eye. “We need no histrionics between us. We were very impressed with the hiring of your investigator. It shows an initiative all too rare in this family. Sit down and don’t presume to understand our intentions here.”

He stared at her for a moment, but half her face smiled at him as she patted the bench once again, and so he sat. The gardener grunted and kneeled behind them, searching on his hands and knees for the tiniest weeds poking through the rich black mulch.

“Those purple spikes over there are from our favorite plant in this garden. Dictamnus albus. The gas plant. On windless summer evenings, if you put a match to its blossoms, the vapor of the flowers will burn ever so faintly, as if the spirits buried in this earth are igniting through its fragrant blooms. Jacqueline has always been a morose little girl, she had the melancholia from the start. Whether you marry her for her sadness or her money is no concern of ours.”

He began to object but she raised her hand and silenced him.

“We are simply grateful she has found someone to care for her no matter what tragedies will inevitably befall her. But we want you to understand what it means to be a member of our family before it is too late for you.”

“I can imagine,” he said.

“No, I don’t think so. It is beyond your imagining.”

The gardener grunted as he stood once more and began again with the shears.

“Our blood is bad, Mr. Grimes, weak, it has been defiled. Where there was strength in my father there is only decay now. My sister died of bad blood, my son has been ruined by it. The result is the weakness evident in my grandchildren. If you marry Jacqueline you must never have children. To do so would be to court disaster. You must join us in refusing to allow the weaknesses in our family’s gene pool to survive. Let it die, let it fade away. We are different from those pathetic others who try so futilely to keep alive a malignant genetic line at all costs. All that’s left of our physical bodies is rot. Everything of value has already been transferred to the wealth.”

The old lady sighed and turned her head away.

“Our wealth has been hard earned, Mr. Grimes, earned with blood and bone, more pain than you could ever know. But whatever remains of my father and his progeny, and of my husband too, still lives in the corpus of our family’s holdings, their hearts still beat, their souls still flourish through the tentacles of our wealth. Everything we have done in what was left to us of our lives was to honor their sacrifice and to maintain the body of their existence towards three divine purposes. Conciliation, expiation, redemption.”

Each of the last three words was spoken with the strength and clarity of a great iron bell. Grimes was too frightened to respond. The chiming of the gardener’s shears grew louder, the pace of his cuts increased.

“Our three divine purposes have almost completely been achieved and we will never allow an outsider to undo what it has taken generations of our family to accomplish. You won’t be squandering our money, Mr. Grimes. You won’t gamble it away like Edward or invest it foolishly like Robert. Your sole duty will be to preserve the family fortune, to tend it and make it grow, to treat it with all the care required by the frailest orchid to satisfy its purpose. And we want to be absolutely clear on one thing. You will never leave poor Jacqueline and take a piece of her money with you. That will not be allowed. Our wealth was hard won by blood and has been defended by blood. Don’t doubt it for a moment. Our father was a great and powerful man and he taught us well.”

The silvery clips of the gardener’s shears came closer and closer until the hairs on the tips of Grimes’s ears pricked up. With each scissoring of the clippers a cold slid down the back of his neck. The old lady looked at him with her one good eye almost as if she were casting a spell.

“Well, enough family business,” she said, and instantly the gardener’s shears fell silent. “Tell us about your ideas for the wedding, Mr. Grimes. We are all so excited, so certain that you will make our Jacqueline terribly happy.”

As he stammered a few words about their plans, how they wanted to be married as soon as possible, the old lady started to rise and the gardener was quickly at her side, helping her to stand. She left her cane resting on the bench and with her free hand grabbed tightly onto Grimes’s arm. Her grip was cold and fierce as she walked with him and the gardener back to the house.

“There is no need to blindly dash into something as deadly serious as marriage, is there?” she asked as they walked. “Take your time, Mr. Grimes, wait, be certain. That is our advice,” she said and then she chatted almost gaily about the flowers, and the grass, and of how the high level of humidity in the air exacerbated her asthma.

Shortly after that visit, Grandmother Shaw died in her ninety-ninth year. She had given explicit instructions that she was to be cremated and her ashes intermingled with the ashes of her husband and placed again beneath the feet of the statue of Aphrodite. The funeral was a bleak and sparsely attended affair. It was shortly after the funeral that Jacqueline first started fearing for her life.

She claimed there were men following her, she claimed to see dark visions in her meditations. When they walked along the city streets she was forever turning around, searching for something. Grimes never spotted anything behind them but he humored her fears. When he asked her what it was that frightened her so, she admitted that she feared one of her brothers was trying to kill her. She said that murder ran in her family, something about her grandfather and her father. She wouldn’t have been surprised if her grandmother died not from an asthma attack but was smothered with a pillow by one of her brothers. The only family members she ever talked about with kindness were her sister and her dear sweet Grammy. Grimes never told her of his brutal conversation with Grandmother Shaw. They would have married immediately but for a delay in Grimes’s divorce proceedings. He offered his wife everything, he didn’t care, because everything he had was nothing compared to all he would have, but still the case dragged on. And still Jacqueline’s fears increased.

Then, one winter evening, he returned to the apartment from his dental office. She had been at the Haven all morning, meditating, but was supposed to be home when he arrived. He called out to her and heard nothing. He looked in the bedroom, the bathroom, he called her name again. He was looking so intently he almost passed right by her as she hung from the gaudy crystal chandelier in her orange robe, a heavy tasseled rope twisted round her neck. The windows were darkened by thick velvet drapes and the only light in the room came from the chandelier, dappling her with the spectrum of colors sheared free by the crystal. Beneath her thick legs a Chippendale chair lay upon its side. Her feet were bare, her eyes open and seemingly filled with relief. Looking at her hanging there Grimes would almost have imagined her happy, at peace, except for the gray tongue that rested thick and swollen over the pale skin of her chin like a stain. He took one look and knew just how much was gone. He turned right around and took the elevator down and used the doorman’s phone to call the police.

Along with the police came a man, tall and blond. He obtained a hotel room for Grimes that night at the Four Seasons, an apartment in a modern high-rise on Walnut Street for him the very next day. Without having to do anything, Grimes’s possessions were in the new apartment, along with a brand new set of contemporary furniture. The lease was prepaid for two years. On his new big screen television set was a envelope with twenty thousand dollars in cash. That was the last he saw of Jackie or her family. The last he saw of his hundred million.

“You’re right,” I told him as we sat side by side at the Irish Pub, across from his new and fully paid luxury apartment at 2020 Walnut. “That’s an absolute tragedy.”

“So when you talk about almost getting a piddling little share of some crappy little lawsuit,” said Grimes, “I don’t want to hear it.”

“Why’d she kill herself?”

“Who knows? There was no note. She was always so sad, maybe it just got to be too much. Or maybe her paranoia was justified and someone in that gruesome family of hers killed her. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t that punkette of a sister, either. But it doesn’t make a difference to me, does it?”

“Guess not. Who was that blond guy who paid you off in the end?”

“Family banker.”

I nodded. “You ever been to a place called Tosca’s?”

“No. Why?”

“Just asking.”

“What’s that, a restaurant?”

“It’s an Italian place up on Wolf Street. Great food is all. I was thinking you can take your wife sometime, make it all up to her.

“Fat chance, that. I tried to go back but she divorced me anyway. I don’t blame her, really. She’s remarried, some urologist, raking it in even with the HMO’s. He’s got this racket where he sticks his finger up some geezer’s butt, feels around, and pulls out a five-hundred-dollar bill. She says she’s happier than she’s ever been. Tells me the sex is ten times better with the urologist, can you believe that?”

“It’s the educated finger.”

“And, you know, I’m glad. She deserves a little happiness. You want to know something else?”

“Sure.”

“I sort of liked her. Jackie, I mean. She was a kook, really, and too sad for words, but I liked her. Even with all her money she was an innocent. We would have been all right together. With her, and a hundred million dollars, I think I finally might have been a little happy.”

He turned back to his drink and swilled the scotch and I watched him, thinking that with a hundred million I might be a little happy too. I took another sip of my beer and started to feel a thin line of nausea unspool in my stomach. And along with the nausea it came upon me again, the same suspicion I had felt before, that somewhere in this unfolding story was my own way into the Reddman fortune. I couldn’t quite figure the route yet, but the sensation this time was clear and thrilling; it was there for me, my road to someone else’s riches, waiting patiently, and all I had to do was discover where the path began and take that first step.

“What now?” I asked myself and I wasn’t even aware I had said it out loud until Grimes answered my question for me.

“Now?” he said. “Now I spend the rest of my life sticking fingers in other people’s mouths.”

10

I SLIPPED MY MAZDA into a spot on the side street that fronted the brick-faced complex. I snapped on the Club, which was ludicrous, actually, since my car was over ten years old and as desirable to a chop shop as an East German Trabant, but still it was that type of neighborhood. At thirty minutes per quarter I figured three in the meter would be more than enough. I pulled my briefcase out and locked the car and headed up the steps to the Albert Einstein Medical Center.

In the lobby I walked guiltily past the rows of portraits, dead physicians and rich guys staring sternly down from the walls, and without stopping at the front desk, took my briefcase into the elevator and up to the fifth floor, cardiac care. The hospital smelled of overcooked lima beans and spilled apple juice and I could tell from just one whiff that Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky in Room 5036 was not a happy man.

“I’m nauseous all the time,” said Jimmy Vigs in a weak, kindly voice as I stepped into the room. He wasn’t talking to me. “I retched this morning already. Should that be happening?”

“I’ll tell the doctor,” said a nurse in a Hawaiian shirt, stooping down as she emptied his urine sack. “You’re on Atenolol, which sometimes causes nausea.”

“How am I peeing?”

“Like a horse.”

“At least something’s working right.” Jim was a huge round man, wildly heavy, with thick legs and a belly that danced when he laughed, only he wasn’t laughing. His face was shaped like a pear, with big cheeks, a large nose, a thin, fussy little mustache. He lay in bed with his sheet off and his stomach barely covered by his hospital gown. In his arm was an intravenous line and beside his bed was a post on which three plastic bags hung, filling him with fluids and medicines. The blips on the monitor were strangely uneven; his pulse was eighty-six, then eighty-three, then eighty-seven, then ninety. I wondered if Jimmy would book a bet on which pulse rate would show up next and then I figured he already had.

“Hello, Victor,” he said when he noticed me in the room. His voice had a light New York accent, but none of the New York edge, as if he had moved from Queens to Des Moines a long time ago. “It’s kind of you to visit.”

“How are you feeling, Jim?”

“Not so well. Nauseous.” He closed his eyes as if the strain of staying awake was too much for him. “Helen, this is Victor Carl, my lawyer. When a lawyer visits you in the hospital it’s bad news for someone. I guess we’re going to need some privacy.”

She smiled at me as she fiddled with his urine. “I’ll just be a minute.”

“With what he’s charging, this is going to be the most expensive pee in history.”

“Okay, okay,” she said as she finished emptying the catheter bag, but still smiling. “Just another moment.”

“She’s been terrific. They’ve all been terrific. They’re treating me like a prince.”

“When are they cleaning out your arteries?” I asked. For the past few years Jim had worn a nitro patch and kept the medicine by his side all the time, often popping pills like Tic-Tacs when things got tense. He had had a bypass about ten years back, before I met him, but I had never known him to be without pain and finally, when the angina had grown unbearable, he had consented to going under the knife, or under the wire at least, to clear his arteries by drilling through the calcium deposits that were starving his heart.

“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “By tomorrow evening I’ll be a new man.”

The nurse fiddled with the drips and took some notations and then left the room, closing the door behind her. As soon as it was closed, Jim said in a voice with the New York edge suddenly returned, “You bring it?”

“I don’t feel right about this,” I said. “I feel downright queasy.”

“Let me have it,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“Let me have it,” he said.

I was reaching into my briefcase when an orderly came in with a tray. I snapped the case closed before he could see inside.

“Here’s your lunch, Mr. Dubinsky,” said the orderly, a big man in a blue jumpsuit. “Just what the dietitian prescribed.”

“I’m too nauseous to eat, Kelvin,” said Jimmy, weak and kindly again. “But thank you.”

“You’ll want to eat your lunch, Mr. Dubinsky. Your DCA’s tomorrow morning, so you won’t be getting dinner.”

“I’ll try. Maybe a carrot stick. Thank you, Kelvin.”

“That’s right, you try, Mr. Dubinsky. You try real hard.”

When the orderly left, Jimmy ordered me to close the door and then said, “Let me have it.”

I stepped over to the tray the orderly had just brought and lifted the cover. Carrot sticks and celery and sliced radishes. Two pieces of romaine lettuce. An apple. A plastic glass of grape juice. An orange slice for garnish. “Looks tasty.”

“Let me have it,” he said.

“I don’t feel right about this,” I said as I again opened my briefcase and pulled out the bag. White Castle. A grease mark shaped like a rabbit on the bottom and inside four cheese sliders and two boxes of fries.

He looked inside. “Only four? I usually buy a sack of ten.”

“You need a note from your cardiologist to get ten.”

He took one of the hamburgers and, while still lying flat on his back, popped it into his mouth as easy as a mint. He breathed deeply through his nose as he chewed and smiled the smile of the righteous.

“What about your nausea?”

“Too many damn carrots,” he said in between sliders. “Carotene poisoning. That’s why rabbits puke all the time.”

“I’ve never seen a rabbit puke.”

“You’ve never looked.”

While he was shoving the third hamburger into his mouth, keeping all the while a careful eye on the door, the phone rang. He nodded with his head to the phone and I answered it. “What’s Atlanta?” asked the whispery voice on the phone.

I relayed the question to Jimmy and he stopped swallowing long enough to say, “Six and eight over Houston.”

“Six and eight over Houston,” I said into the phone.

“This is Rocketman,” said the voice. “Thirty units on Houston.”

I told Jim and he nodded. “Tell him it’s down,” said Jimmy Vigs and I did.

“That’s the problem with this business,” said Jim. “It never stops. I’m scheduled for surgery tomorrow and they’re still calling. I need a vacation. Want a fry?”

“No thank you.”

“Good,” he said as he stuck a fistful in his mouth. “They’re not crisp enough anyway, you need to get them right out of the fryer.” He stuck in another fistful.

“You know, Victor,” he said when he was finished with everything and the bag and empty boxes were safely back in my briefcase and the only remnant of his surreptitious meal was the stink of grease that hung over the room like a sallow cloud of ill health, “that was the first decent bite I’ve had since I was admitted. Starting tomorrow I’m going to change everything, I swear. I’m going to Slim-Fast my way to skinny, I swear. But I just needed a final taste before the drought. You’re a pal.”

“I felt like I was giving you poison.”

“Aw hell, they’re scraping everything out tomorrow anyway, what’s the harm? But you’re a real pal. I owe you.”

“So then do me a favor,” I said, “and tell me about one of your clients, a fellow named Edward Shaw.”

Jimmy sat still for a while, as if he hadn’t heard me, but then his wide cheeks widened and underneath his tiny mustache a smile grew. “What do you want to know from Eddie Shaw for?”

“I just want to know.”

“Lawyer-client?”

“Lawyer-client.”

“Well, buddy, you know what Eddie Shaw is? The worst gambler in God’s good earth.”

“Not very astute, I guess.”

“That’s not what I tell him. He’s the smartest, most informed, most knowledgeable I ever booked is what I tell him. And he’s such an uppity little son-of-a-bitch he believes every word of it. But between you and me, and only between you and me, he is the absolute biggest mark I’ve ever seen. It’s uncanny. He’s such a degenerate he couldn’t lose more money if he was trying. He’s the only guy in the world who when he bets a game, the line changes in his favor, he’s that bad. He bets a horse, it’s sure to come in so late the jockey’s wearing pajamas. I could retire on that guy, go to Brazil, lie on the beach all day and eat fried plantains, suck down coladas, never worry about a thing, just bake in the sun and book his losers.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Well, you know how it is sometimes. Collection can be a problem.”

“Isn’t he good for it?” I asked, wondering how much Jimmy knew about the family.

Jimmy let out an explosion of breath. “You know Reddman Pickles? Well this loser’s a Reddman, and there aren’t too many, either. The guy’s worth as much as some small countries, let me tell you, but it’s all tied up in some sort of a trust. He lays the bets based on his net worth but he can only pay up based on his income, which is less than you would figure with a guy like that. When his old man dies, then he can buy the moon, but until then he only gets a share of a percentage of what the trust throws out in income.”

“Ever have any real trouble getting him to pay?”

Jimmy shifted in bed a bit and the line on his monitor flat-lined for a moment, his pulse number dropping to zilch, before the line snapped back into rhythm and the pulse registered ninety-three, ninety-six, ninety, eighty-eight. “What’s up, Victor? Why so much interest in Shaw?”

“I’m just asking.”

“Lawyers don’t just ask.”

“I heard that he got pretty far behind and you started getting tough, a little too tough.”

He turned his head away from me. “Yeah, well it’s a tough business.”

“How much did he owe?”

“Aw, you know me, Victor, I wouldn’t hurt a pussy cat.”

“How much?”

“Lawyer-client, right?”

“Sure.”

“Over half a mil. Normally I cut it off before it gets that high, just cut them off and work out a payment plan, but he has so much money coming and he loses so regularly, I just couldn’t bear some other book taking my money. I let it get too high, and I was willing to be patient, with the interest I was charging it was going to be my retirement when his old man died. But January a year back I took more action than I should have on the game and laid off too much to the wrong guys. The refs don’t call the interference on Sanders, and it was clear, so clear, but they don’t call it and I’m way short. Next thing I know those bastards started squeezing. I was in hock to them, Shaw was in hock to me, so I had to apply some pressure. It was just business is all, Victor, nothing…”

The phone interrupted him. I picked it up. “What’s the spread on the Knicks tomorrow night?” said a voice.

“Hello, Al?” I said into the phone, rapping the handset as if the connection was bad. “Al? Are you there, Al? I think the tap shorted out the wires. Al? Al? Can you get on that, Al?”

“Aw cut it out,” said Jimmy, reaching for the phone.

“I don’t understand it,” I said. “He hung up.”

“You’re killing me here.”

“You said you needed a vacation. Tell me what you did about Shaw.”

“I went to Calvi.”

“Calvi, huh?” I said. “I heard he’s gone to Florida. Any idea why the sudden visit South?”

“I don’t know, maybe the boss got sick of the smell of those damned cigars.”

“I wouldn’t blame him for that.”

“I also heard some rumors about him getting impatient with his share, stuff I never believed. But I got sources say that Earl Dante was behind the rumors and his ouster.”

“Dante’s rising fast.”

“Dante is a scary man, Victor, and that is all I want to say about that.”

Just then the door opened and a thin young man in a black leather coat and a black fedora stepped into the room. On some guys the leather coat and the hat would have made them look hard, like Rocky, but not this guy, with his long face and beak nose and wide child-taunted ears. He wore thick round glasses and between his pursed lips I could see a set of crumbling teeth. When he saw me he stopped and stared.

“Hey, Victor,” said Jimmy, “you know Anton Schmidt here?”

I shook my head.

“Next to you, Victor, he’s the smartest guy I know.”

“That’s not saying much for you,” I said.

“No, really. Anton’s the real deal, got a mind for numbers like a computer. And don’t ever bet him in chess, he’s a prodigy or something. He’s got a ranking. I didn’t know they gave rankings, but he’s got one.”

“How high?” I asked.

“Nineteen fifty as of my last tournament,” he said through his twisted set of teeth.

“Impressive,” I said, and from the way he said it I guess it was, though I had no idea what it meant.

“He’s almost a master,” said Jimmy. “Imagine that, and he works for me.”

“Anything going?” asked Anton.

“Rocketman bet thirty units on Houston.”

“He would,” said Anton.

“Other than that, Victor put on the kibosh so I think it’s going to be quiet. You got that match to study for, go on home. I’ll see you tomorrow after the procedure.”

Anton looked at Jimmy like he wanted to say something, his eyes behind the glasses widened, then he looked away.

“It’s nothing,” said Jimmy. “Just a procedure is all. Get the hell out of here and study. In two days I’ll let you start me on that exercise program you been ramming me about.”

Anton smiled. “They’re waiting for you at Gold’s.”

“I’ll bet they are, those bastards. I’ll show them something. I can bench a horse.”

“You can eat a horse maybe,” I said, “but that’s about it.”

“Get out of here,” said Jim. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Anton nodded for a moment, looked at me and nodded, stared some more at Jim, and then left.

“He worries about me too much, but he’s a good kid,” said Jimmy. “Keeps everything in his head now so there won’t be no more ledgers should the cops come looking again.”

“You trust him with that much information?”

“Like a son.”

“Good,” I said, “Because I’d hate to have to cross-examine a chess master at your next criminal trial. All right then, so you went to Calvi to collect what Eddie Shaw owed you.”

“Met him at Tosca’s,” said Jimmy. “He was smoking a cigar and I almost gagged as I sat across from him. I have craps smell better than his cigars. I told him my problem and he said he’d apply some pressure. Strong-arm stuff, but nothing too radical. Raffaello doesn’t go for that. He sent some boys up, sent the message, talked to the family, talked to the staff, made sure everyone knew the situation. I heard they got a little rough. Next thing I know Shaw paid off. Half of what he owed, which is all I needed to get myself clear. Had to increase my payout to Raffaello, you know, a collection charge, but it was worth it, got me off the hook. And you want to know something, that crazy loser is betting again. Just last night he took the Lakers and seven for a thousand.”

“What happened?”

“Bulls blew them out by twenty-five.”

“And what about the sister?” I asked.

“What about who?”

“Shaw’s sister.”

Jimmy shrugged, a wholly unconcerned shrug, as loose as a 275-pound man lying on his back in a hospital before surgery can shrug. “What about her?”

“She died just before her brother started paying you back. Some in her family think she was murdered.”

“Who? By me? That’s a laugh.”

“Not so funny if it’s true.”

“Why would I care about the sister?”

“You don’t think Calvi might have hurt the sister as a warning for Eddie?”

“What, are you crazy? His boys broke Shaw’s arm in two places with the blunt end of an ax, threatening to use the blade side if he didn’t pay up. Now that’s a warning. Hey, we got to get tough sometimes, but we’re not animals. What do you think?”

What I thought was that he was telling me the truth, which was a relief because I liked Jimmy Dubinsky and I’d hate to think that someone I liked was a murderer. So Jimmy had gone to Calvi and Calvi had broken Eddie Shaw’s arm in two places and suddenly Eddie had found the money to pay back Jimmy. Where? That seemed to be the crucial question.

“All right, Jimmy,” I said. “Thanks for your help. This thing tomorrow, it’s not dangerous, is it?”

“A piece of cake,” he said. “Roto-Rooter, that’s the name and away go troubles down the drain. I’ll be here for three more days. You’ll visit again?”

“Sure.”

“You’ll bring me another little gift?”

“I thought you were Slim-Fasting.”

“You’re allowed one reasonable meal a day. It says it right there on the can.”

“Sure, I’ll bring a gift if you want,” I said.

“And next time, Victor, be a sport and buy them by the sack.”

My car was still at the meter, when I stepped outside the hospital, still with its tires, still with its radio, still with its battery firmly in place, all of which was a pleasant surprise. It was back in my office where the unpleasant surprise awaited.

11

“THEY JUST WENT IN,” said Ellie, her hands fluttering about her neck. “I tried to stop them.”

“That’s all right, Ellie. Where’s Beth?”

“At a settlement conference. I was the only one here.”

“You did fine,” I said. “I’ll take care of it now.” Ever since I began representing criminals I had made a practice of locking up my most sensitive files, but still I didn’t like visitors free to roam about my office alone, didn’t fancy utter strangers rifling the papers on my desk, the files in my drawers, eyeing which case opinions I was studying in preparation for my court appearances.

“I didn’t know if I should call the police,” said Ellie. “They said it was about business.”

“No, you did the right thing. I don’t want the police in my office either.”

“The little one’s creepy looking, like a troll.”

“It’s fine, Ellie,” I said, staring at the closed door, screwing up my courage to enter my own office. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

“An evil troll.”

I put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a falsely confident smile. “In that case, you better hold my calls.”

I took three steps forward and opened the door.

Two guys. One was tall, dark, and squinty, dressed all in black, with one of those faux-cool ponytails that tries to say, “Hey, I’m hip,” but which really only says, “Hey, I’m a geek trying oh so hard to be hip.” He was concentrating on my tall file cabinet with the vase of dead flowers still perched on top. The cabinet was brown with fake wood grain, fireproof, batterproof, burglarproof, made of heavy-gauge steel for the most security-minded file keepers, and the ponytailed guy was fiddling noisily with the lock. The other guy, short and bearded, with the nasty eyes of a psychiatrist, was sitting at my desk, reading a document he had found there. The sheer brazenness of their actions was comforting, in a way. The most serious dangers, I have learned painfully through my ransacked life, come disguised as gifts.

I cleared my throat like a schoolteacher in an unruly class. The two men stopped what they were doing, looked up at me, and then immediately went back to work.

“Finding anything of interest?” I asked.

“Not really, no,” said the little man. His voice was a natural falsetto. I guess if I was five foot three with a voice like that I’d grow a beard too. “Your desk is a mess. Is all your life this disorganized?”

“Cluttered desk, uncluttered mind.”

“Somehow I don’t think so.”

“We have a problem, Mr. Carl,” said the man in black, in a pretentious husky whisper that went all too well with that ponytail. He was still standing by the file cabinet but apparently had given up his attempt to pick the Chicago Lock Company lock and peek inside. His face was deeply lined and though I had first thought him to be somewhere in his twenties, on closer inspection I believed him to be somewhere in his forties, which made his cry-for-hip outfit all the more pathetic. “We think you can help.”

“Well, I’m a lawyer. Helping is my business.”

That brought a yelp of mirth from the little man.

“Why don’t you gentlemen sit down where the clients are supposed to sit and I’ll sit behind the desk, where the lawyer is supposed to sit, and maybe then we can discuss your situation.”

The tall man looked at the short man. The short man stared at me for a moment before giving the tall man the nod. Then we all do-si-doed one around the other like a set at a square dance. When we were in our proper positions, I appraised the two men sitting across from me and found myself very unafraid, which I didn’t think was their intention.

I guess it was the dealing with all those murderous mob hoodlums in the last few years that did it. It wasn’t that I had turned brave from my association with them. I had been born a coward, raised a coward, and faithfully remained a coward. It was part and parcel of being my father’s son and I would have taken great pride in my cowardice if I didn’t realize it only meant that in my thirty sorry years I hadn’t yet found a cause or a love worth dying for. No, I wasn’t frightened by these two men who had barged into my office in what they had hoped was an intimidating style because my experience with the more vicious elements of the city’s underworld had given me the capacity to judge the truly sadistically vicious from the bad-boy wannabees. The geezer in black, he was a wannabee. The truly sadistically vicious don’t have to go around dressing like Steven Seagal to stoke fear. One look in their eyes and you know to step aside. And as for the little guy, well, would he have frightened you?

“So, gentlemen,” I said. “What is this problem you were telling me about?”

“Harassment,” said the man in black.

“Well, actually, that’s a specialty of our firm. My partner, Elizabeth Derringer, is one of the top sexual harassment lawyers in the city. The surreptitious pat on the butt, the sexual double entendre, the sly brush of protruding body parts as your boss passes you in the hall, the inappropriate suggestion of an after-hours liaison. It’s a terrible problem, yes, but there are laws now under which we can bring suits. Even the stolen kiss in the supply closet, once the province of harmless office fun, has now become actionable. And quite profitable too for the plaintiff and the lawyer. So,” I said with a wide smile. “Which one of you was sexually harassed?”

“That’s not what we’re talking about,” said the man in black.

“No? So what is it? An old girlfriend calling every night? Being stalked by a secret admirer? I want to help.” I roughed my voice a bit. “I just need to know what your problem is.”

“You’re pretty clever, Mr. Carl, aren’t you?” said the man in black.

“With enough rewrites, sure,” I said.

“Well quit the cleverness and shut up.”

“A child has died,” skirled the short man with the beard. “She was a sweet and much-loved child. I find tragedies bring out the best and the worst in us, don’t you, Victor? My name is Gaylord. This is Nicholas. The tragedy of this child’s death has raised a problem for us that you are going to resolve.”

“Well, as you must know, I take a keen professional interest in other people’s tragedy.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” said Gaylord.

“We don’t want you interested in the tragedy of this child’s death,” said Nicholas in his husky whisper.

“All right, gentlemen, let’s stop the playacting,” I said, more curious than anything else. “Who are we talking about and what do you want?”

“You’ve been asking questions about Jacqueline Shaw’s death,” said Gaylord, shaking his head and closing his psychiatrist eyes as if with sadness. “Her death has caused us all much pain and we are trying to put the grief of her loss behind us. Your running around the city like a fool, badgering the police, bothering her friends, is only making it more difficult for our wounds to heal. You are to stop immediately.”

I waited a moment and looked at them, the little squeak of a man and the fraud hard guy in a ponytail, and my only emotion was a sort of indignation that the likes of these two thought they could intimidate me. Didn’t they check me out in Martindale-Hubbell, didn’t they ask around, didn’t they know that with one call to certain of my clients I could have their knees pounded into mash? I leaned forward and clasped my hands together like a choirboy and said what I had to say slowly.

“Listen, you little weenies, don’t you ever again frighten my secretary by ignoring her requests and marching into my office uninvited. Don’t you ever again try to play the hard guy with me when neither of you have the stones to pull it off. And don’t either of you ever again, for an instant, think that I will listen to any orders that come out of pathetic losers such as yourselves. Whatever work I’m doing for my clients I will do no matter what you or anyone else says to me and whether I am or am not looking into the death of this friend of yours, whatever her name is, I will continue to do whatever I was doing before your pathetic attempt to scare me off. Now that we are finished here, get the hell out of my office.”

They both remained seated, staring at me with not quite the shocked and wary eyes I had hoped for. Gaylord started shaking his head and as he did so Nicholas rose. He pushed back his chair, swooped his arms before him and lifted his left knee. He stayed motionless for a moment, his left leg raised, his left arm before him like a shield, his right arm at his side, his stance as ludicrous and as far from threatening as if he froze smack in the middle of a power walk. I think I snickered.

“I believe you underestimate our sincerity,” said Gaylord. “It happens.”

In that instant Nicholas hopped into his left leg as he swung his right around, cracking the heavy vase atop the filing cabinet in two with his kick before it shattered against the wall. The shards of glass hadn’t hit the floor before, with a grunt and another spin, Nicholas pivoted off his right foot and buried his left heel into the side of my fireproof, batterproof, burglarproof, heavy-gauge steel filing cabinet. The concaving of the cabinet was punctuated with the slam bang of his heel against the side and the groan of bending metal, not unlike, I expect, the sound of the cracking of bones. From the force of his blow the lock popped and one of the drawers slid open.

By the time Ellie had rushed in to see what had happened, Nicholas was back in his seat, hands folded before him, and I was suddenly suitably frightened.

“It’s all right, Ellie,” I said, without looking at her so she wouldn’t notice my watering eyes. “Just a small accident with the cabinet. Everything’s fine.” I smiled thinly and she left, leaving the door open.

“Sometimes you walk down the street,” said Gaylord, “without realizing, until it is too late, that the fellow approaching you has the ability to reach into your chest and rip out your lungs.”

“I trained in Chiang Mai,” whispered Nicholas.

“You know, Victor, I think I killed you in a prior life,” said Gaylord. “Were you by any chance in Jerusalem at the end of the eleventh century when Godfrey of Bouillon stormed the city? Because your aura is very familiar.”

I still hadn’t recovered enough from the shot into the solar plexus of my filing cabinet, wondering at what a shot like that would do to my rib cage and the oh so delicate organs encased within, to start exploring my past lives with Gaylord. The image of my heart compressing to the flatness of a plate, my lungs exhaling first air, then blood, then bronchioles, alveoli snapping, my colon popping like a pea, such images tended to wipe out all thoughts of the hereafter with obsessions of the dangers in the here and now. I was breathing hard when I said, “What is it exactly that you want?”

Nicholas, for the first time, smiled. I couldn’t help but notice that his smile was excellent and he still had all his teeth. “No more questions about Jacqueline Shaw. That’s what we want.”

“I seem to remember that I sliced off your head with my broadsword,” said Gaylord. “Does that ring a bell?”

“Being beheaded by a midget in Jerusalem? Not really.”

“You scoff. Did you ever think there may be more to life than you imagine, more than eating and screwing and dying?” asked Gaylord. “Did that ever cross your mind?”

“Well, I do watch a lot of TV.”

“I’m talking existence, Victor. Have you ever wondered if your existence embodies more than you could ever imagine? Or maybe even, more profoundly, less?”

“Metaphysics in the afternoon?”

“I hate that word, metaphysics,” said Gaylord, “as if the truths in our souls are less real than the forces at work on pool balls clacking against one another. Let’s say we’re talking about a higher level of cognition. Any ideas?”

“Meaning. You’re asking me about meaning.” I was vamping for time, trying to figure out where this high-pitched little man was going. “Let’s say I’m still searching for an answer to that one.”

“Did you hear that, Nicholas? Victor here is searching. He is at least a one. There is hope for him yet.”

“If he ever wants to become a two then he’ll cooperate,” said Nicholas. “This was just a warning but…”

“This supposed meaning of life you are searching for, Vic,” said Gaylord, his high voice piercing Nicholas’s husky whisper like a dart, “any idea of where you’re going to find it?”

“I read some, talk to people, watch Woody Allen movies. In the past few years my private investigator has sort of been a spiritual adviser.”

“Your private investigator, how clever. You’ve hired him to investigate the meaning of life, I presume.”

“Something like that.”

“You ever wonder, Victor, if the answer is right out there for you to see? Ever have a coincidence happen that seemed too perfect for coincidence? Ever have a déjà vu and be certain that it wasn’t just a trick of the mind? Ever feel almost connected to the secret of the universe, feel that the answer to everything is just out of reach, or just out of sight? Ever think everything is so close except you are deaf to it for some strange reason?”

“Yes, actually,” I said, because I had actually experienced all that.

“Wonder of wonders,” said Gaylord. “You’re a two.”

“Gaylord is a nine,” said Nicholas. “I’m a five.”

“Nicholas is a five and I’m only a two?”

“Well, keep out of trouble,” said Gaylord, “and maybe you’ll rise. We can teach you how to see it, if that’s what you really want. There are novice meetings in our temporary headquarters every Wednesday night at eight.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a card, tossing it into the clutter of my desk. “That’s all, I guess,” he said, slapping his chair armrests and standing. Nicholas stood too. “Be a good boy, Victor, and maybe I won’t have to use the sword once again. It is so wasteful when we are forced to relive the calamities of our past lives over and over again. We’ll be in touch.”

With a nod from Gaylord they turned and walked out of my office. I sat and watched them go. Then I picked up the card. “THE CHURCH OF THE NEW LIFE,” it read and underneath it “OLEANNA, GUIDING LIGHT.” There was a Mount Airy address and a phone number and fax number and an e-mail address. The Church of the New Life.

I had always been a little leery of churches, being Jewish and all, but what really gave me the creeps was Church Lite. I could fathom the power in the somber Romanesque visions of the Catholic Church, the stained glass and incense, the passionate story of sacrifice and redemption. But there was something creepy about those pseudomodern, calorie-reduced, image-cleansed, whitewashed churches that were springing up left and right. Glass cathedrals selling salvation and tee shirts. Betty Crocker as Madonna, Opie as child. And then there were those super-cleansed New Age halls, so scrubbed and shined that God had been washed right out of them, leaving crystals and pyramids and channeled entities from the fourteenth century to take His place. That was where I figured the Church of the New Life belonged. My new pals Gaylord and Nicholas were even creepier than I had thought. And none too bright either.

I mean, why would anyone bother to threaten someone off a case? Why not just put up a neon sign that flashed, “LOOK HERE FOR GOLD?” If I had still had doubts that there was something of interest to be found in Jacqueline Shaw’s death before my run-in with the apostles of the Church of the New Life, I had none anymore. And as I thought about the meeting and about my two new friends, the suspicion that had been hounding me, the suspicion that there was my very own way into the Reddman fortune, suddenly burst into the open and snatched my attention out of the air in its teeth and wrestled it to the ground. The route had been so obvious, so clear, that I hadn’t seen it. And now that I did I felt something ethereal flow through me. I grew light, almost light enough to float. I could barely remain seated in the chair as I felt myself suffused until bursting with the giddy sensation of pure pure possibility.

12

WHEN I HAD TOLD GAYLORD I took a keen professional interest in other people’s tragedy, it hadn’t been just banter. I am a lawyer and so tragedy is my business. Riches lurk for me in the least likely of places, in that dropped package of explosives at the railway depot, in that cup of drive-through coffee that scalds the thighs, in the airplane engine that bursts into a ball of flame mid-flight. Think of your worst nightmare, your most dreaded calamity, think of injury and anguish and death and know that for me it represents only so much profit, for I am your lawyer, the alchemist of your tragedy.

I had seemingly forgotten this, forgotten that one case can make a lawyer wealthy, one client, one fact pattern, one complaint. In delving into the death of Jacqueline Shaw I had belted myself too tightly inside the trench coat of Philip Marlowe and had forgotten that I was a lawyer first and foremost and that a lawyer, first and foremost, looks after the bottom line. You can make money charging $185 an hour, as long as you work like a dog and keep your expenses low, good money, but that’s not how lawyers get stinkingly rich. Lawyers get stinkingly rich by taking a percentage of a huge lawsuit based on somebody else’s tragedy, and that’s exactly what I meant to do.

Caroline Shaw thought someone had murdered her sister, Jacqueline, and had hired me to find out who. After looking it over it seemed to me that she might just be right, and if Jacqueline was murdered I could figure out the motive right off – money, and lots of it. Why ever would you kill an heiress if it wasn’t for the money? Caroline Shaw had only hired me to find the murderer, but I had other ideas. A wrongful death action against the killer would take back whatever had been gained by the killing and whatever else the killer owned, with a third going to the lawyers. All I needed was for Jacqueline Shaw to have been murdered for her money and for me to find the killer and for me to get Caroline to sign a fee agreement and for me to dig up enough evidence to win my case and take my third of the killer’s fortune, which in itself would be a fortune. Long shots all, to be sure, but that never stopped me from returning my Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes entry twice a year.

I was on my knees picking up tiny shards of glass and placing them on a piece of cardboard, thinking it all through, when Beth showed up.

“Redecorating?” she asked.

“Just some friendly visitors from the Twilight Zone trying to scare me off the Jacqueline Shaw case.”

“Are you scared off?”

“Hardly.”

I stood up and dumped the glass fragments into the trash can where they tinkled against the sides like fairy dust.

“Think on this, Beth. Eddie Shaw’s money situation seems to have eased right after his sister’s death. And Jacqueline herself told her fiancé that she was afraid one of her brothers was trying to kill her. And somewhere there was a load of insurance money, so said Detective McDeiss. And when I had suggested to Caroline that maybe a family member had killed her sister she had snapped that her family had nothing to do with the death, protesting far too much. I’m not sure how the two losers who threatened me are involved, but what if Eddie killed his sister to increase his income and his ultimate inheritance? And what if we could bring a wrongful death action against the bastard and prove it all?”

“A lot of ifs.”

“Well, what if all those ifs?”

“You’d wipe him out with compensatory and punitive damages,” she said.

“With a third for us. McDeiss estimated the total Reddman fortune at about half a billion dollars. The brother’s share would be well over a hundred million. Let’s say we prove it and win our case and get everything in damages. We’d earn ourselves a third of over a hundred million. That would be about twenty for you and twenty for me.”

“You’re dreaming.”

“Yes I am. I’m dreaming the American dream.”

“It probably was a suicide.”

“Of course it was.”

“And if it was a murder, it probably wasn’t the brother who did it.”

“Of course not.”

“It was probably some judgment-proof derelict.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

“There’s nothing there. You’re just chasing a fool’s dream.”

“And yet when the pot was sixty-six million you bought ten lottery tickets.”

“So I did,” she said, nodding her head. “Twenty million. It’s too gaudy a number to even consider.”

“I’ve dreamed bigger,” I said, and I had. That was one of the curses of wanting so much, whatever you get can never top your dreams. “How are you on the meaning of life?”

“Pretty weak.”

“Are you willing to learn?”

“Like you have the answers,” she snorted. “Don’t you think karmic questions about life and meaning are a little beyond your depth?”

“You’re calling me shallow?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Well, sure, yes, but there’s no need to rub it in.”

“Oh, Victor, one thing I always admired about you was your cheerful shallowness. Nothing’s more boring than Mr. Sincere droning on about his life’s search for spiritual meaning in that ashram in Connecticut. Just shut up and get me a beer.”

“Well, maybe I don’t have any answers, but the Church of the New Life says it does. Novice meetings are held every Wednesday night in the basement of some house in Mount Airy. From what her fiancé told me, this was the same place where Jacqueline Shaw meditated the day she died. Somehow, it seems, their connection to her didn’t end with her death. They wanted me to come, but I think I’ll stay away for obvious health reasons. Maybe you can learn something.”

“Why don’t you just have Morris give them a look?”

“I don’t think this is quite right for Morris, do you?” I said, handing her the card.

She studied it. “Maybe not. Who’s Oleanna?”

I shrugged my ignorance.

“Sounds like a margarine. Maybe that’s the secret, low cholesterol as the way to spiritual salvation.”

“You never know, Beth. That something you’ve been looking for your whole life, maybe it’s been hiding out all this time in a rat-infested basement in Mount Airy.”

“I don’t think so,” she said, and then she looked at the card some more. She flicked it twice on her chin before saying, “Sure. Anything for a few laughs.”

Good, that was taken care of, and now I had something even more important to do. What I had was a hope and plan and the sweet lift of pure possibility. What I still needed was Caroline Shaw’s signature on a contingency fee agreement before I could begin the delicate process of spinning the tragedy of Jacqueline Shaw’s death into gold.

13

I CLEARED OFF MY DESK before she came, threw out the trash, filed the loose papers whose files I could find, shoved the rest into an already too full desk drawer. Only one manila folder sat neatly upon the desktop. I straightened the photographs on my office wall, arranged the client chairs at perfect obtuse angles one to another, took a plant from Beth’s office and placed it atop my crippled filing cabinet. I had on my finest suit, a little blue worsted wool number from Today’s Man, and a non-Woolworth real silk tie. I had spent a few moments that morning in my apartment, globbing polish onto my shoes and then buffing them to a sharp pasty black. I buttoned my jacket and stood formally at the door and then unbuttoned it and sat on the edge of my desk and then buttoned it again and stood behind my desk, leaning over with one hand outstretched, saying out loud, in rounded oval tones, “Pleased to see you again, Ms. Shaw.”

It was so important to get this right, to make the exactly correct impression. There is a moment in every grand venture when the enterprise teeters on the brink, and I was at that moment. I needed Caroline’s signature, and I needed it today, I believed. With it I had a chance, without it I held as much hope as a lottery ticket flushed down the toilet. That was why I was practicing my greeting like a high school freshman gearing himself to ask the pretty new girl from California to the hop.

“Thank you for coming, Ms. Shaw.”

“I hope this wasn’t too inconvenient, Ms. Shaw.”

“Have a seat, Ms. Shaw.”

“I’m glad you could make it this morning, Ms. Shaw.”

“God, I need a cigarette,” she said, giving me a wry look as she sat, no doubt commenting on my tone of voice, which sounded artificial even to me. She drew a pack from her bag and tapped out a cigarette and lit up without asking if I minded, but I didn’t mind. Anything she wanted. From out of my drawer I pulled an ashtray I had picked up from a bric-a-brac shop on Pine Street specifically for the occasion. Welcome to Kentucky, it read. She flicked a line of ashes atop the red of the state bird.

She was wearing her leather jacket and tight black pants and combat boots. On the side of her neck was the tattoo of a butterfly I hadn’t noticed before. She looked more formidable than I remembered from that morning outside the Roundhouse when she pulled her gun on me and then collapsed to the ground. Even the stud piercing her nose seemed no longer a mark of desperation but instead an insignia of power and brutal self-possession. I felt, despite my finest suit and newly polished shoes, at a distinct disadvantage. It was interesting how things between us had changed. When she first came to me she was the one begging for help, but I guess a hundred million dollars or so can shift the power in any conversation.

“Couldn’t we have done this over the phone?” she asked, exhaling her words in stream of white smoke. “It’s a little early for me.”

“Well then, I appreciate your punctuality. I thought it best we meet in person.” I didn’t explain that it was impossible to get a signature over the phone. “You’ve disposed of your gun, I hope.”

She gave me her sly smile. “I flushed it down the toilet. Some alligator’s probably shooting rats in the sewers as we speak.” She took a long drag and looked around nervously.

“That butterfly on your neck,” I said. “Is that new? I didn’t notice it before.”

“Yes, it is,” she said, suddenly brightening. “It’s from a designer collection, available only at the finest parlors. DK Tattoo. Do you like it?”

I nodded and looked at her more carefully. She said in our prior meeting that she was in fear of her life and so the first thing she did after hiring me was to go out and get herself tattooed. If not exactly an appropriate response it was certainly telling, though I couldn’t quite figure telling of what. As I was looking at her she took out another cigarette.

“Do you always smoke like this?” I asked.

“Like what?”

“Like a New Jersey refinery.”

“Just in the morning. By the afternoon I’m hacking too much. So what have you learned about my sister’s death, Mr. Carl?”

“I learned that you haven’t been entirely candid with me.”

“Oh, haven’t I?”

I stared at her for a moment, waiting for her to squirm a bit under the power of my gaze, but it didn’t seem to affect her. She stared back calmly. So what I did then was reach into my desk drawer and pull out a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills and slap them onto the desktop with a most satisfying thwack. Caroline flinched at the sound. Ben Franklin stared up at me with surprise on his face.

“Ten thousand dollars,” I said. “The full amount of your retainer check. Take it.”

“What are you talking about?” she said, flustered and suddenly devoid of her slyness.

“I’m returning your money.”

She stood up. “But you can’t do that. I bought you. I wrote the check and you cashed it.”

“And now I’m giving it all back,” I said calmly. “You’re going to have to find someone else to play your games. I don’t represent clients who lie to me.” This itself was a lie, actually. All my clients lie to me, it is part of the natural order of the legal profession: clients lie, lawyers overcharge, judges get it wrong.

“But I didn’t lie,” she said, her voice rich with whine. “I didn’t. What I told you about my sister was true. Every word of it. She didn’t kill herself, I know it.” There were tears of shock in her eyes as she pleaded with me. It was going rather well, I thought.

“I believe you’re right, Caroline. I believe your sister was murdered.”

“You do?” she said. “Really?” She fell back into her chair, crossing her legs and hugging herself tightly. “Then what’s the problem?”

“Didn’t you think it significant that I know your sister was a Reddman? Didn’t you think that would have impacted my investigation?”

“My family had nothing to do with her death.”

“That’s what you hired me to determine.”

She looked at me, her eyes still wet. “I hired you to find out which mob bastard killed my sister and to convince him not to kill me too. That’s all. I don’t need anyone digging up my family graveyard.”

“If I’m going to find a murderer I have to know everything. I have to know about your family, about the family fortune, about this Church of the New Life that sent its goons into my office threatening me off the case.”

Her head lifted at that and she smiled. “So that’s it. The chant-heads frightened you.”

“Why would they threaten me?”

“You want to have a blast? Throw a brown paper bag in the middle of one of their meditation sessions and yell, ‘Meat!’ ”

“Why would they threaten me, Caroline?”

Pause, and then in the most matter-of-fact voice: “Maybe because their church was the beneficiary of Jackie’s insurance policy.”

I looked at her and waited. The room was already dense with smoke, but she took out another Camel Light.

“We all have insurance policies, to help pay our estate taxes should we die. The trust covers the premiums and the family members are named beneficiaries, unless we decide otherwise. Jacqueline decided to name the church.”

“How much?”

“God, not much, I don’t think, not enough to cover even half the tax. Five.”

“Thousand?”

She laughed, a short burst of laughter.

“Million,” I said flatly.

She stared at me for a bit and then her mouth wiggled at the corners. “Are you married, Mr. Carl?”

“No.”

“Engaged or engaged to be engaged or gay?”

“I was once.”

“Gay?”

“Engaged.”

“So what happened?”

“It didn’t work out.”

“They never do, Vic. Can I call you Vic?”

“Call me Victor,” I said. “Vic makes me sound like a lounge singer.”

“All right, Victor.” She leaned forward and gave me a smile saucy and innocent all at once. The effect of this smile was so disarming that I had to shake my head to get my mind back to the vital business at hand.

“Didn’t you think, Caroline, that a five-million-dollar life insurance policy was important enough to tell me about? I can’t work in the dark.”

“Well, now you know everything, so take your money back.”

“No.”

“Take it.”

“I won’t.”

It was almost ludicrous, arguing like that over a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Any other situation I would have knocked her to the floor while grabbing for it, but this wasn’t any other situation. She stared at me and I stared at her and we were locked in a contest of wills I would win because I wanted something ever so much more than she. It was time to lay it out for her. I fought to keep my nerves from snapping.

“I’m not willing to continue under the old arrangement,” I said, “not with the way you withheld crucial information from me. If we’re to go forward together it will have to be different.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There is a type of legal action that is perfectly designed to cover this situation. It is a civil proceeding and it is called wrongful death. If I’m going to continue to work on your behalf I will only do it as your partner in the prosecution of such a suit on a contingency fee basis.”

“Ahh,” she said, crossing her arms, leaning back, taking a long inhale from her cigarette. “Now I understand,” she said and I could tell that she did. I suppose the very rich see the look I had just then more often than is seemly, the baleful gleam of want in the eyes of those they do business with. I wonder if it wearies them with its inevitability or thrills them with reassurance of their power and privilege.

“One third for our firm if it settles before trial,” I explained. “Forty percent if I have to try it, which goes into effect once we impanel a jury. But money’s not the issue,” I lied. “Finding the truth is the issue. If you level with me, I’ll do my best to get to the bottom of your sister’s death.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said with an edge in her voice, as if she were talking to a somewhat unpleasant servant. “You already have.”

It was an awkward moment, but that is inevitable, really, when one’s business is tragedy. She was looking for help, I was looking for a gross profit, how could it be otherwise?

“I have the appropriate documents right here,” I said, indicating the manila folder on my desktop. “If you’ll just read them carefully and sign, we can continue our relationship as I’ve outlined.”

I pushed the file toward her and watched as she opened it and read the fee agreements. I had already signed where I was required to sign; all that was wanting was her signature. As she read, nodding here and there, I barely stifled a desire to get down on my knees and polish her boots. I was certain it was all taken care of when she suddenly closed the folder and dropped it back onto my desk.

“No,” she said.

My stomach fell like a gold bar sinking in the sea.

“Sorry, Victor,” she said. “No.”

“But why not? It’s a standard agreement. Why not? Why not?”

She stood and slipped me that sly smile of hers. “Because you want it too much.”

Out of watering eyes I stared at her with horror as she picked the wad of hundred-dollar bills off my desk and shoved it into a pocket of her leather jacket. The lottery ticket swirled round the toilet bowl to the drain.

“All I wanted you to do,” she said, “was to prove that Jimmy Vigs killed my sister. Was that too hard?”

“But Jimmy didn’t do it.”

“How do you know?”

“I asked him.”

“Nice work, Victor,” she said as she turned to leave.

Panic. Say something, Victor, anything.

“But what if I’m right and it wasn’t the mob? What if it was something much closer? I’ve been asking around, Caroline. The Reddmans, I’ve been told, are a family dark with secrets.”

She stopped, her back still to me, and said, “My family had nothing to do with it.”

“So you’ve said. Every time I mention the possibility that your family is involved in your sister’s death you simply deny it and try to change the topic of conversation. Why is that, Caroline?”

She turned and looked at me. “I get enough of that question from my therapist. I don’t need it from my lawyer, too.”

Her lawyer. There was still hope. “But what if one of those dark family secrets is behind your sister’s death?”

As she stared at me something at once both ugly and wistful slipped onto her face, a mix of emotions far beyond her range as an actress. Then she walked right up to my desk and started unbuttoning her shirt.

I was taken aback until she reached inside her shirt and pulled out some sort of a medallion hanging on a chain from her neck. She slipped the chain over her head and threw the medallion on my blotter. It was a cross, ancient-looking, green and encrusted, disfigured by time and the elements. In the upper corners of the cross, sharp-pointed wings jutted out, as if a bird had been crucified there.

“That is the Distinguished Service Cross,” she said. “It was awarded to my grandfather, Christian Shaw, for gallantry in World War I. He led an attack over the trenches in the first American battle of the war and routed the Germans almost single-handedly. My grandmother dredged it from the pond on our family estate after his death. She gave this medal to me one afternoon as we sat together in her garden and said she wanted me to have it.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said.

“My grandmother told me that this medal symbolized more than mere heroism. Whatever crimes in our family’s past, she said, whatever hurts inflicted or sins committed, whatever, this medal was evidence, she said, that the past was dead and the future full of promise. Conciliation, she said, expiation, redemption, they were all in that medal.”

Those were the same three words the old lady had used with Grimes. I couldn’t help but wonder: conciliation to whom, expiation for what, redemption how?

“So all those rumors and dark secrets and gossip, I don’t care,” she continued. “They have nothing to do with Jacqueline and nothing to do with me. The past is dead.”

“If you believe that, then why do you still wear this medal around your neck?”

“A memento?” she said, her voice suddenly filled with uncertainty.

I shook my head.

She sat down and took her grandfather’s Distinguished Service Cross back from me. She stared at it for a while, examining it as if for the first time. “My therapist says my ailurophobia comes from deep-seated fears about my family. She says my family is cold and manipulative and uncaring and until I am able to face the truth I will continue to sublimate my true feelings into irrational fears.”

“What do you think?”

“I think I just hate cats.”

“Your therapist might be on to something.”

“Why is it that everyone wants to dig up my family’s past in order to save me? My therapist, you.”

“The police also tried to look into any familial connection with your sister’s death but were cut off by Mr. Harrington at the bank.”

She looked up at me when I mentioned Harrington’s name.

“And, deep down, Caroline, you want to look into it too.”

“You’re being ludicrous.”

“Why else would you pay my retainer with a check drawn on the family bank? It was as clear as an advertisement.”

Her voice slowed and softened. “Do you really think Jacqueline was murdered?”

“It’s possible. I can’t be certain yet, but I am certain I’m the only one still willing to look into it.”

“And you think with the answer you can save me?”

“Do you need saving?”

She closed her eyes and then opened them again a few seconds later. “What do you want me to do, Victor?”

“Sign the contract.”

“I won’t. I can’t. Not until I know everything.”

“Why not?”

“Because then I’ll have given up all control and I can’t ever do that.”

She said it flatly, as if it were as obvious as the sun, and there was something so transparent in the way she said it that I knew it to be true and that pushing her any further would be useless.

“How about this, Caroline?” I said. “I’ll agree to continue investigating any connection between the mob and your sister’s death so long as you agree to start telling me the truth, all the truth, and help me look at any possible family involvement too. I’ll pursue the case without a contract and without a retainer, providing you promise me that if I find a murderer, and you decide to sue, then you’ll let me handle the case on my terms.”

She stared some more at the medal and thought about what I had proposed. I didn’t like this arrangement, I liked things signed, and sealed, but it was my only hope, I figured, to keep on the trail of my fortune, so I watched oh so carefully as her hand played with the medal and her face worked over the possibilities.

When I saw a doubt slip its way into her features I said, “Did you ever wonder, Caroline, how the medal got into the pond in the first place?”

She looked up at me and then back at the medal, hefting it in her hand before she grasped the chain and hung her grandfather’s Distinguished Service Cross back around her neck. “You find that out, Victor, and I’ll sign your damn contract.”

“Is that a promise?”

“There’s a dinner at the family estate, Veritas, on Thursday night,” she said. “The whole family will be there. You can be my date.”

“They shouldn’t know we’re looking into your sister’s death.”

“No,” she said. “You’re right, they shouldn’t.”

“Anything I should know before I meet them all?”

“Not really,” she said, with an uncomfortably knowing smile. “Just don’t come hungry.”

14

“ABOUT HOW MANY CONVERSATIONS did you have with the defendant in the course of your dealings, Detective Scarpatti?”

“I don’t know, lots. I taped five and we had others. It took awhile for him to get it all straight. Your boy, he’s not the swiftest deal maker out there, no Monty Hall.”

“So you were forced to lead him through the deal, is that right?”

“Just in the details, but there was no entrapment here, Counselor, if that’s what you’re getting at. Cressi came to me looking to buy the weapons. He wanted to buy as many as I could sell. I told him one-seventy-nine was all I could come up with and he was disappointed with that number. But he brightened when I added the grenade launchers and the flamethrower. To be truthful, I was more surprised than anyone when he showed up. We were targeting a Jamaican drug outfit with the operation. But your guy could never make up his mind on the spot. He always said he had to think about it.”

“Like there was someone he had to run the details by, is that it?”

Scarpatti creased his brow and looked at me like he was straining to actually dredge up a thought and then said, “Yeah, just like that.”

Detective Scarpatti was a round, red-faced man who smiled all the while he testified. Jolly was the word he brought to mind as he sat and smiled on the stand, his hands calmly clasped over his round hard belly. His was a look that inspired trust, which is why he was such an effective undercover cop, I figured, and an effective witness. All cops have an immediate advantage as they step into the witness box in front of a jury; they are, after all, men and women who devote their lives to law enforcement and competent, truthful testimony is only what is to be expected. Of course they usually get into trouble as soon as they open their mouths, but Scarpatti wasn’t getting in trouble at this preliminary hearing and I sensed he wouldn’t get into any trouble at the trial either. I had never met the guy before but one look at him on the stand and I knew he would bury Peter Cressi. What jury wouldn’t convict on the cogent testimony of Santa Claus?

“Now in any of those myriad discussions, did Mr. Cressi ever specifically mention he had to run the details of the deal by someone else?”

“No.”

“Did he ever mention that he had a partner?”

“No, he didn’t. In fact I even asked once and he said he was flying strictly solo.”

“In any of your phone conversations did you ever sense there was someone else on the line?”

“No, not really. But come to think of it, now that you asked, there was one conversation where he stopped in the middle of a comment, as if he was listening to someone.”

“Did you hear a voice in the background?”

“Not that I remember.”

“All right, Detective. Now in the course of your conversations, did you ask Mr. Cressi what he planned to do with the guns?”

“Sure. Part of my job is to draw out as much information as possible, especially in a deal of this magnitude.”

“And how did he respond?”

“Can I refer to my notes?”

“Of course.”

Preliminary hearings are dry affairs, generally, where the defense tries to find out as much as possible about the case without tipping any stratagems that might be used at trial. I was putting on no testimony, presenting no evidence, Cressi was remaining blissfully silent. What I was doing was sitting at the counsel desk, sitting because that’s the way we do it in Philadelphia, the lazy man’s bar, asking my simple little questions, learning exactly how high was the mountain of evidence the state had against my client and whatever else I could glean about his attempted purchase of the guns. I was in a tricky position, stuck between a bad place and two hard guys, defending my client while also trying to find out for my patron, Mr. Raffaello, what Cressi was planning to do with his arsenal. Tricky, hell, it was flat-out unethical, as defined by the Bar Association, but when your client is a gleeful felon buying up an armory and a mob war is brewing and lives are at stake, especially your own, I think the ethical rules of the Bar Association become somewhat quaint. I think when you are that far over the edge it is up to you to figure out your way in the world and if they decide you stepped over a line and pull your ticket then maybe in the end they’re doing you a favor.

While Scarpatti was flipping through his little spiral-bound notebook, I turned to scan the courtroom. It was full, of course, but not to witness my scintillating cross-examination. Once I was finished there was another case set to go and then another and then another, as many hearings as defendants who needed to be held over for trial, and the defendants and lawyers and witnesses and families in the courtroom for those hearings that were to follow Cressi’s were waiting and watching, their faces slack with boredom. Except one face was not slack with boredom, one face was watching our proceedings with a keen, almost frightening interest. Thin sharp face, oily gray hair, dapper black suit, with a crimson handkerchief peeking from his suit pocket. What the hell was he doing here?

“All right, yeah. I got it right here,” said Scarpatti.

I turned around and faced the witness, whom I had forgotten about in the instant I noticed the mortician’s face of Earl Dante staring at me from the gallery of the courtroom. “All right, Detective, what did the defendant say to you when you asked him what he planned to do with the guns?”

“He said, and I’m quoting now, he said, ‘None of your fucking business.’ ”

Scarpatti laughed and the slack crowd, suddenly brought to life by the obscenity, laughed with him. Even Cressi laughed. You know you’re in trouble when your own client laughs at you.

“Thank you for that, Detective,” I said.

“Anytime, Counselor.”

When I was finished handling Scarpatti, denting his story not a whit, the prosecution rested and I stood and made my motion to dismiss all charges against my client. The judge smiled solicitously as she denied my motion and scheduled Cressi’s trial. I made a motion to reduce my client’s bail. The judge smiled solicitously as she denied my motion and, instead, raised his bail by a hundred thousand dollars, ordering Cressi to be taken into custody immediately by the sheriff until the additional funds could be posted. I objected strenuously to the increase, requesting she reconsider her addition, and she smiled solicitously, reconsidered, and added another fifty thousand to the amount. I made an oral motion for discovery, the judge smiled once again as she denied my motion and told me to seek informal discovery from the prosecution before coming to her with my requests.

“Anything else, Mr. Carl?” she said sweetly.

“Please, in heaven’s name, do me a favor here, Vic, and just say no,” said Cressi, loud enough for the whole courtroom to laugh again at my expense. Maybe I should have given up the law right there and hit the comedy circuit.

“I don’t think so, Your Honor,” I said.

“That’s probably a wise move.” The slam of her gavel. “Next case.”

Dante was waiting for me outside the courtroom, in one of the columnar white hallways of the new Criminal Justice Building. He leaned against a wall and held tight to his briefcase. Behind him, his head turning back and forth with an overstudied guardedness, was the weightlifter I had seen with Dante at the Roundhouse’s Municipal Court. Dante had one of those officious faces that was never out of place, a face full of condolence and efficiency. A dark face, close-shaven, with small very white teeth. His back stayed straight as he leaned and his cologne was strong. He could have been a maître d’ at the finest French restaurant in hell. Table for two? But of course. Would that be smoking or would you prefer to burn outright with your dinner? The only comforting thing about being face to face with Earl Dante was that he couldn’t then be behind my back.

“Find out anything yet, Victor?” Dante said to me in a calm resonant voice that held a slight lisp, as if his tongue was too long for his mouth and forked.

I felt a chill even though it was hot in that corridor. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“Those questions about possible partners and anything Cressi might have said about his intentions for those guns, very clever.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you do. You keep searching, you’ll find something.” He stared at me for a long moment, the significance of which I couldn’t gauge, and then turned his head away. “You might not have heard, Victor, but Calvi’s out.”

“I heard.”

“You liked Calvi, didn’t you? You were friends.”

“We shared a few meals.”

He turned his head to stare at me again. “You were friends.”

“Calvi doesn’t have friends. He despises everybody equally. But there were those who could stand his cigars, and those who couldn’t. I could, that was all, so we had lunch now and then and chatted about the Eagles.”

“He took a shine to you, all right. But he’s out. The organizational chart has been changed. You should be reporting to me from now on.”

“I don’t report,” I said. “That’s not what I do. I represent my clients to the best of my ability, that is all.”

“That’s never all.”

“With me, that is all.”

“You find out anything you’ll be smart and report to me, see?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Dante started sucking his teeth. His mouth opened with a slick leeching sound. “Want to hear a story?”

“Not particularly.”

“Out of high school I enlisted,” said Dante, ignoring my protest. “Want to know why? My father was an animal, that’s why. I was willing to shave my head and take orders like a dog for two years because my father was an animal. But I was also patriotic, see? Still am. I hear the anthem at a ball game and tears spring. I still love my country, even after they sent me to that shithole. See, there was nothing out there that was tougher than my father. I love my goddamn country, but over there I learned there is something beyond patriotism. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“It’s called survival. I didn’t survive by volunteering for every crappy mission some promotion-happy lieutenant dreamed up before we could frag him. And I didn’t survive by taking one step beyond the step I had to take. I survived by remembering that I couldn’t love my country if I was dead, see? Loyalty, it only goes so far. After that it doesn’t go no more. Things are changing fast, Victor. Calvi’s not the only one that’s going, there are others. You make the right choice and you come to me first, understand?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I heard you visited our friend Jimmy Dubinsky yesterday, so I thought you might like to know. He died this morning. Right there on the operating table.”

“Oh my God.”

“They had that wire up his heart and he had himself a massive. That’s the funny thing about Jimmy, everything about him was massive, even his death. Just thought you might like to know. Funeral’s Friday. Your people, Victor, they don’t mess around when it comes to burying their dead. A guy doesn’t even have time to cool before he’s in the ground.”

“But I just saw him yesterday. He can’t…”

“Some kids they showed up in our unit, we didn’t even want to know their names. You could see it in their eyes they wouldn’t last. I’m seeing that look right now, Victor.” He sucked his teeth again and chucked me on the shoulder. “See you at the funeral.” Then he turned and started walking away, holding his briefcase, walking off to bail out Cressi once again.

The weightlifter gave me a nasty wink and followed him down the corridor.

I watched them go and then fell to the wall, my back against the porous white stone, and covered my eyes with a hand while I shook. Jimmy dead. I had a hard time fathoming it. I actually liked the guy. But the news was worse than that. That tooth-sucking Earl Dante wanted me to pick a side without a scorecard, without a rule book, without even knowing what game we were playing. The way I looked at it, if I picked wrong I would be as dead as Jimmy and if I picked right I would be as dead as Jimmy. All I knew for sure was that I was on the wrong playing field and needed desperately to get out. When I had told Beth I had to flee the law or it would kill me, she didn’t know I was being literal as hell.

And I couldn’t help but think, as I shook against the corridor wall, that my fate in the coming mob apocalypse and my investigation of the dark secrets of the Reddmans would somehow become entwined. I was right, of course, but in a way I could never then have even vaguely imagined.