Hostile Witness

11

THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE was in a narrow, dirty building sandwiched between two glass skyscrapers. Lawyers with offices in the skyscrapers bustled in and out of the revolving doors, the tassels on their loafers swishing, their Rolexes flashing as they hailed the cabs lined up on the street, the drivers all hoping for that apocryphal fare to the airport. Lawyers from the DA’s office passed out of their filthy lobby in weary navy blue waves, pushing shopping carts full of their day’s files, girded for battle in the city’s grimed and undermanned courtrooms. There was about this throng of city attorneys the air of a soon-to-be-defeated army pushing forward only because any avenue of retreat had been cut off.

“ADA Slocum,” I said to the receptionist in the lobby, a flabby-faced woman with wrinkles around her eyes and the tan stains of a smoker between the first two fingers of her right hand. She was ensconced behind a thick wall of Plexiglas with only a circle of airholes for her to speak through. “He’s expecting me. Victor Carl.”

“Have a seat,” she said, gesturing to a dirty row of ruined plastic chairs out of some high school auditorium. I chose to stand. With the lobby’s dim light and its general filthiness, I felt like I was in a subway station. That receptionist, that lobby, it was all quite a leap down from Talbott, Kittredge and Chase.

A few minutes later the elevator opened and a thin young woman stepped out while still holding the door.

“Mr. Carl?” she said.

We stopped at the fifth floor. On the way to Slocum’s office the woman led me past a maze of secretarial desks and cubicles, through the frenzied sounds of drastically overworked assistant district attorneys. What could have possessed them to take such a job, I wondered. They started at less than thirty grand, they worked killer hours pleading with cops and yelling at witnesses on the phone late into the evening, sending out subpoenas that were ignored, glancing at piles of files the night before the day they had to try them. And when it was time to leave the office for private practice it was tough to find a job other than hustling for cases in the city’s criminal courts. With my spirits buoyed by the grand possibilities that Prescott was promising, I could only feel pity.

Slocum was in his shirtsleeves, leaning back in his chair, his feet resting on his desk as he talked on the phone. His shirt cuffs were rolled up, revealing dark and powerful forearms. Behind his desk were two flags on posts, one the Stars and Stripes, one sky blue and mustard with gold markings, which was the city’s flag. Slocum’s office was cramped with boxes and file cabinets and large posterboard exhibits leaning against the walls, a map of one of the city’s parks, a diagram of an apartment with the outline of a sprawled body in the living room, a photograph of a woman with bruising around her face. The walls were covered with a cheap and fraying paneling. One of Slocum’s shoes had a hole in the sole. Slocum was talking to his car repair guy, arguing over what was required for his car to pass inspection.

“That’s got to be the biggest racket going,” said Slocum after hanging up the phone. “I bring in my car for a thirty-dollar inspection and end up paying five hundred dollars for a new exhaust system in order to pass. Isn’t there a law?”

“You tell me,” I said. “You’re the expert.”

“I told my mechanic once I was going to put an undercover unit on his tail. He laughed at me. Said it didn’t matter how many plainclothes cops came into his shop, it was still going to cost me three-fifty for a brake job. He told me what I really needed was a new car. That was four years ago.”

“Maybe your mechanic’s right,” I said. “Judging by the sole of your shoe you do too much walking.”

He laughed. “The real trick is sitting at the counsel table so the jury can see the bottom of my shoes. Jurors like their public prosecutors a little ragged around the edges. It adds to our sincerity. And they don’t want to think they’re paying us too much. If I hadn’t worn it through naturally I’d have filed a hole in there by now. So what do you need, Carl?”

“You know I represent Chester Concannon.”

“Sure,” he said, webbing his hands behind his head. “You took Pete McCrae’s spot. Too bad about him, huh?” A broad smile hid his evident grief.

“On Concannon’s behalf,” I said, “I’m looking into the Bissonette murder.” Prescott had said it didn’t really matter who killed Zack Bissonette, but I couldn’t agree. My client had been accused of killing that man and it was my job to do what I could to defend him. Investigating Bissonette’s murder might not have been in strict accordance with my client’s orders, sure, but I didn’t figure I was risking much by snooping around. If it turned up nothing, no one would ever need to know, and if it turned up something, well, maybe I’d be a hero. So the night before, standing in my tuxedo in the Roundhouse courtroom, with derelicts staring down at me from the glass-enclosed bleachers up above, I had pulled Slocum aside for a few seconds while the defendants were in the lockup and Prescott was out raising bail and I had set up this meeting.

“Your federal trial starts in a week and a half,” said Slocum. “My advice, Carl? Go back to your office and finish preparing for that trial. This will keep.”

“My team’s working on the federal case,” I said.

“How many people in your office?”

“Two.”

“I thought so,” he said with a scornful laugh. “Make a discovery request and I’ll consider it in due time.”

“I don’t have due time. I was hoping I could get something right now.”

He dropped his feet from the desk and leaned forward, his hands now clasped angelically before him. He smiled a broad smile and his eyes, even through his thick round glasses, were glistening. “It’s a sad thing how often in this life our hopes go unfulfilled.”

My eyes started watering as he continued to flash that broad, dashing smile and for an instant I didn’t know what to do so I did what I sometimes do when I don’t know what to do, I laughed, and he laughed with me and we both laughed together, laughed loud and long, laughed hysterically at how he had all the power over me at this meeting and could send me home with nothing if he chose and it looked like he was choosing exactly that. We laughed so hard that he had to take off his glasses to wipe tears from his eyes and I pressed the palms of my hands into my own eyes as if I could squeeze back the water and we laughed some more at how wildly we were laughing. We let our laughter gear down into guffaws and into chuckles until finally we were only shaking our heads in amazement at how hard we had laughed before. And then I stopped even chuckling when I realized there was nothing funny about it.

“So,” I said. “What about it? Am I going to get some help?”

“File your motions,” he said. “The discovery judge should get to them maybe sometime next month.” He started laughing again, but this time I didn’t join in. Polite requests obviously weren’t going to work. I could think of only one gambit, weak though it was, that might.

“If I have to file the motions,” I said, “I’ll file the motions, but that will take a lot of time.”

“Which you don’t have. You agreed to the trial date, didn’t you?”

“I agreed, but I’ll tell the judge I’m not getting the cooperation I expected and I need more time. He’ll chew the hell out of me.”

“That he will.”

“But then he’ll give it to me.”

“Prescott will love that,” said Slocum.

“No, Prescott won’t be happy,” I said with a shrug. “But you know who will be thrilled?”

“Who?”

“Your buddy Marshall Eggert, who’s anxious as hell for some sort of delay because he needs more time to prepare for the biggest trial of his career as a federal prosecutor and he’s terrified of blowing it.”

As soon as I said Eggert’s name any remnant of Slocum’s smile fled from his face. “That skinny little bastard,” said Slocum. “I was good to go on the attempted murder charges when he got the Attorney General herself to convince the DA to let the feds try Moore first on his racketeering crap. Except for that your clients are scumballs, I’d like nothing better than to see him shoot a blank.” He stopped talking for a moment and gave me a strange look. It was a strange look coming from him because I sensed it was almost a look of respect. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”

“I suspected,” I said. “He seems to be concerned that there’s a lot of money he can’t account for, money that seems to have disappeared.”

“Only a quarter million,” said Slocum. “But Eggert’s concerned about more than just that. The murder evidence is pretty tight but there are other holes that he hasn’t yet filled and he knows it. They overreached in their indictment.” He rubbed his mouth for a moment and then said, “I assume, Carl, that you are now making a formal discovery request.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“And in view of extenuating circumstances you are seeking to receive the information immediately or the prosecution of a major racketeering case will be delayed, inconveniencing the court and all parties, including the Assistant United States Attorney, and delaying the swift and sure execution of justice.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“And these extenuating circumstances will be detailed in a letter that will be hand-delivered to this office first thing tomorrow morning along with a formal petition.”

“My secretary is typing it up this very instant,” I said.

“I’ll check upstairs and let you know by early tomorrow if I can free up a detective to sign out the evidence.” He rubbed his palm across his mouth again. “You know, Carl, my guess is you’re in way over your head.”

“Most likely,” I said.

“We are not lifeguards in this office,” he said. “Whatever trouble you get into, don’t be looking to us for help. My only goal here is to make sure that Jimmy Moore and Chet Concannon pay the steepest possible price for killing that man.”

“I understand,” I said.

“That’s good, Carl. You see, if I have to use you for a stepping stone as you flail about in the water, I don’t want you thinking you’ll get anything more from me than the bottom of my shoe on your face.”

12

I WAS IN MY OFFICE, on the phone to Dr. Louis Saltz, when she called. It was after hours, and Ellie was strictly nine to five, so I had to put Saltz on hold to answer the other line. When I realized who it was I felt the briefest moment of panic. “Hold on a moment,” I told her and then switched back to Saltz.

“Listen, Lou, something has come up. I have to run.”

“We’re set for tomorrow then, right?”

“Four-thirty in my offices,” I said.

“I got hold of the others and most will be there. I still have my doubts. You’re going to have to do some convincing to get me to agree, but I’ll wait for the others.”

“Lou,” I said. “Believe me when I tell you, this offer’s a gift. We should take it and be giddy.”

“Be good, pal,” he said and then he was off.

I sat at my desk for a moment, the light on my phone blinking to indicate a caller on hold, and thought about how much trouble that call could be, how disastrous it could turn out if I took it, but then, smack in the middle of my sensible thoughts, I punched her line. “Ho,” I said. “I’m back.”

“Mr. Carl? Jimmy told me to call you if I had any more troubles with my landlord,” said Veronica Ashland.

“I really don’t do much real estate work, Miss Ashland,” I said. “Maybe you should find someone else who knows what he’s doing. I could refer you.”

“I’m sure this isn’t too complicated for you,” she said. “It’s just that my landlord wants to evict me.”

“Have you been paying your rent?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, that’s sort of the problem, I guess,” I said. “Landlords generally want their rent paid on time.”

“I’ve noticed that. They get very picky if you miss a payment.”

“They learn that in landlord school,” I said.

“That must also be where they learn to turn the heat on in the summer.”

“And that sixty-two degrees is plenty comfortable in the winter,” I said. “And how much money they save by turning off the water periodically for mysterious repairs.”

“Maybe you should come over and see what you can do,” she said.

“Now?”

“I told you,” she said. “My landlord is trying to evict me.”

“Did he leave an eviction notice on your door?”

“No, that’s not what he left. He’s an old Greek, he doesn’t know about eviction notices.”

“So what did he leave?” I asked.

“A dead cat,” she said.

13

OLDE CITY PHILADELPHIA is one of those strange, hybrid places that could only have been conceived in the fevered imagination of some Senate subcommittee charged with finding tax loopholes for the financially deranged. It started out two hundred years ago as a residential district, where our founding fathers worshipped at Christ Church during their deliberations over the Constitution, but swiftly devolved into a manufacturing and distribution area where the sugar shipped to Philadelphia from the Caribbean was refined and the iron ore shipped down the Delaware River was smelted and the wood shipped from the South was turned on a lathe into fine and not so fine furniture. Fifteen years ago it was a tidy little area of small factories and wholesalers and restaurant supply warehouses filling the whole of the suburban restaurant market with bar stools and formica tables and huge copper pots. But then some senator slipped a loophole into the tax code allowing tax breaks for renovations of historically significant buildings, and a whole new real estate scam was born.

The clever guys bought up all the old and rotting industrial buildings in Olde City and syndicated them in a series of limited partnerships in which the limited partners badly overpaid for the opportunity to get a piece of the tax break. With the limited partners’ money in hand, leveraged with high-interest mortgages, the clever guys converted all these decrepit buildings into fancy condo units, setting high enough prices for the units so that the limiteds could get a decent return. It all would have worked just fine except that no one wanted to live in an industrially zoned corner of the city with no restaurants or stores or nightclubs and the clever guys couldn’t unload their high-priced condos at a high enough price to pay the mortgages. One by one the partnerships collapsed into insolvency, including the partnership owned by Dr. Saltz and his fellow investors, and with insolvency came tax recapture and sheriff sales of the buildings. After the clever guys had run off with their commissions and fees, what was left were the lawsuits and hundreds of luxury units interspersed among seedy wholesale outlets, serenaded daily by the rumbling of factory machines coming through filthy block windows.

I found a spot outside a shoe store with a hand-lettered sign, WHOLESALE ONLY, in its sooted window and parallel parked my little Mazda between a van and a pickup truck. Like all men, I believed I was the world’s greatest parallel parker, and I banged the pickup only once as I squeezed into my space. Veronica had said she lived in one of the rehabbed Olde City buildings on the same street as Christ Church, so I followed the tall white spire to Church Street and continued on through the narrow cobblestone alley to her building. It had been a sugar refinery in its more authentic days, but now windows had been knocked into its high brick walls and an elevator rose up and down a large steel and Plexiglas tube appended to the side. There was a parking lot and a courtyard in front and stores had been planned for the lower level, but the plate-glass windows were papered over. The whole look of that empty plaza and its vacant stores was one of desolation. I found her number on the security board and she buzzed me up.

The cat lay on the carpet in front of her door, its head sodden with blood.

I kneeled down beside the corpse like a homicide detective in a bad movie and dipped two fingers in the puddle of blood around the cat’s head. I don’t know why I did that, it is just something that homicide detectives who lean over corpses in bad movies always seem to do, and I regretted it immediately. The blood was still damp. I was just about to wipe my fingers clean on the cat’s fur when she opened the door.

“It’s still dead, I suppose,” said Veronica.

She was leaning face forward against the partly open door, her thin pelvis resting against the edge of the door so that I could only see half of her. Her brown hair spilled forward, lightly, like a veil, giving her simple, pretty face an air of mystery. She was wearing blue jeans and a gray ribbed sleeveless T-shirt. Her feet were bare. Wearing jeans, with her hair loose and flowing forward like it was, she looked more the artist than the mistress. There was something sharp and bohemian about her that was very different from the finely dressed society woman she had seemed that night in the limousine with Jimmy Moore and at the museum.

I looked at her longer than I had intended to before I turned back to the cat.

“It looks like its throat was slit,” I said. “Did you know this cat?”

“Can anyone ever know a cat?” she said and then opened the door wide and turned to go back into her apartment.

Quickly I wiped my still wet fingers on the dead cat and rose to follow her, closing her door behind me.

Her apartment was a huge brown duplex with heavy splintering beams overhead and a varnished floor of thick, uneven slabs of wood. There was one wall of brick, the rest were white, and there were huge, sliding-door windows on the far wall. The main area was furnished with a wraparound couch and a projection TV, and there was a long dining room table covered with piles of papers and unopened envelopes. The kitchen was filthy, dishes stacked haphazardly in the sink, and the living room furniture was covered with pants and shirts scattered here and there. A sweatshirt leaned back comfortably over the edge of a chair. To the side of the entrance was a flight of heavy stairs that reached a wide loft open to the living area. It was a large, masculine space, that apartment, even the mess that covered it was masculine, and when Veronica sat down on the sofa and curled her legs beneath her she seemed small and foreign there.

“Nice place,” I said, looking around.

“What about the cat?”

“The cat, the dead cat,” I said, trying to figure out exactly what I was doing there. “Have you called the police?”

“About a cat?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“This is not just any dead cat,” I said. “This cat was murdered.”

“I’m not going to call the police about a cat,” she said. “What I think we should do is get rid of it and then figure out how to get my landlord off my neck.”

“How do you know it’s your landlord?” I asked.

“Who else would it be?” she said.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s first get rid of the cat.”

“There are some bags in the closet,” she said. “And paper towels somewhere around in the kitchen.”

“You’re not going to help?”

“Do I look like the kind of girl who messes with dead cats?”

There was a bright yellow Strawbridge & Clothier bag in the closet and a roll of paper towels on a cluttered kitchen counter. I wadded up one of the paper towels and used the wad as a mitt as I grabbed the cat’s tail and lifted. It was surprisingly light. While placing it in the bag I kept it as far from me as possible, as if the damn cat could suddenly come to life and swat at my face with its claws. When the cat was in the bag I did what I could to wipe the excess blood from the carpet. It was a pale red carpet, which helped hide the blood, but when I was through there was still an ominous stain. Strangely, the stain didn’t look like a cat’s head; it looked like a fish. Maybe the final wish of a dying cat directed the flow of blood from its incised throat. Maybe not. When I was finished wiping I dumped all the bloodied towels in the Strawbridge bag and rolled it up tight and dropped it down the trash chute in the hallway.

Then I bundled all the resentment that had spilled upon the floor as I cleaned up the dead cat and headed back to the apartment. What is it about me, I wondered. Is there a KICK ME sign on my forehead that can be seen only by women? Do they have a club and pass around my name as a dependable sucker who can be counted on to clean up dead cats in emergencies? I mean, if I was sleeping with the woman, then, sure, it would be okay to be on my knees with paper towels, cleaning up the blood from some dead feline on her doorstep, but when it’s someone else’s girl, why am I the one doing the cleaning? I went back to the apartment angry as hell and fully prepared to tell Veronica that I was a lawyer, dammit, not a janitor and that I was leaving and that the next time she had a problem with a dead cat she should call her friend Jimmy Moore.

She hadn’t moved from the couch but in the short time I had been gone she had grown more beautiful. “It’s taken care of,” I said, my anger balling up like a wet paper towel in my throat.

“What did you do with it?” she asked.

“Down the garbage chute.”

“That’s cold.”

“What was I going to do, bury it in the hallway? Look, I have to go.”

“What about my Greek landlord?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Pay your rent.”

“He wants to kick me out anyway. I have a special deal because of Jimmy, but now with Jimmy in trouble he figures he can kick me out and rent it for twice as much.”

“How much do you pay for this?” I asked.

“A hundred a month.”

“Jesus,” I said. The apartment was worth ten times that. I wondered what Jimmy had done for the old Greek to get such a deal for his girlfriend.

“What should I do? He wants me out. He killed a damn cat to get me out.”

“And you’re sure it’s him?”

“He’s crazy. He slit the cat’s throat.”

“Look. I’m a lawyer, not the SPCA. I don’t know what I can do for you. I have to go. I have a lot of work tomorrow.”

She stood up and walked toward me, her hands clasped and to her side. “Can you at least look at my lease?”

“Why isn’t Jimmy here?” I asked. “Isn’t this cat thing and this landlord thing his problem?”

“Jimmy doesn’t want to know my problems. He has a wife with enough problems to keep him busy till Memorial Day. He’s at some political dinner with her tonight, so I’m on my own.”

I stared at her, trying to keep hold of my anger, but she smiled nervously. She looked very young for a moment and I wondered how old she was. She looked like a college kid, a sweet pretty college kid, suddenly very needy and soft. Why wasn’t she in college? I lifted my hands and said, “Where can I wash up?” She pointed me to a bathroom up the stairs.

I was washing my hands in the sink, scrubbing violently with a thick lather of soap, trying my best to get the cat off my fingers, when I noticed, between the toilet and the bathtub, a litter box. It was filled with clay pellets. The ends of neat little cat turds poked above the surface.

I agreed to look at her lease. I cleared a space at the dining table and examined what she gave me while she went upstairs for a moment. It was not the standard form filled with paragraph after paragraph of tiny print giving the landlord all the power to screw the tenant that the law allowed. Instead, she had given me a two-page, double-spaced document, signed by Veronica Ashland, lessee, and Spiros Giamoticos, lessor, that provided she could stay there as long as she wanted for $100 a month and that the landlord could never raise her rent or kick her out. The only rule was that she couldn’t sublease without Giamoticos’s consent. Noticeably absent were provisions about late payment or eviction. From the face of the lease it was apparent that Jimmy Moore had done a whopper of a favor for Spiros Giamoticos, in return for which Spiros had given the apartment to Moore’s girlfriend for next to nothing. It was little wonder that Spiros wanted out of the lease.

While sitting at the dining room table I noticed her mail arranged in rough piles. While she was still upstairs, I took the liberty of looking through it. There was a final notice from the electric company, an overdue notice from the water company, a letter from the American Record Club threatening her with a lawsuit if she didn’t pay for the compact disks she had ordered, a MasterCard bill showing a balance owed of over three thousand dollars. Her mail looked much like my mail. I searched through other piles until I found a letter from her bank. It had already been ripped open. I glanced around to make sure she hadn’t quietly come back down into the room or was looking from the balcony, and then took out the statement. It was a checking account, in her name and in Chester Concannon’s name, with a grand total of $187.92, down from $1349.92 the month before. She had written a $62 check to her credit card company to pay the minimum balance. The rest of the entries were cash withdrawals from different ATMs around the city. I stuffed the statement back into the envelope.

“Your landlord here can huff and puff all he wants,” I told her when she came back down, “but there is nothing he can legally do to kick you out as long as you pay your rent.”

“What about the cat?”

“Call the police or file for a restraining order. I could file a motion for you, but other than that I don’t know. Getting Jimmy to talk to him would be your best bet. What did Jimmy give this Giamoticos, anyway, to get you this lease?”

“A street,” she said.

“A street,” I said, shaking my head. “He gave away a public street just like that?”

“It wasn’t a big street,” she said with a shrug. “More like an alley. I needed a place, so Jimmy introduced a bill or something.” She stood before me with her arms crossed, shifting her weight from one leg to the other. She wanted something, but she didn’t know how to ask.

“Listen, Veronica,” I said. “I don’t mean to pry, but I couldn’t help noticing all your overdue bills. Are you going to be able to pay them off?”

She laughed nervously and leaned over me at the table, turning her papers facedown. She smelled terrific and fresh, like a cherry tree in full blossom. “No,” she said. “Who can pay all their bills now, really? Bad times all over, right?”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll do what I always do. When I get a big enough pile I give them to Jimmy who gives them to Chet who takes care of them.” That was why Concannon’s name was on her account, I figured, to make it easier for him to supply her with the councilman’s cash when her money got low.

“Don’t you work?”

“I’m thirsty,” she said, looking down at me as I sat by the dining room table. Her breath was minty, as if she had just been upstairs gargling. “Are you thirsty? Finding a dead cat in the hallway always makes me thirsty. Let’s get a drink.”

I was tired and I had work to do tomorrow and there were a lot of things I needed to be doing, but the mintyness of her breath, her long slender arms, the way she leaned over me at the table, it all sent my stomach afluttering. My throat tightened on me, so that when I said, “Sure,” it came out in a raspy whisper.

Outside her building, as she held onto my arm and led me off to a bar she knew near Independence Hall, I glanced behind us on Church Street. I caught the glint of the streetlight off the cobblestones and then, farther back, the shine of a boomerang hovering over the tail end of a black limousine. The car’s lights were off, and I couldn’t see inside, but whatever sexual charge had been within me dissipated immediately, grounded by the sight of that car. It was too dark to make out the license plate, but I had no doubt at all as to who the owner was. That was Jimmy Moore’s limousine and whoever was inside was staking out the councilman’s girlfriend. And there I was, my arm linked in hers, stepping out with her into the night. It was a warmish fall evening, the air thick and humid like in springtime, but by the time we had turned from Church Street onto 3rd I was shivering.

14

FROM THE OTHER SIDE of the door I could hear the muffled sound of a busy office, typewriters clacketing, phones ringing, voices shouting from one desk to another. Inside the small, battleship-gray room it was just me and Detective Griffin.

Detective Griffin was a pasty-faced, donut-shaped man with deep dark swaths beneath his eyes. He grunted as he paged through the Daily News, occasionally throwing out bits of gossip he seemed to take great delight in. “Hey, can you believe this stuff?” he would say before he’d read to me from the lurid middle pages of the tabloid. Then he would let out a great, noisy groan of weariness. I was in that small, stuffy room in the DA’s office to examine a stack of files and two large cardboard boxes of physical evidence, the whole of the basis for Slocum’s indictment in Commonwealth v. Moore and Concannon. The evidence had been signed out from Room 800 in the attic of City Hall by Detective Griffin, personally, and he was there to make sure I didn’t walk away with any of it.

“Hey, can you believe this stuff? Listen,” said Detective Griffin. “That guy Bobbitt, whose wife sliced off his peter, right, he’s stripping now in some gay strip joint. His new girlfriend, some Penthouse Pet, is ripping off his G-string with her teeth while the guys all cheer. He says he’s getting sensation back a millimeter a month. It’s like he’s proud it got wacked. Can you believe that guy?”

I could, yes.

The detective stretched his arms out wide and yawned. “Geez, I’m tired.”

This is what the evidence I was looking at showed. On the night of Bissonette’s final beating a young homeless man, only slightly psychotic, while digging in a dumpster for a late-night snack, had seen a black limousine pull up to the back of Bissonette’s. He didn’t see who got out of the car, but Michael Ruffing did. Ruffing and Bissonette were alone, closing the club, when, through a window, he saw the limo pull up and Concannon and Moore get out. This had all happened on Henry’s night off, and Henry’s alibi had checked out, so it was apparently Concannon who had been driving. Before the two could come in the club Ruffing left through the front door, hoping to avoid a confrontation. Inside there had been some sort of discussion, a few drinks had been poured, and then a fight broke out. Bissonette had gone behind the bar, supposedly to reach for a gun taped beneath the counter. His fingerprints were on it. One of the two visitors had grabbed a Mike Schmidt autographed bat from off the wall and knocked Bissonette down with it before Bissonette could grab the gun. He had proceeded to beat Bissonette with the bat all across his body, fracturing bones in both his arms, his fibula, his patella, his coxae, five ribs, and his skull, leaving a five-inch dent in the side of his head. The medical records were voluminous and ugly. Even through the technical jargon, the savagery of the beating was clear. When the paramedics found Bissonette he was covered with blood and vomit. They intubated him immediately and put him on a respirator the moment he arrived at the emergency room. He never regained consciousness.

A tough way to go for such a nice guy, I thought. Even if he couldn’t hit a slider.

The assailants had apparently not rushed to leave after the beating. The bat had been cleaned of fingerprints, the glasses from the drinks had been rinsed. Everything had been sanitized while Bissonette was undoubtedly moaning and breathing with difficulty through the blood and vomit. In my mind I saw Chester Concannon casually wiping the bar with a rag as Bissonette struggled to stay alive behind the bar, his breath rising and falling in a horrific slurp. That would be just like Chester, I thought, not wanting to leave a mess, such a polite young man.

The two men had left no fingerprints, not even on the doorknobs, all wiped clean, but one of them had stepped in the blood and vomit by accident and so the freshly mopped floor had revealed his stride from the bar to the back door. Forensics hadn’t been able to get a shoe size from the partial markings, but the stride was consistent with a man the height of Chester Concannon. A security guard in a nearby store had noticed a long black limousine pulling out from Bissonette’s about twenty-five minutes after Ruffing had reported Moore and Concannon arriving. It had been a brutal twenty-five minutes.

Along with the evidence of the murder were the same reams of financial documents that the feds had given Prescott and Prescott had given me, records supposedly showing the flow of money from Ruffing to Concannon to Moore to CUP, half a million dollars passed around like pastries. And then the flow abruptly stopping. This was motive evidence, to show why Moore and Concannon had deigned to beat Bissonette into his fatal coma, and the pattern was damning. There was money, then the money stopped, then there was the murder. Only about half the $500,000 supposedly delivered was accounted for in the documents, but that didn’t seem to matter much, really. Especially with those phone conversations between Moore and Ruffing, all on tape, all recorded in high fidelity, the most damning carefully transcribed by the DA’s office.

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?

Slocum thought he had caught it perfectly.

The boxes filled with the physical evidence were most interesting to me because they weren’t in the materials given me by Prescott. The Mike Schmidt autographed bat, an Adirondack Big Stick with the sharp red band just above the handle, was safe in a large plastic sack. I gripped it through the plastic, stood, and took a swing. Detective Griffin looked to be drowsing to sleep into his paper, as if he wasn’t watching me, but when I swung he ducked. It was a little heavy but perfectly balanced: a Hall of Fame bat.

“What’s a Mike Schmidt autographed bat worth these days?” I asked Detective Griffin. “Three, four hundred dollars?”

“Don’t even,” he said as he turned the page of his paper and yawned.

In the label, where Schmidt’s name was burned into the wood, there were still flecks of blood. The laboratory had confirmed that the blood was Bissonette’s. The rinsed glasses were also there, as well as the rag that had been used to clean the bar. It was stained the dull maroon of dried blood. Bissonette’s bloodied clothes, sliced to shreds when removed in the ER, were in one bag; his Gucci loafers, stained with blood and vomit, were in another. His wallet had $230 in ten dollar bills. His key ring was heavy with keys of all shapes. There were four empty crack vials found in his pocket.

So the second baseman was no boy scout after all. I immediately checked back with the medical records but found that there was no cocaine in his blood when he came into the hospital.

And then there were the photographs. The first looked like a pizza where the cheese and sauce had kind of slid off to the side. With a quiet shock I realized it wasn’t a pizza at all, it was Bissonette’s face after the beating. The rest weren’t any more pleasant.

I was starting to open the second box when Slocum came into the room. He swung a chair around and straddled it so that his powerful forearms rested on the chair back. “Don’t go racking your brain over who did it, Carl,” he said. “We already know and we got them nailed.”

“Hey, Larry, can you believe this stuff?” said Detective Griffin. “Listen. These idiots were screwing on a subway track in New York and like, what do you expect, but the train runs over them. Now their lawyer’s suing the Transit Authority. Can you believe that? Lawyers are such pigs.”

“How you doing, Doug?” Slocum asked the detective. “You look beat.”

“I’m fresh off last out,” said Griffin. “All night at a crime scene. Nothing new. The perp’s wife was squawking at him about his drug use, so he shoots her, takes her upstairs, and shoots her again just to be sure. Sells the gun for a hundred bucks, buys more crack, and sets himself up downstairs, smoking, watching TV, eating takeout Chinese while the wife is up there bleeding. Took her three days to die.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That’s brutal.”

Detective Griffin stood, hiked up his pants, and groaned. “Shit like that happens every day. Look, I got to take a dump.”

“I’ll watch him,” said Slocum.

“What about those crack vials they found on Bissonette?” I asked after Griffin had left.

“Ruffing says they found them every night in the bathrooms.”

“At a high-class joint like Bissonette’s?”

“The drug doesn’t care how much money you got,” he said. “But Bissonette wasn’t using or selling. His blood was clean and the vials were empty, but had traces of the drug in them. Sellers don’t keep the vials, they go with the drug.”

“What’s this second box?” I asked.

“Stuff from Bissonette’s apartment. Check it out, you’ll love it.”

I opened the box and suddenly understood why Bissonette was such a favorite of the fans. At least some of the fans. What I pulled out of that box was enough to make Hugh Hefner blush. There were all manner of sex toys, appropriately bagged and numbered. There were shackles and ropes and dildos of varied lengths and widths and surfaces, there were vibrators, there were belts of leather and underpants of leather, there were strange harnesses, there were sadistic metal instruments that looked like something out of an alien dentist’s office. Not bagged were the videos and sex magazines and photographs from a Polaroid camera.

“Our Mr. Bissonette got around,” I said.

“Anyone you recognize?” asked Slocum.

“Not likely,” I said, though I did review the photographs one by one. They were blurred and the shots were off center; the camera had been set above and behind the bed and obviously operated by remote control. They were all of a well-built man, ponytailed, with the familiar ballplayer’s face, having sex with women, sometimes just one, sometimes more than one. In many the heads of the women were obscured, showing only long legs, thin arms, bustiers, a tangle of swollen body parts. And in some there were other men.

“Didn’t know he was a switch hitter, did you,” said Slocum.

“It wasn’t on his baseball card,” I said, still looking through the photographs. One caught my eye, a long pale woman with dark hair stretching her body across his, her back arched, her thin butt riding high as Bissonette worked from below. She was reaching back with her arm and squeezing his balls. There was something familiar, tasty about the woman.

“Maybe it was a jealous husband who did him in,” I suggested.

“Give it up, Carl,” said Slocum. “No jealous husband here. The murderer was too careful for a crime of passion. Besides, we have the IDs.”

Quickly I shuffled the photos so it wouldn’t look like I was concentrating too long on any one. In my shuffling I brought back the picture of the long pale woman. This time I saw it clearly, what I had missed before. I shuffled the pictures again and put them back.

“If you take away Ruffing’s testimony,” I said, “all you got is a black limousine and some guy about Concannon’s height.”

“And if you take away the Atlantic we could walk to London. We have motive, we have opportunity, we have eyewitness identifications, we have two convictions here.”

“What’s this?” I said as I pulled out the final object in the carton, a wooden box the size of a head, painted black with Chinese designs inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

“That’s his love chest,” said Slocum. “Open with care.”

Slowly I lifted the lid.

“Jesus,” I said. “He might not have been a boy scout, but he was sure as hell prepared.”

Inside the box were hundreds of loose condoms in different colors and shapes, lubricated, unlubricated, some of genuine goatskin. The little packets glistened in their foil wrappers and looking at them was a little like looking at a display window of a candy store. Beneath the layers of condoms were stacks of casino chips, heavy, in black and gold colors. There were hundred-dollar chips from Bally’s and Trump Plaza and Resorts, over a thousand dollars’ worth, and a series of heavy gold and green chips without a casino’s name printed on them, just the head of a wild boar embossed in gold. There was a small pot of ointment that smelled of sweet and spice, like liniment, with pictures of tigers on the outside. And there were little pipes with screens and a glass tube and, most interesting of all, a goldenrod colored paper slip with the words “Property Receipt” on top and a date stamp. It was signed by our Detective Griffin and indicated that the lab had been given one glassine bag of a chunky, off-white substance.

I lifted up the property receipt. “Now why didn’t the feds tell us about this?”

“It’s not relevant,” said Slocum.

“It’s not Brady?” Brady v. Maryland was a Supreme Court case that required the prosecution to turn over any evidence that would tend to exculpate a defendant. “It seems to me that knowing the victim was a drug user could show that the crime was drug related.”

“His blood was clean and he had no drug priors or drug history. You know what that little bag was?” said Slocum, gesturing to the property receipt. “That was his last chance aphrodisiac. Any hunter in this town knows enough to pack some coke if he’s really looking. If all else fails, you’ll always pull in something with free jam.”

“What about these casino chips without a name, just a wild boar’s head?”

Slocum shrugged. “Maybe some casino out of the area.”

“Seems to me there are a lot of maybes about this guy.”

“What’s not a maybe,” he said, “is that he’s dead.”

Detective Griffin waddled back in and dropped into his chair.

“I got to get to court,” said Slocum. “But hurry it up, Carl, so we can get the detective some sleep.”

“Just a few more minutes,” I said.

I started going through the documents as quickly as I could, checking for anything I didn’t already have, when I caught Griffin dozing off into his paper. His neck drooped, his head dropped lower, then lower still, until he snapped it up and looked at me with surprise on his face.

“Tough shift?”

“Up all night and then Slocum drags me in for this,” said the detective.

“Want me to get you some coffee?” I asked sweetly.

“No, just hurry it up, all right?”

I continued going through the papers, all the time keeping an eye on Detective Griffin as he kept a tired eye on me. He blinked a couple of times and then opened his eyes wide. His neck again began to droop and slowly his head fell off to the side until his cheek rested on his shoulder.

Out of the love chest I quickly grabbed one of the boar’s head casino chips and one of the condoms for good measure, stuffing both into my inside suit pocket. Then I took hold of the pictures and shuffled back to the photograph of the long pale woman. It wasn’t only the body that I recognized. On her arm, the same arm that was reaching back to get a solid hold on Zack Bissonette’s testicles, were two thick gold bracelets, stamped with runes and encrusted with diamonds. I considered taking that picture, too, taking it to protect her, but thought I might need it in Slocum’s possession if things turned out like I now suspected they might.

The photographs were back in the box and I was looking through one of the file folders when Detective Griffin snapped awake with a gasp. He blinked at me and grunted and turned back again to his paper.

“Hey,” he said after a few moments. “Can you believe this new stuff about Roseanne? Jesus. Listen to this.”

I listened. I figured I owed him that.

15

“MAYBE I’M NOT A LAWYER,” said Dr. Louis Saltz. “But it seems to me that until we find that crooked accountant, Stocker, we can’t really know the value of our case.” Saltz was a tall, gangly man with a long face and hairy arms who had a way of seeming to have figured out everything, which I guess is good in a doctor but which just then I was finding annoying.

“That’s true to a point,” I said. “Stocker collated the figures and made the projections that we claim were fraudulent. If we could put him on the stand and if he testified that the defendants told him to cook the books, we’d win for sure. We’d get punitive damages, too.”

“Exactly,” said Saltz, with a rich smile directed around the room. “We’d wipe the bastards out.”

We were in the conference room shared by all of Vimhoff’s tenants, the same ratty little place in which I had deposed Mrs. Osbourne and ruined Winston Osbourne’s life. In the room was a narrow formica table and walls of cheap particleboard bookshelves stocked with accounting journals and tax codes and sets of law books now out of date. Ellie used to spend hours each week updating our sets from West Publishing, from Collier, from BNA, replacing the pocket parts, slipping in the new pages, lining up the most recent volumes, making sure our Shepard’s Citations were absolutely current. But after Guthrie left and invoices went unpaid, one by one our contracts were cancelled and the updates stopped coming. A legal library falls out of date with a startling quickness. The fear of having our crucial arguments trumped by a recent case not in our now dated law books sent us scurrying to the Bar Association library, where for five dollars a day we could wander like ghosts around the association’s volumes with the rest of those second-rate lawyers too poor to own their own books. We could have sold what books we had for a small amount, but we kept them out of vanity – to the untrained eye these volumes gave the conference room a lawyerly sheen. Of course, when we met with other lawyers we always arranged to meet in their offices because to another lawyer, familiar with the volumes, our incomplete sets proclaimed with utter clarity our financial despair. But it wasn’t other lawyers I was meeting with that afternoon, it was Saltz and five of his fellow limited partners, there to discuss the settlement offer bestowed upon us by the good graces of William Prescott III.

“The problem, Lou,” I said, “is that we aren’t going to find Stocker before the trial. We’re not the only ones looking for him, there’s also the FBI and the IRS. The guy skipped town with other people’s money and his only goal in life now is not to be found.”

I looked at Saltz and then turned my gaze on the other men in the meeting. They were all white, middle-aged guys with so much money they couldn’t keep from throwing it away, which was exactly the state to which I aspired. Along with Saltz were another doctor, an owner of a plumbing supply company, a jewelry seller named Lefkowitz, and two partners in some sort of import/export thing that I never quite could figure out. There were two other plaintiffs who couldn’t make the meeting but had given their proxies to Saltz. I was trying to convince them all to accept Prescott’s settlement offer. Prescott had told me the check was already cut. If my plaintiffs said yes that afternoon, I could have the forty thou in our account by Tuesday.

“And even if we find Stocker,” I continued, hammering home my point, “we don’t know what he’ll say. He could bury us.”

“No way,” said Saltz. “The guy’s crooked as a corkscrew.”

“Can’t we just say how dishonest their accountant was?” asked Benny Lefkowitz, the jeweler. “Isn’t that enough to prove they lied on their projections?”

“What he did in other situations doesn’t prove he cooked the books here,” I said. “The judge will never let the jury hear it.”

“Let’s cut through the bullshit,” said Leon Costello, one of the import/export guys. He was a fat, well-dressed man with some sort of dragon ring on his left pinky. “What are you thinking here, Victor? I mean, with your percentage you got the most at stake, right? What do you say we do?”

“My gut says jump at it,” I said. “If we go to trial now, we’ll probably lose. When they were only offering five grand I was ready to roll the dice. But now they’ve put some real money on the table.”

“If their position is so strong, why offer anything?” asked Lefkowitz.

“It’s the way big firms work,” I said. “They bill the hell out of a case until it gets near to trial and then they settle. That way they suck out all the money they can without ever risking a loss.”

“I don’t think we can make this decision until we find Stocker,” said Saltz. “Or at least give it one more shot. What’s to lose? If we don’t find him by the trial we’ll just take the money.”

“If we don’t agree quickly, Lou,” I said, “they’re going to pull the offer.”

“What was that?” said the other doctor, a podiatrist.

“They are offering us this amount so they don’t have to spend the money to prepare for trial,” I explained. “If they have to spend that money, then they might decide to screw the offer and try the thing. And if they do, I believe they’re going to beat us.”

“That’s not fair,” said the podiatrist, a stricken look on his face. “They offer us a hundred and twenty thousand, that’s what we should get.”

“The only way to make sure we get it is to agree to the settlement now.”

“How much time do you think we have?” asked Lefkowitz.

“Not much, a few days, maybe a week. But they could pull the offer at any time.”

“All right,” said Costello. “I heard enough.”

“Maybe we should talk a bit privately, without you, Victor,” said Saltz. “Is that all right?”

“Sure,” I said, standing. “You’re the clients.”

I stood in the hallway outside the room and again mentally spent the settlement money. With the fifteen-thousand-dollar retainer for the Chester Concannon case we were almost current with our bills and had paid Ellie what we owed her. We had even gotten Vimhoff off our backs by paying rent. My share of the forty thousand would be enough to start getting my financial life in order, to almost bring me current on my student loans, to even start paying back my father. Down the line there would be more money from CUP for my defense of Concannon, not to mention the fees I would make on the Valley Hunt Estates deal with the Bishop brothers, from whom that very day I had accepted the outside counsel spot, with enough work promised to keep Derringer and Carl going for half a year. Oh man, yes, things were looking up.

I had played the meeting perfectly, I thought. Saltz was my biggest problem, seeking as he was the big hit, but I figured the others would each take the ten thousand and run. As soon as I told them of the offer, I knew it was as if the money was already in their pockets. Then, at the end of the meeting, I raised the possibility of the offer being withdrawn, as if a pickpocket were reaching into their wallets and pulling out ten one-thousand dollar bills. These guys didn’t build their fortunes by giving back ten grand here and there. At last I was starting to learn the secrets of the rich: whenever you have a chance for money grab it, quickly, clutch it to your chest as if it were life itself. That’s how the rich got rich and that’s how I would get rich too. Their signed releases were my first step. I had already instructed Ellie to prepare the documents so as to waste as little time as possible and they were now in the conference room, in a maroon folder, sitting in the middle of the table like a glorious centerpiece.

It was Saltz who came out to get me.

“We’ve reached a consensus,” said Saltz when I was seated back at the table.

“We’re gonna accept the offer,” said Costello.

“Terrific,” I said, reaching for the file with the releases.

“But not just yet,” said Costello.

“We want you to try one more time to find Stocker,” said Saltz.

“There’s a private investigator I use,” said Lefkowitz. “The diamond business is full of swindlers and you get taken now and then no matter how careful you are. This guy always comes through for me.”

“We’re going to give this guy three weeks to find that accountant son of a bitch,” said Costello.

“We’ll cover his cost,” said Saltz. “We think the offer will still be good in three weeks.”

“And if it’s not, they can go to hell,” said Costello. “We don’t like being pressured.”

“If he comes up empty,” said Saltz, “we’ll take the hundred and twenty grand. But if he finds him, we’ll nail those bastards to a cross.”

“Frankly, Victor,” said Costello. “We’re all in agreement. Ten thousand dollars plus or minus is not going to change our lives. But these guys took us for a ride and now if we can make them pay big time, it’s worth the risk. This goes way beyond money.”

“It’s the principle of the thing,” said Saltz. “And we know you’ll want us to stick to our principles.”

“Do you have a piece of paper for me?” said Lefkowitz. I reached into the file and took out one of the unsigned releases. He turned it over and scribbled on the back. “This is the name of my guy. I’ll call him tonight and set up a meeting for you tomorrow. Tomorrow’s Friday, so sometime early is better. About ten? Fine. He’ll be here at ten.”

He slid the release back to me. I read the name out loud. “Morris Kapustin? What kind of private eye has a name like Morris Kapustin?”

“He’s tougher than he sounds,” said Lefkowitz. “Morris is something special.”

“Give him the three weeks,” said Costello. “If he craps out then take the money, quick. We don’t need another meeting.”

“Is that all right?” asked Saltz.

“I don’t have much choice, do I?” I said.

“That a boy,” said Saltz.

“I’m an easy guy to get along with,” said Costello. “But I hate being taken and those bastards took me.”

“You and Morris will get them,” said Lefkowitz.

“That’s right,” said Costello. “Pound a stake through their fucking hearts.”

16

I WAS WALKING SALTZ through our small reception area, feeling almost desperate about having to wait for my cut of the settlement, when I saw Veronica sitting on the Naugahyde couch by the door. She was wearing her short black dress with dark stockings and black high heels. Her legs were crossed in a way that was hard not to notice. When Saltz saw her he stopped walking and stared.

“Veronica,” I said. “This is a surprise.”

“Your receptionist told me I could wait here. Is she always so unpleasant?”

“Unpleasantness is Rita’s special talent,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

I dragged Saltz out of the office. He didn’t seem to want to talk about the case anymore. “Is she a friend of yours?”

“A client of sorts. She has a landlord problem.”

“If she needs a doctor,” said Saltz, “give her my name.”

“She’s a little young for a cardiologist,” I said.

“I’m versatile,” said Saltz. He leaned backwards to peer through the windowed door. From where we were standing we could only see her long stockinged legs. “Besides,” he said, tapping me on the chest, “that girl’s a walking heart attack.”

“So, Veronica,” I said when I came back into the office. “Another critter turn up dead on your doorstep?”

She was fiddling around in her little black purse. “I was just in your part of town and I thought we could have a drink together.”

“I have too much work.”

“When can you get free?” she asked.

“December.”

She placed her feet beneath her and stood up gracefully. “I’m supposed to meet Jimmy for dinner tonight at eight. Let’s have a drink beforehand.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I have too much work. There’s the trial and…”

She placed her hand on my arm. “I have two hours free. It’s so sad when I am forced to drink alone.”

“Then don’t drink. Go to a bookstore. Catch a movie.”

“But it’s happy hour, Victor.”

“I really can’t.”

“Of course you can. Didn’t you have fun last night?”

“Yes,” I said, and I did.

Despite the overt threat of that limousine parked on Church Street, I had let Veronica take me to the Society Hill Bar and Grill, where we drank cocktails and listened to the bearded piano player and talked about nothing and laughed and talked some more and were both ever so clever. There was something about Veronica, a certain carelessness maybe, that brought forth a depraved charm I didn’t know existed within me, and I liked it. I had always seen myself as a social cluck, dull witted, slow, my conversation frozen with indecision during blind dates or cocktail parties. But sitting at the bar with Veronica, being raked with the gazes of the other men there, all wondering what a jerk like me was doing with someone like her, feeding off her sweet perverseness, my self-confidence blossomed. I was something more than I had ever been. I told stories and she laughed. I kept up my end of a sparkling conversation. I was Henry James, I was James Bond, I was a raconteur.

“Do you have another engagement this evening?” she asked. “A date?” Her pretty lips twisted into a smirk as she stood before me.

“No,” I said. “That’s not it.”

“Well then,” she said. “Let’s go. Carolina’s is just up the street.”

I hesitated for a moment. I was weakening and she could see it. She moved a step closer and lifted her face up to mine and then the phone rang.

I pulled away, turned my back on her, and answered it. “Derringer and Carl.”

“What are you doing asking questions about a corpse?” said the familiar, high barking voice on the phone. “You’re forgetting your role.”

“Screw you,” I said to Chuckie Lamb, suddenly defensive about my visit to Slocum and examination of the murder evidence, all contrary to my client’s firm instructions. “I’m just doing my job.”

“Your job is not to sneak into the DA’s office and plot. Your job is to sit quietly and shut up. That’s what they’re paying you to do.”

“I know what my job is,” I said. “What I don’t know is why you are so pissed off that I’m doing it. Although I have my suspicions.”

“Oh, you’re a brain all right, Vic,” he said. “You keep looking and you might find something you don’t want to find, something that could get you hurt.”

“So that’s the way it is,” I said. “What this call is all about.” I tried to sound hard but I could feel the flutter of fear rise along my spine. I had never been threatened before, not like that, not by someone like Chuckie Lamb, who I had no doubt could turn murderous if he wanted to, who maybe already had.

“I just think you should know exactly what you’re getting into, Vic.”

“You’re doing me a public service, is that it?”

“Now you got it.”

“Give me one reason I should listen to you and be afraid.”

“I’ll give you a quarter of a million reasons, you small-time loser.”

I turned around suddenly. Veronica was standing by the far wall, looking at a print of some flowers, but it wasn’t a very interesting print. Vimhoff had bought it for fifteen bucks, framed, and I doubted if it grabbed all of Veronica’s attention. Did she know who I was talking to? I didn’t want her to know, didn’t want her to have anything to do with my role in this case. I lowered my voice. I knew there was a $250,000 discrepancy between the funds claimed to be given to Concannon by Ruffing and the funds apparently received by CUP, though until that moment I hadn’t focused on it. But Chuckie had made a slip, had inadvertently let me know that it was important.

“So where are they?” I asked, still looking at the pretty curve of Veronica’s back. “All those reasons.”

“Lay off and you’ll live longer,” said Chuckie Lamb.

“So it is a threat, isn’t it?” My hand started to shake and I couldn’t stop it. I grabbed the receiver with the other hand. That helped, but not much. “It’s been a pleasure, but I can’t talk anymore now,” I said. “There’s someone here.”

“Someone I might know?”

“None of your business.”

“Someone involved with the case?”

“Not really.”

“Long legs, thin hips, the face of a spoiled child?”

Just that instant Veronica turned around and looked at me. “Yes, actually,” I said. “That’s it exactly.”

“Then you are as good as wasted already,” he said.

“Anything interesting?” asked Veronica after Chuckie had hung up and I held the telephone in a still shaking hand.

“No,” I said, putting the phone down slowly. “It was nothing. Just another debt collector.”

“Oh, the terrible strain,” she said. “I can see it on you. You simply must come with me for a drink. To calm your nerves.” It was not a question, it was a statement of fact, and before I could convince myself that I really ought to refuse she said, “Besides, Jimmy wants you to join us for dinner and he insisted I don’t accept no for an answer.”

Carolina’s is one of those places where suits congregate after office hours to pretend their lives are worthy of a beer commercial. There’s a restaurant that serves squab and monkfish and asparagus bundles tied with a yellow silk ribbon, but the real action is off to the side, where women with flat bellies go to have their drinks bought for them by Italian suits standing three layers deep at the bar. Guthrie and I used to go to Carolina’s when we were still partners and still friends and we’d laugh at the scene, even as we scanned for a pair of willing eyes. Guthrie is a handsome dog, broad and swarthy, and he’d usually end up leaning over something comely, laying on his saccharine charm as I clutched my beer, my back against the wall, watching. If there was a friend he’d call me over, but that never worked because after Guthrie had his choice the friend was generally not much worth it or, if she was, she’d have her eye on Guthrie. I always associated Carolina’s with failure, so I hated everything about the place, the too expensive drinks, the blank white walls, the forced expressions of self-satisfaction that were worn there like a uniform. But I must admit, it felt different to be there with a beautiful woman who laughed at my jokes and leaned close as she whispered her confidences.

“My jaw is too heavy,” she said, rubbing the back of her fingers along her jawbone. “It’s like the jaw of a wrestler.”

“You’re being silly,” I said. “Do you want another drink?”

“Of course. No, it’s not silly. I have a jaw like that giant wrestler, what was his name, Alex or something.”

I waved for the bartender. “Andre the Giant?”

“Yes. I have a jaw like his.”

“No you don’t. Your jaw is beautiful.”

“You’re sweet to lie for me. Here, feel it.” She took my hand and placed my palm upon her jawline. Her hand was cool and dry, her cheek smooth. My thumb rested in the hollow beneath her chin. She held my hand there for moment. “That’s why the modeling didn’t work. That and my legs.”

“Now you’re being very silly. Another Sea Breeze and Absolut martini,” I said to the bartender, who nodded at me while he stared at Veronica.

“We have to go soon,” she said. “After this drink. We’re meeting them at a place on Tenth Street. A private room. It’s all very serious.”

“What does Jimmy want to see me for?”

“Chet will be there,” she said. “Chet’s always there. And I think your friend Prescott.”

“And Chuckie too, I assume.”

“No, not Chuckie. He’s off visiting his mother.”

“His mother, huh? He doesn’t seem the type.”

“Oh, he’s always off visiting his mother. But I think they want to talk about the trial anyway and, as far as the trial goes, Chuckie’s out of the loop.” Now that was interesting. So Chuckie wasn’t threatening me on behalf of Chester or the councilman. He wasn’t authorized to make the call, he was freelancing, threatening me only on behalf of Chuckie.

“How can you drink that?” she said, pointing to the bright purple Sea Breeze in the highball glass the bartender placed in front of me.

“It tastes like summer. Besides, if I started drinking martinis I’d collapse before I could step out of this place.”

“Cheers,” she said, lifting her clear martini glass and downing a swallow. “Some nights I need a start on the champagne.”

“Victor Carl, Victor Carl,” said a loud nasal voice that I recognized immediately. “Looking very sharp indeed.” I felt something in the pit of my stomach the moment I heard that voice. Its owner was a tall, handsome man with short black hair, greased and combed straight back. Athletic shoulders filled his olive-green suit. He had a smartass smile and a bright yellow tie and he slapped me hard on the back as if I were a fraternity buddy.

“Guthrie, you bastard,” I said to my ex-partner as flatly as I could manage.

“Looking good, Vic,” he said. I really didn’t like being called Vic and I especially didn’t like being called Vic by him. “First I see you popping up on the nightly news and now in Carolina’s with the most beautiful woman in Philadelphia.” He turned his smartass smile on Veronica. “You’re coming up in the world, I must say.”

“I’m associating with a better class of people now,” I said, looking at him very carefully, trying to see the violence Lauren said was in him.

“Since Vic has forgotten his manners,” he said to Veronica, “let me introduce myself. I’m Guthrie. Samuel Guthrie.”

“And I’m interested,” said Veronica, ignoring his outstretched hand. “Not interested.”

“Oooh. Very tart.”

“Watch it,” I said.

“No offense meant. How’s business, Vic? You busy?”

“Busy as hell,” I said. For some reason lawyers always ask each other if they are busy and the response is always that they are busy as hell, even if they’re not. “Funny, things seemed to pick up just after you left.”

“Well, that’s grand,” he said. “I told you my leaving was the best for all of us. How’s Lizzie? That biological clock of hers still ticking?”

“Beth’s just fine, she’s a champ,” I said, suddenly angry. “By the way, we ran into your wife the night before last at the Art Museum.”

The smartass smile fled like a roach when the kitchen light is switched on. It cheered me to see it disappear. “I couldn’t make it,” he said. “I’ve been mondo busy at Blaine, Cox. And it’s not just the quantity of the work that’s so amazing, Vic, it’s also the quality.”

“She said you were separated,” I went on, not taking the seque he offered me about his new firm, preferring to let him squirm.

“What did she do? Sit you down and tell you all her problems? Be sure to charge her the two hundred bucks. Every shrink in the city already has.”

“She seemed pretty happy to my untrained eye,” I said.

“It’s a mask. Just the other day she said she pined for me.”

“So you’re getting back together then?” I asked.

“When I’m ready. I think I’ll let her hang for a bit. I’m enjoying being on my own again.” He gave Veronica a patented Guthrie smile, all confidence and innuendo, but this night it seemed a bit wan. “Listen, Vic, I’ve been meaning to talk to you. Can we get together sometime?”

“For you I’m booked until the millennium.”

“I’ll have Carolyn get in touch with Ellie and set something up.”

“Oh, the anticipation,” I said slowly.

“It’ll be worth your while.” He turned back to Veronica and reached into his inside pocket. “Let me give you my card. If you need anything, a will, lunch, anything, give me a call. My home number’s on the back.”

“I’m sorry Mr…” she glanced at the card. “Whatever. But I don’t need any more insurance.”

“I don’t sell insurance.”

“Funny, you strike me as someone who would sell insurance.” She ripped his card in half and let the pieces drop to the floor.

“My man Victor,” he said, shaking his head. “We really need to talk.”

“A friend of yours?” asked Veronica after he had left.

“He used to be, before he deserted us for a big firm paying him lots of money. Stole our best files, too.”

“You’re better off without him. He’s a cocky little bastard.”

“I used to think he was charming.”

“He still does,” she said. “But he’s torn up about his wife.”

“It seemed like he was taking it pretty well.”

“It was in his eyes. I read eyes, you know.”

“So you told me.”

“His eyes were very sad, very ugly. He’s desperate for her.”

“For a desperate guy he was coming on to you all right,” I said.

“Since I was fourteen I never met a man who didn’t.”

“Now who’s being cocky?”

“It’s not arrogance, Victor. Every man in this bar would go out with me if he could. Even the gay ones. If I came in alone I wouldn’t have had to buy a drink.”

“You didn’t buy a drink. I bought them all.”

“That’s true. I never buy drinks.”

“Convenient.”

“For an alcoholic. The only difference between men is that though they all want me, some think they deserve me. Take your friend Prescott. He thinks he deserves me. Every time he has a second alone with me his hands are all over my body.”

“I thought he was happily married.”

“He says he can’t help himself.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Or maybe I ask for it.”

She laughed and leaned close and languidly rolled the edge of her finger across my mouth and down my neck and then leaned closer until I could smell her sweet, sharp breath.

“Do you think I ask for it?”

“Stop it.”

She gave me a fake pout. “Don’t you want to kiss me, Victor? Don’t you want to bite my lip?”

“You shouldn’t be talking like that.”

She took hold of my hand and put it on her thigh and I let her. The cool softness of her palm, the textured silkiness of her stocking. My face got hot and I looked around at the bar crowd, deep into the inanities of its conversations, oblivious to us. She rubbed my hand back and forth on her thigh and placed her mouth next to my ear.

“Don’t you want to smell the perfume on my neck,” she whispered, “and kiss my collarbone and reach into my dress and roll my right nipple between your fingers?”

I took my hand away. “Cut it out.” The phone call from Chuckie had left me nervous, too nervous to play her games.

“Anything you want, Victor.”

“Just cut out the teasing.”

“I’m not teasing.” She laughed. “Well, not completely.”

“What about Jimmy? Does he think he deserves you, too?”

“No,” she said, turning back to the bar and drinking the last of her martini. “Jimmy thinks he earned me and he’s right. Finish your drink, we should be going.”

On the way out of the bar, as we squeezed through the crowd of suits, an olive-clad arm reached out to grab my shoulder. “Don’t forget,” said Guthrie. “We have to meet.”

Veronica drapped herself around me until she was facing Guthrie and said “Bye-bye Fred.”

Guthrie said, “My name’s not…” before he realized she was playing with him.

I gave Veronica a signal to let her know I’d be out in a moment and then I grabbed hold of Guthrie’s arm. “Let me ask you something,” I said. “Last night Lauren was wearing two gold bracelets with runes and diamonds. I was thinking of getting them for somebody.”

“The babe out there?”

“Sure. Where did she buy them?”

“You don’t get stuff like that at Sears, Vic. They’re custom jobs, from a jeweler in Switzerland.”

“Is there a catalogue or something?”

“Forget it, they were the only two made. She helped design them, she’s into design now, you know. Besides, Vic, they’re so out of your league pricewise you might as well be thinking of buying the Eagles.”

Outside the bar Veronica clutched at my arm as we walked down 20th, looking for a cab. She leaned her head on my shoulder and I pulled away as I saw an empty Yellow Cab drive toward us. I stepped out into the street and waved. The cab swerved to a violent, Hollywood stop.

“You go to the airport maybe, mister?” said the puffyfaced East Indian driver.

I opened the door before he could get away.

In the back of the cab she sat close and leaned into me. “I think I’m a martini short of where I ought to be.”

“I think you’ve had plenty,” I said, shifting away from her until I was leaning against the door. I took her hand off my knee.

“I wasn’t teasing you.”

“Yes you were.”

“But don’t you want to kiss me?”

“No.”

“Really. Just a kiss?”

“Stop it.”

She pursed her lips and leaned her face toward me.

“Just one kiss and I’ll stop.”

“You’ll stop without a kiss.”

“If you were Prescott you’d have me stretched out on the back seat already with my legs around your neck.”

I didn’t relish being compared to Prescott like that, as if he were the better man in everything. I was on the way up, in my ascendance, but still I couldn’t stop seeing myself as a second-rater compared to the likes of William Prescott III. I felt a swift flash of anger and I cupped her chin to give her a peck on the cheek, like she was a little girl, tossing her chin away from me when it was over.

She laughed. “See, that wasn’t so terrible.”

She leaned forward and kissed me quickly and lightly on the lips. And then again, longer this time, pressing her body into mine as she kissed me. Her lips parted and her tongue licked my lips before slipping itself through and rubbing my teeth and then searching like a serpent for my own. By the time the cab stopped she was almost kneeling on the bench seat, pressing her body onto mine like a wrestler struggling for a pin, and my hands were up the back of her dress and down her panties.

“If maybe you finished here now, mister, we’re at the place,” said the driver. We were in front of a corner restaurant with a brown tiled entrance and a well-lighted sign hanging off the wall that read: DANTE’S & LUIGI’S.

Veronica pulled back from me and, still kneeling on the bench, said through a catlike smile, “See, just an innocent little kiss.”

Then she reached for her purse and told the driver to ride around the block, once, so she could straighten her face.

17

“HOW’S THAT VEAL CHOP, VICTOR?” asked Jimmy Moore. “They make the best veal chop in all of South Philadelphia. The best.”

“It’s fine.”

“Their gravy’s not as good as Ralph’s, but Dante’s and Luigi’s veal chop is the thickest in the city. And they marinate it before they broil it. That’s the secret.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

It was just five of us in a bare and spacious private dining room, with whitewashed plaster walls and a high tin ceiling. The table was covered with crisp linen and the waiters, wearing red jackets and linen aprons, had piled it with pasta, veal, broccoli rabe sautéed in garlic, a large bowl of chopped greens swimming in oil and spiced vinegar. Prescott sat rigid in his chair, ignoring his meal so he could stare at me. Concannon worked carefully on his scaloppine, elbows off the table. Veronica sat next to Moore, who kept his arm possessively in her lap.

“We’re glad you were able to come this evening, Victor,” said Prescott. “We wanted to make clear exactly the foundation upon which our defense will rest in the upcoming trial.”

“Politics in America, Victor,” boomed Jimmy Moore. “That’s our defense. You’ve heard the tapes, we can’t deny that we were asking for contributions from that lizard Ruffing, and I wouldn’t if I could. But everything we did was required by our fine political system. Required. Do you understand?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“What is politics in America all about, Victor?” he asked.

I thought for a moment. “The will of the electorate?”

“Money,” he roared. “America is not about power being bestowed by the people, it is about power being grabbed. Grabbed. This country was built with a revolution, created again in a civil war, nothing comes easy or cheap here. American politics is the fairest in the world because the only thing that matters is the money. Hire the consultants, buy the television time, put a bumper sticker on every car, pay off the ward leaders, grab the electorate by its throat with all your money and take the oath of office. That’s the system and that’s damn fine. Any Tom, Dick, or Hanna can hand in a petition, but only the real Joe, can raise the dough. And to stay the real Joe, you better aim every day of your term at getting the contributions for the next election, you better never let down, not for a second. For those who want to support me it is not enough that they clap when I speak, they must give me money when I run. When I was demanding money from Ruffing for my political action committee, for my causes, for my future as a public servant, it was in the great tradition of American politics. All politicians do it, they just cloak it with cocktail parties or fancy dinners. But I cloak nothing. I was demanding money from a supporter because the system I love requires me to do it. And if I was asking a little more forcefully than others, it’s because I have a greater passion for what I’m doing than the others. Do you understand what I’m saying, Victor?”

“Our strategy,” said Prescott, with a pursed, mournful face, as if he were a presidential flack on Nightline, “is to turn this trial of these two public servants into a trial of the American political system and then to make sure the system gets acquitted.”

“You should be focusing on that strategy,” said Moore. “Preparing to build on that foundation. Isn’t that right, Chet?”

“That’s right,” said my client.

“Now we’ve hired a polling service,” said Prescott. “We’ve studied focus groups, examined the demographics. With the right jurors this strategy will prevail. We’re certain.”

“Can I get a copy of that study,” I asked.

Prescott smiled at me, but not his warm smile. “Of course. The key is to gear everything, the jury selection, the arguments, the testimony, everything to our strategy.”

“What about the murder?” I asked.

“Don’t worry yourself about it,” said Moore, reaching for a basket of toasted garlic bread.

“And the arson?”

“Forget it,” said Moore, his mouth now full.

“It’s hard to forget about murder and arson.”

“How’s your makeup doing, Ronnie?” asked Moore.

“Fine, I think,” she said.

“Why don’t you check it?”

She nodded and rose from the table, leaving the room without glancing at me. I couldn’t help but follow her out with my gaze. When I turned back, Moore was staring at me with a frightening ferocity.

“What were you doing at the DA’s office this morning?” he demanded.

I pulled back from the table. Did everyone know where I had been that day, what I had done, whom I had seen, how many times I had hit the pot? “I was looking into the murder,” I said. “Examining the physical evidence.”

“Why didn’t you clear it with Prescott?”

“I didn’t know I had to clear all my trial preparations with Prescott.”

“Tell him, Chet.”

“You have to clear everything with Prescott,” said Concannon.

Without taking his eyes off me, the councilman fished a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. Holding it like a pencil, his lips tight and dangerous, he took a deep drag. “In war you have to pick your battlefields, son,” said Moore, breathing out smoke with his words. “That’s what Lee learned at Gettysburg.” He jabbed his cigarette at me and the syllables of his words came with the precise staccato of gunshots. “Our battlefield is not going to be Bissonette’s murder.”

“The federal indictment,” explained Prescott, with a surfeit of patience in his voice, “covers the crimes of racketeering and extortion. If the murder and the arson are not linked to the request for money, and if the request for money is legal, the federal case will fail.”

“But if Eggert ties the murder into the request for money,” I said, “any claim for legitimacy disappears.”

“He won’t,” said Moore. “Eggert’s so far down the wrong road he might as well be in Vancouver.”

“But you’ve been looking into Bissonette’s murder on your own, Victor,” said Prescott, “conducting an investigation without our knowledge or consent, acting contrary to your client’s express orders. Risking everything.” He looked at me hard so that I knew exactly what he meant, and he meant everything. “So tell us, Victor, what exactly have you uncovered so far?”

“Nothing definite,” I said. “But I have some ideas about who might have killed Bissonette, some theories.”

Moore leaned back and stared at me. “So you have some ideas, do you, Victor?” he said slowly. “Some theories.” There was a silence as he took another drag from the cigarette, all the while staring at me. He spread his arms wide. “Educate us all with your theories.”

“Yes, Victor,” said Prescott, smiling unpleasantly. “Please do.”

I was being threatened and tested at the same time, I thought. They wanted to see what I had figured out, to determine whether I was ready for all they had to offer me. Well, I was ready. I had been so ready for so long.

“They are just theories,” I started, leaning forward as I spoke. “But I wondered why Chuckie Lamb wasn’t indicted. Chet said it was because only Bissonette had direct knowledge of his possible involvement. That would have given Chuckie a motive for getting rid of Bissonette.” I didn’t tell them about the phone call that evening, didn’t want to run to Prescott and Moore like a little boy when the schoolyard bully threatened, but the call had convinced me that I might be on the right line about Chuckie’s motive.

“So Chuckie did it, huh?” said Moore.

“Also, Bissonette was apparently a ladies’ man,” I continued. “Lots of women. Jealousy could have been a motive. I have in mind one man in particular who was being cheated on who is known to be violent.”

“Tell us who?” asked Prescott while Moore continued to stare at me.

“I’d rather not say just yet,” I said, but I, of course, was thinking of my ex-partner, Guthrie. There was no doubt now that it was Lauren Amber Guthrie in the photograph I had picked out at the DA’s office, those bracelets, and somehow Guthrie must have found out about her and Bissonette too. She had said he could become violent with jealousy, but I knew it would have been more than jealousy, it would have been desperation. Lauren was as domestic as a bobcat, but a tidy package came with her, money, status, entree into a world that kept guys like Guthrie and me out just for the pleasure of the blackball. It was one thing to never have a shot at it, that just caused a slow tightening of the stomach, tying you gradually into knots until you resented everything, hated everybody, held malice and bitterness toward all. But to have it in your grasp, in your bed, to have it all and then to see it slip away as your wife threw herself at some broken-down ballplayer with pectorals, well, that was enough to drive a man to murder. It would have been enough to drive me to murder and Guthrie was no better.

“Any other theories?” demanded Moore.

“Not yet,” I said. “But I’d like to keep looking.”

“That’s not permissible,” said Prescott firmly, as he examined his water glass. “Besides, it would be a waste of time. We already know who killed Bissonette.”

“You do?” I said, surprised.

“What, you think we are idiots here?” said Moore angrily. “You think it just slipped our minds the part about finding out who really beat the hell out of that man?” I shriveled from his blast because that was precisely what I had thought. Suddenly I knew I had made a fool of myself. Whatever test there had been I had failed.

“You were right, Victor,” said Chester with a reassuring smile. “At least about Bissonette sleeping with the wrong woman. And the woman wasn’t discreet about it at all.”

“Mooning over him like a schoolgirl with a crush,” said Moore.

“Linda Fontelli,” said Chester. “Mrs. Councilman Fontelli.”

“Fontelli?” I said. “Councilman Fontelli killed him?”

Moore snorted. “Fontelli doesn’t have the stones for it. Besides, he’s got his own little secrets. He didn’t care.”

“No, it wasn’t her husband,” said Prescott. “It was her father.”

“Linda Marie Raffaello Fontelli,” said Chet.

“Raffaello,” I said slowly. “Jesus Christ.” Enrico Raffaello was the head of the Philadelphia mob, a shadowy, legendary figure said to stand astride the city’s underworld like a modern-day Pluto. “And the limousine at the scene, and the ID by Ruffing?”

“The wino saw a basic black limousine, that’s all,” said Prescott. “There are fleets in the city. And Ruffing is lying. With the lighting in the parking lot it was impossible for him to see what he says he saw. He identified Jimmy and Chester to keep Marshall Eggert happy because Eggert was keeping the IRS off his back.”

“So how do we prove it was Raffaello?” I asked. “Is she in any of his photographs?”

“Yes,” said Prescott. “But getting them before the jury will be tricky. I have two lawyers working on it. Gimbel won’t let us get it in the front door, that’s for sure.”

“So how?”

“A trial like this trial,” said Prescott, leaning back now, putting on the face of a law school lecturer, “a trial like this, where the government is trying to cram a huge array of facts into a neat and tidy package, is made up of contingencies more than anything else. Every defense has to have a backup and every backup defense has to be backed up itself. Now our main defense is that we were merely working within the system, doing what the system demands of every politician. If the trial starts centering on Bissonette then we use our backup, we’ll bring in what we can about Linda Marie Raffaello Fontelli, and even if the judge upholds an objection the name will be floating out there for the jury to grasp.”

“And if that doesn’t work, are there other backups?”

“We’re building them day by day,” said Prescott. “If we need to go that route we’ll let you know.”

“Shouldn’t I know now?”

“No,” said Moore. “There are things only Prescott is to know.”

“We’re building a very complex piece of machinery to get both our clients off, Victor,” continued the professorial Prescott. “And it’s not enough to end with an acquittal. These men are politicians, they must end the trial smelling like virgins, do you understand? Jimmy Moore has to step out of that courtroom cleansed of any taint, risen in stature, ready for a run at the mayor. Now we can’t have you going out half-cocked, stirring up Eggert, getting in the way of the construction of our machine.”

“Eggert didn’t know I was there,” I said. “I went through Slocum.”

“Eggert knows,” said Moore. “The bastard knows everything. He’s got more spies in the DA’s office than I do.”

“So now we’re all on board,” said Prescott. “Each ready to do our duty. Any further questions, Victor?”

“Just one,” I said.

Prescott closed his eyes in exasperation and shook his head. Moore glared. Chet Concannon continued to avoid my gaze. What they all wanted just then, I knew, was for me to shut up and take whatever they were giving with gratitude. But something wasn’t right here. Chuckie Lamb’s slip of the tongue had got me to thinking and what I was thinking about just then, like what I thought about most often in those days, was money.

“Ruffing says he turned over half a million dollars before he backed out,” I said. “CUP’s records showed they only received two hundred and fifty thou. What I was wondering is what happened to the rest.”

“Your job here is not to wonder,” snapped Jimmy Moore. “Your job is to just follow along. I thought Chet made that clear already.”

“I told him,” said Chester.

“Well, maybe you better tell him again.”

“There’s no need,” I said.

“You are to do nothing, absolutely nothing,” said Moore, dumping his ashes on top of the ravioli, his voice rising in anger. “You’re getting paid a lot of money to do absolutely nothing and that’s all you better do. I’m not going to have some skinny-assed geek with a hard-on for my girl sending me to jail because he gets in the way of my high-priced attorney. The only reason you’re here is because Prescott told me you would stay out of his way.”

“I told Jimmy and Chester,” said Prescott, with the false conciliation of a State Department spokesman, “that I thought you were bright enough to grasp our defense and a sharp enough trial attorney to realize the importance of letting me try the entire case.”

“Do you got it now, asshole?” said Moore.

“That’s enough, Jimmy,” said Chester. “He understands.”

“Oh my,” said Moore with a laugh. “He’s crying. I see a tear.”

“Enough,” said Chet sharply.

“I’m not crying,” I said as I wiped my eyes with a napkin. “It’s just an allergic reaction to the smoke. And I don’t have a hard-on for your girl.”

“You could have fooled me,” said Moore. “Walking in here with a billy club inside your pants. You better choose here and now. Up or down, boy? It’s your choice. You step out of line and you won’t be able to find a client to save your life. You play ball and I can send a lot of business your way. A lot of business. It’s already started, hasn’t it?”

“Did you call the Bishops?” asked Prescott matter-of-factly.

“Yes,” I said, understanding now exactly what the position of outside counsel for the Valley Hunt Estates deal entailed.

“It’s a great opportunity for a young lawyer trying to make a name for himself,” said Prescott.

“Not to mention the money,” said Moore.

“We have to work as a team,” said Prescott.

“If that’s what my client wants,” I said.

“That’s what he wants,” said Moore. “Isn’t that right, Chet?”

“That’s what I want,” said Chet, now looking at me square in the face.

“All right,” I said. “Whatever my client wants. But the jury’s going to be asking the same question I just did.”

“We’ll tell them there wasn’t any other money,” said Prescott matter-of-factly as he folded a red napkin. “Ruffing simply exaggerated the amount in his testimony. His accountant advised him that money paid to an extortionist is a deductible expense, so like every other American he lied on his taxes and now he’s stuck with it.”

“You can prove that?” I asked.

“Just keep out of my way, Victor,” said Prescott coldly.

“So, everything’s settled then, right?” said Moore. “No more trips to the DA’s office, right? No more questions. No more freelancing, right?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“That’s damn right,” said Jimmy Moore. “Now, have some wine, Victor.” He poured a blood-red Chianti into my glass. “There’s plenty more where that came from. And finish your veal. I insist.”

I had lost whatever appetite I once held, and the sight of Moore’s ashes sinking into the ravioli gravy made me positively nauseous, but still I was hacking into the meat with a steak knife when Veronica returned. She smiled as she walked in, glanced at me with a touch of concern, and sat down.

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” she said.

“Not at all,” said Moore. “Victor was just telling us how much he was enjoying his chop.”

18

“THIS ISN’T THE WAY,” I said from the back seat of the limousine. I was alone in the car except for Henry, Moore’s driver. With the partition down I could see the back of his head, nappy hair cut short, thick neck, a set of tiny ears. “I told you Twenty-second and Spruce.”

“I be knowing where you live at, mon, believe me,” said Henry in his lilting island accent. “But is some business I need first to do.”

“Can’t it wait until you take me home?”

“No, mon. Just you sit back and be resting yourself. We be done here quick.”

I was too tired and nauseous to argue. From the restaurant we had gone to a bar and then to a place on the river and then to a private club above a storefront off South Street, where the booths had curtains and the lights were low. Through the whole of the evening, whenever Jimmy wasn’t looking, Veronica rubbed her hand across my crotch. Prescott had left us in the restaurant, and I too had tried to leave, but Moore insisted and Veronica smiled and against all my judgment I tagged along. Because the thing was, I knew, somewhere in my weak-willed heart, I just knew that tagging along with Jimmy Moore was exactly what I wanted to do. Jimmy was probably crooked and Chester was most likely his accomplice and Veronica was definitely dangerous, but sitting in those clubs, drinking champagne, laughing my forced laugh, stealing cigarettes, sitting in those clubs, I again felt the knot in my stomach ease and the ice melt. I couldn’t actually say I was enjoying myself after the browbeating I had been given at the restaurant, but for all his faults Jimmy knew something about living I had never learned, something I wanted desperately to learn.

“Have another drink,” Jimmy had said as he filled my glass with champagne. There were others at the table with us now, young girls with bare legs who slurped their champagne loudly, two well-dressed black men, doctors in business with the city, I was told, and, of course, my buddy Chuckie Lamb, who glared at me the whole of our time together.

“I’ve had enough,” I said even as the foam slipped over the top of my glass. “Really.”

“Your lawyer’s very stuffy,” said Veronica to Chester.

“It’s the profession,” said Chet.

“Look over there,” said Moore. A thin-shouldered bald man was leaning over a table, talking earnestly to a young woman with pretty, pouting lips. “Tom Bismark, managing partner of Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox. Who’s that he’s with?”

“I think that’s his wife,” said Chester.

“How unusual,” said Veronica.

“His third wife.”

“I thought he moved out with his secretary,” said Moore.

“He did,” barked Chuckie Lamb. “He’s here with his wife, cheating on his mistress.”

“You have to admire a scoundrel who can’t even be faithful to his unfaithfulness,” said Moore. “What about you, Victor?”

“Not married,” I said.

“You can still cheat even if you’re single.”

“I’m pretty loyal.”

“You’re a boy scout, is that it?”

“I was, as a matter of fact.”

“I was never a boy scout,” said Moore. “I was too passionate for the boy scouts. There was too much I wanted to hold.” He leaned over to Veronica and with his hand turned her face toward him and kissed her with an open mouth. To see it knotted my stomach again.

“How’s your wife doing, Councilman?” I said.

Veronica’s eyes bugged out at me even as she was kissing Moore, but he just laughed when he was through. “Very fine, thank you, Victor. So nice of you to be concerned.”

“I find her very sweet and very sad,” I said. “Lonely, I think.”

“She is all of that and more,” said Jimmy. “But tell me something, Victor, how much sadness can we endure before we run for the light?” He snapped his fingers and one of the young girls with bare legs quickly threw her arms around my neck and her tongue in my ear.

“Hey, Chuckie,” said the councilman. “Victor here thinks you killed that lousy ballplayer.”

“Oh, he does, does he?” said Chuckie.

“You mean Zack?” said one of the girls. “He was so sweet. Why would you do something like that, Chuckie?”

Jimmy started laughing, losing control as he laughed harder, so hard he could barely get out the words, “Victor thinks you’re a murderer, Chuckie.”

“Victor better be careful,” said Chuckie, looking at me with an unkind eye. “He might just be right.”

I had left finally, feeling the tug of too much work and not enough time, the tug of responsibility, downing the last of my champagne and staggering out of the club into the cold misty night. I was looking for a cab on the deserted street when Henry came from behind me and grabbed my arm and led me to the limousine.

So we were traveling north now, across Arch, under the 5th Street tunnel, into the ragged and unlighted sections of Northern Liberties. It was after midnight and still kids sat out on the stoop and young men leaned against boarded up buildings, looking suspiciously into the darkened limousine windows, and teens loitered in groups in the middle of the street, illuminated by our headlights as if caught in twin beams of unreality, unwillingly moving aside as the limousine slid through.

“Where are we going, Henry?”

“We be there soon, no problem.”

“I’m starting to worry.”

“You with me, mon. You safer than safe.”

Northern Liberties was where my grandfather Abraham and his parents, fresh off the boat from Russia, had settled. It was a poor Jewish section then, crowded and hubbubed, Philadelphia’s answer to the Lower East Side. Marshall Street: kosher butchers and discount clothiers and vegetable carts parked wheel to wheel, all catering to the immigrant families crowded four to a row house. My great-grandfather had learned to cobble in a shtetl outside Kiev and so in America he repaired shoes in a little store on Marshall Street, just north of Poplar, and my grandfather shortened his name and went into retail, working the store the whole of his life, even as the neighborhood changed and he moved with his family to the new Jewish paradise in Logan. Logan is no longer a paradise and Northern Liberties has fallen into such disrepair that Marshall Street is deserted and great swaths of the neighborhood are rubble. In the eighties there was an attempt at gentrification and some restaurants and stores opened up in the old Jewish center, but that too failed. There was nothing left of what my grandfather had seen as a little boy in his introduction to America.

We passed north out of Northern Liberties and through another neighborhood of boarded-up buildings and narrow, crowded streets and finally reached a corner that looked like a marketplace from hell. There were at least a hundred people hanging around, sitting on steps or patrolling the curb or just lolling on the outskirts of the crowd, heads jacking back and forth. In the streetlight the scene held a demented quality, unformed, chaotic, deeply dangerous. In front of us a flat-green Pontiac stopped and three kids jostled each other for a place at the driver’s door. Money passed from the car to one of the kids and the kid ran over to an older man with dreadlocks and gave him the money. I watched the man nod to a different kid, who reached for something under a stoop and ran over to the car. In less than a minute from the time it had arrived, the flat-green Pontiac was on its way. Henry stopped the limo and immediately a kid started tapping at the closed window beside my head. Henry turned around and smiled at me.

“I be back, mon. You be taking things slow as they come.”

He left.

I made sure my door was locked as I watched Henry approach the man in dreadlocks. They spoke for a moment. The man nodded and Henry went toward one of the houses, on the front step of which a group of very young women sat. The women wore blue jeans and leather jackets and gold. One woman had huge gold earrings, impossibly, painfully huge. Another had a gold necklace with chain links the size of manacles. When Henry arrived at the house he leaned over and kissed one of the women on the cheek. He patted another on the head and chatted a moment before squeezing through the group and entering the house. Passing him on the way out was a skinny young man with a high nervous step and sunglasses. I was watching Henry enter the house when the front door of the limousine opened and a young black man with the shoulders of a lion jumped into the driver’s seat.

“Where’s we off to now, Chauncey?” he said in a thin, slippery voice.

“Get out of here,” I said.

He turned and smiled at me and the next moment I heard the click of the door locks and my door opened. A very thin man in a fine brown pinstriped suit leaned in the open door and said, “Move over.”

I moved over. He sat down beside me.

His skin was dark brown, his fingers long and thin. There was about him a distinct air of elegance, the way he crossed his legs, the way he clasped his hands close to his chest. But more than anything he was thin, spectrally thin, droopy-eyed and gaunt, so thin it was impossible to tell his age; he could have been twenty-five, he could have been fifty.

“What can I do for you, friend?” asked the man in a deep, soothing voice.

“I’m just waiting for someone,” I said. “He’ll be right back. I don’t want anything else.”

“Generally, white boys in limousines down here want something.”

“I just want to get out of here.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Where we going?” asked the young man in the front.

“Around,” said the thin man.

“Shit,” I said.

The engine shivered quietly to life and the limousine lurched forward, almost running down a young girl carrying a two-year-old boy in her arms as she wandered toward the marketplace.

“Jesus, take the car, I don’t care,” I said with panic in my voice. “Just let me out first.”

“We only going for a ride,” said the kid up front.

“Drive carefully, Wayman,” said the thin man. “We don’t want to scratch the councilman’s car.”

“Then you know whose car this is.”

“Oh yes. Let’s introduce ourselves. Call me Mr. Rogers.”

“Mr. Rogers,” said Wayman with a cackle. “I like that.”

Mr. Rogers reached out a hand. Unsure of what to do, I shook it.

“Victor Carl.”

“Well, Victor Carl, welcome to my neighborhood.”

“Mr. Rogers,” cackled Wayman again.

“What do you think?” asked Mr. Rogers, gesturing out his window.

I looked around at the bombed-out hulks of narrow row houses, some collapsing in on themselves, others boarded up with plywood, crumbling steps, weeds rising like bushes from the sidewalks, empty bottles scattered. An old man, lips working over his toothless gums, sat on a metal chair and stared at the limousine as we passed.

“It’s fine, I guess,” I said.

“Fine for us, right?”

“No. I didn’t mean that.”

“Calm down, Victor.” He laughed a deep, surprisingly warm laugh.

“I just want to get out of here.”

“And you will. Calm down, enjoy the ride.”

He pulled down a panel on the door, revealing the limousine’s bar. There were decanters of liquor and glasses and bottles. He took one of the glasses and looked at the decanters.

“Now which one’s the scotch,” he said to himself. He reached for one, took off the crystal top, and poured. He took a sip and smiled. “That’s what I like about the councilman, always the best liquor. Turn here, Wayman, and remember this car is as long as a school bus.”

We turned down a side alley and then back up 6th Street, making a loop.

“I just wanted to have a little talk,” said Mr. Rogers. “Nothing too serious. You like being a lawyer, Victor?”

“How did you know?”

“I would have been a damn good lawyer,” he continued. “Would have knocked aside your ass in court, I know that, Victor. See, Wayman, man. It’s like I’ve been telling you. You get back in school, you can be anything you want. Even fools like Victor here can become million-dollar lawyers.”

“Would’s I also have to dress like him?” asked Wayman from the front seat, looking back at me in the rearview mirror.

Mr. Rogers sized me up and down, my scuffed wing tips, my shiny blue suit, my striped polyester tie. “Point taken,” said Mr. Rogers. “Where’d you get those shoes?”

“You want them, take them. Anything. Just leave me alone.”

“Last thing I want is those shoes. Where did you pick those flippers?”

“Florsheim.”

He snickered. “Turn up here.”

“I want you to stop the car and let me out, now,” I said loudly. The crack about my shoes had somehow set me off. I sat forward in the seat. “This is kidnapping. I insist you stop.”

“Victor, trust me,” said Mr. Rogers. “You don’t want us to let you off here.”

I looked around. Two kids were shadowboxing in a corner under a dim streetlight on an otherwise deserted street.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, slumping back.

“You know, you are messing in things way above your head, things you can’t even begin to understand. No sir. All politicians are liars, don’t you think?”

“There are some honest ones, I guess,” I said.

“But not Jimmy Moore. He’s a hell of a politician, but he lies and he steals and in the end he takes away everything he promised to give. Now I’m a businessman. I sell a product for a fair price and my customers keep coming back. And I make damn sure I get paid for it. But Victor, I sell more than just a product. I sell my customers a reason to wake up in the morning, a purpose for their lives, something to give meaning to everything they do. In that way, Victor, I’m like a god, and Jimmy resents that. You see, godhood was his career goal, but it wasn’t working out for him. I went to him after his sweet daughter died. I brought him proof of where she got the merchandise that killed her. It was a white group from the suburbs, from Bucks County, from Bensalem. And you think this is a hellhole. That’s where it came from and I had to hurt some people to get that proof. He said he didn’t care, that no matter where it came from I would pay the price. We were two men at war. We bloodied each other. But now the war is over.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There are things you’ll never understand, so I will make this simple.” He wagged a long, bony finger at me and spoke slowly, carefully. “I’ve been getting reports about you. You’ve been asking about missing money. Don’t. You’ve been stepping out of your role. Step back in. Listen to what I say, Victor, your health and career both depend on it, though I don’t really have any control over your career.”

He opened his eyes wide and peered at me, to be sure that I understood, and I did.

“Besides, Victor,” he continued, “anything you would do would hurt more than help. That’s simply your destiny. We all have destinies, Victor, and yours is to be a fuckup. Now, in addition to all this, it seems you know a friend of mine.”

“No. I don’t,” I said.

“How do you know who my friends are?” he said, a slash of anger in his voice.

“I don’t, I mean, I’m sorry.”

“Shut up, Victor.”

From the front seat Wayman laughed like a little maniac, first a hoot and then a series of loud snivels.

“This friend is very special to me, do you understand, and I like to keep track of who she is with.”

“She? A her?”

“You are a bright one, aren’t you. This friend of mine,” said Mr. Rogers, “she has this way of… let’s say attaching herself to people. I don’t want her to attach herself to you.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“We aren’t talking,” he said sharply. “I’m talking. Who I’m talking about is Ronnie Ashland. It is all part of the same thing. And what I’m saying is you stay away from her.”

“Veronica?”

“I assume you heard me, then. Any part of what I said you didn’t understand?”

“Why? What’s she to you?”

“He wants to know why, Wayman.”

“It’s not such a swift idea to ask why ‘round here,” said Wayman.

“I’ll tell you why,” said Mr. Rogers in a sweet voice. “Because if you don’t I’m going to hurt you.”

Wayman let out his scary, sniveling laugh again.

“I’m going to hurt you bad.”

“That’s why enough for me,” I said quickly, almost gaily.

“Good, Victor. Maybe you’re not as stupid as you look. Take us home, Wayman.”

“Yessir, Chauncey.”

Mr. Rogers took another sip from his glass of the councilman’s scotch. “You know, Victor, the extra twelve years really do make a difference.”

Wayman pulled the limo into the same spot we had been parked in before and killed the engine. Mr. Rogers finished his drink, put the glass back in the bar, and lifted up the panel.

“I never want to see you again, Victor, so be sure to remember all I told you this evening. If I leave one of my calling cards you’ll know it and I hope for your sake you’ll also know enough to be scared.”

He got out of the car and held the door open for Wayman, who skipped out of the front seat and leaned through the open door and smashed me in the face with the back of his hand.

I grasped my head in my hands and dropped it between my knees. Pain shot from my cheek to my groin and my eyeball stung so much I thought he had popped it and the fluid was running down my cheek. I opened my eyes through the pain and saw a blurry car floor and, with relief that my sight was still there, I heaved loudly and started to vomit.

Wayman remained leaning in the open door as I puked. “Tell me something, Vi’tor Carl,” he said. “You gots to pay more for two first names?” Then he laughed his sniveled laugh once more.

I was still bent double, hand covering my eye, gasping for a clear breath, when Henry came back to the car. “Aw, mon,” he said. “Him a-chucking in the car.”

“Fuck off,” I said.

“Aw, shit, mon, him a-chucking in the car. Councilman Moore, he won’t be liking that at all, mon.”

“Just fuck off.”

As he drove away from the corner the limo’s windows and the roof opened electronically, letting in the cool of the night. The fresh air only made it worse.

19

MY RIGHT EYE WAS swollen thick and pretty by the morning, with a dark swath sitting directly atop my cheekbone, fading into a brownish stain that ran like coffee down my cheek. The night before I had fallen into bed with an ice cube wrapped in a towel and that might have helped for a while, but I still woke in my suit pants and shirtsleeves, the towel empty, my sheets wet, the faint taste of vomit in my teeth. When I saw my eye in the mirror I wanted to heave again.

“What happened to you?” asked Ellie when I came into the office that morning.

“I walked into a door,” I said.

“Looks like the door had a left hook.”

“Just do me a favor, all right, Ellie,” I said. “Call up Bill Prescott’s secretary over at Talbott, Kittredge and ask her to send over a copy of the report by some jury-polling service he commissioned for the Moore and Concannon case.”

“Sure thing,” she said. “By the way, I have that address you asked for, the address of Winston Osbourne’s daughter.”

She handed me a handwritten note with an address in Malvern. Malvern, big lawns and old money in the heart of Chester County. I had never been there, but I knew there were horses in Malvern, horses and gentlemen farmers and old stone houses. It was Radnor Hunt country. Not too many synagogues in Malvern, I would bet.

“Perfect,” I said. “Send a copy of our judgment to the Chester County Sheriff’s Office and tell them we think Osbourne’s Duesenberg is parked at that address in Malvern. Get the serial number from the file and tell them we want it seized, immediately. Pay any fees required out of the account.” It was nice to have an account out of which to pay any fees required. Solvency felt better than I ever thought it would.

“What should they do if they find it?” she asked.

“Just have them grab it and hold it for me. I’ll decide then.”

I was behind my desk when Beth came in. “Don’t ask,” I said in response to her query.

“Did you fall down the steps?” she asked.

“Something like that.”

“Were you drinking last night?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you having a problem?”

“Yes, but not with my drinking.”

“If you’re having a problem there are people you can see.”

“Stop it, Beth. With what I drink I’d die from hypoglycemia before I became an alcoholic.”

“That eye looks nasty,” she said. “Let me get you something.” She left the office for a moment, coming back with a wet paper towel. “Now close your eyes.”

She patted the wet towel to the puffed flesh just above my cheekbone. I meant to tell her not to, but the cool of the towel was so soothing. With my eyes closed and the dabbing coolness and Beth’s perfume, a sweet and floral mixture that reminded me of someone, I couldn’t remember who, but someone with whom I had once been in love, the whole mixture of sensations took me right out of that office, right out of my present. I was disappointed when she finally stopped.

“That was great,” I said.

She gave me the towel and I continued to dab, but now I was back in my office, back in my life, and it didn’t feel half so good. “How’s your investigation going?” she asked.

“I’ve been called off.”

“By who?”

“By Moore and Prescott and my client.”

“I bet you were called off by Moore and Prescott and your client sort of went along.”

“Sort of.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Exactly what I’ve been told to do,” I said. “Absolutely nothing other than cashing my checks.”

“Nothing is pretty hard to do sometimes,” she said.

“Not this time,” I didn’t want to tell her about Chuckie Lamb’s threats or Mr. Rogers’s warnings. She’d look at the situation perfectly sensibly and have me do something like tell the police or withdraw from the case and I didn’t want to do either. What I wanted to do was to stay far away from trouble and I knew how to do it, too. I would ask no more questions about Bissonette’s murder or the missing quarter of a million. I would sit quietly at the trial and collect my fees and each night go home, alone, like a good little boy, and wait for my prosperity. I would make no waves. That would satisfy Prescott and Jimmy and Chuckie and the strange Mr. Rogers. What I wanted to do was to forget the complications that were rising like flood waters about me. What I wanted to do was float safely through the fall into winter and put all this behind me. What I wanted to do was…

My phone rang.

“There’s someone here to see you,” said Rita, our receptionist.

“You’re supposed to tell me who is here to see me,” I said into the phone. “That’s in the job description.”

“Well, whoever it is, he looks like a short Rasputin if Rasputin had eaten too much chocolate pudding.”

“Find out who it is, Rita.”

Over the phone I could hear her ask, “Who are you, anyway?” and the mumble of an answer.

“Morris Kapustin,” she said.

“Oh, right, the private eye.”

“Funny. He doesn’t look like a private eye,” Rita said over the phone, and, as usual, Rita was right.

Morris Kapustin was a short, very heavy man with a long beard peppered gray and a wide-brimmed black hat. He wore a suit badly and he was sweating badly and he breathed with the slight wheeze common to the badly overweight. From out of his pants, over his belt, flowed four sets of cotton strings. He flapped his arms as he walked into the office and without my asking he let out a high pitched “Whoooh” and dropped into a chair across from me. He sat down so hard a clock on my desk rattled on its base. His little feet barely touched the floor as he sat. He took off his black hat and wiped his forehead with a crumpled and stained handkerchief. Atop his mass of disheveled hair was a yarmulke.

“This office, it never heard from elevators? I’m shvitzing from the stairs. And it’s October, yet. If it was July you’d have to wring out the carpet. Morris Kapustin. And you’re Carl?”

“I’m Victor Carl,” I said, reaching out to shake his damp, pudgy hand. He lightly squeezed the ends of my fingers.

“Accht, that Benny. I didn’t mean to be rude, forgive me, I thought Carl was your first name. All Benny said was that I should meet his lawyer, Carl, at ten on Friday. I thought Carl was the lawyer’s first name. That Benny, I love him, but sometimes he’s so farchadat it is a miracle he doesn’t walk into a bus.”

“That’s all right. This is my partner, Beth Derringer.” He didn’t shake her hand.

“I’m pleased that I should meet you both. Especially the pretty lady, no offense to you, Carl. No, Victor, right? No offense to you, Victor, but in mine business, all day it’s grumpy old men shouting about thieves. It’s enough to give a headache the size of Pittsburgh. Accht, you don’t want to hear mine tsouris. Benny Lefkowitz said that you needed help. He didn’t tell me the what for. That Benny, he’s read too much Philip Marlowe. He’s always yelling after me, ‘Off to catch the crooks, hey, Morris?’ I say yes, when really all I’m after is a pastrami on rye. He’s lucky to have such a business, Benny, and the money he makes, it hurts just to think it, but he likes to imagine I lead a glamorous life, so I let him.”

He wiped his forehead again with the handkerchief, looking as glamorous as a piece of herring.

“I need a towel is what I need,” he said. “They should make for me a handkerchief towel. Such an idea, a handkerchief of terry cloth, for shtik fetah like me who shvitz even in October. I have family in the shmatte business, I know from what I’m talking. We’ll make a fortune, just the three of us.” He turned to Beth and winked. “We’ll retire to Haifa, sit on our balcony all day, catch a breeze off the Mediterranean, sip slivovitz out of clean little glasses. Don’t tell anyone our idea, the gonifs will steal it in a second. A second. I know, I have family in the business. Bigger crooks they don’t have on post office walls. Now, Victor, Benny said I should be meeting with you. So we’re meeting.”

“I think there may have been a mistake.”

“We weren’t supposed to meet today? I wrote it down, I thought, but he spoke to me only yesterday.” He reached into his suit jacket with his right hand, pulling out a little black notebook, while at the same time he searched an inside pocket with his left hand, extracting a pair of wire glasses, the ends of which he slipped over his ears. With a lick of his thumb he started through the notebook. It was as disheveled as he, loose papers of every sort poking out from its covers. “Morris, Morris, you’re growing so famisht, Morris. I was certain it was today.”

“No, Mr. Kapustin, our meeting was for today. You were right about that. But I don’t think you’re going to be able to help us.”

“Good, I was right about the day. Sometimes there’s so much it’s hard to keep track, and I get more and more confused. But at least I was right about the day, at least that. It’s been a week, you don’t want to know about mine week, believe me, so I thought the mistake it was maybe mine, but no. See, right here.” He poked at a loose piece of paper. “Ten o’clock, Friday. Carl. Now that’s cleared up. Good.” He closed the book and took off his glasses and stared at me with a squint. “So, Carl, tell me exactly why I won’t be able to help you.”

“What we needed,” I said, “was to find a man who doesn’t want to be found.”

“Such luck you’re in, then, that’s what I do. What I do, Victor, what Benny thinks is so glamorous, is that I find people, swindlers, crooks, gonifs who have taken off with a diamond or an emerald or the money from a cash register. You wouldn’t believe how many times a jeweler unwraps his diamond and finds it’s been switched. These are professionals, too. There is something about the way it shines, I don’t know, but it attracts thieves, all out to steal from each other. Not Benny of course, he’s an edel mensch, but the others. Me, I never cared so much for diamonds. Too easy to lose, I know. Mine wife, Rosalie, don’t even try to buy her a diamond. She doesn’t want to know from diamonds, Rosalie. Zero coupon bonds, yes. Diamonds, no. So Victor, this man you’re looking for, he’s a swindler?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Well, then, there’s no such mistake, no such mistake at all. Tell me who he is, what he did, his friends, everything you know, and I’ll find him. I’m no Houdini, but then who did Houdini ever find, huh?”

“But the fellow we’re looking for, Mr. Kapustin, is not Jewish.”

“Good. It hurts me here,” he pounded his chest, “whenever it’s a Jew I’m looking for, and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how many times I been hurt right here. It’s a sin. And you know who I blame? Accht, you don’t want to know.”

“Mr. Kapustin, with all due respect, I just don’t think this job is for you.”

“No?”

“To be honest, I didn’t realize when Mr. Lefkowitz gave me your name that you were an Orthodox Jew. I guess working in the jewelry business, in which a lot of Orthodox Jews are involved, it makes sense because you can move within that world. But we’re not looking for a Hassid here.”

He leaned forward. “Believe me when I tell you this. It’s not only the Jews who steal. When it comes to stealing we’re such pisherkeh, the things we can still learn. You’ll be glad to know, Mr. Victor, that Morris Kapustin does not just find Jews. You name it and Morris Kapustin has found it. Just last week, an Armenian boy, cleaning up at Grossman’s, grabbed from the register and ran. I found him in Teaneck, Teaneck of all places. Who would think, an Armenian thief in Teaneck.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kapustin,” I said. “We’ll find a different agency to hire. Thank you for understanding.”

“Wait just a moment, Mr. Kapustin,” said Beth.

“A moment I have,” he said.

Beth pulled me outside my office. We left Morris Kapustin sitting in the chair, staring out my narrow window, pulling distractedly at his beard. Beth closed the door behind us and turned loose a fierce expression on me.

“What are you doing?” she whispered angrily.

“I’ll get someone else, one of those high-tech private eye firms that advertise in the Legal.”

“You’re not going to give him the job because he’s a Jew?”

“It’s not in his field. Our guy is in Buenos Aires somewhere, not Crown Heights.”

“I don’t think that’s it at all, Victor. He’s as qualified as anyone. But you don’t like the way he looks, do you?”

“Well, he’s no Don Johnson.”

“Or the way he talks.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I think you don’t want to hire him because he’s too Jewish.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, really, Victor. And this isn’t the first time I noticed it. What is it with you?”

I never knew what it was with me, but I knew even as I denied it that she was absolutely right. I doubted whether this Morris Kapustin could do the job, but in reality I didn’t care. I’d just as soon Stocker not be found, so that I could get the settlement and take my cut and be done with the case. But I had to admit feeling a touch of revulsion at the sight of Morris Kapustin, sweating that very moment in my office, with his Orthodox hat and tangled beard and the dirty cotton tzitzis that flowed over his belt. The great firms in the city from which I sought acceptance would not hire the likes of Morris Kapustin to investigate their cases.

I had often wondered if my failure to land a job in the firms of my choosing was due to my religion. It was no longer like the old days, of course, when the Drinker of Drinker, Biddle decried the influx of “Russian Jew boys” into the law, men who had risen “up from the gutter and were merely following the methods their fathers had been using in selling shoestrings,” when the Bar Association thought up the barrier of its prefectorship to handle what McCracken of Montgomery, McCracken called “the question of the social origins of men.” Aspiring Jewish lawyers in those years who could actually find a prefector to sponsor them were either tapped for the Jewish firm, Wolf, Block, or forced to chew the legal scraps tossed them by their betters, petty crimes and bankruptcies and slip and falls. Do I sound bitter? Now Jews are hired everywhere, in moderate quantities, as long as they dress appropriately and speak without spitting and don’t answer questions with questions or sprinkle Yiddish in their conversations. But though I had mastered those qualifications, I still hadn’t been able to crack that crowd. In one great moment of clarity the holders of the keys had judged the Jew before them and in a collective voice had said, “Sorry, no.”

My father was a lawnmower man, cutting other people’s grass for a living, surviving without great modesty in a modest house. It was bad enough that my family lived on the cusp of poverty, it was worse that we were Jews living that way, Jews without money. If my father had made a fortune in shoestrings or plastic hangers or potato chips or something maybe I wouldn’t have fought against my ancestry so, but he hadn’t and so I fought. I had wanted to become something new, something glorious, but there was still no estate in Bryn Mawr for me, no BMW, I had not yet been invited to play golf at Merion or tennis on the clean grass courts of the Philadelphia Cricket Club. There was nothing new in what I had become. I was still just a Jew without money. And as I sank into professional failure and a financial despair so deep I had been forced to ask my father, the lawncutter for God’s sake, for a loan, I realized with a growing horror that my failures were sending me spinning back into everything I had sought to escape. And I didn’t need Morris Kapustin sitting in my office reminding me. And I didn’t need Beth staring at me with a pained disappointment in her eyes, the look a mother gives her son when he behaves badly, not my mother, who never cared enough to be disappointed by me, but someone else’s mother, a kindly loving mother who only thought the best of her child and died a little when she was shown the worst. Who the hell was Beth, as Protestant as Luther, who the hell was Beth to tell me a thing about the curses I felt so keenly? Who the hell was Morris Kapustin, sitting in my office, begging for a job, making me feel lower than a slug? Who the hell needed any of it?

“Just shut up,” I told Beth, even though she hadn’t been saying a thing.

“I was thinking, Victor,” said Morris Kapustin when Beth and I had returned to the office, “now that I know it’s your last name Carl not your first name Carl, that I might know your mishpocheh. By any chance was your grandfather Abe Carl?”

“As a matter of fact.”

“The shoe man?”

“He sold shoes.”

“Mine first pair of shoes in this country came right from his store on Marshall Street. What a thing. I was just a yekl then, thin as a piece of grass, that thin, Accht, too long ago to even remember. Abe Carl, the shoe man. Later we used to go to shul together when he moved out to Logan. In shul always he was looking at mine shoes, checking if I needed new ones. ‘You ready for new shoes, Morris,’ he would say. ‘For you I run a special.’ He had a beautiful voice, Abe did.”

“He used to sing me nursery rhymes,” I said. “And Irving Berlin songs.”

“Erev Shabbos, singing L’cha Dodi, his voice was like an angel’s, only sweeter. Mine first American shoes were good sturdy shoes. You can tell everything about a country by their shoes. Ever wear German shoes?”

“No.”

“You put on one pair of German shoes and you get a whole new understanding of the last hundred years. Believe me. He sold good shoes, your grandfather. Whenever I was needing new shoes it was off to the shoe man for me. You look like him.”

“They say I look like my mother.”

“I see Abe in you. That’s not such a terrible thing. Can you sing?”

“Not a note.”

“Too bad that is. Like an angel’s, only sweeter.”

I thought about it for a moment, thought about my grandfather too, his round peasant face and shock of white hair that I used to muss with my fingers and then call him Albert Einstein, about how it was my grandfather, not my father, who would read me stories and take me to the ball games at old Connie Mack Stadium, thought about it all and then reached into my desk drawer. I handed Morris Kapustin a thick file filled with all the information I had about Frederick Stocker, including press clippings about his trust fund swindle and flight from authorities.

“Stocker. Stocker,” said Kapustin, as if he were chewing on a piece of gristle. “Stocker. I know that name Stocker. How do I know that name? Morris, Morris, think. This Stocker, he stole trust funds?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Accht, of course. Stocker. Herman Hoff, a wholesaler, watches and such, gave this very man Stocker money to invest and then it was gone, poof, just like the wind. I’ve heard of this Stocker. Herman is not a rich man, nothing like our friend Benny, what this man Stocker took was Herman’s retirement in Boca. You been to Boca, Victor?”

“No.”

“That’s where they go now, Boca. Who needs to shvitz so much, I say, still that’s where they go. But not Herman, he still sells his watches. Seventy-three already, still selling. He wanted to go to Boca.”

With his glasses back on, he began looking through the file, asking me questions I couldn’t answer.

“All I know is what’s in the file,” I said.

“Anything about this man’s hobbies, his relatives, his friends, where he grew up. It is these things, I’ve found, it’s good to know about.”

“He lived in Gladwyne,” I said.

“I’ll ask around. I have mine contacts there.”

“Really?”

He looked at me strangely from under his brow and for an instant his smile disappeared and there was something fierce about this little man. “I think you have no faith,” he said to me.

“What do you mean?”

“No faith that Morris Kapustin will find this man. For what he did to Herman Hoff, not to mention Benny, he deserves to be found. He’s a crook, a gonif, finding him will be a shtik naches. You think this is a hobby, this finding people. I didn’t start this line with jewelry. But this too needs doing. Talmudic justice. It is mine mission. You study Talmud, Victor?”

“No.”

“So now I know why you have no faith. Somehow, I don’t know how, but somehow we will find that too. But first we find this crook Stocker, agreed?” He smiled warmly and was back to being jolly Morris Kapustin. He took out a bundle of pages and looked through them quickly. “What was this Windward Enterprises thing you have so much papers about?” he asked.

“That was Stocker’s own stab at real estate syndication. It didn’t take and a lot of people lost money.”

“Windward is a funny name for such a business.”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said.

“Maybe he was a sailor of some sort,” said Beth.

“This one,” he said wagging a finger at Beth, “this one has sechel. Are you married, by any chance?”

“No, I’m not,” said Beth.

He turned to her and his face brightened with interest. “Are you perhaps Jewish?”

“No, I’m sorry, Mr. Kapustin. But I do eat kasha at the deli.”

“That’s something at least. Accht, too bad. Not for you, of course, but…” He sighed deeply and wearily. “You see, I have a son. He’s in the business with me.” His shoulders dropped from the burden. “What could I do, he needed a job.” He waved his hand. “So what for am I hocking your tchynik? This sailor thing is a good possibility. He might have run off with a boat. Generally they run off with a woman and not their wives most often you wouldn’t believe. But with sailors, they sometimes run off with a boat. Me, I never understood that one inch.”

“There are not many Jewish sailors,” I said.

“You may be right, but the amount of Jews who think they are sailors, don’t even try to count that high, you give your brain a hernia. What time do you have on your watch, Victor?”

“Ten forty-seven,” I said,

He put his watch to his ear. “It’s stopping again. I have to leave, quickly, one more appointment for this day.” He pushed himself out of the chair. “Kramer. A set of earrings is missing, gone. It’s only him and his wife, so where are the earrings? You tell me, I don’t know myself. But I know Mrs. Kramer, she doesn’t clean. Even with her first husband, Kimmelman, and he wasn’t a jeweler, he had a small grocery with no money anywhere and still she wouldn’t clean. So who cleaned the earrings? That I must know.”

“We have a deadline in this case, Mr. Kapustin.” I said.

“Always complications. So how much time do you have? Six months?”

“Three weeks.”

“Three weeks, Victor, I can’t find the toilet in three weeks.”

“Three weeks, Mr. Kapustin.”

“Call me Morris. Okay, three weeks. But don’t now be expecting miracles. Vos vet sein, vet sein. I’ll start first thing Sunday morning doing the search.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“On the Shabbos, Victor? Never a shoe did your grandfather sell, Victor, on the Shabbos, that you know. But I should be working on the Shabbos? You’re insulting me now.”

“Okay,” I said. “First thing Sunday morning.”

“By the way, Victor. I didn’t want to mention it but now that we’re friends, that eye of yours. What happened, nu?”

“A little accident.”

“You know, a slice of gefilte, not too thin, from the refrigerator with the jelly. It works nice.”

“Thank you, I’ll try it,” I said, without the slightest intention of putting a slice of gefilte fish on my face.

He pointed a stubby finger at me. “You won’t listen to me, I know, Victor, I can see it. What does an old fat man know about anything, you think. Put some gefilte in mine eye and I look like a fool, you think. But why you should be caring so much how you look is beyond me, Victor. Be your own man. For sixty-six years such has been my secret. So I’m not wearing the newest fashions. Thin ties, wide ties, Victor, I wear mine ties and that has always been good enough. So the gefilte, you try it, you’ll see.”

I looked at Morris as he prepared to leave, gathering the papers into a messy pile and shoving it all into the file, grabbing his coat with both arms. A short sloppy Jew who wasn’t embarrassed to be a short sloppy Jew. I would try the slice of gefilte fish on my eye. I’d buy a bottle at the deli. Who knew? And suddenly I didn’t like the fact that I was being told what to do by Prescott and Moore and Chuckie and the demonic Mr. Rogers, that I was being played like a puppet as I reached for what was being dangled. How was it that someone like Morris Kapustin could be his own man but that it was impossible for me? Fuck them all. Rogers had told me that I was in the middle of something that I couldn’t understand and I didn’t like that one bit. And Chuckie had told me I was already as good as wasted and I didn’t like that one bit either. So maybe I’d check out some of the things I had been told by Prescott and Moore, just to be sure. So maybe I wouldn’t float safely through this cold and rainy fall, maybe I’d fight the current and lift up my head to look around and figure out some things.

“Before you go, Mr. Kapustin,” I said.

He turned. “Such respect I can’t take, it makes me want to dress better and who needs so many suits. Call me Morris.”

“All right, Morris.” I reached into my top drawer and took out the chip with the wild boar’s head on it that I had snatched from Bissonette’s love chest. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

Morris dropped his coat on a chair, stepped up to my desk, and took the chip. He put on his glasses and examined it carefully in his small, fat hands. “This is a casino chip, like in Atlantic City, but with no name and this picture. This is a very strange thing here. Every other chip like this I’ve seen, it had the casino name on it. That’s so you know where to take back your money, what little money you have left. And still they line up for the buses. Who can explain that to me? And Rosalie now has started. She plays blacktop. I would forbid it, absolutely forbid it, except that she brings home more than she takes.”

“Could you try to find out what it is?”

“I could. Is this something to do with Mr. Stocker, the thief?”

“No, it’s a different case.”

“A different case?” He lifted his head and gave me a flash of genuine smile. “So, I think maybe you gained a little faith today, Victor. A little faith in Morris Kapustin. No?”

20

I WAS SLEEPING, or trying to in any event, feeling a painful pressure on my eye as I burrowed my head into my pillows, the tangy sweet smell of gefilte fish still clinging to my skin, when the buzzer rang. I groped for the clock radio and read the blue-green fluorescent numbers: 2:38. In a heartbeat I jerked awake, remembering that I had been twice threatened with serious harm only a few nights before. I imagined a horde of drug dealing thugs outside my apartment ready to rip out my spleen and decided not to answer the buzzer, but it rang again and then again and so I dared a look out my window. The street was empty and wet, glazed with a heavy rain. I lived in a brownstone converted long ago to apartments and there was no intercom between the small vestibule, where the mailboxes and buzzers were, and my apartment. The only way to know who was buzzing was to go downstairs and see. I pulled on a pair of jeans that had been lying on my floor and carefully, like a cat burglar, slipped down the steps of my own building to get a look at my late-night visitor through the inside vestibule door.

Veronica Ashland.

She was wearing a tan raincoat and jeans, her brown hair falling flatly in damp strands. The mascara under her eyes was thick from the rain, or was it tears, I couldn’t tell just then, but her eyes were red and her lips thick, as if she had been crying. I searched the vestibule behind her. She was alone. Without opening the door I shouted, “What are you doing here?”

She said something from the other side, I could see her lips move, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying through the glass and wood door.

“Speak louder,” I said.

Her lips moved more emphatically, but still I couldn’t hear her. She made a motion for me to open the door. I wondered if she was merely moving her lips, pretending to speak in order to trick me into letting her in.

“What do you want?”

She made the same motion. With another nervous glance over her shoulder into the shadowy emptiness of the vestibule, I opened the door.

“Victor, what’s the matter?” she said as she stepped into the lobby. I quickly closed the door. She dripped onto the thin blue rug. “You looked as if you were going to turn me away like I was a Jehovah’s Witness trying to convert you.”

“What do you want?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Well, I was sleeping fine.”

“Don’t be such a grouch. Let me upstairs so I can take off this raincoat and dry out some.”

“I don’t think I should.”

“Oh, Victor, you’re such a Puritan. I’m sure I’ll be safe.”

She leaned forward to kiss me. I didn’t pull back, she was too beautiful to pull back from, but I didn’t return her kiss, either, so it was like she was kissing a statue, a statue nearly pissing his pants in fear.

“Who’s Mr. Rogers?” I asked after she had stopped kissing me and backed away with disappointment creasing her face.

“Mr. Rogers?”

“Very thin black man, elegantly dressed, droopy eyes. A drug seller, I think.”

“Oh, you mean Norvel Goodwin. Do you know Norvel too?”

“Is that his real name?” I said. “Well, your Norvel Goodwin took me for a ride Thursday night in the councilman’s limo. He told me to stay away from you. That if I didn’t he would hurt me. Then he had his goon give me this black eye.”

“Oh dear.” She touched the swelling lightly with her fingertips.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Just an old friend. I guess he’s jealous.”

“Of me?”

“Why not?”

“There was more than jealousy,” I said. “There’s something going on between him and Jimmy.”

“Norvel and Jimmy hate each other, they have ever since the thing with Jimmy’s daughter. Jimmy almost killed him once.”

“He said there were things going on with you and this case that I didn’t understand. Do you know anything about that?”

“Norvel’s a little crazy with conspiracies. Ask him who killed Malcolm X sometime.”

“Who does he say?”

“Are you going to let me up?” she asked.

“What are you really doing here?”

“The Greek left me another dead animal. A bird this time, a dove, pretty white feathers. Its neck was snapped.”

“Jesus.”

“Please.”

I stared at her lovely face for a moment and decided that she had been crying. “Follow me,” I said as I turned to go up the stairs.

On the way up I asked, “Would this Norvel Goodwin hurt me like he said?”

“No, he’s not like that.”

And then a few steps later, “Well, maybe.”

And as soon as I opened the door, “Yes, he would.”

I took her coat and hung it over a chair. She was wearing tennis shoes, jeans, and a sweatshirt, but even in her athletic wear, and even with the damage done to her makeup by the tears, she was too beautiful. “Can I use your bathroom?” she asked, and I showed her where it was.

While she was in the bathroom I improvised a quick cleanup, tossing waxed cheese steak wrappers, stained maroon with dried ketchup, into the trash can and grabbing all the loose clothes I could get hold of to dump into the washing machine. My apartment came with a little washer-dryer unit off the kitchen and I generally used the washer as a hamper, running the machine only when it was too full to jam in more clothes, and the dryer as a closet, pulling out what I needed day by day. It was a pretty good system, generally the dryer emptied by the time the washer was full, and it saved all the needless folding and putting away of normal laundry. Of course my T-shirts had a pinkish sheen from being washed with my red shorts and everything was creased, but that was my trademark anyway, creases. There was no hope for the bathroom, the gray grunge in the toilet bowl, the slivers of hair caked on the sink as if with glue, but judging from the condition of her bathroom I didn’t think she’d mind. In any event, I figured, who the hell was she to judge my apartment when she barged in unannounced at 2:38 in the morning.

When she came out of the bathroom all the makeup had been wiped off her face and she looked like a girl in an Ivory Soap commercial, gleaming with health.

“Do you have a drink?” she said. “I could use a drink.”

“I might have a beer.”

“That would be great,” she said. “I’ll get it.”

“Isn’t it a little late?” but she was already out of the living room into the kitchen. I could hear her opening my refrigerator, imagine her peering into it as if the mysteries of the universe were growing there, which they might have been for how often I cleaned it.

“How old is this milk?” she asked from the kitchen.

“I don’t know, pretty old, I’d guess.”

“Old enough so that the ice from the refrigeration cables has grown around it, locking it in place,” she said. “What’s gefilte fish?”

“It’s medicinal,” I said.

“Do you want something?”

“No. I’m fine,” I said.

She came back into the living room, twisting off the top of a Rolling Rock. She sat down on the couch beside me with her legs curled beneath her and took a long drink.

“Thank you,” she said. “I didn’t know where to go when I saw that bird just lying there with its head like that.” She shuddered. “On my doorstep. I had to get away.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get someone to clean it up.”

“Not me,” I said. “I’m out of the dead animal disposal business.”

“Maybe I’ll call Henry on the car phone tomorrow. He’ll do it. He takes care of me when he can.”

“He took care of me, too.”

“I’m so sorry about your eye.”

She sort of shuffled on her knees toward me and touched the eye gently with her fingertips and then harder, hard enough to make me wince and pull away. “Does it hurt much?” she asked.

“Only when you press it.”

She stroked around my eye lightly with the back of her hand, soothing the nerves, and then pressed it hard again.

“Like that,” I said. “Stop it.”

“When Henry came back for us with the limousine we knew you had vomited. Henry had tried to clean it up, and all the windows were open, but it still smelled like hell. The councilman was livid for a moment and then he laughed and laughed. He told Chester, ‘Not only does your lawyer cry, but he drinks like a teenybopper.’ Jimmy and Chuckie thought that was funny as hell. Chester told them both to shut up.”

“It wasn’t the drinking,” I said. “It was the sock in my eye.”

“Now you’re being defensive.”

“I’m a good drinker.”

“Of course you are,” she said sweetly.

“I could drink both those bastards under the table.”

“Of course you could.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No,” she said. “What are we going to do about my landlord?”

“Get your friend Norvel to threaten him.”

“He’s not a friend anymore.”

She was leaning over me now, still looking at my eye, searching the black and blue as if she were searching tea leaves for hidden meanings. With her makeup off, in her sweatshirt and jeans, there was something innocently collegiate about her.

“Tell me, Veronica,” I asked. “What are you doing with these guys, Jimmy Moore and Norvel Goodwin?”

“It’s a long story. Very sad.”

“Tell me.”

“It started with a boy, a very sweet boy. He’s dead now but that’s how it started.” I thought I saw something in her eye, but I must have imagined it because as I kept looking at her it disappeared. “I’ll tell you sometime,” she said. “Just not now, please. What am I going to do tonight?”

“I’ll call you a cab.”

“I can’t go home with that dead bird on my doorstep. I just can’t.”

With a gallant shrug I stood up. “All right,” I said. “I’ll take you home and clean up the bird. But this is the last time.”

“Can’t I stay here?” she asked.

“No. And tomorrow I’ll file for a restraining order. Restraining orders are generally useless, but at least it will be something. I’ll let you know when the court sets up the hearing.”

“Can’t I stay the night on your sofa?”

“No,” I said. “Definitely not.”

I walked to the closet and was reaching for my raincoat when she came from behind and placed her arms around me. Her hands lightly rubbed up and down my chest. “Can’t I stay, please? I wouldn’t sleep knowing that bird was there, and even if you threw it down the chute I’d still see it lying there, its sad little neck bent like it is, a small dribble of blood out its beak.”

Without turning around, with her hands still floating across my chest, I said, “I really can’t.”

“It’s Norvel, isn’t it?”

“It’s everything.”

“I won’t let him hurt you.”

I pulled her arms away and turned around. “I can’t,” I said, but it came out more like “Ay kaaugh” because she had slipped her tongue into my mouth. I tasted the sexy beeriness of her breath and smelled the wetness of her hair and there was something silky and warm about the way she pressed her body into mine and though I said, “Ay ayeaally kaaugh,” I knew that I would.

Jeanne, my first lover, a funny word to use for a sixteen-year-old girl with braces, was an athlete, a distance swimmer, all shoulders and thighs, trained for long, exhausting efforts that left her shaking with weariness. I was a notable disappointment to her and we both ended up more bemused than satisfied. My experiences with Michelle were more satisfactory, she had patience and clever hands and a willingness to experiment that was just right for a beginner. Sandra was tall and cold and endured sex but I was fascinated by her blondness, white white hair, pale skin, a profound phlegmaticness. Rebecca was a virgin, but eager, and let me play the role of experienced older man, though she was only a year behind me in college. “Let’s try this,” I would say, nervously, and she’d always reply with a cheerful, “Sure.” Allyn was in love with me, which brought to the table an intensity I found uncomfortable. Sue was blonde and plump and from Wisconsin but still sweetly kinked, with a thing about her feet. And of course my ex-fiancée Julie, the one true love of my youth, earnest and sad, loosing tears when we orgasmed together with silent sighs under her down comforter. Along the way there were Tina and Bonnie and Lauren, who laughed and grabbed and shouted in French. There was a dancer, a cop, a divorced woman from Toledo with a son older than me. There were many many delightful women, every shape, every size, every political party including the Communists, and I screwed them all. Maybe I was no Wilt Chamberlain, but I was no wilting violet either and I had made love to a peck of women in my life. But I had never made love to a woman like Veronica Ashland.

When we were naked, on my unmade bed, rubbing our hands uncontrollably over each other’s bodies, she opened the foil packet she found in my drawer, the packet I had stolen from Bissonette’s love chest, and popped the condom in her mouth, placing it upon me with her teeth, leaving just the right amount of slack at the tip. Then, like a crazed leopard, she was on top of me, pressing the palm of her hand into my swollen eye, biting my neck, my breast, licking my chest and my ear, pressing my eye and biting so hard I screamed as she worked. She had a thin supple body that responded to everything like a dream, her breasts were small and sharp and prickly hot, entering her was like entering a jar of electric honey, that sweet, that wild. She bent forward and arched back and bent forward like a willow stick, grabbing my hair painfully hard along the way as she sucked a kiss from my throat. She came quickly and ferociously and best of all she came again, and again. I knew it was her, not me, and I struggled to keep up but she was always one moment ahead of me. I moaned my orgasm and she howled, snatching at the air like a lioness and then the willow bent back toward me and she buried her face in my neck and meowed. She sounded like a satisfied house cat, stretched around a newly emptied bowl of milk.

The sound involuntarily brought up a question. “There was a litter box in your apartment.”

“Yes,” she said.

“But no cat,” I said. “That was your cat the Greek killed, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

“But you acted like you didn’t care about the cat, just the mess.”

“It was only a cat,” she said with a dismissive laugh.

“But I know about women and their cats, they are like babies to them, their children. A cat gets a hairball, they grow frantic. But you let me drop the corpse of your cat into a Strawbridge bag and dump it down the chute without a tear.”

“How should I have acted?”

“Mournful, distraught, pathetically tearful. Other women would have.”

“I’m not like other women.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “You are the coldest bitch I ever met,” and, like an incantation handed down father to son from the deepest mists of prehistory, the words made me hard again immediately. I twisted my hips with a violent rush, sending her sprawling on the bed, and I pressed myself into her and held her arms over her head and bit her throat like she had bitten mine and sucked her nipples when she told me to and bit her even after she told me to stop and I made her cry like no cat had ever made her cry and she came rivers.

It was the best sex I had ever had, better than I had ever hoped to have, and no matter the threat and whatever the price, I wanted more.