Hostile Witness

21

PRESCOTT STOOD BEFORE the potential jurors, clipboard in hand, asking questions in his commanding way. There were forty of them, sitting in the courtroom’s benches like churchgoers in their pews. It was from this group, summoned from the jury room by Judge Gimbel’s clerk, that the twelve jurors and two alternates for United States v. Moore and Concannon would be chosen. Prescott had petitioned the court to be allowed to question the jurors himself and Judge Gimbel had grudgingly granted the petition. If you had asked him, Prescott would have told you he was examining these potential jurors in an effort to pick a fair and unbiased jury. What he was really doing, in addition to sneaking in pretrial arguments, was trying to find jurors who would be the most unfair and most biased in favor of Jimmy Moore and Chester Concannon. That’s the way a trial works: the lawyers on the two sides pack the jury with prejudices favorable to their clients with the expectation that these attempts at manipulation will balance themselves out. It is why more than a few juries break down in nervous collapse.

I was at one end of the defense table next to Chester Concannon, who sat with his back straight and hands crossed before him. Jimmy sat at the other end. Immediately behind us were three bright-eyed handsome lawyers all in a row, the Talbott, Kittredge and Chase trial team assisting Prescott. Madeline had been left at the office to do research. The Talbott, Kittredge crowd was furiously scribbling notes and conferring in whispers with a tall, bearded man with a brutal case of dandruff who, I was told, was their jury expert, a man named Bruce Pierpont. Despite repeated promises from Prescott and numerous requests, I still hadn’t seen Pierpont’s report. Every now and then one of the Talbott, Kittredge lawyers would lean over and whisper something to Moore and he would nod, a look of supreme probity on his face. I wondered how long Prescott had worked with him to get the expression just right. The Talbott, Kittredge lawyers never leaned over to whisper something to me. Except for our proximity in the courtroom, it was impossible to tell we were on the same side. That had been Prescott’s idea. “It shouldn’t seem like we’re ganging up on Eggert,” he had said, and so Chester and I kept our distance.

Closer to the jury box was the prosecution table where Eggert and a beefy older man, with heavy hands and a neck like an ox, sat representing the government. The ox wore a blue blazer and his hair was swept rigidly into place, the very image of a man who liked his steak still bleeding. He was the FBI agent on the case, Special Agent Stemkowski. Once, in the middle of the proceedings, he cracked his knuckles and the rat-a-tat sounded like gunshots.

Judge Gimbel sat up high on the bench, bowing his hairless head as he worked on documents obviously unrelated to this trial. He was a busy man, Judge Gimbel, and you couldn’t expect him to concentrate on something as routine as Prescott’s jury voir dire.

“Now, as you may know,” said Prescott to the entire group of potential jurors, “one of the defendants in this case is a public official, a city councilman. The other defendant is the councilman’s aide. Do any of you believe that public officials, like the city councilman here, are usually corrupt?”

No response.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, I need you to be honest. Don’t any of you look at a public official like my client, a city councilman on the government payroll, and say to yourselves, he is dirty somehow?”

Still no response. He smiled kindly, looked down at his clipboard, ran his finger across a list of names of the jury venire, and looked up again. “Mrs. Emily Simpson.”

An older woman raised her hand, thin frame, pale powdered skin, bouffant hair, glasses that looked like they were squinting.

“Mrs. Simpson, do you work?”

“Yes. I work the register at a discount store.”

“And you pay your taxes then, of course.”

“Of course.” Mrs. Simpson’s hands grasped the pocketbook on her lap.

“Do you think the money you send over in taxes is well spent?”

“On the whole? No,” she said, looking around at the others seated nearby for encouragement.

“Why not?”

“The politicians don’t listen to us, they listen to the rich folk, the people who have the money to help them.”

“So what you’re saying, Mrs. Simpson, is that most politicians can be bought.”

“I guess I am.”

“Anyone else? How many believe that politicians as a whole are generally unscrupulous and easily bought and paid for?”

Mrs. Simpson hesitantly raised her hand and looked around for support. The woman seated next to her, with thick features and a dignified cant to her head, smiled at Mrs. Simpson and raised her hand, and then a man in the front row, crew cut, thick neck, and then another hand, and soon the great majority of potential jurors had their hands raised.

I glanced at Eggert. He was nodding his head, as if Prescott was proving his case for him.

“And why is that?” Prescott looked back at his clipboard. “Mrs. Lanford?”

The dignified woman next to Mrs. Simpson said, “Yes, that’s me.”

“Why do you think politicians are so easily bought?” asked Prescott.

“Because they’s greedy.”

“And where do you think the money goes, Mrs. Lanford, this money that buys them?”

“In they’s pockets,” said Mrs. Lanford. “Right in they’s own wallets.”

“Those of you who said that politicians are often bought, is that what all of you think?”

“No,” said a man in the back, his gray hair neat, wearing a polo shirt on his day off from the office.

Prescott scanned the names on his clipboard. “Mr. Roberts, is it? Where do you think it goes?”

“To their campaigns,” he said. “They’re always campaigning. It seems every other year there’s a new election.”

“Do you think it’s the politicians’ fault that they need to ask for money?” asked Prescott.

“I guess not,” said Roberts. “I mean, we end up voting for the guy with the most television ads, so I guess it’s our fault as much as anyone’s.”

“Does anyone here believe that politicians should not be allowed to ask for campaign contributions?”

No hands were raised.

“I’m going to hold you all to that now. What you all are telling me is that you each believe it is proper for politicians to ask for campaign contributions, that such requests are precisely what the system demands of politicians like my client.”

Before anyone could reply Eggert stood and in his reedy voice said, “Objection, Your Honor. Mr. Prescott’s voir dire has again devolved into a lecture.”

“Civics 101,” said Judge Gimbel. “We don’t need citizenship classes, Mr. Prescott. Just get on with it.”

“I’m almost through, Your Honor,” said Prescott.

“We’re grateful,” said the judge.

“Now, how many of you have your own businesses?”

A small number of the jurors raised their hands. Prescott referred again to his clipboard. “Mr. Thompkins, what kind of business do you own?”

“A printing shop,” said a thin balding black man with extremely long fingers.

“Who’s running it now?”

“My employees. I have an assistant manager.”

“Now, Mr. Thompkins, if while you’re away your assistant manager should do something wrong, would you be responsible?”

“If he messed up a job, sure I would. I stand by all the work coming out of my shop.”

“Suppose he did something illegal while you were away. Suppose, without your knowing it, he started printing up counterfeit money. Would you still be responsible?”

“No way.”

“Does anyone believe Mr. Thompkins should be criminally responsible if his assistant manager started printing up counterfeit money in his print shop?”

Prescott scanned the jurors and nodded approvingly when he saw no hands raised. “I don’t think so either,” said Prescott. “You’re off the hook, Mr. Thompkins. Thank you very much for your time, I’m sure you all will be terrific jurors.” Prescott sat down at the defense table and formed a huddle with Moore and his trial team and the bearded, snowy jury expert.

Judge Gimbel put down his pen and looked directly at me. “Mr. Carl,” he said. “Do you have any voir dire?”

“Can I have a moment, Judge?” I asked.

With the jury venire still sitting in the courtroom I calmly broke into the Talbott, Kittredge huddle. “Mr. Prescott,” I said. “May I speak to you, please?”

He pressed his lips together and said, “Let’s go outside for a moment, shall we.”

I followed him out of the courtroom, passing the rows of potential jurors, the press, the court buffs, old men who hang around the courthouse whiling away their retirements with free entertainment. Once outside in the long cream hallway, Prescott lifted his chin and peered down at me, looking very straight and very stern.

“That last bit, Mr. Prescott, sir,” I said. “The questions about the counterfeiter? I have to admit they caused me some concern.”

“They did?” he said, his voice rising in confusion.

“Yes, sir. It appeared as if you may have been indicating, maybe, that a subordinate, not a principal, is the responsible party here.”

Prescott looked down at me, his eyes wide with an injured innocence. “It was just voir dire, Victor.”

“But still, sir, it caused me some concern.”

“Walk with me to the men’s room,” he said. “Let’s take advantage of the break.”

The men’s room was just down the hall and I found myself in the awkward position of standing next to Prescott at the urinals. He was a stern, formal man, not the type, I would have thought, to chatter while grasping tightly to his prick, but I would have been wrong.

“I’ve tried more than fifty cases in these courtrooms, Victor,” he said as he peed. “And in the course of those trials I’ve learned a little about how to win a case. I have spent hours with our jury expert working on the voir dire, on my arguments, on the presentation of our evidence. Everything I do in this trial has been reviewed beforehand by the best minds at Talbott, Kittredge, every question to the jury was scientifically designed to have the maximum beneficial effect for our clients. Now that question about counterfeiting sets up our entire defense. Unlike the counterfeiter, who is cheating the system, these men were not going outside the system’s demands. They were only doing what the system required. The contrast is just what I was trying to put forward.”

Through the whole of his speech I was restraining myself from checking out his equipment. There was something about Prescott that forced me to make comparisons, even though I always seemed to come out the lesser man. “I guess I see that now, sir,” I said.

He gave himself a shake, pulled up his zipper, and moved to the sinks across the other wall. I did the same. Out of the mirror he stared at me and his eyes turned cold. “I’m in the middle of a fight with Eggert here, Victor. I can’t afford to be explaining myself at every turn to you. When you gain a little more experience maybe you’ll understand what I’m doing, but right now what you need is enough faith not to get in my way. You are clear about your instructions, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, like a schoolboy being reprimanded.

He turned on the faucet and began to wash. I followed suit. “Now, I don’t want you to ask any questions of these jurors,” he said. “I have them right where I want them and you can only move them in the wrong direction. And I don’t want you to get involved in the selection process, I’ll tell you how to use your peremptory challenges and I’ll make all the challenges for cause. What I need from you, Victor, what I must have is your absolute confidence in me. Can you give me that, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep your eyes open, Victor,” he said, grimacing into the mirror. He pressed the sides of his hair back with his palms. “There is no telling how much you can learn. By the way, the Bishops are delighted with your work so far.”

“I haven’t done much yet.”

“Well, they’ve been raving. And there is more to come, I promise. Let’s not keep the judge waiting. The old goose hates to wait.”

Side by side, like comrades at arms, we left the bathroom, marched up the corridor, swung open the courtroom doors, and strode back to the defense table.

“Well, Mr. Carl,” said Judge Gimbel. “Are we ready now?”

Something gave me pause. Maybe it was the look of injured innocence in Prescott’s eyes. He was neither an innocent nor so easily injured. But I stared down at the yellow pad in front of me on which I had scrawled a few elementary questions for the jury venire and knew I would follow his directions. Most of my voir dire questions had been asked already by the judge, they were form questions taken right out of a trial manual I had been working with over the weekend. None of them had been scientifically designed for maximum effect on our defense. Besides, Prescott was right, I had my instructions.

I leaned over and spoke with Chet Concannon, just to be sure. When we were done whispering he smiled at me reassuringly. I stood up straight again and said, “I have nothing, Your Honor.”

22

WE WERE IN THE PROCESS of actually picking the jury, or I should say Prescott and his expert were in the process, when I spotted Morris Kapustin entering the courtroom. He saw me notice him and he waved. I gave him the slightest of nods. Morris was dressed particularly shabbily that day, a suit jacket that didn’t match his suit pants, his white shirt undone at the top, letting his faded silk undershirt show through. I hoped that maybe no one had seen the connection between us, but one of the bright young Talbott, Kittredge team, the blond bland-faced man with a name like Bert or Bart and a perfect little nose, had spotted him. I couldn’t help notice the smirk as he leaned forward and said something to Prescott, who spun around immediately to get a good look. I turned away in embarrassment. When I could, without being noticed, I motioned for Morris to wait for me. He sat down on the back bench and immediately began talking to one of the court buffs, an ancient man in plaid pants watching the proceedings.

Once the questioning was finished, jury selection was an almost mathematical procedure. All forty names were in order of selection on our jury sheets. The judge gave each of the defendants five peremptory challenges in which we could knock any potential juror off the jury for whatever reason we chose. The prosecution had six peremptory challenges of its own, and after the judge had taken seven jurors out of the group because he thought they were unduly prejudiced for one side or the other, including Mrs. Lanford, who had said she believed all politicians took money and put it in their pockets, we began the selection. First Eggert, then Prescott, then I, following Prescott’s recommendations, excused jurors. One by one the excused jurors were crossed off our lists, and then we recalculated who would be in. We ended with a predominantly male jury, as Bruce Pierpont, the jury expert, had suggested, which included Mr. Thompkins, the printer, Mr. Roberts, the man who had believed the voters forced politicians to ask for money, Mrs. Simpson, who believed that buying public officials was a natural part of the political process, and a Mr. Rollings, who had been a security guard for ten years at a warehouse in North Philly. When the selection was completed Prescott looked over the jury, conferred with his jury expert, and nodded approvingly.

“Opening statements ten o’clock tomorrow,” said Judge Gimbel. “And then prosecution’s first witness. Court adjourned.”

I waited until Prescott and Eggert left the courtroom with their respective teams before I packed up my trial bag and walked over to Morris, who was still talking to the older man next to whom he had sat.

“I didn’t expect to see you here, Mr. Kapustin,” I said a little sternly.

“Ah, Victor, I want that I should introduce you to Herm Finklebaum. Herm, this is mine lawyer friend Victor Carl. Herm used to sell toys over on Forty-fourth Street, now he spends his time watching in this very building.”

“Pleased to meet you, buddy boy,” said Herm. His face seemed to collapse upon itself where his front teeth had once been and there was a hole in his head, thinly covered with skin, through which I could see the faint pulsing of his blood. “You’re representing that Concannon fellow, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Watch your baitsim, fellah. Eggert’s a tiger.”

“What did I tell you, Herm, you’re not listening, no?” said Morris. “This Victor is no pantywaist, not like some of those other shmendricks staggering around. Your Mr. Egbert has his own little tiger on his hands.”

“I never seen Eggert lose,” said Herm. “I never seen him even sweat.”

“He’ll be shvitzing like an Hassid in Miami by the time Victor gets through with him. You tell me if it’s not so, Herm. I’ll bet you a pastrami.”

“At Ben’s?” asked Herm.

“Where else? McDonald’s?”

“With Russian dressing?”

“No, with mayonnaise on white bread. How do you think I eat pastrami?”

“You’re on, Morris.”

“You tell Ben, Herm, you tell Ben the sandwich you are buying is for me and he’ll stack it extra thick just as I like it. Now stop all this talk about food, it’s driving me meshuggeh. Three weeks already since Yom Kippur and still I’m hungry. Come, Victor, we have to talk.”

As I started following Morris out of the courtroom, Herm Finklebaum, the retired toy merchant of 44th Street, grabbed my arm and said, “I’ll keep my eye on you, buddy boy. Yes I will.”

When we were alone in the white linoleum hallway of the courthouse, Morris said, “The lady at your office, the one at the front desk, told me you’d be here.”

“Rita.”

“Yes. Such a haimisheh girl, very helpful.”

“Rita?”

“She gave to me this for you.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pink message slip folded in half.

I opened it and read it and smiled.

“Something good, I hope,” said Morris.

“For me at least,” I said.

“It’s okay, I hope, that I came to the courtroom,” said Morris. “But I had news for you. Windward Enterprises was exactly right. Exactly. Your lady friend, what was her name?”

“Beth.”

“Beth. Such a smart girl. Beth. She was exactly right. Maybe she should be helping you with this fancy trial in federal court?”

“She is.”

“See, you have sechel too. Good. Maybe you might just win this fancy trial after all. Now, let’s see.” He put on his glasses, pulled out his grimed notebook, and started flipping through the pages. “Frederick Stocker had a second home down the shore, Ventnor, on the bayside. Such a home, all done up with columns and glass. His wife sold it when he disappeared. She had nothing, of course, just that shore house, and a mortgage on their place in Gladwyne. She told me she didn’t know where he was, and I believe her for a very good reason.”

“You spoke to her?”

“How else do you find someone? Talk to people, Victor, you might learn things. She was a very angry lady, this Mrs. Stocker, which you can understand of course, angry, angry. She had a tight little mouth, like a tochis, that tight, and her fingers were twisting around each other and after talking with her I suspect I know why this Frederick Stocker he disappeared.”

“That bad?”

“You don’t want to know how bad. A real kvetcherkeh. This woman could pickle cucumbers without the brine. He had a boat, she said. He called it The Debit. Such a clever name for an accountant who is also a thief, don’t you think? A thirty-foot sloop. What’s a sloop, I couldn’t tell you if you klopt mein kop with an anchor, but that’s what it was, a sloop. He cared more for the boat than he did for her, she said. I hate boats, wouldn’t get on another for the life of me, but between you and me, I agree with him. Mine guess is that this thief Stocker he sold his boat and bought another and is sailing somewhere full of joy because he is on his boat and his wife is not.”

“So that’s it, then. He’s somewhere on the high seas.”

“Yes, that’s it, but of course who can sail forever without putting in to land? October, the seas start getting colder, Stocker the thief will want to find a harbor he can dock in, kibbitz a bit, find a bummerkeh or two, spend some of the money he stole. My guess, Victor, and it’s only a guess, is that he is sucking down schnopps on his boat in a marina somewhere it is warm.”

“So there’s nothing to be done, right?”

“Quiet, now. You hired Morris Kapustin. Morris Kapustin will decide when there is nothing more to be done. There are ways to keep looking, registries of marinas.”

“There must be thousands. How are you going to check all the marinas in the country?”

“By computer, how else? Acch, you leave it to me, I’ll do what I can. I tried this once before looking for a boat.”

“Did it work?”

“So once it didn’t work, I shouldn’t keep trying? Mine son, the computernik. Such a chachem, trying to drag the business into the new world and who am I to stop him. He knows from machines, computers, cars, he was a locksmith in his summers away from school. Me, I know from people. You can learn from people things computers never dreamed about. But, of course, trying to find one boat in all of the Atlantic or Pacific, for that you need a computer. Oh, by and by, Victor, bubeleh, this is for you.”

He put his notebook back into his jacket and reached deep into one of his pants pockets. He pulled out the heavy gold and green chip with the boar’s head on it and flipped it to me. I dropped my briefcase as I fumbled to catch it. The chip eluded me, spinning on the floor in a wide circle that I followed.

“I can see a basketball player you weren’t,” said Morris with a deep laugh as I stepped on the rolling chip and scooped it into my hand.

“I was all right,” I said.

“Now I insulted you, I’m sorry. You were a regular Magic Jordan, I see that now. How I could have missed it I don’t know? Seven feet four you were in college, but the years have been hard, you shrunk. I too have shrunk. It happens.”

“What did you find out about the chip?”

“A very special chip, that is. I asked around. Yitzhak Rabbinowitz, the accountant? Pearlman and Rabbinowitz, maybe you heard them? Well, it turns out that Yitzhak, and I knew his grandfather too, though he was no prince like Abe Carl the shoe man, it turns out that Yitzhak does work for certain private organizations. I showed the chip to him and he said immediately what it was. Especially made for a gentlemen’s club in South Philadelphia. I wrote out the address for you. They play poker there almost every night with these chips. But it’s not a club you can just walk into, Victor. It’s a very private club. I think maybe you should forget about that chip.”

“What kind of club?”

“How should I say it? It’s a club for taleners, alte kockers, and not all of them were vegetable sellers in the Italian Market, do you understand? A club for retired mobsters, for old gangsters. It’s a dangerous place with dangerous men, not a place for a nice Jewish boy like Abe Carl’s grandson.”

Before I paid a visit to South Philadelphia I took I-95 to Chester and then followed the directions I had been given to a cracking industrial road ending at a gray trailer with a hissing neon sign set above it that read: PETE’S YARD – TOWING, STORAGE & REPAIRS. CLASSIC CARS OUR SPECIALTY. Stretching out from the trailer was a chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire, circumscribing an expanse of more than a acre, and what was atop that acre was cars. Lots of cars. Shiny ones and smashed ones and new ones and ones without any wheels, parked in long rows spreading out from that trailer, enough to excite the fancier with the sheer number and variety. But I wasn’t excited. I never cared much for cars. I figured when I had the money I would see which BMW everyone else was driving and then drive one level better. Until then I’d drive what I could afford, which was my seven-year-old Mazda compact, registered at my father’s suburban address to keep my insurance down.

I parked in front of the trailer. Inside there was a young woman reading a magazine behind a Plexiglas guard. Above her was another sign: TOWING $50. STORAGE $10 PER DAY. NO PERSONAL CHECKS. ALL FINES MUST BE PAID AT TIME OF REDEMPTION. PLEASE HAVE REGISTRATION AND IDENTIFICATION READY.

“I’m here about a car,” I said.

“That’s good,” she said, without looking up, “because we don’t take in dry cleaning.”

She was cute, in a trashy little car yard way, and the remark had been clever enough so I couldn’t help myself. “Do I know you?”

“License plate number,” she said flatly. I decided then and there I would have to get a better line.

“I’m here about a car seized for the Sheriff’s Office,” I said, and then read directly from the pink slip. “Number 37984.”

She went into a file and searched for the paperwork. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Carl,” she said, suddenly smiling. “Pete wanted me to get him personally when you came in. If you’ll wait just a minute.”

Pete was a big, sandy-haired man, his stomach bursting from beneath his belt. His tie was loose, it had been tied loose, and his jacket was too tight for him, bunching up around the armpits. Just the sight of it made me flex my shoulders in a claustrophobic reflex. Pete was one of those guys who had never accepted the last fifty pounds. He reached out to shake and pumped my hand like a jack handle. “Glad you made it, Mr. Carl,” he said heartily. “I wanted to show you personally what we picked up for you.”

He led me out the back of the shack into the yard and I followed. He spoke as we passed the automotive detritus that had been towed from Chester County’s streets, rows and rows and rows of it.

“The deputy sheriff, he was there already when we showed up,” said Pete. “Six in the morning. The morning’s the best, before anyone gets a mind to drive off. It was quite a house, like some castle. And a lawn that stretched forever, six football fields or something, all fenced in. There was three cars in the driveway, but not what we was looking for. And nothing in the garage, either. Happy as hell to show us the garage, so I knew before we looked it wasn’t going to be there. The deputy wanted to leave but there was all that lawn, right. Fenced in, that was the ticket. ‘You got horses?’ I asked. Sure they did, Mr. Carl. A place like that. Then when I convinced the deputy to check out the stable, they went a little batty.”

“Was there an old man there?” I asked. “Round, sallow face, long hair, slightly wrecked looking?”

“Oh yeah, he was there, mumbling something, shouting. You’d think they’d cut his nails for him, wouldn’t you? But I didn’t take no mind of him, I’d seen it before. You know this type of work is not the most pleasant. People don’t like to see you taking away their cars. Take their washing machines, their VCRs, their wives even, fine. But not their cars. We won’t do it without the sheriff there and the sheriff won’t do it unless he’s armed. But then again we don’t get too many houses like that one. So we go to the stable, right. There are horses there, sure, hay and barrels of oats. Smells like leather and horse shit, you know. Little strips of yellow hanging down covered with flies. We walk through it slowly. Nothing, right. I look up in the rafters, you never know, right? Nothing.”

He took me inside a large low building in the center of the yard, with a ceiling of corrugated tin. He led me to something big, something long, covered with tan canvas.

“And then, hiding out there in the last stall, Mr. Carl, this is what we found.”

He grabbed hold of the side of the canvas and whisked it off. Underneath was a majestic looking thing, a long, two-seater convertible, with a golden hood and blue wheel wells front and rear. Four shining exhaust pipes snaked out of either side of the engine. There was a high, majestic grill and a spare tire hooked above the trunk and the delicate front bumper was shaped like a woman’s kiss.

“I knew we was getting a Duesenberg, Mr. Carl, but frankly I expected a wreck of some sort, not a 1936 SJ Speedster in decent condition. This baby’s got a twin overhead cam, eight cylinders, a centrifugal supercharger, tubular steel connecting rods.” He stopped speaking for a moment, staring at it in awe. “This is more than a classic, Mr. Carl. This is a work of art. This is a legend. Designed by Mr. Gordon Buehrig himself. When it first came out, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable both ordered a special model. A man who cared would give a lot for this car.”

“About how much, exactly?” I asked.

“In mint condition, at a car show, properly advertised, between two and three hundred thousand. This model hasn’t been kept up lately, it’s got some rust, the leather seats are cracked, the engine’s leaking off a little oil, needs a valve job. But it would be well worth it to spend some time and money and fix up this baby until it shines and then sell it at a show.”

“How much would we get if we auctioned it off right now?”

“These things are tough to say, Mr. Carl. It would be a distressed price. It would depend on who shows up. Probably something like forty or fifty. But that would be a shame, Mr. Carl.”

I was still getting twenty-five percent of everything I collected from Winston Osbourne. Twenty-five percent of the fifty would be twelve five. It was amazing how once money started flowing it didn’t stop. Twelve five.

“Sell it, Pete,” I said, turning around and leaving the building.

He followed after me. “But Mr. Carl, that would be a shame. I’d be honored to work on it for you. In six months, Mr. Carl, it would be mint. I promise it. But to just up and sell it like this would be a damn shame.”

I was sure it would be just that. But you see, I wasn’t a car fancier. It was just steel and leather and rubber and glass to me. And all in all, I’d prefer the twelve five sooner than anything else later. “Sell it,” I said, still walking away. Take that, you little blue-blood snot. “Sell it as soon as you can.”

23

NINTH STREET, NORTH OF WASHINGTON, is the heart of South Philadelphia’s Italian Market. On weekends the street becomes a cacophonous melange of vegetable stands and fishmongers and fine meats laid out in glorious pink rows inside the white refrigerated displays. Cannoli so rich it takes a full half-hour to eat them, hoagies thick with spiced ham and provolone, drenched in fine wine vinegar and covered with hot peppers. Fresh squid soaking in their ink, prosciutto sliced so thin you can read the paper through it, okra and bok choy and radicchio, strawberries ripened to burst like flowers in your mouth. “Please, lady, please, I pick the best for you, I promise, the best in the world, the sweetest, like sugar for you, just do as I say and don’t shake the melons.” It’s a sweet old-fashioned street when the market is open, and from all over the city they come to buy the freshest seafood, the finest veal, the ripest produce. Families have owned their stalls on Ninth Street for generations, Giordano’s produce, Cappuccio’s meats, Anastasi’s freshest seafood. The Italian Market is a brilliant Philadelphia tradition, a feast for the senses and the perfect place to shop for that lavish dinner party. Just so long as you don’t shake the melons.

This happened to a friend of mine. True story. He was in the market one Saturday morning with his parents. A family outing. They were at LiCalzi’s produce store buying tomatoes. My friend’s mother is one of those women who shake the melons and press their thumbs deep into the eggplant and take a bite of radish before buying the bunch. If there is a best lemon in the rack, a best ear of corn, a best box of strawberries, she will find it.

“Hey lady,” said the vegetable clerk, a tall fat man cloned from tall fat LiCalzi stock. “The sign says don’t touch the tomatoes. They’re all good. You want a good tomato, I’ll give you a good tomato. Here, take this one.”

“I’ll find my own, thank you,” she said.

“Hey lady, do what I tell you and stop squeezing the fucking tomatoes.”

“Don’t talk to my wife like that,” said my friend’s father.

“I’ll talk to her any way I want,” said the clerk, giving him a shove.

My friend shoved him back.

“What’s the problem here?” said another, older LiCalzi.

“The lady is squeezing the tomatoes.”

“Don’t squeeze the fucking tomatoes,” said the second clerk.

“Fuck you,” said my friend.

And that was it.

The first clerk dived over the stall, scattering tomatoes like large, squishy marbles across the street, and loosed a right cross that broke my friend’s jaw. When my friend’s father tried to pull the first clerk off his son, the second clerk grabbed him in a headlock and started pounding his face with uppercuts, one after another, like a wrestler on Saturday morning TV, shattering his nose. In the melee my friend’s mother was slugged in the eye with the second clerk’s elbow, cracking the socket. By the time the ambulance carrying my friend and his parents had left, the cops had dispersed the crowd, the stall had been righted, the tomatoes replaced, a new bin set up for tomatoes, slightly damaged, at a bargain rate, and the fat tall LiCalzi clerks were calmly weighing celery stalks for the new wave of customers. My friend and his parents now do all their shopping at the Super Fresh.

So that is South Philadelphia, a charming ethnic enclave in the middle of the city, small immaculate row houses, terrific restaurants, churches, softball fields, Pat’s Steaks, Geno’s Steaks, two bars on every corner, little girls in their Catholic skirts smoking as they walk home from school, old people in T-shirts and shorts sitting on the sidewalk into the night listening to the Phillies on the radio and drinking cold cans of beer. But if a parking spot is marked off with folding chairs don’t take it, and if a drive-by shooting splits open the night walk the other way, and never ever shake the melons in the Italian Market because underneath the sweet ethnicity of South Philadelphia is steel.

I was sitting in my car in the gloomy darkness of 7th Street, just east of the Italian Market, watching the entrance to the Sons of Garibaldi Men’s Club. It was an old-style storefront with the windows painted in green and gold stripes except for the last two feet, left clear to let in whatever daylight could slip through. Above the door was a wooden sign with the club’s name and a boar’s head on it. With the painted windows and the closed wooden door it was impossible to see inside, but light shone out of the clear swath at the top of the windows and I saw a shadow slip across the ceiling. A man, bent with age, shuffled along the street and stopped at the heavy wooden door, giving two hard raps with the gnarled handle of his cane. The door opened from the inside and the old man stepped up and into the storefront. The door closed behind him.

What I was doing sitting in my car outside that club was screwing up my courage to go inside. What I had was a chip and some questions about a dead man and I wondered whether those two things alone were enough to get my jaw broken or my nose smashed or my eye socket cracked. But inside that club was still where I wanted to go. Prescott had told me the mafioso princess had slept with the horny second baseman and that was why the second baseman was dead. Whether Prescott was telling me the truth or lying about Bissonette would tell me whether my trust in him would be misplaced. I wanted to trust Prescott, oh yes I did, I wanted more than anything for everything he ever said or ever promised to be true. But after those damn questions to the jury I needed some assurance and I had the feeling that the assurance I needed was inside that dangerous looking men’s club. I had no choice but to go in and get it, despite my instructions to do no more investigating and despite the threats that had come backing those instructions. See, I genuinely liked Chester Concannon, admired his calm, good-natured manner and his outsized loyalty, but it wasn’t Chester I was worried about, for if Prescott was setting up Concannon for a fall he was maybe setting me up at the same time. And maybe the deals and contacts and the promised advances to my career were as phony as any connection between Bissonette and Raffaello’s daughter. If so I might have to do something about it, don’t ask me what, but something. So, with not a little trepidation, and not a lot of confidence, I stepped out of the car, walked up to the ominous wooden door, and knocked twice with my knuckles.

The door opened slowly and what looked like one of the LiCalzi brothers stood in the doorway, staring at me while he chewed on something with his mouth open. He wore pressed jeans and a silk shirt, buttoned low enough so that I could see his pectorals, as flat and solid as flagstone. He just stared and chewed and stared some more and then, through whatever he was chewing, he said, “Yeah?”

“I was hoping I could come in,” I said.

“This is a private club.”

I reached into my suit jacket and, quick as a cobra, he grabbed me by my collar and lifted me two inches off the ground. Slowly I pulled out the chip. “I have this.”

He dropped me. I did an awkward three-point landing. “I don’t care what you got,” he said. “This is a private club. Get lost.”

“I just wanted to ask…” But before I could finish the sentence he had me turned around and hoisted by my belt, ready for tossing.

“Who is it, Giovanni?” asked a whispery, accented voice from inside the room. The voice was slow as a snake slithering toward its prey.

Giovanni put me down none too gently, gave me a look that would wither a dogwood, frisked me quickly, and, with a tight grip on my arm, brought me inside.

It was a dusty room, bare and beat, with a linoleum floor and whitewashed walls with travel posters of Sicily curling up at the edges. A fluorescent ring spit a white glow from the ceiling. There was a bar in the corner, wooden and battered, with a few bottles with pouring tops grouped together on top. Beside the bottles were six water glasses upside-down on a tray. An ancient radio with canvas over the single speaker hissed out a thin strain of opera. The room smelled of talcum powder, of liniment, of tobacco burned long ago. Along the sides were metal chairs with red leatherette upholstery that looked to have been swiped from an old barbershop. In the center, under the blinking fluorescent wheel, was a large round table topped with green felt, ringed with wooden chairs. In the far chair, directly facing me, was the old man whom I had just seen come in. He was bent over the table, a deck of cards in his hands. His face, twisted by deep canyons of wrinkles, was as skinny and as sharp as a hatchet. There was no one else in the room.

“It’s some guy with a hundred-dollar chip who says he wants in,” said Giovanni.

“Let-a me see,” said the old man.

Giovanni took the chip from my hand and let go of me only long enough to walk it to the old man. The old man examined it carefully.

“Where did you get this?” the old man asked.

“It belonged to Zack Bissonette. I got it from him.”

“Bissonette’s dead,” hissed the old man. He put the chip into his pocket. “Dead-a men don’t have chips. It’s a club rule. I have to confiscate it. Show him out, Giovanni.”

I pulled my arm out of Giovanni’s grasp. “Wait a minute. That’s my chip. You can’t just take it and put it in your pocket like that.”

His hands, long and yellow, the knuckles swollen to the size of jawbreakers, divided the cards swiftly into two piles and gave them a loud, expert shuffle. “I must enforce the rules. I’m the president of our club. How would it look if I let-a you break the rules?” He separated the cards and gave them another loud shuffle. “Show him out, Giovanni.”

Giovanni grabbed my arm again and began to drag me, my Florsheims sliding on the worn linoleum as they headed toward the doorstep, when I said loudly, “The least you can do is let me play you for it.”

“What you got to play with?” asked the old man in his whispery voice, and Giovanni stopped dragging me.

I pulled my arm out of his grasp, shucked my shoulders, and reached up to straighten my tie. “The chip,” I said.

“It’s not-a your chip no more. I had to confiscate it.”

“I brought it, so it’s mine. Any fair club would agree to that. What I’ll agree to is to play cards with it, give you a chance to win it off me fair and square.”

“And even if that would be acceptable, it wouldn’t be enough.” The old man gave a sharp, bitter smile. “There’s a minimum buy-in.”

“How much?”

“How much you got?”

“Another fifty on me.”

“That would only cover your temporary membership dues.”

“Temporary membership dues?”

“To play you have to be a member.”

“How much are the temporary membership dues?”

“Fifty dollar.”

“But if I pay that I won’t have enough for the buy-in.”

“No. You would not.” He separated the cards again and gave them another loud shuffle. “Of course, we could work something out.”

“I have an ATM card.”

“Is that-a so? How much can you withdraw at one time?”

“Four hundred dollars.”

“Well, since you’ll be a member, four hundred dollar is how much it will take to buy in.”

“That means three hundred plus the chip, right?”

“Excuse me,” said the old man. “I must have been confused. You’ll be a temporary member only. For temporary members the buy-in is higher.”

“How much higher?”

“Four hundred plus the chip.”

“I see.”

“Plus the fifty you have on you for your temporary membership dues.”

“Five hundred and fifty dollars, total.”

“That’s right.”

“That seems pretty steep.”

He shrugged. “Don’t worry, Mr…”

“Carl.”

“Mr. Carl.” He shuffled his cards again, loudly, perfectly, merging the two piles seamlessly into one. “It’s a friendly game. There’s a cash machine at Eighth and Catherine, two blocks away. Giovanni will walk with you. This neighborhood, you know. It’s not what it once was.”

“That’s good,” I said. “I wouldn’t want to lose five hundred and fifty dollars to a thief.”

“I understand perfectly,” said the old man, now nodding his head sagely. “While you’re gone I’ll call the other members, tell them we found ourselves a game.”

24

“YES,” I SAID, LOOKING over my cards, subtly trying to dig out the information I needed. “Zack told me about your games, said he had good times here.”

“Is that-a so?” said the old man whom I had first seen in the club and whose name I now knew was Luigi. “That’s very interesting, Victor. I’ll bet twenty. I don’t have nothing, of course, but I like to keep things interesting.”

“You’re raising just to keep things interesting?” asked Virgil, a huge man with fists like hams and a big-jawed face slackened by age. His voice was thick and slow.

“That’s right,” said Luigi.

“It don’t have nothing to do with the two ladies up and the third on her belly?” asked Virgil.

“If I had-a three queens I would have bet forty,” said Luigi.

“If you had bet forty I wouldn’t be thinking of staying in.”

“Okay,” said Luigi. “I’m going to raise my bet to forty.”

“What are you, senile?” said Jasper, a tall thin man with deep wrinkles around his eyes and a full head of bristly gray hair. His nasal voice had the tight, tense quality of a postman on the edge. “You can’t just up and change your bet like that. Once it’s down it’s down.”

“I’m changing it,” said Luigi. “What’s it to you anyway, Jasper, you were out before the first bet.”

“I didn’t have no hand.”

“You didn’t have no hand since Truman was president,” said Luigi.

“You still can’t raise yourself,” said Jasper. “There are rules.”

“Let him change it,” said Virgil. “What do I care?”

“Okay,” said Luigi, tossing in another four red chips with the boar’s head embossed in gold. “The bet is forty.”

“Forty dollars,” said Virgil. “Now I know you don’t got nothing. I’ll see the forty and raise ten.”

Luigi wheezed out a laugh and said, “Fifty to you, Victor.”

There were five of us around the table, four men to the far side of retirement and me. We were playing sevencard stud, high only. Giovanni sat by the door, slumped like a sack of cement in one of the red leatherette chairs, thumbing through a well-worn Playboy magazine. I couldn’t figure out what he was, guard, bartender. He sat around and got drinks for the players when they asked and sat around some more. I had played my share of poker before, but never at stakes this high. My jacket was off, my tie loosened, the top two buttons of my shirt undone, my sleeves rolled up to my forearms. Every now and then I checked my watch, aware that I had to be in court the next morning. But I had been tossing out asides all night, trying to build a conversation about Zack Bissonette, and still hadn’t learned what I had come to learn.

I looked at my hand again, lifting the down cards tightly so that no one could see. Down I had the four of hearts and the four of spades. Up I had two more hearts and the four of diamonds. Three fours wasn’t bad but except for Jasper, who had folded early, each of the other four had pairs up and were betting strong. We all had two more cards to go. If it was just the fours I might have folded, but there was still the chance to fill the house or maybe pick up the heart flush. I looked at my chips. I had only about a hundred and fifty left of my original five-hundred-dollar stake and it was thinning fast.

“Let’s go, Victor,” said Virgil. “This ain’t brain surgery.”

“I’m in,” I said, tossing in two twenty-five-dollar chips.

Dominic, sitting next to me, a short dour man with forearms like bricks and a tight beer gut, tossed in another fifty. Dominic hadn’t said two words together all night, just bet money and scooped up pots. There was now over three hundred dollars in the middle of the table.

“So you were buddy-buddy with Zack,” said Jasper. “Is that what you been trying to tell us all night, Sport?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“Zack was some distant relative of Dominic’s, like a second cousin twice removed, or something,” said Jasper. “I can never figure those things out. So we let him play with us when he wanted. Nice fucking guy.”

“Lousy ballplayer,” said Virgil. “Lousier poker player.”

“That’s why we let him keep playing,” said Luigi, and he let out another wheeze of a laugh that devolved into a spasm of coughs.

“Nice fucking guy, good loser,” said Jasper. “And the girls he had, I’ll tell you, Sport. What do you think? They loved him.”

“He had to beat them off with a baseball bat,” said Virgil.

There was a quiet, awkward pause and then Dominic spoke in a voice hard as slate. “That’s enough,” he said.

“You know what you are, Virgil?” said Jasper. “You’re an idiot.”

“I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“That’s your problem, you never mean nothing by it,” said Luigi. “I’m raising twenty.”

“Three queens,” said Virgil, shaking his head as he tossed in another twenty. “I knew he had them queens.”

“In,” I said.

Dominic put in his chips and Luigi dealt the next round. No one tripled their pairs but I pulled the seven of hearts, leaving me four to the flush.

Dominic tossed in twenty-five dollars and Luigi saw it.

“What happened to Mr. Forty Dollars?” asked Virgil. “Where’s he gone?”

“You in or not?” asked Luigi.

“In,” he said, tossing in his chips.

“I’m in too,” I said. “What I heard about Zack was that he was stepping out with the wrong girl at the end.”

“Where’d you pick that up, Sport?” asked Jasper.

“That’s just what I heard.”

“Is that what you heard?” said Jasper. “Well, maybe you heard right.”

Dominic threw in his chips and then, without looking at me, said in his harsh voice, “Haven’t I seen you on TV or something?”

“Wheel of Fortune?” I said.

“Maybe that’s it,” said Dominic. “You on Wheel of Fortune?”

“No.”

“Funny guy,” said Dominic without a smile. “Deal them cards.”

Luigi dealt out the last round of cards face down. I slipped mine on top of my other down cards and pulled them to my chest. Slowly, carefully, I looked at my down cards. The four of hearts. The four of spades. I glanced around at the old men looking at me and then I looked at the new card. King of hearts. I had flushed, king high. I was finally going to win a hand. I let out an involuntary sigh.

“What’s that?” said Virgil. “What was that, did you hear that?”

“I didn’t hear nothing,” said Luigi.

“You been deaf in your left ear since ’fifty-nine.”

“I heard it too,” said Jasper.

“What was it?” asked Luigi.

“He sighed,” said Virgil. “Victor sighed, three hearts up and he pulled his flush. That was a flushing sigh if I ever heard it. Something high too, an ace. He’s got an ace high flush.”

“Can’t be, no way, no how,” said Jasper, searching through and then turning over one of his folded hand. “I got the ace of hearts right here.”

“You cannot-a do that,” said Luigi. “You’re out, you cannot-a say what you had.”

“Aah, stop that,” said Jasper. “All of a sudden now it’s Hoyle from the guy who raises himself.”

“Believe it or don’t believe it, I don’t care none,” said Virgil. “But he’s got his flush.”

“I don’t-a believe it,” said Luigi. “Whose bet?”

“Dominic,” said Fred.

Dominic put twenty-five in the pot.

“I see it,” said Luigi.

“Count me out against the flush,” said Virgil.

“I’ll see the twenty-five and raise twenty-five,” I said.

“Told you,” said Virgil.

Dominic tossed in another fifty.

“Another raise?” said Luigi.

“You and your queens,” said Virgil. “You and your queens are worth zippo. You should have folded with Jasper.”

“Jasper bent over the day of his first-a communion,” said Luigi, “and he’s been folding ever since.”

“What? You want I should bet like you, Luigi?” said Jasper. “You want I should blow my check staying in like a douchebag with three queens against a flush? I don’t got no rich son-in-law running a funeral parlor in Scranton. I got to be careful or by the end of the month I’m eating Alpo.”

Luigi looked at Jasper, sneered gently, and said, “I see Dominic.”

“Is that what got Zack killed, the wrong girl?” I asked nonchalantly as I looked over my cards for the final bet. I only had fifty dollars left.

“Let’s just say,” said Jasper, “between you and me, Sport, his luck wasn’t rotten only in baseball and poker.”

Still looking at my cards, I said, “I heard he was playing around with Raffaello’s daughter,” and after I said it a silence crashed into the room.

I looked up. Around the table the four men were staring at me like I had blasphemed the virgin mother. Giovanni sat up in his chair. I started to sweat.

Finally I said, “I’m in,” and to break the silence that followed that declaration I said, “and I’ll raise my last twenty-five.” But the game didn’t continue just then.

“Hey, stugatz,” said Luigi. “Don’t be talking about things you should not-a be talking about.”

“It’s just what I heard,” I said, trying to shrug it off.

“From who?” asked Jasper. It had turned into an inquisition, four against one. “What greaseball you hear that from, Sport?”

“I just heard it,” I said. “It wasn’t like a secret.”

“You must not be from around here,” said Jasper, “because if you was from around here you would know you talk about a man’s family like that you might just wake up to find yourself dead.”

“It’s been known to happen,” said Dominic in a flat, cold voice.

“Some men don’t like nobody talking about their family,” said Virgil.

“You should learn to keep-a your mouth shut,” said Luigi.

There was a long quiet while the men stared at me and I stared at my cards and then Dominic said, “Let’s play.”

Luigi shook his head at me. “No more talk, hey. Enough with the talk. I’m in,” he said, tossing in his chips.

Dominic put in his twenty-five.

“Now,” said Luigi, turning up his down queen. “Show me that-a flush.”

“Sure,” I said as I turned over my cards. I reached to rake in the pot but Dominic’s hand grabbed my forearm and squeezed.

He squeezed so hard I felt it in the bones.

“Full house,” he said, without turning over his cards.

“Of course he had the boat,” said Virgil. “Why else would he have stayed in against the flush?”

Dominic pushed my arm away and then slowly began transferring the chips from the middle to his piles. He still hadn’t turned over his cards.

“Let’s see it,” I said.

Dominic froze at the table, his hands still on the chips, and I could hear his breathing, slow, steady, dangerous as a leopard’s.

“If Dominic says he’s got a boat, Sport,” said Jasper, softly, “he’s got the boat.”

“I’m not saying he doesn’t,” I said. “I just want to see it.”

“What you are saying,” said Luigi, the coldness back in his whispery voice, “is that you don’t-a believe him.”

“I’d just like to see it.”

“This is a gentlemen’s club,” said Luigi. “And since you have no more money your temporary membership is revoked.”

Giovanni rose from his red leatherette chair and moved to the table behind Luigi, his arms crossed in front of him.

“You’re ripping me off,” I said.

“It’s time to go,” said Giovanni.

I looked around at these old men, who had seemed harmless just a few moments ago, and what I saw was not a group of geriatrics needling each other in their weekly poker game but something much more ferocious. Luigi had the sharp hatchet face and Sicilian accent of a Mafia underboss. Virgil was an aging enforcer, collecting for loan sharks, breaking legs when necessary. Jasper was the negotiator, the dealmaker, the man who set up the lucrative arrangements that the others enforced. And Dominic, silent and stolid, was as dangerous as a hit man. I never had a chance in that game, the goal of that night was to fleece me of all my money and I was lucky that was all they were after. But I had learned what I had come to learn, that Bissonette had played around with the wrong girl and had been killed because of it. And though these aged gangsters had refused to talk about it, their silence and threats and the absence of denials loudly confirmed that it was Raffaello’s daughter Bissonette had been playing with and that it was Raffaello who’d had him killed. And I wondered, for a moment, if it was one of these old men who had done the deed. Maybe Dominic, Bissonette’s second cousin, twice removed, whose grip, I knew, was still strong enough to wield a Mike Schmidt autographed bat.

I stood up and nodded at the men around the table and, without saying a word, self-consciously walked to the door.

“You’re forgetting your jacket, Sport,” said Jasper. “We don’t want you should forget your jacket.”

I returned to the table, avoiding the angry gazes of the men as I took hold of my jacket, and walked again to the door, moving as quickly as I could without running.

“Hey, kid,” I heard from behind me.

I stopped and turned around. Dominic was staring at me with a scary squint in his eyes. Slowly he turned over his down cards, one by one, first the ten of spades, then the ten of clubs, then the six of diamonds, which gave him a sixes over tens full house.

“No one calls me a cheater, kid,” he said. “Leastways no one who wants to keep breathing.”

I looked at him and expected him to smile at his joke, but he didn’t, his face was as hard as the squint in his eyes. And then I dropped all pretensions of calm and ran out of the club, ran to my car, and tore the hell out of South Philadelphia.

I was filled with relief when I drove north past South Street, into the safety of Society Hill. It was relief at being out of that grubby little men’s club, away from the gangsters there with murder in their eyes. And, just as much, relief at learning that everything Prescott had been telling me might actually be the truth. He was right about who killed Bissonette and he would do his best, which was far better than my best, to make sure the jury knew about it too. I could now, with whatever good conscience I could muster, stay safely silent, following his orders as he tried my case, collecting my fat hourly fee by merely sitting next to my client, keeping my mouth shut and my tie clean as I slipped into my prosperous future.

I had just left the front door of my apartment building the next morning, heading for the Market Street subway to take me to the courthouse, my body still suffused with the soft elation of relief, when the rear window of a parked car exploded in front of my face.

25

IT WAS A HATCHBACK, Japanese I think, and I was just in front of it when the rear window shattered into a constellation of diamonds that hung in the air for a brilliant incandescent second before falling. It was such a startlingly pretty sight that I didn’t move, just stared at the now jagged opening yawning from the back of the car and the sparkles spinning on the pitted asphalt. Then I saw someone across the street pointing down an alley and a man in front of me dropping to the ground, like a soldier under ambush, and I realized that the window hadn’t spontaneously exploded of its own accord but had been shot out in front of me. That’s when I dropped to the ground too.

There were no more shots. There were the sounds of footfalls and a car stopping suddenly and more footfalls and people shouting, but no more shots. By the time I had picked myself off the sidewalk a crowd had formed and a policeman was coming over to look at the damage and to ask his questions. There was a group of us now, the man I had seen hit the ground, the man who had seen someone run away and had been pointing across the street, an old woman from my building, out for a morning walk with her purebred dachshund, the dachshund barking rabidly, the woman laughing wildly. I had seen nothing but the explosion of the window and so I wasn’t much help, but the officer took down my name and address just the same.

“What do you think it was?” asked the pointer.

“Probably just some random shooting,” said the cop, a peach-fuzzed kid with a holster and an attitude, trying to speak over the dachshund’s barks. “Happens all the time.”

“In Beirut maybe,” said a passerby.

The dachshund growled into my crotch.

“Quiet, Oscar,” said the dog woman, no longer laughing, giving her dog a tug on the leash. The dog sniffed my ankle and growled again.

“Maybe someone was trying to damage the car?” said another man in a tan raincoat.

“That’s possible,” said the officer, who for the first time took note of the car’s license plate. “Anyone know who owns this vehicle?”

No one knew, so he called in the license plate on the portable radio attached to his belt.

“All right now,” he said as he was waiting for a response. “I have your names. Let’s get on our way.”

I left, and took some comfort in the officer’s nonchalance, but not too much. I stepped quickly to the subway. I took a seat in the corner of the first car and hid myself behind a newspaper. Back on the street I was careful to stay within the bosom of the crowd on my way to the metal detectors in the lobby of the Federal Courthouse. And all the time I couldn’t help but carry with me, along with briefcase and raincoat, the suspicion that the shot had not been random or aimed at the car, but fired at me. Oh yes, I was not completely blind. I could feel the danger rising about me, from the threatening Chuckie Lamb, from the paranoid Norvel Goodwin, from my new and fervent relationship with Veronica, from Jimmy if he ever found out about the two of us, from Prescott and the power he could use to break me, from the poker playing gangsters with murder in their eyes and full houses in their hands, from the shadowy Raffaello.

This I knew about myself: I was not the most courageous of men. I was comfortable with that fact. I left the heroics to those who were paid for it, policemen, Brinks guards, inside linebackers, paparazzi. That’s one of the reasons I was attracted to the law, I guess. By its very nature the law is a hedge, boom or bust, mergers or bankruptcies, there is always work. And so the shot had only confirmed for me the decision of the night before, confirmed it in a way that was more than intellectual, in a way that was visceral. And whether the bullet was aimed at me or not was no matter; I had learned the lesson of the lead. Whatever was to come, whatever humiliation, whatever ugliness, whatever betrayal, I would do nothing to stop it. My instructions were to follow along, and follow along I would. Whatever you want, Mr. Prescott, sir, you can count on me.

Outside the courtroom that morning I was talking to Beth about my opening statement when we were approached by one of the Talbott, Kittredge coterie working with Prescott. It was the blond bland man with the perfect nose who had sneered at Morris the day before. His name was Bert or Bart, something harsh and efficient. I knew nothing about him, really, didn’t know whether he had a family, a child, whether he read poetry or Proust, whether he felt deeply for the disadvantaged or whether the pains in the world had turned his viewpoint cynical and his humor wry. But what I did know was that he held a Harvard law degree and I didn’t, that he had the job I wanted, that he owned the future of which I had dreamed, and for all of that I hated him.

“Bill asked me to give you this,” he said, reaching into his shiny silver case and pulling out a sheet of paper with a few lines printed out in bold capital letters.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s your opening,” he said.

“We prepared an opening,” Beth told him, her voice showing incredulity at his nervy assumption that we weren’t ready.

After the poker game I had spent most of the night practicing my delivery of a lengthy and blistering attack on the government’s case against Concannon. It had been written primarily by Beth, so I knew it was quality. Beth’s opening highlighted the gaps in the case against Concannon: There were no tapes capturing Concannon’s voice, no pieces of physical evidence directly involving him in any of the transactions, no photographs showing him with Ruffing or Bissonette. The case against Concannon would depend solely on the testimony of Ruffing and certain financial records from CUP, and Beth had laid out a viciously effective argument against Ruffing’s credibility. I understood that I would be following Prescott’s lead in every sense, but I still expected that I would be saying at least something of my own to the jurors.

“We’re sure that it’s a fine argument,” said Bert or Bart. “But what we want you to do is to give the opening we have prepared for you.”

“Who wrote it?” asked Beth, grabbing the paper from my hand.

“I did,” he said, his chest puffing out slightly. “Bill looked it over, discussed it with the jury expert, made a few changes, and decided you should go with it.”

“Is that what he decided?” I said.

“That’s what we decided.”

“I think we’ll stay with what we worked up already,” said Beth.

“I was told you were with the program, Vic,” he said to me, ignoring Beth. “That you wouldn’t be any trouble.”

“What’s your name?” Beth asked.

“Brett Farber. Brett with two t’s.”

“Well, Brett with two t’s,” she said. “The only program we’re with is our client’s and as best I can tell, from a quick look through this little statement of yours, it’s a piece of shit.”

Brett didn’t pull back from the attack like I would have. Instead he brought out his sneer and leaned into me until I could smell the coffee in his breath and he said, “Shit or not, Vic, your client approved it and it is what you are going to give.”

Before Beth could reply he had turned on his heels and was gone.

Fucking Brett with two t’s, I thought as I watched his back disappear into the courtroom. Maybe there was a reason other than luck that he was an up-and-comer with Talbott, Kittredge and I was not.

“Such a pleasant young boy,” said Beth. “His mother must be so proud. So tell me, Victor, how does it feel to have assholes like William Prescott and Brett with two t’s as your colleagues?”

“For two-fifty an hour I’d sleep with an orangutan,” I said. “This is only slightly worse.”

“What are you going to do?”

I took the piece of paper from her and read it quickly, eight sentences typed in bold capital letters so that I wouldn’t stumble as I read it to the jury. “What I’m going to do,” I said, “is discuss it with my client and then, Beth dear, I’m going to suck it up.”

“You suck it up any more, Victor, you’re going to start looking like a chipmunk.”

I hadn’t told her about the shattered hatchback window and didn’t intend to, nor about Veronica, nor about Chuckie’s call, nor about Norvel Goodwin, nor about my disastrous poker game. If there was danger to be ducked, it was mine and I would do the ducking. So all I did, as she looked at me with disappointment flashing in her sharp, pretty eyes, was shrug.

When I sat down at the defense table I showed the paper with the eight sentences to Concannon. “Is this what you want me to give as an opening?”

“Is that what Prescott showed me last night?”

“Yes.”

He shrugged. “Is it a problem?”

“It’s a big fat zero,” I said. “It does nothing.”

“The way he explained it to me is that we should make my role in the deal, the arrangements, everything, seem as small as possible.”

“Eggert’s not going to let the jury forget you’re on trial.”

“If that’s what Prescott wants you to give, then give it.”

“You know I checked it out, about Bissonette and Raffaello’s daughter,” I said. “It appears to be on the up.”

“Victor, Victor,” he said, his voice slightly scolding. “You were supposed to stop your interfering.”

“Consider it stopped,” I said just as the door behind the judge’s bench opened and the court clerk stood to start the trial. “From here on in I’m Chuckie Lamb’s mannequin.”

“All rise,” said the clerk as the judge climbed the steps to the bench.

We all rose.

26

“ANY CRIME IS A betrayal of the trust we have in each other, but when it is a public official who commits the crime, an official who asked for our vote and swore an oath to serve the public, the betrayal is particularly cruel.”

Eggert very slowly walked over to the defense table until he was directly opposite the defendants. He was giving his opening to the rapt jurors, his reedy voice rising in indignation. He pointed at Jimmy, his finger close enough to the councilman’s face that Jimmy could have bitten it off if he wanted to, and the moment it flashed there, like a white scimitar, that’s exactly what it looked like Jimmy would do. Then he recovered control and the look of deep sobriety returned. Through it all, his eyes never wavered from Eggert’s; if there was to be a staredown, it would be Eggert who blinked first. In the front row of the public benches, three different artists were furiously sketching the moment, Eggert’s straight back, his accusing finger, the bunched muscles in Jimmy Moore’s neck.

“James Douglas Moore is a city councilman, a public official placed into office by the people of this city who looked to him to promote the interests of all of Philadelphia, not just his own. The first requirement of his office was honesty, and that was the first thing he threw out the window. The evidence will show, ladies and gentlemen, that Jimmy Moore used his office to extort money, and when his extortion plan went awry he resorted to threats, which you will hear on tapes legally obtained by the government, he resorted to arson, and he resorted to murder. Murder, ladies and gentlemen, the murder of Zachariah Bissonette, the former ballplayer, who stood up for what was right and refused to be blackmailed. Jimmy Moore took a baseball bat and battered Bissonette so badly he was in a coma for five months, never to open his eyes, to see the beauty of the day, to look into the faces of his loving family, never to recover before he died. That is how Jimmy Moore observed the public trust. And we’ll show you where the money went, how it was funneled through his political action committee, how a chunk of it never even got to the committee but was instead skimmed off for his own personal use, how Jimmy Moore used his office to grab enough money so he could ride around the city in a big black limousine and drink champagne and gamble in the casinos along the Boardwalk. That’s what the evidence will show.”

Eggert moved on to Concannon and again the finger of the prosecution pointed.

“Chester Concannon is Jimmy Moore’s chief aide, a public servant whose duty was to help the councilman achieve his legitimate goals as a public official. But instead of looking out for the interests of the people of Philadelphia, Concannon aided the councilman in each of his extortion schemes. Concannon was the go-between, the bagman, the fellow to see if you wanted the councilman on your side. Chester Concannon took his share of the lucre ripped out of the skin of the people of this city, and Concannon was with Jimmy Moore the night Bissonette was battered with that baseball bat into complete and unwavering unconsciousness.”

When he was finished accusing the defendants he detailed the elements of the crime of racketeering that he would prove, going over what each witness would say and how it would all come together to show so clear a pattern of illegal conduct that the jury would be forced to convict. Then he leaned over the defense table and stared, first at Jimmy Moore, then at Chester Concannon. “At the end of this trial, I’m going to come back to you and ask for a guilty verdict on all the counts. And instead of the money or the political power or the black limousines and champagne nights and extravagant evenings in Atlantic City, I’m going to ask you to give this corrupt councilman and his corrupt aide all that they truly deserve.” With a final look at the defendants, a look filled with all the weary disgust he could muster, Eggert walked slowly to the prosecution table and sat down.

Prescott didn’t jump up to follow Eggert as most lawyers would. He remained seated, his head down dramatically. Judge Gimbel, still at work on whatever opinion he was drafting for some other case, didn’t seem to notice the delay and just kept writing. The crowd in the courtroom stirred, one of the jurors coughed, Prescott remained seated.

“It is at a time like this,” said Prescott finally, while still seated at the defense table, “it is in a trial like this that the genius of the jury system shines through.”

With a great sigh, Prescott stood, his shoulder slightly bent, his head shaking sadly. He looked down solemnly as he spoke and the whole effect was of a profound disappointment.

“My client Jimmy Moore is a politician who is gaining power in this city because he practices the politics of inclusion. His goal is to fight the scourge of drugs, a scourge that has taken the life of his daughter, his only child. The youth home he founded is a national leader in drug treatment for the young. And in pursuit of this noble goal he has brought together all the people of this city, no matter their race, no matter their religion, no matter their economic status, whether they are homeless or HIV infected or children subject to the worst abuses. His political action committee, Citizens for a United Philadelphia, or CUP, has in the last two years spent over half a million dollars informing citizens of their rights and registering the unregistered. His committee has added two hundred thousand voters to the city’s polls. And as Jimmy Moore’s influence grows, so does the power of his opposition.”

Prescott turned to look at the jury and then slowly walked from behind the defense table to a position directly behind Eggert, who was leaning forward in his seat.

“There are powerful men in this city who feel threatened by the inclusive coalition being forged by Jimmy Moore. Fat cats and politicos who want to keep it all for themselves and are not willing to open the system to those they have been able to ignore. Men with enough power that they can use the United States Attorney’s Office as a tool for their political designs.

“Now the President of the United States can sweep into town and hold a fund-raiser and leave with a million dollars in his pocket and that is politics as usual. But when Jimmy Moore goes about raising money for his program of healing, it is extortion. Politics has become money, the need to register voters, the need to put up posters, the need to buy buttons and bumper stickers and, most important, the need to produce and put on television commercials. That’s why the President takes his cool million when he visits and it is why Jimmy Moore raises money from those like the businessmen who were seeking his help here. Politics is money, and it may not be pretty and it may not be right and it may not be what we would choose if we were starting over, but that’s what it is. And Jimmy Moore was doing nothing more here than any politician ever does as he tries to raise the money to run for office.

“So if Jimmy Moore was doing just what every other politician does, why is he on trial? As you listen to the evidence, as you analyze the government’s case, that’s the question you have to ask yourselves. If Jimmy Moore was a business-as-usual politician, not ruffling the feathers of the powerful men who can control a United States Attorney’s Office, would he be on trial? The answer, at the end of this case, will be a resounding no. You examine the evidence, you figure out what was really going on here, you decide who actually committed the crimes alleged by the government. You decide if the government is seeking justice or is seeking to pull out a political thorn in the side of the status quo. You look it all over very carefully, and in the end you’ll decide to acquit Jimmy Moore and let him continue in his good work.”

It was my turn now, my chance to speak to the jury on behalf of my client. In front of me was a yellow legal pad with the lengthy and impassioned opening argument Beth had drafted and I had rehearsed the night before. But as I rose, I left it on the table. In my hand was a single white sheet. On it was written the following little speech:

MY NAME IS VICTOR CARL. I AM REPRESENTING CHESTER CONCANNON IN THIS CASE. MR. CONCANNON IS JIMMY MOORE’S CHIEF AIDE. HE HAS BEEN INDICTED AS PART OF THE GOVERNMENT’S VENDETTA AGAINST JIMMY MOORE. YOU WON’T HEAR CHESTER CONCANNON ON ANY TAPES. THERE IS NO CORRESPONDENCE LINKING HIM TO ANY OF THE CRIMES ALLEGED HERE. I EXPECT YOU WON’T HEAR MUCH ABOUT HIM AT ALL. TRY TO REMEMBER, WHENEVER YOU HEAR HIS NAME, HOW LITTLE HE IS INVOLVED, AND AT THE END OF THE CASE I AM SURE YOU WILL ACQUIT HIM OF ALL CHARGES.

I glanced at Prescott, who was jotting down notes upon his legal pad, purposefully avoiding my gaze. I glanced at Concannon, who was staring at his hands clasped together on the table. I twisted to look at the audience. The courtroom was packed. Beth was frowning at me. Chuckie Lamb was pinching his lips together as he shook his head. In the aisle I saw Herm Finklebaum, the toy king of 44th Street, smiling at me with encouragement. I walked to a spot just in front of the jury box, surveyed the jurors one by one, and then read the anemic piece-of-shit opening that had been written for me by Brett with two t’s.

When I sat down I was actually embarrassed.

The first witness was Special Agent Stemkowski, the WWF reject sitting with Eggert at the prosecution table. For a bruiser Stemkowski was very well spoken, calm, and deliberate, able to keep a straight face as he used phrases like “I exited the vehicle” and “I effected implementation of the interception of Mr. Ruffing’s phone conversations.” He wore a camel-colored jacket, a white shirt, a calm blue tie. On his thick pinky he wore one of those flashy gold class rings, undoubtedly commemorating his graduation with honors from the FBI Academy. He had played football in high school, tight end, he said, and when Eggert drew out this insignificant piece of testimony, three of the men in the jury box nodded with approval. His demeanor on the stand was evidence that the country was in good hands, the soft competent hands of a receiver with biceps like great ragged chunks of pig iron.

Stemkowski explained how the FBI had been investigating a drug operation being run out of Bissonette’s by a bartender, an operation not in any way involving Bissonette or Ruffing, when it had begun wiretapping the club’s phones. It was through those wiretaps that the Bureau had discovered the extortion scheme. Special Agent Stemkowski authenticated the cassette tapes, identifying the marked date and time on each cassette as being in his handwriting and accurately based on FBI logs maintained during the surveillance. Eggert then produced thick loose-leaf binders containing all the transcripts, which were first authenticated and then distributed to judge and jury.

An FBI audio man had set up a sophisticated tape playback device with microwave transmission to headphones placed at the counsel tables, on the judge’s bench, beside each seat in the jury box. I would have liked to hear Bruce Springsteen pour out of those headphones, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, I would have liked to hear Jimi Hendrix’s version of the national anthem strip away the wax from our ears, but that’s not what we heard through those government approved high-fidelity headphones. What we heard, playing clearly, numbingly, for the whole of two full days, were the taped conversations of Michael Ruffing and City Councilman Jimmy Moore.

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

Ruffing: My new investor don’t think so.

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

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

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

Ruffing: I don’t want Concannon.

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

I had heard the tapes before, knew every line now almost by heart. I knew what had been said, but the jury didn’t. When Moore threatened the hell out of Michael Ruffing on the tape the whole of the jury, headphones firmly on, reacted like I had reacted the first time I had heard it: their necks reared, their eyes fixed on both Moore and Concannon, and the squints in their eyes were like squints of a posse intent on a hanging. Not an encouraging sign after just one witness.

27

“TELL ME HOW YOU got involved with Jimmy Moore,” I ordered Veronica. “Tell me how.”

She was stretched beneath me, her wrists tied stiffly to the headboard with long silk scarves, her legs pinned down by my bent knees. She snapped at my belly with her teeth, at my chest. I stretched my body over hers, pressing down hard, and we clawed each other with our mouths. It wasn’t kissing in any way I had known kissing to be before, there was a violence to it, a rapaciousness. We stirred each other’s hunger and satisfied it at the same time. When she bucked her hips and raised her knees, opening herself for me, I sat up again and grabbed her hair and laughed at her.

“Tell me.”

“After,” she breathed.

“Not after. Now.”

“Let me loose and I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me and I might let you loose.”

She jerked her hands trying to get free but the scarves, long and soft and creamy maroon, were strong and the knots I had tied with boy scout accuracy and enthusiasm held. In the light of the candles we had set around the loft bed her flat stomach flickered yellow as her hips rose violently. She tried to kick me off but I rode her like a bucking mule and stayed right where I was. I stretched my weight on top of her and we clawed each other with our mouths and again she tried to open herself to me and I wouldn’t let her. It was my turn on top and I had control for once and I was going to keep it.

These scarves and pseudo-violent acts, this outbreak of forced control and mock desperation, this was not my usual thing. I had liked my sex slow and soft, an easy glide, a dance of the lips and the hips, rising and falling in a series of synchronous crescendos, Fred and Ginger swaying together in black and white as he tapped out a subtle mysterious rhythm and the feathers of her boa floated about them in sensual waves. If the sex of my earlier life had been a movie, it would be Dancing in the Dark. But it had turned with Veronica. We weren’t in the middle of a light romantic comedy. Sex with her was more like Marathon Man and she was the dentist. But we had tried it my way and we had tried it her way and believe me when I tell you this – her way was better.

I knew I shouldn’t be there in her apartment, but the danger of it all drew me as much as the sheer addictive kineticism of our sex. That I had been warned, that a car window had shattered in front of my face, that if Jimmy found out about us everything might be lost, all that and more drew me there. Even as I banged the steering wheel of my car with my palms at my foolishness, I still drove to that Olde City building, coming at her beckon, where I would rise up in that Plexiglas windowed elevator and knock on her door, knock quietly, head bowed, as reverent as a supplicant before the Pope.

That night she had pulled the scarves out of the drawer beside her bed and floated them across her chest like a harem girl teasing her eunuch. “I don’t think you’re ready for these yet,” she had said.

“I don’t think so either.”

“There are places you’re not ready to go.”

“You’re right.”

“But aren’t you in the least bit curious?”

“About what?”

“About what it’s like to tie me up?”

“I can imagine it.”

“But that’s the point, Victor. With me you don’t have to imagine. You can do anything you want to me. It’s too bad Roberta is out of town.”

“Roberta?”

“She’s a friend of mine. A model. You’d like her, Victor. She’s very thin, very blonde. All the boys just die for Roberta.”

“You’re fine enough for me.”

“I’d be there too. It’s about appetites. The more you get, the more you need. It grows like a marvelous cancer. A week in Cancun with me and Roberta and you’ll never be satisfied with just one again.”

“Cancun?”

“Roberta likes to travel.”

“How about just you and me?”

“Where?”

“Someplace exotic.”

“I’m not sure I trust your taste for the exotic. You’re not a very adventurous boy.”

“Someplace you’ve never been.”

“Cleveland? You want to take me to Cleveland?”

“Tahiti.”

“I’ve been to Tahiti. Too long a flight for a beach.”

“Thailand.”

“Too hot.”

“Burma. Have you ever been to Rangoon?”

“No, take me to Rangoon. Yes, Rangoon.”

“But first Cleveland. The best hotel in the city.”

“Motel Six?”

“Sure, and a bottle of Bud from room service.”

“When?”

“After this trial.”

“Could we bring Roberta?”

“I don’t need anything more than you.”

“Not for you, for me.”

“I’m not enough?”

“In case you tire.”

That’s when I tied the half hitch to the bed post, a solid sailing knot, and wrapped the scarf tightly around her wrist, so tightly that her wrist purpled when she gave it a solid yank. “Not so tight,” she said with a laugh and I ignored her, as I was sure she hoped I would. There were enough scarves to bind her ankles too, but I thought it would be more acrobatic if I left her legs free to wriggle about. “Really, you should loosen them,” she said, “they’re too tight.” But no matter what she said I did what I wanted. “Stop it, you’ll leave a mark.” She was taking me to a strange outer world where no meant yes and stop meant go and all that I had learned about political correctness and sexual courtesy was meant to be breached. There was something clicking in my brain stem, something primordial, something with the glorious confidence of the unself-conscious, something that had existed long before the forebrain swelled and turned sex into an intellectual exercise, something that had been pounded down in my years of politeness in bed, my years of caring if it was good for her, my years of striving for joint satisfaction. “Stop it. Please. I’m begging you, please. God stop stop no stop it now.” The ultimate, I had always believed, was the simultaneous orgasm, the instantaneous joinder of passions and fulfillments, where two became one. But the part of my brain stem stimulated by Veronica, as if she were an electrode buried deep into a mass of long dormant neurons, cared nothing for simultaneity. It was selfish and violent and brutal. It was Neanderthal, prowling with a club in each hand, one wooden, one swollen flesh, searching for satisfaction, demanding it, objectifying anything that could be grabbed and placed beneath it, anything whose sole purpose was to sharpen desire at the same time it satisfied it in a painful gut-wrenching burst. It wasn’t pretty what I felt gurgling inside my brain stem, it wasn’t something that was pleasant to admit was within me, but there was nothing pleasant about sex with Veronica. It was closer to hell than to heaven, its power was buried in the genetic memory of the past, but once discovered, it was a place I couldn’t leave. And even after I came I stayed impossibly hard inside her, my brain stem allowing for no respite. I sucked a bruise out of the base of her breast and bit her earlobe and with my knees spreading her knees and my hip bone grinding into her hip bone her voice broke into a torrent of ancient cries and while I drove on and on into the mist of my predatory history she came despite my caring not at all and I kept on despite her cries and she came again in a yelp, scraping my neck with her lower teeth, and the back of my neck burst apart in a maddening orgasm and she sucked my Adam’s apple and flipped her loose legs high until her feet kicked my head and she screamed murderously.

When I collapsed on top of her, my weight pressing her legs onto the mattress, she jerked her arms as high as the scarves would allow and let out a howl that sounded like the baying of a great wounded cat, golden, striped, saber-toothed.

I rested there, just like that, still inside her, lying atop her like a corpse. I might have dozed off, I couldn’t tell, but it seemed like I lay atop her for the longest time. She said nothing, made no movement to shrug me off. There was a silence about us, a haze that only slowly lifted as the sounds of cars slipping along the cobblestones of Church Street edged their way through the quiet. In my chest I could feel a strange asynchronous heartbeat – ba ba boom boom, ba ba boom ba boom, boom ba ba boom boom, ba boom ba boom, ba ba boom boom. I worried for a moment, thinking the intensity of the sex had chased me into arrhythmia, but then I realized my chest was pressing so hard onto hers that I was feeling both our beats. I pushed myself up with weary arms and squatted atop her. She was still tied up and the fact that I remained in control thrilled me. I cupped her left breast with my hand and squeezed her nipple between my fingers. Her eyes stayed closed but her pretty face twisted into something carnal and pained.

Without opening her eyes she said, “God, I’m sick of old men.”

And that was when I ordered her to tell me about how she ended up with Jimmy Moore. She struggled a bit, and tried again to yank her arms loose. I kissed her gently on her lips, on her cheek, on her eyes, on her lips again, the softness of my kisses calming her. Her eyes were still closed. I rubbed my hands across her sides and said, “Tell me,” and so she told me.

She was born in Iowa, she said as I rubbed my tongue across the lower edge of her breast, in a small town west of Cedar Rapids called Solon. In Solon the kids used to hang out at Jones’s House of Pork and eat fried tenderloin sandwiches as big as a head and play pool, a quarter a game, and grow fat and pimply. It was a small town, not far from a lake where they swam on sweltering summer days, and there was a city park and an American Legion baseball team and once a year the town would gussy itself up for Solon Beef Days and people would come in from all over eastern Iowa and there would be carnival rides and a parade and a steak dinner with corn and salad for $2.79 served under a tent.

Her father taught at the university, about thirty minutes south of Solon, medieval history, and at night he would tell her tales of kings and queens and bloody princes until she knew more about the House of York than the House of Pork. Her dream, always, as long as she could remember, was to marry a prince and live in a castle and hold court. She didn’t know if there were any princes left in the world or if they had grown extinct, like dinosaurs, but she knew for sure that there weren’t any princes in Iowa.

Her mother she remembered only from photographs, tall, plain, an intense concern grooved into the flesh around her eyes. Maybe she could see into the future, Veronica said, and see her early, painful death from a burst appendix. She was a fine woman, Veronica’s father had told her, strong, gentle. Veronica’s father was on a trip east, lecturing at Princeton, and her mother hadn’t told anyone about the pain, certain it would go away like an upset stomach, unwilling to leave her baby daughter to find a doctor. Her father had flown to Princeton a promising young scholar and had flown back a widower with a baby daughter to raise alone. He was totally gray before he turned forty.

She went to the University of Iowa and pledged a sorority and dated football players and golfers and in the homecoming parade sat decked out like Princess Di on a sorority float made out to be Buckingham Palace. When she had the chance to go to London for her junior year she jumped at it. Her father died while she was away, a sudden heart attack, and she returned just long enough to bury him and sell the house in Solon and cash out his pension before returning to England, an orphan with money to spend. That’s where she met a boy named Saffron Hyde.

“He was a poet,” she told me. “I met him in a pub in Southgate, a rock club. He came up to me and asked me to buy him a pint and I did. He was skinny and nervous and unlike anyone I had ever met before. There were no Saffron Hydes in Iowa. I had an apartment in the North End and he came home with me that night, more like a stray puppy dog than a seducer, but he moved in the next day. We drank a lot, I quit school, he wrote poetry about me, we made sweet love, but he wasn’t really interested, which was fine, actually, and every night we went to the art films at the museum.”

“What was his poetry like?” I asked.

“Dark, jittery. Much of it was very funny, but there was always a black loneliness behind the jokes. I thought it breathtaking.”

“Did he publish it?”

“No. He let me see it, some of his friends, but that was it. He said it was the poetry that mattered, not how many people read it.”

“That sounds like an excuse.”

“Well, he was a great one for excuses.”

“How did he live? How did he support himself?”

“I supported him.”

“And before you?”

She shrugged, an absurd little shrug, calm and matter-of-fact, despite her wrists being bound to the bedposts. “I didn’t ask, he never said.”

“Did you love him?”

“More than anything before or since. He was the love of my life, the prince I had been dreaming of since my girlhood. So when he burst in one afternoon, drunk and full of excitement, and said we just had to go to India, I said ‘When,’ he said, ‘Right this instant,’ I said, ‘Fine.’”

They took the ferry and backpacked through Europe, Spain, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, living like royalty, for backpackers, staying in pensions and rooming houses, eating in restaurants with tablecloths. They took a meandering route, flitting off to wherever seemed the most interesting, but always heading east, taking trains, hitchhiking, boats, Greece, Crete, Turkey, Iran, always on a route toward India. He had to see the Ganges, he said, bathe himself in the holy river, tap into a spiritual source centuries older than his Saxon heritage. He had read Hermann Hesse, it had changed his life, he needed to immerse himself in the sacred waters, he said.

“Remember when Hermann Hesse used to change lives?” I asked.

“You have to read it at a certain age,” she said.

“I read Siddhartha when I was fourteen,” I said. “I think I was too old even then.”

“That’s to your pity.”

It was a wonderful trip, she continued, revelatory actually. She was ecstatic and the further away she moved from Iowa the freer she became, swimming naked in the public beaches on the French Riviera, trading her blue jeans for peasant skirts in Corfu, buying drugs in the open-air markets outside Constantinople.

“Drugs?” I asked.

“Yes, that was Saffron at the start, big spliffs of hash in the rock clubs in Amsterdam, than later cocaine in Florence and Greece. I didn’t join in at first, but as we continued, the trip seemed more and more dreamlike. Drugs just seemed to fit in.”

“That was pretty stupid for an American.”

“Yes, but after a while we seemed to have stripped away our nationalities, we were just travelers. It was no longer the goal of India propelling us forward, it was just the urge to move, to see more, to go ever further on. Then in Iran, on the way to Pakistan, we had the accident.”

They had tried to catch the bus from Teheran but it was full, and the next day’s was full too. They didn’t know when there would be an opening, but at the bus station there was a man, black silk shirt, gap-toothed smile. He sidled up and said he was going to the border and would take them for a small fee, less than the bus, only 2,000 toman. The next thing they knew they were in the back seat of a battered blue Mercedes van, sitting on stiff seats with no padding, the van filled with women in black chador holding babies, unshaven men sweating in their grimy shirts, two handsome young men drinking orange Schwepps. With the top of the van piled high with luggage they barreled down the hills outside Teheran, past signs with warnings of falling rocks, into the salt desert on the ancient silk road into Pakistan. They discovered shortly into the trip that the other travelers were being smuggled out of the country, dissidents, young men trying to skip the army service, and the surreptitious nature of the journey thrilled Saffron no end. In a late evening rest stop just outside Isfahan they had drunk some bad water and now Saffron was throwing up, to the amusement of the other passengers, sticking his head out a window, banging his cheek on the frame, heaving loudly, the van shaking like a carnival ride. At a narrow switchback just through one of the tunnels south of Isfahan on the way to Shiraz, the driver barely braked as he swung wildly around, descending into the darkness, the van tilting over the hill as it rushed into the turn. A truck coming up the other way blared its horn and the driver swerved right, the wheels slipped off the road, and, like a gymnast in slow motion, the van tumbled down, down the slope, falling down until it broke apart on a rocky desert ledge.

Veronica had been fine, a bruised shoulder, a sprained wrist, but Saffron, sitting beside the window, had been a mess. In the Shiraz hospital where they had been taken, the doctors set his broken arm and stitched up the gashes in his face, but the real problem was his back, a compression fracture of three vertebrae, which Saffron was adamant about not letting the Iranian doctors set. Instead he gritted his teeth through the pain and, once released, took the next bus out, a modern bus with padded seats and shock absorbers and a bathroom in the back. By the time they reached Pakistan, Saffron was delirious with pain, crying out for drugs, limping alone into the first market he could find and bringing back a reddish gray powder, a local herb, he said, which he snorted first and then mixed with tobacco and smoked and which seemed to give him some measure of blessed relief. She tried it too, mixed with the tobacco of a cigarette.

“It was sweet, numbing, terrific really,” she said. “Later I found out it was heroin, but I didn’t know at first and when I found out it was too late.”

“You really didn’t know?”

“I was from Iowa. Within a week he was shooting up three times a day and I was joining him. Everything after that turned into a nightmare, unreal, smoky, disastrous.”

“Jesus.”

“Untie me, Victor.”

I untied her. Without rubbing her wrists she pulled her arms tight into her torso and turned away from me. I put my hand on her arm to reassure her but she shrugged me off. I didn’t want to hear any more, I wished I had never asked the question about her and Jimmy, wondered how the councilman entered into her story anyway.

“Through Pakistan and India he grew thinner and thinner, he was skinny to begin with, but he turned into a ghost. All night he shook, he sweated, his teeth started falling out. He was feverish. I begged him to come with me to America to get treatment. I told him they would fix his back, get him off the drug, we could live in Iowa, I told him, or New York, but he insisted on reaching the Ganges. His arm got infected, it swelled, it began to stink, he started limping from an abscess in his foot. His fever made him delusional in the nights. He was too weak to carry anything, so I emptied out half my stuff and put his clothes in my pack. He stopped eating anything but fruit, drank only water. He could barely talk when we arrived in Varanasi. We went right to the river and he wrapped himself in a white sheet and stepped down the ghat, slowly, mournfully. He turned and waved at me and then stepped down into the water of the Ganges until he was submerged.

“It was filthy, they were washing clothes, dumping sewage, it smelled like a latrine, shit and foam floated by, just upstream they were dumping ashes from the corpses ceremonially burned on the great pyres by the river. He was submerged for a long time, too long a time, and then I knew he would die in the river, his final wave was a wave good-bye, and I started running down after him. But he emerged, filthy, the white sheet covered with mud, his face serene, his eyes calm. His fever had broken. When he climbed out of the river he said, ‘Okay, Ronnie. Take me to America.’

“I put him in one of the whitewashed boarding houses they have just off the river and ran to a travel agent. There was just enough left in my account to buy two tickets to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by way of New York. We would leave the next day. Thrilled, I rushed back to the room and discovered him dead. I found out later that the boarding house was primarily for old men who were coming to Varanasi to die and have their ashes scattered in the river. Before I left I arranged for him to be burned like the others, in his muddy sheet, and to have his ashes shoveled like manure into that fucking Ganges.”

“My God, Veronica.”

“I didn’t wait for the funeral.”

“That is awful.”

She stayed on her side, facing away from me, silent, and I knew enough not to say anything. She lay there for five minutes, for ten. I lay on my back, my head atop my hands, thinking about the skinny dark poet with a name like Saffron entering the river bit by bit until he wasn’t there anymore. Suddenly she flipped over until she was facing me and ran a finger lightly down my side.

“So I cashed in his ticket,” she said. “It was money, you know. I had to change planes in New York and realized the last place I wanted to go was Cedar Rapids, so I stayed. I got a job as a paralegal, hated it, I waited tables, hated it, I worked in a gallery, hated it, I tried modeling, they hated me, so I decided to go back to school. I got into Penn, which is how I ended up in Philadelphia, and how I met Norvel.”

“How did a Penn student meet a drug dealing scum like Norvel Goodwin?”

“I looked for him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was still hooked, Victor. Just because Saffron died didn’t mean I was cured. I had a source in New York, but when I ended up at Penn, in West Philadelphia, I just walked into the neighborhood and started asking. He wasn’t hard to find. He liked me right off, this pretty white girl stepping into his place and asking for a fix. We became a thing.”

“What about Jimmy in all this?”

“Well, Norvel had a place in West Philly, about six blocks from campus. It was on Fifty-first Street, a shooting gallery of sorts, but not as bad as some of the places up north. Jimmy had lost his daughter only a few years before and was in full battle cry. A neighborhood group came to him about the house. He raised a mob of concerned citizens and raided the place with clubs and shovels and axes and baseball bats. I was there the night Jimmy smashed his way through the door. You should have seen him, his eyes fired, bashing anything in his way, knocking out windows, busting doors, slamming a television screen with a hatchet. He almost killed Norvel, dragged him out of a closet where Norvel had been hiding and started beating the hell out of him with his fists and then with a chair. Norvel’s a big man, stronger than he looks, but Jimmy beat the hell out of him. And then he torched the place. He later said the drug dealers had set it on fire, but his people had quietly cleared the surrounding houses before they burst in. Two boys died in the fire, lost in a stupor in a hidden attic. They found them later, after the ashes had cooled.”

“What about you?”

“He found me in a daze in a small room on the third floor and gave me to Chester to take to his car. Chester left me with the driver, who watched over me, made sure I didn’t leave until it was over.”

“Who was that, Henry?”

“No, Henry was inside. He was Norvel’s partner at the time.”

“No.”

“Sure. And after that, after Henry cleaned himself up, Jimmy gave him a job, turned him into one of his models. Everyone Jimmy hires had a problem. That’s so when he gives his speeches he can point with pride to his workers and lecture about how possible it is to change your life.”

“But what about you?”

“After the fire, after the police came and went, after Jimmy had given his speeches for the news reporters in time for the eleven o’clock news, after everything was over, Jimmy came back to his car and took me to a private drug treatment center. He knew by then that I had been Norvel’s girl. At the center they told him they didn’t have any openings but then he started yelling about city council funding and I was admitted that night. I told him I didn’t want it but I really did. I was ready. When I saw that house burn down I knew I was ready. I thought that would be it with Jimmy, but he kept on visiting me, my only visitor, hectoring me to kick my illness, taking me out for ice cream. It may sound strange, since it was more than a year later, but that raid and the fire, that whole night was part of that accident south of Isfahan. It was Jimmy who pulled me from the twisted wreckage of that van. With his help I got clean – he saved my life. By that time, though, school was finished for me, I had incompleted everything. Jimmy got me the apartment in Olde City, he got me a job.”

“And he got in your pants.”

“That was my choice.”

“And if you said no?”

“Believe it or not, if I wanted nothing to do with him I bet he would have done everything the same. When he pulled me out of that house he didn’t know me from Eve, all he knew was that I was in trouble and needed help.”

“And pretty as hell.”

“Well, maybe yes, but I had been pretty for a long time and in trouble for a long time and only Jimmy stepped up to take care of me.”

“And for that you owe him the occasional roll in the hay.”

“No, Victor. For that I owe him everything.”

28

“I HAD KNOWN THE COUNCILMAN as a friend and customer for many years,” said Michael Ruffing from the witness stand. “About twice a month him and his party would come into my club and order drinks and food. He was a very good customer.”

“Did he spend a lot of money?” asked Eggert. He stood behind the podium, his body still, his voice calm, his questions short and non-leading. Eggert was a good enough lawyer not to steal the spotlight from his star witness.

“He was a very good customer, like I said. He never bought the cheaper wines. He always ordered the Dom, every time he came in. No matter how many were with him, that’s what he would order. Bottle after bottle.”

“What is ‘Dom’?”

“Dom Perignon, one of the finest champagnes made. It’s like drinking love, or at least that’s what I would tell the customers.”

“Is it expensive?”

“The price depends on the year. The ’seventy-eight you can’t even get, the ’eighty-five is about one-fifty a bottle, sure, but worth it.”

“And that’s what the councilman would order?”

“Nothing but the best, he told me. ‘Mikey,’ he used to say, ‘you’re either class or you’re shit.’ That’s what he used to say, and then to prove he was class he’d order another four bottles of the Dom.” Ruffing looked at the jury and gave a little wise smile and whatever that smile was saying it looked like the jury agreed with him. The jurors had already heard the tapes, they had already heard a series of witnesses testifying about the waterfront deal and the City Council’s involvement, and now they were hearing the story of a shabby shakedown straight from the victim, a law abiding Center City businessman.

Michael Ruffing was a short, energetic man with thick hands and curly gray hair. He was one of the guys who grew up in the neighborhood and kept his neighborhood ways, his Philly accent, his rough talk, his way of shooting his cuffs and fixing his tie between questions. He had grown rich in real estate and lost everything in the bust and grown rich again with a series of nightclubs, the last and largest of which was Bissonette’s, which made him a name in the city. He was one of those developers who believed he could build anything he could envision, and he had envisioned a hotel and shopping complex on the waterfront that would draw tourists from five states and would be riverboat-ready when the governor, the only remaining obstacle to legalized gambling on the river, left office. But more than one visionary developer had run aground on the shoals of the Philadelphia waterfront, a cement-encased stretch between the Delaware River and I-95 that had defied commercial development on a grand scale. Ruffing was now testifying as to how his vision died and the part Jimmy Moore and Chet Concannon had played in its death.

“Now on these expensive outings of his at your club,” continued Eggert, “how did the councilman pay?”

“Cash. Sometimes he would put it on a tab when he was short, which was okay by us because he was in about twice a month like I said, and if he was short one visit he would make up for it the next. Actually it wasn’t the councilman that paid, it was Chet.”

“You mean Mr. Concannon.”

“That’s right. It was Chet who carried the money. Or if not Chet then it was the councilman’s media guy, Chuckie Lamb.”

“And he tipped well?”

“The councilman, sure. Chet too. But Chuckie wasn’t a great tipper. Whenever the councilman would catch him shorting one of the servers he’d give Chuckie hell, call him the cheapest bastard this side of Trenton.”

Everyone laughed at that and I did too. I turned around. Chuckie was sitting in the back of the courtroom. Well, almost everyone was laughing.

“Now, Mr. Ruffing, did there come a time when you entered into business discussions with Councilman Moore?”

“Yes.”

“And how did that come about?”

“One night, when Jimmy was in with his girlfriend and Chet…”

“Objection,” shouted Prescott from his seat.

I turned around again, quickly. In the row behind Jimmy sat his wife, Leslie. Her eyes were closed, her face tense, she was breathing deeply. Then she opened her eyes again and looked forward calmly. Chuckie had been right, Leslie Moore had known about Veronica all along.

“I ask that the answer be stricken,” said Prescott.

“I’ll so order,” said the judge. “Now, Mr. Ruffing, try only to answer my question. How did you enter into business discussions with Councilman Moore?”

“He was at the club one night and he called me over and made room for me to sit down next to him. I was actually busy and I tried to beg off but he insisted, so I sat.”

“And what did he say, Mr. Ruffing?” asked Eggert.

“He was angry. He told me he had heard I was setting up plans for the waterfront development and was seeking help in the council but that I didn’t talk to him first. He told me he had been a good customer for a long time and that I had insulted him by not going through him to get approval for my plan. I told him I didn’t mean to insult him and that, sure, I’d love his help. So he said if we worked together he could be the best friend I ever had and that I should call him and I did. That’s when he told me he thought my plan would take off like a rocket ship and I thought that was great, that got me all excited. It was a good plan, it would have been good for the city, and I thought that Councilman Moore saw that too. So he told me to set up a meeting with Chet Concannon and I did.”

“When was that meeting?”

“A few days later. Chet sat down with me on a bench at Penn’s Landing and told how the legislative process worked with the council and how the councilman would propose the enabling legislation I needed for the development and shepherd it through a political obstacle course to get the legislation approved.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I was excited about his help and was very optimistic. Then Chet started talking about CUP, that’s the councilman’s political action committee, and about all the good work it was doing, sponsoring drug treatment facilities, registering voters, organizing neighborhoods, general political stuff, you know. Now I’m no young kid from the suburbs, I knew what he wanted. So I told him, I said sure, how much do you want? That’s when he flabbergasted me.”

“What did he say?”

“He said one percent of the cost for the entire project. The thing was budgeted at one hundred and forty mil, if we got both the hotels we wanted and the shopping strip. So what he was demanding was a million four.”

“Did you agree?”

“Not at first. I couldn’t. How was I going to come up with a million four right off the books? I wasn’t making enough on the club to cover it all and the financing was too tight to work with, really. The banks had it down to the penny. But Chet told me that I had to think of the future, how much could be realized if the waterfront plan went through. How much money I would make. And he said the councilman didn’t expect it all at once, he’d take it over time, which would make it easier. I still didn’t figure I could make it. But then he told me that the councilman had a lot of power on the zoning committee and would be looking very carefully at the plans and he told me that unless the councilman was certain of my commitment to help all the neighborhoods of the city he would kill the plan and any bills introduced to get it done.”

“How did you take that?”

“As a threat, sure. He was telling me I pay a million four or the plan was dead. I had been in real estate a long time, I knew the shakedown when I saw it, but I had already invested over a million in the design and initial purchasing of lots and I had mortgage commitments with penalties that I had signed personally, options that were costing me a fortune to keep up. I couldn’t afford to let it die.”

“So what did you do?”

“What could I do? I paid.”

“How much?”

“Chet said he would take a hundred grand to start, and then the same amount each month or so. And then he said the councilman would like a large part of it in cash so he could pay it out to the neighborhood organizers that were instrumental in running the programs.”

“How did you pay?”

“About once a month the councilman would call and give me an update on the project, how the bills were progressing through City Council. And then he would set up a meeting for me with Concannon. I would meet Concannon at various places around the city. We’d talk about the deal, sometimes we’d have lunch. Everything was very friendly, you know. And then I’d pay him.”

“What would you give him?”

“A check made out to CUP for fifty thousand and the rest of that payment in cash in a manila envelope. What I did was set up a credit account at a couple of the casinos in Atlantic City and take out enough chips in bits and pieces over an evening to make up the fifty thousand. Then I’d cash out, asking for hundreds. Concannon told us the councilman liked the cash to be in hundreds and cleaned through the casinos.”

“To pay the neighborhood activists?” asked Eggert with a wry smile.

“That’s what Chet said.”

“And what happened in Council?”

“Oh, the councilman was true to his word. The project was moving through the system. It got stalled here and there, which you got to expect, it’s the city after all. And I was already running short of cash because of the delays, but the councilman was doing his part. But then, along with my money problems, Zack found out about the payments.”

“You mean Mr. Bissonette?” asked Eggert.

“Yeah, right. I had given him a small piece of the club in exchange for his name and every now and then he’d take a look at the books. When he saw these payments to the casinos and CUP he went crazy. He was a good guy, Zack, and I couldn’t really blame him. Said he wouldn’t be involved in anything that wasn’t completely legal, said he wouldn’t let profits from his club be used to bribe a councilman.”

“Objection,” said Prescott. “We don’t need to hear Mr. Bissonette’s interpretation of the legality of Mr. Ruffing’s campaign contributions to CUP. In any event, it’s hearsay.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“Fine,” said Eggert. “Did Mr. Bissonette get involved in the waterfront deal?”

“Yes,” said Ruffing. “When I told him I needed to keep paying Concannon because I couldn’t afford any more delays he said he could raise all the bucks I needed as long as I stopped giving any payments to the councilman. I was running out of cash for development. It didn’t help that I was dishing out about a hundred grand a month to Moore and Concannon. I needed a partner, so I said sure.”

“And he came up with the money.”

“Surprised the hell out of me, don’t know how he did it, but yes, he did. Enough to keep the options alive and the mortgage commitments going, which was what I needed. So I agreed to stop paying the money demanded by Moore and Concannon.”

“By that time, how much had you paid?”

“I had given CUP half a million dollars, exactly.”

“How did you stop making the payments?”

“I called up Moore and told him it was over.”

“What was his reaction?”

“He was apoplectic, what do you think? He told me he would send Chet over to talk with me.”

“Did you talk to Chet?”

“Sure, I told him I had no choice. I explained the thing with Bissonette. Chet told me if I stopped paying the deal was dead and that was just the start of it. He told me to think of the poor and the underprivileged, the drug addicted youth who had begun to rely on my payments. And then he told me if I stopped paying it wasn’t only the deal that would be dead. He told me the club could have licensing problems and other problems. He told me the councilman could no longer guarantee my safety. When he left, I was shaking I was so scared.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t have no choice. I had sunk everything I had into the development project and the only way it could go forward was with the money Bissonette brought in and Bissonette said no more payments to Moore. So I stopped paying. I thought maybe they was bluffing. Boy, was I ever wrong about that.”

“Objection,” said Prescott.

“Sustained,” said the judge. “Just tell us what happened after you stopped the payments, Mr. Ruffing.”

“One night, about two weeks after I stopped paying, in the club, we were closed then, it was after two and we were closed, I saw the councilman’s limo pull up and it looked like Moore and Concannon getting out. Bissonette was still there. I told Bissonette that I was getting out of there, but he said he’d stay and talk to them. As they approached the back door I got out the front. My car was in the back but I didn’t dare go back there. I took a cab home. Later that night I was called by the police and told that Bissonette had been beaten to near death and was in a coma. Just a few days ago he died, poor guy.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. A month later my club burned down. Arson.”

“And what happened to the waterfront development deal, Mr. Ruffing?”

“It’s gone, like the club. With Bissonette in the hospital and the plan delayed in Council I ran out of money. It would have been beautiful, but it all turned to crap. So I ended up with nothing, which is what I got right now, a lot of nothing. You know, when the councilman called me over, told me to sit with him, and said he could be the best friend I ever had, I was on top of the world. I had a hot club, I had a partner I admired and trusted in Zack Bissonette, you know how hard it is to find a partner you can trust? I had a waterfront deal in the works that was going to make me a name as big as Rouse, as big as Levitt. I had everything going for me. Nine months after getting the councilman on my side I’m broke, the club is gone, the development deal has disappeared, and Bissonette is dead. With friends like that, Jesus.”

29

THE NIGHT BEFORE RUFFING’S cross-examination I was in the offices of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase, sitting at the long marble conference table, drinking one of those free Cokes, enjoying the luxury of it all. But I wasn’t there to work on the Concannon case. The Bishop brothers had insisted we spend that very evening going over the paperwork for their Valley Hunt Estates deal, so I was once again reviewing the documents that we would be putting into the prospectus, spreadsheets, pro forma projections, performance data on prior Bishop Brothers deals, a list of limited partners who had already committed to purchasing shares. I was sitting there alone at that conference table, drinking my Cokes, when a secretary opened the door and ushered Beth into the room.

She looked around. “Fancy,” she said. “Like a mausoleum.”

“Never been here before?” I asked when the secretary had left. “Look at all this stuff. Pens with Talbott, Kittredge and Chase embossed in gold, all the yellow pads you could ever want. Why don’t you take some back to the office in your briefcase? You want a soda?”

“No, thank you,” she said.

“It’s free. Come on, have one. Diet Coke?”

“Doesn’t this place give you the creeps, Victor?” she asked. “How many trees had to die to panel these walls? How many deserving plaintiffs were screwed to pay for all this? I don’t like it here.” She shivered. “I feel like I’m in a wax museum after hours.”

“We should get ourselves a marble conference table,” I said. I pointed to the antique prints of Philadelphia landmarks, City Hall when it was still young and clean, Independence Hall, the Second Bank of the United States. “And some artwork just like this. What do you say?”

She sighed. “I have enough faith in you, Victor, that if you ever got any of this you’d hate it all too much to keep it. Rita told me you were here. I came over because I thought I could help you prepare for Ruffing tomorrow.”

“That’s not what I’m working on. It’s this Valley Hunt Estates prospectus.”

“What about Ruffing?” she asked.

“I have my instructions, and my instructions are to do nothing. How can I justify billing for preparing to do nothing?”

She sat down across from me and sighed again. I was beginning to fear her sighs. She looked around. “Is this place bugged?”

I shrugged. “Probably.”

“Well, screw it,” she said. “Victor, if Prescott is going to point the finger of blame on Chester he’s going to do it tomorrow.”

“He won’t,” I said. “He told me he was going to get Chet off.”

“Like his old boss Nixon said he wasn’t a crook. You should be preparing just in case. Prescott’s whole defense is based on the legality of asking for political money, right? If he tries to distinguish Concannon’s meetings with Ruffing from the phone conversations between Ruffing and Moore, Chester could be in serious trouble. Prescott could claim that what Moore was doing was perfectly legal but that Concannon extended it to the illegal.”

“Concannon was Moore’s top aide. No one would believe that.”

“Remember about the missing money? A quarter of a million that never ended up at CUP? Money like that can erode anyone’s loyalty and don’t think the jury won’t believe it. If Prescott can pin the missing money on Concannon, then Chester is going to take the fall for his boss.”

I took a sip from my Coke. It was in a tall glass, filled with ice cubes I had lifted with pewter tongs from the ice bucket sitting on the marble credenza. “There is no missing money,” I said. “Ruffing’s lying about the numbers to get a bigger tax deduction.”

“Who told you that?” asked Beth.

“Prescott.”

“So it must be true.”

“You know what I think,” I said, suddenly angry. “I think you’re jealous. I think you’re worried that I might just make the big time here and leave you behind, that I might pull a Guthrie. And frankly, it pisses me off that you would think that of me.”

She stared at me for a long moment. I thought I might have seen something terribly sad in her face but then was sure I hadn’t because she was too tough to let me see anything she didn’t want me to see. “What I think of you, Victor, is that you’re drunk on this marble conference table and these fine prints of Old Philadelphia and these free Cokes. And that when you sober up, you’re going to be very sorry for all that you did while under the influence.”

She stood and stared down at me. “Morris wants you to call him,” she said coldly before she left, stranding me with the embossed pens and piles of yellow pads and antique prints. I took another sip of soda.

I turned back to the Valley Hunt Estates papers and read again the list of limited partners who had already agreed to buy into the deal. There was an entry that puzzled me, a partnership purchased by one set of initials for the benefit of another. I was still looking it over, trying to figure it all out, when Jack and Simon Bishop came into the room.

“How’s it all looking, Victor?” asked Simon.

“Great,” I said. “There’s only one thing that troubles me.”

“I don’t fancy the numbers in the five-year pro forma, either,” said Jack, holding in his hand the financial projection prepared for the prospectus. “The numbers are too high.”

“It’s not that,” I said. “The numbers look fine.”

“They look smashing to me,” said Simon. “We’ll sell out within a week.”

“And be sued within a year if things don’t work out,” said Jack.

“They’ll work out, Jack,” said Simon. “They always do. But let’s deal with it later. Right now we’re off to dinner. You coming, Victor?”

I looked at them, their round faces as open to me as an invitation, and whatever concerns I might have had disappeared in the warmth of their generosity. “Sure,” I said. “Dinner sounds great.” I followed them into the elevator for the ride to the parking garage and their Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow.

They took me to a fine French restaurant, a small place in a fancy suburb. It was a long drive but Simon told me it would be worth it and it was. The place was full, a mob of swells waiting at the bar, but the man at the door knew the Bishops and led us right to an empty table by a window. They were actually a jolly pair, these Bishops. I had first thought them to be very stiff and very formal, but that was just their surface manner. Underneath they were great fun, full of rollicking appetites and a taste for fine wines. Halfway into our second bottle I excused myself to make a call.

“Victor, is that you, Victor?”

“Yes, Morris. It’s me.”

“You have a cold or something, Victor? You don’t sound yourself.”

“I’m just a little tired, but I wanted to return your call.”

“You must take care of yourself, Victor. That’s number one. What I do when I’m oysgamitched from all the work, I pick up a bottle of Manischewitz that’s good and thick like a medicine, I lie in bed, turn on the news, drink the wine, fall asleep to Peter Jennings, and when I wake up I’m the old Morris. You should try it.”

“What about chicken soup?”

“Forget what they tell you. Chicken soup in bed it creates such a mess, all that splashing. News I have for you, Victor. Mine son, the computer genius, he has a phone right in his computer and he pulls out a register of marinas and starts looking for our man.”

“Any luck?”

“Calm your shpilkehs and let me tell you. So first he looks under the thief’s name. Stocker. Plugs it in, the search takes an hour, more, the cost of the call is so high I don’t want to say it over the phone.”

“We’ll cover it.”

“Of course. I’m in this business to lose money to AT &T? So word finally comes back, no Stocker. So I think that our friend the accountant might not have sold his boat so fast so we looked up The Debit, and sure enough we get the listings of five boats called The Debit. Five accountants with the same idea, a conspiracy of accountants. So we check them all and, what do you know, there is only one thirty-foot sloop. I still couldn’t tell you what a sloop is, but mine son, he says he knows, and The Debit anchored in a marina just south of St. Augustine, Florida, is a thirty-foot sloop. Owned by a man named Cane. So I happen to know that cane in German is stock.”

“You happen to know?”

“I just happen to know, so I think maybe it’s the same man. So I call the marina and they get hold of our Mr. Cane.”

“And it’s him?”

“Accht, let me finish.”

“Morris, you’re a genius.”

“Victor, so you’ve finally caught on. Yes, with all modesty, I confess that I am. But no, Mr. Cane was not Mr. Stocker. He’s Mr. Cane, Nathan Cane, his father was a Cantowitz. He sells real estate and he sold a big house or something so he says he splurges and buys this boat, The Debit.”

“From who?”

“Funny, that’s exactly what I asked. He says he bought it from a Mr. Radbourn, a little pisher, he tells me. All the papers were in order. So I ask him who Radbourn got it from and he looks on the bill of sale and it turns out Mr. Stocker sold it to Mr. Radbourn, and if you ask me, from the description, Mr. Stocker and Mr. Radbourn are one in the same. He transferred it to himself to make it harder to find him.”

“So what we have now, Morris, is the boat but no Stocker.”

“Exactly right. You’re very quick there, Victor.”

“So what do we do?”

“Well, of course, I figure our friend the thief he likes boats too much not to have one, and he has the money, so I figure he bought himself something else, and this time something bigger. A chazer bliebt a chazer, right? So we check the marina records again for a Mr. Radbourn. Gornisht. We check the records for the sale of a boat larger than thirty feet at around the same place and time and you know what we found?”

“What?”

“Hundreds. Too many to check. To check them all would take us six months.”

“So we’re done.”

“Not yet, Victor. We talk again to our friend Mr. Cane, a nice man, really. He promised to set me up with a condo deal if I decide to move south for mine retirement. When it gets colder like it is now I start thinking that maybe shvitzing is not the worst thing in the world. So he seems to remember Mr. Radbourn mentioning something about going across the state and buying something on the west coast of Florida, where he heard prices they might be cheaper.”

“So what does that tell us, Morris?”

“It narrows it down. Our friend Mr. Stocker, I tell you with much confidence, our friend Mr. Stocker is right now, right this instant, in a boat larger than a thirty-foot sloop, living under some other name, docked in a marina somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico.”

When I returned to the table, the Bishops were laughing loudly at something. The laughter died slowly when they saw me. “Who died, Victor?” asked Simon. “You look like the plague.”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Everything’s fine.”

My veal was on the table now, three delicate medallions in a light lemon sauce. I finished the wine in my glass and Jack quickly filled it again. For a moment I felt a slight sense of disappointment. I had almost believed that the strange and mystical Morris Kapustin could do anything he put his mind to, and his finding Stocker would have opened a different door for me, more difficult yes, confrontational yes, but also less reliant on the them that had always disappointed me before. It had been a nice belief, Morris as savior, warming in its way, like a Jimmy Stewart movie, but Stocker was lost somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico and that door was closed and I was here at this prime table in this exclusive restaurant with two of the richest men in the city buying me dinner. The future was shaping up with great clarity. I would settle out Saltz and follow along sheepishly in United States v. Moore and Concannon. I would avoid all bullets aimed at rear windows of imported cars. I would placate the paranoid Norvel Goodwin and the suspicious Chuckie Lamb with my inactivity. I would keep screwing Veronica in secret and write my opinion letters for Valley Hunt Estates and collect my fat fees and step into my future and all would be right with the world.

But still.

“What say we do the town tonight?” said Simon.

“Find us a high-class knocking shop,” said Jack.

“Just a pleasant night out with the boys,” said Simon.

“I noticed something curious in the partnership list,” I said. That got their attention fast. “That’s what was troubling me before. There were two partnership shares held in trust by W.P. on behalf of W.O. Any idea what that is all about?”

“A old friend of Prescott’s,” said Simon. “A prep school mate, being hounded by some cackhanded fool for a million dollars or so. Something to do with his divorce, I think. Seemed to be a sad story, actually, when Bill told it to me. It’s always sad to see a sot being chased for his money. Prescott owed him something so he bought two shares to be held in trust, until the legal problems settle.”

So that’s the way it was, I thought. William Prescott and Winston Osbourne, friends from the start, prep school mates, one helping the other hide his money from me. Well, now I knew where to find a little bit more for my twenty-five percent share. But all of a sudden I wasn’t hungry for the last of Winston Osbourne’s dollars. I was tied up with William Prescott in a very real way, which meant I was tied up with Winston Osbourne too. And I guess that was the price for joining the club, that we all help each other out, even the destitute. I could be munificent, sure, if that was what was required of me, I could be munificent as hell. Simon was right, it was so sad to see a sot being chased for his money. I had taken enough from him, I figured. Whatever he offered in final settlement after the car would be enough. Good. My first case as a lawyer would finally be over. It was time to move on.

“Well, what do you say, Victor?” asked Jack. “Boys night out? A few cigars, a few cheap thrills?”

“Or maybe not so cheap thrills,” said Simon.

“Sure,” I said with a shrug, shucking off all concern that Beth had raised about the Ruffing cross-examination, ignoring the worries about the connection between W.P. and W.O. that should have been hammering at my consciousness but were instead only tap, tap, tapping there, tapping so lightly they couldn’t break through the spell of the alcohol and fine food and rich company. “Why not,” I said. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

“More wine, Victor?”

“Yes, please.”

I drank the wine, a crisp Chablis, and ate the veal and laughed along with Simon’s jokes. The waiter brought another bottle and my glass was filled again, the two Bishops so attentive to my goblet they might almost have been trying to get me drunk, and as the wine danced on the back of my tongue my spirits rose. This wasn’t so bad, this veal, this wine, this ambience of money. I could get used to this.

30

PRESCOTT WAS IMPRESSIVE on cross-examination. Even without saying a word he could be unnerving. He leaned slightly forward, his hands gripping tightly to the sides of the wooden podium, his eyes fixed like laser sights on the witness. As he stood there, tall, in a solid navy blue, pitched forward, his posture angry, the polite smile on his stern face tight and angry, as he stood before the court a tension grew and then out of that tension came questions, soft at first, full of incredulity or certainty, rising and falling in pitch and volume, questions that compelled answers.

“Now, Mr. Bissonette was a ladies’ man, wasn’t he, Mr. Ruffing?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“He went out with lots of different ladies, isn’t that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Older ladies and younger ladies and single ladies and married ladies.”

“He did all right, he was a ballplayer, after all.”

“And the married ladies had husbands?”

“By definition, right?”

“And the single ladies had fathers?”

“I would guess so.”

“And Mr. Bissonette with all his lady friends was sure to have made some enemies, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Are you married, Mr. Ruffing?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have daughters?”

“Two.”

“Would you have let your two precious daughters go out with Mr. Bissonette?”

“Not on your life,” said Ruffing with a broad smile at the jury.

“No, I’m sure you wouldn’t, Mr. Ruffing. But plenty of men, without giving permission, had their precious daughters go out with Mr. Bissonette, right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“And Mr. Bissonette used to talk about these girls, didn’t he?”

“Occasionally.”

“He’d tell stories.”

“Sometimes.”

“He’d entertain his friends at the bar with his stories of all these ladies.”

“Now and then.”

“Stories about these ladies he took to bed, these wives and daughters he took to bed and fucked.”

The jury leaned back as if they had been slapped. The word was all the more shocking coming from the upright and austere personage that was William Prescott III.

Eggert said, “Objection to the language and the relevance.”

The judge turned to Ruffing and said simply, “Is that what Mr. Bissonette would talk about?”

“Sometimes,” said Ruffing. “Yes, sir.”

“Watch your language, Mr. Prescott,” he said. “You can continue.”

“Now, Mr. Ruffing, did Mr. Bissonette ever tell you the names of these women?”

“Sometimes.”

“And was one of them the daughter of Enrico Raffaello?”

“Objection,” shouted Eggert, jumping to his feet before Ruffing could answer, and the judge picked his head out of his papers and stared long and hard at Prescott and then said, “The jury is excused for fifteen minutes, the bailiff will lead you out,” and everyone stayed still as the jury rose and filed out, Prescott gripping the podium, Eggert standing, his arm raised in protest, the judge staring at Prescott.

When the jury had left the courtroom the judge said in four sharp and precise syllables, “In my chambers.”

I rose as steadily as I could and followed the other lawyers into the judge’s book-lined office. I had drunk far too much wine the night before with the Bishops, graduating later in the evening to Sea Breezes. We had never gotten back to the marble-tabled conference room. Instead, Simon knew of this place on Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Jersey where the women dance on your table and sit on your lap, so long as you buy them twenty-four-dollar glasses of fake champagne cocktail, which we did. One of the women in this place had the longest legs I had ever seen, bacon and eggs Jack called them, legs she could wrap twice around the pole that bisected the stage, and the Bishops bought her three champagne cocktails just to keep her on my lap. Her name was Destiny, she wore golden spikes, her breasts were like porcelain, that white, that smooth, that immobile as she danced. I liked her smile. Destiny. With real red hair and golden spikes. It was a good thing that my orders were to let Prescott do the whole of the examination because that morning my brain was so fogged and my tongue so thick I doubted a single word would have been understood by the jury.

“Mr. Prescott,” said the judge, with more than the usual tinge of anger in his voice. He was sitting behind his desk in his chambers while the rest of us stood around him in a semicircle. The court reporter had brought his machine from the courtroom and was sitting serenely next to the desk. “What kind of question was that?”

“A probative one, Your Honor,” said Prescott.

“I won’t let you bring up all the names of the women Bissonette might have been with. I gave you more than enough latitude with your questions about his stories as it was.”

“Your Honor, we believe Mr. Bissonette was murdered by Mr. Raffaello because he was having sex with his daughter.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Eggert. “I demand an offer of proof.”

“I don’t think,” said the judge sourly in his brutish rasp of a voice, “that you should ever demand anything in my chambers, Mr. Eggert. However, I appreciate your concern. Do you have any proof, Mr. Prescott, to back up this charge?”

“I can prove Bissonette was sleeping with Raffaello’s daughter, and we all know that he’s a killer.”

“Is that so?” asked the judge. “Are you going to prove that Mr. Raffaello is a killer in this trial?”

“Every one of those jury members knows who he is. Just let me ask the question, Judge.”

“Not if you can’t prove he’s a killer. Now, Mr. Eggert, is this Mr. Raffaello under investigation by your office?”

“Under federal law, Your Honor, I can’t confirm or deny that.”

“I hereby make a formal request for all the evidence you have against Enrico Raffaello,” said Prescott.

“On what grounds?” asked a surprised Eggert.

“Based on what we know, anything you may have is Brady,” said Prescott.

“We don’t have anything exculpatory and you know it. We’ve found absolutely nothing linking Raffaello to Bissonette’s murder, nothing at all.”

“Mr. Eggert,” said the judge. “Do you have enough evidence to indict Mr. Raffaello?”

“No, sir. If we did, we would have already.”

“I’m going to formally deny your Brady request, Mr. Prescott, and I am going to forbid you, under threat of contempt, to ask any more questions about Mr. Raffaello’s daughter or anyone else whom Mr. Bissonette might have slept with. Do you understand, sir?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Prescott.

“I’m not going to allow gossip and inadmissible innuendo to act as a defense in any trial in my court, this is the federal courthouse, not the offices of the National Enquirer, do you understand, Mr. Prescott?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Do you understand, Mr. Carl?”

“Yes, sir,” I mumbled.

“All right, then let’s go out there and try this case as if the rules of evidence were still in existence.”

“What do we do now?” I asked Prescott in the courtroom as we waited for the jury to return.

“We scramble,” he said.

And scramble he did. He asked Ruffing about the waterfront deal and why exactly it had collapsed. He asked about the phone conversations with Moore and the meetings with Concannon, the exact locations, the exact words spoken. He asked about the discrepancy between the amount Ruffing claimed to have given to Concannon and the amount actually received by CUP and whether Bissonette had deducted the full amount claimed on his tax returns, and Ruffing said he had. It took Prescott almost all of that day to ask his questions. He asked about the lighting in the back parking lot the night of Bissonette’s beating and how far away the limousine had been when he saw the men stepping out of the car and he got Ruffing to say he wasn’t totally sure who the men were but that it looked like the councilman and someone else, a black man, and to say that though he recognized the limousine as the councilman’s he couldn’t exactly say how that limousine was different from any other long black limousine with a boomerang on the back. And he asked about the back taxes that Ruffing had owed and the deal Ruffing struck with the IRS and how part of the insurance money on the burned down club went to the IRS to keep up Ruffing’s part of the deal. In all it was a solid cross-examination by Prescott, indeed he had asked almost all of the questions I would have asked had I spent the night preparing instead of drinking. But in the end, with all his bluster, all his questions, all his intimidation and insinuation, he did nothing to make Ruffing seem like a liar in front of the jury.

The swelling in my head had subsided and what was left was a deep exhaustion as Prescott asked questions about areas traversed twice or thrice already and Ruffing answered them with the very same answers he had produced before. The rhythm was repetitive, drowsing, hypnotic. I could barely keep my eyes open as Prescott asked his last series of questions.

“All of your conversations with Councilman Moore were on the tapes, isn’t that right, Mr. Ruffing?”

“Most of them. Some were made on untapped phones.”

“Were the unrecorded conversations any different than the taped ones?”

“No, substantially the same.”

“Now I noticed something peculiar on the tapes of your conversations with Mr. Moore. What I noticed, Mr. Ruffing, is that nowhere in those conversations did Councilman Moore mention a specific amount of money.”

“I thought he had.”

“There was no mention of it in the tapes.”

“He mentioned contributions.”

“But never amounts and never how it was to be paid.”

“He might have mentioned it in the unrecorded conversations.”

“But you said those were substantially the same just a second ago, isn’t that right?”

“Yes, I did.”

“So we can assume if he didn’t mention specific amounts in the taped conversations, he never mentioned them at all.”

“I guess so.”

“In fact, it was only Chester Concannon who gave the specifics about money.”

“That might be right.”

“And those conversations weren’t taped.”

“No.”

“Now those checks you gave Concannon, did they come back from the bank?”

“Sure, cashed out by CUP.”

“But you didn’t get anything back from CUP for the cash? No receipts?”

“No, nothing.”

“So CUP only acknowledged payments of the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that was duly reported on its books.”

“I don’t know about their books.”

“And the councilman never mentioned that he got the cash?”

“No. He didn’t want to talk specifics about that.”

“It was Chester Concannon who talked the specifics.”

“That’s right.”

“It was Chester Concannon who told you how much to pay, how to pay it, that some should be paid in cash.”

“That’s what I said.”

“And it was Chester Concannon who threatened you after you stopped paying.”

“Yes, that’s what happened.”

“And as far as you know, that cash might never have reached CUP.”

“As far as I know.”

“And it might never have reached Councilman Moore.”

“As far as I know.”

“It might have gone no further than Chester Concannon.”

“That’s possible.”

“I have no further questions,” said Prescott.

Judge Gimbel lifted up his heavy prune face and, peering hard at me over his half reading glasses, said, “Do you have any questions for this witness, Mr. Carl?”

Still sitting, I looked around the courtroom. Prescott was back at the table, conferring quietly with the councilman, ignoring me. Eggert was looking at a yellow pad, taking notes. Concannon’s eyes were closed, like he had been put to sleep by the questioning himself. I shook my head to wake myself and stood up slowly. I found it difficult to phrase the words, my mouth dry, my tongue thicker than before, my stomach turning over. Finally, after trying to squeeze them through my lips, the words fell out in a tumble. “I’d like a few moments with my client.”

Judge Gimbel smiled condescendingly at me. “Good idea, Mr. Carl. Court is recessed for twenty minutes.”

31

WHAT HAD STUNNED ME by the last series of Prescott’s questions to Ruffing was not just that he had turned on Concannon, shifting blame to him, but that he had done it so blatantly. I would have expected him to do his damage subtly, a question here, a remark there, I would have expected Prescott to slip the knife into Concannon surreptitiously, silently, the razor-thin blade sliding through the vertebrae so cleanly that Concannon himself wouldn’t have known he was dead until his knees collapsed beneath him, and even then not be sure. But Prescott had discarded all subtlety. He had looked at the jury, smiled, and said it wasn’t my guy, it was his guy, and all of a sudden the strategy imposed upon me of trying to make my client seem not a part of the proceedings was revealed to be a sick joke.

My first reaction was to sit down at that counsel table and put my head in my hands and try to keep from crying. It is undignified for a lawyer to cry at a trial, unless it is in front of a jury and then only for effect. But the jury was out of the room, the spectators were milling, my client had left for the men’s room, in that situation crying was not a trenchant strategy. Even so, I couldn’t stop my eyes from watering. I heard Prescott laugh to my left, not a loud laugh, but loud enough.

I felt a hand on my arm and I turned around as quickly as my hangover would allow.

It was Herm Finklebaum. He was back on his heels, smiling thinly at me. “You feeling all right, buddy boy?” he asked.

“Not so good just now,” I said.

“I been watching you, like I said I would, but I ain’t seen much.”

“By design,” I said.

“By whose design? Eggert’s?”

“It’s a very complex strategy, Herm. You wouldn’t understand.”

“A toy company came out once with a doll that pooped in its diapers,” said Herm Finklebaum, the toy king of 44th Street. “I asked the sales rep, ‘What’s the fun in that? I’ve changed diapers. Changing diapers is not fun.’ The rep told me I didn’t understand but that the doll was hot hot hot, that it was going to sell like flapjacks. I bought fifty for the Christmas season, sold three. He was right, I didn’t understand, didn’t understand that I was being a schmuck for buying fifty.”

“What’s your point, Herm?”

“Point? There’s no point,” he said, turning away from me and starting to walk away in his jaunty, splayfooted walk. “It’s just a story I like to tell on myself.”

As I watched Herm walk to the rear of the courtroom I saw Beth sitting in the back row, staring at me, not triumphantly or angrily, just staring. She stood and gestured me to meet her in the hallway. I nodded and turned around again.

I didn’t have much time to figure out what I was going to do. Judge Gimbel would be asking me if I had any questions for Ruffing at the end of the twenty-minute break and then and there I would have to know for sure. But I really needed to figure it out for myself before then, before I faced my client, before I faced Beth.

After the shock of Prescott’s questions had worn off, I realized I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Of course Jimmy would betray Chester, he was a politician, after all, and the only difference between a politician and a viper is that a viper’s fangs retract. And how could I ever have assumed that Prescott’s offer of opportunity meant anything other than opportunity at a price? But the price was so damned high. To shuck all the principles of my profession with the ease of shucking an ear of corn and let my client suffer an unrebutted attack that would leave him imprisoned for the rest of his life was almost unthinkable. But then again there was money to be made, bonds to be forged, opportunity to be seized. Valley Hunt Estates was just the first of a myriad of projects that would be offered me as I rose to the upper echelons of my profession. Prescott would make it all happen for me, he had as much as promised it. They say behind every great fortune is a great crime and I had always been waiting to find mine to commit. Now here it was, and all I would have to commit was nothing. And even if I tried to do something, what could I do, stand on the table and holler that the mobster Raffaello had killed Bissonette? That would get me nothing more than a contempt citation. And what about the threats from Norvel Goodwin and Chuckie Lamb? And what about the exploding hatchback window and the message of the lead? And what about…

But even as I debated it all in my mind, I knew what the answer would be, never truly doubted it for a minute. And right in the middle of deliberations I shut off my thoughts like I shut off a faucet, stood, and left the courtroom.

Chuckie Lamb was waiting for me in the hallway. He grabbed my arm and pulled me aside and his fish-lipped grin was unpleasantly dark. “You going to ask Ruffing any questions, Vic?” asked Chuckie.

“I don’t have time for this,” I said. “I need to talk to my client.”

“You going to ask any questions, Vic, or are you going to be their good little boy?”

I leaned into him and stuck a finger in his chest, like my Uncle Sammy would have. “Look, Chuckie. As far as I’m concerned you don’t exist, your threats, your opinion of me, it’s like you’re on Mars. I’m going to do what I have to do.”

I turned around and walked away from him, on my way to meet Chester and Beth, but his voice chased me down the hallway. “We all do what we have to do, Vic.”

The room we found had pale green walls and a formica table with steel legs. Metal chairs were jumbled there and here. Beth gestured toward a chair and Concannon sat. She stood over him. I sat at the table across from him. Even though there were only the three of us, with a trail of ashes fallen out of the tinfoil ashtray and sprinkled over the table, with the too many chairs, with the stale air in the room, it felt crowded.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” Chet said. I looked at him carefully, wondering whether he truly didn’t know there was a six-inch blade buried knuckle-guard-deep in his back.

“Are you really this stupid, Chester?” said Beth. “Or is this all an act?”

Chet didn’t get angry or start to shout. He clasped his hands together on the table and stared at them for a moment. “The councilman told me about this line of questioning last night,” he said finally. “If Prescott couldn’t get into evidence that Raffaello’s daughter was sleeping with Bissonette, then the councilman told me Prescott was going to do whatever he could to make it seem like the whole thing might not have happened the way Ruffing said it happened.”

“Well, did your friend Jimmy also tell you,” said Beth, “that if Prescott convinces the jury that you were taking money on the side and were the one making the threats, he could walk out of here smelling like a violet while you got the jail time?”

“He told me he was taking care of me,” said Chet.

“Sure he is, Chester,” she said. “He’s going to take care of you all the way to a twenty-year racketeering sentence.”

Chet stared at her without saying anything. I turned around to look out a window, but there were none in the room. For a moment I felt I was in a coffin.

Beth said, “With your prior convictions, Chester, Victor and I had no intention of putting you on the stand, so we didn’t want you to tell us what happened. But now we need you to. How much would Ruffing give you in that envelope?”

He shrugged, but he answered her. “A hundred thousand each time, like he said, a check for fifty and fifty in cash.”

I turned away from the wall and stared at him. “And you let Prescott lie to me about the money?” I asked.

“You said you were asking the same question the jury would ask,” said Chet. “Prescott told you exactly what we were going to argue to the jury, that’s all.”

“Why not the truth?” I asked.

“Because the truth looks bad,” said Chet. He shrugged, like a boy caught at a prank, and I turned away from him again.

“Who told you to get it in cash?” asked Beth, continuing her interrogation.

“Jimmy.”

“And what did you do with it once you got it?” she asked.

“I gave it to him.”

“All of it?”

“Yes, all of it. He sometimes gave some back to me. He liked me to have cash for his expenses. And sometimes he gave me cash for Ronnie.”

“You never took any out for yourself?”

“Never.”

“Come on, Chester,” she said. “Never even a little?”

“I didn’t keep my job for five years by stealing from the councilman.”

“Were you there the night of the murder?”

“No.”

“Who did it?” she asked.

“Raffaello.”

“Who told you it was Raffaello?”

“The councilman.”

“And you believe him?”

“Absolutely.”

“Chester, listen to me,” she said slowly. “Jimmy Moore is selling you out.”

There was a pause then. Chet sat straight-backed in his chair, his hands clasped before him, clasped tightly, his fingers twisting around each other like knotted ropes, and Chet was staring at those clasped hands, saying nothing. I tapped my fingers on the formica tabletop, fatatatap, fatatatap, fatatatap.

“Chester,” she said finally. “We have to fight back. If we act now we can still mount a defense. We have to point the finger at Jimmy and let the jury choose between you and him. My guess, everything being even, they’ll go after him.”

There was another pause, and then Chet looked my way. “What do you think, Victor?” he asked. “What do you think I should do?”

Here it was. Beth was staring at me, a sad uncertainty in her gaze. Chester was looking at me and I could see that boy again, the lonely one inside of him that all his careful manners had been hiding for so long, and the little boy was scared. I had to be careful here, I knew. I had to phrase it just right.

“It appears, on the surface,” I said, looking only at Concannon as I spoke, “that the councilman’s lawyer may be planning to make you a scapegoat. But it’s also possible that Prescott is simply trying to cast any doubt he can on Ruffing’s story to show the weakness of the prosecutor’s case. If so, he would argue in front of the jury that Eggert hadn’t proven whether Jimmy was at fault or you were at fault and therefore reasonable doubt existed. That’s exactly what defense attorneys are supposed to do, raise reasonable doubt. And, frankly, it might not be a terrible strategy. So what we should do, Chet, really depends on whether or not you trust the councilman.”

I kept looking at Concannon, only at Concannon, even after I finished speaking. I was almost disappointed to see the relief spread across his features.

“That makes it easy, then,” said Chet. “I’m going to trust Jimmy. He’s the closest thing I’ve ever known to a savior. If he says he’s going to get us both off, I’m going to trust him to do it.”

Beth banged the table with her hand. “You’re his sacrificial lamb, Chester,” she said. “He’s feeding you to the government to save himself. And it doesn’t stop here. After this trial there’s the trial in state court. You remember that, don’t you? The murder trial where ADA Slocum is going to ask for the death penalty?”

“I didn’t kill that man,” said Chet. “And Jimmy didn’t either.”

“It doesn’t matter who did what,” she said. “If you go down here, you’re going to go down there too, do you understand? Don’t throw your life away.”

When his answer came it was slow, precise, but the anger in it was clear and hard. “I was wasting away to nothing when the councilman took me from the street and gave me something to be. You don’t know what it’s like, feeling the frustration of wanting something so bad and knowing there is no way in hell you’re going to get it. And then along comes Jimmy Moore like an angel of God and he gives it all to me. We get one shot, that’s the rule for us, one shot if we’re lucky, and the councilman’s my shot. Victor says it’s all about whether or not I trust him, well, I do. More than anything else in this world. And I will continue to trust him until you can prove to me, I mean prove it in black and white so there is no doubt, until you can prove to me that his strategy is to dump me to save himself.”

“We can’t get proof like that,” said Beth.

“Then I want Victor to keep following Prescott’s orders. Prescott doesn’t want Victor to ask any questions of Michael Ruffing.”

“Is that right?” I asked.

“That’s what he wants. The councilman’s a loyal man, all he demands is loyalty in return. I’ve seen it over and over, people doubting him and him coming through for them. Get me the proof or do what Prescott tells you.”

I slapped the table lightly. “Well, I guess that’s that,” I said. “The decision’s made.”

“Why don’t you give us a minute alone, Chester,” said Beth.

After he left we stayed there in silence for a while, Beth and I. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, afraid of what I would see in her eyes. I thought she’d start out by screaming at me, but she didn’t. Her voice when it came was soft and even, but I could still feel the emotion in it.

“You should get the hell out of this case,” she said. “Cause a mistrial, leave Prescott holding a leaking paper bag with his spoiled strategy inside.”

“The judge won’t let me go,” I said.

“Then you should get Chester back in here and convince him that he’s getting screwed.”

“He’s the client,” I said. “He made his decision.”

“You could convince him,” she said. “What you told him was absolute bullshit and you know it. He listens to you, God knows why, but he does. You could change his mind, give him a fighting chance.”

“And then do what? What evidence do I have? What can I ask Ruffing that will change anything? It would be different if I had something concrete to use.”

“Would it?”

I didn’t say anything.

“So what are you going to do now, Victor?”

“Just what my client wants me to do,” I said. “Nothing.”

“I can’t accept that,” she said.

“It’s not your case.”

“It’s my name on the letterhead.”

“Yes, but it was the retainer I got in this case that finally paid the stationery bill. The decision has been made,” I said. “Whatever happens, it’s my responsibility.”

She gave me that damn sigh again and I shuddered as if I had been hit about my shoulders with a stick. “They’ve been trying for years to get me to work down at Community Legal Services,” she said. “Perillo called me again about CLS just last week. He has an opening for me. The pay’s steady, and there’s plenty of work.”

“Beth,” I said, but that’s all I could say, because when I finally looked up at her she was facing away from me and in the hunch of her shoulders was a sadness I had never seen in her before, a sadness that shocked me into silence.

“I think I’m going to accept his offer,” she said, and I knew then why she was turned away from me; Beth would sooner have me see her naked than have me see her cry. “Don’t you know, Victor, haven’t you learned yet that the one thing we’re never allowed to do in this life is nothing?”

“Beth,” I said again, and again that was all I could say, because before I could say anything else she was out the door.

This is what I realized just then. I realized that the difference between those who got what they wanted and those who didn’t was not merely talent or brains or grace under pressure, the difference was that those who got what they wanted simply wanted it more than those who didn’t. Well, dammit, I knew what I wanted and I knew just how bad I wanted it, too. I was sick of our outdated law books, of our scruffy copier, of the dunning letters and collection calls and my same three suits and my frayed collars and the worry over small change that had kept me tossing on the sofa as the late show droned. I was sick of our second-class practice, sick of my second-class life. I wanted my share of the wealth and glory in this world, I wanted money, and if my wants were shallow then sue me, dammit, for I was third generation now, American to the core, and what I wanted was only what this country had taught me to want. And it taught me how to get it, too. As Beth walked out of that room I learned that she simply didn’t want it all as much as I did. Too bad for her. Maybe she belonged at Community Legal Services, working in a cubicle, handling landlord-tenant disputes for families on welfare, but not me, no sir.

When Judge Gimbel came back on the bench and brought the jury into the courtroom and asked me, “Now, Mr. Carl, do you have any questions for this witness?” he might just as well have been asking whether I had any doubts about how badly I wanted the success that Prescott was promising, because the answer would have been exactly the same.

“No, Your Honor,” I said without hesitation. “None at all.”

When I sat down again Prescott was smiling at me. It was a warm smile, and what I interpreted that smile to mean was, “Welcome to the club.” I smiled too.

Now, when I think back on that smile of mine, full as it was with hope and anticipation and deference to my patron, I think of the chuckle it must have given to that bastard and I can’t help but wince.

32

I WAS IN MY OFFICE ALONE, late, checking through my mail and making calls, when Morris phoned with the bad news. I had spent another awful day in court, the only kind I seemed to allow myself, another day where I sat silently beside my client and let the evidence spill over him like ocean waves unchecked by any reef. And afterwards I had come back to the office to find it deserted again. I had not seen Beth since the afternoon of Ruffing’s cross-examination. She was conveniently absent when I was around but I noticed that the personal effects in her office, the photograph of her father, the photograph of her sisters, the little outhouse whose doors opened up with the touch of a button that she got such a kick out of, one by one the personal effects were disappearing. She was leaving, no doubt, she had meant what she had said, Beth always meant what she said. And so we would no longer be GUTHRIE, DERRINGER AND CARL or DERRINGER AND CARL but just plain AND CARL, and each night thereafter would be like that night, where I was left alone with nothing but the emptiness of the office and a pathetic stack of mail. On the high road to success.

My mail that day was much like my mail every day, letters confirming conversations on the telephone that in no way matched the descriptions in the letters, advertisements for legal journals and continuing legal education courses, an accounting firm’s brochure listing all the exciting ways it could make my practice more successful, when in fact the success it was seeking was its own. And then, in an ominous manila envelope, on crisp paper backed with a blue piece of cardboard, I found an answer. No, it wasn’t an answer to life’s more perplexing questions, like why we exist or how to drink beer and laugh at the same time without getting suds up your nose. What it was, actually, was an answer to the motion for a protective order I had filed on Veronica’s behalf against one Spiros Giamoticos, Veronica’s landlord, who had been leaving dead animals in front of her doorway in an effort to chase her out of her bargain lease.

Giamoticos was being represented by Tony Baloney, which was a surprise since Anthony Bolignari, Esq., dubbed Tony Baloney by the admiring press, was one of the more successful and expensive drug lawyers in the city, an interesting choice of counsel for a deranged landlord. You wouldn’t see Tony at the Philadelphia Bar Association dances or lunching at the Union League, even though he outearned most of the big-time corporate types. There is a certain pungency to drug lawyers, to mob lawyers, to those attorneys who represent society’s outlaws, a smell that makes such lawyers unwelcome in the more hallowed hallways of the bar. Where you saw Tony Baloney was on the evening news, his cheeks jiggling beneath his wide walrus mustache as he explained in overwrought language the details of still another acquittal for one of his clients.

The answer Tony had filed stated very simply that Spiros Giamoticos had not done any of the things Veronica had claimed he had done, which was not a surprise because Tony’s clients always pleaded not guilty, even when the cocaine was found inside their intestinal tracts, wrapped in greased prophylactics swallowed before boarding the plane from Bogotá.

“Yes, Victor,” said Tony Baloney into the phone, after I had waited on hold for a solid five minutes. “Not surprised you are calling. This nasty Giamoticos matter, I assume.” His voice was high, exuberant, punctuated by the deep breaths of the asthmatic. “My daughter resides in that very building. Giamoticos brings your motion to her. Like a devoted father I agree to take the case. I expect you’ll do your best to make me regret it.”

“Is he going to stop the animal killing crap?”

“It’s not him, Victor. He says he didn’t do it.”

“You sound like you’ve said that before.”

He laughed. “Yes, well,” he said. “Maybe I have. That’s the speech for the lummoxes in the DA’s office all right. But sometimes it happens to be true.”

“He killed her cat,” I said. “I know. I was forced to clean it up. The tenant I represent has a bargain-basement lease and he wants her out so he killed her cat.”

“‘Courage, man. What though care killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care.’”

“You speaking Spanish?”

“Not a devotee of the Bard, hey, Victor? Too bad. There’s more to learn of law from Shakespeare than from all the digests put together. So tell me what it is your client wants.”

“What she wants, Tony, is to be left alone.”

“Well then, darling, how about a deal?” he asked. “You withdraw this scabrous motion. My guy will swear to be a perfect gentleman. Follow the letter of the law. Stay forty paces from your client.”

“Like he’s on probation?”

“Just like.”

“No skulking around hallways, no more dead birds from him?”

“I’ll vouch for him. He didn’t do it. He wants no trouble. The whole legal thing scares the ouzo out of him. It seems the law is different in Greece. I keep telling him there are no firing squads in America.” I could hear him pound his desk as he shouted, “There are no firing squads in America!”

“Deal,” I said.

“Good, Victor. Good. Now this Veronica Ashland. She’s Jimmy Moore’s friend, isn’t she?”

“I have nothing else to say.”

“Discretion is good, Victor. I like that. I need to be discreet too. But even so, Jimmy and I used to be buddies. A drink or two together now and then. But after what happened to Nadine he wrote me off. The wrong side, or some nonsense like that. She was a good kid too, Nadine. Her biggest problem was her father. Jimmy thinks he’s a new man, that what’s past is prologue. ‘But love is blind, and lovers cannot see.’ Merchant of Venice, Victor.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, and I didn’t. All I could catch was that he was trying to threaten Jimmy through me and I didn’t like it. I had received enough threats in this case to last me a lifetime.

“I can’t say anything more at the moment. Discretion, right? Just tell him what I said. And if he wants to call me, he can.”

“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t feel very messenger-boyish just then, especially not for fat Tony Baloney. I figured I would let him threaten the councilman on his own.

So it was back to the mail, reviewing letters, dictating missives of my own into the little tape machine for Ellie to butcher on the typewriter the next day, marking it all down on my time sheets in six-minute increments to be billed. That’s what I was doing when Morris called.

“Vey is mir, Victor. It pains me to have to call you this evening, I hope you appreciate that. During the short time we have worked together, Victor, and I mean this with all sincerity, you have become like mishpocheh to me. I wouldn’t say like a son because, frankly, we haven’t become that close, but a nephew, maybe, a distant nephew, a nephew from a foreign country, a Czechoslovakian nephew, yes? And so, being that you have become as dear to me as a Czechoslovakian nephew, it pains me to tell you what I have to tell you.”

“What is it you have to tell me, Morris?”

“First I want you to know that we left, mine son and I, not a single stone but that we turned it and not a single path but that we followed it to nowhere.”

“Just tell me, Morris.”

“Your Mr. Stocker, your thief, I know he is somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico, I know it, I can taste it, he is so trayf you wouldn’t believe, but still I can taste him on his boat, floating happily, bobbing up and down, as happy as a Cossack on a sea of vodka, that happy, Victor. He is there, I know it, but where I can’t tell you. If I could tell you where he was then I’d be a happy man, but such is life that we are not to know such happiness until we find ha’olum haba’ah. Do you know what such is that, Victor? Ha’olum haba’ah?”

“No.”

“How will you get there if you don’t know what it is?”

“What is it?”

“The world to come.”

“Heaven?”

“Of a sort, but better. No angels with wings, no annoying harp music, and the food, Victor, all the food is kosher.”

“I assume they have pastrami there.”

“What, you think you go all that way for egg salad?”

“So what you are telling me, Morris, is that you can’t find Stocker.”

“I’m calling tonight because you gave me three weeks and tomorrow is exactly three weeks to a day from when you hired me and so mine time is up. I would spend the extra day and call you tomorrow but it’s Friday and preparing for the Shabbos I wanted not to forget.”

“Don’t worry about it, Morris, you got farther than I ever expected, you even got farther than the FBI in finding the guy.”

“So that’s such a challenge? Being as mine investigation has come to a close, I will be sending along a tzatel with my charges, sending it tomorrow, in fact. Now, just as a point of curiosity, to who should I send mine tzatel, to you or to mine friend Benny Lefkowitz who told me to see you?”

“You should send it to Mr. Lefkowitz, Morris. He’ll ship it over to me, but he and the other clients are paying it.”

“Perfect, I just thought I should know. So, Victor, that is that. Do you have anything else you need investigating? Anything you want Morris Kapustin to look into?”

“Nothing right now, Morris.”

“You keep me in mind, Victor, and I would be very appreciative. I feel very bad about this, Victor. Anything you need, any help at all, you give Morris a call.”

“Sure.”

“A gezunt ahf dein kopf, mein freint. And don’t be a shmendrick, call me sometime. We’ll do lunch.”

“We’ll do lunch?”

“A guy like me, I could have been in Hollywood, why not? John Garfield, Jewish. Goldwyn and Mayer and Fox, all Jewish. So why not Morris Kapustin?”

“No reason, Morris. No reason at all.”

I wasn’t feeling the same pain as Morris over his news. What it meant was that the deadline for finding Stocker had passed without a positive result and I could now settle the Saltz case for the $120,000 offered by Prescott, from which I would immediately deduct my one-third share, forty thousand dollars, forty thousand sweet smelling, crisply crinkling, beautifully off-green, satisfyingly stiff new dollar bills. I could feel the rough texture between my fingers already. In anticipation of Morris’s failure I had sent out release forms to the clients with self-addressed, stamped return envelopes. One by one the envelopes had come back and I opened them gleefully, like a child receiving birthday cards. Eight releases, each of them duly executed and ready for turning over to Prescott in exchange for a sweet little check made out for one hundred and twenty thou. With Morris throwing in the tallis, I was ready to settle.

And the man with whom I had to settle was ready for me.

“Good morning, Victor,” said Prescott as he strolled into court the morning after Morris’s final call. As always, he was followed by his legion of natty and intense Talbott, Kittredge lawyers. “This morning I’ll carry the cross-examination of the crime scene search officer. I’ve gone over the reports with my own experts and I think I’m best qualified to minimize his effectiveness.”

“That’s fine, sir.” I said.

“Splendid,” he said as he looked through a sheaf of documents handed him by Brett with two t’s.

“By the way, sir,” I said. “I have those releases for the Saltz settlement. I’m sorry it was so late but I had a hard time getting them back from all my clients, vacations and such.”

“The Saltz settlement?”

“Madeline sent us over the final settlement agreement and we’ve signed that too.”

“Did my clients sign?” he said, still looking through his documents.

“Not yet.”

“Hmmm. Well, Victor, I’m sorry, but I don’t believe that deal is still operative.”

A sickening fear rose from my groin and grabbed my throat. “What are you talking about?” I said. “We had a deal.”

“We reached an agreement, yes, but that was with the expectation of an immediate settlement. When you hadn’t gotten back to us we thought the deal was off and proceeded accordingly.”

“Accordingly?”

He lifted his head out of his papers and stared straight at me. “We’ve been preparing for trial, Victor. Haven’t you?”

“I’ll enforce the settlement,” I said. “Judge Tifaro likes his calender clean, he won’t let you yank the offer back.”

“Oh, he’ll holler and shake,” he said, his gaze again upon his papers, as if I were no more consequential then a buzzing fly. “But it’s been over three weeks, Victor. You can’t expect my clients to wait forever. That offer has expired, it is gone, disappeared. It is as dead as Bissonette.” Then he looked at me again and one of his sly, diplomatic smiles spread onto his face. “However, Victor, I’m sure my clients would be willing to rethink the settlement and to pay what had been previously agreed under certain conditions.”

Here it was, I thought. Whatever the conditions, Prescott had been waiting to lower them upon me for a while, waiting as patiently as a spider having already woven his web.

“It seems,” said Prescott, putting his arm around my shoulder and leaning in close so that he could speak in his lowest voice above a whisper, “that my clients happen to be very interested in this case. They have made certain deals with Councilman Moore concerning certain of their real estate ventures and it would be very inconvenient for them if Councilman Moore was convicted here and stripped of his council post.”

“I’m not quite sure I understand.”

“Don’t be a cowboy, Victor. What they want is for you to keep staying out of my way. You do and, win or lose, you’ll get your settlement.”

“But I’ve been cooperative,” I stammered.

“Yes, you have, Victor. We’ve all been extremely pleased with you. And if you remain cooperative we won’t have any problems, will we?”

“This sounds something like blackmail,” I said.

“Don’t,” said Prescott quickly, his voice dipping to a ferocious whisper, his hand now squeezing my shoulder harder, so hard it hurt. “Don’t even think of using such language with me. For the rest of this trial you’re just going to sit back and let me do whatever I have to do. I want you out of it. The Saltz offer was generous beyond belief, we both know it, you sit back and it is yours. But you act up in any way and it is dead and you’ll get your balls handed to you at the trial. I want you silent and docile for the rest of this trial, that’s what we’re paying you for. You step out of line and I’ll absolutely destroy you.”

With his grip still tight around my shoulder he pushed me down and I fell hard into my seat. I looked at the empty jury box, the dark maroon chairs swimming in the tears that had sprung to my eyes. In a pleasant voice Prescott said, “I think we understand each other now, Victor.”

I didn’t answer, but I didn’t have to. We understood each other perfectly. Prescott believed he could read me like a comic book. He believed he could buy me for a mere forty thousand dollars, our cut of the Saltz settlement. He believed that for a minor monetary gain, and the hope of future deals, I would sit back and take a dive in the biggest trial of my life. He believed he understood all that burned inside me, all the hidden dreams and pent desires, and from that knowledge he thought he knew my price.

And so what if he might have been right, dammit, I didn’t have to like it. I thought I was becoming a member of the caste by going along, but Prescott had just dressed me down like I was a cabana boy. I had a half a mind to spit it all back in his face, but only half a mind. After all, what could I do, realistically? Disregard my client’s orders, defy the judge, try to slip in more references to Enrico Raffaello and his daughter’s sad and deadly affair with Bissonette? That would leave me with nothing but a citation for contempt.

No, William Prescott III had turned me into his cabana boy and I was helpless to fight it. What else could I do but sit back and take the money?

33

I WAS LYING ON THE COUCH in my apartment with the lights off, drinking a beer and occasionally banging the wall with my fist, when she called for me. I was banging in frustration at allowing myself to be bought, banging at whatever it was inside of me that kept me from fighting it. And I was banging at the way Prescott was playing me. It rankled. “Oh, cabana boy, bring me a drink. Oh, cabana boy, sit down and shut up and let me have my way with you. Oh, cabana boy…” I drank my beer and stared at the shadows of light that swept through my window from the street and bang, banged, waiting for the phone to ring. From the first trill I knew who it was.

“I’ll be right over,” I said into the handset and within thirty seconds I was out the door.

Even before my fall into outright whoredom I had been running to Veronica whenever she called. She was like a drug to me, an addiction, and even when I wasn’t with her, when I was sitting in the courtroom supposedly concentrating on the testimony I was not permitted to challenge or rebut, I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting back to the salty smell and soft soft skin and the electric tongue. Jimmy, preoccupied with the trial, still slipped out now and then for a quiet rendezvous with his mistress, though his nights of carousing through the city with his entourage were on hold pending the verdict. Whenever he was with Veronica I worked late on Valley Hunt Estates or whatever else I could find to suck up my time and on those nights, whenever the Bishops weren’t taking me out for dinner and filling me with wine, I would stop at the corner grill for my evening cheese steak and fall asleep to the brilliance of late-night television. But on the nights Veronica called I would hang up the phone and rush out the door and drive enthusiastically to Olde City.

For a while we had been meeting at bars for a drink or two before retiring to her apartment. There was something reassuring about that, a restaurant for a late dinner, a bar for a nightcap. On those evenings out we could pretend that we were dating, as if we were a normal couple in a normal relationship satisfying our normal desires. But after the rear window of that hatchback exploded in front of my face I grew cautious of public places. And then there was that night in Carolina’s.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said, turning her head quickly away from me. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

We were at the far end of the bar, drinking our martinis and Sea Breezes, sharing cigarettes. She had begun smoking on our nights out, Camel Lights, and a cigarette was between her fingers now when her eyes widened with a shot of terror and she said, “Oh, Jesus,” and she turned away from me.

I thought for an instant she was gasping at my face, which was a gasper, really, but that wasn’t it. Behind me was the entrance and when I swiveled to grab a look, whom I saw walking in that entrance was Chester Concannon. I spun around again before he could see me.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “We have to get out of here.”

“Would he tell Jimmy?” I asked to the back of her head.

“Of course he would,” she said. “And that’s not all he’d do. Jesus. He has a wild crush on me, didn’t you know?”

“No,” I said.

“He told me on one of our nights out when he was bearding me. We got drunk together and he made a pass and told me. Jimmy and me is one thing,” she said, sliding off her stool. “But if Chester knew about you he’d go nuts. Come on, follow me.”

Without turning toward the entrance she headed for the rear of the room and I followed, hunching down so I might not be recognized from the back. We entered a short hallway with two lavatories and, at the end, an unmarked door. Veronica went to that door and opened it. Inside were shelves filled with supplies, toilet paper, and towels. There was just enough room for two to stand inside the closet.

“Did you know this was there?” I asked.

“No,” she said, with a laugh. “But good thing it is.”

“And you want us to hide from Chet in there?”

“I’m not the type to stay in closets,” she said. “I want you to hide from Chester in there. Thirty minutes.”

She left me in that closet, telling me that she would get Chet out of there before he saw me with her. I stood tall in the darkness, surrounded by the sweet menthol smell of urinal cakes, wondering at how far I had fallen that I had to hide from my clients in closets. This Veronica thing was impossible, I had told myself before and repeated it to myself inside that dark mentholated cave, but even as I swore to end it I knew I wouldn’t. It was something obsessional and foolish and perverse, but it had evolved into something else too, it had evolved into something close to love. Twisted, yes, forged from depravity and desire, yes, but there it was, like a nugget in my chest. And no matter how impossible it might have been, no matter how doomed, I would stay in that closet to keep it alive as long as I had to. When by the green glowing hands of my watch I could tell a half-hour had passed, I straightened my jacket and opened the door.

A woman standing in the hallway waiting for the ladies room saw me emerge from the closet and screamed.

“Funny,” I said with a shrug. “I thought it was the men’s room.” And then, with all the dignity I could muster, I walked past her back into the bar.

So, for safety’s sake, we didn’t meet in bars or restaurants anymore. When she called for me I came running to her apartment, straight as if on a string, and the night I was bang banging on my walls in frustration was no different from any other night. She called, I ran, and we rolled around her bed like cats, sometimes playful, sometimes lupine, always carnal, and it was worth everything.

And when it was over it was always the same.

“You have to go,” she said.

“Why?” It came out in a half-moan, dragged from the recesses of my sleep, a sleep that was eluding me in my own apartment but that attacked me as I lay in the warm muskiness of her bed.

“Because you do,” she said.

“Let me stay. Let me sleep just a little bit more.”

She pushed me hard, rolling me over toward the end of the bed, and I jerked awake in a panic of falling. “What?”

“You have to go,” she said,

“Just one night,” I begged. “Let me spend just one night over.”

“Absolutely not.” She rose from the bed and put on a heavy terry cloth robe. She took a cigarette from the pack on her bedside table and lit it, inhaling deeply, and then leaned against a wall with her arms crossed. Smoke leaked out of her mouth, covering her face like a veil. “Your clothes are scattered here or there. Pick them up on your way out.”

Generally, I had always believed there was no greater luxury after sex than to be alone. It is something about men, about the way our bodies work, about the physiological effects of orgasms in our brains. The neurotransmitters that are released by sex trigger those neurons that say turn over, pretend to sleep, maybe she’ll just go away. Give us a beer afterwards and a remote control and an empty bedroom and we’re halfway to heaven. Which is why men have invented the great after-sex lies: “I have to be at work early,” or, “I’m allergic to your cat,” or “I have to pick up my laundry before the dry cleaner closes.” The problem had always been getting away. Now I was desperately disappointed that she wouldn’t let me stay.

The reason for the desperation was clear to me that night, and it was more than just that nugget of love in my chest. Nothing existed in my life that I could yet be proud of and nothing ever had. Who I was just then, Prescott’s cabana boy, was no one I ever thought I’d ever want to be. But in her touch, her warmth, in her wet embrace, with Veronica I could lose myself. Her apartment had become a magic wonderland of sensuality and vice, a place separate from the rest of the world, which had suddenly turned even uglier for me. With her I was not Victor Carl, the shady lawyer who had been passed over by the profession, first duped and then bought by those he would have had as peers, instead I was part of something wild and lost and satisfyingly perverse. With her I metamorphosed into a piece of a puzzle that promised so much and that only the two of us could possibly solve. With her I… let’s just say with her I was someone else and someone else was very much what I wanted then to be. To force me to leave was to force me to become myself again. She didn’t know how cruel she was being.

“Don’t do this to me,” I pleaded.

“I’m doing.”

“You can’t just use me and then toss me out. I’m not a tampon.”

“No, you’re not as useful.”

“Why do you make me leave each night?”

She sucked smoke. “I like to wake up alone.”

“Well, tonight I’m staying.” I lay back in the bed, my arms crossed beneath my head.

“Then tonight’s your last night.”

I sat up. “You’re not serious.”

“I’m as serious as celibacy.”

“I bet Jimmy stays over.”

“Never,” she said.

“Really? What’s he like in bed?”

“The thing about men,” she said, holding the cigarette in her lips while she stooped to pick up my T-shirt and then tossed it into my face, “is that they see sex as a competitive sport. They want scores from the judges, a set for technical merit and a set for artistic impression.”

“I’m just curious,” I said, starting to dress.

“Well, how do you think he is?”

“Passionate. He’s a very passionate man.”

“He is.”

“Yes?”

“So are you, Victor.” With one of her bare feet she nudged a sneaker toward me. “Now put on your shoes and go.”

“When will I see you again?”

“When I call,” she said.

“I’ll be waiting.”

“Surprise me sometime, Victor,” she said dryly, holding the cigarette in front of her face. “Let the phone ring more than once before you answer it.”

Ever since the incident with the hatchback I had developed a small ritual upon leaving Veronica’s apartment. There were no windows in the hallway, but the elevator had a scuffed Plexiglas side from which the residents could see out as they descended to the cobblestone plaza. When the elevator opened for me I slipped in and searched through the Plexiglas to see if anyone was waiting for me outside. My plan, if I saw anything suspicious, was to get off at a lower floor and cower, but that night, as best as I could see in the uneven light, the plaza was deserted. When the elevator reached the ground floor I looked carefully out the front glass door before I opened it. Again there was nothing.

Slowly I slid out the door and walked along the shadowy edge of the plaza to Church Street, the little cobble-stoned street on which Veronica’s building sat. Like a little boy I looked both ways. Nothing, no car idling malevolently, no shadowy pedestrians lurking, no stray raccoons. Relieved, I walked down Church Street to 3rd, where my car was parked. I was leaning over, my key in the driver’s door, when I felt the hand clamp onto my shoulder.

I jumped, or I tried to jump, but the hand kept me pressed down on the ground like the gravity of some giant planet. I turned to see who was there. It was a tall bruiser, an older man with sallow yellow skin, a tan fedora, a loud plaid jacket, yellow pants, white shoes, a nose that had been run over by a forklift. He looked like an aging heavyweight retired to Miami Beach.

“You’re Victor Carl,” the man said in a ragged, nasal voice carved by one too many shots to the schnozzola.

“No,” I said. “You got the wrong fellow.”

Without taking his hand off my shoulder, the man reached into his plaid jacket and pulled out a piece of newspaper that he showed to me. It was a picture of Jimmy Moore and William Prescott talking to the press outside the courthouse, and there, behind Moore’s shoulder, inside an ominous circle drawn with black, was me. Not a bad likeness, I thought as I stared at it. The paper made me look heavier and more handsome.

“No, that’s some other guy.”

“It sort of looks like youse.”

“I got that kind of face,” I said, and it would have been a pretty brave line if my voice hadn’t cracked in the middle of it.

“Maybe it’s not youse after all,” said the bruiser. “Maybe not, you know, because the guy here in the picture, this guy looks like a handsome guy and you, you look like a punk. But there’s a man wants to see youse. If it turns out youse ain’t you then I’m sure he won’t want to see youse no more.”

“Huh?”

“Whatever. He’s waiting up the block, here.”

He squeezed the hand on my shoulder, yanking me away from my car and toward Arch Street.

“What about my keys? I left them in the car door.”

“From what I hear,” said the bruiser without slowing down, “this here’s become a very safe neighborhood.”

That was the sum of our conversation as he led me to Arch Street. The front, squared-off nose of some big white American car parked on Arch jutted out from behind a brick wall. I didn’t know whose car it was, I couldn’t tell if it was a limousine from what I could see. I expected it was Norvel Goodwin inside, or maybe Jimmy, but no matter who it was there waiting for me I knew it wasn’t a good thing to be snagged by a bruiser outside Veronica’s apartment after sticking my thing in her thang. I thought about running, but the hand was tight on my collarbone, squeezing so hard my shoulder rose as we walked. When we were closer to the car more of it came into view. It wasn’t a limousine, it was a Cadillac, long, shiny, dangerous with chrome. Its windows were up and tinted black so that it was impossible to see inside.

The bruiser stopped me just in front of the rear door. He knocked on the window and slowly the door opened. For a moment I saw nothing but the blackness inside. And then a man stepped out and smiled at me.

“How’s it going there, Sport?”

It was Jasper, the gregarious poker player at the Sons of Garibaldi Men’s Club, and he was smiling at me in a way I didn’t like.

“We want you should come for a ride with us,” he said.

“Thanks, but I’d just as soon go home alone.”

“C’mon, Sport, a short ride. I got someone here you need to meet.”

As he was speaking the darkened window on the front passenger side opened slowly, electrically, and appearing like a ghost at some boardwalk house of horror was Dominic, Bissonette’s second cousin twice removed, the hit man whom I had falsely accused of cheating. “Get in, kid,” he said softly and, with a push from the bruiser, I was in the car.

There was an old man on my left and Jasper got in so that he was on my right. It was a big car, with a wide bench seat in the back, and there would have been plenty of room if Jasper hadn’t jammed himself next to me. The bruiser closed the door and immediately went around the car to the driver’s seat. The bench seat was black leather; the car smelled of Brylcreem. The old man on my left was looking out the window, out into the night. He wore a cream-colored suit, his thick hands were carefully laid one on the other in his lap. There was a diamond in his lapel. Slowly, easily, we pulled out on Arch Street and the bruiser turned up 2nd Street and we drove on for a while, south, toward Society Hill Towers, without anybody saying anything. And then the old man spoke.

“I wanted to meet you, Victor.” His voice was soft and lightly sprinkled with an old world accent. When he turned I saw his face, pitted ugly, his hair gray but pulled back elegantly and heavily greased. “I thought it was time we should talk. Do you know who I am?”

“Yes,” I said. The word came out in a gush of breath that I had been holding once I recognized the man. I had seen his face in newspaper photographs, on mug shots flashed on TV, in gory hard-boiled articles in Philadelphia magazine. The man sitting next to me, his swollen hands calmly resting on his lap but close enough to my throat so that he could have reached up and strangled me before I let out a yelp, that man was the boss of bosses, Enrico Raffaello.

34

PHILADELPHIA HAS FIVE major spectator sports: football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and the Mafia wars. Whenever one of the subtle mob hits occurs somewhere in South Philadelphia or in the new ganglands of New Jersey, the papers and the television stations go crazy with coverage. There are photographs of the victim, sprawled in an alley or in his car, puddles of blood leaking from his newly created orifices. There are statements from the victim’s neighbors saying what a stand-up fellow he had been and that no, they hadn’t known, had no idea he was associated with the mob. The necrologies are printed in the papers like an honor roll. Speculation as to who ordered the hit and who performed it is rampant. And the charts come out; the deceased’s name is crossed off the list and everyone below rises a notch. The mobsters have nicknames, just like ballplayers: Chicken Man, Shorty, Weasel, Tippy, Chickie, Toto, Pat the Cat. We root for our favorite as he rises and drink a beer to him when he winds up on the front page of the Daily News, slumped over the wheel of his Cadillac, his once handsome and arrogant face disfigured from the force of the bullet that came in the back of the neck at close range and exploded out the front of his face, taking the jaw along for the ride.

For a long time there was peace in the city’s mob and folks followed the Phillies and the Eagles. But one night Angelo Bruno, the boss of Philly bosses, the man who kept the peace, was sitting in his car when his driver, a Sicilian named Stanfa, powered down Bruno’s window, through which a wiseguy with a shotgun blew apart Bruno’s skull. After the Bruno hit the necrology began to grow. “Johnny Keys” Simone, Bruno’s cousin, shot dead somewhere and dumped in Staten Island; Frank Sindone, Bruno’s loan-sharking capo, found stuffed into two plastic bags in South Philadelphia; Philip “Chicken Man” Testa, blown apart on his porch with such savagery that Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about it. And after that, about once every quarter, as regular as 10Qs from a Fortune 500 company, another one fell. Chickie Narducci, gunned down outside his South Philly home; Vincent “Tippy” Panetta, sixty, strangled along with his teenage girlfriend; Rocco Marinucci, found a year to the day from the Chicken Man’s incineration with firecrackers stuffed in his mouth; Frank John Monte, shot to death next to his white Cadillac; “Pat the Cat” Spirito; Sammy Tamburrino; Robert Riccobene; Salvatore Testa, the Chicken Man’s son; “Frankie Flowers” D’Alfonso. And after each of these unfortunate accidents the charts came out, names were crossed off, one by one the bigger players fell off the list and the smaller players rose. Nicky Scarfo was on top for a while, but the killing continued and soon Scarfo was indicted in federal court for racketeering and in state courts running from Delaware to New Jersey to Pennsylvania on numerous charges of murder. There was quiet during this period of uncertainty, but after Scarfo was shipped to the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, the high-security jail that replaced Alcatraz, and left there to rot, the battle for power began again.

Enrico Raffaello wasn’t even on the charts at the start of this second war. He had been peripherally involved with the mob, a friend of friends who were cousins to some of the boys, like almost everyone in South Philly. Enrico was a merchant. He sold pastries in the Italian Market, content, it seemed, to bake cannoli shells and mix the ricotta custard and sprinkle the filled shells with freshly ground cinnamon until he died. It was his son, “Sweet Tooth” Tony they called him, who was the comer. He was one of the guys you saw in the pictures of Scarfo as the boss walked triumphantly into court to pick up another twenty years here or forty years there or a Lucky Strike bonus of life without parole. Sweet Tooth was in the back, carrying the boss’s bag, smiling like a sweet fat kid from the neighborhood who was thrilled to be hanging around the downtown boys. But when it was decided finally that Scarfo was through, decided not by the feds or the DA but by the guys underneath who were sick of waiting, and a new war of succession broke out, bit by bit Sweet Tooth Tony’s name started rising up the charts. First he was just on the list of mob associates, then he was in the group of enforcers, then he was one of the lieutenants, and then he was listed as a possible successor, number four on the charts, but rising fast, number four with a bullet.

That bullet finally came in just below Sweet Tooth’s ear while he was waiting for his driver outside his father’s pastry shop on 9th Street. He had a pig’s ear in his mouth and was reading the sports section of the Daily News when a woman with a baby carriage passed behind him and stuck a silenced.45 into his neck just below the ear and pretty much blew Tony Raffaello’s head right off his body. Enrico rushed out of the store and found his son on the ground, his head twisted grotesquely, the blood filling cracks in the sidewalk and falling in a viscous stream into the gutter. The picture of Enrico on his knees, covered in his son’s blood, staring up at the sky and bellowing in agony as Sweet Tooth’s head lay cradled in his apron, made the front page of the New York Times and was nominated for a Pulitzer.

About ten days later there began a brutal flurry of killings. Mob leaders and lieutenants up and down the charts were wiped out in a veritable plague of violence until the charts themselves became obsolete. Businesses closed, people stayed home, every night another picture of a sprawled and bloody corpse made the papers as the city sickened from the spreading pool of blood. And then after a month of horror, after a month in which more mobsters died than in any previous year, after a month that forced the police commissioner to resign and the Pennsylvania Crime Commission to throw up its hands and the United States Attorney General to set up a special task force to investigate, after a month in which even those fans who bet in pools on the next mobster to fall turned away in disgust, after a month that put Philadelphia on the cover of Time and Newsweek and National Detective, after a month that has gone down in history as the “Thirty-Day Massacre,” after a month there was quiet.

It took the attorney general’s special task force and the newspapers a full year to reconfigure the charts, and it was a year of peace. No more bodies were discovered floating face down in the Delaware, no more bodies found in the trunks of abandoned cars under the bridge in Roosevelt Park, no more corpses sprawled on the cover of the Daily News. The government sent out its informants like an infantry of spies and they came back with word that there was a new boss with support from New York and a series of interlocking agreements among the city’s mobsters that kept everything peaceful and profitable. He was a strong man, a respected man, he was called the “Big Cannoli” by the cognoscenti, he was not a man to be trifled with, but he was an honorable man who through his strength would keep the peace. In one short year he had become a legend and his power flowed from Philadelphia through Atlantic City into New York and Pittsburgh and as far away as Las Vegas. He was the most powerful man in the city, in the state, he was the Big Cannoli, and on the first Monday of every month he visited the grave of Sweet Tooth Tony and left a pig’s ear on the mound of earth rising above the specially ordered oversized coffin.

“I want you to know, Victor,” said the Big Cannoli, sitting next to me in the back seat of that Cadillac, “I want you to know that I am not a violent man by nature.” His voice was soft, genteel even with the accent, a grandfather’s voice, a voice without obvious menace. It was the voice of Geppetto. I would have thought him a harmless old man, ugly but harmless, if I hadn’t known who he was. “I think I would have been happy as an artist, painting flowers on canvases. But such was not my fortune. I tell you this so you should not be frightened of me. The newspapers, they exaggerate so. Now my friend Dominic… You know Dominic, I believe, Victor.”

“Yes.”

“Dominic is a violent man. It’s in his nature, it’s in his blood. Even though he’s retired now, it still takes everything in my power to keep him under control. And Jasper, too. Such a nice man, Jasper, but there is a streak in him that is very hard to restrain. Lenny, my driver, was a boxer for years. You’d think a boxer would be violent, but not Lenny. He’s a sweetheart. Isn’t that right, Lenny?”

“That’s what my grandchildren say, Mr. Raffaello, so long as I treat ’em to taffy.”

“What Lenny did as a profession Dominic and Jasper do for pleasure. Such is the way of mankind. But that’s not my way, Victor. I am more like Lenny.” Suddenly his voice hardened. “It’s a good thing that I have people like Dominic and Jasper because without them, Victor, without them, I tell you, I don’t think I would get any respect in a world such as this.” He was almost shouting now. “Without them, Victor, I’d just as well be baking cookies.”

“You listen to Mr. Raffaello, Sport,” said Jasper.

Raffaello threw up his hands in a kindly shrug and when he spoke, his voice was soft and grandfatherly again. “I had two children, Victor. We wanted more, of course, but two was all we had. A boy and a girl. A millionaire’s family. Anthony and Linda Marie. You might have heard about Anthony,” he said, looking at his nails. “It was in all the papers.”

“I’m sorry about your son, Mr. Raffaello,” I said in a voice as soft as a whisper.

“Yes, well, these things happen. That leaves me with Linda Marie. Linda Marie is a sweet girl, a wonderful girl. I love her totally, believe me. Do you have a daughter, Victor?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, have a daughter and hold her in your arms and then you’ll know how much I love my Linda Marie. So it is with this much love that I say in all honesty my daughter is troubled. She is married to a man who doesn’t love her, a man who’d sooner keep the company of other men than sleep with his wife. Do you know her husband, the councilman?”

“I know of him.”

“Well, he is one of her troubles. And sadly, I am another. She has difficulty accepting my current position. I pay for a psychiatrist for her, an hour a day, five days a week, but it doesn’t seem to help. You see, along with her husband and father she has another problem, the fact that she’s a slut.”

Dominic quickly said, “Enrico, no, don’t say such a thing,” and Jasper started demurring to his boss, but the Big Cannoli lifted up his hand to stop them and they quieted immediately.

“I say this with a heavy heart. It hurts me to call my daughter such a thing. But it is the truth, a truth I can live with. Now, Victor, I can call my daughter a slut.” His voice suddenly deepened. “But don’t you ever.”

“You listening, Sport?”

“You see,” said Raffaello, his voice slowly falling back into calm, “I’m very touchy about my family. What do you think of my daughter, Lenny?”

“A very fine girl, a sensitive, pretty girl,” said Lenny without turning from the road, tilting his head up as if he were talking into a microphone in the ceiling of the car. “A princess, a queen.”

“It is well known among my associates,” said Raffaello, “to only speak well of my family. There were once men who treated my family with disrespect, Victor, and they’re not around anymore. Now there was a poker game not too long ago in which you were involved, along with Dominic and Jasper and certain other friends of mine, and in that game you treated my family with disrespect.”

“I didn’t mean to…”

Raffaello held up his hand and I shut up quick.

“You sound scared, Victor, and that is not what I want. I am not a violent man. I’m more of an artist, like I said. I should have been a poet. Do you read much poetry, Victor?”

“No.”

“Neither do I. I’ll be frank with you, I don’t understand it. Seagulls and clouds. But even so I feel, in my heart, that I have the soul of a poet. I should have had an education. There is so much I wanted to do. Now in this poker game you implied that Dominic’s cousin Zachariah…”

“Second cousin twice removed,” said Jasper.

“Yes. You implied that Zachariah was having an affair with my daughter and because of that I killed him. Such a rude comment is unforgivable, really.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I stammered, but before I could go on he quieted me with a soft gesture from his right hand.

“Now one reason for our visit,” said Raffaello, “is for me to tell you that this is not true. There was an affair, yes, and it pains me to say it. Zachariah was like a dog without any control, but I didn’t have him killed. If I killed all the men Linda Marie slept with over the years the Schuylkill would run red.”

“I understand,” I said into a pause.

“Besides, if I was going to kill Zachariah it would have been for the way he butchered second base.”

Jasper laughed, like a horse with a wheeze.

“You see,” Raffaello continued, “when I was told of the conversation at the poker game I realized you might have mistaken the silence and lack of denial by my associates as agreement that I had ordered the killing. That would have been a mistake. The silence was just that, silence. My associates know not to speak about my family. They have learned that over the years.”

“I believe you, Mr. Raffaello,” I said quickly. “I do.”

“That’s good, Victor. Now you may be wondering who did kill Zachariah. Well, the answer is that we don’t know. The federal prosecutor, as usual, has it wrong. It was not part of Jimmy Moore’s extortion of Ruffing, I am certain.”

“How are you so certain?” I asked.

“Victor, Victor,” said Raffaello, shaking his head. “You have to trust me, Victor. Jimmy is not a stupid man. A passionate man, yes, which he never fails to tell me when we break bread together, but not stupid.”

“If not Jimmy, then who?”

“Dominic, tell Victor what you told me,” said Raffaello.

Dominic twisted around in the front seat so he was facing me. “Zack told me, before he died, that he was in love in a way he had never been in love before. He told me it was dangerous and he had to be careful but that he was going to stop whoring around because this girl was so special.”

“Who is this girl?”

Dominic shrugged. “We don’t know, but when he told me this I could see that he was scared.”

“Victor, what we are telling you is the truth. Use this information however you want. But what I don’t want to hear anymore, Victor, is anything about my family in this trial. Do you understand?”

“I didn’t bring it up.”

“No, Jimmy’s lawyer did. But I have had representatives speak to Jimmy already and he has given his assurances. What I want from you is your promise that you won’t bring my daughter into it either. Can you promise me, Victor?”

Jasper leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You should promise the man, Sport.”

“I promise,” I said.

“That’s good, because I know you to be a man of your word. I know that Victor. And the reason I know that is because Dominic and Jasper also heard that promise and these are men who believe nothing is more important than keeping one’s word.”

“Nothing,” said Dominic.

“I understand completely,” I said.

“Yes, I think you do,” he said calmly. “I am not a violent man, you must believe that. I should have been a sculptor or a farmer, anything but what I have become. I don’t really have the temperament for it. But sometimes, when it comes to my family…” He shrugged. “When that happens, I become like an animal. Listen when I tell you this, Victor. It’s been known to happen. Now there is something else. You know that while we do much for the community…”

“We protect and serve,” said Jasper. “No different than the cops.”

“Though we do much good,” continued Raffaello, “we are not a charity. Like all businesses, we are forced to take our share of the economic benefits our protection allows.”

“A modest sum,” said Jasper.

“And we require that those involved in activities that aren’t government sponsored and thus not subject to normal taxation pay an even larger share.”

“Think of it like a baseball game,” said Jasper. “And we’re home plate. No matter how big a hit, you need to touch base with us before you score.”

“Do you understand the concept?” asked Raffaello.

“Yes, sir,” I said quickly.

“Now, our information tells us there is a quarter of a million dollars unaccounted for, money that was given by Mr. Ruffing but never received by Jimmy Moore’s organization. A quarter of a million dollars. Whoever ended up with that money never touched home plate. Inadvertently, I assume.”

“Mr. Raffaello is a very forgiving man,” said Jasper, shifting closer to me and leaning so close to my face that I could smell garlic and a touch of rosemary on his breath.

“But still,” said the boss of bosses. “We expect our share. Now one third of a quarter of a million dollars is…”

“Eighty-three thousand,” said Dominic. “Three hundred and thirty-three.”

“Let’s call it an even hundred thousand,” said Raffaello. “I always liked clean numbers. So, Victor, we’re missing one hundred thousand dollars. It is as if someone walked into my house, opened a drawer, and took one hundred thousand dollars from me. I’m a forgiving man, Victor,” but now his voice rose until he was screaming once again, “but to just march into my home and open a drawer and take from me, that I cannot forgive.”

“What happened to the money, Sport?” asked Jasper, still leaning close to me.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Find it for us, Victor,” said Raffaello, “and I’ll forget all about your disrespect for my daughter. You see, I can be forgiving.”

“You should thank the man,” said Jasper into my ear.

“But I don’t know where…”

“Find it, Victor,” said Raffaello, interrupting my pathetic whine. “And we’ll forget about the unpleasantness at the poker game. Otherwise…” He shrugged.

“Thank the man, Sport.”

“Thank you,” I said obediently.

“All right, we’ve taken care of our business,” said Raffaello. “Lenny, do you have something for our friend Victor?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Raffaello.”

Lenny pulled the car over and reached down for something and then turned around quickly. I ducked, expecting another shot to my eye. I was getting sick of these rides around town. But Lenny didn’t turn around to sock me with the back of his hand. When I recovered and opened my eyes he was holding a small white paper sack with slight grease markings on the bottom.

“This is for you, Victor,” said Enrico Raffaello. “It’s a cannoli, from my own special recipe. I hope you like vanilla custard. Now take my advice, Victor. A cannoli this rich you must not eat too fast. I never created the great art I dreamed of, but my cannoli come close. Eating one is like having sex. If it’s too fast, you just end up nauseous. But eat it slowly, carefully, let the custard melt in your mouth. You eat it right and the joy you experience will fill you with an unaccountable joy. You like sex?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, trust me, Victor, you eat it right, you’ll like my cannoli better. We’ll be hearing from you, I assume.”

With that the door opened and Jasper jumped to the street and jerked me out with him. “See you later, Sport.”

I leaned back into the car. “Thank you for the cannoli, Mr. Raffaello. By the way, sir, you didn’t, by any chance, just sort of happen to take a shot at me a few days back, did you?”

Raffaello leaned forward in his seat and smiled as sweetly as he could with a face such as his. “Victor. If we had taken a shot at you, you wouldn’t be around to ask such a question.”

35

ENRICO RAFFAELLO WAS almost right about his cannoli, it was heavy and crisp and I ate it slowly, letting the white custard slide down my throat like sweet, perfumed oysters. It wasn’t quite as good as sex, but after an evening with Veronica it was all I could have asked for. I sat in my car and ate the cannoli and let the cinnamon tickle my nose and bite after bite my spirits fell because, along with giving me that superb cannoli, Mr. Raffaello had opened a door I’d rather have remained shut. On the other side were danger and loss, but there it was, open wide and waiting for me. I didn’t have much choice. I ducked my head and stepped through and found myself the very next morning at the Sporting Club.

The Sporting Club was swank, which wasn’t exactly what I wanted in a gym. Gyms should be sweaty, smelly places, where muscle-bound lugs grunt as they move around great discs of metal and the rubbery thwack thwack thwack of a basketball echoes from the court. That wasn’t the Sporting Club. The Sporting Club was swank.

“I’m interested in joining,” I said. “And I wondered if I could look around for a bit.”

“Of course,” said the woman in the membership office. She wore white, her top stretched by a very fit pair of breasts, worked out, I was sure, on a Nautilus breast machine until they were every bit as taut as her thighs. “Why don’t you fill out this form first.”

They wanted to know my name, my address, my credit card, they wanted to know what I did for a living, who I worked for, my estimated yearly income. It was almost like the way potential dating partners sniff each other out at a party or a bar. Out of pride, I lied to make myself sound like a better candidate for their club, even though I had no intention of joining.

“Well, Mr. Carl,” she said, “let me give you a little tour.”

“How about if I look around myself, get a feel for the place, would that be all right?”

“Of course,” she said. “Take this pass and go right through there. The men’s locker room is on the left and there are signs to the various rooms.” Her gaze drifted down to where my chest would have been had I had one. “Be sure to check out our free weight room.”

I smiled back anyway and left the office, waving the pass casually at the beefy man in white guarding the entrance.

It wasn’t very crowded at seven in the morning, a few haggard souls trying to sneak their workout in before they were awake enough to realize how crazy it was to take an elevator seven floors just to bound up an endless flight of mechanical stairs. In the men’s locker room I grabbed a couple of towels and found a locker and stripped. I couldn’t help but look at myself in the mirrors that surrounded the room. What I saw was pathetic. I would need to join a gym someday, but not this one, not one so swank.

With a towel around my waist, I followed signs to the men’s sauna and steam rooms. The sauna was empty but in the steam room, lying on one of the tiled tiers, was a hard mound of flesh with a towel around its waist and over its face. I sat on a lower tier where it was still possible to breathe and waited for a moment as the steam floated about me and the sweat started sucking from my body.

When sweat dripped from my nose to my knees I said finally, “Enrico Raffaello didn’t kill Bissonette.”

“Good morning, Victor,” said Jimmy Moore, without lifting the towel off his face.

Concannon had told me that Moore worked out at the Sporting Club every morning, primarily by sweating out the alcohol from the night before in the sauna or steam room, depending on his mood. It was directly to the councilman that the door Raffaello opened had led, it was Moore whose answers to the big questions I needed to hear.

“Where did you gather your startling bit of information?” he asked.

“From Raffaello himself.”

“So you had an audience with the pope and the pope told you he’s innocent.”

“And I believe him,” I said. “No reason for him to lie, his hands are already crimson. Which raises the question I have raised before and to which I still don’t have an answer. Who killed Bissonette? Did you?”

He grabbed the towel off his face, sat up, and let out a long grunt that was like the baying of a great wounded mammal.

“If you want, councilman,” I said, “you can have your attorney present when we have this conversation.”

He pushed himself off his tier and stepped down, loosening the towel from his waist and letting it drop into the puddled steam slipping across the tiled floor to the drain. Beside the door was a cold-water shower and he turned it on. His muscles were turning slack and what was once a formidable chest was dropping, but what I noticed most clearly was the size of his prick, which was big, huge, like a bull elephant’s, it flopped down and hung there and the size of it was sickening. I wrapped the towel more tightly around my waist.

“I think I can handle this without Prescott’s help,” he said from inside the shower, water streaming down his face and body. “So you want to know if I killed the ballplayer. If I am a murderer. Because the way you figure it, it was me who beat him to death with a baseball bat.”

“You’ve lied to Chester and me about who did it and you’re setting up Chester for a fall. It doesn’t make sense unless you killed him.”

“Get dressed,” he said, wiping his face with a towel and opening the steam room door. A blast of frigid air swirled in. “We have time for a morning drive before court.”

“Do you know how I was first elected to City Council, Victor?” asked Jimmy Moore. We were inside the limousine now, driving north on Broad Street. Henry and the car had been waiting in the alley next to the old Bellevue Stratford, where the Sporting Club was situated. Inside the limousine was a tray of danish and a steel thermos, out of which Jimmy poured us each a cup of coffee. “Cream?” he asked.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“I ran on an anti-busing platform,” he said. “I opposed integration. I promised to keep our neighborhoods crimefree, which is political shorthand for white. You don’t have to use Klan language to grab the racist vote. Talk about maintaining the integrity of the neighborhoods, talk about the scourge of crime, talk about protecting the American dream of home ownership and maintaining real estate values, talk about busing and the electorate understands. I even got into a fistfight in the Council chamber over a Gay Pride Day. I was opposed to it, of course. In my district the politics of hate were good politics and all I wanted was my city post, my city car, the power to make deals, so they were my politics too. The papers hated me, I was a joke, except that I carried my district with seventy-three percent of the vote.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Drugs were the other people’s problem,” he said, ignoring my question. “You know much about the gospels? No, of course not. Saul, an agent of the Jews and the scourge of Christianity, on his way to Damascus has a vision, hears a voice. ‘Saul, Saul, why persecuteth thou me?’ It is the voice of Jesus. At that moment he becomes a new man, he changes his name to Paul, he becomes Jesus’s messenger on earth. Well, I didn’t hear any voice. What I heard was a silence. My own daughter’s silence. But it spoke to me just as clearly. ‘Daddy. Daddy. Why forsaketh thou me?’ And I didn’t have an answer for her. Not a one.”

He took a sip from his coffee and another, looking out the side window into the desolation of North Philadelphia.

“Now I do,” he said.

“One of our most important programs here at the Nadine Moore Youth House,” said Mrs. Diaz as she led Jimmy Moore and me through a tour of the facility, “is our community outreach program. Actually, it was at the councilman’s insistence that we began the program and it has become the cornerstone of our effort. So often the only place children in trouble can receive help is through the criminal justice system and by then it is often too late. Through our education and outreach programs we can get hold of these children and deal with their problems before they enter the criminal system. That makes all the difference, we’ve found.”

Mrs. Diaz was a handsome woman with broad cheekbones and strong hands. We were walking down a hallway running around the perimeter of the building. All the classrooms had windows facing the hallways, which gave the construction a large and airy feel, more like a fine office building than a prison school. We stopped in front of a classroom where a group of twenty teenagers, dressed alike in white shirts and navy pants, were sitting in a semicircle around a teacher in goggles performing a chemistry experiment.

“The day for our children starts early in the morning,” said Mrs. Diaz. “We have a regular school curriculum, supplemented in the afternoons with classes designed to meet the specific needs of the individual child. The afternoon classes include group therapy. What we have found is that these children go back to school with their scholastic skills improved to such a point that they excel, which is primarily why our graduates generally do so well on the outside. Through our monitoring and counseling program, which continues long after the children leave here, we have found that almost ninety percent have stayed off of drugs and out of trouble.”

“Explain to Mr. Carl where our funding comes from, Loretta,” said the councilman as we continued our walk down the hall.

“We get some support from the city,” she said. “Councilman Moore has been able to secure for us some federal funds. And of course there are private donations. Whatever you’d like to give, Mr. Carl,” she said with a warm smile, “would be greatly appreciated. And then CUP, Citizens for a United Philadelphia, has been extremely generous. In the past, whenever we have anticipated a shortfall, CUP has balanced our budget.”

We followed Loretta Diaz up a flight of stairs into a gym where a large class of young men and women in their blue pants and white shirts were marching, in short-order drill, like soldiers on the parade ground. A teacher was barking out commands, “Left face. Right face. Quarterturn. About face,” and the marchers were chanting together, to the beat of their footsteps, “We got to go home on our left, our right, we got to go home on our left, our right.”

“There’s a consensus growing around the country,” said Mrs. Diaz, “that army-type discipline helps build self-esteem. So-called boot camps. I’m not so certain about whether it works or not, but the President is enamored with the idea and so it helps with the grant monies. As our plans for the future are ambitious, everything we can do to increase our funding we do. Besides, the children seem to actually like it.”

“What exactly are your ambitions?” I asked as the footsteps of the marchers and the chanting rose around us. Left. Left. Your left, your right. Left.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought the councilman explained all that to you. The Nadine Moore Youth Home is a pilot program. We only have room in this facility for one student out of every thirty who are referred to us. Our goal is to build fifteen more here in Philadelphia and then expand into other cities. This home acts not only as a center for these children but also as a laboratory, and we expect our success here will serve as the model for a great bloom of healing. Our great hope,” she said, as the councilman surveyed the troops marching to and fro on the basketball court, something wet and glistening in his eyes as they chanted, Sound off, one two, little louder, three four, kick it around, one two three four one two – threefour, “our great dream,” she said, “is that for every child in this country struggling with drugs there be a Nadine Moore Youth Home to help her through her time of deepest need.”

“This is our next one,” he said. Henry had driven us to a vacant lot on Lehigh Avenue, across from a stream of crumbling row houses and boarded-up stores. A school was up the avenue just a bit. “The Art Museum fund-raiser gave us just enough to complete the effort. We start construction in two months. This will be twice the size of the facility you saw.”

“It certainly is a grand ambition,” I said.

“It will be her immortality,” said Jimmy Moore. “After she died I realized that what had killed my daughter was not someone else’s problem. It was everywhere. And I was in a position to do something about it. Something. For the first time I saw what politics could be about and it was not about hating or getting. That was when my passion reared and my mission began. First fight the dealers, then heal the children. We are making progress on both fronts and when I become mayor we’ll win it all. We’ll put the lords of death out of business and build those youth homes throughout the city. And not just homes, youth centers, boys’ clubs and girls’ clubs. I can do it. I will do it. It was as good as done before they set me up.”

“Who set you up?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe the mayor, maybe the dealers. I was in danger before the indictment. Why do you think I ride around in that limousine? My City Council car was shot up more than once by my enemies. But my black beauty is bulletproof now and I continue on. Then the feds, after consulting with the mayor, determined my fund-raising extortionate. And even if it is, so what? The money is going to the right place. But then came the murder and the arson and they decided to pin that on me too.”

“So you didn’t kill Bissonette?”

He turned to me and looked me square in the eye. “No,” he said without a flicker of his eye, without a hesitation in his voice. “Absolutely not. Why would I kill that boy? For money? That’s the problem with prosecutors, they’re so willing to sell out for a small piece of change they think everyone else is too. I’m on the track to something big, huge, and you’ve just seen the tip of it. Besides, did you know that the money Bissonette was able to mysteriously raise for Ruffing came from Raffaello?”

So that was what Raffaello had meant when he said Jimmy was too smart to kill as part of the extortion plot. What he meant was that Jimmy was too smart to fight him. “If you didn’t kill him, why are you setting up Chester to take the fall?” I asked.

“Because I don’t have a choice,” he said quickly.

“Bullshit.”

He let out a sigh, took out a cigarette, tapped it on its box, and lit it. “Maybe it is bullshit. Maybe I’m just a coward, I don’t know. I hire a lawyer, the best in the city, and I tell him to do anything he has to do to get me off and save my dream. He’s a hard bastard, clever, and what he tells me is that if he can’t prove who actually did the killing, the only way to get me off is to go after Chet. He told me we needed an attorney to represent Chet who wouldn’t get in the way. Someone he could control. First it was McCrae. But then he took his ill-advised trip to Chinatown and so we needed someone else.”

“And that was me,” I said bitterly. The cabana boy.

“He told me it was my only choice. That if it works right it will make the government’s case look so weak we might both get off.” Jimmy took a deep drag from the cigarette and let it out slowly. “So I told him to go ahead.”

“Even if Chester ended up behind bars for good.”

“What do you think, I like this? I don’t have a choice. No choice at all. We’re in a war here, fighting to build something grand and noble, but as in any war there will be casualties. Concannon might be one. I’ll take care of Chet, and he knows it. But my enemies are coming after me. I won’t let them win. If they do, it is the children who will pay the price. We need you to stick with us, to follow Prescott’s direction and foil the government’s plot against me. I brought you here so you would be aware of all you are endangering if you oppose us. Together we can make a difference.” He flicked his cigarette onto a tuft of weeds sprouting through cracked brick and it smoldered there. “If you want, I’ll put you on the board of CUP. A terrific position for a young lawyer. Together we can change the world for the better.”

That would be a terrific position for me, I knew. It was on charitable boards and political committees that lawyers found clients. Serve on enough boards, get enough clients, and you become a rainmaker, with the power to go to any firm in the city and name a price. I didn’t jump right away onto my hind legs and say, “Okay,” but I was thinking.

“So who killed him?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he spit out. “God, I wish I did. You’re the man with the theories, you find out. See if you can do any better than we did.”

I looked out over the vacant lot and then the neighborhood. There was something eerily familiar about it. “What number is this?” I asked.

“Nineteenth Street.”

Now I knew where I was. The old baseball stadium had been a block away. Connie Mack Stadium. Where the park had been was now a big modern brick church, like a giant McDonald’s, but when it had still been a ballyard my grandfather had brought me there to watch the Phillies play. He called it Shibe Park, its old name. We’d sit in the bleachers and chant, “Go Phillies Go,” and watch Willie Mays beat the hell out of the home team. Richie Allen and Clay Dalrymple, Jim Bunning and Johnny Callison. And Gene Mauch sitting in the dugout, his dark face in the pained squint that became permanent after the team collapsed in ’64. But what I remembered right then was not just the baseball but the young boy holding his grandfather’s hand, walking past the parked cars on 20th Street to get into the park. How had he become me?

“Where’s the rest of the money?” I asked, suddenly tired of the dog-and-pony show, tired of Jimmy Moore’s self-righteousness. “The missing quarter-million.”

“I don’t know,” he said, his arm spreading over his vacant lot. “But it’s going to end up here, I’ll make damn sure of it, and in the others we will build. I’m working on it as we speak.”

“Mr. Raffaello wants his share.”

“Not a penny,” he shouted. “They sell their poison right under his nose and it’s fine so long as he gets his cut. He’s a disgrace. I’d sooner die.”

“I’m sure he could arrange it.”

“Let him try. If he wants a war that’s what he’ll get.” He pointed a thick finger at me. “I’m ready to take him on and take on anyone else who gets in my way. We’re going to fill this vacant lot and fourteen like it with facilities that will heal a generation. It is my mission, and I will do anything to protect it. Anything. My mission is all I have left to care about now.”

I guess it all was getting to me, the false nobility, the lies, the inevitable bribes, a deal here, a settlement there, a position on an influential board. Was it so clear that I could be bought, was a “FOR SALE” sign printed on my face, unmistakable above my watery eyes. I hated it, especially here, where I felt haunted by the little shoe merchant and the young boy holding his hand. I couldn’t help my anger from bubbling out. Even so, I might have kept quiet if his prick hadn’t been so damned thick. But when he got all self-righteous on me I thought of the sight of him in that cold shower and I got even angrier and I said, “But that’s not the only thing to still care about, is it, councilman?”

“What else could there be?” he asked, his voice as plaintive as if there could be nothing.

“Fucking Veronica,” I said.

I regretted it immediately, regretted it all the more when he turned his startled face to me. It was twisted strangely into a mask that proclaimed both helplessness and need and, for the first time since I met him, Jimmy Moore was speechless.

But from what Veronica had told me and from the mask on Jimmy Moore’s face I could piece it all together. Still in a rage from his daughter’s death, he bursts into a crack house and sees her on the floor, helpless and high, about the same age as his daughter would have been, this pretty young girl on drugs, as pretty as his daughter. She might even have looked like her. And he shelters her in his car and takes her to a treatment center and saves her life, like he had been unable to save his daughter’s life. And he visits her, his surrogate, and he makes sure she is cured, and bit by bit some deep desire starts rising from the forbidden, locked portions of his soul and he finds that he can’t help himself, the unthinkable has become real, the impossible had become inevitable, and it is finer than any imagining.

36

YOU CAN LEARN EVERYTHING about a man by learning what he truly wants. I had seen the bricks and glass of Jimmy Moore’s greatest ambitions; they dwarfed my own in grandeur and worth. I felt a strange, sad sympathy for Moore, with his grand dreams of healing and his own hopeless love for Veronica Ashland, both built on a foundation of tragedy, and truly I hoped his grand dreams could all come true. But not over the rotting carcass of my client.

“We need to talk,” I said into the pay phone, taking no chances on a tap.

“My office, at five,” said Slocum.

“Forget it,” I said. “Last time I went there it made the front page of the Daily News.”

“You got some heat, huh?”

“Like Las Vegas in August.”

“Never been.”

“Hot,” I said. “Let’s find a bar.”

“Dublin Inn?”

“Too many ADAs. How about Chaucer’s?”

“Fine,” he said. “Make it later then. Eight o’clock. Something interesting?”

“You’ll think so,” I said, and I knew he would.

See, Prescott made a mistake, really. Had he treated me with the respect I craved, had he taken me to lunch as his guest at the Union League, at the Philadelphia Club, had he welcomed me with open arms into the fraternity of success, I might have sat quietly, willingly, and let Concannon eat whatever shit Prescott served him. But the bastard had threatened me, given me orders, turned me into his cabana boy, and that was his mistake. In the rush of my late-night prowlings with Jimmy Moore and his entourage, of my society functions, of my mentorship with Prescott, of my sexual obsession with Veronica, of my work and play with the Bishop brothers, of this new life that had seemingly been granted me, in the midst of it all I had lost my resentment for a while. But it was back, with a vengeance. It slipped over my shoulders like a favorite old sweater and it felt damn good. Even if the orders from my client prohibited me from actively engaging in the trial, even if my cut of the Saltz settlement and my deals with the Bishops and my directorship of CUP required my formal obeisance in court to Prescott, even if all that, my resentment still demanded I do something, anything, something, no matter the consequence. Concerning the mystery of who killed Bissonette, Jimmy Moore had said, “You’re the man with the theories, you find out.” So maybe I would.

What I had discovered from Raffaello was that Bissonette might have been killed because he was playing around with the wrong woman, so now all I had to do was find Bissonette’s final fatal love. Lauren Amber Guthrie and her jangling gold bracelets? Maybe. Some other woman with a husband bent for revenge? Possibly. Or was it Chuckie Lamb after all, silencing the one witness who could connect him to everything? And what about the missing quarter of a million dollars, two-fifths of which was owed to Enrico Raffaello and the rest of the downtown boys? I wanted answers and quickly, before Eggert started nailing the shingles on the roof of the jail Prescott was building around Chester Concannon and before Raffaello started pressing me for information. Which is why I had called the man with the grand jury subpoenas, my old friend K. Lawrence Slocum, ADA.

Chaucer’s was a friendly sort of neighborhood saloon with a famous shuffle bowling game, cheap paneling, stained-glass windows in the doors, and deep booths where groups of kids right out of college could sit and drink pitchers and gossip about other kids right out of college. When I first started going there it was filled with older, blue-collar types, with truck drivers, with lesbians who dressed like truck drivers, with college dropouts who ruefully discussed their dubious futures. But it no longer had that type of charm. Now the boys wore their baseball caps backwards, ponytails spilling out beneath the brims, the girls sheathed their long legs in black leotards, and they were all college graduates, discussing their dubious futures with pride. I still drank there, but now I felt too old to be a part and that was scary and sad both. I still remembered when it was a thrill just to be inside a bar, when the soft lighting and cigarette smoke and strangers on the stools whispered something so seductive I couldn’t believe I could just walk in, sit down, and order a beer. But now I was one of the older and the sadder and the people slipping in were younger, gayer, more vibrant than I. Now I knew what the older people in the bars used to think of me because I knew what I thought of this new generation. I wished they all would just go home to their mamas.

Slocum and I were sitting in one of those deep booths toward the rear of the bar. The waitress had given us each a bottle of Rolling Rock and a glass and each of us had ignored the glass. I almost liked Slocum. He took it all very seriously, as one would want a public prosecutor to take it all very seriously, but he had a sense of humor, too. It was a weary sense of humor, that was the only type a prosecutor would ever allow himself, but even a weary sense of humor put him leagues ahead of the rest. I told him the whole story of my meeting with Raffaello, although I left out the part where he called his daughter a slut. I still remembered that Jasper and Dominic believed nothing was as important as keeping one’s word, and though I almost liked Slocum, I wasn’t willing to bet my life on whether or not he had a connection to Raffaello. Everyone else seemed to in this burg.

“He said it was a jealous husband?” asked Slocum.

“He didn’t give me specifics.”

“So right now it’s just a mystery girl.”

“Right,” I said.

“And you want me to check it out?”

“Yes.”

“To send out my detectives to find that girl?”

“That would be terrific.”

“You want me to send out my detectives to find this mystery girl, the existence of whom was disclosed by the biggest criminal in the city, all in an effort to destroy my murder case against your client.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Larry, an innocent man is getting railroaded here.”

“Or maybe Raffaello’s lying. You ever consider that gangsters sometimes lie? Nothing happens in this town without him getting a cut. Maybe he was part of the whole thing and now he’s throwing out false leads to take the heat off his compares.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said. “Not for a minute. What I believe is that you’ve got the wrong guys facing death row and you don’t want to admit it.”

He shrugged, like he wasn’t certain that I was wrong. “Maybe, Carl. It happens. But you’re going to have to do your own investigating. How much you getting an hour for this case? No, don’t tell me, it’ll just make me ill. Earn your money, find the girl yourself.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth and looked at me for a moment. “But maybe I can help.”

I just stared at him and waited.

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “All right, I’m going to tell you something. I’m telling you this because I think there’s a chance, small, but a chance you may be right. But if it comes back in my face in some motion or in a newspaper article I’m going to be very disappointed, do you understand? And you don’t want to disappoint me.”

He paused and took a drink from his beer.

“When we showed you the physical evidence,” he continued, “we didn’t show you everything. There was a book.”

“Shakespeare?” I asked.

“More like Ma Bell.”

“A phone book?”

“A personal phone book.”

“You withheld Bissonette’s little black book?”

“Now don’t get like that,” he said, raising a hand in protest. “The office made a determination that it wasn’t appropriate to release Bissonette’s personal phone book, as it might tend to embarrass certain, how should I phrase this, certain well-known and highly placed women in the city. These women and their families have privacy rights. This wasn’t like a hooker’s book with the names of her johns. There were no crimes committed here.”

“So there’s this book.” I pressed on.

“You want another beer?”

“Tell me about the book.”

“I’d like another beer.”

I raised my hand for the waitress like I was in grade school and ordered two more Rocks when she came. “All right,” I said. “Tell me about the book.”

“Well, this book has the names of the usual suspects, a lot of women with reputations.”

“Let me see the book.”

“Are you listening to me, Carl? I said we’re not disclosing the book. There are names in there that if you saw them your jaw would drop to your knees, world-famous singers, athletes, wives of heavy politicians.”

“Like Councilman Fontelli’s.”

“This was his book. But there aren’t just phone numbers there. He rated them, gave them stars, one to five, like a damn critic.”

“Just like a baseball player to be obsessed with statistics. But that’s good, then,” I said. “We can use that book to find the girl he fell in love with. She was a five-star for sure.”

“There’s more than one five-star name.”

“Just give me the five stars to check on, then.”

“Some are just initials, some without numbers.”

“Well, whoever this mystery woman is, it’s someone in the book,” I said. “A man falls in love, he puts the number in his book.”

“You sound like you have a book of your own, Carl.”

“More like a few paper slips with hand-scrawled numbers.”

“You ever find a number you don’t know whose it is?” asked Slocum, taking a long gulp from his beer, his eyes, behind his thick glasses, showing amusement.

“All the time.”

“What do you do then?”

“I call it. ‘Hello, anyone there single and under fifty-five?’”

“Oh man,” he said. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to be married.”

The waitress came with two more Rolling Rocks, the green long-necked bottles fogged with cold. “Two more,” I said.

“So this is what I’m offering here,” said Slocum after the waitress left. “You give me the name of any women whose possible involvement you’re investigating and I’ll tell you if she’s in the book and her rating. You can take it from there.”

“Linda Marie Raffaello Fontelli.”

“Three stars,” he said. “I would have figured more with all that practice…”

“How about Lauren Amber Guthrie?” I said quickly.

“Where did that name come from?”

“I recognized her photograph in the love box.”

“And you withheld relevant information about a homicide from me?” He shook his head at me sadly. “I’ll let you know if she’s in there tomorrow. Any others, you just give me a call.”

“Tell me something else,” I said. “Tell me what you know about a drug dealer named Norvel Goodwin.”

He stared at me for a long moment, took a drink from his beer, and then stared at me some more. “What the hell are you into?” he asked finally.

I shrugged.

“Norvel Goodwin,” he said, shaking his head. “One of the worst. We’re onto him, but he’s tough as hell and he’s got a good lawyer. Bolignari.”

“Tony Baloney,” I said. “I have a case with him.”

“Well, no matter how good a lawyer Tony is, it’s only a matter of time. You don’t step up like he is stepping up without paying for it. He was big in West Philly for a while and then dropped out of sight.”

“When Jimmy Moore burned him out?” I asked.

He gave me another long look. “That’s right. Now he’s back. There’s been a lot of violence in the East Kensington Badlands as he pushes his way into other people’s territories. Fights over street corners. The five-year-old who got a bullet in her head last week, cover of all the papers?”

“That was terrible.”

“That was Goodwin. A stray bullet from just another fight over another corner. But all of a sudden Goodwin has a lot of muscle and he’s taking over a lot of territory. He’s a stone-cold killer.” He shook his head. “What the hell are you into now, Victor?”

I wouldn’t have told him even if I knew.

37

JOSIAH BLAINE WAS A shriveled old scoundrel who huddled before his rolltop desk late into the night in his second-floor law office two blocks away from the courts in City Hall. I’m speaking now of a different time, when the law was a less pervasive thing and a ten-thousand-dollar case was as big as they came. Josiah Blaine practiced law at the turn of the century, representing envelope makers and hat blockers, collections mostly, first the dunning letters and then the confessions of judgment, attachments of the bank accounts, foreclosures, all for fifty or a hundred dollars, plus interest, plus costs. He owned a building at 6th and Green in the old Jewish section and once a month, on the first of the month exactly, except on Saturdays when it was impossible to get the Jews to pay him because they couldn’t touch money on Shabbos, an excuse to get away with an extra day he would have told you if you asked him or even if you hadn’t, he would roam the hallways, bent at the waist, banging on the doors and shouting at Mr. Pearlstein and Mrs. Himmelfarb and Mr. Carlkovsky, my great-grandfather Carlkovsky, to come up with the rent or face eviction the very next day. His wanderings through the hall were in the early mornings, too early for his tenants to escape his dreaded monthly knock on the door. And true to his word, those who were late would find the men in their apartments hauling out the mattresses, rolling up the rugs, tossing pots out the window to the street, where they clanged to great effect, clearing the place for a new extended family that had come up with the deposit and first month’s rent.

When Josiah Blaine grew too arthritic to march through the hallways of his slum on Green Street, he sponsored Everett Cox to the bar so he would have someone to collect his rents on the first of the month and to file his confessions of judgment with the court. When Everett Cox, incapacitated by great quantities of alcohol, found himself unable to rise early enough to effectively collect the rents, he hired Samuel Amber as a clerk to do it for him, promising to study him in the law, a promise he was unable to fulfill because of the great quantities of alcohol. But Amber studied on his own and it was finally Josiah Blaine, now over eighty and rapidly losing his mind, who sponsored him before the bar. It was this Amber, of the Bryn Mawr Ambers, though in those early days they were not then of elegant Bryn Mawr but of Fishtown, it was Amber, Lauren Amber Guthrie’s great-grandfather Amber, who began to add some semblance of modernity to the office’s practice of law. He hired clerks to do the menial labor, he bought drinks for fellow lawyers in the bars surrounding City Hall, he obtained a position with the city from which he was able, for a small percentage to the city solicitor, to shuttle a nice piece of the city’s legal work to the firm. Everett Cox insisted that the firm hire his son, Everett Jr., who embezzled city funds, a crime that it cost a considerable amount for Amber to buy his firm out of, but there was now enough work for more clerks and more lawyers and eventually more partners. By the time Josiah Blaine died, mad as a hatter, threatening his nurses with eviction, the offices had moved to the Fidelity Building, a corner suite, and there were eight names on the door.

In the firm’s offices now there was a painting, on the frame of which a brass nameplate read JOSIAH BLAINE, OUNDER. The face in the painting was noble, blue eyed, a ferocious moustache like the elder Holmes, a fine head of hair. It was a face of solidity, of propriety, a founder’s face, but it was not the face of Josiah Blaine. Lauren Amber had told me the truth one late night as we lay together in my bed. Her great-grandfather had found the painting among the bric-a-brac of an estate he was administering and thought it projected the proper image.

On an afternoon when our trial was recessed due to a pressing engagement Judge Gimbel had with his dentist, I was sitting in a tapestried wing chair directly under that very painting of Josiah Blaine. The offices of Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox were not in One Liberty Place but in one of the older, less obtrusive buildings in the city. Blaine, Cox was one of Philadelphia’s older, less obtrusive law firms, with well-monied clients and estate lawyers managing the wealth of the city’s grandest grandes dames. The firm’s two hundred lawyers practiced respectfully, discreet litigation, sensible corporate work. The bankruptcy department was exiled to a lower floor so as not to make the corporate types nervous. There was something so solid in the dark wood paneling, something so white-shoed and blue-blooded, something so foreign to me that I felt as if the fake Josiah Blaine in the painting above my head was staring down at me with those cold blue eyes, demanding my monthly rent, threatening me with eviction if I didn’t come through.

“Mr. Guthrie will see you now, Mr. Carl,” said the receptionist. “He’s sending his secretary up to get you.”

That was the way they did it in the big firms, they sent emissaries for the visitors to summon them into the meetings. I didn’t like being summoned, but Guthrie had said he wanted to meet and I had some questions to ask my dear former partner, a cuckold prone to violent rages, questions about his wife, from whom he had separated, and about a man with whom she was cheating while they were still together, a man who now was dead. I was out to find a murderer, so with the afternoon free I had told Ellie to set up the meeting and she had.

When the emissary from on high came I recognized her.

“Hello, Carolyn,” I said. She was a tall African-American, pretty, competent, and an awesome typist. I knew about the typing because she had been our secretary before Guthrie brought her to Blaine, Cox, along with the files he stole.

“It’s good to see you, Mr. Carl,” she said as she began to lead me through the wide hallways of her new firm.

“How are they treating you here?”

“They pay us for overtime.”

“Terrific.”

“And we work plenty of overtime.”

I followed Carolyn through winding hallways of wood and secretaries, remarkably busy for seven in the evening. When Carolyn worked for us she was always out the door at 4:58 on the nose. “I have to catch the train,” she’d say, “or there’s nothing else to get me home at a reasonable hour.” Now, getting paid for overtime, she seemed to have no trouble catching the later West Trenton Local. It’s funny what a little thing like time-and-a-half will do to a train schedule.

“Guthrie, you bastard,” I said after Carolyn had led me into his office.

“You look like crap,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“Hey, what are friends for? Sit down, Vic. So this is your first time in my new digs, right? What do you think?”

What I thought was that this was everything I had ever wanted and I resented the hell out of him for it. The big office, the leather couch, the burnished desk, the window overlooking City Hall, the freshly painted walls and fancy phone and computer on his desk for his e-mail. I recognized the painting behind his chair. I pointed at it and said, “Wasn’t that in our offices?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Excuse me a moment while I call the police. You must have stolen it along with the files.”

He winked. “I’ll messenger it over tomorrow if you want.”

“I want. Along with the files.”

“If only I could, Vic. Truthfully, they’ve been more headache than anything else. I’d love to dump them. But the clients all wanted to stick with me. Hell, there’s more than enough work here to keep me busy.”

“What about the Saltz case?”

“I asked Lou what he wanted to do and he said he thought I was a prick for leaving and to let you have it.”

“He said that?”

“What did I care, it was a dog. But I heard you got a settlement anyway. You guys ever find that accountant?”

“No.”

“And a settlement even so. I should get a part of it, don’t you think? After all, I brought it in. A referral fee?”

“Sue me.”

“I don’t sue friends, Vic.”

“No, you just screw them in the ass.”

“Still sore, huh?”

“What gives you that idea?” I asked while looking out the window.

“Maybe I can make it up to you?”

“I never figured you for a suicide, Guthrie.”

“So hostile, Vic? Have you considered therapy?”

“I’d rather buy a gun.”

“It was only business. I understand Lizzie is finally hooking up with Community Legal Services.”

Word traveled fast, especially when the word was bad and it was about me. I didn’t want to go into the whole sorry mess, especially not with Guthrie. “It’s a consentual thing,” I explained. “I’ve been doing more criminal and investment work than she felt comfortable with. When she found they had an opening she decided she would take it.”

“That’s terrific for her,” said Guthrie. “It’s where Lizzie belonged all along. And it makes what I wanted to meet with you about easier for everyone. The reason I wanted to get together is that Tom Bismark was asking about you. You know Tom? The managing partner here?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, though I did. Not personally, the Tom Bismarks of the city didn’t waste their time with second-raters like me, but I had seen him in one of the bars with Jimmy. He had been out with his wife, cheating on his mistress, or so Jimmy had said.

“Tom caught you on the news with this trial of yours, the Jimmy Moore case. How did you get that, anyway?”

“They scoured the city for the most desperate shyster they could find and my name naturally came up.”

“No, really.”

I shrugged. I didn’t want him to know that what I had said was the absolute truth.

“Well, he saw you on the news and asked me about you. It seems they’re trying to build up their white-collar crime department here and are looking for some laterals with trial experience. I told Tom you’d be terrific.”

“You said that? Why?”

“’Cause you’re a friend, a buddy.”

“Skip it.”

“It’s the truth, Vic, nothing but. I gave him a glowing report and he wants to talk to you about joining the firm.”

“This firm?”

“Of course. After the trial.”

“Why would this firm be interested in me?”

“Frankly, I don’t know, Vic. I thought they’d have more sense. But you’re in a high-profile case, I lied about your ability, things are just breaking right. Don’t let this opportunity slip through your fingers.”

“I’m doing pretty well by myself right now,” I said. “It wouldn’t be so easy to just up and join here. Leases and stuff.”

“Hey, Vic. No pressure. Forget it if you want.” He leaned back at his desk and smiled at me. “But I know you. You’re just like me. This is something you’ve always wanted, and when it’s offered to you you’re going to jump for it. Like a show dog. Look at this office, look at the paneling on the lobby walls, paneling an inch thick. Look at what you can be a part of. You’re just like me, Vic. You want it. Set up a meeting with Tom after the trial.”

God, how I had hated Guthrie. I had hated his clothes and his shoes and his handsome twisted face and his supercilious manner and his slicked hair and his ability to absorb insults as if they were compliments. The idea of ever again becoming his partner was unthinkable, but now here I was about to be offered a job at his new firm, the job of my dreams. When he said it was something I had always wanted he was right. When he said I would jump at it he was right again. And when he said I was just like him I hated the very idea of it, but I guess, dammit, he was right about that too. Beth could have convinced me otherwise, maybe, but she had gone off to serve the poor and so I was left with becoming Guthrie. God help me.

Although he didn’t know it, by reminding me how very alike we were Guthrie was confirming all the more my suspicions about him and Bissonette. I knew how angry I would have become if everything I had gained in a marriage to an Amber was falling from me in an affair between my wife and some broken-down ballplayer, I knew how desperate, how irrationally ruthless, how murderous. And I knew something else, something I had learned with great gusto from my own carnal knowledge of his wife before she was his wife and which was confirmed by Slocum after consulting with Bissonette’s little black book. Lauren Amber Guthrie was a five-star in bed, someone almost worth dying for.

“What’s really going on between you and Lauren?” I said, steering the subject to where I wanted it. “I was really saddened to hear about the problems.” I lied, yes, but with sincerity.

“They’re only temporary, trust me,” he said, but the way his face fell into a strange, sad cast I knew he was lying too.

“Were you playing around on her, Sam?”

“Jesus, no,” he said quickly. “It wasn’t like that at all.”

“Then what?”

He swiveled in his chair to look out the window. “It just happened. Come on, Vic, you of all people know what she’s like.”

“Which is what?”

He took in a breath of frustration. “Flighty. Maddeningly independent. With the attention span of a mosquito.”

“So she was cheating on you, was that it?”

“I don’t think I want to talk about it, Vic.”

“You don’t think your problems with her will affect you here at your firm, do you?”

He didn’t answer right off, but I had suspected the answer. Married to an Amber, the partnership decision on him, two or three years hence, was assured. If he was just a Guthrie, with no name, no contacts, nothing but ability, he would be out on his butt within six months. “We’ll work it out,” he said. “I know we will.”

“Well, at least Bissonette’s out of the way, right?”

It was the way he turned and looked at me that said everything I wanted to know. His head swiveled and his eyes were so full of pain and fear. His jaw quivered, his face paled, the sweat on his forehead glistened with an oily sheen. It was on his face as clear as an affidavit. His wife had been screwing Zack Bissonette and he knew it, he knew it, he knew all about it, and the knowledge was killing him. I was ready to bet then and there that it had killed Bissonette, too.

I walked into the courtroom the next morning deeply distracted. It wasn’t just that I suspected my former partner of being a murderer. That was almost a pleasant thought. I had no idea of how to prove it, of course, except by talking it over with Lauren, with whom I had already set up a dinner at a far too expensive restaurant, but I figured that when I found out enough I’d simply put Lauren on the stand, have her identify the picture, have her tell about her husband’s violent rages, and then stand back and let the jury draw its own conclusions. Afterwards, I’d turn whatever I had over to Slocum and let him do the legwork to clear up the murder charges. But that wasn’t all that was on my mind. My distracted air that day arose from the offer that had been magically bestowed upon me.

The night before I had lain in my bed thinking of being at Blaine, Cox. Veronica hadn’t called and I hadn’t been able to sleep, but I didn’t miss her or my sleep that night. I stayed warm into the early hours thinking about my own burnished desk and leather couch, thinking about my visitors waiting for me under the fake portrait of Josiah Blaine, thinking of my name on that letterhead. It was coming, it was coming, late maybe, but coming all the same. I would call Bismark, Tom, now that we would be working side by side, I would call Tom when I had a chance and set up an interview.

“Good morning, Victor,” said Prescott as I set my bag on the table. “Eggert’s putting on an accountant who did work for Citizens for a United Philadelphia today. In a few days it will be the executive director of the committee. We have to be very careful in questioning these witnesses, since CUP is in a very sensitive position. It’s almost here as a defendant. I’ll handle both examinations.”

“Of course, sir.”

“Fine. And I don’t expect you’ll be speaking to my client outside my presence again, do you understand?”

“I asked the councilman if he wanted his attorney there and he said no.”

“Do it again and I’ll pull your ticket,” he said rather sweetly. “And don’t doubt that I can.”

I set out my notebooks and papers and pads and placed my briefcase underneath the table. When I was set I turned around to scan the audience. Chester was standing in the corner of the courtroom talking with the councilman and Chuckie Lamb. I noticed Leslie Moore and her sister, Renee, seated side by side behind the defense table. There was Herm Finklebaum, the toy king of 44th Street, in the back. And then I saw someone I didn’t expect to see at all.

On the aisle, alone, sitting erect, a tall, bald man, wearing a very fine suit. I recognized him right off. He was Tom Bismark, managing partner of Blaine, Cox, my new boss to be, here, I assumed, to see me at work. He would be disappointed to find I was asking no questions today, or any day really. I smiled and he smiled back, so I went over to formalize our introduction.

“Mr. Bismark, hello. I’m Victor Carl.”

He stood and shook my hand. “Yes, I know, Victor.” He spoke quite crisply. “Or is it Vic?”

“Whatever.”

“Sam Guthrie has spoken very highly of you, Vic.”

“Good old Guthrie,” I said. “If you’re here just for the show, I won’t be doing much today. We’ve agreed that Mr. Prescott will be handling today’s examinations.”

“That’s fine,” said Tom Bismark. “Just fine. That’s exactly as Bill and I discussed it.”

“Bill and you? I don’t understand.”

“Oh, I’m not here for the show, Vic,” he said. “I’m working. Blaine, Cox is corporate counsel to CUP. I’m here to make sure the reputation of our client is not besmirched in this trial.”

“I see.”

“I’m certain, Vic, that you’ll cooperate in every way possible.”

“Sure, Tom,” I said, and I actually winked. “Anything I can do, you let me know.”

I sat down at the defense table and started doodling on my yellow pad. So it wasn’t just the Saltz money, or my fees, or my deal with the Bishop brothers that were at risk. And it wasn’t just my prospective directorship on CUP or the councilman’s grand dreams of good works, either. A job had been added to the mix, not a job at Talbott, Kittredge, no, that would have been a bit too obvious, but at Blaine, Cox, yes. Stay quiet, smile, stop asking those foolish questions, stop barging in on the councilman’s morning shvitz, just sit back and let Chet take the rap and the future was mine. I could do that, yes I could. I could play ball, yes I could. Yes I could. Maybe.

There was something so wrong here, and not just the idea that I was for sale. I knew what I was, knew it in my pained heart: I was small-time. There are those in the world destined to be names, those who might fight their way to near namehood, and those, like myself, who would give it all up for a handful of change. And that’s what troubled me here. I wasn’t being offered a handful of change, I was being offered everything. The price was far too high. Play ball and your dreams will all come true could only mean that playing ball involved something bigger and dirtier than I could now imagine. Dreams don’t come true on the cheap. And it could also only mean that there was an opportunity for me not to play ball. I didn’t see it yet, couldn’t see any other option but to follow along in court like a lap dog, but it was there, it had to be, or so much pressure would not have been brought to bear. As I drew ferociously on that pad, circles and diamonds and six-cornered stars, I decided then and there to keep looking for answers. See, I could play ball, I could sit back and keep my mouth shut and be the best little cabana boy these pricks had ever seen, but only when I knew all that I would have to kick under the carpet for my lucre. If I had any nobility at all it was this: I would not sell myself short.

38

THAT VERY EVENING I DROVE through the wilds of Northeast Philadelphia, huge shopping plazas and multiplexes and rows of stores selling pizza and pharmaceuticals and Buster Brown shoes. As I searched for one specific address on Cottman Avenue I passed the Toys ’$$$ Us, passed the Herman’s World of Sporting Goods, passed the Clover discount store, passed the John Wanamaker’s department store. This was the part of the city that looked like every other place in America, strip malls and chain stores, glowing plastic signs held high over the landscape by great metal stanchions. I passed the Northeast High School grounds and then spied the numbers I was looking for and turned left into the lot. It was a low brick building, L-shaped with only one entrance, right in the crook of the L. I drove around the lot a bit, just to get my bearings, and then parked near the entrance. The metal letters bolted into the brick above the door read: ST. VINCENT’S HOME FOR THE AGED.

There was a lobby with hospital lobby furnishings, plush orange chairs, bare coffee tables, nondescript prints of flowers on the green walls. Out of that lobby was one door that led inside to the home and in front of that door, behind a counter, was a guard. He wore blue with a cop hat and as I got closer I could see the gun. A large register squatted atop the counter.

“I’m here to visit one of the patients,” I said. “A Mrs. Connie Lamb.”

“Are you family?” asked the guard. His nametag said James P. Strickling. He was an older man, with deep lines of dissatisfaction fanning out from either side of his pinched mouth.

“A friend of the family,” I said.

“After eight I can’t let you in unless you’re family,” he said.

“I’m sort of a cousin,” I said.

“Well, then, I sort of can’t let you in,” he said.

I knew what that meant. I could read it in that dissatisfied face as clear as a tabloid headline. I slipped my wallet from my back pocket and pulled out a twenty. “I just want to say hello.”

He looked at me.

I pulled out another twenty. “Just to cheer up the old lady.”

He looked at me.

I opened my wallet wide and stared inside. I pulled out a five and two ones. “That’s all I have.”

“That’s not enough,” he said. And then he laughed, a big hearty laugh that shocked me, coming as it was from this dour-faced man behind the counter. “Take your money back, son. If I could be bought I wouldn’t be worthy of this uniform, now would I?”

I took a closer look. It was a private security agency uniform, some sleazy outfit that hired retired guys off the street, gave them a gun, and stuck them behind a booth as fodder should anything go wrong. What I figured, as I embarrassedly picked up my money, was that the uniform wasn’t worthy of this Mr. Strickling.

He picked up his phone. “I’ll get an attendant, we’ll see if a visit’s all right.”

While a heavy woman in a nurse’s outfit waited for me on the other side of the door, I was required to record my entrance in the register. Strickling checked my driver’s license and then pointed out where I should sign. I signed and he filled in the date and time.

“You’ll have to sign out, too,” he said. Then he winked. “Enjoy your visit, Mr. Carl.”

I followed the heavy woman down the hallway, past a meeting area with a television on, past a recreation area with men and women sitting in their chairs and playing chess or crocheting or just plain shaking. And there were the rooms, of course, many with their doors open, the residents lying in bed, waiting.

“I’m sure Mrs. Lamb will appreciate your visit,” said the woman attendant. “All she ever sees is her son.”

“He here today?” I asked.

“Not today,” she said.

“Are visitors allowed to stay overnight?” I asked.

“Of course not,” she said, looking at me sideways.

“I didn’t think so.”

This is what I had been told by Veronica and Chester both. I had been told that Chuckie Lamb was visiting his mother the night that Bissonette had been beaten to comatosity, that he had stayed overnight because she was especially ill that day, that he had been in the nursing home the whole of the time of the beating. I didn’t buy it. Chuckie didn’t seem the type to care that much. And did I mention the smell? It was a medley of favorites: cat piss and overcooked string beans and the sharp scent of the alcohol swab they give you before they prick you at the doctor’s. I couldn’t see Chuckie spending more than five minutes at a time in that smell.

“Mrs. Lamb,” said the attendant in a loud voice, leaning over the bed once we were inside her private room. Chuckie Lamb, the dutiful son, had sprung for the best. There were flowers in a vase and nice curtains and on a table was a boom box and a stack of cassettes, opera. “Mrs. Lamb. You have a visitor.” She straightened up, smiled at me, and stood by the door while I approached the bed.

Mrs. Lamb stared past me, up at the ceiling, her gums working one against the other, her eyes darting back and forth, back and forth, not seeing me in their journeys back and forth. She was a small, toad-faced woman, shriveled, her skin, even with its deep cracks, tight against her face.

“Hello, Aunt Connie,” I said.

Just the gums worked in response to my greeting.

“She likes it if you hold her hand,” said the attendant.

It sat atop her sheet like a withered claw. I leaned over and touched it, barely able to hide my revulsion. “You look good, Aunt Connie.”

Just the gums working. She seemed as delighted to have her hand held by me as I was to hold it. I had wanted to ask her some questions, see if I could get anything definitive from her about her son’s alibi, but I wouldn’t get it out of that face, those lips, those god-awful gums.

“Doesn’t say much, does she?” I said when we were out of there.

“Not anymore,” said the attendant. “Your aunt’s been very sick. There were times we didn’t think she’d make it, but she’s stronger than she looks.”

“When she gets seriously ill, is it possible then for a visitor to stay over?” I asked.

She didn’t stop walking me back to the lobby as she spoke. “If we believe the end might be imminent, and there is a private room, then sometimes we let immediate family stay. But no nephews, Mr. Carl, just spouses, siblings, or children.”

“Does cousin Chuckie come often?” I asked.

“All the time,” she said with a smile. “He’s a very devoted son. I’ll be sure to let him know you were here.”

“That’s not necessary,” I said. “We’re not so close anymore.”

“I can’t do that, Mr. Carl,” said Strickling when I had been deposited back outside into that lobby. “Those books are private records.”

“But it’s very important,” I said, reaching again for my wallet and then stopping when he shook his head. “Listen, Mr. Strickling. I’ll level with you. I’m a lawyer.”

“Well in that case…” said Strickling, laughing at me.

Being a lawyer might have meant something at some time, but not anymore. I knew I was in trouble when I was forced to resort to the truth. “I’m representing a man accused of a murder, Mr. Strickling, a murder I think Mr. Lamb might be involved in. He says he was here overnight the night of the murder. I just want to check it out.”

“Oh, right. I seen you on TV,” said Strickling. “You’re representing Councilman Moore.”

“His aide, actually. I just want to know if Chuckie was here the night Zack Bissonette was beaten into a coma.”

“I saw Bissonette play down at the Vet,” said Strickling. “What a bum. I remember once, ninth inning of a tie ball game, slow bounder to second, the guy kicks it. He kicks it. Like he thought he was playing soccer. Two runs scored.” He took a deep breath. “Well, seeing as you were on TV and all, what’s that date again?”

That was it, I guess. Lawyers were as nothing in the new scheme of things, as were scholars and doctors and businessmen. But have your face flashed for a few seconds on TV and all of a sudden you were somebody to be trusted, to be revered, someone to do favors for. I gave him the date and he searched below the counter for the applicable register. With a heave he lifted it up and turned it around to let me look. There it was, Chuckie’s signature going in at 9:37 P.M. the night of the murder and not leaving until 6:45 the next morning.

“Could this have been faked?” I asked.

“No, sir,” said Strickling. “In fact, I signed him out. That’s my writing there. I was on the late shift. So I can tell you for a fact he didn’t leave between midnight and six-forty-five.”

“Any other exits?” I asked.

“Just emergency exits, and alarms go off if they’re used. We’ve had some thefts and we have lots of drugs here, so we’re pretty careful.”

“And that’s his signature?”

He turned the book around and looked. Then he opened the most recent register to a few days back. There was Chuckie’s signature signing in and out. It was the same.

So that was it. I shrugged at Strickling and he smiled at me and wished me a good night. I left the lobby and stood outside at the entrance and thought a bit. I believed the registers because I believed Strickling. He had two jobs at that place, to carry a gun and to keep the registers, and Strickling would do both jobs with an integrity I could only admire, not match. So Chuckie Lamb hadn’t been threatening me because he had killed Zack Bissonette. Maybe he had ended up with part of the quarter of a million and was trying to protect his stake, as likely a possibility as any, Chuckie the thief. But he wasn’t Chuckie the killer. Too bad, too, because I would have liked nothing better than to nail Chuckie Lamb for murder. Well, maybe one thing would be better: nailing that bastard Guthrie.

39

I WAS IN MY OFFICE, working late revising my opinion letters to be appended to the Bishop brothers’ prospectus for Valley Hunt Estates, when the phone rang. I didn’t have time to answer, I was already late for my dinner date with Lauren Amber Guthrie, but thinking it might be Veronica wanting to change our plans for later in the evening, I picked up the receiver and said, “Victor Carl.”

It wasn’t Veronica.

“Victor. I need to talk with you. It is extremely urgent.”

From the soft, rounded tones, from the precise pronunciation, from the lockjawed superiority of the voice, I knew who it was.

“I don’t have time to speak to you now, Mr. Osbourne.”

“You took my car, Victor. My father’s Duesenberg. I must have it back.”

“It was lawfully seized by the sheriff, Mr. Osbourne. There are papers you can file if you believe the judgment we have against you is improper. Otherwise it is going to be sold.”

“My car, Victor. It is a classic, the only memento I have left of a more glorious time.”

“If you want, Mr. Osbourne, you can have your daughter bid for it at the auction.”

“After having the police stomp through her property she has refused to help me any further. I have offered you all the money I have. Victor, you must stop this harassment. You simply must. You don’t know what you are doing to me. I have prospects, grand prospects, but you are ruining them. You are making me feel like a hunted animal. I am not an animal, Victor.”

“We need to sell the car, Mr. Osbourne.”

“Have you no compassion? I’m a man, Victor. If you prick me, do I not bleed?”

“I believe that is my line,” I said flatly.

“If you poison me, do I not die?”

“I’m not trying to hurt you, Mr. Osbourne. Make me a final settlement offer in writing and mail it to me and whatever it is, no matter how low, I will urge Mr. Sussman to accept it. I promise.”

“If you wrong me, shall I not revenge?”

“Good-bye, Mr. Osbourne. I have to go,” I said, and then I hung up the phone.

It rang immediately afterwards, but I didn’t pick it up again. Since learning from the Bishops that Winston Osbourne was an old school chum of William Prescott’s, I hadn’t enjoyed my moments with him as I had in the past. I think it was the grayness of it all that did it. The dun-colored skies of that bleak autumn, the haziness of my own prickly moral dilemmas, of my own twisted arrangements with Prescott, it had all turned the crisp blacks and whites of the world into a muddle. Things just weren’t as simple as I had pretended them to be when I sat down with Winston Osbourne’s wife and destroyed his life. Though at that moment, with the phone tolling on my desk, I didn’t want to judge myself for what I had done in the now-distant past, I couldn’t help but know I had done something deep within the gray. And I couldn’t help but sympathize with Osbourne’s plight and his attempts to maintain his position in the club that I was still desperate to join. Whatever it was that was working its way through my spine and into the recesses of my intellect, I found I could no longer gleefully despise him. I would indeed call my uncle Sammy. I would tell him the whole situation. I would advise him to leave it at the car, to cash in the Duesenberg, and then mark the note as satisfied. My uncle Sammy, surprisingly, was what Morris would have called a mensch. He would do it if I asked him, and I would ask him. I would let Winston Osbourne off the hook.

Lauren was waiting for me at Restaurant Tacquet, a small bistro nestled in a Victorian hotel smack in the middle of the Main Line. It was suburban chic, large bay windows, almond and blue walls with a stenciled border, pale green ceilings. Charmingly informal and gallingly expensive, it was a very in place for the horsey set, just down the road from the Devon Horse Show grounds. Lauren sat at a trapezoid table by one of the windows. Beside her on the table were long fuchsia flowers in a narrow black vase. She had ordered a red wine and was deep into the bottle already by the time I showed up.

“I was afraid you were going to stand me up, Victor,” she said in her soft, breathless voice, reaching out her braceleted arm, fingers pointing down for me to take hold of. “I was feeling like one of those sad blue-haired ladies who dine alone each night, as if I had jumped into my future. It was too horrible to bear, so I ordered some wine.”

“Chateau Lafite Rothschild, 1984,” I read from the label.

“Appropriate, no? Pour yourself a glass and we’ll toast.”

I did as I was told.

“To the renewal of our… Well, to the renewal of our whatever,” she said with a gay laugh.

We clinked glasses and I took a sip. True to its name, it was rich and powerful and slightly exotic. I let it linger on the back of my tongue for a moment before I swallowed and took another mouthful right away. Even with my Rolling Rock palate I could tell it was magnificent.

“So how is your friend Beth doing these days?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said, content to leave it at that, and as far as I knew she was. It was I who was missing her terribly. We still hadn’t talked since she walked out on me from that witness room. But her office now was sadly empty of all her personal effects. Just a file cabinet and a desk and a wastepaper basket.

“It’s too bad about Alberto.” The “r” rolled lightly off her tongue.

“What happened?” I asked.

“She dropped him. It looked like things were going so well and she just up and ended it. And no one knows why. Poor Alberto was devastated. It appears he was in love. He’s a very serious young man but apparently your Beth made him laugh.”

“She has that talent.”

“A simple thing like that and Alberto was lost. If I had known that was all it took, I would have learned to tell a joke.”

“You do all right.”

“But not with the serious ones. I could never have gotten Alberto to laugh.” Lauren stared at me and twisted her head slightly, giving me the impression her eyes were boring into mine. “I could never get you to laugh much either. But I’m still willing to try.”

I broke the moment by dropping my gaze and taking a sip of wine and then another. “Actually, Lauren, I’m here on business.”

“Please, no. Victor. Don’t tell me you are only wooing me as a client. Do you do divorce work now? All right, darling, you can represent me, but only if you promise to forget all about that silly old precept against sleeping with your clients.”

“That would be against the code of ethics.”

“Which would make it all the more fun, no? The best sex is always surreptitious. If nothing else, marriage has taught me that.”

“I don’t do divorce work.”

“Good. I’ve already hired Cassandra. She’s a tiger, I hear.”

“Guthrie deserves something for his years with you, don’t you think?”

“I let him sleep in my bed for a good part of the time, Victor. What more could he want?”

“Money.”

“Don’t be vulgar. Besides, Cassandra says we have a case.”

“Was he cheating on you?”

“Men don’t cheat on me, dear.”

“So it was the violence.”

“Something like that.”

“How violent is he? I was just wondering, you know. What exactly do you think Guthrie is capable of?”

“That’s the second time you asked about Sam’s violent tendencies.” She looked at me with a touch of appraising coldness in her blue eyes. “I’m beginning to see a pattern.”

Lauren was a lot of things, dissolute, depraved, dissipated, but she was far from stupid. If not born with the twin handicaps of being very rich and very pretty there is no telling what she could have accomplished.

The waiter came over to our table before Lauren could say what was on her mind. His accent was French but I suspected it was fake. Lauren ordered the mixed greens and a fish. I ordered lobster ravioli in a vodka cream sauce and a steak au poivre. She ordered more wine. When the waiter left, Lauren sat back in her chair, crossed her arms, and frowned at me.

“Frankly, I’m insulted, Victor. Pumping me for information like I was a common street tart.”

“I could never accuse you of being common.”

“Sweet boy. How did you find out about Zack?”

“He took a picture,” I said. “From a remote-controlled camera, I think. The police have it, along with scores of others.”

“It’s a good likeness of me, I hope.”

“Actually, no. The camera was up high. The picture is only of your back.”

“But you recognized me anyway. How encouraging.”

“It was the bracelets,” I said, indicating the diamond studded, rune engraved gold bracelets that lay spectacularly on her delicate forearm. “And a certain way you grabbed at his balls.”

“Darling of you to remember, Victor. You told the police, of course, who the unidentified figure was.”

“No, I didn’t,” I lied.

“My Galahad.”

“I just want to know what happened,” I said.

“You just want to know if my taste for beefcake had something to do with the beefcake’s murder, is that it? You want to know if my husband killed him, is that it? Because if it is my husband, then your grubby little politico client might just get off, is that it?”

“That’s it,” I said.

“Once again, Victor, the girl from Bryn Mawr is going to disappoint you. Pour me some wine, please.”

I poured her the wine from a new bottle the waiter had brought. She drank it quickly, too quickly for its price. She was still drinking it when the salad and ravioli arrived. My ravioli were light and radiant. I sopped up the dregs of the cream sauce with thickly buttered bread. I could feel my arteries clench. Lauren merely picked at her greens between deep drafts from her wineglass.

“How much do you want to know?”

“As much as you want to tell me.”

“Wonderful. We won’t discuss it at all.”

I shook my head and she reached out a hand and cupped my chin.

“All right then, I’ll tell you everything. It was at that vile little club he put his name on. We went there now and then. Guthrie had run off to the bathroom. He was always running off to the bathroom. They don’t make men with bladders anymore, Victor. It’s true. All the good bladders are gone. While he was away Zack came over and asked if everything was satisfactory. He asked it with a smile that I recognized from my own mirror. So I told him no. Which was the truth, Victor. I had married Sam with the best intentions. My little piece of rebellion. I mean, he wasn’t a Biddle or a Pepper, but then he wasn’t anything scandalous either.”

“Like a Jew,” I said.

“Maybe you should go to the men’s room and straighten yourself, Victor. Your chip is showing.” She smiled at me, a broad, cold smile. “My intentions with Sam were always honorable, but things simply weren’t working out. I had thought him insouciant at first. But that was an act. Underneath he is very earnest. I don’t like earnest, do you?”

“That’s not how I think of Guthrie.”

“Marry him and find out. A very perspirable, very earnest young man. We should have lived together first. I would never have made such a mistake. But Mother wouldn’t have it. So instead I married him and found myself sadly disappointed. I began to dally. Discreetly, while he was at the office. Just minor bits of fun here and there. Decidedly dry, decidedly unearnest fun. So when this very handsome, very well-built man asked me if I was satisfied, I said no. He had the most marvelous apartment, a real bachelor pad. All kinds of wonderful toys.”

“I saw them.”

“Yes, I suppose you did. We had a wonderful few afternoons together.” She laughed in spite of herself.

“How did Sam find out?”

“Oh, so you know that too. A detective, hired by my earnest husband to discover if I was cheating on him.”

“And when he found out he went apeshit,” I said.

“What a pleasant term. Yes, he went apeshit. He hit me in the face with the back of his hand, knocked me clear over the bed. I had a perfectly beautiful bruise. I must tell you, Victor, it was the most passionate I had ever seen him. What a night we had.”

“And then he went off to find Bissonette.”

“No, Victor, I’m sorry.”

“Yes, he did. You’re protecting him now.”

“No.”

“How can you be sure?”

“By the time Sam got the report I was already through with Zack. He had broken it off, actually. Some foolishness about being in love. No, after Zack there was my personal trainer and then a heating contractor, working on our pipes, and then a florist, a sweet Englishwoman named Fiona, and they were all listed in the report too. And they’re still very much alive. By the time Zack was beaten we were in the middle of an earnest but ultimately futile reconciliation. So you see, Victor, it wasn’t Sam after all.”

I didn’t respond. Instead I sort of grunted with disappointment. The waiters whisked away our appetizer plates and brought our main courses. My steak, thick filets in a deep brown pepper sauce, seemed too much to eat just then.

“Suddenly,” I said, “I’m not hungry.”

“Doggie bags are such bad form, Victor. Eat. You look a little peaked. But I must say it is charming that you think me worth a homicide.”

She smiled at me, her impossibly wide, sexy smile, but then it withered into something arctic.

“But it wasn’t me you thought he would kill for, was it, Victor? It was the name, it was the money, it was the slot at the family firm. You’re a monster, do you know that? Both of you bastards. You belong together. At least poor dead Zack was honest. All he wanted from me was my body.”

I dropped my gaze down and saw my steak sitting there, charred and thick in its sauce, malignant with peppercorns. I cut into the meat. It was blood-red inside and I realized I was more than not hungry. I was nauseous, lost. I was adrift without a clue.

Someone was lying about killing Bissonette: Enrico Raffaello lying to throw us off the scent, or Jimmy Moore lying to save his political career, or Lauren lying in one last gallant gesture to her soon-to-be-former husband. Or maybe no one was lying. Maybe the murderer was someone else, a jealous husband I hadn’t yet stumbled upon. Or Norvel Goodwin, threatening me off the case to try to keep his drug-related murder of Zack Bissonette a secret. It could be anyone or no one, as far as I was concerned, because all my hunches had been all wrong and I had no more hunches to follow. Prescott would have his way with his cabana boy after all and there was nothing I could do about it.

“Excuse me,” I said to Lauren as she sadly separated the flakes of her trout with her fork and I rose to go to the men’s room. But once I reached the glass-enclosed bar, instead of turning right and heading into the hotel lobby, where the lounges were, I turned left, out the door, down the ramp, out and across the side street to the parking lot and into my car. I could see Lauren’s back through that bay window. So what if I stuck her with the check, she could afford it. I had someplace I had to be. Lancaster Avenue to City Line Avenue to the Schuylkill Expressway to I-676 to Race Street into Olde City and the converted sugar refinery and the loft bed where something golden awaited me and where, like a convict leaping the fence, I could escape from my life.

40

VERONICA IS WAITING FOR ME, naked, languid in her bed, legs slung carelessly about a twisted sheet, arms resting on a pillow above her head, breasts leaning on either side of her narrow chest. Her hair is wild, tangled, the room smells of her, it smells of deer in suburban forests, of raccoons. She doesn’t turn her head to look at me as I stand over her bed, staring at her, overcome.

“You took so long to get here,” she says.

“You shouldn’t leave your door unlocked.”

“How did you get in the building?”

“An old lady with grocery bags.”

“You took so long to get here I started without you.”

“It looks like you finished, too.”

“It is never finished.”

I undress hurriedly, like a schoolboy at the pool while others are already splashing. I yank off my shoes without untying them, my pants end in a pile. A sock lies limply against the leg of her bed. A button pops as I fumble with my shirt. With her I feel young and clumsy, competent only as long as she tells me what to do. I want her to watch me undress, but her head is turned away, she is lost somewhere. Wherever she is is where I want to be.

“Mr. Lee, what is your position?” asked Eggert from behind the courtroom podium.

“Executive Director of Citizens for a United Philadelphia.”

“And what exactly is Citizens for a United Philadelphia?”

“We are a political action committee. We collect funds and then support political candidates we feel have the best chance of ensuring that Philadelphia prospers and that this prosperity is shared by all members of the Philadelphia community, not just the privileged few. We also spend money organizing community groups and on voter registration drives, not to mention our prime charitable project, the Nadine Moore Youth Centers, providing full-time drug rehabilitation for troubled teens.”

“Is your organization connected with Councilman Moore?”

“The councilman is chairman of our board of directors.”

“And Mr. Concannon?”

“Mr. Concannon is also on our board.”

“And have you supported Councilman Moore in his previous elections?”

“The councilman is exactly the type of public servant we are looking for, a forward thinker who is determined not to let anyone get left behind.”

“Yes, I see,” said Eggert. “Are you aware of any plans of the councilman’s to run for mayor?”

“We have asked him to run.”

“We?”

“The board of the committee.”

“On which the councilman sits?”

“Yes, but he abstained from the formal vote. There is a lot to be done in this city and we believe he is the one to do it. The youth centers are just the start of his plans.”

“Has the committee been raising money for the councilman’s mayoral campaign?”

“Yes, and we have been surprisingly successful. The support out there is way beyond what we had expected. There is a great excitement citywide for the councilman.”

“How much have you raised so far?”

“Over two million dollars.”

“Was Mr. Ruffing a contributor?”

“Oh yes, a very generous contributor.”

“How much did he contribute?”

“That is confidential, sir.”

“I ask the court,” said Eggert, “to instruct the witness to answer the question.”

“Answer the question,” growled Judge Gimbel.

“But, sir, that is precisely the type of question I can’t answer and be faithful to my duty to our contributors.”

“Answer the question, Mr. Lee,” said the judge, “or you will go to jail.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Not five hundred thousand dollars?” asked Eggert.

“No, sir, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“Did you ever receive any cash contributions?”

“Never. We made it a policy never to accept cash. In fact, the councilman insisted on that. Everything had to be by check, everything had to be on the straight and narrow.”

“How did you get Mr. Ruffing’s check each month?”

“Mr. Concannon brought it over.”

“You mean the defendant Concannon.”

“Yes, the man sitting right over there.”

“Did he ever bring you cash from Mr. Ruffing, too?”

“Never.”

When I slip beside her she turns from me, showing me her back, long and slender, the vertebrae marching with precision down the shallow valley. I reach over and take hold of her breast and bite the lobe of her ear. She stretches like a house cat and snuggles back until her buttocks are spooned against my groin. She twists to make herself comfortable and lets out a soft purr. Her arms are still above her head. I brush her hair away from her neck, it smells wild, abandoned. It is a mustang’s mane. I kiss her there, on the wild-smelling neck, soft oyster kisses, wetting the down on the nape. It quivers beneath my tongue, turns febrile. I rub her nipple between my fingers, it swells slowly, like a bruise, as I rub. I squeeze harder. She shifts her position once again. Her nipple grows hard as a tack, my fingers hurt, I squeeze harder. Her neck rears and I begin to suck at its side. She reaches down between her legs and takes hold of me and squeezes. She is wearing a ring, the metal bites into my flesh. I suck harder at her neck, I play with her skin between my teeth. She yanks her neck away.

“You’ll leave a mark,” she says.

“Let go of me.”

“No.”

I grab her hair and again pull it away from her neck and bite at her back. She locks her legs behind mine and squeezes harder. I take hold of her ankle. We are shackled together, like prisoners, chained together like lifers at a slag heap. I pull her leg back, she breathes in sharply and then squeezes hard. I can feel myself deflate.

“You let go and I’ll let go,” I mumble through teeth still in her neck.

“I don’t want you to let go,” she says.

So I immediately open my teeth, let go of her ankle, release her nipple from between my fingers.

“No,” she says with a disappointed shrug, even as she pulls her knee up to her chest, turns toward me, curls into a ball, and, without ever letting go, places me, bruised, deflated, lolling, places me into her mouth. As before a judge, I rise.

“Now, Mr. Petrocelli, what were you doing on Delaware Avenue the night of the fire at Bissonette’s?” asked Eggert.

“Sleeping in my cab.”

“Why were you sleeping in your cab on Delaware Avenue?”

“I was tired. It’s a long shift.”

“And when did you wake up?”

“About five in the morning, when I heard the sirens.”

“What were the sirens from, do you know?”

“The fire trucks.”

“Where were the fire trucks going?”

“To the fire.”

“Where was the fire, Mr. Petrocelli?”

“At that club.”

“Bissonette’s?”

“That’s it, yeah.”

“Now, when did you fall asleep, Mr. Petrocelli?”

“About an hour earlier.”

“That would be four in the morning?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“It’s not unusual for you to catch a nap on Delaware Avenue at four in the morning, is it, Mr. Petrocelli?”

“It’s a long shift.”

“Just before you went to sleep at four o’clock in the morning, tell the jurors what you saw that night, Mr. Petrocelli.”

“I saw the car.”

“Where did you see the car?”

“It was leaving from behind the club.”

“Bissonette’s?”

“Like I said, yeah. It flashed its brights at me as it came out.”

“What kind of car was it, Mr. Petrocelli?”

“I got a good look at it under the streetlights there.”

“What kind of car was it, Mr. Petrocelli?”

“I couldn’t help but notice it.”

“What kind of car was it, Mr. Petrocelli?”

“It was a black limousine.”

Her mouth is silk, her tongue, her soft lips thick with passion. I run my hands through the tangles in her hair, the strands are thick, greasy. I am on my back, she is on her knees, crouching over me, her hair spilling down, obscuring her face. She is working, like a squirrel over a nut she is working. Her legs, smooth as felt, rub against my legs. Her head bobs in her work. My hands in her hair, over her ears, I pull her off and up so that she is stretched over me. The smell of game is in the air, quail. As I kiss her I taste my own saltiness. We lay like that, her stretched out on top of me, kissing gently, sweetly, passing the saltiness back and forth, suspended as in a hanging prism, but even as our mouths lay upon each other just as gently, even as our tongues dance about each other just as sweetly, like waltzers floating arm in arm across a wooden floor, even as we try to hold on to the moment our bodies are picking up the tempo, her hands pressing into my side, my grip on the thick muscles of her thigh, her foot, toes splayed, pressing down on my own, my knee, her knee, my teeth, her hip. I grab her tight and spin around and she is beneath me now, reaching for me. I pull my hips away, away from her gropes, and drag my tongue down from her neck, between her breasts, down.

“And what did your investigation of the fire find, Inspector Flanagan?” asked Eggert.

“A hot spot in the basement, just underneath the bar area.”

“What exactly is a hot spot?”

“It’s a place where there is damage beyond that which we would expect to see from a normally spreading fire. The hot spot is where the fire started.”

“What kind of damage did you find to indicate this was a hot spot?”

“Well, in this basement, for example, there were pots and pans being stored, metal racks, cans of food, that sort of thing. A normal fire, there maybe would have been some damage, but since a normal fire rises, not as much as we found. There was an area down in the basement where certain metal objects had just melted, not charred at all, just melted, as if they were made of clay and someone had stepped on them. You wouldn’t see that as part of a normal fire. And the lower walls of the basement were singed. A regular fire goes up, a fire set with chemicals spreads out and down, which is what this looked like.”

“Did you perform a chemical analysis in the basement?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what did you find?”

“There were trace elements consistent with a great deal of kerosene being burned in the basement. We checked with Mr. Ruffing and he stated that there was a small amount of kerosene kept in the basement, but not a sufficient amount to have left the quantity of trace elements we found.”

“Why would a fire in the basement burn the whole building, isn’t the basement floor cement?”

“Actually, yes, it was, but the walls were wooden and, more importantly, the joists in the basement were all wood. Once the joists catch the entire foundation is weakened and most likely the building will collapse.”

“Is that in fact what happened to Bissonette’s?”

“Yes.”

“Did you, in the course of your investigation, come to a conclusion as to when the fire started?”

“Based on the evidence, as we could best put it together, it started sometime between three and four-thirty in the morning. It wasn’t called in until ten to five.”

“Did you come to a conclusion as to how this fire was started, Inspector?”

“Yes, we did.”

“And what was that conclusion, sir?”

“Arson.”

She tastes of prairie dogs and coyotes, angry, taut and electric, oily, ancient, of something untamed and dangerous. Salt pork. Beneath me she quivers, she howls, soft, ominous, inhuman. I am biting into the flesh of a live snake. She digs her thumbs into my biceps, her heels kick at the small of my back. I fight to maintain control, first with my tongue, spelling out mysterious words in dead languages, then my arms, straining as they grab at her clavicles, her neck. My head leaps forward and like a wrestler I am on her, pinning her arms, my face pressing into hers. We breathe together in the struggle, hot wetness passing from her lungs to mine and back again. I slip an arm around her body and flip her over. Her legs tangle about themselves as she spins. With my arm I sweep her knees to her chest and then I am atop her, one arm across her breasts, the other hand grabbing tight at her elbow. I spin around her from one side to the other. I am in a classic riding position. Two points for the takedown. She tries to lift up with her arms and I break her down. She growls when I enter her. Our rhythms are in opposition. There is thickness there, resistance, despite my ferocity I drop into her slowly and a force in opposition rises as I pull back. She straightens her legs and suddenly I fly into the air, lost for an instant, then we are back to the slow insistent pounding. I fall on top of her and bite her shoulder. She takes my hand and starts to suck at my fingers. It accelerates, the pounding, the breaths. I am igniting atop her. She straightens her legs and I fly once more through the air, ungrounded, untethered, suspended, lost somewhere above the unceasing Colorado.

“And what did Chester Concannon say then, Mr. Grouse?” asked Eggert.

“He said some of the city’s finest citizens had already contributed to the committee, this CUP. I asked him who.”

“Did he give you names?”

“Yes, sir. He rattled off a whole list of prominent businesspersons. It was a very impressive list.”

“Did you agree then to make the contribution?”

“Well, no, not really. I’m a Republican, you see.”

“What did the defendant Mr. Concannon say then?”

“He mentioned a few other contributors, including Mr. Ruffing.”

“Did you know Mr. Ruffing?”

“Oh, yes. We worked on a development deal in Hatboro-Horsham once. His place had just burned down and I told him that it was a terrible shame what happened.”

“What did Mr. Concannon say then?”

“He told me that, yes, it was a great shame. And then he said, and I remember because it gave me chills, he said it was a great shame but that Mr. Ruffing had fallen behind in his contributions to the committee.”

“What did you do then, Mr. Grouse?”

“Then and there, Mr. Eggert, then and there I wrote out a five-thousand-dollar check to CUP.”

I lay beside her now, my legs stretched, my arms resting on a pillow above my head. The sweet cloak of sleep slips across my brain and my head turns to the side. There is a sharpness to the room, it is hot, moist, it smells like the Carnivora house at the zoo. I want to sleep, I don’t have much time, I know, before I will be evicted, but with her leg tossed carelessly over mine, I want to sleep.

“Let’s try something,” she says.

“Too tired,” I mumble. “I’m exhausted.”

“But that’s the point. To get so exhausted that everything else disappears, until it all fades silently away and nothing matters but the fading away.”

“I’m there.”

“I’m not.”

“Let me sleep.”

“I can still hear the traffic, I still know my name.”

“Veronica.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Let me sleep, please. Just a minute.”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

“I love you,” I say as I slip away into a shifting dreamy thickness. She curls her head on my chest and brings up a knee to rest on my hip and I smell the wilderness in her hair. The slight weight of her body presses me down and I slip beneath her unbridled scent and drift and I know with a searing certainty that the nugget is real and I do love her and I want her with a gnawing pain and she will never be there for me and I love her and there is nothing I can do about it because I am asleep and dreaming.

“Your Honor,” said Eggert, standing erect, his voice infused with satisfaction. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The prosecution rests.”

41

THE LAW OFFICES OF ANTHONY BOLIGNARI, P.C. was printed in gold letters above a rendering of the scales of justice on the plate-glass window of the storefront at 15th and Pine. The lights were off in the front waiting area, but I could see a glimmer of light traveling from the back part of the office, through a hallway, spreading like an invitation into the waiting room. I switched the heavy plastic bag from my right hand to my left and buzzed the buzzer. When nothing happened I buzzed it again and again. I kept buzzing it until the light widened in the waiting area and Tony Baloney, stuffing his shirt into his pants with one hand and leaning on a cane with the other, came limping along the very same path that the light had traveled. At the window he peered out at me.

“We’re closed,” he shouted. “What do you want?”

“We have to talk,” I shouted back.

He looked at his watch. “It’s after eleven. We’re closed. Who are you, anyway?”

“Victor Carl.”

He cocked his head to give me what looked like an evil eye and then twisted open the lock on the door.

Tony Baloney was a tall man with the face of a walrus, the belly of a bear, and the tiny feet of a ferret. His outsized suit pants were cinched to his stomach by a thin belt, his pink shirt open at the collar without a tie.

“That’s right,” he said. “I recognize you now from the evening news.” He glanced at his office and stroked his thick mustache. “My apologies, but we’re closed. Whatever it is, we can discuss it at length in the morning.”

“We’ll talk about it now,” I said as I marched past him and started down the hallway to his office.

“Wait, Victor. Stop,” he said as he rumbled after me as quickly as his leg would allow. He grabbed an arm and said, “What the hell are you doing?” but I shrugged it off and kept going.

The hallway was lined with legal books, Pennsylvania Digests, Federal Reporters, fully updated, I was sure, with pocket parts right in place because Tony, I was sure, took in enough cash up front to keep his books current. Past the hallway was a partly open door, through which the light had been streaming. I pushed it open and found myself in Tony Baloney’s office.

It was big and rather simple, with a white couch and a huge desk. Bookshelves climbed halfway up the wall, filled with even more legal tomes, digests, hornbooks, compilations of decisions by ancient British courts. Between the books on one wall was a television set. The rest of the walls were painted blue and covered with artwork, good stuff, too, by the looks of it, colorful abstracts and bright impressionistic oils. No doggies playing poker on Tony Baloney’s walls. And then, so motionless I almost missed her, sitting on the couch was a startlingly beautiful woman, dark and small, in a tight white dress, her legs crossed and the veins in her dangling foot pulsing out of a white high heel.

Tony finally made his way back into his office. “What in fucking hell is going on, Carl?” he said between gasps.

“I thought your client was going to be a good boy.”

“Who? The landlord? Giamoticos?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Well, Spiros flunked his probation.”

“What are we talking about?”

I took the plastic bag over to the desk, littered with stacks of papers and files, and dumped its contents onto the desktop.

“God, man,” shouted Tony. “Jesus Christ. Now what did you have to go and do that for?”

What lay now on Tony Baloney’s desk was a dachshund, Oscar I think its name was, owned by a woman in my building, the dog chocolate brown and very dead, its neck snapped, its belly slit open, its intestines oozing out like thick glossy eels. I had found him on my doorstep that night when I had straggled home after an evening with the Bishops and knew immediately from where he had come. Veronica’s landlord, Spiros Giamoticos. He must have picked my name off the motion I filed and was trying to scare me off from helping Veronica. I thought old Tony should see firsthand the crap his client was pulling. From out of the dog’s entrails a dark viscous liquid was puddling over Tony’s papers.

I looked over at the woman on the couch, wondering if I had gone too far, but she wasn’t screaming, she wasn’t even flinching. A smile appeared on her dark pretty face and between her painted lips I could just glimpse an array of twisted brown teeth. Her smile was scarier than the dead dog. I turned away from her as soon as I saw it.

“Giamoticos left this for me on my doorstep,” I said.

“On your step?” asked Tony.

“That’s right,” I said. “You were going to keep him under control, remember? You vouched for him, remember?”

He looked at me closely, like he was looking for something, then he loosed a sharp, quick stream of Spanish and the woman on the couch stood up and walked out the door. On her way out she grabbed hold of the bottom of her dress and yanked it down.

“A client,” said Tony Baloney with a shrug. “‘So lust, though to a radiant angel linked, will sate itself in a celestial bed, and prey on garbage.’ Hamlet’s ghost.”

“Cut with the quotes,” I said.

“Look, take a seat.” He gestured to the couch.

“I’ll stand,” I said.

“Well, I’ll sit, if that’s all right,” he said, dropping onto the couch. He carefully leaned his cane beside him. “These late-night conferences consume much of a man. Now, how shall we clean up that mess?” He casually gestured at his desk, as if a carcass lying on its top was not an unusual sight.

I held out the plastic bag still in my hand and dropped it onto the floor. “Use this if you like.”

“No, you’ll clean my desk, Victor,” he said.

“Not in this life,” I said. “Do something about Giamoticos and make sure it sticks.”

“You know, this whole sorry chain of events, Victor, is putting me in a difficult position. There are attorney-client considerations that are putting me in a very difficult position. Not to mention my obligations to the bar. Come on. Sit down.”

I remained standing. “What are you going to do to stop Giamoticos?”

“I shouldn’t have taken the case,” he said as if to no one in particular. “My daughter calls me and right off I know what the story is. And it’s just getting more complicated.” He raised his head to me. “You’re an esteemed member of the bar, Victor. Let’s do a hypothetical.”

“I’m not here to play law student.”

“Humor me,” he said. “A simple hypothetical, like in the ethics exam we all cheated on. Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, we are representing a client accused of doing something deeply nefarious.”

“Like a Greek accused of killing cats.”

He pointed at me like I had guessed a word in charades. “Exactly so. Hypothetically, of course. And we also have another client who has nothing to do with the first. And this other client tells us, with the full protection of the attorney-client privilege, that he does as a practice what the first client is wrongly accused of doing. See where I’m going here?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Been feeling a bit sluggish lately, darling? Any troubles concentrating? No sinus clogs?” He sniffed loudly twice. “No sniffles?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Let’s expand our hypothetical a bit. Struggle to keep up, if you can. Now let us say a lawyer shows up accusing the first client of doing something to him, something which we figure was not done by the first client but by the second client. Right-o? And now we have a problem. Because if it was done by the second client then in all likelihood the lawyer is involved in activities that he shouldn’t be involved in. Activities that can impinge upon his fitness to stand before the bar. Now tell me, Victor. Do we have a duty to inform the bar association about this lawyer?”

“What kinds of activities?” I said, starting to get the horrifying idea behind Tony Baloney’s hypothetical.

“You don’t see me chairing any bar association committees, do you, Victor?” he said in a calm, quiet voice. “They don’t take my photograph two-stepping at the Andrew Hamilton Ball with the other high-flying members of our bar. I’m an outcast. And you know why, Victor, don’t you? It’s my clientele. Can you guess now what type of activities this hypothetical second client is involved in? I’ll make it very simple for you.”

He leaned forward, smiled at me, and shouted, “DRUGS!”

I jumped back at the shout.

“You see,” he continued, “we, hypothetically, have one client who has a wide distribution network. When he distributes on credit, and bills aren’t paid, he leaves what he calls his calling card. And that calling card happens to be dead animals. Furry little things generally, with their necks snapped and their bellies slit. And then, funny thing, he generally gets paid what he’s owed. It’s so much more effective than a dunning letter, wouldn’t you say? So in all likelihood, it is not a hypothetical Greek landlord leaving these little calling cards. It is a hypothetical drug dealer and he’s leaving these calling cards for his hypothetical drug addict clients.”

I pulled a chair around and sat down because I had to. “Norvel Goodwin,” I said quietly.

“Hypothetically, of course. I gave you a message for Jimmy and I expected you would pick up on it.”

“I thought it was a threat,” I said.

“Yes, judgment is the first thing to go. I’ve been there before you. ‘How use doth breed a habit in a man.’”

“It’s not what you think,” I said.

“It never is. Clean my desk, Victor. There are supplies in the back closet.”

I didn’t move, didn’t respond. I just sat there staring at him.

“What kind of asshole would come into my office,” he said, “and dump a gutted dog on my desk to advertise that he is a drug addict? What kind of asshole would do that unless he is crying out for help and wants me to report him? And I will tell you, Vic, right now you look like you could use some help, you know. I mean, right now, Vic sweetheart, you look like hell.”

I was sure I did just then. I was blanching. What Tony Baloney had just explained hit me like a short quick blow to the stomach, one of those shots you subconsciously know is coming but takes your breath away just the same.

“So clean up my desk, darling,” he said. “Clean it now.”

I tried to stand, but I couldn’t. I was helpless, in shock, because what I realized just then was that Norvel Goodwin had risen like a specter to once again threaten my life. And what I realized just then was that Veronica, with whom I had fallen in love, was once again hopelessly addicted to drugs. And what I realized just then was that in all our wild and brutal sex this drug addict whom I loved might have given me the plague. And what I realized just then was that it was over with me and her and I didn’t I didn’t I didn’t want it to be over at all. I couldn’t stand just then because I realized all of that, but it wasn’t only all of that. I couldn’t stand just then because at the same time I was realizing all of that I also realized exactly who had murdered Zack Bissonette and all that I would have to give up to prove it.