Hostile Witness

1

WHAT I HAVE LEARNED through my short and disastrous legal career is that in law, as in life, the only rational expectation is calamity. Take my first case as a lawyer.

There were three of us at the start, fresh out of law school, hanging up our shingles together because none of the large and prosperous firms in Philadelphia would have us. We were still young then, still wildly optimistic, still determined to crack it on our own. Guthrie, Derringer and Carl. I’m Carl. All it would take, we figured, was one case, one accidental paraplegia, one outrageous sexual harassment, one slip of the surgeon’s knife, one slam-bam-in-your-face case to make our reputations, not to mention our fortunes. We were only one case away from becoming figures of note in the legal community that had so far left us out in the cold. But before that grand and munificent case came walking through our door, we were sitting with our feet on our desks, reading the newspapers, waiting for anything.

“I’ve got something right here for you, Victor,” said Samuel R. Sussman, dropping a document on my desk. He was a bellicose little man who leaned forward when he talked and did annoying things like jab his finger into my chest for emphasis. But he was family.

The document was a demand note, personally guaranteed by a Winston Osbourne, representing a debt of one million dollars. Seven figures was two figures more than anything I had ever seen before.

“I picked up this baby at a discount,” said my Uncle Sammy.

“What exactly do you want me to do with it?”

“Collect it,” he said with a finger jab. “Osbourne says he’s broke and not going to pay me a cent. Get what you can off this society schmuck, and whatever you find keep a quarter for yourself. You’re getting married in the spring, right?”

“That’s the plan,” I said.

He winked. “Consider this my wedding gift.”

That was how my first case out of law school came to be a collection. I had not intended to use my degree to collect debts, I had not gone to law school so I could most effectively foreclose on the houses of the poor, but at the start I was desperate for anything. And besides, Winston Osbourne was not your usual deadbeat.

He was the scion of an old Protestant family, born to wealth, to society, given every advantage withheld from me, and through talent, luck, and sheer perseverance he became bankrupt. Tall, finely manicured, with a prosperous round face and sincere thin lips, he was of the Bryn Mawr Osbournes, an old and revered family, blue of blood, properly Mayflowered through a line of cousins, listed with the Biddles and the Ambers and the Peppers in the Social Register. In every expression, in every gesture, Osbourne’s breeding showed. He looked like a somebody, one wasn’t sure exactly whom, but a somebody who was a something and I guess that was how he managed to borrow so much money on his personal guarantee, money he invested in a huge tract of undeveloped land in Whitpain Township, seeking to reap the miracle benefits of subdivision. “Real estate is the only sure thing,” he used to say, jaw locked, chin up, “because they simply can’t make any more of it.” As he strode across his glorious acreage in Whitpain Township, planning the location of the fine luxury homes he would build there, he must not have noticed the strange foul liquid, pale and sulfurous, like the earth’s own bile, seeping into each of his footprints. Within six months of buying the property Winston Osbourne faced environmental catastrophe, and within a year he was in utter default.

“So you’re the grubby little shyster who’s chasing my money,” Winston Osbourne said to me when I first hauled him into my office in search of his assets. He was wearing a perfect gray suit, Gucci loafers, his sandy hair was trimmed close and neat, a gold Rolex flashed from beneath his cuff, and he actually said that. Well, not in those exact words, maybe, but that’s what he was thinking. It was as clear as the cleft in his chin. What he actually said was, “I’ve lost almost everything I ever had, Victor, and what little I have left is judgment proof. But I’m willing to pay you ten thousand dollars to end this. Believe me, Victor, that is the most you’ll ever get from me.”

I rejected his offer, and though I had a chip with which to bargain him higher, to Jew him up as it were, I thought the wiser play was to hold onto it, to flash it elsewhere in an effort to pry loose the entire million. I had no intention of letting him off the hook that was buried deep within his properly locked jaw. Winston Osbourne represented something to which I knew I could never ascend but my exclusion from which I could never quite accept. His old-line family name, the glorious prospects handed him at birth, his natural charm, even his bland sandy good looks, I resented it all, and for all of it he would pay. That was why that very day the process server was delivering a subpoena to Osbourne’s house in exclusive Gladwyne, ordering his wife to appear in my offices for deposition. I had plans for Mrs. Osbourne.

She was a handsome woman, elegant tweed suit, skin surgically tight around her blue eyes, pearls, hair that was done, I mean really done, a hundred and forty dollars’ worth of done, and I had her just where I wanted her, in our conference room, across the table from me, required to answer all my questions and sworn to tell the truth. She had chosen to come without counsel, which pleased me.

“How many cars do you and your husband own, Mrs. Osbourne?” I asked.

“Three,” she said in a reedy, masculine voice. “There is the station wagon.”

“That’s a Volvo, right?”

“Right,” she said. “It is a Volvo. Then there is the blue sedan.”

“A BMW?”

“From your tone of voice it sounds like a crime, Mr. Carl.”

“And the other?” I asked.

“A vintage car my husband maintains. His toy, really, but quite valuable. It was his father’s.”

“A Duesenberg.”

“Yes, that’s right. We have an old Lincoln, for transporting our dogs to the shows, but that’s hardly worth anything anymore. It’s almost four years old.”

“So that makes four cars total.”

“Yes, I suppose,” said Mrs. Osbourne.

“And in whose names are the titles to these cars?”

“Mine and my husband’s.”

“Even the Duesenberg?”

“Yes, Mr. Carl,” she said, confidently stroking her pearls. “Everything is in both of our names and, as you know, I’ve signed nothing.”

I knew that, yes I did. In Pennsylvania, property owned by a husband and wife together cannot be grabbed to satisfy the individual debts of either, so long as they remain married. Mrs. Osbourne, as best as I could determine, owed nothing to no one, not even to American Express. She had not guaranteed the loan and therefore all property she owned jointly with her husband was safely hidden from my grasp, so long as they remained married. And everything Winston Osbourne owned, his house, his cars, his bank accounts, even his damn Rolex, everything he owned he owned jointly with his wife. Well, almost everything.

“You own a house in Gladwyne, Mrs. Osbourne, is that right?”

“Yes. The title is in both of our names.”

“Has the house been appraised?”

“For insurance purposes, yes. It was appraised at two and a half million dollars. But that is our house, we live there, we raised our children there, we would never think of selling.”

“You’re aware, aren’t you, Mrs. Osbourne, that your husband owes Mr. Sussman a million dollars.”

“I am aware that Mr. Sussman is a speculator who bought that note for an absurdly low amount and now wants to grab his handful of flesh. My husband is a wonderful man, Mr. Carl, and I love him very much. But he is not the cleverest of businessmen, not as sharp, I am sure, as your Mr. Sussman. Anyone who lends my husband money does so at his own risk.”

I actually admired Mrs. Osbourne as she sat in our crummy little conference room and so bravely defended her husband’s standard of living. If I was in less need of my twenty-five percent share of Winston Osbourne’s cash I might have thought twice about what I was planning to do. But even after a second thought I would have continued. My investigation had uncovered information of which Mrs. Osbourne might not have been aware and of which I assumed it was my duty to apprise her.

“You own a property in Aspen, is that right, Mrs. Osbourne?”

“A condominium, yes. The children love to ski.”

“And that is in both of your names?”

“Of course.”

“And there is the property in Palm Beach.”

“Yes, but that is not ours. That is owned by Winston’s mother. Winston’s grandfather built it, it is a fabulous place, really. Have you been to Palm Beach, Mr. Carl?”

“No.”

“Where do you winter?”

“In front of the television.”

“I see. Well, the house in Palm Beach is not ours. We are permitted to use it, but when we are there we are guests. My understanding is that Winston’s mother has willed it to Winston’s brother, Richard.”

“So my patience would not be rewarded.”

“No, I’m afraid not. The entire family is aware of Winston’s current troubles. Whatever is to be left is being left to the children. Winston has made you an offer, has he not?”

“And there is the boat,” I continued, ignoring her comment about the offer. “You own a boat.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “He named it after me. We leave it in Florida.”

“How big is the boat?”

“Something like forty feet, I’m not sure. Winston is the sailor. He is quite dashing in his white ducks and blue blazer.”

“In whose name is the boat titled?”

“Isn’t this getting repetitious, Mr. Carl? It is in both of our names. Everything is in both of our names.”

“Including the condominium in Atlantic City?”

“We don’t own a condominium in Atlantic City.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “There is a condo in a building right on the Boardwalk titled to Winston Osbourne. Let me show you a copy of the deed. I’ll mark this P. 12.”

“There must be some mistake, you must be thinking of another man. We don’t own a condominium in Atlantic City.”

“The person living there identified your husband as the owner.”

“I’m not aware of a condominium in Atlantic City.”

“Well, this person living there now says she doesn’t pay rent to Mr. Osbourne, and I was wondering if she paid the rent to you. Any such rent would be attachable on behalf of Mr. Sussman.”

“No, of course I am not receiving the rent.”

“Perhaps you know the person living in your husband’s apartment, a Miss LeGrand?”

“No.”

“Let me show you a picture. I’ll mark this P. 13.”

“What is this? This is a brochure of some sort.”

“Yes, for a gentlemen’s club called the Pussy Willow. Why don’t you look through it. I’m referring to the section about the exotic dancers. Let me show you. The woman right there.”

“Tiffany LeGrand?”

“Oh, so you do know her,” I said, even though the shaking of her head, her dazed eyes, opened brutally, unnaturally wide, the death grip with which she now held onto her pearls, all of it stated with total clarity that no, no, she did not know her, had never heard of her, no.

I ran into Winston Osbourne again the gray and tremulous fall of which now I speak, a full six years after I had begun my relentless search for his final dollar. Halfway up 21st Street from Chestnut, just before my small and decrepit office building, yawned an alleyway. There was a stink to that alley, it was where the dumpsters were stored for the buildings on either side; it smelled of fish bones from the seafood restaurant on 22nd Street, of rotting vegetables from the Korean grocery beneath my office. Two homeless men shared the alley as sure as if they had signed a lease. They pissed in the entranceways of all the surrounding buildings, like wolves marking their territory. They panhandled, drank out of brown paper bags, shouted obscenities when the mood struck, and sometimes actually worked by carrying a sandwich board for Condom Nation, a prophylactic store, back and forth in the neighborhood. Every time I walked up 21st Street, I accelerated as I approached the alley, keeping my eyes straight and my shoulders hunched, trying to avoid any contact with my neighbors. I had just passed the gap one night that fall when I heard my name being called and felt a grab at my arm.

I whirled away from the contact, expecting to see one of the homeless men, but who I saw instead was Winston Osbourne. His raincoat was grimed, his hair long and stringy, his once prosperous face now drawn and sallow. His fingernails struck me particularly; where they had been manicured and glossy they were now long, yellow, opaque with ridges. They were the fingernails of a corpse.

“Victor,” he said, his voice still dripping with superiority. “We’ve been discussing you, Victor.”

“You should have your lawyer contact me, Mr. Osbourne,” I said, staring at his nails. “I can only speak to your lawyer.”

He took a rolling step toward me. There was a limp now that hadn’t been there before. “Yes. But you see, I couldn’t afford to pay him.” He took another step forward. “Since the divorce I’ve gone through a difficult time, Victor. Much toil, much trouble. But I’m certain I can see my way clear of it now.”

“That’s good, Mr. Osbourne.”

“But I need to open a bank account, Victor, a local account for business purposes, and every time I try you end up attaching the funds. This has become very inconvenient for me.”

“With interest, Mr. Osbourne, you still owe Mr. Sussman almost nine hundred thousand dollars.” My gambit with his wife had not worked as well as I had intended. Osbourne, sheared in the divorce settlement, had been able to secrete most of what little his wife’s lawyer had left him before I could file my attachments. Foreign bank accounts, straw-man holding companies. He was much better at hiding money than at making it.

“I’m aware of exactly all that I owe Sussman,” said Winston Osbourne. “And I do wish I could pay him back for everything. You too, Victor. In fact, plans are being laid this very instant to pay you back. But I need to open a bank account. I can’t revive my prospects without a bank account, now can I, Victor?”

“Have you talked to a lawyer about declaring bankruptcy?”

“Yes, of course. But I’m an Osbourne, Victor, something you can’t begin to understand.” He shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “And not all my debts are dischargeable, I’ve been told.”

“What do you want, Mr. Osbourne?”

“I want you to leave me alone. All I’m asking is for you to behave reasonably. This is your last chance. I’m willing to pay you to leave me alone.”

“How much?”

“Ten thousand dollars, like before. But, unfortunately, nothing for at least a year.”

“Mr. Osbourne, you still have a vintage Duesenberg hidden somewhere. I believe you have money stashed in the Cayman Islands, as well as in certain Swiss banks. I understand you recently traveled to Florida, out of season, yes, but still Florida. Frankly, I think you can do better, Mr. Osbourne, than a slim promise of maybe ten thousand dollars to be paid in a year.”

“You can’t know how difficult it’s been for me since the divorce.”

“Florida. The Sunshine State.”

His head dropped slightly. “My daughter insisted I go with her.”

“Where is your Duesenberg, Mr. Osbourne?”

“It’s not worth anything anymore. It’s too old, I haven’t been able to keep it in repair. For your own good, Victor, take my offer.”

“Turn your car over to the sheriff, Mr. Osbourne, and we’ll talk.”

I walked away from him, toward the door of the building, when I heard him shout, “By God, man. I just want to be able to open a damn bank account like a human being.”

I couldn’t erase the image of Winston Osbourne and his fingernails from my mind for the whole of that season. There was a time in his life when the wealthy, handsome, socially prominent, socially registered, socially social Winston Osbourne was everything I ever wanted to be. Now, as I struggled with the frustrations in my life, he was everything I feared I would become. The case we had been waiting for, the slam-bam-in-your-face case, had never come, and we too now had bills we couldn’t meet, dunning letters came by the bushelful, we couldn’t pay our secretary week to week, not to mention the office rent. One of my partners had already bailed and I couldn’t really blame him, though I did. Six years out of law school and I was flat-out broke, one step up from the grimed broken figure I saw outside my office. I had once bitterly resented Winston Osbourne for all he was born to, but now I feared falling to his depths and so I resented him all the more. If he wanted to open a bank account that meant there was money and if there was money, by God, I would get my hands on it. Every last dollar, you bastard, every last dollar until you die.

I see now that I was suffering a profound weariness that autumn. The disappointments of my life had worn me down, not to mention that I was alone and lonely and had been both for far too long. Whatever optimism I had once held had been supplanted by a deep and gnawing resentment of everyone and everything. Then in that sad gray fall there finally arrived the chance for which I had been waiting. It was an opportunity rooted in murder, premised on betrayal, an opportunity that required the suspension of all I once held sacrosanct, but still there it was. And the only question was whether I was man enough to pay its price.

When I think back upon that season I see its inauguration in the apparitional appearance of the ruined Winston Osbourne, but from there it spun furiously out of control. It was the season of my opportunity, yes, but also a season of corruption, of treachery, a calamitous season of self-delusion and abnegation. Most of all it was a season of love, a sweat-soaked love that still leaves me gasping when I awake with a start in the middle of the night and remember. It was a season that promised my most desperate dreams and stroked my deepest fears.

It was fall in Philadelphia.

2

ONE LIBERTY PLACE was a huge granite and glass rocket that blasted beyond the staid and squared-off Philadelphia skyline until it lost itself in smoky autumnal skies, the highest, grandest, most prestigious building in the reviving City of Brotherly Love. Which explained why the law firm of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase had leased the fifty-fourth, fifty-fifth, and fifty-sixth floors for its offices even before construction was completed. Talbott, Kittredge and Chase was the city’s most entrenched law firm. It was the home of congressmen and mayors; it had yielded six judges to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and one to the Supreme Court. It was the dream of every law student who sought the brightest of the golden rings the law had to offer. Only the best was good enough for Talbott, Kittredge and Chase.

I applied for a position at Talbott, Kittredge as a second-year law student. I wrote a spiffy letter and goosed my resume until I didn’t recognize myself on its crisp ivory paper. I was not law review and my grade point average was merely mediocre, but still I sent my application off with a queer confidence, sure that my true quality would shine through the flat black type, and for all I know it did. But only the best was good enough for Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. I didn’t even rate an interview.

I wasn’t consciously thinking of this rejection as I walked through the great stone lobby of One Liberty Place and stepped onto the marble-walled elevator seven years after sending off that letter, but as I rose to the fifty-fourth floor my resentment rose with me, and not just a resentment of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. There was Dechert Price & Rhoads, there was Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, there was Rawle & Henderson, White & Williams, there was Drinker, Biddle, and Reath. There was even Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen. Out of law school I applied to the top twenty-five firms in the city and they all passed on my offer to slave in their libraries and work outrageous hours so their partners could become obscenely rich. Cut adrift, I was forced to stoop lower than I could ever have imagined and work for myself.

By the fall of my visit to Talbott, Kittredge and Chase there were only two of us left in our sad little firm, we were now merely Derringer and Carl. Our third partner, Guthrie, had fled. Seeing the inevitability of our failure, Guthrie had found himself a rich girl with family connections and had ridden her name to a job with Blaine, Cox, Amber & Cox, one of the fine old firms that had initially rejected us all. Where he found his young and prosperous wife, now Lauren Amber Guthrie, was in my bedroom, which made his leaving for the money and the prestige and the wood-paneled offices of his new employer particularly galling. The bastard left without a backward glance and he took our best cases with him. That left just Derringer and me and the bills we couldn’t pay and the files Guthrie didn’t think were worth stealing. One of those files was Saltz v. Metropolitan Investors, in the service of which my resentment and I were rising like a firecracker to the fifty-fourth floor of One Liberty Place.

The elevator opened on a broad and open lobby, tastefully floored with a rich wood parquet and furnished with antique couches. TALBOTT, KITTREDGE & CHASE read the glossy brass letters tacked above the receptionist’s desk. Two of the walls were of glass, offering killer views of the city south and east into New Jersey, with the blue sweep of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge spanning the breadth of the Delaware. The other walls were paneled in cherry, waxed and buffed to a military shine. But it was not those walls that were most impressive, nor the huge oriental carpets nor the couches nor the fine wood cocktail tables nor the gorgeous blonde receptionist who smiled warmly at me the moment I stepped off the elevator. What was most impressive was the enormity of the space itself, a breathtaking expanse bigger than a basketball court, a tract with no purpose other than projecting an image of elegance and wealth and power at fifty bucks a square foot. I couldn’t help myself from doing the math. With what they spent each year on that lobby alone they could buy me five times over.

“Victor Carl to see William Prescott,” I said to the receptionist.

“Fine, Mr. Carl. Take a seat and I’ll tell him you’re here.”

I stepped toward one of the couches and then turned back to the receptionist, who was already on the phone. She was a strikingly beautiful woman, this receptionist. The kind of woman who should only exist in perfume ads or on car show platforms. Her hair was pale and windswept, as if even while I stood in the enormous calm of that lobby, she was perched on the deck of an ocean yacht.

“Do I know you?” I asked. That was my line at the time, though it has since been discarded, like all the others, due to continued and unmitigated failure.

She looked me over carefully and then gave a light toss to her oceanic hair. “No, I don’t think so,” she said.

“It was worth a try.”

“Not in this lifetime, Mr. Carl,” she said with a look that exiled me to one of the couches at the far end of the lobby.

But she was right, of course. Women like that did not exist for guys like me, they existed for the wealthy, the witty, the thrillingly articulate, for ballplayers and movie stars and presidential aides. And, of course, they were for adorning the offices of those brilliant firms like Talbott, Kittredge and Chase that refused to let me join their ranks. Oh man, I hated this place, I hated it so bad I could taste it.

“Mr. Carl,” said a pretty, sharp-suited woman who had crossed the broad expanse of lobby to the couch where I was sitting. I had been waiting for half an hour, pretending to be interested in a copy of the Wall Street Journal I picked off one of the cocktail tables in the pathetic hope that the receptionist might mistake me for a corporate client checking on the value of his stock options. “Come with me, please,” the woman in the suit said. “I’ll take you to Mr. Prescott’s office.”

I followed her up a flight of stairs and through twists and turns of broad hallways. I passed desks of grim secretaries typing efficiently into their word processors and caught glimpses of well decorated rooms from which worried associates darted back and forth. There was a hum of activity in those offices, a melange of sound emanating from the fluorescent lights, from the computer fans, from the laser printers squeezing out page after page after page, from the incessant soft ring of the phones and quiet voices explaining that Mr. Wilson or Ms. Antonelli or Mr. Schwartz was on another line but would get right back to you. To a lawyer the sound was of more than just run-of-the-mill office activity. It was the sound of billable hours, it was the sound of money. It was not a sound I heard too often. In our hallway what I heard instead was the hush of financial desperation.

She ushered me into a large corner office, an office bigger than my apartment. The view stretched south and west. Straight ahead Broad Street ran like a mighty river to Veterans Stadium in the distance, and to the right I could see old Franklin Field and the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, whose law school, along with Harvard’s and Yale’s and Stanford’s and NYU’s and all the other top ten’s, had rejected my application. Prescott’s office was wood clad, like a judge’s chambers, furnished with an elegant living room set at one end, a long oak table piled with briefs and exhibits in the middle, and a large, gilded desk in the windowed corner, with two tapestry-covered chairs before it and a low wooden credenza behind it. Across one of the walls was a flurry of framed photographs, pictures of mayors and congressmen, senators and presidents, each smiling as they stood next to a tall, stern-faced patrician, the photographs inscribed across the bottoms. On the far wall, above the living room set, hung a large neorealist painting of two boxers circling each other against an angry yellow background. The boxers’ bodies were clenched, they peered over their gloves, waiting for the moment to explode into violence. The painting was as tense as a coiled spring and the eyes of the fighters were filled with hate. It was a litigator’s painting.

“Mr. Prescott will be right in,” said my guide. “Make yourself comfortable.” She gestured at one of the chairs before the desk and I sat like a trained puppy.

On the credenza was a picture of the perfect family, three smiling beef-fed kids, a pretty wife, the tall patrician once again. In another the children were older, the wife wider, they stood before a beautiful country home with a wide veranda surrounded by thickly leafed trees, the patrician now in a wicker chair with a newspaper and a pipe. In that sad fall of my life such teeming family bliss seemed the most remote of all the ambitions I had so far failed to achieve.

I had never met William Prescott III but I had heard of him, everyone had. He was a great man, this William Prescott, the pride of his old and revered family. Skull and Bones at Yale, the law review at Harvard, he was a former deputy attorney general, a former ambassador to some obscure country in South America, a former Chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar. He was a pillar of the Republican Party and served on the boards of the Art Museum, the Free Library, the Philadelphia Orchestra. And now he was the top trial lawyer, the prime rainmaker, the managing partner at Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. One had to wonder what price he had paid for such success. He had everything a lawyer could ever want, but was he happy? Well, to tell from the pictures, he was ecstatic. I had never met this William Prescott but already I despised him.

“Victor, thank you for coming up to see me,” said a grayer version of the man in all the photographs.

I stood quickly, like a thief caught in the act, when William Prescott swept into the room. He entered like an emissary from some great nation-state. Very tall, very thin, with narrow lips and high prominent cheekbones, he peered from beneath bushy black eyebrows with blue eyes of startling clarity. He was not a classically handsome man, his nose was too long and his lips too thin, but he was a compelling presence, the very image of integrity. He wore a navy blue pinstriped Brooks Brothers suit, a banker’s suit, which he kept formally buttoned as he reached out in greeting. My hand was swallowed by his. Despite his slenderness, I had the unpleasant sensation that had he wanted to squeeze my hand until the bones crumbled he could have.

“You know Madeline Burroughs, Victor, I’m sure,” he said as he led me to the living room set beneath the painting of the boxers.

I hadn’t seen her there, my attention drawn so completely to Prescott and his presence. “Yes, of course.”

“Hello, Victor,” said Madeline. She was a round-faced, frumpish woman who dressed and acted like a spinster though still in her twenties. She smiled awkwardly for a moment; it was like a fist opening and closing.

“Sit down, please, both of you,” said Prescott. His voice was precise, graveled with age but still charmingly formal, like the wide unpaved driveways leading to Versailles. He came from the same world as Winston Osbourne and that was in his voice too, but where Osbourne’s voice betrayed all his innate snideness, in Prescott’s it was well hidden if it existed at all. I sat in one of the easy chairs, he sat directly across from me on the couch, leaning back and crossing his legs in a way that put me immediately at ease. Madeline sat tensely in the bend of the couch off to the side.

“I may call you Victor?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Normally I love the autumn, don’t you? But the grayness of the skies this year takes all the pleasure out of it. It might be time to visit our Miami office.” His blue eyes smiled at me and then turned cold. “Saltz v. Metropolitan Investors, Victor. That’s why we’re here today. How long have we been tangling over this case?”

“Three years, sir,” I said. The “sir” came instinctively, drawn out by his very demeanor and appearance. He seemed to accept my deference as his due.

“You’ve been hanging on all that time like a bulldog. Three years on a complaint not worth the filing fee. A bulldog. Good for you, Victor. Now Madeline here, one of our toughest litigators, has filed four motions to dismiss but the judge has kept it alive out of mercy.”

“Judge Tifaro is too timid to make a decision,” said Madeline, breaking into the discussion.

“What you’re both trying to say,” I said, “is that all your attempts to kill our case have failed.”

“Yes,” said Prescott, giving me an appraising look. “That is it exactly.”

Saltz was the weakest of those cases my ex-partner Guthrie left behind when he fled our firm on his way to success. A real estate limited partnership had gone bad, as they all seemed to have gone bad, and Guthrie had convinced the investors to sue those who had syndicated and sold the deal. There was a lengthy complaint with wild allegations of fraud and conspiracy. We had the case on a one-third contingency. I had thrown away a pot of money investigating only to find that there was no real evidence of anything other than stupidity on the part of all involved. My investigation wasn’t helped by the fact that a crucial witness, the accountant who prepared the prospectus, a weasel named Stocker, had disappeared, taking certain of his clients’ trust funds with him. Without him we had nothing but a hope that we could bluff our way into a settlement. Which was why I was there, to take one last look at my hand, to press my lips together, to look around the table and back at my hand and then to raise, confidently, in the faint chance the bastards would fold. Not likely. I had been asking for half a million, hoping they’d give me a counteroffer in the mid-five figures, upon which I planned to leap.

“Would you like some coffee or a soft drink, Victor?” asked Prescott. He reached to a phone sitting on the coffee table between us and pressed a button. The pretty woman who had led me to the office immediately appeared. “Janice, a coffee for me, please. And for you, Victor?”

“Coffee, black.” Janice left without taking a request from Madeline.

“We’re not here to argue, Victor,” said Prescott, which was a lie, because that was precisely why we were there. “The syndicators have asked that I take a more personal interest in this case as we approach the trial. Glancing through the file, I noticed your name wasn’t on the complaint. It was filed by a Samuel Guthrie.”

“He was my partner, but he left the firm.”

“Yes. Joined Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox, didn’t he?”

“They gave him a very handsome offer.”

“Married an Amber, I understand. Their youngest, the pretty one. I was invited to the wedding but was overseas at the time.”

“I couldn’t make it either,” I said, though I hadn’t missed it because I was overseas. I think there was something on television I needed to see that night, The World of Disney on Ice maybe, or something.

“I suppose the marriage might have had something to do with the offer.”

“Something.”

“That leaves you with two lawyers now, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.” Prescott had done more than merely glance through the file.

“I assume Mr. Guthrie took a number of his clients with him,” he continued. “But he didn’t take this case. Tell us why not, Victor.”

“Because it barks,” said Madeline.

I glanced sideways at her and let out a soft growl under my breath.

“Do you know what the key to any successful law practice is, Victor?” asked Prescott.

I couldn’t help my bitter smile. “Obviously not, sir.”

“Objectivity,” he said, with a rich man’s certainty. “It’s all too easy in this business to take positions that satisfy our emotions but that ultimately hurt our clients. It’s all too easy to let our passions stir.”

I tried but failed to imagine passions stirring in the formal upright man before me.

“Now we’ve given you all our files and you’ve found nothing,” he continued. His graveled voice, still precise and formal, now gained a touch of anger, just a hint, but just a hint was enough to send me slinking back in my chair. “Some minor discrepancies between the information we received and what went out in the prospectus, yes, but not enough to show a pattern. And you won’t be able to prove reliance on the prospectus anyway. Nobody reads those things. You can be assured the jury will learn of the many charitable organizations our clients support, the many philanthropic boards they sit upon. And in the end the jurors will view your clients as fools with so much money they were willing to throw it away on any twisted tax shelter that promised they wouldn’t have to pay their fair share. Frankly, Victor, if we go to trial we’re going to bloody you, and you know it.”

He paused when the door opened. “Ah, Janice.”

She came in with a large silver tray and laid it upon the low table. There was a silver coffeepot and two white china cups and a crystal creamer and a crystal sugar bowl with a fine silver spoon. On a doily set upon a china plate perched an array of fancy cookies. It looked as if the Queen were coming to join us. I was grateful for the respite as my eyes had begun watering. My eyes water whenever I am under attack, a condition that was hell in elementary school, and I was under attack now. In less than a minute Prescott had exposed every weakness in my case. As Janice poured for me, I tried to squeeze back the tears.

“The project never made a dime,” I said before taking a sip of coffee. It was so exquisite it startled me for a moment, rich and crisply bitter. I took another sip. “As soon as you took our money it all went down the tubes. I’ll make that very clear for the jury.”

“The real estate market died on us,” said Prescott. “Everyone on the jury will know that. They can’t sell their houses either.”

“Your projections weren’t even close.”

“They were only projections. We never claimed we could predict the future.” He put a shrug into his voice. “It was a business deal between businessmen that went bad. Business deals go bad every day without any fraud involved. We can go on all day like this, Victor, back and forth, but that’s no way to find common ground. Our clients want to fight to the end.” Then he flashed the smile of a diplomat greeting an unworthy adversary whom protocol required him to flatter and said the words I had been waiting to hear. “But I have convinced them that the economics are in favor of our working something out.”

I felt a thrill ripple through me just then, the thrill of a settlement on the horizon, of money in my bank. Without changing a card, my poker hand had grown brawny.

Keeping his eyes focused on mine, he said, “Madeline, what were the most recent figures discussed?”

“Plaintiffs demanded half a million dollars,” she said through a smirk. “We offered five thousand.”

“It hadn’t seemed worth pursuing,” I said.

“Well, let’s try, Victor,” said Prescott. “Even if you won everything you’d win what? A million dollars?”

“We’ve asked for punitives.”

“Yes, and we’ve asked for sanctions for the filing of a frivolous lawsuit. We’ll say a million. You received tax benefits on the losses of about thirty percent, so let’s put actual compensatory damages at seven hundred thousand. Now tell me honestly, Victor, since this is all off the record, at what do you put your chance of actually winning? Five percent? Ten percent?”

“Fifty-fifty?” I hadn’t meant it to, but my answer ended up being phrased as a question.

“That’s a joke, right?” said Madeline.

“Be reasonable, Victor,” said Prescott. “We’re trying to work together here. Let’s put it at ten percent.”

“It’s not worth seventy thousand dollars,” said Madeline.

“Ten percent, Victor? Seventy thousand dollars. What do you say?”

One third of seventy thousand dollars came to something like twenty-three grand, enough to pay off our firm’s bills and make payroll and rent for the next month. I had to hold myself back from shouting yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. “It’s not enough,” I said. “You couldn’t try this case for less than a hundred thousand, and you still might lose. I’d go back to my clients with an offer of two hundred and fifty thousand.”

“Of course you would,” said Prescott.

“I told you it wasn’t worth discussing,” said Madeline. “Guthrie we could talk to, but Victor acts like he’s on some crusade.”

“You’re using my hourly rate against us, Victor,” said Prescott. “That doesn’t seem quite fair. Ninety thousand.”

“I don’t set your fees, Mr. Prescott,” I said, even as I figured. If we could pull in thirty thousand from this case, I thought, I could even take a draw, start to pay down my credit card bills. I put down the coffee cup so it wouldn’t rattle as my nerves started to pop. “For two hundred thousand we could settle this today.”

“One hundred thousand dollars, Victor. And we won’t go higher.”

Madeline said, “That’s way too high for this frivolous piece of…”

“One-ninety,” I said, cutting her off.

Prescott laughed. It was a deep, genuine laugh, warm in its way. It was so authoritative a laugh that I had to struggle not to join in, even though he was laughing at me. “No, we’re not splitting the difference, Victor. One hundred thousand dollars, that’s as high as we go.”

“That’s not going to do it,” I said. But threes started to jiggle like belly dancers before my eyes. Thirty-three, three hundred, thirty-three. Thirty-three, three hundred, thirty-three. It had a golden sound to it, like bangles sweeping one against the other during a slow, seductive dance. Thirty-three, three hundred, thirty-three. And thirty-three cents. “One hundred and eighty thousand,” I countered.

“You’re disappointing me, Victor,” said Prescott. “I thought we could reach an accommodation.” He leaned back again and looked away from me, toward the window and the view. “I have instructed Madeline to begin trial preparations tomorrow. Once we start spending money on the trial, paying experts, compiling exhibits, organizing the documents, once we start all that, I can’t offer the same amount. So this offer is only good until you leave this office.”

“I’ll tell you what, Mr. Prescott. For one hundred and eighty thousand dollars, we’ll disappear. We won’t say anything to the press, won’t sully the perfect reputations of your clients. No nasty trial. Nothing. The end.”

He shrugged. “That’s all a necessary precondition in any event. One hundred thousand dollars.”

I stood. “That’s not enough.”

“I’ll whip you in court, son.”

“You just might at that, sir.”

Prescott stared me down. I was supposed to turn to leave, that was the act, but the sound of those threes jangling bangling through my mind froze my feet in place and I stared back at him, waiting for him to save me.

“I’ll tell you what I’m willing to do,” said Prescott. “I hate doing this, I think I’m going too far, but you are a bulldog, Victor, and you don’t leave me much choice. What I’m willing to do is give you one more number. This number is a blue light special, do you understand? I want to hear a quick yes or no. If it’s yes we have a deal. If it’s no we’ll fight it out in court. Are you ready for the number, Victor?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“One hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

The division was so easy it couldn’t have been unintentional. Forty thousand dollars registered in my mind with the ringing clarity of a bell. In the blink of an eye I plotted my expenditures. Twenty thousand directly to the office, overdue salary to our secretary and receptionist, overdue rent, overdue use and occupancy tax, overdue dues due to the bar association. Blue Cross had been hounding us for money, as had West Publishing and Xerox, which had refused to service the machine because we were behind on our maintenance payments. All our copies came out badly streaked and gray, as if they were copies of copies of copies. We were short of stationery, manila folders, yellow pads; our postage meter hadn’t been reset in months. Twenty thousand dollars disappearing like so much drifting paper into the abyss of our failing legal practice. We’d put five in the bank to take care of another month’s nut, just in case, leaving fifteen grand to be split between Derringer and me, which, after paying overdue estimated taxes, would leave me with four thousand dollars. One of my credit cards was maxed, so I’d pay that down, and my student loans were deeply in default, maybe a payment or two would renew their patience, and I still owed my father the five thousand I had borrowed last year when things got very very tight.

“We have a deal, Mr. Prescott,” I said.

He slapped his palms onto his thighs and stood, smiling warmly, pumping my hand like I was a new father. “Splendid. Just splendid. Madeline,” he said without looking at her. “Why don’t you get to work right away drawing up the papers.” He said nothing more until she stood and, without saying farewell, left the office.

“I should get going too,” I said. “Tell my clients the news.”

“Not just yet, Victor. You’re tenacious, I’ll give you that. A bulldog. Let’s take a moment together. I might have a proposition for you, son.”

He put his arm around my shoulder. The gesture was so unexpected that I froze as if under attack.

“I might just have for you,” he said, “the opportunity of a lifetime.”

3

CONNIE MACK, the ageless Philadelphia baseball magnate who coincidentally looked very much like William Prescott III, once said, “Opportunity knocks at every man’s door,” but I didn’t believe it for a second. There were men and women who toiled all the days of their lives without getting a single chance. I knew them, I was related to them, I was one. I had been waiting for it all my life and still it had never come for me, never called my name, never knocked on my door, never slipped itself through my mail slot. Or then again, maybe the post office had simply misplaced it, along with that letter I’d been expecting from Ed McMahon. No, it was the great myth of America that this is the land of opportunity. For guys like me, I had learned painfully, there was no such thing as opportunity, only a grind to wear away our spirits as it stole the heart from our lives day by day. So I was naturally skeptical. When someone like Prescott whispered the word opportunity in my ear, it generally meant the opportunity for him to take advantage of me.

“A brilliant man,” said Prescott, gesturing toward a picture of himself standing beside a slouching President Nixon. “It was an honor to work for him.”

“I’m sure it was,” I said. There were things I could say to him about Nixon the perjurer, the man who lied about his secret plan to end the war and then saturated Hanoi with his bombs, who resigned in disgrace and was saved from indictment only by presidential pardon, but this wasn’t the moment.

“Oh, he made mistakes, of course,” said Prescott. “But in my mind that gives him all the more stature. He is a tragic hero, a man brought to power and glory through his brilliant, slightly paranoid will and brought to ruin by the same. But while he was at the top of his ride, he was a damn good president.”

“I’m an admirer of Kennedy.”

“Oh, yes.” He stepped over to another picture of a very youthful William Prescott III shaking hands with a smiling Jack Kennedy. We were standing before his wall of photographs, a shrine, really, to himself, as Prescott introduced me to the greats and near greats who had known him. I listened politely, fighting all the while to restrain the giddy joy I felt about the settlement we had reached in Saltz.

“All charm and good looks, Kennedy,” continued Prescott. “But a bumbler, really. He stumbled into the Bay of Pigs, almost fumbled us into a nuclear war over Cuba, and then put us into Vietnam. November 22, 1963, was a terrible day, but frankly I think the country was better off because of it.”

“Kennedy had vision,” I said.

“No, not really. What did he care about civil rights before King started grabbing headlines? Now Reagan had vision.” There was a large color photograph of Ronald Reagan with his arm around Prescott. “He was a genuinely nice man, too. He wasn’t the brightest, but he didn’t have to be. There are a million smart bureaucrats in the federal government, that’s not what we need at the top. But Reagan’s vision was unrealistic. That’s why of all the presidents I’ve known, the one I admire most is Bush.”

He guided me to a picture of himself with George and Barbara Bush. The Bushes were smiling warmly at Prescott, who was standing with a regal stiffness, staring straight into the camera.

“A fine man,” said Prescott. “A great leader. A true pragmatist in a world of ideologues. He was betrayed by his own people. That’s how the clown we have now slipped in.”

I voted for the clown, but this wasn’t the moment to bring that up either, though I did say, “I’m not sure pure pragmatism is admirable in a politician.”

“Anything else is just diddling, Victor. If you don’t concentrate on the practical consequences of your actions, what do you concentrate on, intent? Good intentions were not the problem with our presence in Vietnam, it was just that, practically, victory there was impossible. A quarter million French had been defeated by the Vietnamese, how did we think we could prevail? The only way to govern effectively is to look beyond the ideology, beyond the surface morality, right to the heart of the doing.”

“But what goals do you seek without an ideological framework?”

“Peace, prosperity, justice, equality. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Goals are easy, everyone wants the same things, but a pragmatist won’t be misled by a false ideology and won’t let narrow restrictions on means get in his way. Lawyers are by their very nature pragmatists. Whether or not we’re in ideological agreement with our clients, our job is to win for them within the rules, no matter how. Anything less is a violation of duty.”

“I like to think we’re more than hired guns.”

“So, Victor, you show yourself to be a romantic. Very good.”

“I was wondering,” I said, trying to change the conversation to a safer subject. “How soon do you think we can close on the Saltz settlement?”

Prescott laughed. “Maybe I stand corrected. I’ll have Madeline work the night on it. We can close as soon as your clients sign releases.”

“Terrific,” I said, trying to fight the smile. “The sooner the better.”

“We’ll do everything we can to accommodate you. Everything.”

Normally I hated Republicans, there was something oily and insincere about them. I didn’t care much for weepy hearted Democrats, either, but it was Republicans who really set me off. Maybe it was that theirs was the party of big money and I had none. Maybe it was that their cure for every ill was a cut in the capital gains tax when I had never in my life had a capital gain. Or maybe it was just that when a Republican pulled you aside to explain that assault weapons were as wholesomely American as apple pie and DDT, or that ketchup really was a vegetable, the blather would all come out of a self-satisfied George Willian smirk that you would slug if you were on the fifth-grade playground. Normally I hated Republicans, but there was something about Prescott that I couldn’t help but like: his formality, his honesty, the way he exuded integrity. There was about him and his portrait gallery an air of noblesse oblige that I admired. Most likely my newfound affection derived from the fact that he had just given me forty grand, but for whatever reason I felt the glow of good fellowship in his office, even as we disagreed on the political issues of the day.

“Come over here,” he said, leading me to his desk. “Sit down for a minute, Victor.” He lowered himself into the deep maroon desk chair and leaned forward, hands clasped before him. I sat stiffly in one of the upholstered chairs.

“Now that your calendar has suddenly cleared for the next month,” he said, “I might have an opportunity for you.” That ominous word again. “I was impressed with the way you handled the Saltz case. Your tenacity. I read your briefs. Very solid. We pride ourselves on teaching our associates how to litigate here, but you can only teach so much. We can’t teach how to spin gold from straw; it is either innate or it will never be learned.”

“Our case isn’t mere straw.”

He waved away my comment. “We’ve settled.” He clenched his fist and shook it at me with affection. “Tenacity. Victor, I think you’re a terrific lawyer, yes I do.” He looked at me as if he were deciding something about my face. “Ever do any criminal work?”

“Some. DUI, a few drug cases that pleaded out. I tried one aggravated assault to verdict.”

“How did it go?”

“Fine, until the jury came back.”

“Juries can be like that. The only lawyers who never lose a case are the ones who won’t try the tough ones. Do much federal work?”

“Yes, sir. It’s the only way to get to a jury before the client expires from old age.”

“Ever appear before Judge Gimbel?”

“No, but I heard he’s a tough old bird.”

“Yes, he is,” said Prescott. “A little overdone for my liking, too.”

I rubbed my chin to wipe off whatever it was he was staring at. Then he leaned farther forward. His voice became conspiratorially soft. “Jimmy Moore, the councilman.”

“I know of him.”

“He and his chief aide, Chester Concannon, are under indictment for extortion and racketeering.”

“Yes. I know that also.”

“Moore is accused of using his City Council post to try to extort a million and a half dollars from the owner of the nightclub Bissonette’s.”

“That’s a lot of dollars,” I said.

“Yes, it is. He’s accused of actually getting five hundred thousand. He is also accused of brutally beating Zack Bissonette, the former baseball player who was also part owner of the club, because Bissonette had tried to interfere in the extortion plot. Finally, he is accused of burning down Bissonette’s because the payments stopped. All very serious charges that, if true, would make Jimmy Moore a monster. I represent him.”

“Good luck,” I said, without really meaning it. From everything I had read about the case in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Moore was guilty as hell and going to spend many, many years in a federal prison. And the whole city knew that Bissonette, a retired second baseman who had been a darling of the Veterans Stadium crowd, was still in a coma from the beating.

“Frankly, Moore’s politics are the exact opposite of mine,” said Prescott. “But in court that doesn’t matter. Now, Chester Concannon, the aide, was represented by my old friend Pete McCrae.”

“It’s a shame what happened to him,” I said. McCrae was an obese Republican politico who had recently died in a Chinatown restaurant. They had thought it was a heart attack until they cut open his throat at the autopsy and found a large, fatty piece of duck lodged there. Dr. Heimlich, I guess, was dining elsewhere that night.

“A tragedy,” agreed Prescott. “But now Chester Concannon needs new counsel. I was impressed with the way you handled the Saltz case and I thought you might want the opportunity.”

“I’m flattered,” I said.

“You should be. Trial is in two weeks.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “If trial’s in two weeks I won’t have time to prepare.”

“Everything you’ll need we have here for you, the documents, copies of the government’s tapes.” He gestured at the piles on his conference table. “We’ve done all the discovery already and McCrae’s files are readily available.”

“I’d be thrilled to handle it, Mr. Prescott. But I would need more time. What’s the chance of getting a continuance?”

“We don’t want a continuance. For political reasons the government indicted too soon, hoping to affect this fall’s election. Now they’re stuck going to trial with an incomplete investigation. And Bissonette is still in the hospital, unable to testify. They’re hoping he revives. We think, due to the weakness of their case, it’s to our advantage to get to trial before he does. We’ve opposed every motion for a continuance and asserted our rights under the Speedy Trial Act. The government wants a delay but the judge is holding to the trial date so long as the defense agrees. We need someone who can get up to speed quickly and be ready to go in two weeks.”

“I can’t be ready to try a major criminal case in two weeks.”

“Actually, you won’t have to. McCrae, before his visit to Ying’s Peking Duck House, was satisfied to let me present a joint defense on behalf of both defendants. He found, and I’m sure you will too, that if we stand together we can turn the government’s case into cheesecloth. I believe we could be a very effective team, Victor. And if you’re able to take this case, other work together could be arranged. I often used McCrae for outside counsel and gave him cases we couldn’t handle ourselves because of a conflict. He built up quite a lucrative practice that way. You could, too.”

“I’m very interested in the other work, Mr. Prescott, very, but I just don’t think I can accept this case. The Rules of Professional Conduct won’t allow me to take a case where I couldn’t be adequately prepared.”

He pressed his lips together and then began writing on a pad. Without looking up at me he said, “That’s fine, Victor. We’re not always ready to seize our opportunities, no matter how transient they may be. I understand completely. Janice will show you out.”

I waited for a moment, waited for him to look up and smile, waited for him to again tell me how good a lawyer I was and all that we could do together, but he didn’t say another word, concentrating instead only on the pad upon which he wrote. After more than a few moments of waiting I rose and headed for his door.

“Did I mention the retainer,” he said as I turned the doorknob.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Fifteen thousand dollars up front if you decide to take the case.”

“That sheds a new light on the offer,” I said, releasing the knob from my grip.

“I thought it might.”

“Mostly, sir, it would be the honor of working with you.”

“Yes, I see. So I take it you’re on board?”

I hesitated a moment, but not too long a moment. “Yes, sir.”

“Terrific,” he said brightly and he smiled his charismatic smile that warmed me. “The trial team is meeting Monday night, here, at six. You can meet your client then. Before the Monday meeting you can look at whatever evidence we have. I’ll set up a room for you, say starting at ten.”

“Fine.”

“We have a status hearing before Judge Gimbel on Tuesday morning. I’ll make sure your retainer is ready by then. By the way, Victor, what’s your hourly fee?”

“One-fifty,” I said.

“You’re going to make us look like chiselers by comparison. For this case your fee is two-fifty. Is that acceptable?”

“Perfectly.”

“It’s great to have you on the team, Victor. This is a terrific opportunity for you, son,” he said, and I knew that it was. Prescott was offering me more than just a high publicity case in which my picture would make the papers and my name become known. He was offering to mentor me, to guide my career, to raise me to something more than second-rate. There was no telling what I could gain from his wise guidance and touching concern for my welfare.

“I understand,” I said, “and I am very grateful for the chance.”

“Yes,” he replied, without a hint of credulity in his face. “I believe that you are. And I have no doubts but that you’ll come through for us.”

So maybe I had been wrong after all. Maybe this glorious land to which my great-grandfather had brought his family from Russia actually was the land of opportunity he sought and maybe this William Prescott III was the instrument of that opportunity, along with whichever fate had lodged that chunk of roasted duck in fat Pete McCrae’s throat. I still had my doubts, sure, but fifteen grand up front and two-fifty an hour did a lot of easing.

4

BESIDE A RAGGED DOOR in a hallway atop a Korean grocery on 21st Street, south of Chestnut, hung a series of names spelled out in small chromed letters. There was VIMHOFF & COMPANY, ACCOUNTANTS, and beneath that PARALLEL DESIGN INC., and beneath that JOHN STEVENSON, ARCHITECT, and beneath that, oddly off-center from the rest, DERRINGER AND CARL, ATTORNEYS. The name of our firm was off-center because the first series of letters had been ripped off the wall, and hastily, too, if the presence of plastic nubs still imbedded in the drywall was any indication. A careful examination of the dirt shadows around the missing word revealed the name Guthrie. I won’t deny that I had been the ripper and it had felt damn good, too, even as the sharp edges of that bastard’s name bit into my flesh. When is betrayal not betrayal? When it is only business.

All the firms shared a receptionist, an older woman named Rita with a white streak in her blue-black hair and a blue streak in her voice. “Any messages?” I asked her when I returned from my meeting with Prescott.

“Nothing worthwhile, Mr. Carl. Surprise.” Her voice was pure New Jersey, like an annoying siren. “Except that guy from the copier company called again. He started complaining to me, like I was the one who owed him the money. I told him to make a xerox of the invoice and send it in.”

I took the pink slips from my place in the message rack and shuffled through them. “They don’t want you to call it a xerox,” I said idly. “It’s a trade name.”

“Yeah, I know. But I love when they start explaining it over the telephone. He’s sending you a warning letter and a xerox of their trademark policy. Vimhoff’s looking for you,” she said.

“Is he here?”

“No, but he said he wants to talk with you Monday morning. How much rent do you owe?”

“I won’t be in Monday morning.”

“That much?”

“A new case. Really.”

She didn’t laugh, she gave off more of a snort.

I took my messages and followed the vinyl-papered hallway past Vimhoff’s office, as neat and orderly as a row of numbers, past the large design office filled with the whirr of Macintosh computers, past the architect’s office, door closed as always, until I reached the rear, where Ellie, our secretary, sat quietly at her desk, chewing gum, reading a magazine, guarding our three sad little offices. She was impossibly young, Ellie, very pretty in a Catholic school way, red hair, freckles, cute comic book nose, and always dressed inappropriately bright and sharp, as if each morning she was on her way to a christening. Guthrie had hired her right out of high school, had gotten her name from a nun, though when he left for his new firm he took with him Carolyn, our other secretary, the one who knew how to type. But Ellie had kept coming around even after her paychecks stopped, which was better than her knowing how to type.

“Where’s Derringer?” I asked. “I have news.”

“On the way back from Social Security.”

“How did it go?”

“It was the Cooperman case,” said Ellie in a tone that meant nothing else needed to be said. “By the way, Mr. Vimhoff’s looking for you.”

“I know. I finally settled Saltz.”

“That dog?”

“Be polite.”

“Does that mean I get paid this month?”

“Just as soon as the check clears. By the way, Ellie, do me a favor. I ran into Winston Osbourne the other day and it got me thinking. Find out who Osbourne’s daughter is, her name, I think she’s married, and her address. Call Mrs. Osbourne at the house. She’ll know. Pretend you’re an old friend.”

“Sure.”

“I’ve a hunch where we’re going to find ourselves a Duesenberg.”

My office proper was a small dark place. I had once had plans for it. I was going to paint the walls an eggshell blue, lay down an oriental carpet, haul in a huge mahogany desk, hide the pale metal of the filing cabinets in a wood veneer. From the galleries on Walnut Street I was to pick a large landscape, Early American, epic and green, and hang it catercorner to the window. Plants, there would be tall leafy plants, and deep leather chairs for my clients to sit upon as I wove for them the sage legal advice for which I would become renowned. But the plans for my office, like the plans for my life, had dissolved before the relentless progression of my reality. My office now was a small dark place, cluttered with the detritus of a failing career – disorganized piles of meaningless paper, dusty stacks of long dead files. On the windowsill was the narrow brown spine of a wandering Jew who had settled down in death. There was desolation in my office that would not be eased by forty thousand dollars, only prolonged.

“Abington Cardiology.”

“Dr. Saltz, please,” I said into the phone.

“Who’s calling?” asked the receptionist.

“Victor Carl. He’ll know what it’s about.”

“One minute, please.”

There was a click, and then the soft sounds of Henry Mancini vibrating gently from a thousand strings, from a thousand and one, and then Saltz’s slurry gangster voice.

“Hey Vic, hold on a minute, will you? I’m on the other line.”

“Sure.”

And once more the sweep of violins. I hated being placed on hold. It was not the waste of time so much as the fact that my time was being wasted by someone else. The indignity of it. The not so subtle message that I was nowhere near as important as whoever was on the other line. I bet the President never got put on hold, nor football stars, nor billionaires, nor women with whippet bodies and deep blue eyes. Shady lawyers in failing firms with maxed credit lines got put on hold. And why did they pipe music through the hold line? You’re not important enough to deal with right now, but so your time won’t totally be wasted…I would have hung up then and there but I needed to talk to Saltz and I had nothing else pressing and, well, Saltz probably was talking to someone more important than me, a powerful and desperate patient in the middle of a heart attack receiving the vital information he needed to stay alive.

“Victor,” he said finally. “Thanks for waiting. I was talking to my plumber. The money those guys charge, Jesus. What’s up?”

“Good news,” I said. “We got a settlement offer.”

“How much?”

“I met with a fellow named Prescott, the big hitter over at Talbott, Kittredge, who seems to have taken control of the case. We met for over an hour, yelling at each other, but I pushed him up to something great.”

“How much?”

“I got him to give us a hundred and twenty thousand.”

“And how much of that would I get?”

“There are eight of you with equal shares, so after our fee that would be ten thousand each.”

There was a pause where I waited for the congratulations to spill out my side of the receiver.

“Is that all?” he said in his rough, loose voice. “What the fuck’s that, that’s nothing. I put a hundred and twenty-five grand into that piece-of-crap building and all I’m going to get out of it is a measly ten thou? They defrauded the hell out of me. I should be getting more than ten grand there, Victor. I should be getting their balls on a plaque.”

“Lou,” I said quietly, “if they wanted to stonewall and take us to trial, we’d lose.”

“A hundred and twenty-five grand I lost. Did you ever find that accountant who did the numbers in that bullshit prospectus? What’s his name?”

“Stocker,” I said. “Still missing. The FBI is looking for him, too.”

“I bet he’s got stories to tell.”

“Not in time to help us. He’s probably on the beach somewhere in Brazil, doing the samba with dark-skinned women and laughing at us.”

“I hate to think I’m getting taken again here, Victor. Maybe we should just throw the dice and let those bastards fade us, see what the jury comes up with. Did you talk to the other guys?”

“I wanted to talk to you first.”

“Set up a meeting next week,” he said. “We’ll talk about it together. Maybe it will look better to me then. I got to go, the electrician’s on the line and I don’t want to put him on hold.”

“What is it, home improvement week?”

“We bought a house in Radnor. Two point five mil and the thing still needs to be gutted. Go figure. But you know what that’s like, what am I telling you for?”

“Right.”

“I’ll talk to you at the meeting next week.”

“Sure.”

What I hated most about the rich was not their money. I envied them their money, I coveted their money, but I didn’t hate their money. What I hated was the way they pretended it was no big deal.

I went about returning my messages, unfamiliar names and numbers on little pink sheets. They involved bills, each and every one. There was a call from a computer specialist who had fixed the blink in our word processor, one from Little, Brown & Co. about payment for a book Guthrie had ordered before he left, one about a transcript in the Saltz case, which I had ordered but didn’t expect to need any longer. To each I said I would check our records and get back to them and then tossed the pink sheet into the overflowing wastebasket. Vimhoff was supposed to get our offices cleaned twice a week and I realized with a flash of lawyerly insight that the overflowing wastebaskets were my defense to being late with the rent. Constructive eviction. “Clean the damn offices and we’ll pay our rent,” I would say with a bite of indignation. That might work, at least until I tidied up the Saltz settlement. Ellie poked her head into my office and said she was leaving. I played with my time sheets a bit, fluffing up my hours, and waited to tell Derringer the news of our new case. I didn’t have to wait long.

“So how did it go with the snobs at Talbott?” she said when she strode into my office without knocking and sat on a wooden bridge chair across from my desk.

“They threw money at me,” I said.

“No, really.”

Elizabeth Derringer was short and slight, with glossy black hair cut like a helmet around her head. She wore round glasses that made her look very serious, even when she smiled, but if you could see past the glasses and the sharp features you could see the glint of a vicious humor. I had met her in law school, where she had been attending nights while she did social work for the city. Her final year she quit her job to get enough credits to graduate a semester early and that’s when I met her. She was smarter than me, she was smart as hell, and tougher than burned beef, but she ended up with a night school degree and the firms that turned me down didn’t hire from the night schools. They must have figured that if a law student was smart enough to join their firms, she was smart enough to figure out how to find parents who could afford to pay her tuition. But they missed a prize.

“They’re giving us a hundred and twenty thousand to settle Saltz,” I said.

“Golly, we’re rich. And for that dog yet.”

“If it goes through. Saltz doesn’t think it’s enough.”

“Tell him we have bills to pay,” she said.

“I’m setting up a meeting next week to nail it down. What happened with Cooperman?”

“Don’t ask.”

“There’s no way they were going to find him disabled because of a little ringing in his ear,” I said.

“Please, Victor, have some respect for the ill. Tinnitus. And he can’t work if it’s driving him crazy.”

“He’s in demolition.”

“I’ll win the appeal,” she said. “I’ve got those SSI bureaucrats right where I want them.”

Beth was mugged once, in broad daylight, by a crackhead whose courage was stoked by a five dollar hit. He walked up to her, smiled, and then in one quick motion grabbed her purse strap and started to run. Beth held on. Even as the crackhead dragged her down the sidewalk she held on. She was raised in Manayunk, before it was discovered and gentrified. It’s a hilly place, Manayunk, uneven streets, tough kids. She broke her wrist in the fall and scraped her face on the sidewalk, but still she held on. Finally he was the one who let go and ran from this crazed little woman he had dragged half a block, ran straight into a beige Impala with Jesus headlights. The police scraped him off the street. At the preliminary hearing he glowered at her through his bandages, trying to intimidate her out of testifying. She smiled sweetly and buried him.

“I guess I’m not going to convince you to drop the case,” I said.

“Nope.”

“What say we talk about it over a beer and a burger at the Irish Pub.”

“I can’t. I’m going out tonight.”

“On a Friday night?” I asked. “You have a date?”

“It’s not a date, not really. It’s a blind date. A blind date is more an interview with a prospective date, an exchange of resumes, silly chatter designed to test social skills, nothing more.”

“I was going to tell you about the new case I picked up today,” I said, a little jealous that she had someplace, anyplace, to go that night.

She stood up. “Tell me tomorrow, I’m going to be late.”

And then she was gone.

I readied to leave and turned out my office lights and then sat down again in my chair to watch the shifting city light play out across the garbage cans in the alley. I could feel it all about me. It was inescapable, falling cold and hard from stars in the sky, dripping from the leafless trees along the polluted city streets, surging down in waves, swirling like the sea about me. The air melted in thick, heavy drops and the spots on the walls danced maniacally and the order of all things was pointlessness and despair and finally death. Its scent lay fetid in the air, rotten, musked, overpoweringly seductive, like the juice of a strange woman. It played across the sallow face of Winston Osbourne in his calamity, it grew despite the X-rays pumped through my father’s lungs, it lay crouched and silent within my heart and infected everything I touched, my practice, my dreams, my relationships. I wanted to get out so bad, out of this life and its manifest pointlessness. I would do anything to get out, anything at all, anything. I was sick to death with the wanting.

When I was in junior high I was picked to perform a genetics experiment with different forms of fruit flies called drosophilae. In the back of the classroom I mated the red-eyed variety with the white-eyed variety and then determined the characteristics of the offspring. Drosophilae were perfect for the experiment because their lives were so short and their reproductive cycle so swift that in a very few days I could follow their genetic adventures through a number of generations. For the length of my experiment they were like pets, and when I was supposed to etherize the final batch of offspring to get a precise count of the red-eyed and white-eyed descendants, a procedure that would inevitably kill a majority, I decided instead to release them. “Go, my friends,” I said as I opened the small vials in which they had been bred. “Be free.” And I watched as successive rows of my classmates waved distractedly at the air. I thought about my friends the drosophilae in those moments when I felt overwhelmed by the evocations of despair swirling around me and envied them their short, sentienceless lives. To fly, to suck at fruit, to mate and reproduce, all with absolutely no consciousness of their inevitable fate.

So what I did that night after Beth left me was what I did most every night. I stopped off at a storefront grill and ordered a cheese steak with ketchup and onions to go and took it home and ate it in front of the television with half a six-pack beside me. Whatever the night, there was always one show almost worth watching and I was able to stretch a whole night of mindlessness around that one show, running from Jeopardy! through prime time through the late news and the talk shows and finally the late late movie on UHF, until I’d fallen asleep on the couch, drugged by all I had seen. That Friday night was like every other night of what my life had become, and for the few blessed moments that I was caught like a science fiction hero in the power of that electron beam I lost whatever sentience I held and became as connected to the now of my life as the simple but noble drosophila.

5

THOUGH I HAD NEVER met Jimmy Moore, I knew his name. I knew thousands of names, actors and criminals, sports heroes and politicians, authors, rock stars, the silly little guy who sells suits on South Street. It is the names who rule the world, the Tina Browns, the Jerry Browns, the Jim Browns. They are the aristocracy of America and whatever their rank, and there is a ranking, from the national to the local to the almost obscure, it is the names who attend the best parties, screw the prettiest people, drink the finest champagne, laugh loudest and longest. Jimmy Moore was a local name, a businessman turned politician, a city councilman with a populist, anti-drug agenda that bridged the lower and middle classes. He was a name with aspirations and a loyal following. A name who would be mayor.

I spent the better part of Monday in the offices of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase listening to Jimmy Moore on the telephone. He wasn’t on the telephone with me, of course, as I was not a name and thus not worth talking to. Instead he was on the phone with Michael Ruffing, a restaurateur whose flashy enterprises in the city had made him a local name among the city’s well-cultured and whose phone at his nightclub, Bissonette’s, named after his partner Zack Bissonette, the currently comatose former second baseman, happened to have been tapped by the FBI. I sat alone at the foot of a long marble table in a huge conference room. Fine antique prints of Old Philadelphia lined the walls: Independence Hall, Carpenters Hall, Christ Church, the Second Bank of the United States. The carpet was thick and blue. A tray of soft drinks lay on a credenza behind me and I didn’t have to pay six bits to open one, they were just there, for me. I can’t help but admit that sitting in that room like an invited guest, sitting there like a colleague, gave me a thrill. I was in the very heart of success, someone else’s success maybe, but still the closest I had ever come to the real thing. And there was a dark joy in my heart the whole of my time there because I knew that if all went right this could be my success, too. So I couldn’t help smiling every now and then as I sat in that conference room with earphones on and a yellow pad before me, listening to a score of cassettes holding Jimmy Moore’s taped conversations with Michael Ruffing.

Moore: Your plan for the riverfront is brilliant. Prescient. But I see problems in council.

Ruffing: Uh, like, what kinds of…

Moore: Jesus, Mikey, you got problems.

Ruffing: I don’t need no more problems.

Moore: Every damn councilman gets a take out of the water going a certain way. That’s why it still looks like the Bronx down there. What you need is a champion. What you need is a Joe Frazier.

Ruffing: Okay. I see that. That’s who I need then, what I’m looking for.

Moore: Take Fontelli. Part of the waterfront’s in his district, so he thinks the whole damn river’s his pisspot.

Ruffing: I don’t want Fontelli, you know. I’ve heard things.

Moore: They’re all true. What have you heard?

Ruffing: He’s, you know. What I heard. Connected.

Moore: Of course he is, Mikey. You know who he’s married to.

Ruffing: I don’t want them.

Moore: Of course not. Of course not. In for an inch and they’re screwing your sister. Now I like your place, you know that. I’m in there almost every week, you know that.

Ruffing: And you don’t stint on the Dom, either.

[laughter]

Moore: Fuck no, you’re either class or you’re shit. Now I could help with this. We could help each other, Mikey.

Ruffing: Okay, yeah.

Moore: But the kind of influence you’re talking about here, well, you know.

Ruffing: Of course. That’s, uh, assumed.

Moore: But I’ll be your Joe Frazier.

Ruffing: What exactly are we talking about here?

Moore: I’ll send my man Concannon over to discuss arrangements.

Ruffing: Give me an idea.

Moore: He’ll call you. You’ll deal with him on everything.

Ruffing: Sure, then.

Moore: This is going to work out for everybody, Mikey. For everybody. Trust me. This project’s going to take off like a rocket ship.

It was these tapes and certain subsequent events that were the basis for the government’s case against Moore and Concannon. Ruffing’s waterfront development plan was budgeted at $140 million, and Moore wanted a full 1 percent to propose and ensure passage of the enabling legislation in City Council. The government’s theory was that Moore and Concannon were shaking down Ruffing for the million point four and that when Ruffing stopped paying after the first half mil they turned violent, first beating the hell out of Bissonette, the club’s minority owner who had convinced Ruffing to stop the payments, and then burning down the club. Moore and Concannon had been indicted for violations of the Hobbs Act, RICO, the federal conspiracy laws, and there was plenty of evidence to back it all up. Ruffing would testify at the trial to an arrangement that had gone very bad, and there were reams of records, which I had not yet been able to examine, that purported to follow the trail of money from Ruffing to Concannon to Moore’s political action committee, Citizens for a United Philadelphia, or CUP, as well as physical evidence relating to the assault. But most significant of all were Moore’s own words, captured with startling clarity on the ferric oxide of the tapes.

Moore: I don’t understand the problem.

Ruffing: We’re going a different way is all.

Moore: But we had a deal. A deal, Mikey.

Ruffing: I’m not happy about it but I don’t got no fucking choice. Bissonette found out about us.

Moore: And I should care about that. He hit two-twenty lifetime, Mikey, two-twenty. We can walk all over him.

Ruffing: There are things about him I didn’t… I got a new investor with a new plan.

Moore: Don’t do this, Mikey. You back out now, your project’s dead. Dead.

Ruffing: My new investor don’t think so.

Moore: It’s that cookie baker, isn’t it?

Ruffing: Shut up. You were taking too much anyway, you know? You were being greedy.

Moore: So that’s it, is it, Mikey? I’m sending my man Concannon down.

Ruffing: I don’t want Concannon.

Moore: You listen, you shit. You talk to Concannon, right? I ain’t no hack from Hackensack, we had a deal. A deal. This isn’t just politics. We’re on a mission here, Mikey, and I won’t let you back down from your responsibilities. You catch what I’m telling you here? You catch it, Mikey?

I worked through lunch, eating a tuna salad sandwich as I listened to the tapes. I had not even touched the six boxes full of documents when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I whirled around and saw standing behind me Prescott, tall, stern faced, dressed in his severe navy blue pinstripes. I nearly jumped when I saw him. He looked like a mortician. I took off the headphones and was disoriented for a moment by the Dolby quiet of reality.

“What do you think?” asked Prescott.

“I haven’t been able to look at everything yet,” I said.

“But from what you saw. Be honest now, Victor.”

“Well, sir, to be honest, the tapes make Jimmy Moore out to be the archetypal grasping politician.”

“I knew you’d catch on,” he said as his stern features eased into merriment. “That’s exactly our defense. Come, Chester Concannon is waiting for us and Jimmy’s on his way. Chester especially is anxious to meet you.”

“Fine,” I said, grabbing hold of my pad and following Prescott out the door. He led me through a maze of hallways and up a flight of steps.

“It’s very important,” he said as I followed, “that Chester agrees to your representation and to maintain our current strategy.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said, masking my apprehension. This, I knew, was the first crucial moment of my opportunity. I had never met Chester Concannon, had no idea what he looked like, what his manner was, but somehow I had to convince this stranger with his life on the line to hire me as his lawyer and to allow me to follow Prescott blindly.

Prescott brought me through another hallway and into a different conference room, just as elegant and imposing as the one in which I had spent the day, but this one filled with a pack of lawyer types. In the middle, sporting a ragged corduroy jacket, sat a rather ugly man who didn’t fit. His brown hair fell scraggly to his shoulders and he scrunched fat fish lips between forefinger and thumb as he watched me walk into the room. I assumed he was Chester Concannon. You can always tell the client among his lawyers because he looks like the one who’s been forced to pay for everyone else’s worsted wool.

“I’d like you all to meet Victor Carl,” said Prescott when we stood together before the table. Prescott’s arm rested like a father’s on my shoulder. “Victor is a terrific litigator and going to be a big help to us all.”

I smiled the smile I was expected to smile.

“So you’re the mannequin,” said the ugly man in corduroy, his voice loud and sharp, like the bark of a Pomeranian.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“They said they needed a mannequin with a pulse and a clean tie to take over for McCrae,” he said. “So I guess that’s you, Vic. Except I see you don’t have the clean tie. You got a pulse at least, Vic?”

I fought the impulse to check my tie and turned my head just enough so I could look at him sideways without letting him see the tears involuntarily welling. If this indeed was my client-to-be I was in deep trouble. “Last time I checked,” I said.

“Good for you,” he said. “Just take a shower in your wash-and-wear so you’ll be presentable when you pose for the judge.”

“Victor,” said Prescott. “I’d like you to meet Chester Concannon.”

I hesitantly reached out my hand toward the man in the corduroy but he remained seated, his thick lips back to being pinched by his forefinger and thumb. Next to him an African-American man in a tight fitting, expensive suit stood and took hold of my hand.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Carl,” he said in a strong voice. Chester Concannon was boyishly handsome, with thin shoulders and strong hands. While his smile was bright, his suit was subdued and his tie striped and simple. “I appreciate you joining our team.”

“And this,” said Prescott, gesturing to the man in the corduroy who had called me a mannequin, “is Chuckie Lamb, Councilman Moore’s press secretary.”

Chuckie Lamb gave me a sort of snorting nod and then leaned back in his chair until the chair’s front legs tilted off the carpet.

“I’ve told both Chet and Jimmy all about you, Victor, and the tenacious job you did on the Saltz case,” said Prescott. “They were both enthusiastic about your coming on board. This is the rest of our crew,” he said and introduced me to the Talbott, Kittredge contingent seated around the table, whose names I forgot the instant they escaped from Prescott’s lips. They were finely dressed, perfectly groomed men and women, showily multicultural, as if cast by a politically correct producer for a television series about litigators. There was an Asian-American man and an African-American woman, and there was a blond guy with a perpetual smirk on his face. And then at the end of the table was Madeline Burroughs, who eyed me suspiciously, arms crossed, the fist of her face closed. It was the very picture of the sharp legal team of which I had always dreamed of being a part and on which I had always suspected, somewhere deep down, I didn’t belong.

“Now Victor has spent the day looking through Pete McCrae’s files and the materials provided us by the U.S. Attorney’s office,” said Prescott, “and he assures me that he can be ready for trial in two weeks.”

“What a stunning surprise,” barked Chuckie Lamb. “The mannequin is ready to pose.”

“That’s enough,” said Concannon softly, and Chuckie Lamb quieted immediately.

“Victor’s readiness,” said Prescott, “means we won’t require the continuance the government so desperately wants us to have.”

“I haven’t looked at everything yet,” I said, glancing at Chuckie Lamb for a moment. “But it shouldn’t take me too long to get up to speed.”

There were smiles from all the bright young successes and I smiled back. I was an actor playing the part of a competent and experienced lawyer and doing quite well, I thought. And if they all didn’t believe in what I was presenting they were acting quite well themselves, all except for Chuckie.

“Terrific,” said Prescott. “But maybe, before we proceed any further, Victor should spend a few minutes alone with Chester.” He raised his eyebrows at me, giving me my cue.

“I guess we should see if you really want to hire me,” I said to Concannon with my most ingratiating smile. Chuckie Lamb laughed in my face.

Concannon and I were escorted to an open office. On my way there, without letting anyone notice, I checked my tie. Chuckie had not been lying, a glob of tuna had crusted on the edge. I rubbed it off, leaving a dark oily patch, streaked larger by my thumb.

I closed the door behind us and gestured for Concannon to sit in one of the chairs arrayed expectantly before some Talbott partner’s desk. I sat on the tabletop. Behind the desk was a collection of swords and sabers and battle-axes, the metal edges gleaming. Another litigator’s office.

“Mr. Concannon,” I started, “I thought we should talk a bit before you agreed to hire me or I agreed to represent you.”

“That’s fine, Mr. Carl.”

“Call me Victor,” I said.

“Victor or Vic?”

“Victor. I never liked Vic. It makes me sound too disposable, like a throwaway lighter or a ballpoint pen.”

He laughed at my old joke, which was good. He seemed a charming enough man, Chet Concannon, quiet and very polite. I told him I was sorry about what happened to Pete McCrae. I told him a little about myself, my experience, the highlights of my career, just a little about myself because there was only a little to tell. Then it was time for the defense attorney’s lecture, so I paused, took a breath, and began. I gave him the talk about lawyer-client confidentiality, about how my job was not to find the truth but to defend him, and how if I learned the truth I was duty-bound to stop him from saying anything other than the truth on the stand.

“You mean stop me from lying,” he said, obviously amused.

“I know you might want to confess, the urge is understandable,” I said. “And whatever you say remains with me, but you have to be aware that any such confession could have consequences as to our defense.”

There was more to it than that, of course. I could have gone on speaking for a good ten minutes, but after talking about his undoubted need to confess and seeing him sitting there, calm, composed, his face lacking the slightest indicia of an urgency to tell me anything, I stopped.

“I guess you’ve heard all this before,” I said.

“I guess,” he replied.

“Good,” I said, though I started to sweat a little. There was something about his composure that was unnerving. “Now just a few questions. Have you ever been arrested before?”

“Yes,” he said without a wince. “Before I met Jimmy I was involved with drugs and drug sellers. I was arrested often.”

“Were you convicted of anything?”

“Once of possession with intent to distribute a banned substance, to wit, cocaine, and twice of forgery. I supported my habit by check,” he said with a smile. “Except the checks weren’t always mine. None of this is a secret. I’m one of Jimmy’s success stories, one of his saved souls. He likes to be able to point at us to show what is possible with drug rehabilitation.”

“Still, you probably won’t be testifying,” I said. “Forgery is just the kind of prior conviction that a prosecutor would use to show your lack of honesty or trustworthiness.”

“That’s what Mr. McCrae said too.”

“Did you know Zack Bissonette?”

“Sure,” he said. “Nice guy, lousy ballplayer.”

“Assuming you didn’t do it, any idea who would have beaten that nice guy into a coma?”

“I heard it was the mob.”

“Is that what you heard?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Is that what he’s going to say when he wakes up?”

“What I also heard, Victor,” he said, his hands laying still, one atop the other on his lap, “is that he’s on the edge of never waking up.”

“And then you’d only be up for murder.”

There was a crack in the calm facade at that moment, a lowering of the guard, and what I saw was not the confident insider but a child, scared and lonely, the kid at the edge of the playground, the kid never passed to in the basketball games, who only received two valentines while his classmates took home sacks full. The peek inside didn’t last long, quick as a politician’s lie the facade was back, but I had a glimpse of what he was feeling and how much he was hiding and it all touched me in a strangely personal way. And suddenly my playacting the role of a hard-boiled criminal defense attorney didn’t seem quite so clever.

“Are you sure you don’t want someone more experienced?” I asked.

“You’ll do fine,” he said. “Jimmy said you’ll do fine.”

I thought about it for a moment. “If we both agree that I will represent you,” I said, “we also are going to have to agree on a strategy. What line of defense was Mr. McCrae going to follow?”

“He was going to follow Prescott completely,” he said.

I tried to smile reassuringly. “From what I’ve seen, that looks like your best bet,” I said. “But that decision is up to you.”

“I know,” he said. “And that’s the way Jimmy still wants it to go.”

“You know, Chester,” I said, speaking very slowly, very carefully, wanting to phrase what I was required to say just right. “With co-defendants there is always a potential conflict between defenses. One defendant could always point the finger at the other and say I didn’t do it, he did it.”

“There is no conflict here,” he said quickly, without hesitation.

“Do you trust the councilman with your life?”

“Absolutely.”

“Rushing to trial like we are, I might not be able to help you if things go wrong.”

“I appreciate you wanting to be in a position to help me, Victor,” he said, without putting even a touch of patronization in his voice, which was pretty impressive. “I really do. But there’s always been someone reaching out to help me, someone with a clipboard from the city or the state or the federal government, and all they’ve ever done is dig my hole a little deeper. Only one man ever reached out a hand and really, truly helped.”

“And who was that?”

“Jimmy Moore,” he said. “Jimmy’s been called a lot of things by a lot of people and he’s everything they say. But he’s been the best friend I ever had. He told me to hire you, so you’re hired. He told me to follow Mr. Prescott’s lead, so that’s what we’re going to do.”

“Then your explicit instructions are not to interfere with Prescott.”

“Exactly.”

I looked at him carefully. He was a smart man, I could see that, and he trusted Jimmy Moore completely. Who was I to get in the way? This had been easier than ever I had thought. I slapped my knee and stood up. “Good,” I said. “Then that’s settled.”

“So you’ll represent me?” he asked.

“If you want me to, I will.”

“I do,” he said.

“I don’t have the connections old Pete McCrae had.”

“You’ll do fine,” he said. “Don’t worry, Victor. You’ll make out just fine.”

And that’s how we left it, Chet Concannon patting my arm to help brace my courage as I faced the coming ordeal, as if I were the defendant and he were the lawyer, instead of the other way around. He opened the door and gestured for me to precede him out of the office. I had just stepped through the opening when I heard a loud voice rasp through the hushed Talbott, Kittredge hallways.

“Hell, I’m hungry. Hungry.” It was a sharp, emphatic voice, the voice of an overzealous lieutenant colonel or a college basketball coach. “I’m too hungry to work just yet. We have all night.” It was a voice of authority, an exuberant, demanding voice. “Let’s get out of this dump and find something to eat.”

I recognized the voice right off. I had been listening to it all day. It was the voice of Jimmy Moore.

6

“LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING,” said Jimmy Moore in his insistent voice, poking his cigarette right at me. “Those fat goons in the mayor’s office have no idea what is happening. No idea. They can’t understand it. They see the numbers, same as I do. If the primary was right now, even with the indictment, I’d beat that bastard by a hundred thousand votes, easy. Easy. And he knows it, he knows it, but he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know my secret. He doesn’t know where my power lies. But I’ll tell you where.”

He took a drag from his cigarette, held between the tips of his thumb and first three fingers.

“It’s in my passion,” he said with a violent expulsion of smoke. “Just like Samson’s strength was in his hair. If ever I lose the passion, well then stick a fork in me, I’m done. I might as well retire to Palm Springs and play golf every day. Too bad for the mayor I never cared for the game, right, Chet?”

“That’s right, Councilman,” said Chester Concannon.

We were at DiLullo Centro, a shining, famous bistro across the street from the Academy of Music, where a stylish crowd greeted each other warmly as they hopped from table to table. Everyone seemed to know at least someone there, and the one who everyone seemed to know was Jimmy Moore.

Moore was a thick-shouldered man of about fifty, short gray hair cut like Caesar’s, clean-shaven, with a round, angry face. He wore a flash Italian suit, designed for men thinner and taller. It was too tight on him and, in it, he looked nothing like the draped, statuesque mannequins in magazine ads. He had transformed it from a suit of elegance to a suit of armor. Embroidered on the white cuff of his shirt were the initials JDM. He had the intense eyes of an athlete and sucked attention to himself as he spoke, grabbed it with those eyes and the vicious certainty in his voice. He moved quickly, aggressively, head turning in sudden jerks like a giant bird. When he looked at me, it was as though he was looking into me and there was a sudden and intense connection. For that instant there was no one else in the room but him and me. And then he looked away, at someone else, and the connection was broken. But, even so, his animalistic power lingered like an afterimage burned onto the cornea, leaving no doubt that here was a dangerous man.

There were seven of us at a large, round table in DiLullo’s, having just finished a lavish meal. Next to Jimmy sat his wife, Leslie, grasping tightly to the stem of her champagne glass, the puffed shoulders of her bright red dress shining like huge apples. She was still a pretty woman, auburn hair done up in all kinds of wing things, smooth shiny skin tight over sharp cheekbones, a dramatic neck, but the years with Jimmy Moore’s passion had clearly not been easy ones and her face showed the wear. Next to Leslie Moore was her sister, Renee, a heavier, more bitter version of Mrs. Moore, whose mission in life, it appeared, was to keep Leslie’s champagne glass filled. Then sat Chuckie Lamb, Concannon, myself, and Prescott, who had encouraged me to have the champagne but had taken none for himself. Jimmy Moore was holding court here, his voice loud and rich, his strong large hand warmly shaking those of his admirers as they came to the table paying respect.

“The mayor thinks he can destroy my reputation with this indictment, but he’s dreaming. Dreaming. His stooges in the so-called Department of Justice can try to sully my name, they can drag me through their mud, hell let them. Let them. I got enough to kick their butts halfway to Jersey and still become mayor. They all think I’m doing this with mirrors, my numbers rising like a rocket ship, my fund-raising shooting through the roof. Over two million in the last year for CUP, my group, not to mention the fat stream of donations I have going for my youth treatment centers. And let me tell you something, I got some big guns giving, sure, but I get more ten dollar donations, twenty dollars, fifty dollars, more than anybody. Nobody understands it. Nobody. I was just a normal political hack like every other slob in City Hall when Nadine died, just another grubby councilman looking for his piece of the pie. But when she died, when they killed her with their poisons, murdered her, fuck. Fuck.”

He slammed his cigarette into an ashtray and lit another with his gold lighter. Leslie Moore drained her glass of champagne and reached for the bottle herself. There was a long silence. The Moores’ daughter, Nadine, had died of an overdose of barbiturates, it was in all the papers five or six years back, a teenager still when she started playing around with a dangerous crowd, experimenting with whatever was available. And then one night at a party, after too much cocaine and too many of the wrong pills, she collapsed and died. Moore was on the evening news, crying first and then shouting about vengeance, railing at the drug dealers who were destroying the city’s youth. A few weeks later he started his campaign to wipe them out, neighborhood by neighborhood, crack house by crack house. There were marches, there were raids, there were mysterious fires and unexplained deaths. He had started a war.

After a drag from his cigarette, Moore continued. “I’ve been building my new coalition day by day. I speak in the neighborhoods, I do the good work, I open the athletic centers, the shelters, my youth treatment centers, but it’s not the speeches, it’s not the buildings, it’s not the programs that draw my support. These people, they look into my eyes and you know what they see?”

“Their taxes being raised,” said Prescott.

Jimmy Moore laughed, a genuine, head thrown back laugh. “My lawyer the Republican wouldn’t vote for me on a bet, I know that.”

“I can’t vote for you,” Prescott said. “I live in Merion.”

“Of course you do. But I didn’t hire you for your vote. I hired you because you’re going to kick the government’s ass.”

“We’ll do what we can.”

“No, you’ll do what you have to. But let me tell you, Bill. What the people see in my eyes is real. It can’t be faked. You won’t find a white politician in the entire country with the following I have in the black community and that’s because they know the pain I’ve felt, they know the hate I feel, they know I will rid them of their greatest threat or die trying. What they see is my passion.”

He leaned over and draped one of his thick, tightly clothed arms over his wife’s shoulders.

“It’s no different than what I felt when I first saw Leslie, standing in that crowd outside the schoolyard, with her little Catholic school skirt and her saddle shoes. She was so shy, she was, hiding out at the back of the group, unable to meet my stare from the other side of the fence. I was in my football uniform when I first saw her, on the practice field, and my passion spoke and I knew. I wouldn’t let anything get in the way. Not her mother, not her little private school boyfriend with the fancy sweaters. Nothing.”

“And nothing did,” said Leslie Moore without even the hint of a smile.

“That’s right,” said Moore. “Remember the flowers and jewelry and poems, those marvelous rich poems?”

“Cribbed,” said Mrs. Moore’s sister, Renee. “You couldn’t even write your own love poems to Leslie.”

“I was not as sharp with words in my youth as I have since become,” said Jimmy. “And John Donne expressed what I was feeling far better than I could have then.” He gazed into his wife’s eyes and recited, “‘Twice or thrice I have loved thee, before I knew thy face or name.’”

Mrs. Moore took another drink from her glass.

“What happened to the boy with the sweaters?” I asked. Chuckie Lamb, who was in the middle of a champagne gulp, coughed the bubbles loudly out his nose and fumbled for a napkin.

“Richard Simpson,” said Mrs. Moore. “Sweet Richard Simpson. He was such a nice boy. Refined.”

“He stopped coming around after we started together,” said Moore, turning to greet a stooped, grayed man who passed by our table. “Judge,” he said loudly to the man.

“You broke his jaw,” said Renee.

“Judge Westcock,” said Moore, reaching out to shake the old man’s hand. “You’re looking better than ever, you fox.” The judge’s palm pressed into the back of a pretty young woman as he spoke warmly with Moore, the conversation at our table stopping cold until Moore was free again to lead it. Every few minutes someone of import stopped by to shake the councilman’s hand and whisper in his ear, and during these interludes we waited until Moore could once again turn his attention back to the table. I knew the names of many of the people who came, basketball players and politicians and local names from every stratum. It was as if this table at DiLullo’s was the councilman’s after-hours office, where he could always be reached and deals always be cut.

“Funny,” said Chuckie after the judge left. “That didn’t look like Mrs. Westcock.”

“She’s about fifty pounds lighter and fifty years younger than Mrs. Westcock,” said Jimmy Moore, laughing.

“I’m tired,” said Mrs. Moore.

Moore lifted the champagne bottle out of its silver bucket and poured what was left into Mrs. Moore’s glass. “That will perk you up, it always does. Chuckie, get another bottle.”

Chuckie Lamb pressed his lips together and said, “Yes, Councilman,” before ducking away from the table to find a waiter. This would be our fourth bottle, and though the plan had been to grab a quick dinner before heading back to join the Talbott, Kittredge team at work, the champagne had successfully numbed our desire to deal with the piles of paper waiting for us at Prescott’s office.

“What kind of name is Carl?” asked Moore, turning his attention at me.

“My family is Jewish,” I said.

“So you’re a Jew,” he said in a voice so loud I shrunk from it. He might as well have been a druggist asking for the whole store to hear whether I wanted ribbed or lubricated.

“I’m sort of nothing, but my family is Jewish.”

“It’s good we have some diversity now. Prescott’s a fine lawyer but WASPs have such thin blood. It’s that northern heritage, all those millennia shivering atop Scandinavian glaciers. There’s no passion bubbling through his veins, just cool calculation. But the Jews are a Semitic people, your blood was thickened in the heat of the Egyptian desert and the centuries settling beside the Mediterranean.”

“My grandfather came over from Russia,” I said.

“You’ll provide the passion in our defense,” said Moore.

Chuckie Lamb slipped back into his seat and said, “Just don’t spill all that passion until after the trial.”

“Victor will do just fine,” said Chet Concannon.

“No doubt,” said Prescott.

“I’m tired,” said Mrs. Moore, draining what was left of her champagne. “Renee and I would like to go home.”

“Why are we leaving so soon?” asked Renee.

The waiter just then brought another bottle of champagne and loosed the cork at the table. It shot into the napkin he held with a festive smack and bright white lather streamed down the bottle’s sides.

“The car will take you home,” said Moore. Concannon stood as the women readied to leave. Prescott and I joined him.

The waiter had poured a small amount of the champagne into Moore’s glass and was waiting for a sign to pour it generally. Renee grabbed the bottle from his hand and poured it into her glass, taking a quick gulp.

“It was a pleasure meeting you, Victor,” said Leslie Moore.

“Thank you, Mrs. Moore,” I said. “But the pleasure was mine.”

“I’ll walk you out,” said Moore.

“No need,” said Leslie.

“I insist,” said Jimmy.

“Something’s wrong with that bottle,” said Renee, pouring another glass for herself.

“Let me see that,” said Jimmy. He pulled the bottle from her hand and examined the label. “Who bought this crap?”

“It was our fourth bottle,” said Chuckie. “I thought…”

“Don’t think too much, okay, Chuckie? That’s not why I pay you. You think too much, you’ll end up back in that shithole I dug you out of. I don’t care how much it costs, always get the best. I’ve told you that before.”

“But I just…”

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear it. You buy another crappy bottle of champagne and I’ll can your butt, understand?”

“I understand,” said Chuckie.

“Now give this California piss to some homeless voter and buy us another bottle of the real thing.”

“Yes, Councilman,” said Chuckie, his head down and his barking voice now pale and small.

As Jimmy and his wife walked to the restaurant’s exit, Renee took another quick swallow before following the others.

“I guess Jimmy prefers the imports,” said Prescott.

“The councilman can’t tell the difference after one bottle,” said Concannon, “but Renee’s got a taste for the best the councilman can buy. Sit down, Charles. I’ll take care of it.” He called a waiter over. “Dom Perignon, seventy-eight. And take this bottle away, please.”

The waiter bent a little lower and put on an expression. “Is something unsatisfactory, sir?” he said.

“You mean other than your breath?” said Chuckie, slumped in his seat.

“The wine was a bit too insouciant,” said Concannon calmly. “The sommelier knows our tastes. Tell him we were disappointed.”

“Of course, sir,” said the waiter, whisking the offending bottle from the table.

Concannon mussed Chuckie’s hair. “It’s just the trial,” he said. “Jimmy’s on edge.”

“Too bad it’s not a knife’s edge,” said Chuckie.

“Leslie looked good tonight,” said Prescott, changing the subject.

“Therapy four times a week,” said Concannon.

“She seemed almost cheery.”

“For the amount of money that doctor costs,” said Chuckie Lamb, “she should be damn joyful. She should be a fucking Santa Claus.”

“Well, it’s working, then,” said Prescott.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but that is as sad a woman as I have ever seen.”

“And still,” said Prescott, “the improvement is startling.”

He pushed his length out of his chair. “I see Senator Specter over there. Chester, why don’t we give our regards before I head home. When Jimmy comes back,” he commanded me, “tell him I’ll talk to him in the morning.” Off he strode with Concannon to the other end of the dining room.

“Mrs. Moore is upset about the indictment, I guess,” I said to Chuckie.

“Shit. Look at the bar,” he said. “As soon as the councilman finishes escorting his wife out of the restaurant the councilman’s girlfriend will step away from it and join us.”

I scanned the bar, crowded with couples waiting for tables and singles, dressed as if they were in New York, waiting for something else. On one of the stools at the end of the bar an aggressively curved woman sat alone, drinking. From the angle we could see the breadth of her cheekbones and the swell of her chest. She turned her head to look at us for a moment.

“She’s been here the whole time?” I asked.

“Just waiting for Leslie to get lost.”

“Does Mrs. Moore know?”

“She knows,” said Chuckie Lamb. “She knows every last thing, that’s her problem.” He stood. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I got to pee.”

Chuckie Lamb left for the bathroom and I was left alone like a geek at that large, now empty table to concentrate on the woman at the bar, Moore’s mistress. From the way she was turned I could see just enough. Where do these women come from, I wondered, thinking of Moore’s mistress, thinking of the receptionist at Talbott, Kittredge and Chase, thinking of the new Miss Jersey Tomato, whose picture in the Daily News that morning I couldn’t help but admire. How do their breasts grow so? Some sort of growth rub? Who does their hair and how do they get it to stay model-perfect, as if it had just been teased by a stylist before the photo shoot? How many cases of Aqua Net? Is there a finishing school for these women, a Barbizon trade school, do they have their own professional association? And if there are so damn many of them, spread across the country like overripe peaches on a tree, why do they always end the night in someone else’s bed? Maybe I should move to Georgia, improve my chances.

As I stared at the curve of her back and my feeling of deprivation grew, I noticed another woman walking up the aisle that ran past our table. She was Audrey Hepburn to the Marilyn Monroe at the bar. She was beautiful too, but in a 180-degree different way. Tall, with shoulder-length, straight brown hair. Her thin hips shifted as she walked. Her shoulders were marine straight, but her head hung low, with pale blue eyes, big and just slightly limpid, subtle cheekbones, a soft, round nose. She wore a short black dress with thin shoulder straps and she was looking at me as she walked up that aisle. I wondered if everyone else saw the beauty lurking there, hoped they hadn’t, hoped she had a mother who always told her how homely she was, hoped she was insecure about her slight breasts, hoped she had been a high school outcast. Guys like me know that things like that can help. She saw me looking at her, possibly read the hope in my eyes, and she smiled at me. Her smile was incandescent.

I smiled back, expecting her to nod and move on, lost to me for all time because that was the way it always was with girls I passed on the street with whom I fell instantly in love, but then she did something strange. She came right up to the table and sat down next to me.

“Hi,” she said.

“Do I know you?” I asked hopefully.

“Veronica,” she said, reaching out a slim, soft hand.

“Victor Carl.”

“Explain something to me, Victor Carl,” she said. “Men with toupees.”

“What’s to explain?”

“Explain to me why. Look over there by the bar, the man with the dead beaver on his head. Why would a man wear so obvious a rug? You’re an initiate to those dark secrets of manhood. Explain toupees to me.”

“It’s a calculation,” I said. “Champagne?”

She smiled and let out a soft giggle that was sexy, not silly. “Yes, please.”

I reached across the table for the new bottle the waiter had deposited in the wine bucket and turned over Prescott’s unused goblet. I filled her glass and then mine. She tasted the wine and looked at me and gave me that smile again.

“That is so good,” she said.

“It is, isn’t it. The French.” I couldn’t understand why I had never before tried to pick up a woman with Dom Perignon.

“I don’t remember seeing you here before,” she said.

“I’m here with City Councilman James Moore.”

“Is that so? What do you think of him?”

I shrugged. “He’s a politician.”

“Yes. So tell me about toupees.”

“I’m of the theory,” I said, “derived from my misspent college career as an economist, that every choice in life is a calculation. Everything we do is the product of a cost-benefit analysis as to what is best for us.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. Now that fellow at the bar has calculated that he looks better with hair, even when that hair lays on his head like a dead rodent. And who’s to say he’s wrong?”

“Me.”

“You’ve never seen him bald. I’m sure he feels a lot peppier looking fifty with the hairpiece than sixty-five without it.”

“But couldn’t he get a better looking one?” she asked.

“That’s where calculation becomes miscalculation. He thinks it’s snazzy.”

“Oh, it’s snazzy all right. I don’t believe everything is calculation, Victor Carl,” she said.

“Because you don’t want to believe.”

“What about love?”

“The biggest calculation of them all. We each have lists of qualities we’re looking for and love comes when enough of the boxes are checked, or at least we get as many checks as we think we’re going to get.”

“How romantic.”

“Some fellow won a Nobel Prize for coming up with that.”

“He must be a charmer.”

“I’m sure his wife appreciates him.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something, Victor Carl. I don’t believe it, and you don’t believe it either.”

“I don’t?”

“I read eyes like some people read palms and I’ll tell you what your eyes say.”

She brought her face close and put her soft fingers on my cheek and brow, peering into my eyes as if she were reading something writ in tiny letters on my retinae. Her breath smelled sweet and dry from the champagne and as she looked into my eyes I felt as if I were drowning in pale blue waters. Then she pulled back suddenly.

“See, I was right,” she said.

“What did you see?”

“I saw enough to know.”

“Tell me what you saw,” I said, only partly joking now.

I heard the scrape of a chair and Jimmy Moore sat down next to Veronica and all of a sudden I was embarrassed, as if this woman who had just been gazing into my eyes should be kept away from the likes of Jimmy Moore. Even so, I was about to introduce them when Jimmy said, “I thought they’d never leave,” and Veronica stretched her long beautiful neck and turned away from me, resting her chin on the back of her hand, facing Jimmy. I looked at the bar and saw the aggressively curved woman there laughing with a man who had his arm around her neck, and with a sickening disappointment I realized that sitting next to me was not a woman mysteriously attracted to my smile and wit but instead was Jimmy Moore’s mistress. It was enough to break my heart in two.

7

EVEN IN THE BEST OF TIMES I am not one of those people who leap out of bed in the morning ready to attack any challenge the day might bring. I wake like I enter a swimming pool, slowly, hesitantly, one step at a time as my body gradually becomes accustomed to the cold. The morning after the night before, with my head swollen from the councilman’s champagne and my legs sore from I knew not what, I might have stayed comfortably unconscious until noon except for a shrieking pain in my bladder that demanded, DEMANDED, attention. Good thing, too, since as I was pissing relievedly at 9:05 I realized I had to be in Judge Gimbel’s courtroom at 10:00 in United States v. Moore and Concannon.

I didn’t remember all of what happened after the fourth bottle of champagne the night before. I remembered Veronica, who grew more beautiful by the drink until I would have sworn I had never seen anyone as perfect before, and Jimmy Moore, growing larger, louder, ever more powerful, ever more passionate, and Chuckie Lamb, his surliness expanding with the hour, and Chester Concannon, easing our transitions as we moved in a group from club to club. There was Henry, the councilman’s driver, a handsome, silent Jamaican with purple-black skin and a high forehead, standing just over six feet tall and sporting evil looking sunglasses despite the darkness. And then of course the limousine, that great black cat of a car. It had a boomerang hovering over its trunk and a bar and television in back and it wasn’t rented, it was owned by the councilman and cared for by Henry, so it was clean as soap and it shined in the city light and moved as smoothly and as predatorily as a panther through the night. I remembered that car all right. My first limousine ride, looking out the darkened windows at those who could only wonder who we were to deserve such splendor. I had always hated limousines, their ostentation, their imposing bulk, the way they tied up traffic on tight streets, parked in front of restaurants too expensive for me, the way they proclaimed that the people inside were somebodies, names, and that the people outside were nobodies, the nameless. I had always hated limousines, but I had to admit that viewed from inside they were entirely more benign.

“Want a rose, Ronnie?” said Jimmy, lowering his window and snapping his fingers at an Asian girl carrying a basket of cellophane-wrapped flowers in the street. We had walked from DiLullo’s to an open Art Deco club with swarms of hunters, where we had shared another bottle, and now we were in the limousine heading to some other of the councilman’s haunts.

“I don’t need anything,” said Veronica.

“Buy a rose for Veronica,” said Jimmy to Chuckie Lamb, who immediately fished into his pocket for dollar bills.

“Aren’t they Moonies?” asked Veronica.

“Moonies have a right to eat too,” said Concannon.

“And we need a pin with it,” said Jimmy.

“Two dollar,” said the girl into the window. She was far too perky for that time of night.

“Help her on with it, Victor,” said Jimmy.

I took the flower and slipped my fingers beneath Veronica’s shoulder strap so as not to jab her collarbone, fiddling the stem’s pin into the thick cotton of the strap. I felt the softness of her skin on the back of my fingers. She looked down at my hands as I worked and I wished I’d had a manicure at least once in my life. There was something about Veronica that was so delicately beautiful it hurt. Her face had a sad cast about it, and the coltish way she moved was sad, and the way her head hung low was sad. But every now and then, like a gift, was that smile, brilliant, promising. Though she watched closely as I fastened the flower to her strap, and though I was embarrassed at my peeling cuticles and cracked nails, I couldn’t help but linger.

I was in an entourage, and the very idea of it was thrilling. At some point in the evening a few others joined up, a state senator, an afternoon disc jockey, a famous jazz musician, and we rode around in that car together, hitting place after place, first the waterfront, then South Philly, then an after-hours place above a storefront off Market. Each club was different in design but all had the same atmosphere of practiced decadence. I was tired, and I knew I had to be in court the next day, but there was something about being in an entourage, even the entourage of a luminary as small-time as Jimmy Moore. Whenever Jimmy Moore arrived, his group trailing behind him, doors opened, greetings were warmly given, corks popped like firecrackers off perfectly cooled bottles. He could have been Eddie Murphy, Leon Spinks, hell, he could have been Elvis. And as I was with him, part of the grandeur splashed off on me. It didn’t seem to matter a whit what I actually thought of the man. Throughout the night I had tried to pull out, to get to bed, but always Jimmy would tell me one more place and Veronica would flash that smile and I would duck with the rest of them back into the limousine.

“Club Purgatory,” said Jimmy.

“Yaboss,” said Henry through the partition and we were on our way.

“Prescott says you do real estate law,” said Moore.

“Just this fraud case we’ve settled,” I said.

“We might need a real estate lawyer,” said Moore.

“I don’t really do too much.”

“Ronnie’s having trouble with her landlord,” said Moore.

“He is being quite unreasonable,” said Veronica.

“Give me your card, Victor,” said Moore.

I nervously patted my jacket. In the inside pocket I found a card, corners bent, the old, still optimistic name of our firm listed, but my name front and center in solid black printing. I handed it to him.

“Guthrie, Derringer and Carl,” said Moore.

“Guthrie left,” I said.

“Here, Ronnie,” said Moore. “If that Greek bastard hands you any more trouble you give Victor here a call.”

“I will,” she said, and she tossed me that smile and then and there I hoped that the Greek bastard, whoever he was, gave her a peck of trouble soon.

“You’ll do a fine job, Victor,” said Jimmy Moore. “I know it. I wouldn’t leave Chester with anyone but the best.”

“I appreciate your confidence,” I said. Concannon was looking out the window as we spoke.

“Be sure you do,” said Jimmy. “I have a feeling you’re going places, Victor. And I’ll help you get there. Just be sure where you’re going is where you want to be.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Up or down, boy?” said Jimmy. “It’s your choice. Choose up.”

“He wants to make sure you stick with the program,” said Chuckie.

“Up or down, boy?”

“Victor will stay out of trouble,” said Chester softly.

“Keep your eye on this one, Ronnie,” said Jimmy with a loud and dangerous laugh as he wagged a finger at me. “He is going places.”

That’s what I remembered as I dressed for court, hurrying out of the shower and putting on my shirt while my skin was still wet, so that the cotton stuck to my back, and tying my tie frantically and sloppily. And I remembered also that as the limousine had dropped me off in front of my building and slid away into the night, leaving me alone on the deserted street, facing nothing but the emptiness of my apartment and the loneliness of my bed, and with the bud of nausea starting its gorgeous blossom in the pit of my champagne-sloshed stomach, I couldn’t help but laugh, long and out loud, a laugh that had echoed like the howl of a hyena through the dark, empty street and had announced to the whole of the world that finally, dammit, I was on my way.

8

JUDGE GIMBEL’S COURTROOM was like all the courtrooms in the Federal Courthouse, two stories high, wood paneled, dark, designed with a ridged modern texture that was dated even as the workmen were slapping it onto the new building’s steel girders. Scattered in the benches were twenty-five lawyers waiting for Judge Gimbel’s status call, twenty-five lawyers at, let’s say, a total of $5,000 an hour, waiting for His Honor, who was already half an hour late. He had probably stopped off at the ACME to pick up a sack of potatoes on special, saving himself forty-nine cents and costing all the litigants together $2,500. Thus the efficient engine of the law. Seated with the lawyers racking up their billable hours were the print and television reporters covering the Jimmy Moore case. Some were clustered around Chuckie Lamb, who was releasing the councilman’s statement for the day. Moore, Concannon, and Prescott huddled together in the corner. I was sitting alone, merrily letting my meter run at my new and inflated rate of $250 an hour. Safely within my inside jacket pocket was a fifteen-thousand-dollar check drawn upon the account of “Citizens for a United Philadelphia,” or CUP, Moore’s political action committee. When I saw it was CUP that was paying my retainer for Concannon’s defense I balked a bit, but not too much.

“I’d rather it come from a different source,” I said to Prescott after he had handed the check to me outside the courtroom. “Like from Concannon himself.”

“I don’t believe Chester could pay two hundred and fifty dollars an hour,” explained Prescott. “By the way, there is a CUP fund-raiser for the councilman’s new youth center tonight at the Art Museum. You should come. Definitely. I’ll put you on the list. You do have a tuxedo, don’t you?” asked Prescott, his voice suddenly as snide as Winston Osbourne’s in its prime.

“Yes,” I said, conscious of the insult.

“There will be some people there you should know,” he said, his tone once again avuncular. “It’s never too early to start meeting the right people.”

“But about the check.”

“Don’t worry, Victor. Concannon is on the board of directors of CUP and his indemnification is provided for by the committee’s bylaws. It is all perfectly legal, I assure you. Take it.”

So I took it, and stuffed it in my pocket, and sat with it in the courtroom, thinking of the black-tie affair to which I had just been invited, wondering at all the important people there to whom Prescott would introduce me. I was imagining the scene, sparkling with tuxedos and gowns in a pure black and white, like a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie, when I was tapped on the shoulder by a tall, pale man.

“You Carl?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Let’s talk,” he said, giving a toss to his head in the general direction of the hallway.

He wore a blue suit, a red tie, black, heavy police shoes, the generic uniform of a prosecutor. There was a weariness in his eye, a sense of having seen it all before. Prosecutors have two primary expressions, one of weary cynicism when they think they are being lied to, which is often, and one of weary self-righteousness when they believe themselves to be the last bastions of truth and justice in the world, which is always. These expressions are as much a part of the uniform as the red ties. When they hire on with the government they must be sent down to Washington to train with an army of mimes in a basement of the Justice Department building, mastering their weary expressions.

“I’m Marshall Eggert,” he said, perfunctorily holding out his hand when we reached the hallway. It was like grabbing hold of an eel. “I’m prosecuting the Moore case. I understand you’ll be representing Concannon.”

“That’s right.”

“We’re glad as hell that McCrae’s off the case,” he said. “If we had known that’s all it took we would have taken him out for some Peking duck months ago.”

“Your sympathy is heartwarming,” I said.

“We could never get McCrae to accept a deal for Concannon. Could never get him to even consider one.”

“What kind of deal?” I asked warily.

“We’ll drop everything down to one felony and recommend a minimal term. And we won’t object if the Bureau of Prisons gets soft and sends him to a Level 1 facility like Allenwood.”

“And what does he do?”

“Testify.”

“Against his boss.”

“Exactly.”

“And for that he gets jail time? It won’t happen, Marshall, can I call you Marshall? Chet Concannon’s a stand-up guy. He won’t flip.”

Eggert sniffed at me. “What would he want?”

Good question. Truthfully, I had no idea what Chester Concannon would want to testify against his boss, but I knew exactly what I wanted here. “Complete immunity,” I said.

“You know better than that, Carl. We would never give immunity in a case like this.”

I shrugged.

“Your boy’s in a tough spot,” said Eggert, who had dropped a hand into his navy blue pants pocket and was now jingling his loose change. “With his priors he’s looking at serious time. And he’s liable to be caught in the crossfire between the government and Moore. If I were you I’d be jumping out of my pants to make a deal. Look everything over, talk to Concannon. We’ll keep our offer open for a week, but then it disappears. Now how much time will you need to get ready for trial? We’re willing to be flexible.”

“Trial’s in a week and a half,” I said. “That should be enough.”

The jingling stopped suddenly and Eggert’s expression shifted to weary incredulity. He sniffed twice, cracked a weary smile, and the jingling began again. “Ever tried a racketeering case before, Carl?”

“No.”

“This is not your usual rear-ender. There are tapes, there are boxes of documents, there are reams of financial records, there are over a thousand pages of Jencks Act material from the grand jury. And there’s a half a million dollars flowing from the good guys to the bad guys, a half million we can’t all account for. This is complex stuff. There’s no way you can be ready in a week and a half.”

“I’ll work overtime,” I said.

“Listen, pal, if you don’t ask for more time I’m going to demand it, and make you look like a fool in the process. I’m not going to have my conviction overturned upstairs because of your incompetence.”

My eyes were watering, so I turned aside and looked down the hall. “You started the clock running when you indicted, Marshall. Time to step up to the line, ready or not.”

“Oh, we’ll be ready,” he said, the jingling of his change growing furious. “The government is always ready. But you’d be well advised to be careful here, Carl. These people you’re palling around with now, they’re not boy scouts. Bissonette would tell you so if he could talk out a skull still as soft as a ripe guava. And fat Pete McCrae, whom you replaced, that piece of duck might have done him a favor. He was two weeks from getting indicted himself.”

“I can look out for myself,” I said.

“I don’t know how you fell into this case, Carl,” he said, “but trust me when I tell you that you didn’t fall in clover.”

Then Marshall Eggert, a knight in cheap navy blue wool and clunky black shoes, a weary prosecutor weighed down by all his grave and portentous righteousness, Marshall Eggert turned from me and stalked back into the courtroom. Well, I could never say I hadn’t been warned.

Judge Gimbel was a great prune of a man, his skull covered in a wrinkled bag of skin without even a pretense of hair, except for wiry sprouts erupting from his brows and ears. His mouth was dried and downturned. A set of reading glasses perched aggressively on the tip of his sharp nose, through which he peered with a marked disdain for those with the temerity to stand before him. He had been a federal judge longer than anyone could remember and acted as if he had been born to the job. His voice, turned grotesque by age and disease, was like a handsaw eating through a log.

“Did Mr. Concannon get new counsel?” the judge asked. There was a slight echo in the courtroom that gave the proceedings an air of grave importance.

“Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “Victor Carl on behalf of Chester Concannon. I filed an appearance of counsel this morning.”

There were four of us at the defense table. Prescott stood next to me, straight as a pole in his stock navy suit, his own pair of reading glasses perched on his nose, lending him the virtuous air of a scholar. Moore and Concannon sat on either side of us. Behind our table was the Talbott, Kittredge team, all in a row, waiting to hand off any document for which Prescott snapped his fingers. At the prosecution’s table stood only Eggert.

“Are you satisfied with Mr. Carl’s representation, Mr. Concannon?”

Concannon stood and said, “Yes, sir.”

“I can attest,” said Prescott, “that Mr. Carl is a highly qualified attorney.”

“We’ll see, won’t we,” said the judge. “When’s our trial date?”

“October sixth,” said the judge’s clerk, a young woman sitting at a table in front of the bench, ceaselessly working through piles of paper as she spoke.

“That’s thirteen days from now,” said the judge. “Are we going to be ready?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Prescott.

“The government will be ready, Your Honor,” said Eggert, “but in light of the fact that Mr. Carl filed his appearance only this morning, we believe a continuance is in order.”

“I’ve discussed the case with Mr. Carl,” said Prescott. “He’s had access to all our discovery and to Mr. McCrae’s files and he has informed me that no delay of the trial date will be necessary.”

“Your Honor,” said Eggert, “Mr. Prescott does not speak on behalf of Mr. Concannon and, with all respect due Mr. Carl,” he glanced at me and his face clearly indicated exactly how little he thought that amounted to, “we don’t want to go through the expense of a trial only to have a conviction overturned somewhere down the line for ineffectiveness of counsel.”

“That’s enough carping, both of you,” said Judge Gimbel. “Mr. Carl, can you be ready in thirteen days?”

“I think so,” I said.

“You only think so?” said the judge. “Mr. Concannon.” Concannon stood again. “Your counsel has just told me he only thinks he’ll be ready for trial in thirteen days but wants to go ahead anyway. What is your opinion of that?”

“We’ll be ready, Your Honor,” said Concannon.

“Why don’t you have a little talk with your attorney before you decide.” The judge waved us to the back of the courtroom. We sat next to each other on the last bench and spoke softly while everyone else waited.

“The judge wants me to explain to you what’s going on,” I said.

“I understand what’s going on,” he said. “They think because I’m black they have to say it twice, like English is my second language. Just do whatever Prescott says.”

“The truth is, Chet,” I said quietly, “Eggert’s right. There’s no way I can go over everything before the trial. There’s too much material.”

“Whatever Prescott says.”

I saw something move to our side and I turned my head quickly. One of the reporters was sneaking up the bench, trying to listen in on our conversation. “Do you mind?” I said loud enough for the entire courtroom to hear. The judge stared hard at her as she smiled awkwardly and backed away from us.

“Vultures,” said Concannon, his head hanging low. He didn’t look so assured just then, he looked young and scared and sick of it all.

I looked away, scanned the courtroom, saw the gaggle of Talbott, Kittredge lawyers conversing easily. I swallowed once and said, “The government offered me a deal for you.”

“Let me guess,” he said. “They want me to testify.”

“That’s right. You’d end up with a minimal term. I could probably work out a recommendation for no jail time if I push.”

“They want me to testify against the councilman?”

“Yes.”

“And then what happens to me?”

“Maybe probation for a few years.”

“And then what?”

“And then nothing. You’re off the hook.”

“And then what?” he said. “Don’t you understand, Victor? There is no choice for me here. Before working for the councilman I was sitting on the stoop in my undershirt, buying malt liquor with my mother’s check. For the guys I grew up with that was the ultimate career goal. Occasionally, for a little extra beer money, I would cook up cheese steaks at a place my uncle owns, sweating into the chipped beef as I mixed it with the onions and Cheez Whiz. Two years of Temple University but that was still all the work I could find. I have a record, no worse than anyone else I grew up with, but enough to kill my future. Then comes the councilman, seeking guys with records who had cleaned up their acts, role models for his crusade. And so there I was looking for something and there he was looking for me. He saved me, absolutely. Now I drive around in his limousine and drink champagne every other night and make good money and do good work. And when he becomes mayor I’m going to be his chief of staff. Now what happens if I testify against him?”

“Chet, do you want to go to prison?”

“I’ve been there already and let me tell you, I’d rather sit in prison than on that stoop. You do whatever Prescott tells you to do. I’ll take my chances with the councilman.”

Another lawyer might have decided to withdraw, might have told the judge that despite his client’s wishes he could not be ready, forcing a continuance so that new counsel would have sufficient time to prepare. Another lawyer might have walked away knowing he was acting in the best interests of his client. That is what another lawyer might have done. But it wasn’t another lawyer standing there before prune-faced Judge Gimbel, it was me, with a $15,000 retainer check in my inside jacket pocket and my name on a guest list to a black-tie fund-raiser where I would meet the important people it was so very important for me to know. And somewhere in the uncertain future were newspapers with my picture featured prominently on the front page, adorning articles about this case, and deals in which Prescott had promised to include me, and cases he had promised to refer to me, and gobs of money he had all but guaranteed would be mine. And, yes, somewhere out there in that gray and ugly city was the mysterious Veronica, on whose dress strap I had pinned a single rose and who now had my number on a bent and spindled card.

“We’ll be ready,” I told the judge when Concannon and I had returned from the back of the courtroom.

“Now, Mr. Concannon,” said the judge. “I’m willing to give you a continuance if you ask, but your counsel tells me you don’t want one. Is that correct?”

Concannon stood. “That’s correct, Your Honor.”

“So I don’t want to hear from you that your counsel didn’t have enough time to prepare if the verdict goes against you,” said the judge. “You are waiving your right to that claim in any future proceedings, and your right to any other insufficiency of counsel claim. Do you understand what that means?”

“Yes, sir,” said Concannon.

“Explain it to him anyway, Mr. Carl,” said the judge.

I leaned over and explained it to him as if English was indeed his second language.

“That’s fine with me,” said Concannon.

“You satisfied with that, Mr. Eggert?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Eggert.

“Do us all a favor, Mr. Carl,” said Judge Gimbel, “and stay away from Chinatown until this case is over. October sixth, ten o’clock. Come prepared to pick a jury.”

9

THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART sits aristocratic and brown atop a rise at a bend in the Schuylkill River, spreading its wings to embrace the whole of the city before it. Long flights of stairs rise from a great statue of Washington on horseback to a courtyard fountain, surrounded by columns supporting colorful Greek pediments. It is a grand entrance, made famous by the movies, and the courtyard affords a spectacular view of Philadelphia. At night, with a full moon and the city lights twinkling, if you squint you can imagine yourself someplace exquisite and full of hope, someplace elegant and magical. For me that had always meant someplace else until that evening. That evening the city truly did seem to sparkle like a jewel of promise in the night, a jewel ready to be plucked.

I didn’t have an invitation and so, while gay, formally dressed men and women with haircuts and gleaming teeth flashed their invitations and breezed on by, laughing, I had to wait as the guard at the rear lobby checked for my name on the list.

“Oh, yeah, here you are, Mr. Carl,” said the guard. “But it only says one.”

“There must have been a mistake,” I said in my best Winston Osbourne impression.

“I guess so, Mr. Carl. Go on in and enjoy yourself. You too, ma’am.”

“I suppose men in tuxedos do get more respect,” I said once we got inside.

“Unless they’re mistaken for busboys,” said Beth.

I had brought Beth because I needed company as I brushed shoulders with a crowd two or three classes above me. She would rather have spent the night at Chaucer’s Pub, where the draft beer is Rolling Rock and T-shirts are acceptable, but as a favor to me she had put on her red dress, the tight one, about which she was forever fretting as to whether or not it still fit. It fit tonight. Its smooth curves softened the normal sharpness of her face and she looked almost beautiful. I had always been a little bit in love with Beth. It was never a sexual attraction, really, but there was a power in Beth that I could sense, a sharp integrity. In some strange way I needed her to think I was worthy of her and, to my astonishment, she always had. Beth was my best friend, it was as simple as that. And that night I thought my best friend looked pretty damn good.

I looked pretty damn good myself. It was the first time I had ever worn my tuxedo. I bought it when I was still full of optimism and beneficence, six years before, in anticipation of my wedding. It is a long story, but suffice it to say that on the eve of the ceremony my bride-to-be took a long hard look at me and decided she was too young to be married. The tuxedo didn’t fit like it had when I bought it, but I guess that’s why they invented cummerbunds.

We handed our coats off to the coat check guy and climbed the stairs alongside the huge yellow Chagall mural of a sun and a field of wheat and a man stuck out alone in a boat. We passed statues of fat naked women, turgid bronze breasts thrust forward, and stepped into the Great Hall, where a huge formal staircase rose to a bronze of the naked Evelyn Nesbit as Venus. Underneath a soaring Calder mobile we snatched champagne glasses from a passing silver tray. The place was teeming with tuxedos and formal gowns; they leaned against the walls and huddled in cliques and glided like spirits in and out of the open galleries. A small jazz band played at the foot of the stairs. A tray of cheese sticks passed by and I swiped three.

“What’s this benefit for again?” asked Beth as she sipped her champagne and looked around.

“Drugs, I think, or maybe AIDS,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

“Misery is such a clever excuse for a party.”

“I’ve never been to one of these before,” I said. “Are those little shish kebabs over there?”

“It’s amazing how far you’ve come in just a few days, Victor. Our finances are on the edge of solvency, your face was on the television this evening, standing behind Moore as he gave his speech on the courtroom steps, and if you don’t watch out your name will be in bold print in the society column. ‘Who was that partying into the wee hours last night for AIDS? Why, our own Victor Carl, looking very chic in his black tie.’”

“I was beginning to wonder if I would ever wear this thing.”

“You look good in it.”

“Yes, I do,” I said. I did look good in it, and I felt good in it, too. For a moment as I stood among that crowd of the wealthy, the sophisticated, the elite, who had done all they could to keep me out, as I stood there and surveyed the scene something hard and cold in my gut began to ease and the bitterness seemed to melt away. I was finally where I was always meant to be. I looked around and sipped champagne and decided I would stay.

“I should wear my tuxedo more often,” I said.

“Julie doesn’t know what she missed.”

“Let’s find Prescott,” I said, suddenly scanning the crowd. “You should meet him.”

“Look at that face on you, my God. Oh, I’m sorry, Victor.”

“There he is, now,” I said and I led her to a stern looking Prescott and two sober-faced round men in the corner. Together they looked like mourners at a wake. They were standing before a Diego Rivera mural, three soldiers swathed in bandoliers cutting down a whipped and hogtied man and wrapping him in blankets. As we approached Prescott I slowed down, warned off by the demeanor of the men and the somberness of the mural, but then Prescott saw me and his face cracked into a smile that drew me to him.

“Ah, Victor,” he said over the band, shaking my hand. “Terrific that you could come.”

“Thank you for having me, Mr. Prescott. This is Elizabeth Derringer, my partner.”

“Pleased to meet you, Elizabeth. It’s a shame my partners don’t look so good in their evening wear.”

“Richard DeLasko is one of your partners, isn’t he?” asked Beth. DeLasko was the current Chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association.

“Yes, he is,” said Prescott, proudly.

“Well, you know,” said Beth in a confiding whisper, “I heard the Chancellor looks just marvelous in his black pumps and red sequined gown.”

Prescott was taken aback for a moment and then he smiled tightly, saying, “Yes, well,” before turning to me. “Victor, these are two men I’d like you to meet, Jack and Simon Bishop.” I knew of them, they were names for sure, the most successful real estate developers in the area. Each month a new Bishop Brothers development was opening somewhere in the far suburbs.

“Good to see you, Victor,” said one of them, Jack or Simon, I couldn’t tell yet which. His accent was British, his voice smooth and melodious. “Bill has told us all about you. Said you might fancy working with us on a new project we’re developing. He speaks quite highly of you.”

“Valley Hunt Estates,” said the other brother, with a harsher voice and a harsher accent. “We bought ourselves an old mansion not too far from the Schuylkill. Hit upon the notion of a neighborhood of manor homes around it. Huge front lawns, six bedrooms and whatnot. For those with upscale dreams, if you gather what we’re proposing.”

“Luxury throughout,” said the first brother.

“But very traditional too, mind you,” said the second. “And the options are gorgeous. Optional stable. Optional carriage house. Optional stained-glass window running up three stories, makes you think you’re living in Westminster Abbey. Valley Hunt Estates. Simon’s the genius came up with the name.”

“Yes, well, but it does have a certain ring, doesn’t it,” said Simon Bishop.

“I’m taking a more active role in this limited partnership than I normally do,” said Prescott. “Recently I’ve begun to take an interest in the business side of things and so we were talking about the need for outside counsel. For opinion letters and the like. Your name came up.”

“Take my card, Victor,” said Simon, reaching into his inside pocket. “Ring us up tomorrow.”

“I will,” I said.

“Have you received the documents?” asked Prescott.

“Yes, sir,” I said. He had sent me over six boxes of documents released by the government and copied for me by Talbott, Kittredge and Chase, six boxes at twenty-five cents a page, all billed to CUP. I was overwhelmed by the quantity of it. “Thank you.”

“If you need anything else, let me know. Anything at all.”

“I will, sir.”

“So that is how it’s done,” said Beth after we had swung away from the trio. The jazz band was playing “Begin the Beguine,” an older couple started dancing in the open area in front of the stairs. They must have been names because, as if on cue, other couples crowded past us to start dancing alongside them. A tray of tiny egg roll squares swept through, but as I reached for them I was stymied by a broad tuxedo back and then the tray was gone.

“That’s how what is done?” I asked.

“Networking. I had heard about it but I never saw the real thing until tonight. You’re surprisingly good at it.”

“Just trying to build up the practice. You see any more of those egg roll things?”

“Yes, sir, no, sir, anything you want, sir. But you shouldn’t kiss Prescott’s butt so intently, Victor. It can leave stains on your ears.”

“It doesn’t help,” I said, “when you start accusing his partners of cross-dressing.”

“Your friend Prescott’s a snake. I wouldn’t trust him for a second. I looked him up in Martindale-Hubbell. Did you know he worked for Nixon?”

“A lot of fine people worked for Nixon.”

“Ehrlichman,” she said. “Haldeman, Mitchell, Dean, Kissinger.”

“Kissinger never went to jail. Oh, Nixon wasn’t so bad. Take away Watergate and Vietnam and he was a pretty good president. Pretty damn good.”

“Victor,” she shouted loud enough to get the attention of a group nearby.

I tried to shush her quiet.

“Listen to yourself,” she said. “Don’t turn into a whore, Victor, just because some Republican gave you a case.”

“At fifty bucks an hour you’re a whore,” I said. “At two-fifty an hour you’re a success.”

From out of one of the galleries and into the foyer came first a clatter of noise and shouts and then the surge of a crowd of tuxedos and gowns and sprayed hair. At the front, marching forward with his back arched and head high, was Jimmy Moore. Behind him was an entourage, grown larger by the event, a gaggle of followers following gladly. Jimmy’s tuxedo was tight around his barrel chest and thick shoulders. He was laughing, eyes bright, shaking hands as he passed the partyers, talking a bit here, talking a bit there, shaking hands with the vigor of a politician on the campaign trail, which I guess is what he was.

“Victor Carl, Victor Carl,” he said when he reached me, grabbing my hand and shaking it with the enthusiasm of a Kennedy. “Terrific of you to join us. Terrific.”

“I wouldn’t have missed it, sir.”

The crowd behind him seemed to flow around us until we were in the center of a very large group.

“Quite the turnout, wouldn’t you say, Victor. Funding for our youth home on Lehigh Avenue is just about completed. We’ll be able to start construction as planned, thanks to these good people. You’ll be generous, I’m sure, Victor. Lawyers are always so generous when it comes to the needy,” he said with a wink.

“It’s good to see you again, Mrs. Moore,” I said.

Leslie Moore was by her husband’s side, clutching a small purse in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. The tendons in her long neck were as taut as suspension wires. Her sister, Renee, held tightly to her arm as if to keep her standing. “Thank you, Victor,” said Leslie in her soft voice, barely discernable above the blatting of the crowd. “We’re both so grateful you could come.”

“This is my partner, Elizabeth Derringer,” I said.

“Good to see you, young lady,” said the councilman. “Yes. Always grand to see another lawyer for the cause.”

“And what cause is that?” asked Beth.

“Why, giving kids a second chance,” said Jimmy with a huge smile. “Raising up the disadvantaged, healing the sick. Righteousness.”

“Since when did City Council ever care about righteousness,” said Beth, taking a sip of her drink. “I thought all it cared about was parking spaces.”

As Jimmy and Beth were talking I saw Chester Concannon walk by the group, looking unusually sharp in his evening clothes. He held onto the arm of a tall young woman whom I didn’t recognize until she turned her head to look at me. It was Veronica. I raised a finger to say hello, but she acted as if she didn’t remember me. They were a handsome couple, Chester and Veronica. After they passed I looked back at Jimmy and Leslie. Jimmy was concentrating on Beth, his eyes never wavering, but Leslie followed the handsome couple as they walked the length of the wide hall. There was something fierce and strained in her face as she watched them, something serpentine.

“But if you’ll excuse me, Victor,” said Jimmy, interrupting my spying. “It’s time for the obligatory speech. It was a distinct pleasure, Ms. Derringer.”

“Good luck, Councilman,” she said.

“Where would I be if I depended on luck?” he said. “Keep up the good work, Victor.”

And then the crowd surged past us, like we were two stones in the middle of a mighty river. The band stopped playing. Jimmy climbed four of the steps, hopped onto one of the great granite blocks that rose on either side of the stairway, and turned around. Magically the foyer quieted. Jimmy gave his speech.

I had heard it all before.

I was at the bar, waiting on a Sea Breeze for me and a beer for Beth, when I heard a familiar voice behind me. “You’re missing the speech, Vic.” I turned around. Chuckie Lamb was grinning at me with those fish lips, his scraggly hair brushing the shoulders of a rather ragged tuxedo.

“It’s the same old crap,” I said.

“Yes, I know,” said Chuckie. “I wrote it. Bourbon,” he barked at the bartender and then turned back to me. “You got yourself a nice gig here, Vic, lawyering for Chester. Big bucks, invitations to the nicest parties, a chance to wear a rented tux.”

“Yes, it is nice,” I said.

“Who’d you blow for all this? Prescott?”

“Did we go to school together, Chuckie?” I asked him. “Did I beat you up at recess or something and you still hold the grudge, is that it? Because otherwise I don’t understand why you despise me so.”

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those jellyfish who just want to be liked.”

“Isn’t everyone?”

“Not everyone. But you want to know why, Vic? All right. Because my instinct tells me you’d sell your mother for a hundred bucks. Is my instinct right?”

“Actually, yes,” I said, turning back to the bar to pick up my drinks. “But then you don’t know my mother. In any event, what’s any of it to you? I don’t see your name on an indictment.”

“Yeah, well, I got lucky.” He reached over my shoulder for his drink. “And so did you. But I’m naturally lucky. Are you naturally lucky, Vic?” He raised the bourbon up as if he were toasting me and then swallowed half the drink in one swallow. “You better hope so.”

I blinked twice as I watched him go.

I handed Beth her beer and together we wandered through the open galleries. It was a treat to have the museum to ourselves, and even though there were plenty of people, that it was a private party made it feel like we had the museum to ourselves. We were drifting in the museum’s Impressionist gallery, paintings by Renoir, Degas, paintings by Mary Cassatt, who had been born in Pennsylvania but had been clever enough to leave. Then we passed from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Shadowy figures from Jasper Johns, a collage in flames by Rauschenberg. I paused at a stark painting of a grand and empty courtyard, slashing shadows, a bare statue, repetitive arches, and in the background just the top of a train belching smoke into the empty air. There was a terrifying emptiness about the painting, a palpable sense of loss.

“Giorgio de Chirico,” said Beth, reading from the little plaque on the wall.

“It should be called ‘My Life,’” I said.

“Now what do you know about de Chirico’s life?” asked Beth.

“Who’s talking about de Chirico?”

“Well, look who’s over there,” said Beth.

I turned to see a tall thin woman in silk pants, leaning back, hips thrust forward like a model’s. She was strikingly beautiful, blue eyes, straight narrow nose. Her black hair swept out with the unnatural wings of a television anchorwoman. She was with a tall, gray-haired man who looked perfectly natural in his expensive tuxedo and who was not her husband. I knew that because I knew her husband, I hated her husband terribly, and never before had I seen the gray-haired man who now put his arm over her shoulders and brushed the top of her head with his lips.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said softly.

“Don’t you think we should say hello?”

“Let’s go. Please.”

“Oh, Lauren,” said Beth in a high-pitched call, loud enough for the woman to hear. She turned, and her eyes brightened into a smile. With her adulterous friend in tow she came to us, leading with her hips, walking across the room as if it were a runway at a Paris opening. She reached out her arm to me, wrist cocked down. Two thick gold bracelets, stamped with runes and encrusted with diamonds, slid bangling down on her thin forearm. “Why, Victor,” said Lauren Amber Guthrie, wife of my ex-partner Guthrie. “I’m surprised to see you here. You don’t usually come to these sorts of affairs.”

“Hello, Lauren,” I said.

“Beth dear,” said Lauren in her soft breathy voice. “What a cute little dress.”

“You know, Lauren,” said Beth, “I’ve been looking but I haven’t seen Guthrie here tonight.”

“I don’t think he’s coming,” said Lauren. “I’m here with Rodolpho. Rodolpho dear, meet two dear friends, Victor and Elizabeth.”

“Charmed,” said the gray-haired man in a voice twisted by a strong Italian accent. “I justa love this…” He gestured to all the paintings, struggled to find the right word, and then shrugged. “This,” he said.

“Don’t give up on the tapes,” said Beth. “They take time.”

“Rodolpho is in silk,” said Lauren. “He comes from Como.”

“Como, Texas?” asked Beth.

“Italia. I’m from Italia.”

“She knows, dear,” said Lauren. “She is just being funny.”

“Ah, yes. Now I see.” He laughed deeply and falsely.

“Where’s Guthrie tonight, Lauren?” I asked.

“I really don’t know.”

“Don’t you think you should know where your husband is?”

“Unwatched husbands sometimes stray,” said Beth.

“How would you know, dear?” said Lauren.

“Husband?” said Rodolpho.

“He’s hardly ever violent,” I said. “Except when he becomes jealous.”

“Husband? Do I know about this husband?”

“I could use another champagne, Rodolpho,” said Lauren. “Be a dear?”

“Of course. But we musta talk about this husband, yes?”

“Tonight, yes. Now hurry,” she said, her breathy voice turning breathless. “I’m so very thirsty.”

We watched Rodolpho as he walked with mincing European steps out of the gallery on his way to the bar.

“I met him at a reception at the Italian consulate,” said Lauren. “You’d be surprised how many Italians are in Philadelphia, it’s like a glorious, sophisticated subculture in the midst of the Philistines.”

“That you have made it your mission to entertain,” said Beth.

“Be nice, dear, and I’ll introduce you to it.”

“Don’t you think you should be more discreet in your infidelity?” I asked.

“I have been, Victor. I’ve been the soul of discretion. But things have changed.”

“You’ll introduce me?” asked Beth.

Lauren looked Beth up and down, examining her closely. I expected her to stick a finger in Beth’s mouth to check her teeth. “There’s a serious young man, Alberto.” She rolled the “r” in Alberto. “An architect working with Venturi. Dirt poor but very handsome. Give me your number, dear, and I’ll pass it on.”

“How have things changed?” I asked.

“We’re separated, Victor. I moved out. Well, really Sam moved out, but I would have been the one to leave if my father hadn’t bought the house for us.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I lied. “How’s Guthrie taking it?”

“Not well, I’m afraid.”

“That’s too bad,” I said, fighting the smile.

Beth was rifling through her small red handbag.

“And Victor,” said Lauren. “You know that crack about the jealous husband, it was not so far off.”

“Guthrie?”

“He can be brutal. Violent. An absolute beast. I should have known from the first. Anyone who sweats as much as he.”

“You married him,” I said accusingly.

“I thought it was charmingly masculine at the start, those subtle beads of perspiration. He is very athletic, you know. But it kept on coming. Like Niagara Falls. Finally I had him go to the doctor about it, but there was nothing to be done.”

“And so Rodolpho,” I said.

“For tonight, at least. Have you smelled him? He wears the most marvelous scent.”

“Turn around, Victor,” said Beth. I did as she ordered and, using my back as an easel, she scratched out something on a business card. “My home number’s on the back,” said Beth as she handed the card to Lauren.

“You should have two different cards, dear,” said Lauren. “One professional, one personal. That’s what I do.”

“But you don’t work, Lauren,” I said.

“Now that I’m suddenly single, I’ve gone into fashion.”

“Ah, yes,” I said. “The destitute divorced woman, abandoned by her husband, forced to scratch out a desperate living on her own.”

“Close enough,” said Lauren. “Oh, here comes Rodolpho. If you’ll both excuse me, you’ve worried him so. I need to calm him.”

“You won’t forget,” said Beth.

“Alberto,” said Lauren, again rolling the “r,” her eyes widening with the excitement of it all. “Victor, now that things have changed, give me a call. I’ve missed you.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Oh, do, Victor. We had such fun. Ciao.” And off she swept, hips forward, right arm raised, her gold runic bracelets jangling together on her arm, off to intercept the worried Rodolpho and lead him on to another gallery.

“Alberto,” said Beth, rolling the “r.”

“Poor old Guthrie,” I said.

“Yes, Guthrie the beast. All that money,” mused Beth. “That wonderful old name. Gone.”

“But at least he had everything for a time.”

“What about you? You were with her first. What happened?”

I shrugged. “She was slumming when she met me, looking for fun. She said she found me too serious. It was his basic insincerity that first attracted her to Guthrie. And she liked the way he hit on her all the while she was sleeping with me.”

“What else are partners for?”

“Well, at least it’s working out all right in the end.”

We strolled through the rest of the twentieth-century wing, ending in a room dominated by the work of Marcel Duchamp. There were tiny surreal sculptures, a wall of cubist paintings, visual jokes on paper, a glass vial of 50 cc of Parisian air in a case by a window looking out over the front courtyard. In the rear of the room, in its own alcove, was a wooden door with a peephole. I looked. Through a hole in a brick wall I saw a faceless woman, lying on her back, naked in the straw, her vagina jagged as a wound. The woman was holding a lantern that illuminated the scene brightly. It was a wildly disconcerting view through that little hole and I was slightly off balance when I left the alcove and bumped into Veronica. Chester Concannon was with her, still playing the beard.

Veronica was wearing a short silk dress, her head purposefully facing away from us, scanning the walls, showing off her long neck and gentle gentile profile, as I made the introductions. When I mentioned her name her head slowly turned until she stared me straight in the eye. “Hello, Mr. Carl.”

“Pleased to meet you, Veronica,” said Beth with an amused voice that Veronica ignored.

“How’s that landlord of yours?” I asked.

“Still a problem,” she said. “So tell me, Mr. Carl, what do you think of this painting?”

She gestured to a large canvas on the wall. It was painted in different shades of red and brown and tan, a flurry of abstract shapes. I walked over to it and bent down to read the label. “Duchamp: Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. 1912.” I stood back and could just make out the figure on the stairs and track her movement downward and to the right.

“Interesting,” I said.

“I had a boyfriend once who told me I looked like that,” said Veronica.

I stared into her eyes for an instant and then turned back to the painting. “It’s sort of abstract,” I said. “Which makes it hard to tell.”

“It’s easier if you see me with my clothes off.”

She was smiling at me, I could tell, even with my back to her. When I faced her again I smiled back and so we smiled at each other.

“Do you want to join us after the fund-raiser, Victor?” asked Chester, interrupting our smiling. “You too, Elizabeth. We’re meeting at Marabella’s.”

“Thank you, Chester,” I said. “But I should get some sleep this week, don’t you think? Can I have a word, though?” I motioned him away from the two women so we could talk confidentially. “Tell me a little about your friend Chuckie Lamb,” I said quietly.

“Oh, Charles is all right,” he said. “He’s smart as hell, but peculiar, too. Very loyal to the councilman, very loyal to his friends, devoted to his mother. But if you catch him wrong he can be difficult to take.”

“I must have caught him wrong.”

“Then you’re in pretty good company.”

“Why wasn’t he indicted with you and Jimmy?” I asked. That was the question I was really interested in. Chuckie said it was luck that kept him out of it, but federal prisons are full of guys who thought luck would keep them out of it.

“They didn’t have any direct evidence about him at the time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, you see, he never met with Ruffing or talked to him on the phone. It turned out Charles had only one meeting.”

“And let me guess,” I said. “That meeting was with Bissonette.”

“That’s right. And with Bissonette unable to testify they didn’t have anything about Charles they could put before the grand jury.”

“Quite the convenient little coma for Chuckie,” I said.

“You could say that,” said Chester, slowly, like an idea was starting to form. He looked at me for a moment. “Don’t get into any trouble, Victor.”

I shrugged.

Then he called out to Veronica, “Look, Ronnie, we have to go. He wants us there first.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Carl,” said Veronica as she turned to follow Chet.

“Nice meeting you too,” said Beth to her back.

I watched them go, well, actually watched her go, watched the way she shifted inside her shift, and then turned back to the Duchamp painting. I studied its lines and angles ever more closely, and found them suddenly very sensual.

“That’s a sweet little girl,” said Beth.

“The councilman’s mistress,” I said.

“Aaah,” she said. “And dangerous to boot. When’s that trial of yours scheduled?”

“A week from Monday.”

“What are you doing to prepare?”

“I have some documents to look at, but other than that, nothing, which is exactly what my client wants me to do.”

“But that would leave the whole trial to Prescott.”

“Do you think she looks like this?” I asked, still looking at the canvas, feeling an erection stir. “I’m beginning to see the resemblance.”

“Have you ever thought, Victor,” said Beth with an audible sigh, “that the reason Prescott gave you the hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar settlement in Saltz was so that you would take this case and then stay out of his way as he screwed your client? Did you ever consider that?”

That brought me away from the painting. “You’re saying he bought me off?”

“I was just bringing up a possibility. I mean, of all the lawyers in all the firms in this overlawyered city, why did he pick you to step in to represent Concannon?”

“He hired me because he thinks I’m a good lawyer and a smart enough guy to stay out of his way and he’s right. They gave me a fifteen-thousand-dollar retainer, they’re paying me two-fifty an hour, and there has been the promise of more good things to come. Whatever he wants me to do, I’m going to do.”

“You just don’t get it, do you, Victor,” said Beth. “They’re never going to let you join their little club.”

I didn’t get a chance to respond because just then a flash of red shot through the window onto the wall, and then blue and then red again. There was a police car now outside in the front courtyard, and then two more, their lights all spinning. Five cops and a man in a tan raincoat stepped out of the cars and headed up the stairs to the entrance of the museum.

10

BY THE TIME I GOT to the Great Hall, the five uniformed officers and the man in the tan raincoat were already there, surrounded by a mob of tuxedos and gowns. The man in the raincoat was an African-American. He wore thick round glasses, a navy suit, a red tie, and his shoes were black and clunky. I recognized the uniform, if not the man. He stepped right through the crowd until he reached Jimmy Moore at its center.

“What is the meaning of this?” bellowed Moore.

Two officers immediately moved to either side of Jimmy. The man in the raincoat waved a document and said in a weary but precise voice, “James Douglas Moore and Chester Concannon, I am here on behalf of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania with warrants for your arrests.”

That brought a shocked little babble from the crowd.

One of the officers, a broad-shouldered woman, said to Moore, “Put your hands behind your back, sir.” She had the voice of a gym teacher urging her girls up the hanging ropes.

“This is a travesty,” shouted Moore. “I am being persecuted.”

“Hands behind your back, sir,” said the woman.

Concannon, who was standing at the rear of the crowd with Veronica, tried to back away but a young blond officer grabbed his arm and another officer, older, with a serious face, put a hand on Chet’s shoulder. “Hands behind your back, please, Mr. Concannon,” said the older officer. His serious face squeezed itself in embarrassment as he brought out his handcuffs. “I’m sorry, sir, but I have to cuff you. I have orders.”

“I’m Mr. Concannon’s lawyer,” I said after I had made my way to my client through the crowd. “By whose orders is he being cuffed?”

The officer nodded at the African-American man in the raincoat. “Assistant District Attorney K. Lawrence Slocum.”

Prescott cut through the crowd and took hold of Slocum’s arm. “What is this about, Larry?” he said, his voice sharpened to a fine edge.

Slocum looked down at his arm until Prescott let go. “We’re making an arrest.”

“I’m acting as Councilman Moore’s attorney. You tell me what is happening, immediately, or I’ll slap a civil suit against the state and city before you leave the Parkway.”

“Stay out of our way, Bill,” said Slocum calmly, “until the suspects are taken into custody.”

“Hands behind your back,” said the woman officer as she took hold of Moore’s arm, turned him to the side, and leaned him forward.

“James Moore and Chester Concannon,” said Slocum as soon as the men were cuffed. “You are both under arrest for the murder of Zachariah Bissonette.”

I looked at Concannon, whose head was down and whose arms were pinned behind his back. His eyes darted to and fro like minnows as the young blond officer frisked him.

“Bissonette?” I said to Concannon. “I thought he was in a coma.”

“Not anymore, sir,” said the officer with the embarrassed, serious face. “He died at eight-o-two this evening at Pennsylvania Hospital. Too bad, too. He seemed like a nice enough guy.”

“But a butcher in the field,” said the young officer.

“I didn’t do anything,” said an angry Concannon. “I didn’t do a damn thing.”

“Shut up, Chester,” I said sharply. “Don’t say a word to anyone. Give your name, your address, your Social Security number, and nothing else. We will get you out of jail and we will take it from there, but you keep your mouth shut.”

His lips twitched, but he managed to calm himself. “What are you going to do?”

“Do you understand what I told you?”

“Yes.”

“You just hang on,” I said. “We’ll get you out.”

Flashes popped as the society photographers clicked away, thrilled at something more exciting than a spilled glass of Pinot Chardonnay to photograph on their beat. “Look this way Councilman,” one shouted as Moore and Concannon were led to the museum doors, “and be sure to give us a smile.” Old habits, I guess, die hard.

“Enjoy yourselves,” shouted Moore to the throng of gawking swells. “Continue the festivities. My lawyer will clear up this little misunderstanding.” He started to say something else, but before he could get it out he and Concannon were whisked out the doors and down the front steps to the waiting police cars. They were barely out the door when the band started up and the whirl of conversation turned gay again. No reason to let a silly little thing like a murder arrest get in the way of a party.

I followed Slocum out the doors to learn what exactly would be happening to my client. Assistant District Attorney K. Lawrence Slocum stopped between two columns right outside the entrance and watched with Prescott as the suspects were led down the steps and around the fountain to the cars. He was bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet.

“I’m surprised at you, Larry,” said Prescott as we watched the woman officer put her hand on Moore’s head and press it down so it wouldn’t hit the roof as she placed him into the back seat of one of the cars. “I would have expected you to find a more public place for the arrest.”

“You know how it is, Bill. The Eagles were out of town this week.”

“I’m Victor Carl,” I said. “I’m representing Chester Concannon.”

“What can I do for you, Carl?”

“Tell us when we can bail out our clients.”

“We’ll arraign them at the Roundhouse right away.”

“Who’s the judge there this evening?” asked Prescott.

“Does it matter?” said Slocum. “We’ll ask to hold them without bail but whatever judge we get probably owes his seat to Moore and will set a half a million at ten percent. For Concannon too.”

“And where do you think they are going?” asked Prescott.

“This is a homicide here,” said Slocum in all his weary righteousness, the jaw muscles beneath his smooth dark skin working. “A death penalty case. They shouldn’t walk with just fifty thousand down.”

“Do you have anything more on them than the U.S. Attorney?” I asked.

“They got everything but the tapes from us in the first place,” said Slocum. He turned his head and spat onto the step below Prescott. “But Eggert’s not one to wait his turn.”

“I assume you notified the press at the Roundhouse,” said Prescott.

“They’ll be waiting.”

“You’ve always been a hound, Larry,” said Prescott.

“A city councilman being arraigned in night court. Front page of the Daily News, don’t you think?” said Slocum. “That’s why I had them cuffed. Looks better on page one.”

“You missed your calling,” said Prescott.

“Maybe so,” said Slocum, taking off his thick glasses to wipe the lenses with his tie. “But I’d rather make news than report it.”

The cop with the serious face climbed up the steps to Slocum. “We’re all set.”

“You read them their rights?”

“Word for word.”

“Well, gentlemen, it was a pleasure,” said Slocum. “Want a ride to the Roundhouse?”

“We’ll take the limo,” said Prescott. “Better scotch in the back seat.”

“Oh man,” said Slocum, shaking his head as he walked slowly down the steps to the police cars waiting for him, their engines running, their lights still flashing. “I can’t wait for private practice.”

“Is he any good?” I asked Prescott as Slocum ducked into one of the cars and all three pulled back around the museum.

“The best they have,” he said. “Let’s get our clients out of jail. Chuckie will prepare a statement for the press.”

“Concannon was a little unraveled,” I said.

“He’ll get over it. I’ll tell you what’s really unraveling. The federal case. Eggert had always hoped that Bissonette would revive and finger Jimmy. That’s one of the reasons he wanted to delay everything. Now there’s one less witness to worry about.”

“So who do you think actually did kill Bissonette?” I asked offhandedly.

He looked at me with his cold blue eyes squinted sternly for a moment and then eased his face into a paternal smile. “It doesn’t really matter, does it?” he said.